We are told, by many people, that matters of right and wrong are situational.  They change with the times, with cultures, or with other conditions.  They reject the idea that there are eternal, objective standards to which we are all obliged to conform, regardless of our personal opinions or preferences.

Most people seem intuitively to believe that there really is such a thing as morality.  We just disagree on which standards, if any, to uphold.  So the question becomes, what evidence do we have that there is an objective, perhaps scientific, standard of morality independent of our personal opinions?

Modern science is underpinned by a philosophy called by various names, including “physicalism.”  That philosophy says that nothing objectively exists except that which is explained in terms of physics.  It rejects any notions of spirit, soul, or God.  That rejection is well and fine for a philosophy, but it is entirely unscientific.  A purely physicalist view of reality has no place for notions of good or evil, right or wrong, justice or injustice.  It is entirely neutral, neither preferring nor disdaining either side. 

Therefore, to assert that there is an objective standard of morality is not unscientific, it is merely non-physicalist. 

Is there, then, some way to prove the matter, one way or the other?

Yes, there is, but society is so complex, the human mind so inscrutable, that it takes years, even centuries, for a social experiment to produce verifiable results.  Oftentimes, the outcomes of social policies are completely opposite those that the experts predicted.

The following bit of recent history provides an example.

Up until the 1960s, the out-of-wedlock birth rate in most segments of society was very small, despite there being no reliable contraceptives available.  One overwhelming reason for the low incidence of premarital pregnancy was social opprobrium.  For a young, unmarried woman to be known not to be a virgin was considered shameful.  For her to become pregnant was scandalous.  The prospect of being humiliated was a powerful inducement, for women, to delay sexual intercourse until marriage.

The advent of the birth control pill changed all that, and as history shows, the incidence of out-of-wedlock motherhood, which was supposed to have been dramatically reduced, instead increased intensely.  Why?

The birth control pill helped to reduce the stigma of losing one’s virginity before marriage.  This, in turn, indirectly reduced the stigma of premarital pregnancy.  This, in turn, reduced the perceived need for the birth control pill.  Once the initial phase of these events had occurred, the floodgates were opened, and what quickly followed was what is called the Sexual Revolution.

This revolution was supposed to have freed women from the injustice of sexual repression.  Instead, it led to millions of women becoming pregnant and abandoned, left on their own, to raise their fatherless children.  Many of those children were raised in poverty and amid crime.  The welfare state sought to correct this mistake by subsidizing single motherhood.  This, in turn, predictably increased what it subsidized.

Today, the harm wrought by the abandonment of sexual morality has left us with a society that cannot even recognize the good and natural differences between the sexes, even to the point of denying that there are two complementary sexes, and certainly denying that they are a naturally ordained partnership, one without which society suffers consequences so pervasive that many people call them good.

The illusion is now deeply ingrained that sexual morality is an antiquated notion and that its violations have no harmful consequence.

Worse yet, casual acceptance of homosexuality and transsexuality has morphed from one of mere tolerance to the present state of enforcement.  Small, confused children can be subjected to the radical procedure of so-called “transitioning” from their birth sex to the other one.  This can be done in opposition to the parents’ wishes, as indeed, pregnant teenage girls can have their pregnancies aborted with neither the knowledge nor the consent of the girl’s parents.

To interfere is to be accused of child abuse.  Even to openly advocate Jewish and Christian standards of morality can bring about significant penalties.

We are now at the point where pedophilia itself is gaining traction as a so-called sexual orientation.

Where will all this end?  The experts say at utopia.  When have they been right?

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