Moral Processing in the Brain is Not an Ontological Origin for Morality
Image credits belong to: Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 (@priscilladupreez) | Unsplash Photo Community
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
All humans are imperfect and can be found guilty of that moral imperfection at any point in time. Humanity cannot achieve perfection by its own clever inventions, alone. Humanity needs help.
That aligns with the foundational principles of Christianity that trace back to the time of the New Testament, two-thousand years ago.
Today, we have a prevalent cultural belief that our own human empathy, rationality, autonomy, and well-being of sentient creatures can and should be the sole basis for all moral decisions and outcomes.
Of course, those are undeniable tools for accomplishing great things. But do they alone suffice for making us good without God?
The Trolley Problem
A trolley is heading toward five humans on the tracks and your only option for saving them is to flip a switch and divert the trolley onto the other track where it will kill one human. Do you feel less guilt about killing the one to save the many? Perhaps you feel sadness in response to the whole situation, to begin with. But how do you feel about taking the man next to you and throwing him onto the tracks to block the trolley? Does your guilt increase or decrease? Is there any pain-free escape from this thought experiment that I have stumbled upon so many times since my college days?
The Morality Lab at Boston College might be interested in understanding your qualms and feelings, as they study human moral judgments through the use of “modern behavioral and neuroimaging methods.”
It is interesting to realize that we use inner monologues to have moral disputes with ourselves, not just online strangers and those closest to us.
Specific brain regions employ a “theory of mind,” which develops approximately at age 4 or 5, to discern other people’s beliefs, desires, and intentions with respect to how they might differ from one’s own. That is part of Liane Young’s research as the director of the Morality Lab.
Young’s team has investigated the role of emotions in moral judgments, such as compassion, shame, and guilt, which are often diminished by focal lesions on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC). In hypothetical scenarios where participants had to decide whether to harm their own child to thwart greater harm to others, those with VMPC lesions were more likely than the control group to make the emotionally difficult, outcome-focused choice. This suggests that moral judgments are influenced by emotions, and when these emotions are severely curtailed, as seen in patients with VMPC damage, a different pattern of moral judgments emerges.
Young’s team joined forces with Rebecca Saxe, PhD. They found that assessments of malicious intentions, instead of outcomes, correlated with increased activity in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), a brain region associated with theory of mind that discerns other people’s mental states. They used transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily disrupt rTPJ activity, which caused participants to minimize the importance of intentions and decrease condemnation toward cases like attempted poisoning, since no harm ensued. This suggests that understanding intentions is vital to making moral judgments, and it underscores the neural mechanisms involved.
We must use this wonderful science to improve our understanding of how moral judgments are processed in the brain. But the science seems to be agnostic or neutral on the question as to whether morality’s ontological grounding is in God or secular/naturalistic sources. It does not settle the core concerns for those invested in the conversation between atheism and Christian apologetics.
Maybe the secular humanist ontological approach to morality assumes that morality is essentially secular and humanistic, because we can easily discard Christian lingo and have no conscious thoughts toward God when making moral arguments and decisions. These assumptions are rooted in a type of linguistic reductionism that is useful in certain areas of thinking but does not tell us the whole story.
Removing God as an ontological origin of morality is easy when many of us have directly experienced abusive Christians in church buildings, in online forums, and in our homes. Many of us have encountered very decent atheists and other non-Christians in various places where religion is absent. Those repeated toxic experiences among many people today have forced us to realize that religious belief alone does not forge decent moral character. I think trauma-related schemas in a victim’s brain will develop in response to spiritual abuse and try to prevent future abuse by removing God as a plausible explanation on the origins of morality.
That is mostly my opinion based on my many years of online experiences with Christians and atheists. I do not have a hyperlinked source for that. Sorry!
But no matter how many indecent Christians or decent atheists I meet, I think any person will express their inherent selfishness when tested in the right way or when closely studied in private. I think this realization can take place upon experiencing the self-defining moment of pure surrender in which you had to admit to others that you could not do what was asked of you. You were pushed beyond your boundaries and limits. Where someone might think this observable fact undermines Romans 3:23-24, I think it actually bolsters the Biblical passage.
We must acknowledge the axiom: no one is perfect!
So, if no one is perfect, what does it mean to be good without God? In spite of whatever we can say about this empirically, this also strikes me as a personal issue that requires self-reflection. And Christianity’s emphasis on prayer strongly recommends self-reflection.
Stay tuned for the next blog post that will address part 2 of this issue.
The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.
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