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The Universe Next Door: Ethics and Worldviews A worldview is the set of beliefs that is fundamentally grounded in each person’s heart whether they realize it or not, whether they hold true to it or not. Put simply, it is the basis on which a person lives his/her life. Therefore, ethics, the defining of right and wrong in life, is a crucial aspect of each worldview. Some would say ethics is based on feeling, others would say religious beliefs, while still others would say ethics is based on the law or the standards of behavior accepted by society. The absence of ethics is also a theme in some worldviews. While James W.
Sire discusses several different worldviews in The Universe Next Door, the ethical beliefs held by each worldview can be honed down to just a few basic groups with major similarities. They then diverge into their individual minor differences based on their metaphysical and epistemological beliefs. For theists, God is the foundation for all values. He is transcendent of this world yet immanent and personal, the standard for which people should live their lives by. His personal goodness, absolute holiness, and perfect love is manifested in human form through His Son, Jesus Christ, the model of morality for all humanity.
God also reveals His laws and moral principles through Scripture and special and general revelation. Because of God’s pure goodness and love, though, He is limited by His character and cannot force humans to do what He wants. That freedom given to humanity led to their fallen state and subsequent flawed sense of morality, but even today, humans cannot seem to shake the feeling of right and wrong deeply imbedded into their being, for their personality is grounded in the personality of God, the Creator.
Another problem that came with the first sin was that God became veiled to humanity, his goodness too pure and bright to be seen by the sinful man, and over a great deal of time, the Christian theists became separated into a variety of discordant factions. By the 17th century, Christians had become so bogged down with their quarrels and God’s character so muddled, that deism arose as a result. It was an attempt to unify the sects of Christianity and put an end to all the theological and philosophical disputes.
However, this attempt, rather than unify Christians under God, only diminished the character of God. Deists disregarded the special revelation found in Scripture and opted to learn God’s character only through nature. By overlooking special revelation, though, deists consequently created a god that was not immanent and personal nor sovereign and providential. The ramifications of this inadequate understanding of God meant that the God of deism became simply “the clockmaker” of a closed universe closed to human reordering.
In this closed universe, everything is as God planned it to be, and humanity is unfallen and in a natural state, for it would be an insult to the omniscient God to believe that He had made a mistake in the original plan. In terms of ethics, this universe and idea of God actually destroys any possibility of ethics. If whatever exists is as God planned it to be, then there can be no wrong, but no wrong holds the implication that there is no right either, and without the ability to distinguish between the two, ethics disappears. Is” becomes “ought” in the framework of deism. Charles Baudelaire expressed the impracticality and frustration of ethics in deism when he said, “If God exists, he must be the devil. ” Because of the many inconsistencies found throughout deism, naturalism came about and completely threw out the existence of God altogether, choosing to rely solely on their own reasoning to gain or affirm knowledge. Naturalism arose as a logical extension of notions previously held about the universe, so ethics did not really play a central role in the rise and development of naturalism.
Therefore, Christian and naturalist ethics are actually quite similar: respect for man’s dignity, love for one another, and a commitment to basic truth and honesty, but the basis for their ethical beliefs are radically different. As aforementioned, God is the foundation of values in Christian theism, but for naturalists, values are created by human beings. The problem is, without any transcendent standard of good or bad, how does one derive what “ought” to be from what “is”? Naturalists believe that all people have a sense of moral values acquired by intuition and authority or picked up from their environment.
For them, good action is the action that promotes harmony and survival within the community. This is the view held by postmodernists as well, where society determines what social good ought to be. Ethics thus becomes autonomous and situational rejecting the need for any theological sanction. At the very core of naturalist beliefs however, matter is all that there was, is, and ever will be. The implications of this take on reality is that humans are merely complex machines, a result of evolution.
How then, can one be sure that what one thinks to be logic and reason is really significant at all? Ironically, naturalism began as an Age of Enlightenment based on the affirmation of human intelligence, but a truly consistent naturalist leads to what is called a nihilist. Nihilists realize that they can place no confidence in knowing anything at all. In an attempt to escape the hopeless vacuum of nihilism, existentialism emerged, accepting all the propositions of naturalism except those regarding human nature and humans’ relationship to the cosmos.
Human significance was created by constructing two forms of reality, objective and subjective. Subjective reality – the world of mind, consciousness, and freedom – cannot be penetrated by the science and logic of the objective world. So in existentialism, people essentially make themselves who they are and can thus create their own values. Ethics therefore becomes personal and chosen. This presents the same issues that naturalist and postmodernist ethics have: in a worldview that places the core of morality in individual subjectivity, how does one determine which “good” is most right?
Eastern pantheistic monism is a worldview completely unlike any of the aforementioned worldviews because of the fundamentally different roots in the East. Ethically, however, it boils down to a similar fate as many of the other Western worldview ethics. In monism, ultimate reality is entirely of one substance, and the ultimate goal in life is to become one with the One, or the Cosmos. When one achieves oneness with the Cosmos, good and evil is transcended. (New Age proponents also believe that in cosmic consciousness, morality disappears. ) All actions of this world are merely illusion, and thus there is no “ought” or “is”.
On the way to becoming one with the One, though, every soul passes through the illusion of life, and one’s present fate is determined by karma, or the record of one’s deeds in the past life. This may seem like a moral universe where good deeds are rewarded and “sin” punished, but there is no God, like in Christian theism, who can bear the weight of sin and forgive. Any sin must be worked out through the reincarnation system. Thus, there is no point in alleviating suffering in this life because karma demands that every soul pay the price of sin.
There is also no value in helping one another except for the fact that it helps the self attain unity with the One. Doing good therefore becomes a selfish act and not one of love. A critical look at all the worldviews listed above reveal a few certain themes in terms of ethics. Either there is a transcendent standard of morality, multiple standards of morality, or no morality whatsoever. For Eastern pantheistic monism, naturalism and its various extensions and successors such as existentialism and postmodernism, their ethical systems failed to be consistent with the metaphysical and epistemological propositions of their worldviews.
When one constructs his/her own ethical system, there is no ability to distinguish good and bad; everything becomes subjective and ethics becomes meaningless. Each of these worldviews ultimately leads to nihilism. Theistic ethics are based on and consistent with the character of God and fulfill subjective satisfaction as well. While subjective satisfaction, finding meaning and significance in life, is not founded directly on facts and logic, it is still an important factor that determines how people choose to live their lives.