I am not a Catholic nor particularly ‘religious’ in the traditional sense of the word but recently Pope Francis warned mankind that there will be accountability for our destructive individual and collective actions on earth. The Pope’s warning brings to the fore a larger issue; one of the need for universal accountability. This warning raises many questions:
Is a belief in a higher power and arbiter of the actions of human societies necessary for our continued existence on earth?
Can humanity survive without a belief in an afterlife where all accounts will be settled and evil will be punished?
Do our instincts whisper to us that this life is all there is?
Is the concept of immortality (life after death) essential for a fuller and more meaningful understanding of the universe?
Humans have created societies that demand what I would call ‘micro-accountability’. For example, I am accountable to myself, to my family, to my employers. As a citizen I am accountable to my community and my country. Without these spheres of accountability there is chaos and individuals, families and societies suffer break down. In the same vein individuals ultimately are accountable for the actions of the larger global human society. This can be called macro-accountability.
As stated above human societies are structured to demand accountability of its citizens. Accountability encompasses every facet of human life and is the hallmark of a civilized and mature society. The exercise of accountability takes many forms voluntary and involuntary (imposed) by consensus and through the rule of law. We agree to be accountable and to abide by laws. The alternative is a society without accountability resulting in lawlessness, anarchy and chaos. Moreover, there can be no accountability without morality and justice. Morality is the foundation upon which we construct systems of accountability. Justice is the means through which we administer accountability. Therefore, morality is at the root of all human behavior.
Where does our sense of morality come from?
Was it acquired through evolution or was it programmed into us during creation by a higher intelligence?
Morality provides us with a sense of what is right and wrong. Is our sense of love also connected in some way to our sense of morality?
Can an unintelligent evolutionary process such as Darwinian natural selection expressed as ‘survival of the fittest’, account for the emergence of caring, loving, self-sacrificing, intelligent and self-accountable moral human beings?
Can evolution with its fundamental law that determines selection of only the fittest lifeforms produce a human being who would fall on a grenade to save his fellow brothers in arms?
Don’t our consciences, the inner voice in our mind guide us to what is right or wrong irrespective of our upbringing and/or our ‘religious’ affiliation or lack thereof? Isn’t this evidence of creative intent and purpose?
Wherever the source of our sense of what is moral (right) and what is immoral (wrong) it is imperative to structure civil society to conform to the rule of law and moral accountability.
But is there such a thing as absolute morality?
Is morality relative; can it be dictated or imposed upon those who don’t conform to our interpretation of what is moral?
If morality is relative then who is to judge whose code of conduct is ‘more moral’ or immoral?
Increasingly there are human beings in the world whose morality is quite different from the mainstream. If the law of survival of the fittest (social Darwinism) continues to proliferate as the sole explanation for the appearance of mankind on this planet then who will prevent future sociopaths like Hitler from justifying their actions on the basis of assisting nature by proactively and systematically exterminating the weak and the infirm, the mentally handicapped, and those human beings they consider defective?
In conclusion, we live in a finite world within a universe with infinite resources. And yet those infinite resources are located in galaxies, stars and planets whose distances from earth, even at the speed of light, far exceed the lifespan of mere mortals. However, if the distances between galaxies is viewed from the perspective of a future immortal existence then the infinite distances between galaxies becomes less unfathomable.
If we continue to adhere to the notion that this life is the end and that there is no existence beyond death wherein there could be a final accounting for human actions, then this vast universe with all its unexplored potentially habitable planets, each containing untold and unimaginable beauty, has no meaning or purpose and will have existed in vein — an immense and colossal wasteland. Without a firm belief in a final arbiter of human affairs and a universal code of morality and justice to both guide and judge human actions in this life, we may never be able to coexist long enough even to attempt to achieve the scientific and technological know-how to perpetuate our own existence let alone attempt to travel within our own solar system so as to populate nearby worlds, perhaps discover new lifeforms, new sources of rich mineral deposits, and new ‘natural’ wonders.
Finally, the gradual abandonment of a belief in a higher power who is the final arbiter of human actions will eventually have irreversible consequences on mankind and the planet. A perpetuation of current conditions will result in the piecemeal deterioration of human society and the destruction of a once beautiful and precious planet. At this stage in human history this fate seems inevitable.