Lord Chesterfeld wandered into a chapel once when George Whitefield was preaching. He sat in the pew that belonged to Lady Huntingdon, listening intensely. The preacher was comparing an ignorant sinner to a blind beggar on a dangerous road. His little dog gets away from him when skirting the edge of a precipice, and the old man is left to explore the path with his iron-shod staff. On the very edge of the cliff his stick slips through his fingers, and falls away down the abyss. All unconscious, its helpless owner stoops down to regain it, and stumbling forward. At this moment Chesterfilef, who had been listening with breathless alarm to this description of the blind man's movements, jumped up from his seat shouting, “Good God! he is gone!", trying to prevent the catastrophe.
If morality, if our ideas of right and wrong, are purely subjective, we should have to abandon any idea of moral progress (or regress), not only in the history of nations, but in the lifetime of each individual. The very concept of moral progress implies an external moral standard by which not only to measure that a present moral state is different from an earlier one but also to pronounce that it is "better" than the earlier one. Without such a standard, how could one say that the moral state of a culture in which cannibalism is regarded as an abhorrent crime is any "better" than a society in which it is an acceptable culinary practice? Naturalism denies this. For instance, Yuval Harari asserts: "Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in th
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