A good many parents decline to give their children any religious instruction, saying that they think it is better to "let them make up their own minds."  But declining to teach is itself a way of teaching, a very effective one, which transmits belief in a very definite creed with eight articles:  (1) It is not important for children to know anything about God.  (2) The questions which children naturally ask about Him require no answers.  (3) Parents know nothing about Him worth passing on.  (4) To think about Him adequately, no preparation is needed.  (5) What adults think about Him makes no difference.  (6) By implication, He does not make any difference either; God is not to be treated as God.  (7) If anything is to be treated as God, it will have to be something other than He.  (8) This is the true creed, and all other creeds are false.

In general, a person who has been raised in a sound tradition is far better prepared to change his mind, should his beliefs prove faulty in some particular respect, than a person who has been raised "to make up his own mind" about them.  While the former has at least acquired some equipment -- the habit of taking important things seriously, and a body of inherited reflections about what some of these things are -- the latter is weighed down with different baggage:  The habit of not taking important things seriously, and the habit of considering the way things really are as less important than what he thinks of them at the moment.

Some acts are wrong because of their results:  If I would be hit by a truck, then this is a bad time to cross the street.  But other acts are wrong no matter what their results:  No good consequence can make it right to deliberately take innocent human life.  Such an act is intrinsically evil.

What makes an act intrinsically evil is that by its very nature it cannot be put in right relationship to our ultimate final end, which is God.  If this is the correct explanation, then we should expect atheists – who do not believe that this ultimate final end exists – to have difficulty recognizing that there are any intrinsically evil acts.  This is in fact what we find.

Even an atheist who does believe in intrinsically evil acts will have a hard time conceding that such acts are never to be done.  If thinks there is no God, he will be more than usually subject to the temptation to play that role himself; the counsel “Do the right thing, and let God take care of the consequences” is useless to him.  Instead he will say "Let us do evil so that good will result."

Notice that I am not denying that the atheist has a conscience, which testifies within him to the awful wrong of wrong.  But he will have difficulty accounting for his conscience, too.  For just as conscience speaks to everyone, so it speaks to him:  Not in his own voice, but in the voice of Another -- Someone in whom he has chosen not to believe.

A generation ago, Arthur Allen Leff wrote an article in the Duke Law Journal article entitled “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” the agonized, confused, and conflicted conclusion of which has by now been quoted many dozens of times: 

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have.  Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel.  Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us ‘good,’ and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should.  Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us, could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable.  As things now stand, everything is up for grabs.  Nevertheless:  Napalming babies is bad.  Starving the poor is wicked.  Buying and selling each other is depraved.  Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot -- and General Custer too -- have earned salvation.  Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.  There is in the world such a thing as evil.  (All together now:)  Sez who?

Lo these thirty-five years later, a great many legal professionals still identify with Leff’s statement of the problem.  It seems to them, as it seemed to him, that if there is no objective morality we are in deep trouble, yet they don’t see, as he didn’t see, how there could be an objective morality.  Having embraced a view of nature as chaotic and meaningless, they find the natural law tradition not so much wrong as incomprehensible.  So by their own description, they remain stuck in the Leffian quagmire.

Except for those who are stuck in a different one.  One day after I spoke at a law school about natural law, a member of the faculty approached me to state his objection:  “If there really were a natural law, then there wouldn’t be any fun anymore, would there?”  I wish I had asked him what kind of fun needs to be shielded by denying the foundational precepts of right and wrong.  God have mercy on our souls.

Natural science, which deals with universal generalizations, must never be confused with natural history, which deals with particular events.

Think of how legend might tell the story centuries hence if in our time, as in Walter Miller’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, there had been a nuclear war:  “From a scientific point of view, of course, we know there never was a Flame Deluge.”

According to the “Strong AI” theory, if a digital computer were ever to imitate a human mind so well that we could not tell that we were speaking with a computer, then we ought to admit that the computer too has a mind.  To put it another way, if a computer could ever be programmed to produce the right outputs in response to the right inputs, then it should be regarded as understanding what it is doing in the very same sense that we understand what we are doing.

Philosopher of language John Searle has provided what I consider a wholly convincing refutation of this hand-waving view.  Searle speaks English and does not know Chinese.  Suppose, he says, that he is locked in a room with a set of rules, written in English, for correlating certain sets of Chinese symbols, which are passed into the room, with other sets of Chinese symbols, which he passes out.  And suppose that he masters the rules so well that when the people outside the room pass in Chinese questions, he returns the right Chinese answers.  The people outside the room may be convinced that he understands the conversation, but in fact he doesn’t.  According to Searle, this is all that happens when a computer executes a program.

Notice that this argument does not show that the human mind cannot be reduced to the operation of a machine; it shows only that it cannot be reduced to the operation of that kind of machine, a machine executing algorithms by digital processes.  Whether it can be reduced to the operation of some other kind of machine is an open question.

But now Searle engages in some hand-waving of his own, because he does not regard the question as open.  “We know,” he says, “that thinking is caused by neurobiological processes in the brain, and since the brain is a machine, there is no obstacle in principle to building a machine capable of thinking.”

Just how do we “know” this?  It is not an argument, but a declaration of faith.