The Moral Poverty Of Evolutionary Naturalism
THE MORAL POVERTY OF EVOLUTIONARY NATURALISM
Mark D. Linville
Darwin's account of the origins of human morality is at once elegant, ingenious, and woefully inadequate. In particular, that account, on its standard interpretation, does not explain morality but, rather, explains it away. We learn from Darwin not how there could be objective moral facts but how we could have come to believe, perhaps erroneously, that there are.
Further, the naturalist, who does not believe that there is such a personal being as God, is in principle committed to Darwinism, including a Darwinian account of the basic contours of human moral psychology. I'll use the term evolutionary naturalism to refer to this combination of naturalism and Darwinism. And so the naturalist is saddled with a view that explains morality away. Whatever reason we have for believing in moral facts is also a reason for thinking naturalism is false. I conclude the essay with a brief account of a theistic conception of morality and argue that the theist is in a better position to affirm the objectivity of morality.