As far as reading material that addresses these issues, the first that came to mind was a 2011 speech by Elder Oaks called “Truth and Tolerance”:
https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dallin-h-oaks/truth-and-tolerance/
Basically, he identifies one of the two key fallacies that your students are making (and the way you worded your inquiry suggests you already understand all of this, so I’m a little embarrassed to be writing to you “sharing” my thoughts—but, hey, you asked for it :)
1. First, as Elder Oaks points out, it’s a fallacy to assume that we “can’t legislate morality” since all laws (all of them) legislate morality. Every single one. Laws against theft are legislating the morality of “thou shalt not steal.” Laws against murder are legislating the morality of “thou shalt not kill.” Laws providing government assistance are legislating the morality of helping the poor. Laws against slavery are legislating the morality of racial equality (etc. etc.).
So the question isn’t, “Should we legislate morality?”—we already know the answer is “yes”—but “Which morality should we legislate?” For Latter-day Saints, Section 134 gives clear guidelines on this (as do the rest of the scriptures, but just in a less direct, concise way).
2. The second fallacy is the idea that some people get their moral insights (and, by extension, their beliefs about which morality we should legislate) from religion while others do not, and that it’s somehow illegitimate to bring religious values into politics. This is a critical error.
The reality is that everyone gets their morals (and therefore their ideas of which morality we should legislate) from religion, i.e., faith. As Paul pointed out, faith is knowledge of the unseen and since moral truths are completely invisible, then what we know about morality is entirely a matter of faith. Science is the realm of the empirical (the seen) and can give empirical knowledge, but the most important truths, such as truths about morals, are non-empirical. No scientist ever looked into a microscope and said, “Hey, will you look at that? It’s wrong to torture innocent children!” or looked at a test tube and said, “I’ve just found out that we should be compassionate!” We know such moral truths (and much else) by the faith which precedes scientific investigation.
Anyone who says otherwise is deceiving themselves, but boy are they trying hard and getting good at this self-deception. My friend Michael Shermer, for instance, once sent me a long article he wrote arguing that we can get morals from science because we can see that “Humans everywhere seek to survive and flourish and therefore we should do what helps human flourishing and survival.”
This is bad reasoning because he’s engaging in the futile task of trying to derive an IS from an OUGHT. Philosopher David Hume showed this was impossible over two centuries ago, but it’s also just basic common sense. Every rational person knows that it’s absurd to say, “It IS the case that men abuse their wives therefore men OUGHT to abuse their wives” or “it IS the case that humans are greedy therefore we OUGHT to be greedy.”
If we used Shermer’s logic, then we would need to conclude that we OUGHT to commit every evil act because it IS the case that humans do commit every evil act (genocide, rape, murder, cruelty, etc.). Sorry, but Hume was right: IS has nothing to do with OUGHT.
So Shermer saying “It IS the case that humans survive and flourish therefore we OUGHT to promote human survival and flourishing” is no more empirically valid than saying, “It IS the case that COVID-19 viruses survive and flourish and therefore we OUGHT to promote COVID-19 survival and flourishing” (actually, we OUGHT to do the opposite, which is why Shermer got vaccinated). IS has nothing to do with OUGHT and therefore science (the realm of IS) can’t even begin to shed light on morality (the realm of OUGHT).
And it’s not just Shermer. Pretty much every atheist begins their appeals to a scientific basis for morality with, “If we can just agree that…” but this “just agree” is where the leap of faith comes in. What are we agreeing on, and how do we know it? They’ll say something like, “If we can just agree that we should maximize human well-being…” or “If we can just agree that we should respect human rights…” or “If we can just agree that compassion is better than cruelty…” but these are all appeals to non-empirical assumptions for the “agreement.” They are all taking a leap of faith before the scientific investigation even begins.
Atheist Steven Pinker’s claim that, “I don't want other people to hurt me so I shouldn’t hurt others” is no more scientifically valid than saying, “I don’t want other people to hurt me so I should kill and control others to prevent them from hurting me.” And, in fact, the latter statement is far more justified and common from a Darwinian point of view: those most successful in reproducing their genes throughout history (e.g., Ghengis Kahn) were those who were the most ruthless in killing and controlling other people. The most successful reproducers throughout history have made the Kahn survival calculation, not the Pinker one, and it has paid off big time. So why should we heed Pinker instead of Kahn? There’s no good reason except that we know through faith (i.e., intuitions) that the Kahn survival strategy is morally wrong and the Pinker survival strategy is morally right-. You simply can’t get that knowledge by conducting experiments in a laboratory, observing nature, or reading a biology textbook. All other “science gives morals” arguments are based on the same faulty reasoning. Nietzsche understood this, but current-day atheists do not (or, more likely, pretend not to).
Which brings us back to the two fallacies: since morals can’t be known empirically, then they can only be known through revelation, i.e., “moral intuition,” and since this is non-empirical knowledge, then we are knowing moral truths through faith, i.e., “religion.” Everyone gets their morals from religion, no matter how “secular” they believe themselves to be, ergo, the idea that we “shouldn’t bring religion into politics” is absurd because it would mean excluding all morality from politics and yet all law, as Elder Oaks pointed out, is an implementation of someone’s idea of morality
Just this past week Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor fell into this error, when she claimed that it was somehow illegitimate to oppose abortion because believing the fetus is a life is a "religious issue." It’s true that believing that an unborn child is a person is a religious belief, but so is the belief that slaves were people—does she believe, then, that the Supreme Court shouldn’t have overturned the Dred Scott or Plessy rulings? Would she have excluded all of the 19th century anti-slavery arguments from public discourse since virtually every abolitionist organization in America was explicitly Christian? The essence of personhood is not something we find out through scientific investigation, nor is the idea that persons have rights. These are non-empirical truths known only by religious means—faith—and nobody is seriously considering excluding morality from laws, and therefore, by definition, they can’t be in favor of excluding religion from consideration in the making of laws.
All the best --
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