Thinking Christian

From Melanie Phillips today comes possibly the most intellectually aware statement I have seen from any journalist on the Intelligent Design controversy, including this:

While materialist fundamentalists can deal with religious believers by scoffing they are in a separate domain altogether from the real ie scientific world, the suggestion that science might itself arrive at the conclusion that there are limits to what it can understand is a heresy that directly threatens the materialist fundamentalist closed thought-system — and therefore must be stamped out.

… they cannot grasp that ID is a metaphysical idea that comes out of but stands separate from science, in that science leads here to an idea with which by definition it must abruptly part company. Instead they insist that the two must be fused – and when that proves impossible, they cry victory.

As Charles Johnson asks on LGF:

If ‘intelligent design’ is really based on science, why have their advocates failed to produce any scientific evidence for that claim, despite millions of dollars worth of funding and years in which to do it? Instead, ‘intelligent design’ proponents spend all their time on public relations. Where are the peer reviewed studies? Where are the experimental proofs that can be duplicated by other scientists? Answer: nonexistent.

Well of course they are non-existent — because ID is not in itself a scientific discovery. It is rather an inference from scientific discoveries. Looking at the complexity of the created world, it says the evidence points inescapably to a guiding intelligence as the cause of that complexity. It is an idea, a conclusion to a chain of observation and thought. When people demand proof of this idea, what they are actually demanding is proof that an ‘intelligent designer’ exists. The fact that there are no peer-reviewed studies (!) demonstrating the existence of such a cosmic ‘designer’ provokes this yah-boo response. But it is obviously no more possible to prove the existence of an ‘intelligent designer’ than it is to prove the existence of the Biblical God.

ID is thus a paradox. The whole point is that it states that the ‘intelligent designer’ it posits as the only logical inference from scientifically verifiable complexity cannot be known through scientific means. This is because the essence of the ID idea is that there is a limit to science beyond which it cannot go….

I’m certainly more than overdue to respond to Tom Clark here, and now finally there is opportunity to do so. It has been so long since the last post on this topic, and this answer will run so long, that I’m publishing it as a new blog post.

First, I want to state my agreement with what he wrote about non-Christians’ ability to “be moral in all the ways that Christians endorse,” though only partially. I think he and I would both agree that this applies strictly to moral norms such as found in the latter portions of the Ten Commandments and not to the earlier, where the topic has to do with relating to God. The first and greatest commandment, Jesus said, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” (Matthew 22:37). This is not something a non-Christian can do or would choose to do, unless she were at the same time deciding to follow God’s way. Somehow, strangely, I think even Christian believers have forgotten that this is a central ethical issue, though as the first and greatest commandment it certainly must be.

Nevertheless in terms of human relationships, atheists can and generally do indeed act morally, as do Christians, so that point is not in contention here. The question is whether naturalism presents a compelling and coherent explanation for morality, and as Tom said at the end of his comment, it was his goal, he said, to show that a naturalistic ethic could be stated and held coherently.

He may have met that goal, though I have serious questions about that. There is another important goal in moral discussion, which is to state an ethic compellingly. On this he ended up where (in my experience) non-theistic ethics always seem to end up, in a place that is not at all fruitful for moral thinking. I’ll explain as I go along.

Coherence
First, my questions about the coherence of his description of morality.

Tom Clark says “values flow from human nature as modulated by human culture… we’re hard-wire to take our moral intuitions very seriously.” We agree that values may be discovered by observing human nature, and by reflecting on our own experiences; and we agree that these are things we take very seriously. To the not inconsiderable extent that this is an empirical fact, it is explained at least as well by theism as by naturalism. Christian and Judaic theism takes it that humans are created in God’s image, which includes having at least some grasp of what goodness is in God’s view.

Tom says then “there’s good empirical evidence for a robust natural motivational basis for the problem morality addresses.” If by that he means that this provides differential support for a natural motivational basis–i.e., that this is evidence for a natural more than for a supernatural basis–I would disagree, for supernaturalism accounts for the empirical evidence at least as well as naturalism does.

We come now to a further point Tom makes here, which raises several puzzling questions for someone like me.

How does a liberal-progressive Western naturalist like myself justify the proposition that all humans have equal claim to the same set of rights against the opposing conservative-regressive claim, advanced by some Eastern Muslim theocracies, that certain classes of humans (gays, women, minorities, non-Muslims) should not be granted equal rights? This is a quintessentially normative, not empirical question, but it is informed by empirical considerations. The basic argument, some of which you kindly quoted, is that all classes of human beings have, in empirical fact, more or less the same desire for self-preservation and actualization – for human flourishing – and there’s no empirical basis to deny any class the opportunity for such flourishing. So, absent any countervailing considerations, they should be granted such opportunities.

Normativity
My first question with respect to this is how it can be, when Tom has set up empiricism as the only basis and test for knowledge, that another category, the normative, can find room to enter in. He seems on the one hand to have set the two in opposition to each other, but on the other hand to have given the normative some epistemic space anyway. I’m not at all sure how this can be done, given his epistemology (discussed earlier in this series).

Equality of Desire
Second, is it empirically true that all human beings (not classes of human beings as written here, but human beings themselves) have the same desire for self-preservation and actualization? How has this been measured? Is there not psychological/sociological evidence to the contrary? What about suicidal persons? The question is important because of a follow-up point found not much later:

The claim that all humans are of equal worth flows from the fact that each of us has more or less the same desire for flourishing, and the fact that there’s no basis to suppose some classes of humans should be thwarted in that desire. The value, the worth of each human being, is rooted in human nature itself, namely in each and every person’s strong innate desire to live and thrive.

If worth is derived from desire to flourish, then if I become depressed and suicidal, does my worth decrease? I assume Tom would answer no, but on what basis? This puzzles me.

My third and fourth questions from this passage requires me to quote part of it again:

There’s no empirical basis to deny any class the opportunity for such flourishing. So, absent any countervailing considerations, they should be granted such opportunities.

Abstractness
I frankly don’t know how to apply morality to a class. This is an abstraction beyond practical application. I can treat a person morally or immorally, and I can treat members of a class morally or immorally, but I can only do so by the way I treat them as individual persons. Maybe my decisions on how to treat them are based on the class to which they belong (in reality or in my perception). But even in that case it is not the class I’m treating well or ill, it is the person. Even if another member of that class feels well-treated or put off because I made my decision on the basis of class membership, that is a person, not a class, that is being affected by my action.

This point matters in this discussion because Tom Clark seems to think equality of worth comes from each class having equal desires for life, self-actualization, and flourishing. Statistical leveling of large groups tends to make this the case, but morality is not about statistically-defined groups, but about persons. I would like to know if he can take this to the level of individuals.

What is a Class?
Further, even if treating the matter according to classes could be defended as legitimate, I wonder if there’s some smuggled-in set of assumptions about what constitutes a class. I think there may be a class of suicidal persons who do not have the same desire for flourishing as others have. Does being a member of that class make one’s worth less than others? Or, there may be a class of suicidal persons and their spouses. Why can we not define a class in that way? This class’s overall desire for self-actualization and self-preservation is, on average, less than the rest of the population. Does that mean that even the non-suicidal spouse, as a member of that class, has a lower worth than someone who is not associated with a suicidal person?

In other words, if there is a coherent basis for regarding each person as equal in Tom Clark’s ethic, I have yet to understand it.

has to do with a to the question, “why should I follow moral system M?” Without this compellingness, there is no reason to follow an ethic, and the person is free to make up his own or to follow an ethic of personal impulse and immediate unmoderated desire. Compellingness (and here for now I will switch to the more common “oughtness”) may be either internal or external. There is the inward oughtness of human nature, discussed above, and there is also that which is learned from outside oneself through family and culture, which often becomes internalized as an inward sense of oughtness.

Compellingness
I suppose I made up that word “compellingness.” It has to do with answering to the question, “why should I follow moral system M?” Without this compellingness, there is no reason to follow an ethic, and the person is free to make up his own or to follow an ethic of personal impulse and immediate unmoderated desire. Compellingness (and here for now I will switch to the more common “oughtness”) may be either internal or external. There is the inward oughtness of human nature, discussed above, and there is also that which is learned from outside oneself through family and culture, which often becomes internalized as an inward sense of oughtness.

But as Tom Clark has astutely pointed out, these norms are not all universally shared. The naturalist has two options to revert to at that point: persuasion and power. He states it clearly enough here:

Because there’s no value-neutral criterion (such as God’s authority) by which to decide between competing moral principles, arguments for them necessarily involve appeals to pre-existing values. So, progressive naturalists appeal to the innate moral sense… and they cite the virtues of existing cultural traditions and political arrangements based in progressive values…. However, given sharp differences in cultures and worldviews, there is no guarantee such arguments will cut any ice with the opposition, and sometimes we are forced to use force in defending our principles. This point gets elaborated here.

In the ellipsis I left out part of the way in which he would attempt to persuade those who disagree, but the point is that there is either persuasion or force. What bothers one like me most about this is that quite clearly, morality is a matter of who wins. I don’t see a universal law in naturalism that decrees liberal equality will be the winner. In fact, I suspect there may even be some chronological/cultural chauvinism involved in supposing that our culture, alone among all cultures and all periods of history, has figured it out in a way that will last. The door is wide open for a different winner, one that Tom Clark will argue (unless he changes his mind) fails to meet the standards of empiricism. The new winner may well say, “we see it differently,” and that will be that. The word “compellingness” comes back, with a decidedly less friendly feel to it than in the first way I employed it here; and who knows where “oughtness” goes?

Christian theism’s ethic is based on a much firmer foundation. Standards of morality are part of the furniture of reality, as it were, which is why we have a basic apprehension of them in our consciences. Their oughtness is inherent within them, and not derived from some other non-moral principle. Their compellingness is fitting to them, inherent and appropriate to their own basic nature, and our experience of their compellingness may be internalized or external. Either way, it fits.

Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that religion is a dangerous form of child abuse, a claim he reiterated in an online essay titled “Religion’s Real Child Abuse.” He explicitly says that while sexual abuse by priests may be bad, what’s worse is raising children to think of themselves as members of one religion or another, or saddling them with the fear of hell.

In response to that I wrote an article for our local newspaper, republished in BreakPoint Online in early 2007, showing that this is not just a religious/theoretical claim, but it has distinct scientific implications. Psychologists and sociologists have worked out a clear, empirically-based picture of how abuse affects children. If religion is a form of abuse, it should have some of the same identifiable negative effects on children that abuse has. Research shows, however, its effects are generally quite the opposite: as I wrote then, according to the National Study of Youth and Religion, American youth who are devoted to religion (predominantly Christians in this study) come out better than non-religious youth in every one of the 99 life-outcome dimensions that were measured.

Dawkins is a zoologist by professional training, but he has become much more than that. At the time he wrote these things he was the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. By holding that position, and by his prominence in the media, he has been for many “the voice of science” in the English-speaking world. He has consistently staked out a position as one who speaks for reason, rationality, evidence, and empiricism. When Christian thinkers took him to task for writing on a topic, religion, on which he has done astonishingly little actual research, he responded, “Why bother? What need is there to dig into a topic that’s so obviously irrational?” While there are serious weaknesses with that answer, my attention here is on something even more fundamentally, obviously amiss: as a scientist, a spokesman for science, he persistently and publicly contradicts what science has to say about this topic.

This seems strange to me. Stranger still is that in over two years since then, to my knowledge no scientist and no other journalist has called him to account for it.

I suppose some would say that if Dawkins’s thesis had been presented in a journal rather than a popular publication, it would have been flagged down by peer-reviewers and never published. Or if somehow it had been published, it would have been quickly and decisively answered. The same should not be expected of a popular publication, some might say.

That would be a fair answer to give in many cases, but I think Dawkins’s case is different. In becoming the public face of science, he took on an especially high level of accountability for how he treats science. He ought not to be contradicting scientific findings so cavalierly as he has done with this topic. Those who care about the integrity of science ought not to be letting him get away with it—even in a popular publication; rather, especially in a popular publication, where many, many thousands are supposedly being shown what real science is.

But as far as I’ve been able to observe, no one has raised a word of scientific objection on this point. That raises questions in my mind, which I will leave for discussion here:

• Has there actually been some response that I’ve missed, some scientific or journalistic call to accountability?
• If not, what does this say about the consistent application of self-correction in science? Why is it not being applied in this case?
• What’s really going on? How do we explain Dawkins’s anti-scientific stance on this issue, and the lack of response from the scientific/journalistic world on it?

Book Review

Bayard Taylor has a knack for explaining issues for teens and college students, and doing it clearly, with a refreshing sense of humor. He did it previously with Blah, Blah, Blah, an excellent guide to worldviews (and yes, that’s its title, or at least part of it). He has done it again with The Late Great Ape Debate, a tour of five prominent views of origins. What he does with these five views may be regarded as heretical by some—especially by mainstream evolution proponents. He lets the readers decide for themselves.

Actually that may be a bit overstated. The book is an introduction to these five views, not an exhaustive description. It’s an orientation, providing readers a way for to find their way around in the debate, to recognize the various views for what they are when they see them or hear them. There is not enough information in the book for the reader to come away with an educated, strong opinion on which view they ascribe to themselves, but there’s plenty for them to get started with.

Taylor does not tell us where he himself stands until very late in the book, except that as a Christian he quickly rejects naturalistic evolution, the view that natural processes with no guidance or intervention from God produced life, the universe, and everything (to borrow a phrase from elsewhere). The other four views (theistic evolution, young earth creationism, old earth creationism, and intelligent design) he maps on to a taxonomy showing how they each treat scientific evidences and Biblical interpretation. Briefly he sets forth pros and cons for each. Near the end, as I said, he lets us know what he himself thinks, but he also lets us know his own wife doesn’t necessarily agree with him. That, as much as anything else, underscores his approach: we can disagree on these things and remain friends—but we ought to at least know what we’re talking about!

That’s one of the three main features I found most valuable about this book. It gets the reader started, prepared to evaluate some of the debate, wise to what’s going on under the surface in various approaches, without hammering on one interpretation in particular. Like Taylor, I’m convinced that naturalistic evolution is completely wrong, for we have multiple independent reasons to be confident that God has directed natural history. Also like Taylor, I have a definite position of my own in the controversy; but also like him, I know the whole story has not been told yet, and new information might lead to new interpretations. No matter what, it behooves us all to be aware of the various positions and their implications.

It’s particularly important in a contentious atmosphere to understand others’ positions accurately. Taylor does us all a terrific service by straightening out one of the most significant distortions of the all: the astonishingly tendentious version of the Scopes trial presented in the play and movie, Inherit the Wind. Scene by scene, character by character he compares the fiction with the reality. The book is worth reading for that alone.

That’s the second of the three features of this book I appreciated the most. The third is its enjoyable readability, especially for high school and college students. Taylor has a flair for a phrase. The chapter on Inherit the Wind he titles “Inherit the Spin.”. Section headings like “To Go Ape or Not To Go Ape—That Is The Question” spice up the reading throughout. Sure, it’s not on the order of a professional journal presentation, but that’s not what it’s for.

It’s almost graduation time. This would be a great summer reading gift for a recently graduated senior heading off to the worldview bazaar known as college. (Coupling it with Blah, Blah, Blah would make it even better.) But it doesn’t have to be a graduating senior: anyone could profit from the excellent overview this provides for a difficult debate.

The Late Great Ape Debate by Bayard Taylor, 2008. Cincinnati, OH: Standard Publishing. 196 pages plus endnotes. Amazon Price US$11.04.

After a two-month hiatus, it’s my pleasure once again to take up conversation with Tom Clark, director of the Center for Naturalism, who also runs the website Naturalism.org and the Memeing Naturalism blog. Our first three rounds on this were interesting and productive, in my opinion, and apparently also Tom’s.

Previously we discussed whether his approach to epistemology was adequate and supportable, which I do not intend to raise for discussion again here; I think we’ve covered that, even though we did not come to agreement. The great remaining question has to do with his position on the ethics of naturalism. I will illustrate his position with a series of quotes from his paper Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First.

This statement of the obvious – that respect for empiricism matters, crucially – simply sets the stage for the central argument of this paper: that when it comes to representing reality, there is no coherent, ethically responsible substitute for science and other empirical disciplines.

But the empirical imperative is not only rational, it becomes a positive ethical obligation when we engage in collective projects that affect the lives of millions.

A little epistemic humility would go a long way toward reducing the ideological tribalism underlying the culture wars.

So we see that Clark values, and seeks to be guided by, responsibility and humility, and he acknowledges that there are ethical obligations upon humans. On these things we are quite in agreement. He shares more detailed ethical views in passages like this one:

Religiously motivated opponents of birth control, abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage have sought to disseminate information at odds with science: about the supposed inefficacy of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV, the purportedly dire psychological impact of having an abortion or growing up with two mommies or daddies, and the supposedly superior feasibility of some alternatives to embryonic stem cells.

(I note in passing that the “superior feasibility of some alternatives to embryonic stem cells” is, at least at this stage of research, quite empirically factual. But that is not my main point here.)

Now, all of this is in context of an impassioned call for empiricism, Clark’s position that nothing is known unless it is knowable through science or means very much like science, i.e., intersubjective empiricism. In a spirit of epistemic humility, no belief or opinion should be regarded as knowledge unless the object of that belief is a public object, capable of being examined by anyone (theoretically at least), and on which other persons generally find agreement.

Clearly, though, he takes ethical obligations to be an object of knowledge. How can he do this on his empiricist epistemology? One potential difficulty with his position comes to mind but must be discarded immediately. By public object, we can be sure Clark does not necessarily mean a physical object; I’m sure he also includes abstract objects like, say, the triangle formed by our sun, Betelgeuse, and Sirius; or numbers; or logical relations. So even though ethical obligations are not touchable, countable, or measurable, that in itself does not automatically rule them out under his epistemology, provided they can be tested by some appropriately empirical means.

Clark suggests that this is possible. He says that “empiricism and equality go hand in hand,” producing a basis for ethics that stands, by the way, in sharp contrast to religiously based ethics:

The primary justifications for discrimination against women, racial, ethnic and religious minorities, atheists, homosexuals, and other out-groups are found in traditional faith-based religions such as Christianity and Islam, and in non-empirical secular ideologies such as Nazism, social Darwinism and white supremacy. There are no good science-based reasons for such discrimination, so to the extent that we can divest people of their factually unfounded prejudices we’ll move toward a more tolerant, pluralist, egalitarian culture of universal human rights.

In an earlier paper of his he expresses this view in further detail:

By contrast, there is no science-based, empirically derived justification for supposing any class of individuals merits fewer opportunities for self-development, or for limiting their rights to education, political participation, owning property, or any other right commonly held by individuals in liberal secular societies. Such limitations and discriminations can only find justification in non-empirical beliefs about the privileges owed those ranked higher in a social hierarchy, or belonging to certain in-groups, whether based on gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religious identification, or other denomination. The history of progress in human rights (progress as progressives see it) is the dismantling of such justifications, of showing them to have no basis in empirical fact.

Whatever biological and cultural differences exist between genders, races, ethnicities, religious groups and nationalities, there are no scientific grounds for supposing members of out-groups, or low status members of in-groups, deserve not to have their human needs met, or not to develop their full potential by according them the same rights as others. As scientific empiricism has won allegiance as our guide to reality, displacing faith and other non-empirical grounds for belief, the discriminatory social practices built on such beliefs have been deprived of their rationales, making the presumption of equal rights more and more the norm.

In summary, then, Clark holds to an ethic including responsibility, humility, and human equality (a generally liberal approach to this, as stated elsewhere in that paper); and he considers that there are obligations attached to all of these. He maintains that there is an empirical basis to his ethic.

Two questions come to mind in response. First, is there any place where he proposes to bridge the is-ought gap? This is the famous issue posed by David Hume and described as the naturalistic fallacy: that one cannot derive an ought from an is. Christian theism has no problem with this, for the ought is as much an aspect of the character of God, and thus the foundation of reality, as any other aspect of his character. The oughts of human ethics do not start from an is, they derive from the original oughts of basic reality in God.

Second, is there really an empirical basis for any of his ethics at all? What is the empirical basis for supposing we have an ethical obligation to empiricism? Is that not somewhat circular? In his paper he poses this ethical obligation as being demonstrated in its results; that it leads to more equal treatment for humans, more respect for public health and the environment, and so on. These imply values attached to the environment and to human equality. Do these values flow from empirically-based knowledge?

To the second of those, human equality, he proposes an answer. He says there is “no empirically derived justification for supposing any class individuals merits fewer opportunities…. there are no scientific grounds for supposing members of out-groups, or law status members of in-groups, deserve not to have their human needs met.” But what is the empirical study that supports this? Is it not empirically obvious that persons are not equal? As individuals, some of us are more intelligent, some less; some more emotionally intelligent, some less; some more athletic, some less; some more productive in giving to society, some less, some even taking more than they give. Now, it’s true that science has shown that, taken as groups, we are all very much the same (some highly controversial studies even differ on that). But individuals are not at all the same.

People as individuals differ, groups are similar, at least on a biological level. What ethical imperative flows from that? About a hundred years ago, it was forced sterilization and other eugenics programs. Now, Clark says that the ruling value is that people should be allowed to “develop their full potential.” This sounds suspiciously like Maslow, whose “Hierarchy of Needs” has, unfortunately for Maslow and possibly also for Clark, not been supported by empirical research. Regardless of that, what empirical study showed that individuals developing their full potential is more important than the improvement of the race? Now, I certainly do believe that individual growth is a better ethical idea than eugenic manipulation, but I didn’t get gather that opinion from an empirical study, and I don’t think Tom Clark could have, either.

Further, suppose people were much markedly similar to each other than they are in fact. How would that fact make equal treatment an ethical imperative? It seems that “equal treatment” was picked out of the empirical air.

But in fact it wasn’t. It comes from historical roots, for example, “All men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator…” And those historical roots have roots themselves. The principle of equality was never one of empirical observation, but of theological reflection. The only relevant sense in which humans are equal is in worth, but worth is not an empirical concept at all. How is it measured? How could it be? No, equality is a matter of our standing before God. As a matter of historical fact, this conception of human equality arose out of Christian roots. Agreed, it took time to flourish, but it’s no accident that is has never flourished anywhere but in lands informed by Biblical beliefs.

Now, this post is running long, and it was not my primary purpose to establish the validity of Christian ethics or to defend their historical expression. (Timothy Keller does a great job of this in this talk: mp3 download.) Rather, my main purpose has been to explore two of Tom Clark’s central beliefs: that the only reliable route to knowledge is the empirical one, and that there are ethical obligations binding upon us, including the obligation to be empiricists. I think he can maintain those two beliefs as long as he does not try to impose the first one on the second one. If he does, he will find that on his terms of knowledge, his knowledge of ethics has no standing.

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In my previous posts on Mary Midgley’s view of morality, I noted my appreciation for her unwillingness to accept reductionist explanations (especially for human experience), and her nearly answering a lifelong question of mine: is there really no way to ground a solid sense of morality apart from God? At the end of each post I wrote that there was nevertheless something lacking. As I put it most recently,

Thankfully, what is lacking is not interest, for as I said, it is the closest I’ve found to a positive answer for my lifelong question. Yet there are at least two specific and serious shortcomings that I will return to in my next post on this topic.

So I proceed now, with respect for the questions she raised. Let me reprise my two-sentence summary of her take on morality:

Morality is the means by which a reflective species arbitrates the competing demands of various naturally derived motives/motivations, which are in some way shared with or consistent with motives/motivations of related creatures, and which have a genuine reality of their own, not susceptible to scientistic reductionism. This takes place both individually and socially, and its chief benefit is in allowing the reflective being to make decisions and to behave consistently with long-term social and individual motives higher than short-term motives.

Does this suffice? The question I had early in college was this, quoting again from my last post on this:

Why couldn’t I just do anything at all? What was really wrong with getting drunk, having all the sex I wanted (whether the woman wants it or not), cheating in class? I couldn’t think of any reason not to do those things, other than that I’d been raised differently. That wasn’t enough.

I had not read Dostoyevsky yet, but I was running into what he said so succinctly: “Without God, everything is permitted.” But that just seemed impossible to me. There had to be some difference between right and wrong. Yet I couldn’t think of any way that difference could make sense without God.

It’s time now to explore how well she answers questions like mine.

I was describing Midgley’s book The Ethical Primate to my seventeen-year-old son, and he fairly cut me short, saying, “Ask her how she knows what’s right and what’s wrong.” Now, he hadn’t read the book, and I hadn’t given him a very thorough description, but that was a great question anyway, because until he said that, I hadn’t noticed that the words right and wrong never appear in the book, in the context of moral evaluation—not that I’ve conducted a full computer-assisted search, but I’m pretty sure they don’t appear anywhere in there. For Midgley, morals are apparently not about right and wrong.

Yet her morality is not relativistic, it is objective; but it is contingently objective. Morality is a set of rules summarizing what we works for the long-term good of the species. If through evolutionary contingencies the species had turned out different than it had, the long-term good might very likely have been different; and therefore if anything like morality had appeared in that case, such morality would also be different. It’s hard to imagine it being so different that, say, total wanton mutual destruction was advantageous. It is not so hard, however, to imagine evolution leading to a world where theft, total selfishness, hatred, incest, Machiavellian power maneuvering, race-centrism, and so on were applauded. Our own attitudes on these ethical issues could have come out differently than they did.

To which Midgley simply says, “but they didn’t.” We have the ethics we have because we are what we are. “Live with it,” she might add (I’m putting words in her mouth here), “Our sense of morality is the contingent product of our contingent evolutionary history, but the way it is, is the way it is.” I find there is something attractive about that answer. (This is why I found her book so captivating.) It’s reality-based, within limits I’ll come to later. And it’s objective, in that it’s focused on something very definable, something almost concrete: the longer-term motivations of the organism and species, grounded in what evolution has made us to be. Why should I ask for more than that?

Here’s why. First, what Midgley offers is, in the end, the morality of what works; or, more accurately, it’s the morality of what has worked, in proto-fashion for our evolutionary relatives and forebears, and now in full fashion among humans. We developed rules because they helped us keep our behavioral motivations in line with our longer-term interests. The rules have nothing to do with what is right or wrong, for there is no such category for Midgley. Perhaps she uses those terms elsewhere, but surely if she does, they function only as a language shortcut to “that which guides/does not guide us to behave consistently with our long-term motivations.”

Some of my correspondents on this blog have responded to this kind of statement in the past by saying, “That view of right and wrong is sufficient, Tom. You’re stacking the question in your favor when you call for something beyond that for right and wrong.” Perhaps, but I think I do it justifiably, because I am quite sure that most of the time when we (including my correspondents) say, “That was just wrong!” we don’t mean, “that didn’t work for the long-term interests of the species!” If right and wrong really mean to us, “what works for the long-term interest of the species,” then I would say Mary Midgley’s account of it was more than adequate. I just don’t believe that’s what we mean when we use the words.

Or are we just confused? Maybe right and wrong actually should mean to us,”that which works for the long-term good of the species.” Here we approach my second objection to Midgley’s ethics. It’s one I am loathe to register, because it’s so closely related to something I appreciate so much about her. It’s her insistence on explaining human experience non-reductively. As I wrote before, she won’t accept reductivist physical/chemical explanations for who and what we are, because (like all of us) she just knows better. Our freedom, our human agency, our thoughts, our decisions, our emotions—in all these things we know that it is we who are doing the acting, deciding, thinking, feeling. We are not unwitting and unwilling passengers on a train of physical/chemical reactions.

I agree with her on that, but I cannot credit that evolution got us here. There is too great a disconnect between the presumed processes of evolution and the observed result. Midgley carries on fierce disputes with Richard Dawkins with respect to his Selfish Gene idea, and with other reductivists for similar reasons. She has little positive to say for Daniel Dennett’s views on consciousness. She differs with them for good reason, because their positions clearly do not accord with life as we observe it and experience it. Yet they have a powerful position in the secular debate nevertheless, for they take seriously what evolution is and what it says. Given naturalism as a starting point, where from the beginning there has been nothing but matter and energy, and their interactions by necessity (natural law) and chance processes, human agency and freedom could only appear by magic. That which makes us human was never in the building blocks, nor in the mortar, nor even in the blueprint from the beginning; for the only blueprint was, try one thing after another and keep what reproduces successfully (and even that is unacceptably anthropomorphized, but it sure is hard to keep that out of one’s language on these things).

Thus Midgley’s morality must—I hate to say it but I must—reduce to “what motivates/does not motivate our species to long-term reproductive advantage.” If there is any other motivating force besides that, where did it come from? For evolution itself knows of no other force directing behavior (I am of course speaking of naturalistic evolution). Midgley’s take on human freedom is likewise cut off from the reality of its roots. It’s there, but on her terms it is completely unexplained. It popped out of thin air, and no less so if it “popped” gradually, having appeared first in the whales, dolphins, octopi, and lower primates. It still appeared from nowhere. Atoms and molecules, genes and proteins—they do what they must do according to chance and necessity. Who are we as humans to think we can interfere with that?

Our longer-term motivations are not toward the longer-term good, unless we say that good means “for reproductive advantage, of the individual, group, or species.” But there is a further problem. I made an unannounced shift in terms a few paragraphs ago. I said, “Maybe right and wrong actually should mean to us, ‘that which works for the long-term good of the species.’” Before that, though, I had been using Midgley’s terms, describing morality as “”that which guides… us to behave consistently with our long-term motivations.” Without notice or explanation, I shifted from talking about long-term motivations to long-term good. Shame on me! But—did you notice? Or were you yourself ready and willing to equate long-term motivations with long-term good? It’s an easy mistake to fall into, but what are these motivations? Does the term good really apply to them? How so? They’re what evolution gave us. What makes that good? No matter what evolution had given us as motivations, that’s what we would have. If whatever you get from evolution is what you’re going to call “good,” then “good” just means, “whatever you have.” That’s pretty weak.

So now I will circle back around again to my short statement of Midgley’s moral theory. She says morality is what allows us, as reflective organisms, to manage our behavior according to the long-term good. But we have discovered that this really means that morality is what allows us as reflective organisms to manage our behavior according to long-term reproductive advantage. From where did we gain our intelligence, language, and capacity for reflection? From evolution, which, you recall, has no motivating force but reproductive success. We’re about to spin in a dizzy circle now: The advantage morality gains us is reproductive success. The reflective abilities we have were formed by a process that had no end in mind but reproductive success. The development and propagation of those reflective abilities has been driven by one force: reproductive success.

There are no philosophers more reductivistic than Paul and Patricia Churchland. I believe it was Patricia who said everything in the natural world comes down to natural selection’s four Fs: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing. (Pardon me, but that’s what she said.) Midgley wants to accept the reality of human experience, while also accepting evolution as our creator. Unfortunately for her, the two really cannot be melded. Her version of morality doesn’t fit her picture of reality, for her picture of reality is itself hopelessly disjointed; nothing could fit it. So like all other non-theistic moral systems I’ve had opportunity to survey, this one, too, falls short.

Finally, and very quickly and without developing them, I must mention two last problems I have with Midgley’s moral system. First, the longer-term motivations of organisms make for an incredibly vague starting point for moral theorizing. What does this tell us about, say, supporting or opposing homosexual rights, or abortion? I think that any answer could be argued.

Second, I must raise a reminder here of what I wrote last time. My search for a satisfactory secular morality comes from a specific source: I was looking for it in college, I never found it then, and I’ve been curious since then whether such a thing exists. It seemed incredible to me at that young age that nothing of the sort was possible, and that sense of surprise has never quite let go of me. As I said once before, it also surprised me, and in a way worried me, that this was something I more or less figured out as a very green college freshman!) Along the way, though, I found another source and system for morality, in the triune God and his word. I’m certainly not dissatisfied with that. I’m very confident that God exists and he has spoken; thus Midgley’s morality, which excludes that reality, fails on that count also.

The Ethical Primate, though possibly the best book I’ve read on evolution and human experience as we know it, still fails to explain how the one could realistically have led to the other.

In spite of efforts by scientists (not all, but many) to show us otherwise, belief in God as creator persists. There must be some reason for that. Jesse Bering, a professor of history and anthropology at Queens University in Belfast, says in a current Scientific American article that belief in creation is a trick our minds play on us. We believe in a creator because we’re genetically prone to see design everywhere, whether it exists or not. So unless we’re really on our guard, it’s hard not to come to a wrong conclusion. The article is titled “Creationism Feels Right, but That Doesn’t Make it So.” He is so confident this explains away all human tendencies to believe in God or any designer, that by the end he says,

But when applied to human origins, Darwin’s mindless machine of natural selection obviates the need for an intelligent designer. Somebody needs to explain this to Rick Warren—Stat!

The message is not just for (prominent Protestant pastor) Rick Warren. It’s for me, too. It’s for all believers in God. If Bering is right, our beliefs are built on an entirely wrong foundation. If I’m that thoroughly and obviously deluded, it behooves me to rethink everything. This could be very serious, even fatal for theism.

That shaky foundation for belief looks something like this. Humans are driven biologically to find purpose-related explanations for things we see in the world. Evolution has found it useful to equip us with that motivation. In fact, we experience a strong biologically-based reward when we come up with such an explanation, and that reward comes and reinforces our belief even if the explanation is wrong.

[Alison] Gopnik argues that human beings have evolved an “innate explanatory drive” that motivates us to seek explanations similar to the way we’re motivated to achieve sexual climax. That is to say, for the sheer thrill and phenomenological bliss of it.

Physiologically speaking, says Gopnik, your brain is rigged up to chase these short-lived moments of pleasure: orgasm in the one instance because sex is nature’s feel-good ruse to get your genes out there, and explanation in the other because knowing why things work the way they do enables you to learn and therefore to make more adaptive responses in the future. The thing is, Gopnik points out, your explanation doesn’t actually need to be correct to get that burst of pleasure; you’ve just got to believe you’ve solved the problem.

We do this in the small things, the big, and the very big: the whole of existence. The purpose-based, intentional creation answer is wrong, but it hooks us regardless, with that biologically-based head rush.

My first response to this was to ask myself why they didn’t title the article, “Gopnik’s Explanation Feels Right, But That Doesn’t Make It So.” On first glance her theory seems to undermine all explanation, not just some. She’s saying we can’t trust explanations because they can feel so right, even when they’re wrong. But if that’s her explanation for why we shouldn’t trust explanations, should we trust it? If Gopnik is right, then there’s a very high chance that she’s wrong. It’s a self-defeating theory.

One defense Gopnik might offer is that her theory only applies to certain explanations, those whereby we seek purpose-oriented, teleological functions for artifacts. As Bering goes on to say,

One important point made by researchers working in this area is that teleo-functional reasoning invokes our social cognition because it has us guessing what the person who’d originally conceptualized the object intended it to be used for. “Oh I see,” we’ll say, rotating some mysterious contraption in our hands and finally recognizing some hidden function for one if its doohickeys or thingamajigs, “how clever.” Of course for artifacts, or for that matter anything intentionally manmade, this type of thinking makes sense.

It’s unclear from the article, however, just how Gopnik’s theory can be limited to that. She says there’s a certain potentially deceptive first-person psychological experience attached to such explanations. From my own first-person experience, a good explanation feels the same, whether it’s a teleological one or a solution to a geometry problem, or even a psychological theory. I’m willing to bet you would say the same.

Or maybe Gopnik would say that we can apply careful scientific and logical analysis to an explanation, and work it through until we’re confident that we’re satisfied with it for the right reasons and not the wrong ones. With the right rigorous approach, we can prevent ourselves from falling into the feel-good explanation trap. This may not be as simple as she thinks, though, for the same trap is set on every step of the path. How do we even know what the right rigorous approach is without seeking some explanation for logic and rigor—which will itself have a potentially deceptive feel-good reward attached to it?

Now, Gopnik is certainly correct in saying there are feelings attached to satisfactory decisions, and those feelings are important to our deciding. Probably every psychology student has heard of the brain-damaged man who lost access to feelings in his mind. His cognitive/logical functions were unimpaired, but he couldn’t make a decision. I looked for it on the web, and succeeded in finding a short version here.

Damasio described how his stroke patient, code-named Elliott, would spend up to an hour debating the pros and cons of Wednesday versus Thursday for his next appointment, without getting any closer to a decision.

It would appear we have to agree with Gopnik that there is some gut-sense feeling of satisfaction that confirms our decisions for us. It’s not really news; Damasio’s work has been around for a long time. Should we then conclude that none of our conclusions are credible? I trust you can see how incoherent that conclusion would be, just from the way I wrote that question.*

So where does that leave us with respect to believing in a creator? Apparently our brains are biased toward seeing teleology in nature, whether it exists or not. I can accept that. What should we conclude from it? I think the easiest way to decide that is by seeing just what it is that Bering is trying to argue, which we can do by expressing the problem in syllogism form. His argumentation is not tight, so we need to try this more than one way. The question we’re trying to answer is, how do we get from psychological theory such as Gopnik’s to that urgent message to Rick Warren. At first it appears he is arguing,

A.
(A1) We see teleology (intention, purpose, or design) in nature.
(A2) But we are genetically biased toward seeing teleology, whether it’s real or not.
(A3) Therefore teleology is not real.

As deductive arguments go, that’s a little weak. (How’s that for understatement?) One hopes he knows better than that, even though it really does appear that’s the argument he wants us to follow. But maybe he started from a different point altogether. Could this (B) be what Bering wanted to say?

B.
(B1) There is no real teleology in nature.
(B2) We are biased toward seeing teleology, whether it’s real or not.
(B3) Therefore we see it even though it doesn’t exist.
(B4) Thus our “seeing” teleology where it does not exist is explained.

That’s a little better. It’s not in the form of a syllogism, of course; rather, it’s an outline of an inductively-informed argument. But that’s okay. (B) tells us why we might falsely conclude there is a designer. It depends on its being false that there is a designer, of course. (We’ll return to (B) in a moment.)

Or we might try this somewhat more deductive version (C). It has basically the same form as the anti-design argument Dawkins used in The Blind Watchmaker:

C.
(C1) The world appears to us as if it was designed by a designer.
(C2) There is an alternate explanation for that appearance of design.
(C3) Therefore there is no designer.

But this suffers from the same “colossal distance between premise and conclusion” as Dawkins’s version did. To be charitable, though, it’s possible Bering really meant something closer to (D), which is somewhat related to (C) but different. This one actually works on one level:

D.
(D1) The only reason to think there is a God is as an explanation for apparent design in nature.
(D2) The appearance of design in nature can be explained without reference to God.
(D3) Therefore it is not necessary to think there is a God.

That’s a formally valid argument, i.e., if (D1) and (D2) are true, then (D3) is true. The only problem is that (D1) is certainly false, and (D2) is in dispute. One false premise is enough for us to throw out the argument. And I must add that I was being very charitable by suggesting that Bering had just (D1-3) in mind; for in fact he went on also to imply (“call Rick Warren!”),

(D4) Therefore there is no God.

Between (D3) and (D4) is that same colossal distance again.

Let’s go back to (B) again. (A), (C), and (D) are total logical disasters, so we must set them aside, hoping for Bering’s sake that they were not what he had in mind. If Bering knows (B1) is true, then he can follow the inductively-informed line of reasoning to (B3). Unfortunately he doesn’t tell us why we should think (B1) is true. He seems to be assuming it for purposes of this article. Either that, or he really does think he can lead us there by way of something like Disaster (A), Disaster (C), or Disaster (D).

So is it time for theists to re-think everything? It’s always appropriate to keep our eyes open and our minds alert, but this supposed challenge is no threat at all. Our perception of design in nature could be the product of some deceptive brain quirk caused by evolution, but there’s nothing in Bering’s article to convince us of that. It could also be the result of God wiring us to recognize him through his creation. That phone call to Rick Warren is not so urgent after all.

*If my analysis of Gopnik is correct, then this actually amounts to further support for Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. I can’t take time to develop that thought here, though.

The obvious problem with the article “God or science? A belief in one weakens positive feelings for the other,” as with Adam Frank’s accusation that “creationists” are schizophrenic about science, is simply this: both take “science” to be a monolithic whole. “Do you believe in science or not? Answer yes or no, please,” seems to be the question.

But the term “science” so employed is undefinable; nobody knows where the line is that marks off “science” from other pursuits. (This is Larry Laudan’s famous demarcation problem.) Further, there is no reason to suppose that one has to swallow “science” whole. Science is in process. It has some things figured out very nicely, and it’s still working on other questions. Some important questions it cannot even touch.

Thus I can believe in God and “science” (or better, “almost-everything-’science’-says”), while questioning, doubting, or even rejecting some things “science” says; and there’s no schizophrenia in that at all.

There are very few topics on which (some of) “science” has set itself in opposition to God (origins, the soul, miracles, God’s revealing himself through his word). Funny thing: these were the same topics the “God or science” study volunteers reacted to as setting up a choice between God and “science.”

I was not a believer in Jesus Christ when I left home for college in 1974. My brother and I had both been very interested in the occult, and around that time I must have read dozens of books by people like Ruth Montgomery and Jeanne Dixon, purveyors of belief in psychic phenomena. My recent church experience had not been at all good, and I didn’t know of any reason to believe in Jesus Christ.

I had no real beliefs about ultimate reality at all, in fact. So, being on my own for the first time, and having the opportunity to do whatever I wanted, I very quickly realized all limits were off. I’m sure I was not the only college freshman who has discovered that! But there was a question that haunted me: why couldn’t I just do anything at all? What was really wrong with getting drunk, having all the sex I wanted (whether the woman wants it or not), cheating in class? I couldn’t think of any reason not to do those things, other than that I’d been raised differently. That wasn’t enough.

I had not read Dostoyevsky yet, but I was running into what he said so succinctly: “Without God, everything is permitted.” But that just seemed impossible to me. There had to be some difference between right and wrong. Yet I couldn’t think of any way that difference could make sense without God.

Several months later I decided to follow Jesus Christ. There were many of reasons for that decision, including the genuine love of Christians I had come to know there at school, and the evidences for Christ’s resurrection they shared with me. One contributing factor, though, was that I knew that in Christ there was a genuine answer to this question of right and wrong, that there was real grounding for real ethics.

I couldn’t leave it there, though. The same question still followed me like a specter: Is there really no way, apart from God, to make sense of right and wrong? Could I have missed something? I took an ethics course to find out what the philosophers said. We concentrated on modern philosophy in that course, starting with Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, continuing through John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, and ending up with de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity. What I recall most clearly was that they were all significantly flawed, even in the opinion of my very secular professor, who said plainly that there was no solid plane on which to ground an ethical system.

Even that was not the end of it. Maybe he was wrong, too. Ever since then, I’ve kept my eyes open for other moral explanations that could conceivably make sense apart from God. I’ve never been able to let the search go. Part of the reason for that, I think, is knowing how young I was when I first thought this through, and how unlikely it was that a really uneducated college freshman like me could have gotten this right. Knowing how I first came to my conclusion, I’ve remained somewhat suspicious of it.

So over the years, not constantly, perhaps, but at least persistently, I’ve been looking. I’ve gone back to Plato and Aristotle, and I’ve spent time with other modern thinkers. I’ve learned that the current secular consensus seems to be either (a) that there are objective moral values, genuine right and wrong, anchored in virtually nothing at all (Michael Martin is an example of that thinking), or (b) that there is no right and wrong at all. Michael Ruse, for example, says morality is nothing more than a useful evolutionary fiction. Such relativism is extremely common among evolutionary thinkers, and it dominates the arts and humanities—and thus most of Western culture today.

Mary Midgley is different. That’s why I’ve read her book The Ethical Primate not once but twice this week (twice for the latter half, that is, where she details her ethical theory). More than any other writer I’ve encountered, she comes close to showing how genuine ethics could exist without God. This book has been a significant contrast to (for example) Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, which was well written all the way through, but in the end very disappointing for its insanely weak anti-theistic argumentation. Migley made it very interesting for me, because she almost got there.

What makes her account of morality compelling is that she takes the data of humanness very seriously, while also recognizing what evolution says about our continuity with the animal kingdom, and with that she has developed something very much like an objective version of morality. I’ve tried to distill her account of ethics down to two sentences:

Morality is the means by which a reflective species arbitrates the competing demands of various naturally derived motives/motivations, which are in some way shared with or consistent with motives/motivations of related creatures, and which have a genuine reality of their own, not susceptible to scientistic reductionism. This takes place both individually and socially, and its chief benefit is in allowing the reflective being to make decisions and to behave consistently with long-term social and individual motives higher than short-term motives.

In other words, we, like all animals, have numerous competing drives and motivations. Some of them are short-term (she calls them “acute”) and some long-term (”chronic”). The longer-term motivations, like care for one’s family, are more advantageous in the long run, but as driving forces they are not as immediately powerful as the short-term ones. An intelligent, reflective species such as ourselves needs moral rules to guide us toward keeping the long-term motivations in charge of our behavior. Thus Midgley’s version of morality is grounded in a genuine recognition of who we are as humans, while also connected to our evolutionary roots. It may be a contingent morality, in that the species we are could have turned out differently than it did under other evolutionary circumstances; but we are what we are, and not (as she says) “Aldebaranians or Daleks.” Given who we are, morality is not arbitrary or relative, because it points us towards the long-haul good, for ourselves and our species.

So what is lacking in it? Thankfully, what is lacking is not interest, for as I said, it is the closest I’ve found to a positive answer for my lifelong question. Yet there are at least two specific and serious shortcomings that I will return to in my next post on this topic.

Adam Frank at Discover Magazine says,

Houston, the Bullies Have Landed

Who are these bullies? Frank describes them this way:

• A “depressingly long disaster flick”
• Responsible for the “ritual burning of science education”
• “Dangerous”
• A “sad spectacle”
• “Hijackers”
• “Schizophrenic”
• “Maddening,” for their “self-imposed blindness”
• “Practicing … intolerance”
• Doing “damage” to “the scientific and … economic enterprise”
• “Bullies” on a school board
• “Charades”
• “A threat that must be confronted”

That’s in an article just seven paragraphs long, more brutally negative than even this list conveys.

Who is it, then, that is acting the bully? Here’s how the word is defined in its verb form. See if you can find anything on this page that fits.

bul·ly
v.tr.

1. To treat in an overbearing or intimidating manner. See Synonyms at intimidate.

2. To make (one’s way) aggressively.

It doesn’t help that Frank’s assertions don’t fit the facts:

• Is ID a threat to science education?
• Does the standard under discussion in Texas even mention ID?
• Is this creationism in disguise? (See also here on that.)
• Is this all about religion?
• Are “creationists” “schizophrenic” about science? On that one, Frank’s assertion is so outlandish it’s self-refuting. Is it schizophrenia to recognize that not all evidence in nature points to the truth of evolution, especially of the undirected, unguided sort?
• Is this a matter of intolerance? I think it might be—but not in the direction Frank says it is.
• Does ID do damage to scientific enterprise? Remember that what Frank is objecting to is that students be expected to “analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations.” Pretty dangerous stuff there! But check out the last few paragraphs here; and note also that Frank’s theory on this could be tested scientifically, but no one who states it ever seems to be scientifically-minded enough to want to do that.