Humanity is Basically Good

There is a more modern belief that humanity is “basically good.” Is this true? According to Scripture, this statement is false. Putting scripture aside though, does the secular world support this theory? No. In fact, it is the opposite.
History confirms the unanimous opinion that man is aggressive and selfish. Joachim Illies [I1, p. 85], a biologist, writes, “The human fist, as a means of showing and implementing aggression, is in fact a tangible proof for the development of man.” A biologist from Freiburg, Hans Mohr [M2, p. 16–17], emphasizes this further: “The origin of man, as Homo sapiens, occurred towards the end of the Pleistocene—as a result of natural selection in a battle with other hominids and other men. An irrefutable conclusion is that hate and aggression and the tendency to kill are inherent . . . murder, homicide, torture, and genocide characterize the cultural history of man. The murdering children of Pol Pots are no singular excess, but the rule. It should be obvious that even the ritualization of murder to the point of being acceptably cultivated, as in knightly battles and duels and in Haager’s war ordinances, has the same genetic origin as blind, merciless, lustful murder.”
The question that begs to be asked is if it is so blatant that humankind is not “basically good,” then why is this theory prevalent? I believe the answer is because the secularists need a way to define their morality, otherwise, they have no foundation for morality.
The reality is, for the atheist or secular humanist, there is no foundation for morality besides his or her own subjective opinion. These individuals often throw around words such as evil, immoral, moral, or ethical, often in the context of Christian religion or Christian people.
In their worldview, what makes anything immoral or wrong? It boils down to nothing more than their opinion. They believe that something is wrong, and therefore it must be. But who is to say that their opinion is the right one? After all, there are many different opinions on what is right and wrong. Who decides which one is right and which one is wrong?
Some atheists will argue that morality is simply decided by society. For example, here in America, our society has decided that murdering an innocent human being is wrong and therefore that action is morally wrong. But this kind of thinking simply does not hold up to scrutiny.
Society often changes its opinion. One clear example of this is in regards to gay “marriage.” What was considered morally wrong by most of the society is now legal, applauded, and celebrated by some groups. In this view, homosexual behavior went from being morally wrong to being morally acceptable. What if our society decides that murder is acceptable, as it did in the case of Roe v. Wade when America legalized the killing of unborn children? Does murder suddenly become morally acceptable too? What about adultery, stealing, lying, or any other manner of morally reprehensible actions? Would the atheist or humanist accept a society that decides that society can kill all atheists and humanists? If society is the moral compass, then the compass never points north but rather jumps all over the place and changes with every generation.
Also if society determines morality, how can one society tell another society what is right or wrong? Most people would agree that the abhorrent actions of the Nazi death camps were morally wrong. But why? Nazi Germany decided, as a society, that these actions were morally acceptable. What right does our society have to judge their society if morality is simply a societal preference?
Bringing it to today, what about radical Muslim groups? Few would agree that blowing up innocent civilians, slaughtering hundreds of people from other religious groups, kidnapping and enslaving young women, or using children as suicide bombers is morally acceptable. Yet if morality is simply a societal preference, what right does our society have to tell their society that their actions are wrong and must be stopped?
If morality is simply decided by societal preference, it fails to make any sense and becomes arbitrary, subject to change by time and culture.
What about human reason? The problem only gets worse when you break it down to a personal level. Some secularists will argue that morality is an individual decision and no one has the right to tell another person what to do. Of course, the irony of such a statement should be evident. By saying that no one should tell someone else what to do, they have just told someone else what to do!
If secularists truly believed this, then they couldn’t say “religion is evil” in the first place since it is not their place to say.
If this view of morality is true, then our justice system cannot exist. After all, why should one judge, legislative assembly, or government body impose their view of morality on another individual? If stealing, killing, raping, or abusing is right for one individual, what gives another individual the right to say that view of morality is wrong?
Now this personal morality or human reasoning view stems from the idea that people are basically good and that, left on our own, humans tend to do right and not wrong (again, who defines right and wrong?). But humans aren’t basically good! Human experience shows that throughout history humans have committed atrocities, even in our supposedly enlightened Western world.
Autonomous human reason simply does not provide a sufficient foundation for morality.
Evolutionists, by necessity, believe that morality (along with everything else) is simply the result of evolution. Somehow after billions of years of death, struggle, atrocities, disease, and suffering, man realized that we should strive to do the opposite! Man should oppose survival of the fittest and try to be moral. In their worldview, we are nothing more than highly evolved animals, and our brains are nothing more than chemical reactions. We are simply the product of our DNA.
This view raises the question of how the strictly naturalistic process of evolution leads to the development of an immaterial, absolute moral conscience that somehow applies to all people everywhere? And what happens if this conscience evolves? Does morality change again?
And furthermore, if we are simply animals, why are we held morally accountable? After all, we certainly don’t hold animals accountable for their actions. No lion court exists to punish lions that maul gazelles to death and then eat them. No one jails a female cuckoo for abandoning her babies or forces male rabbits to pay child support. These are simply the things animals in this cursed world do, and no one faults them for doing it. If we are just animals, what makes humans so different?
The problem gets even worse if you argue that our brains are nothing more than random chemical reactions and that we are at the mercy of our DNA. If we are just programmed DNA, then how can we be held accountable for any of our decisions? Because there is no free will in a view such as this, there is no accountability for decisions or actions.
Morality simply cannot be the result of naturalistic processes over millions of years. This view does not hold up to close examination.
When faced with their worldview’s inability to provide a foundation for morality, many atheists respond by claiming that you don’t have to be religious to be moral. It’s true that plenty of atheists are moral citizens. But those who argue this way have missed the point.
Atheists certainly can be moral. Actually, starting with a biblical worldview, this is to be expected. God has put His law in all our hearts (Romans 2:15) so even atheists, who claim that they don’t believe in the Creator God, can adhere to this law and be moral. But the point is that they have no foundation for this morality in their own worldview. They have no basis for saying something is right or wrong, moral or immoral.