Morals via Reason Alone?

                                                                                                                                                                       Vol. XIV, No. 3, March 2001

Following is an excerpt from How Now Shall We Live? by Church Colson and Nancy Pearcey, Tyndale House, 1999, pp. 374-376. This is an important book, though easily read. TCP

Can reason alone come up with a viable moral system? The answer is no, and the failure of reason alone to generate moral norms was illustrated forcefully some years ago by the fate of the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion. In the summer of 1939, with Nazi armies occupying Czechoslovakia and poised to strike at Poland, the last hopes for appeasing Hitler were finally shattered, and the world girded itself for the horrors of another world war. Realizing that the moral resolve of the Western world must somehow be reinforced, Louis Finkelstein, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, began planning for a grand conference where the greatest scholars from every discipline would draw on their collective wisdom to devise a universal code of ethics to provide the moral foundation for democracy. The conference was announced in June 1940 in a statement signed by seventy-nine leading intellectuals, including Albert Einstein. The New York Times printed the announcement in full on page one, breathlessly hailing it as an "intellectual declaration of independence." A week later the Times published an editorial, "To Defend Democracy," which concluded that "we need a new Social Contract, a new Declaration of the Rights of Man."

When the group convened later that year, the goal was what Finkelstein called "corporate thinking" -- that is, an effort to synthesize Judeo-Christian ethics with Enlightenment humanism and modern science, in order to create a new foundation for democratic societies. Yet even before the opening gun -- during the organizing session the battle lines were drawn between traditionalists and modernists. On the side of the traditionalists, Mortimer Adler, editor of the Great Books series, declared, "We have more to fear from our professors than from Hitler," referring to those intellectuals who had abandoned historically accepted moral truths. His adversary, Sidney Hook, responded that Adler was promoting a "new medievalism." "The only absolute is science," Hook contended, and called for a pragmatic approach to morality. The modernists contended that all values are relative -- except, of course, the value of tolerance.

Notwithstanding the difficulties of the first conference, hopes continued to run high for the second one. Surely the best minds of our nation could agree on universal norms of conduct so that out of the ashes of war would emerge a new world of hope. The press continued its effusive coverage.

It was not until the third conference that the optimistic fervor began to subside as the debate came to a stalemate over which morality should be adopted. Around the country, editorialists began to reduce expectations slightly with headlines such as "Scholars Confess They Are Confused."

The Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion continued to meet through the war years and after, debating issues such as the atom bomb, one-world government, and the end of Western colonialism. By the 1948 meeting, reports Fred Beuttler of the University of Illinois, "the biggest fear of most academic intellectuals was dogmatism and indoctrination." In other words, the relativists had carried the day. "All absolutist thinking," they said, "has totalitarian potential." By the early 1960s the conference was disbanded. The original goal of "cultural universals" had proved impossible.