A man got to have a code. —Omar, The Wire.

One of the central tenets of the New Atheist program lately being peddled by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, et al., is that rational atheism does not entail moral nihilism. But what happens when scientists, working in the new field of moral psychology, find out that our moral thinking depends less on reason than it does on naturally-selected instinct?

Steven Pinker, in a long essay in this week’s New York Times Magazine, recognizes the threat:

“Morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them…. The whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.

Pinker thinks that he can save the appearances, but his solutions aren’t very convincing. He proposes that we conjure moral principles out of the lessons of nonzero-sum games and our ability to imagine ourselves in another’s shoes, which is supposed to result in—surprise!—a morality that just happens to look a lot like a rudimentary market-driven liberal society.

But granted that nobody—well, almost nobody—likes to be called a nihilist, it would be nice to see Pinker own up to the facts that he so clearly lays out. “Amoral nihilism” is precisely what you get if you accept evolutionary explanations as the first and last word on human behavior. To say otherwise is either deception or sentimentality.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that the science is wrong. But it does suggest that the pious platitudes of the New Atheists depend on faith just as much as the religions they so despise. Sartre at least had the courtesy to acknowledge that the prospect of a world without values might inspire something other than a hectoring optimism:

The absurd is not, to begin with, the object of a mere idea; it is revealed to us in a doleful illumination. “Getting up, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, in the same routine…,” and then, suddenly, “the seeing collapses,” and we find ourselves in a state of hopeless lucidity.