In a recent email, "The Seven Deadly Sins: They're Not Your Fault! Your DNA Made You Do It" I reported on a Discover magazine article that blithely asserted that the notion of sin was passé, and is being replaced by a purely scientific description of the various evolutionary and chemical causes of what used to be called the seven deadly sins—pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. In my explication, I made the connection between atheism, a reductionist, materialist view of science, and the denial or moral responsibility.
A reader took me to task, claiming that I had completely distorted and misrepresented the actual beliefs of scientists, atheists, agnostics and non-Christians. "No atheist or agnostic has ever stated that people who commit crimes are not responsible for what they do (unless they happen to be insane), or that they should not be imprisoned if they commit a crime, as far as I know." Furthermore, in making a connection between Darwinism and the denial of moral responsibility, the reader accused me of rehashing "the ridiculous notion that Darwinism is responsible for the atrocities of the Nazis and other evil regimes such as the former Soviet Union and China." Moreover, I was guilty of historical ignorance on a grand scale, for grand evils were perpetrated long before Darwinism, and many of these evils were committed by Christians. "Did Genghis Khan and Tamerlane need Darwin's theories to slaughter vast number of people in the centuries before Darwin? Or the Catholic church when it slaughtered enormous numbers of innocent women who were believed to be witches? Or Christians and Muslims to slaughter each other during the crusades? Or Europeans to slaughter the natives of both North and South America in the name of Christianity? Of course not. People have been oppressing and slaughtering each other all over the globe for thousands of years. To blame Darwin's theories for any of this is not only grossly unfair but ludicrous."
These are serious charges and demand my most serious attention. First of all, is there a direct connection historically between materialism, atheism, and the denial of responsibility for one's actions? Yes. One can draw a smooth, fat line between the first great modern atheist, the 17th century Englishman Thomas Hobbes, and the 21st century authors of the Discover magazine piece converting sin into mere chemistry. Hobbes was the first modern thoroughgoing materialist, arguing that everything is made up of matter, there is no immaterial soul, and our ideas, passions, and actions are all mere material reactions. As a consequence, he boldly asserted there is no good or evil by nature. No free will; no evil; no sin; no moral responsibility.
But this is not something Hobbes invented. It is the inner logic of materialism itself, and that is why the adoption of pure materialism by science leads to the denial of moral responsibility. The assertion of complete materialist determinism necessarily means that one's actions are the result of physical processes that follow laws, and that means, in turn, a human being is no more responsible for its actions than are hydrogen atoms, a rocks, or trees.
And what has this to do with Darwin? As his private notebooks written right after his expedition on the H. M. S. Beagle confirm, Darwin was a materialist from a very early age. It is not surprising, then, that later on in his Descent of Man, published about a decade after the Origin of Species, Darwin argued that one's moral traits—such as they are, good or bad—are the result of natural selection. Since natural selection occurs between species, he gauged various human "subspecies" (such as the Scottish and Irish) by their evolved moral traits (the Scots were "frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, [and] ambitious," while the Irishmen were careless, squalid, [and] unaspiring"). Like every other trait, from hair color to body-build, both "bad tendencies" and "good ones are likewise transmitted." And, adds Darwin, "excepting through the principle of the transmission of moral tendencies, we cannot understand the differences believed to exist in this respect between the various races of mankind."
Darwin was not a complete determinist (insofar as the eugenic breeding for traits does not produce the desired results every time, but only most of the time). But Darwin makes stunningly clear that, like good animal breeders, we can breed for morally better human beings. That, of course, entailed the enticing opposite: that, like a deformed or ill-bred animal, there was nothing that could be done for those who had received "bad tendencies." They were not responsible for their criminality anymore than for their hair color or the shape of their nose. For precisely this reason, they were irredeemable. Darwin did not suggest the extermination of criminals. That was left for later Darwinists. He would just keep them from breeding so prolifically.
That brings us to the Hitler connection. Before anyone so easily dismisses the Darwin-Hitler connection, I suggest he reads Charles Darwin's Descent of Man, cover to cover; Richard Weikart's From Darwin to Hitler; and my Darwin Myth. I add the last because I spend some time showing how good Darwin the man was, and how horrified he would be at what Hitler did, but how, nevertheless, how Darwin's racial eugenics and account of hereditary moral traits led to Hitler's racial eugenics.
None of this is to argue that individual Darwinists or individual atheists are budding Nazi brownshirts. The original question of the article was focused on the connection between pure materialism and the denial of moral responsibility. It happens (and not by accident) that nearly every last atheist and most Darwinists are materialists. Materialism is the systematic denial of anything spiritual. Wherever else pure materialism leads, if it adheres to logical consistency, it leads to the assumption that human actions, including those deemed "moral" actions, must have non-moral, physical-chemical causes. Thus, the Discover article's collapse of sin into DNA is completely predictable.
I do agree with the reader that many materialist atheists do not in fact deny moral responsibility. In this, they choose to remain both sane and inconsistent. I congratulate them. But many other prominent atheists have embraced full materialist determinism and hence deny free will. The authors of the Discover article chose consistency over sanity.
Finally, the topic of sin. The whole point of the doctrine of sin is that sin is everywhere and infects everyone, Christians and non-Christians, theists and atheists, in short, all human beings for all human history. The problem to which I call attention is not the existence of sin, but the effects of its denial. Christians have indeed sinned in the past, and no one, Christian or non-Christian, needs a primer on destruction. Sin afflicts us all. That is the very reason we should bristle at any "scientific" attempt to erase our belief in it.
But the real danger occurs precisely when we give up the notion of sin and accept full determinism, and then jettison God as well. The belief of Marxists that one's thoughts and actions were entirely determined by the modes of production, that history was ineluctably moving forward according to the laws of dialectical materialism, and that there was neither God nor sin, allowed them to slaughter 100,000,000 human beings who could not be salvaged because they were entirely determined by capitalist modes of production. The enemies of the communist state were not sinners; they were automatons from an obsolete age that needed extermination.
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