The other day while driving I picked up an AM radio station out of Toronto and heard an interview with an expert on neurogenerosity - which apparently has been a subject of discussion for the better part of a decade. I wasn't sure at first whether to take it seriously.
Basically it was a materialist assessment of generosity focusing in particular on 'the science' behind the recent downturn in giving. The expert in question talked about how there was no evidence of a lack of generosity but instead problems with emotional bandwidth being maxed out, people being distracted and the like. This is what the science says.
In other words the notion that it is better to give than receive is reduced to a series of chemical equations and interacting synapses.
If
this is true, then concepts like better, happiness, or the morality
related to such questions have no meaning. There's no moral component
to any of this. It's simply that giving causes certain processes that
make you happy - which itself would be difficult to define, let alone
attach quality, meaning, or morality to.
Therefore it would make
sense (I would argue) to just take a pill and make yourself happy and
keep that money in your wallet - which will make you even happier
later when you find you still have it.
How can there be any virtue in giving? In a materialist framework there is no such thing as virtue - it's just a word we use to describe an idea that has no more substance or validity than does virtue or unicorn.
Of course the same then is true of good, evil, love, happiness, sadness, hate, or whatever. These aren't 'things' and thus they are nothing, empty sets that can be filled with whatever we want. For that matter the very underlying concepts of personhood reflected in pronouns - I or we, are also dubious. We're just biological computers and consciousness is just an emergent, temporary, and tenuous phenomena resulting from a multitude of complex synaptic interactions. Inevitably it would follow that other non-biological machines will at some point attain sentience and thus they too will have a claim to personhood and the use of pronouns - and will be just as meaningless in the end. By some estimations this is what the most recent Blade Runner film explores. One is left wondering what is darker or more bleak - the dystopian setting, or the nihilistic reckoning of human existence?
Well, (the materialist would certainly argue) giving is good because it helps the species.
Why? Why should the strong help the weak? Where do you see examples of this in nature? The weak are culled, eaten, forsaken for the sake of the strong. The Australian anti-ethicist Peter Singer may be a monster but at least he's consistent. Survival of the fittest is the law of nature, right? Then why should the strong help the weak if they don't deserve it? This same repugnant ethic is advocated by the likes of Ayn Rand, the economic philosopher that has been so influential among the Right and American Christians. These same people may wish to dispense with Social Darwinism because of its historical results - but it's inescapable if one holds to their materialist evolutionary views.
Again, if the argument is that giving will make you happy and feel better about yourself - well, that certainly removes the moral component. If happiness (whatever that is) is an end itself, then who's to say what I need to limit myself to? Maybe not giving makes me happy. Maybe seeing people suffer makes me happy. Who's to say it's wrong? As a Christian I can answer that question, but they cannot.
As mentioned elsewhere, I was once again struck by the fact that this supposed expert on human-ness is viewed as a type of theologian. Remember in humanism, the self is god and so the experts on humanity and human nature are essentially clerical figures providing the deep answers and applications.
Over and over again we hear the refrain - the science says, the science says. It's as if science and scientists don't have precommitments which drive the interpretation of data. It's as if these precommitments don't steer the mechanisms of inference, as if they don't assign levels of validity to deduction and exclude other factors ab initio.
Their objective and 'neutral' approach is in reality anything but. In absolutizing the method they beg numerous questions and without warrant exclude entire areas of human existence and experience because it doesn't fit with their materialist criteria. By absolutizing the method, they exclude all notions of teleology - and thus all is but chance. But then how do they justify a method that requires stability and consistency - an order that (even if fallen) exhibits not only forces and tendencies, but laws and principles interacting in a complex of seemingly infinite differentiation - and this is just chance? It could all just come undone in a moment? How can anyone speak seriously of meaning or virtue being attached to generosity? Does the dirt on top of the log have a moral claim of ownership as opposed to the dirt that rests in the shade of the log? The very question is absurd and yet this is the world in which materialism operates - and yet never with any kind of consistency.
The great irony is they can't justify any of this and so they proceed by faith. They have a faith in the closed, materialist, and atheistic world they would seek to explain. It is a religion with no god apart from humanity. Science is the epistemic authority, and with education it functions as a messiah. They even have an eschatology connected to immortality and the mastery of matter, unlimited energy, and the like.
It's godless and so they're lost. They are in one sense of very little concern to me. And yet the very kind of 'science' being used to explain and justify generosity is just the sort of thing I hear Evangelicals embracing. They would simply 'add on' a Christian gloss to the materialist interpretation but seem oblivious to the assumptions driving these materialist models of explanation. Our spiritual state, emotions, and the like can indeed have a physiological effect (and sometimes there's circularity) but we cannot draw conclusions in terms of causality - let alone quantify such measures. To think we can is to fall into the error of Job's friends. They might speaks some truths but with their limited purview, they were simply wrong and Job was never given an explanation either. The causal connections these Evangelicals seem to embrace are dangerously inconclusive - let alone if you use them as an impetus for action.
The Church's embrace of this kind of pseudo-science and its larger epistemological, ethical, and even spiritual implications represents a watershed, and the magnitude of this epistemic shift (and Biblical betrayal) cannot be overstated. This is another religion at work shaping society. Our opposition is not carnal - we don't fight them by the sword, politics, or otherwise. We wield the weapon God has ordained - the foolishness of preaching and proclaiming the Word God has revealed.
But sadly today's Evangelicals have thrown it all away and have chosen instead to try and find a compromise - and have failed to see that in that compromise, they've already surrendered. It may take a generation for the full implications to be worked out but they've already left the battlefield.
Future studies in Church History will mark this time as a critical moment of change, a shifting epoch. We would do well to reflect on it even as we watch these events unfold. They think their movement is on the cusp of a revival. I'm afraid what I see is the groundwork being laid for large-scale apostasy akin to what took place with the rise of Theological Modernism and Higher Critical scholarship in the 19th century.