Commenter ECM sent me this post from Uncommon Descent about the is-ought fallacy, and the difficulties that atheists have grounding morality on worldview in which only material things exist. The post is written by Barry Arrington. He is summarizes an argument based on some of the comments from an earlier post.
Barry introduces two assumptions:
(1) That atheistic naturalism is true.
(2) One can’t infer an “ought” from an “is.” Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions.
Given our second assumption, there is nothing in the natural world from which we can infer an “ought.” And given our first assumption, there is nothing that exists over and above the natural world; the natural world is all that there is. It follows logically that, for any action you care to pick, there’s nothing in the natural world from which we can infer that one ought to refrain from performing that action.
This makes sense to me. If only matter exists, and the whole universe is an accident, then where would an atheist get this idea that the current arrangement of matter ought to be any other way? Matter just is. This concept of “ought to be” is totally alien to an atheistic worldview where everything is matter, because moral obligations are non-material.
The article goes on: (I added the number 3)
Add a further uncontroversial assumption: (3) an action is permissible if and only if it’s not the case that one ought to refrain from performing that action. This is just the standard inferential scheme for formal deontic logic.
Basically, he is saying that an action is permissible so long as there is no moral obligation against that action. Can you see what’s coming? (I added the number 4)
We’ve conformed to standard principles and inference rules of logic and we’ve started out with assumptions that atheists have conceded. And yet we reach the absurd conclusion: (4) therefore, for any action you care to pick, it’s permissible to perform that action.
And let’s be clear about why this is bad for atheists:
If you’d like, you can take this as the meat behind the slogan “if atheism is true, all things are permitted.” For example if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible. Many atheists don’t like this consequence of their worldview. But they cannot escape it and insist that they are being logical at the same time.
Let me just add one more point. How are we supposed to be morally obligated to perform any action if we are pure matter? Meat machines don’t have free will. We would just be strings of dominoes falling forward, with no choice whether to fall or not. And even if we could somehow choose, our choices have no ultimate moral significance.
So, what does morality mean to atheists, then?
A while back, I listed some quotes about morality on atheism, taken from atheists who have actually thought through the consequences of atheism for rational moral behavior.
Here is a quotation from Richard Dawkins:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Of course, atheists can sense the objective moral standard that God has built into every person. But their materialist worldview undercuts the meaningfulness of moral values, moral duties and moral accountability. And people just don’t act morally once morality has become irrational for them. Acting morally is hard.
What ends up happening to atheists is that they only do the right thing for pleasure, or to avoid social punishments. Once the pre-supposition of materialism has destroyed the rationality of morality, it becomes impossible for atheists to answer the question “Why be moral?”. Any atheist who continues to act morally is living inconsistently with their own worldview – and that is not sustainable in the long run.
Atheistic assumptions wear down the awareness of the moral law that atheists started out with, so that they begin to advocate for obviously immoral things, like the suppression of freedom of inquiry. Eventually, the guilt becomes so strong that they exchange authentic moral values like chastity and sobriety for cheap narcissistic fads like recycling and yoga.
The case of William Wilberforce
Consider this article from the Wall Street Journal about the abolitionist William Wilberforce.
In fact, William Wilberforce was driven by a version of Christianity that today would be derided as “fundamentalist.”
…William Wilberforce himself, as a student at Cambridge University in the 1770s and as a young member of Parliament soon after, had no more than a nominal sense of faith. Then, in 1785, he began reading evangelical treatises and underwent what he called “the Great Change,” almost dropping out of politics to study for the ministry until friends persuaded him that he could do more good where he was.
And he did a great deal of good…[h]is relentless campaign eventually led Parliament to ban the slave trade, in 1807, and to pass a law shortly after his death in 1833, making the entire institution of slavery illegal. But it is impossible to understand Wilberforce’s long antislavery campaign without seeing it as part of a larger Christian impulse. The man who prodded Parliament so famously also wrote theological tracts, sponsored missionary and charitable works, and fought for what he called the “reformation of manners,” a campaign against vice.
Even during the 18th century, evangelicals were derided as over-emotional “enthusiasts” by their Enlightenment-influenced contemporaries. By the time of Wilberforce’s “great change,” liberal 18th-century theologians had sought to make Christianity more “reasonable,” de-emphasizing sin, salvation and Christ’s divinity in favor of ethics, morality and a rather distant, deistic God. Relatedly, large numbers of ordinary English people, especially among the working classes, had begun drifting away from the tepid Christianity that seemed to prevail. Evangelicalism sought to counter such trends and to reinvigorate Christian belief.
…Perhaps the leading evangelical force of the day was the Methodism of John Wesley: It focused on preaching, the close study of the Bible, communal hymn-singing and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Central to the Methodist project was the notion that good works and charity were essential components of the Christian life. Methodism spawned a vast network of churches and ramified into the evangelical branches of Anglicanism. Nearly all the social-reform movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries–from temperance and soup kitchens to slum settlement houses and prison reform–owe something to Methodism and its related evangelical strains. The campaign against slavery was the most momentous of such reforms and, over time, the most successful.It is thus fitting that John Wesley happened to write his last letter–sent in February 1791, days before his death–to William Wilberforce. Wesley urged Wilberforce to devote himself unstintingly to his antislavery campaign, a “glorious enterprise” that opposed “that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature.” Wesley also urged him to “go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.”
Wesley had begun preaching against slavery 20 years before and in 1774 published an abolitionist tract, “Thoughts on Slavery.” Wilberforce came into contact with the burgeoning antislavery movement in 1787, when he met Thomas Clarkson, an evangelical Anglican who had devoted his life to the abolitionist cause. Two years later, Wilberforce gave his first speech against the slave trade in Parliament.
…This idea of slaving as sin is key. As sociologist Rodney Stark noted in “For the Glory of God” (2003), the abolition of slavery in the West during the 19th century was a uniquely Christian endeavor. When chattel slavery, long absent from Europe, reappeared in imperial form in the 16th and 17th centuries–mostly in response to the need for cheap labor in the New World–the first calls to end the practice came from pious Christians, notably the Quakers. Evangelicals, not least Methodists, quickly joined the cause, and a movement was born.
William Wilberforce believed that slaves were made in the image of God – that they were embodied souls who could be resurrected to eternal life. Wilberforce believed that the purpose of human life is to freely seek God, and to be reconciled with God through Christ. He wanted all men and women to have the opportunity to investigate and respond to God’s self-revelation to them.
Further study
You can read more about Wilberforce’s beliefs here and his public activities here. And you can still see modern-day abolitionists, like Scott Klusendorf, acting out their Christian faith. Only today they’re called pro-lifers.
A good paper by Bill Craig on the problem of rationally grounding prescriptive morality is here.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Good stuff. Thanks for the word.
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You seem to confuse permissible with desirable…they are not the same. Even with your belief in god grounded morals, Hitler still happened. Does that mean that christians viewed it as permissible. I doubt it. Acts such as those you reference are neither permissible nor desirable.
If you look at violent-crime rate figures worldwide and correlate them with religiosity it becomes clear that the non-believers are a much more peaceful (and moral) bunch than the supernaturally credulous. The same is true if this correlation is made by US state, rather than nations. It seems clear that the more religious a group becomes, the greater it’s propensity for bloodshed. (http://home.uchicago.edu/~psheaton/workingpapers/religionandcrime.pdf, http://www.prisoners.com/relcrime.html, a weak correlation, but one none the less: http://forums.canadiancontent.net/canadian-politics/34796-u-s-vs-canada-statistics.html, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article571206.ece).
Also, let me take this on from a different point of view: In the Old Testament, it makes claim that God damned the entire human race because of the acts of two people…not very moral. It goes on to say he caused a worldwide Flood that drowned pregnant women, innocent children, and practically everything else…moral? And it reports he killed Egyptian babies at the time of the Passover.Exodus 12:29-30
The New Testament states that God required the torture and murder of his own son.Romans 3:24-25 (I guess this is why christians belief the path of torture the US has embarked on to be just…but we’re not deities). I could probably go on and on depending on how long and hard I want to search. So with all of this, where do you get away with claiming that morals are grounded in a deity that we would deem immoral?
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What standard are you using to make moral judgments?
a) personal opinion
b) fashion of this society in this time and place
c) objective moral standard
if a) and b), who cares about jibber-jabber? If c), congratulations, you just proved God exists.
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It seems to me that moral behavior is very plausibly an evolutionary trait and that it can even be understood within the context of simple game theoretic models. For example, the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma studies of Axelrod (for which he won a MacArthur Prize) show how repeated interactions favor the development of strategies along the lines of “tit for tat”, even when the Nash equilibrium favors both parties defecting. The three essential elements to TFT which make it evolutionarily successful are (i) it is initially cooperative, (ii) it exacts proportional punishment, and (iii) it is forgiving. See Axelrod’s famous book, “The Evolution of Cooperation.”
The conclusions which favor TFT-like strategies have nothing to do with your (a) and (b) criteria. One might be tempted to say that TFT is then “objectively” effective, since this is essentially a mathematical result valid over a wide class of individual payoff matrices. Yet TFT is not teleological in any way, in that it does not require any cosmic moral lawgiver.
Personally, I am an ethical noncognitivist, but I believe that the work of Axelrod and others, and the work of various evolutionary psychologists, brings us much closer to the truth than the simplistic yet ultimately mysterious metaethics espoused by theists.
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This comment misses the point entirely. The things to be explained are:
– is the standard of good and evil real?
– to whom are moral duties owed?
– what does it matter in the end whether I am moral?
– is free will, which is needed for making moral choices, grounded on atheistic materialism?
These questions cannot be answered on atheism, and that is why morality is not rational on atheism. Atheists can only be moral for two emotional goals: 1) because it makes them happy to act in the fashion of this time and place, or 2) to avoid social disapproval for not acting in the fashion of this time and place. I don’t need to spell out for you what follows from the view that morality is illusory, do I?
Imagine yourself in the UK before William Wilberforce. What would be “moral” on atheism? Whatever the customs of that time and place were would be “moral”, on atheism. Only with a transcendent moral standard are you able to condemn slavery, but there is no such standard on atheism.
Imagine that Jerry, Sam and Wintery Knight are living in the UK before Wilberforce has finished acting out Christianity. Sam and Jerry would be “moral” (on atheism) by owning slaves, because morality is the standard that the herd has evolved in that time and place. If you wanted to be “moral”, you would act in the fashion of your herd. But I would not. I would act in line with the transcendent standard in the Bible, regardless of what the herd thought.
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“It seems to me that moral behavior is very plausibly an evolutionary trait”
A plausible explanation that has to be believed in entirely on faith because there has been no testing of such a theory and no potential method for testing it. The most that could be said about Meyerson’s belief in plausibility re TFT and the evolution of morality is that his explanation is consistent with the data; Meyerson provides no probabilities related to his explanation vis a vis the experimental data.
The fact that an explanation is “plausible” is merely another way of stating that the data are “consistent with”. An opinion expressed by “consistent with” (which I infer because that is the most that could be said about Meyerson’s ), doe not provide actual probabilities in regard to causation or identification. Moreover, a consistent explanation does not exclude any other potential explanations.
Indeed, “consistent” has been described as the worst word used to express scientific evidence. “To a scientist, and to a dictionary, ‘consistent with’ is simply the opposite of ‘inconsistent with’. . . . Two events are inconsistent with one another if they cannot possibly occur together . . . Anything with is not inconsistent with is consistent . . .” (Robertson & Vignaux, Interpreting Evidence: Evaluating Forensic Science in the Courtroom, 1995).
There are many possible explanations for the TFT data. Meyerson grabs onto one in faith not because his explanation is the most probable one, but because his explanation does not exclude (is consistent with) his belief in physicalism / materialism.
Furthermore, there is good reason to doubt Meyerson’s explanation. One of Darwinism’s crucial tenets is gradualism. Hence, we would expect that morality would arise gradually as its supporting physical structures evolve gradually. Just as we see (assumption) wide spread evolution of the eye and observe it a various levels of complexity, so also we should see wide spread evolution of morality and its manifestation at varying levels of complexity. But in fact we do not. Only humans have morality, and their morality is so extremely qualitatively different from anything even remmotely similar in the rest of the animal kingdom that it is not possible to even postulate what particular physical structures in the brain it might be associated with, let alone derived from or based on (generic frontal lobe is not sufficient, since that is the assumed locus for so much else, what is it in that lobe and in relation to other brain parts?).
In summary: Meyerson has no explanation of the data that would both explain the data and exclude other explanations, no way of testing whether his explanation is true, and no way of giving any probabilities for his explanation. His belief that it is true is a faith based belief.
regards,
John
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Gradualism went out decades ago. Evolutionary biology is an exciting field and a very active area of research. Recent experiments and observations suggest that the mechanisms of gene swapping are far from understood, and in some cases evolution proceeds surprisingly rapidly (e.g. the Galapagos finches, as studied recently by Rosemary and Peter Grant at Princeton).
The explanations for the relative superiority of TFT-like strategies of course are entirely mathematical and have nothing whatsoever to do with theology. John’s point should be that we can’t be sure to what extent the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments tell us anything about the evolution of human behavior, and I certainly would concur with this view. However, all I need to do is to argue for a plausible connection, and I think that is quite apparently the case.
Human behavior is extremely complex, and we are constantly subject to conflicting desires and impulses, which are generally regarded in a way which is socially contextualized. We have “moral instincts” but we also have other instincts, some connected with fear reaction and defensiveness, which result in a hierarchy of allegiances (e.g. family/community/nation/species) that seem quite clearly connected with phenomena such as xenophobia and racism.
Finally, there are of course pathological cases. Just as there are examples of people with color blindness or who do not digest milk or who have various genetic diseases, many sociopaths, I would argue, exhibit aberrant behavior due to a biological condition. One example is Brunner’s study of violence in males lacking the MAOA enzyme, which breaks down neurotransmitters believed responsible for the “fight or flight” threat response.
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Finch beak variations are micro-evolution, variation within a type. What I car about is the origin of new body plans and organ types. I accept beaks changing size, bacterial resistance and other types of changes within types.
Sam, I need you to focus like a laser beam.
On atheism:
1) what is the standard of good and evil? what is its existence?
2) to whom is the duty to follow this standard owed?
3) what ultimate significance is there on atheism for adopting the moral point of view, especially in cases where self-interest and moral oughtness are in conflict?
I need an answer to these questions, so that I can explain what follows from your answers. Remember. On atheism, the universe is an accident. Humans are biologically determined machines. There is no non-material moral law. Nothing that we do affects our final state. Individual humans and the race itself is doomed to death in the heat death of the universe.
Now I want an explanation for prescriptive morality within this atheistic framework. Otherwise, I think its clear to all that on atheism, morality is an illusion and we ought to understand that “moral” statements made by atheism are content-free. On atheism, why should I be moral when it gives me less pleasure, and when I can avoid social disapproval by secrecy or by exercising power to escape the social consequences.
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If you had been paying attention, you’d have noted that I am an ethical noncognitivist. I do not believe that objective morality exists. Rather, I believe that humans have evolved to reason in ways we identify as “moral”.
So, to answer your questions:
1) There is no universal standard of good and evil. While I am an ethical noncognitivist, I would say that “do not cause gratuitous suffering in others” is the statement which perhaps comes closest to expressing a moral universal, in that an overwhelming majority of humans, other than sociopaths (which I mentioned earlier).
2) This question presumes the existence of a universal ethical standard, which I deny. However, in any event it is a loaded question. The existence of a universal moral standard (which I deny) does not require the existence of a moral lawgiver who is a person (your “whom”), no more than the existence of physical law requires a lawgiver.
3) I’m not sure of what you mean by “ultimate significance.” As I myself emphasized, oftentimes our “moral reasoning” is in conflict with other impulses, and these conflicts are resolved in a socially contextualized way.
I have rather little interest in ethics, but there is no shortage of books on the subject. Michael Martin’s book, “Atheism, Morality, and Meaning,” describes how objective morality and purpose in life are possible without God (or belief in God), and furthermore how the Christian worldview provides a severely flawed basis for moral reasoning.
A very loose analogy may be drawn, in my view, between our ethical sense and our sense of e.g. hunger. Hunger causes us to act in a certain way, i.e. to eat. Sometimes though we defer such actions because of conflicting imperatives, e.g. I would very much like to sit and eat breakfast but I have to run and catch a train. The conflict between hunger and other instincts does not mean that hunger does not exist, obviously. Nor does the ultimate heat death of the Universe render our hunger meaningless (LOL !).
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Thanks Sam. Sorry to be a beast but I don’t want the conversation to stray from what I regard as the important issue: is morality rational on atheism?
What I mean by ultimate significance is that on atheism, whether we do the right thing or not does not have any ultimate significance, because humans, individually and collectively, will die.
Consider the example of being on a sinking cruise ship. All the guests will drown individually and collectively, and there are no lifeboats. What does it matter what each guest does ultimately? No individual actions of each guest can the ultimate outcome of the sinking boat, either at the individual or group level.
It is in that sense that I mean that there is no moral significance on atheism. Your moral actions will not affect your destination. And what this means is that atheists are not rational in performing any action that is against their immediate self-interest. They are rationally compelled to be selfish, to not act compassionately or charitably.
Also, in Christianity, there is a judgment at the end in which the actions of each individual will be weighted. On atheism, so long as you can evade the social consequences, there is no reason not to pursue pleasure by any means possible regardless of the fashions of your society. These fashions are just arbitrary by time and place!
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Some useful information on speciation:
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/S/Speciation.html
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WK, you could say that whether or not I eat a sandwich ultimately has no significance because of our own mortality and, to heighten the absurdity, the heat death of the Universe. Still, this does not change the fact that we sense hunger in a very vivid way. Similarly, I claim, we sense moral issues. I feel compelled to “do the right thing” even though I don’t believe at all in God and I fully believe I will eventually die and there is no afterlife and the entire Universe will eventually expand into a structureless emptiness. I believe I have evolved to reason and react this way. I can no more rationalize my way out of my moral instincts than I can rationalize my way out of feeling hunger.
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Thanks again Sam for this excellent comment. I understand that you have this instinct. But my question for you is, on atheism, why is it rational for you to listen to these feelings when it goes against your own self-interest? Those are just instincts drummed into you by evolution and social pressures about what is “fashionable”.
Suppose you have the urge to do something really bad. On Christianity, you have reasons not to do it. The universe is designed such that following these moral laws is the best way to flourish in the long run. You would be wrecking your main relationship with the Designer, who has done great things for you (e.g. – atonement). You would be failing you mission to explain God to others because they won’t listen to you if your character is a mess, and you might even be hurting them, so they really won’t listen to you.
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I’m not sure that acting morally in these hypothetical situations is contrary to my own self-interest, especially when I consider the psychological consequences of acting immorally.
It seems to me that within Christianity it is quite possible to lead a life of evil and licentiousness, yet at the last moment to “accept Jesus as one’s personal savior” and then be accepted into heaven. In other words, a deathbed conversion by Hitler is worth more than a live of dignity, principle, and compassion by Gandhi. I consider this morally absurd.
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Sam, I appreciate your commenting efforts. You’ve given me a lot to think about and write about.
Consider the situation where you are called upon to sacrifice your life to save that of your worst enemy, who is drowning in a pond. On Christianity, that is rational, in fact it is following Christ’s own example. This is the way we were made to be. On atheism, it would be irrational.
Regarding death bed confessions. I think this is a great point. But let me try to defend against it in two ways:
1) I doubt the sincerity of death bed conversions. Seriously! To change your mind on God and the resurrection and all these other things takes a lot of time. The will to believe is formed by study, and what sort of study is possible on a death bed? Come on, this is just self-interest.
2) There are degrees of resurrection quality of life. The cut between Heaven and Hell is made based on faith in Christ as Lord and Savior. But once you have decided where you are going, there is the question of the degree of reward/punishment. In short, Stalin will have a worse experience in Hell, than, say, Anthony Flew.
Regarding moral people in other religions, I am planning an entire post on this. But let me be clear: the purpose of life is NOT to behave morally. Nor is it to be happy and to have feelings of pleasant satisfaction. The purpose of life is to know God as he really is and to build a relationship with him.
That may involve studying science in order to appreciate how much effort was put into creating an entire universe out of nothing and fine-tuning it for life, as well as producing a habitable planet. It may also involve investigating the life of Jesus to find out exactly how God feels about humans and how far he is willing to go to communicate his character to us.
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WK, I also appreciate your thoughtful posts and replies to my comments. It is unfortunate that so much of the dialog between atheists and Christians is so simplistic, contentious and mean-spirited.
I’m not sure what it is in Christianity which obligates one to sacrifice his life for his worst enemy. But more to the point, it is quite possible, as I’ve tried to explain, that an atheist would experience the impulse to do the same. You could argue, “but it isn’t *rational*” and the atheist might even agree. But: (i) even if I stipulate that supreme self-sacrifice is irrational, that does not falsify my model of an evolutionarily derived moral instinct, and (ii) such arguments really require us to delve more deeply into what each of us means by “rational”. Rationality to me is a mental process guided by reason, where each step is logically related to the preceding steps. You seem to be operating under the assumption that any choice which results in one’s death is necessarily irrational, and that strikes me as highly problematic. There are many reasons I can imagine for self-sacrifice. There are soldiers who are atheists who willingly place themselves in dangerous situations knowing that the probability they will be killed is considerable. Some might instinctually dive on a live grenade to save their colleagues, or to save an enemy child. These battlefield decisions are made without the full engagement of our rational, analytical capacity, but if one does step back and analyze them, I can concoct several reasons why self-sacrifice could be quite rational.
Regarding deathbed confessions, surely the prospect of one’s death could plausibly move many an individual to reflection and introspection, so it seems to me that these 11th hour epiphanies are not necessarily unlikely or cynical. But in any event, surely it was *possible* that Hitler sincerely repented of his deeds to God and accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior just as the bullet was going through his brain. From what I understand, such an action would guarantee that Hitler is now in heaven, whereas Gandhi and Einstein (absent similar deathbed conversions) are now in hell, experiencing the permanent absence of God (as Craig and the Reformed theologians claim), or writhing in flames (as Dante and perhaps you believe).
Finally, your description of hell seems positively Catholic, along the lines of Dante’s circles, and utterly inconsistent with Reformed theology, which posits (as WL Craig has often claimed) that hell is simply an absence of the divine presence. So are you saying that Stalin is experiencing “more of an absence” of God than, say, Gandhi or Einstein? Do you have any independent (e.g. “scriptural”) justification for your claim #2?
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Hey, I’m happy with what we’ve both said on this to give you the last word, but you can come back and add more later.
Regarding the degrees of punishment/reward, I am NOT Catholic. No, no, no! This is straight from the Bible.
Look, here’s something from Luke 10:13-15:
13 “Woe to you, Korazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.
14 But it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you.
15 And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths.
Also, here is something from Philippians 4:10-19:
10 I rejoice greatly in the Lord that at last you have renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you have been concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it.
11 I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.
12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.
13 I can do everything through him who gives me strength.
14 Yet it was good of you to share in my troubles.
15 Moreover, as you Philippians know, in the early days of your acquaintance with the gospel, when I set out from Macedonia, not one church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving, except you only;
16 for even when I was in Thessalonica, you sent me aid again and again when I was in need.
17 Not that I am looking for a gift, but I am looking for what may be credited to your account.
18 I have received full payment and even more; I am amply supplied, now that I have received from Epaphroditus the gifts you sent. They are a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.
19 And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.
I feel very happy about these comments we are exchanging. I like to talk about these things, to see how we differ.
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By the way, I am not laboring under a misapprehension regarding the Christian position on morality. Reformed theology, from what I understand, acknowledges that individuals of any religious belief, or level of unbelief, can *act* morally. However, the claim is still that morality exists only due to God, and is an expression of God’s good nature, and furthermore that God has instilled a moral sense within all humans, whether or not we acknowledge it. The moral actions of a Gandhi or an Einstein are irrelevant to their status vis-a-vis the afterlife, because what is required to enter into heaven and into an eternal loving relationship with God is faith in God, and the acceptance of Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior.
If you think I’ve missed some crucial element of the dogma, please let me know.
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No, you’ve got it down better than most Christians do! Holy snark! Reading that comment made me happy.
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WK, I’m not sure you’ve got your theology straight, and I also disagree with your implied exegesis of Luke 10. First of all, this passage is a polemic modeled after those in the Hebrew Bible, e.g. Isaiah 14. It deals with cities, and not people. Furthermore, the text does not say that the punishment of Chorazin and Bethsaida would be greater than that of Tyre and Sidon, but rather that the former would find the moment of judgment less bearable, presumably because they would come to reflect on the miracles that had been performed in their midst and rue their failure to repent.
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Meyerson: “Gradualism went out decades ago.”
Depends on who you read. There are lots of competing theories out there, and by no means has the Evolution establishment abandoned gradualism.
It is not sufficient for Meyerson to assert that his theory explaining the TFT experimental results is “plausible”. Indeed, his theory that evolution can account for the experimental results is not plausible but rather entirely speculative.
The physical location of morality producing structures in the human brain is unknown. And, more importantly, there is no known method of transmission of morality pruducing structures: it is unknown whether it is genetic or epigenitic, etc.
The salient characteristics of the mind, such as intentionality, qualia, free will, incorrigibility, restricted access, continuity of self through time, and unity of consciousness (the ‘binding problem’)–which underly any concept of morality–are impossible to explain materialistically. Morality, along with these other properties are not physical properties. Nothing about matter as understood in a materialist scientific paradigm invokes or explains subjective mental experience.
Regarding “within Christianity it is quite possible to lead a life of evil and licentiousness, yet at the last moment to “accept Jesus as one’s personal savior” and then be accepted into heaven. In other words, a deathbed conversion by Hitler is worth more than a live of dignity, principle, and compassion by Gandhi. I consider this morally absurd.”
One cannot regard the death bed conversion as morally absurd unless one agrees that objective moral standards exist, which is the thing that materialist evolution cannot explain. Second, one does not enter heaven on the basis of good behaviour, nor–in orthodox theology–does good behaviour or thoughts give anyone a basis for claiming entry in heaven (I’ll use that as shorthand for an eternal existence in the presence of God. In orthodox Christian belief existence hin heaven is temporary as one’s eternal life is spent on a resurrected earth in a resurrected body; but that is another issue).
To argue the absurdity, or not, of the Christian view of deathbed conversions presupposes a Christian view of morality. Hence the crucial point of discussion comes before that stage. Initially one must deal with the impossibility for a materialist view to explain the immaterial aspects of human existence. The Christian perspective, on the other hand, starts not with material existence but with the existence of a moral nonmaterial being.
regards,
John
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Eldredge and Gould’s model of punctuated equilibrium was articulated in the early 1970’s and various examples of “adaptive radiation” are acknowledged to exist in the fossil record (e.g. bryozoans, Cambrian explosion, etc.) Models of phyletic gradualism are still sometimes employed in plant evolution but for most taxa there is rather little current activity in that area, as documented by Dawkins. (Incidentally, it is hardly clear that Darwin himself was a gradualist.) Today, the hot areas of evolution research are all in gene swapping.
Regarding morality, I have demonstrated, by appealing to Axelrod’s results, how a simple moral atom such as the “Golden Rule” can be described in purely a dispassionate game-theoretic (i.e. mathematical) context, and hence does not require any cosmic lawgiver.
As Shelly Kagan and other atheist moral philosophers have very convincingly argued, no deity is required for the existence of objective moral values. Furthermore, moral values are perfectly describable on materialistic grounds.
By the way, I thought Kagan absolutely crushed William Lane Craig during their debate on the necessity of God for morality. Craig seemed terribly confused and off-balance during Kagan’s questions, nor could he make a dent in Kagan’s arguments. One was left with the impression that Craig had shot his entire wad, yet Kagan still had an enormous reserve of ideas and models to draw upon.
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I am still waiting to hear the ontology of these objective moral values and duties, and why they are significant, on atheism. I.e. – I am waiting to hear details of how this works, instead of pronouncements of victory.
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The University of California Museum of Paleontology, in its web section on learning about evolution (a site recommended by National Center for Science Education), states in regard to gradualism and evolutionary jumps: “We observe examples of both slow, steady change and rapid, periodic change in the fossil record. Both happen. But scientists are trying to determine which pace is more typical of evolution and how each sort of evolutionary change happens.” Jerry A. Coyne, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago, writes “In Why Evolution Is True” (2009): “Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.”
Therefore, I suggest that contrary to Meyerson, there is activity in research on evolution on both the gradualist and rapid process fronts. Anecdotally, both he and I could find research papers on both processes, but since there is no statistical analysis of the number of research papers that are gradualist v. rapid, tossing examples back and forth won’t get us anywhere.
Either way, it doesn’t help Meyerson. When challenged that gradualism does not provide a sufficient explanation for gradual evolution of morality, Meyerson offered up rapid evolution. But by its very nature rapid evolution is not susceptible to research and appears to perform a magical black box or science of the gaps function: i.e., materialist evolutionists can’t show how morality could have evolved gradually, so it must have happened rapidly without leaving an evolutionary trace, which is why it can’t be explained.
Meyerson, “Regarding morality, I have demonstrated, . . . how . . . can be described . . .” If Meyerson does mean only “description”, then he hasn’t offered us anything helpful. Describing a zebra doesn’t explain how it evolved. If Meyerson means that he described an evolutionary process, then he has not; he has only given us a “just so” story.
The value of Axelrod’s study of Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma (RPD) for evolution is still a subject of discussion. Axelrod himself was aware that cooperation is only one of many possible outcomes of evolutionary play in the RPD., and his 1984 work explicitly stated that the focus of the reasearch was on conditions necessary for cooperative play. Subsequent work has demonstrated that theories of evolution of cooperation based upon RPD experiments are sensitive to assumptions made concerning agent rationality and to the composition of the initial population. More to the point, Axelrod’s study and subsequent research on RPDs only demonstrated what types of strategies are effective in repeated plays of Prisoner’s dilemma. They did not show how it could come to be that the players could have a several choices of strategies, nor whether successive plays of such games over generations would select for brain structures favouring a certain type of morality. There are additional critiques of Axelrod’s work, but all in all it’s pretty thin gruel upon which to base the evolution of morality.
If materialism is true, then there is no reason at all to assume that rationality exists. Moreover, rationaliyt cannot exist in the form it is commonly described, nor can free will exist, which is usually assumed to be necessary for any theory of moral accountability. The only escape is to redefine morality in a deterministic manner.
BTW, I don’t share Meyerson’s description of the Kagan – Craig debate, and I recommend that the interested do check it out.
regards,
John
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WK, I thought Kagan made his ontology quite clear in the sketch he gave during the debate. Did you watch it?
John — please, call me Sam. Regarding phyletic gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium, I found 66 papers on the ISI database dating back to 1978 with “phyletic gradualism” in the list of topics. A search for “punctuated equilibrium” came up with 479 hits. This is hardly a cautious scientific analysis but I hope you get the idea. As I said, Dawkins himself, who knows the field quite well, has made the same point. Gradualism is not completely dead, but overwhelmingly biologists believe that evolution is generally marked by more rapid changes. The idea that evolution = gradualism went out decades ago.
Nor did I “offer up” rapid evolution in the context of the evolution of morality. For all we know, moral reasoning could have evolved relatively slowly in humans.
I’m glad that I was able to introduce you to Axelrod’s work. Suffice it to say that the evolutionary success of TFT-like strategies is quite robust within a large class of payoff matrices. I get the sense that you feel that unless one can offer a complete account of the evolution of morality that it is pointless to invoke Axelrod’s work. But inasmuch as there is so much regarding human behavior that we do not understand in living subjects, it seems hopeless to demand that science at this stage connect all the dots. At any rate, the conclusions of the study are quite clear: if strategies are forced to interact repeatedly and to compete, cooperation can arise *naturally* as a preferred strategy even when the Nash equilibrium lies elsewhere. We are quite far from turning any of this into a detailed theory of evolutionary morality, which is why I only claimed that the connection was plausible.
I’m not sure how you come to your grandiose conclusions regarding materialism and rationality. Perhaps you could flesh that out a bit.
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Sam, I appreciate your use of data. I would not disagree that rapid evolution is currently a hotter area of research, but both your data and the UCatB site indicate that gradualism is still an area of active research. It seems that researchers would agree that evolution may occur rapidly or gradually (depending on the mechanism), and that disagreements would lie in the proportion of evolution that occurred each way, and when, etc. My point, however, was that there is no evidence that morality evolved gradually, and no mechanism for rapid evolution of this trait.
The science of the gaps is a hope that though there is no proof now, there will be proof because there has to be a materialist explanation of the origin of morality (based on the assumption that all observable data must have only material correlations and causes). What we get in the meantime are just so stories.
The problem with the Axelrod work is that it deals with the necessary conditions for the RPD strategies, not with how we obtain those conditions. That is, under certain conditions, players will more frequently use certain strategies because they have greater success over the long term. The more relevant question, from an evolution of morality perspective, is how do those initial conditions arise? What is the structure and associated function that gets passed on genetically? There is no evidence.
I do not disagree that the tit for tat strategy is a regulator of behaviour. One of the best known examples is Manfred Milinski’s 1987 laboratory experiments with stickleback fish. What we have in each case, however, is an observable demonstration of the use of the TFT strategy, but no explanation of how the strategy may have arisen, nor how it might be passed on.
The title of his work (The Evolution of Cooperation) is a bit misleading (but unintentionally so) to those that are not familiar with it. Those interested in knowing more might read “The Evolution of Morality”, Dennis Krebs, Simon Fraser at Universityhttp://www.sfu.ca/psyc/faculty/krebs/publications/The%20Evolution%20of%20Morality.pdf However, evolutionary psychology is a bit of a dirty concept; even atheist scientists make fun of it. Nevertheless, the article is a demonstration of what people try to achieve (see Stuart Derbyshire’s review of “Sex and War”, “Sex, war and stupidity”, wherein he writes, “In labelling Churchill as ‘ape-like’ and claiming that Timothy McVeigh was driven by ‘primate’ instincts, the authors of Sex and War hope to prove that war is an evolutionary trait. Their thesis is mind-blowingly dumb.” at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_printable/6299/
I put the evolutionary psychology theory of the evolution of morality into this same boat.
At any rate, back to Axelrod who starts with certain givens, which include the ability to use various behavioural strategies that have differential benefits. He then observes which strategy comes to be used the most. Axelrod does not provide an explanation for how these essential initial conditions might have arisen, nor any example or theory of how survivors might genetically pass on to their offspring a disposition to use the successful strategy sooner or more frequently. There has never been any observable genetic (i.e., unlearnt)difference in the offspring. It is an unproven assumption that better cooperation strategies provide increased survivability of offspring.
I contend, therefore, that it is not “very plausible” that morality could arise via evolutionary mechanisms. There is no probability that could be attached to such a theory that would even move it from the realm of impossible to the realm of possible but unlikely. Consequently, one reason that atheist morality is unintelligible is that there is no possible way in which it could have arisen. Note that I do not use “possible” with the meaning of “speculative”, but rather in relation to probability theory and the bounds on probability.
What I want readers to understand is that atheist science has not provided a plausible model for the evolution of morality from no morality. As a result, the atheist is left with only the playing field of philosophy, and the attendant difficulties raised by Wintery Knight.
Please note that my quote of Derbyshire is not intended to imply anything about Meyerson himself, who has engaged us in a decent, intriguing and interesting debate.
regards,
John
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Elucidation: by the phrase “no explanation of how the strategy may have arisen,” I’m not referring to the tit for tat strategy arising as the best among possible strategies, but rather refering to the conditions necessary for the organism to have the potential strategies at its disposal. We do not have, anywhere in the animal kingdom, examples of evolutionary precursors to tit for tat and related strategies.
regards,
John
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John, it seems to me that you are insisting I provide a detailed evolutionary account of morality, but, as I have explained, all I have claimed is that cooperation, which I take to be a form of ethical behavior, can be evolutionarily advantageous, and that a plausible link to the DNA world exists.
As to how in detail cooperation is nucleated in a harshly competitive environment, various suggestions have been made, starting with Hamilton and Axelrod, who argued that reciprocal altruism was bootstrapped by kin selection. There’s a description in chapter 9 of Robert Wright’s popular book, “The Moral Animal” (a congenial introduction to the subject of evolutionary psychology).
There are many plausible genetic and physiological connections as well. For example, mirror neurons fire in response to mimicry. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neurons
At any rate, as I myself have stressed, we are a long way from a coherent model of moral evolution, and you are right that evolutionary psychology doesn’t receive the respect that other areas of psychological research and evolutionary biology receive. Still it seems to me that there is a very plausible connection to be made here. Trivers’ ideas on reciprocal altruism have certainly stood the test of time — the concept is still very much in vogue among researchers. (I found 422 ISI citations to the topic of “reciprocal altruism” for example. I think it would be quite educational for you to browse their titles and also the types of journals where they appear.) There has been a spate of popular books on the subject as well: by Hauser, by Joyce, by de Waal, by Wright, by Ridley, and others.
I believe that our moral capacity is intricately linked with our capacity for language. From what I gather (I am a physicist and not a biologist), it is pretty much universally accepted that human brain evolution is very strongly correlated with the development of language.
Here’s a public lecture by Marc Hauser, entitled “Evolution of our Moral Intuitions.” It doesn’t address biochemical pathways or genetics in detail, but it does go into kinship dynamics etc.:
http://forum.wgbh.org/lecture/evolution-our-moral-intuitions
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Sam, I think we are getting off topic. You think that an evolutionary model provides a rich stew of possibilities; I think that it provides a meagre gruel that doesn’t enter the world of the statistically possible. You are correct that I do insist on a detailed evolutionary account, because without that it remains a “just so” story, a faith in something yet to be proved, a faith that science will fill in the gaps because from a materialist starting point it has to. We will have to agree to disagree. Still, I think that our exchange has been useful as it gives readers some opinions and further references to think about and chew over.
Returning to WK’s points before he chastises us, there is a problem with evolutionary morality per se. It cannot be an objective standard.
Firstly, if it is evolutionary, then it only relates to what helps the organism to survive. Thus, evolutionary morality is only, “if it helps the organism pass on its genes, it is moral”. Since genes are selfish and can only act at the individual level, then the morality is personal: i.e., if it helps me pass on my genes then it is moral for me. Hence murder, theft of resources (food, etc.), becomes moral if it helps me pass on my genes.
If we postulate that human morality has evolved to a group based morality, such that morality helps groups survive and pass on their genes, then what is moral is what helps the group survive and Auschwitz and genocide are moral because the killers survive as a group.
If the response is that it is not the standard that is evolving, but only the capacity for morality, then the particular standards of morality are only accidental. That is, when we evolved the capacity for morality, the standard that went with it was merely accidental and we have been stuck with that standard (and some earthfirsters would argue that that standard is what is killing the planet). It is then impossible to change our standard because it is what we got together with our capicity, or we can evolve a new standard (in which case the problem raised above occurs), or we are “free” to choose a new standard but have no objective basis for choosing one, other than survival.
Survival, however, is a very limited basis for morality. It cannot help us solve petty theft (it’s irrelevant to survival). On abortion, evolutionary morality cannot give rise to a standard based on privacy rights (woman’s right to body). Indeed, from an evolutionary standpoint abortion is immoral because it is the direct removal of one’s genes (they are not passed on).
Beyond the problems raised above (lack of moral standard, relative moral standard, accidental moral standard, changing moral standard), we have the problem that we are not even talking about the same thing. Sure, you and I and WK are all using the word “moral”, but I use it to refer to something transcendent, something outside ourselves, but you would only be talking about something entirely within ourselves.
This returns us to WK’s points, which have not yet been addressed.
regards,
John
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Sam and John, please try to stay on the topic of the original post. Focus on the ontological foundations for moral values, moral duties, and moral accountability on atheism and theism. The issue is not not why do we see patterns of behavior in nature. The issue is whether there is an objective moral standard, why should we follow it when it goes against our self-interest, and what difference does it make?
If you want to say something about how free will plays into morality on atheism and theism, that would be fine, too.
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I don’t think that we have any way to assign a priori probabilities to any of these evolutionary models. I do think there are several intriguing ideas in play, and on the whole the naturalist approach seems far more sensible and satisfying than the theistic one.
John, your claims to the effect that an evolutionary naturalist approach cannot “help us solve petty theft” (whatever that means) seems utterly baseless. Indeed, any model in which we are stamped with the urge to cooperate, or “put ourselves in someone else’s shoes” would address this point. Similarly, your claims about abortion strike me as pointless because (i) one could certainly imagine situations where abortion would be beneficial to one’s genetic survival (e.g. if future offspring were more likely), and, more to the point, (ii) not every individual act has consequences at the level of the species.
As far as objective moral values go, I thought Shelly Kagan gave a very fine account in his debate with Craig — the notion of do help and don’t harm, the “social contract,” etc. The notion that morality is embodied in the rules a set of rational individuals would agree upon for human interaction, analyzed from behind the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” seems quite sensible and clearly objective.
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Please stay on topic. Answer the question: what is the ontological status of these objective moral values, on atheism? On theism, they are rooted in God’s own nature, and because he created and designed the universe and us, we have a reason to care about this externally-existing moral standard. Following it is in our best interest – it allows for our flourishing.
But what is the ontology (being) of the objective moral standard on atheism. Atheism is committed to materialism. Where is this standard of right and wrong on atheism?
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I’ve answered but you apparently have not been paying attention. The standard of right and wrong is determined by how the community of rational persons, under a veil of social ignorance, would judge human actions.
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Petty theft means small theft, theft that does not affect personal or species survival, e.g., stealing your pencil. Why should something be immoral if it does not affect survival?
Your response re abortion shows how vacuous the concept becomes when one attempts to apply it to a particular situation. Who can know the future? And whether aborting this one would lead to greater child rearing success? And who gets to make this decision? Only the pregnant woman? Then basically everyone gets to do what is right in their own eyes, i.e., no standard at all.
At what level is the decision made? at the individual level only (as above). Or at the nation state level? Take Russia, for example, with a currently falling population. Is it right in that country to pass laws prohibiting abortion in order to ensure the survival of the genes of the russian people?
Or should Russia be prohibited from passing such a law because the world population is still increasing?
And though Kagan might find his personal standard of morality convincing to him, by what right can he enforce that standard on people who disagree with him? Why should others submit to his theory of morality?
And while you may like Rawls, he has been heavily critiqued by many (Jurgen Habermas delivered a great critique of him a few years ago), and has not been overwhelmingly convincing. And why should one prefer Rawls over Kant? or Hobbes?
Moral ontology is the study of what sort(s) of reality underwrites the truth or reasonableness of moral claims or attitudes. Sam proposes a naturalist moral ontology–morality can arise in an evolutionary fashion. But ethical naturalism falls prey to the critiques raised by G.E. Moore over a century ago.
Ethical naturalism is the view that the reality underlying the Good is something natural, such as “…the subject matter of the natural sciences and…psychology,” or “…all that has existed or will exist in time” (Moore, 1903: 92). Moore raised two defeaters of ethical naturalism. One is the “naturalistic fallacy”. This argument holds that any attempt to identify the Good with something natural must commit a fallacy because goodness is a normative (value-laden, prescriptive) property whereas nature is non-normative (value-neutral, descriptive).
regards,
John
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