I grant Dr. Keyes all of it and thank him for his passion and his encyclopedic historical understanding and unified analysis. The written, enforceable, construct of our rule of law depends for legitimacy on submission to an empowering supernatural will. And the consequences to humanity – within that construct and upon the removal of that supernatural will – have historically been deadly.
The ethics, however, of liberty and freedom, born of that supernaturally-based system of justice, remain compelling for all phases of human existence, concurrent with a modern scientific skepticism about the metaphysical and the supernatural.
I have to disagree with the proposition that human respect and dignity cannot survive without submission to a supernatural being, because to agree with that proposition means that our species is incapable of learning from experience.
We no longer have the excuse of not knowing the demonstrated value of our supernaturally based ethics. Once upon a time, when the Declaration of Independence was written, it was largely theoretical about the outcomes of liberty. Now we have proof.
Nor can we ignore how science has devastated metaphysics and supernatural ideologies. Evolution propagates through survival that which benefits the species. Intellectual adaptations communicate through generations of humanity and benefit our survival every bit as much as physical adaptations. I am confident our ethics will survive without the fantasy of metaphysics in all of the essential human relations that Dr. Keyes outlined in his speech – because they are self-evidently beneficial!
The enemies of constructive evolution are those who manipulate and revise history and corrupt contemporaneous analysis of the world. And perhaps that leads to a bargain one can make with the supernaturals. In other words, supernatural idealism is a repository one can return to for a fresh batch of persuasive ethics whenever the destructive forces in humanity get ahead in the game, as they often do.
I expect that eventually we’ll grow out of that dependency and instead argue for the intrinsic ethical constructs that we know work, notwithstanding how we first came to understand them, while the battle against interpreters who corrupt reality rages on.