A couple of weeks ago one of our regular contributers, Velma II, shared this insight:
I have a dear friend–my oldest friend, in fact, who is an atheist. He also happens to be very into the environment. This is an area where usually we can find agreement, as I care a great deal about the environment, nature, and our never ending consumer demands that continue to ruin all that is good an beautiful. (I might be being over dramatic, but it reads well.)
Anyway, the other day we were talking, and he began to talk about the Army Corp of Engineers ruining a project with efficiency and concrete when a little bit of effort and probably less money could have made something environmentally friendly and added some beauty to the area.
What surprised me was his visceral, angry rant about the morals of the Army Corp of Engineers (he didn’t call it morals, but that’s what he meant), then on Republicans, and Americans in general for their unethical treatment of the environment.
I didn’t disagree with him, but I did stop him and ask on what moral authority he found fault in any of this. As a Christian, part of my world view is being a good steward of God’s creation, not being greedy, not taking what is not mine, etc, but how did he argue the merits of any of this?
He’s not a deep thinker. I mean him no disrespect. He probably considers himself a deep thinker. But a philosopher he is not. He gave me a confused, blank stare and said something to the effect of, “I don’t know what you’re talking about–it’s common sense and common decency that we don’t take what isn’t ours, that we preserve what belongs to others and to our posterity, and that we don’t crap all over the environment–these aren’t deep thoughts, Velma, it’s just common sense.”
I considered pointing out to him that once again he just made a moral argument. Some atheists I know actually still believe in absolutes and morals or a certain natural code–I was actually just curious to see what sense of morality he was appealing to–after all, here he is an atheist and me a Christian and we seemed to be in agreement on “right” and “wrong” yet I knew my notion of right and wrong stemmed from my Judeo/Christian values.
Anyway, knowing some of his philosophical shortcomings, I decided to just let it go.
Velma was unhappy with her friend’s answer, but I find it illustrative of the point I’m trying to make. Velma’s atheist friend did identify the moral code he was appealing to; common sense.
Consider the term, common sense. Velma’s friend was saying there is such a thing, a moral sense that we all share. It’s something we all have. It’s something we cannot not know. It’s just common sense.
Christians believe in a common sense. Humanly speaking, this is one of the reasons Christianity has been the world’s only truly cross-cultural religion as well as its most successful. I also believe that this why is it has appealed to so many intellectuals; it appeals to the common sense.
But let me offer a little empirical support for my argument. Jim Leffel is the director of the Crossroads Project and a adjunct professor of philosophy at Ohio Dominican College. I will be referring to and quoting freely from an essay by him.
In his essay, Leffel refers to the research of an infant psychologist, Donald McIntosh. McIntosh’s research has demonstrated that infants recognize a world of objects and events, and that they can even think at a pre-lingusistic stage of development. Of course, no parent or grandparent is surprised by this, it is, after all, just common sense. But what is self-obvious to the common man is often a source of great surprise to intellectuals and academics.
McIntosh’s research indicates that children want to acquire language because of an already existing framework of thought. The research of McIntosh and others has shown that before children can talk they demonstrate a certain uniformity in thought. Leffel writes, “The human approach to the world is pretty much the same prior to the acquisition of language. Our language may be arbitrary, but we do know something objectively for which these words serve as labels.” (Emphasis added)
Now I realize that many of our concepts and patterns or thinking are derived from our specific language or cultural. I’ve seen this first hand during some of my international travels. Often when speaking to those who have grown up in another culture I have run into words and concepts that are difficult to translate. Nevertheless, most of the time, and in most subject areas we were able to communicate very well.
I attribute our ability to communicate cross culturally to the fact that though we hail from many different language groups and cultures we all share a common humanity. What I mean by this is that as human beings we share certain ways of thinking and we share certain shared assumptions. These shared or common patterns of thinking seem to be both universal and necessary for communication with one another — within the culture we are born into and when communicating in other cultures — and without It is doubtful that the human race could have survived.
Now some have argued that these are learned behaviors. Indeed, some of them may well be. But many of them seem to necessary requisites to learning. In other words, Some basic framework for thinking had to be there first before other behaviors could be learned.
In summary, Christian epistemology recognizes that there are some things we just know. We know them intuitively. We cannot not know them. Further, these things seem to be innate, they seem to be universal, and the seem to be necessary for personal interaction. This being the case, a non-personal source for things necessary for personal relationship seems odd to say the least. Why, the very suggestion of a material causation goes against the common sense.
