It is commonly thought that while human reason can be used to discover fundamental, universal truths in the physical realm (commonly referred to as ‘science’), it is unable to penetrate the realm of human belief that is most essential to our day to day interactions - the moral realm. David Hume is oft (somewhat erroneously) cited on this point, which is summarized as “one cannot get an ought from an is”.

Arguably, this is where we are as a civilization. While all but the most irrational admit that some things really are morally true – they are not relativists in the strictest sense of the word – a vast majority of secular thinkers regard moral truths as vague and unsettled in comparison to the cold hard facts of science. For example, most would agree the statement “one ought not cause needless suffering” is true, but would contend that this is not the same kind of truth as “snow is white”, and is more related to innate preferences and intuitions rather than anything clear and rational.

I speculate that this insufferable moral uncertainty we are living through is a residual effect of a religious stranglehold on moral philosophy that stretches as far back as we as a species can remember.

While religious superstition still captivates much of the non-Western world, religious belief has been in steep decline in the West for quite some time and the trend only seems to be accelerating. I think it uncontroversial to say that this decline is in part traceable back to one Galileo Galilei, whose discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun marked the beginning of the end of the Church’s monopoly on natural philosophy (science). More broadly, Galileo uncovered what the Greeks had discovered over 2000 years earlier: that we can know things for ourselves, through our reason. This seedling eventually blossomed into the Enlightenment, a movement which is said to have cast aside superstition and made reason the primary source of authority and legitimacy.

Three hundred years on, however, a revision of that story is in order. The Enlightenment certainly did much to demonstrate that religious superstition held no legitimate authority, and the wonders of modern science attest to reason’s primacy in our understanding of the physical world. It was this application of reason to the physical realm that brought down the Church, and naturally reason filled in the gaps that the Church left behind. But only to an extent.

While the Church can no longer make claims about the motion of the planets, reason has been unable to penetrate religion’s stronghold on claims about how we should behave. At this point in history, humanity has bifurcated into those that hold on to the religious superstitions in their moral understanding, and those who reject religious legitimacy on all truth, but fail to fill the moral gap with anything less superstitious.