Of course, appearances might deceive. Immediate perception tells us that the earth is flat and that the sun and moon circle around it; modern experimental science has revealed otherwise. So what appears to be action motivated by gratitude and love might in fact be determined by genes. That is indeed possible. But we need good reason to doubt the appearances. One reason could be that the genetically materialist story makes better sense of the data of behaviour and experience than rival accounts. Yet attempts to explain human acts of heroic self-sacrifice in terms of the long-term strategy of mindless and invisible genes are laughable in their contorted implausibility. Their claims are more dogmatic than demonstrated. 

So why does the materialist construal of the empirical and scientific data gain traction? Why is its dismally anti-humanist story so strangely (and dangerously) popular? The deepest reason probably lies in an anxious, wilful rejection of spiritual realities, made on the adolescent assumption that external claims constrain and suffocate human freedom. The fact that, without a given horizon of value, human freedom itself vanishes into horrifying insignificance is not permitted to speak.

A more proximate reason lies in the widespread authority of the tale about human being told by Thomas Hobbes. Writing in the light of growing political conflict and then terrible Civil War in England, Hobbes decided to take as his disillusioned starting point for thinking about social and political life a supposedly original "state of nature". Here human life is famously "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", because social relations comprise a war of all against all, since human beings are individualistic atoms, driven first and last by the fear of pain and death. On the simple ground of this desperately materialist reading of human motivation, Hobbes proposed to understand the construction of social and political co-operation. And his proposal has since been blithely taken up by many others, not least by secularists in search of a naturalistic basis for morality. Accounts of ethics that operate in terms of natural evolution usually owe quite as much to Hobbes's speculation as to Darwin's science. In fact, Daniel Dennett so conflates them as to label Hobbes "the first sociobiologist".

But Hobbes's anthropological realism is not so realistic. While he was indulging his speculative disillusion in penning Leviathan from the armchair safety of Paris, his friend Lucius Carey, 2nd Viscount Falkland and amateur theologian, was demonstrating that not even England's internecine bloodbath lived down to the mythical "state of nature". Toward the end of the battle of Edgehill in 1642, Falkland interposed himself between his own victorious royalist comrades on the one hand, and a sorry group of surrendered parliamentarians on the other, in order to stop the former from slaughtering the latter. He transcended his own fear of death to save others. These others were not his kin; they were not even members of his political group. And they were not just strangers; they were the enemy.