Just Atheists

by Daren Jaques

I promised to answer the question of whether an objectively wrong action (such as murder) would still be wrong if the human race no longer existed - say it is the year 100,000 CE, and the human species, along with 97% of all other living species, are wiped out from a massive caldera eruption in North America. Mass extinctions of this scale appear in the fossil record approximately every 250 million years or so, and we’re about due statistically. [I believe the mass extinction of 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs was less than 50% extinction, but I digress]. There are no humans now living, so is “murder” objectively wrong? The short answer is “yes,” the long answer is very complicated.

The Long Answer: Because humans experience the flow of time in a specific direction, known as the “arrow of time” which flows from what we call the past to the future we conceive of things of having not existed yet (as in the children I have not yet fathered) and the things that no longer exist (such as Tyrannosaurus Rex) but perhaps this is a peculiarity of how we, as temporal humans, understand the universe. Bear with me; time is actually a dimension of the universe, and viewing everything through the way in which we experience time may be failure of imagination. For example, we know that other theoretical dimensions exist, and that it is theoretically possible for a physical four, or five dimensional cube (called a “hypercube”) to be observed in our three dimensional universe. We as three dimensional creatures have a tendency to see our perception of the physical as the “real” universe. However, we may simply be limited by our physical reality - the “real” universe appears to be far more complex with perhaps billions of symmetric and asymmetric dimensions.

Here is my point: the asymmetry of time’s arrow cannot change either what has or what will be. Thus, once it was objectively wrong to murder at any point along time’s arrow, that fact simply exists, regardless of whether it is being actively perceived by a creature at a particular point along the arrow. The same holds for what has not yet occurred to our senses. When pterodactyls ruled the skies, human murder was still wrong. The pterodactyl experienced our same arrow of time, and just because it was limited to experiencing time in the same asymmetric way doesn’t mean that occurrences along the arrow “later” aren’t just as real simply because the creature hasn’t yet experienced them.

This of course does not mean that the dino understands murder, or is bound by the human objectivity of it. As I’ve said, it is only objective in human cognition. Yet, the fact that it exists at all makes it exist, period.