Thinking Christian

Last week I posted an article in which I attempted to show that evidence against evolution can legitimately be evidence in favor of Intelligent Design. I ran into some serious opposition on that, and even though my interlocutors’ objections there were often mis-aimed, they did lead me to think through the matter more deeply. I got the argument wrong last time. I’m stating it here in a corrected form. I’ll borrow some of my wording from the previous version so that this article can stand alone, though I’m going to change terminology somewhat for clarity’s sake. This article divides naturally into three separate sections, so I am going to divide it into three posts published simultaneously. For those who followed the earlier discussion, there is some new material in this post, and I would draw your attention especially to the fifth through seventh paragraphs (counting this as number one). The second and third sections are quite different from what I posted previously.

The question is whether it is legitimate to regard evidence against evolution as evidence in favor of ID. Evolutionists often complain that positive arguments for ID are lacking, and that ID offers nothing but negative arguments against evolution. I’m going to refer to that as The Complaint. It is indeed true that ID makes part of its case (though certainly not all of it) on the basis of arguments against naturalistic evolution, so ID proponents must take The Complaint seriously. Is there something inherently wrong with ID arguing its case this way? Can a negative argument against evolution really be a positive argument for ID? Or is negative argumentation conceptually flawed from the start?

I’m going to begin with the simplest level of analysis and work upward from there to a fully realistic level. This argument becomes complex later on. I have placed a tree-diagram representing the whole of it at the end of the third post in this series. You may skip ahead and use it to guide you through if you like.

I begin by noting that at this time there are only two possible explanations for biological origins on the table: either some intelligence was guiding it, or there was no such intelligent guidance. If the first is true, then some form of Intelligent Design is the true explanation. If not, then the only explanation currently on offer is undirected random variation coupled with natural selection, which I will refer to here as Naturalistic Evolution, or NE.

At the end of the movie Expelled, Richard Dawkins speaks of the possibility that life on earth was designed, and opines that ID could explain earth’s life if the designers were some alien creatures. That raised some hearty chuckles from ID proponents, but in our laughter many of us missed what else he said: that those aliens, if they existed, must have come about by Darwinian processes. For Dawkins there is only one route up “Mount Improbable” (the term he used for life’s increasing complexity in his book The Blind Watchmaker). That one route is the gradualistic path of natural selection acting on random variations.

If he is in fact right about there being only one naturalistic route to biological complexity, then there are only two options open for consideration: Intelligent Design in some form (which of course is not an option Dawkins would consider), and NE. These are fully dichotomous: if one is true, the other is false, and vice-versa. Mainstream evolutionary scientists insist that NE is fact, and that we know it is fact. One helpful way to express their certainty is to express it in terms of probabilities: their view is that p(NE)=1 and p(ID)=0.

For this analysis I define evidence E for theory T as any information that, if true, increases the probability that T is true. I distinguish evidence from proof: it is that which adds to the probability of T, not that which proves T. Evidence is not unidimensional or unidirectional; there can be evidences for and against T, and each piece of evidence E must be considered in light of its own virtues and faults, in context of all other evidences for and against T. Further, there is a time factor factor involved. E is evidence for T if p(T) at T2 is greater after the introduction of E than at T1, before the introduction of E. This before/after relationship could be logical rather than chronological; whether E existed or was known at T1 is not as important as whether it was included in the probability analysis at T1.

There are many mainstream scientists who insist, as Michael Ruse has, that “Evolution is fact, FACT, FACT!” In other words, the matter has been settled, and regardless of any possible future evidence,  p(NE)=1. There is no possibility that ID is true: p(ID)=0. I can’t fathom how they can take that position. Evidence has to have some capability of influencing a theory, doesn’t it? Or is evolution true regardless of evidence? That’s hardly science.

Since “fact, FACT, FACT!” in that form is therefore fallacious reasoning and also bad science, I’ll proceed by entertaining the possibility that there is at least conceivably some evidence E that could reduce our confidence in evolution (even by the smallest fraction) such that  p(NE) < 1. That’s not assuming much. It’s a lot more reasonable than insisting that NE is true no matter what evidence might surface.

Now, if Dawkins is right that NE is the only possible naturalistic route up Mount Improbable, the probability equation for origins must include only the terms stated so far here; thus, p(NE) + p(ID)= 1. These are the only options on offer. If the probability of either term is 1, then the probability of the other is 0; if the probability of either term increases or decreases by some degree n, then the probability of the other term decreases or increases by n. 1 – p(NE) = p(ID), and 1 – p(ID) = p(NE).

ID theorists argue that certain features of the natural world are inconsistent with NE. The Cambrian Explosion is one of them. It is hard to explain on NE terms how it came about. This is an example of a negative argument against NE. This post is not about whether that argument is true or not; it is about whether, if there is merit to the argument, it counts legitimately as an argument in favor of ID.

And it seems to me that given a binary, dichotomous relationship between ID and NE, it must; for p(NE) + p(ID)= 1. Suppose for the sake of argument there is some merit to ID’s concerns about the Cambrian Explosion. The effect of that must be to reduce confidence in NE by some non-zero amount. Now suppose also that before this argument was presented, the universal consensus was that p(NE)=1. To the extent that the Cambrian Explosion argument has merit, confidence in NE must be reduced by some degree n, with the result that p(NE) = 1- n, and p(ID) = n. (The degree of change, n, depends on how successful the argument actually is.) Increased confidence in ID (its increase in probability) must be numerically identical to the decrease in confidence in NE, because the sum of the two probabilities must equal 1.

Therefore any evidence E that reduces the probability of NE as an explanation for origins increases the probability of ID as an explanation.

That brings us to the end of the first stage of this argument. To recap:

1. The Complaint is that ID’s negative argumentation against NE is somehow illegitimate, unscientific, or otherwise weak or wrong.
2. ID and NE are mutually exclusive.
3. On Richard Dawkins’ view, NE is nature’s only available method for developing biological complexity.
4. Therefore on that view, ID and NE fill the entire probability space for origins: p(NE) + p(ID)= 1.
5. And therefore any successful negative evidence against NE is successful positive evidence for ID:

That is the simplest view of the argument, and it seems pretty cut-and-dried if random variation coupled with natural selection (NE) is nature’s only option for building biological complexity, as Dawkins thinks.

But when I have written of this before, some have objected to my considering only two possibilities: ID (in some form) and NE. “How do we know these are the only two possibilities?” they ask. “Science marches on, and who knows what we might discover? Why do we assume that ID is the only alternative to NE? How could we know that?”

That question takes us to the second section of this article.

This is the second stage of an argument responding to what I have called The Complaint: that Intelligent Design’s (ID’s) negative argumentation against naturalistic evolution (NE; defined here as the development of life and its complexity through undirected random variation coupled with natural selection) is somehow illegitimate, unscientific, or otherwise weak or wrong. If you have not read the first stage, that would be the place to begin.In it I showed that in the simple case where we assume there are only two options on the table, negative evidence against NE is quite clearly positive evidence for ID. I expressed this in the probability equation 1 – p(NE) = p(ID), where p(NE) is the probability that NE is the true explanation of origins, and p(ID) is the probability that ID is the true explanation.

Now we must examine the possibility of more than two options. As I said last time, this argument becomes complex. I have placed a tree-diagram representing the whole of it at the end of the third post in this series. You may skip ahead and use it to guide you through if you like.

Recall that ID stands for origins being brought about by a designer. If there is a third option it cannot involve a designer, for that frame is already filled by ID; it must be another naturalistic explanation. At this point there is no naturalistic explanation on offer besides NE, so it must be an unknown naturalistic explanation. I will refer to it as the Unknown Naturalistic Theory, or UNT.

If we are to grant the entirely reasonable assumption that science could develop some other, new naturalistic explanation for the development of life and its complexity, then the probability equation we started with must be expanded:

p(NE) + p(ID) + p(UNT) = 1

We have no way of assessing UNT’s probability, but we can deal with that by considering two possibilities.

A.
p(NE) + p(UNT) = 1;
  p(ID) = 0

B.
p(NE) + p(ID) + p(UNT) = 1;  
0 < p(ID) < 1;
0 < p(UNT) < 1

I will deal with A in this post and save B for the next in this series.

A is a mathematical restatement of, “We won’t claim we’re absolutely certain that NE explains life’s origins; but we’re certain that whatever the explanation is, Design had nothing to do with it.” Often coupled with this statement is something to this effect: Science has made continuous progress in finding naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena. Attempts to use God (or some other Design process) to explain natural phenomena have consistently had to give way to naturalistic explanations. Therefore we think it’s reasonable to conclude that science will eventually demonstrate that the origin and complexity of life have fully natural explanations, whether NE or some other theory not yet conceived of.

The question there is, what evidence is adduced for this opinion? There is one kind of evidence that is offered, and another kind that is not even in the picture. What is offered is the history of science, and what is inferred from that is an extrapolation to the future of science. What is not even in the picture is evidence from nature. No matter what evidence E might surface in nature at any time in the future, E can only count as evidence for naturalism (NE or UNT), for p(ID) = 0, world without end, Amen. The probability of naturalism today, T1, is 1; the probability of naturalism tomorrow T2 will be 1, and the probability of naturalism at T3, T4, T5 … to infinity is 1. And this we are assured of, regardless of what evidence E might be introduced at some time Tn in the future.

That is either begging the question, simply stating ID is wrong and that’s that, regardless of what evidence should ever appear! or else, if it is not begging the question, it is placing enormous load on the evidence that has been offered on its behalf: the history of science. We must recall that science has not had uniformly increasing success in explaining what we observe in the world. It has gotten nowhere with explaining realities like consciousness, reasoning, purpose, meaning, free will, moral responsibility and even the origin of the first life. (Claims to the contrary abound, but as I — and many others — have argued elsewhere, they are philosophically uninformed.)

But even if that were not the case, extrapolation in a matter like this is hardly more than an expression of faith. To extrapolate without a supporting theory is bad statistics and bad science, and the only theory that could support this particular extrapolation is one that begs the question: the theory that all of life’s features will someday be explainable naturalistically.

So version A above is unsuccessful. To introduce p(UNT) into our probability equation that way is logically fallacious. We’ll have to pUNT (I’ve been saving up for that pUN) to version B and see whether it works. That will be the topic of the next post.

This is the third post in a series exploring The Complaint of evolutionists: that Intelligent Design’s (ID’s) negative argumentation against naturalistic evolution (NE; defined here as the development of life and its complexity through undirected random variation coupled with natural selection) is somehow illegitimate, unscientific, or otherwise weak or wrong. (This is not the place to begin if you have not read the first two posts; start here instead.)

So far I have shown that if NE and ID are the only explanations on the table for discussion, The Complaint is unjustified. I have also begun to address the possibility that NE and ID are not the only options; we have to consider that some currently unknown naturalistic theory (UNT) could surface someday as a third possibility. Using probability math, I have expressed two ways UNT could enter into consideration:

A.
p(NE) + p(UNT) = 1;
p(ID) = 0

B.
p(NE) + p(ID) + p(UNT) = 1;
0 < p(ID) < 1;
0 < p(UNT) < 1

And I showed in the last post that A is question begging.

But there is a non-question-begging way to introduce UNT into analysis, and that is B. It doesn’t assume ID is false and naturalism is true. So on first appearance it seems more hopeful, for those who would want to justify The Complaint. Could they be right, under B? Let’s take a look at this.

First, let’s recall that The Complaint has to do with how ID theorists use evidence against evolution in favor of ID. So let’s introduce our term E now. We’ll assume that at time T1 our confidence in NE was perfect: p(NE) = 1. But now we consider E, and find that it is evidence against NE, so that at time T2, our confidence in NE is reduced by n: p(NE) = 1 – n at time T2.

We can substitute 1 – n for p(NE) in our equation from B:

(1 – n) + p(ID) + p(UNT) = 1

Which is equivalent to

p(ID) + p(UNT) = n

Both terms on the left side of this equation are greater than 0 and less than 1. The question that The Complaint addresses is, can we rightly conclude that p(ID) varies directly with n? If p(ID) increases when n increases then negative evidence against evolution is positive evidence for Design.

It’s possible, mathematically, for p(ID) not to vary directly with n. It could happen in either of two ways:

Mathematically it’s possible that p(ID) is constant. In that case p(UNT) varies directly with n. Whatever evidence E appears that counts against NE, counts equally in favor of UNT. That’s really just a special case of what I argued in the previous post, however: no matter what evidence comes in at any future time, it cannot under any conditions count in favor of ID. All evidence is evidence for one naturalistic explanation or the other. For the deliverer of The Complaint to resort to that as support would plainly be question-begging.

It’s also mathematically possible that p(ID) varies inversely with n. That would require p(UNT) to vary directly with n, with some multiplicative factor such that when n increased, p(UNT) increased even faster. But that would be strange, to say the least, especially since UNT is by definition unknown. To assume that its probability varies with n that way is to assume that we know something quite unexpected and remarkable about the unknown. For The Complaint to rely on that would be nothing but special pleading.

But it’s worse than that, in reality, for in fact we do know something about UNT: it hasn’t been thought of yet. Richard Dawkins says it doesn’t even exist. So while we can’t eliminate the possibility of UNT completely, we can safely set its value near zero. And the closer p(UNT) is to zero, the more likely it is that p(ID) varies directly with n.

So how shall we assess The Complaint now? We have to allow that it is conceivably legitimate, but only if p(UNT) varies directly but multiplicatively with n. Only if we resort to special pleading, in other words. My conclusion is that negative evidence against evolution can legitimately be taken as positive evidence for ID.

This has been an extended argument with multiple branches. I have attempted in my ham-handed way to illustrate it through the following diagram, which may be useful as a guide to you in re-reading and re-evaluating these three posts. Or (since my space was limited, and so is my experience with these things) it may not be that helpful.

Update inserted at 5:45 pm, August 1:

There is a group I call “the loyal opposition” who have frequently disagreed with me and other Christians writing here. Of that group, my logs indicate that David Ellis, Ordinary Seeker, Tom Clark, Jacob, Tony Hoffman, and doctor(logic) have visited this blog since I posted this entry. All of them except possibly doctor(logic) visited this entry or the main page which includes it.

It’s fascinating what they have found to criticize here—and what they have not found to criticize. The only complaint that was raised was an irrelevant one, having to do with how accurate it is to say the majority of ID proponents are theists. Jacob had an additional note to add to the discussion, but I don’t think it really amounted to a disagreement. (Bobxxx’s rant was too crazy too count.)

No other dispute has been offered. Considering the post is about “why Intelligent Design is essential to mainstream biology,” I find that very interesting.

There is no such thing as purely objective scientific research. It is always conditioned by culture, and thus it is always going to have biases. Its best defense against culturally-conditioned bias is a combination of good philosophical work, honesty in research and reporting (a moral dimension), and cross-cultural challenges to test the reigning cultural biases. These challenges may come through work done by others with different philosophical starting points, and they also come by the passage of time, for cultures change over time.

Evolutionary science is strongly associated with agnosticism or atheism. More than eighty percent of evolutionary biologists hold those positions. Wherever there exists a monolithic mindset of that sort, there is the danger that it will lead to badly skewed interpretations of reality. This is a simple and widely agreed fact of human nature.

Biologists often complain that ID is strongly influenced by theism, for the majority of ID proponents are theists. This must be acknowledged: ID researchers are typically biased toward theism, and universally biased against philosophical naturalism.

To be biased is not necessarily to be wrong. Either there is a theistic God or there isn’t; either philosophical naturalism is true or it isn’t. One side or the other has a more nearly correct view of reality. Each side naturally thinks its own is the one. Good philosophical work can (idealistically) help determine which is which; more realistically, it can at least contribute to understanding how to correct for biases. Even with that work being done, though, each side is still likely to emphasize interpretations and findings that support its own preferred view of reality.

Culturally aware mainstream biologists therefore ought to be encouraging work on intelligent design, just because it might prove to be a corrective to their monolithically shared view of reality.

Let me re-state that in plainer English, and the difficulty with it will become clear. Mainstream biologists ought to recognize that they have biases, and because of those biases they might be wrong. They ought to welcome work by people with opposing views of reality, because there is a chance they will be successfully corrected in case they are wrong. The difficulty with acknowledging one has biases is that it means admitting one might be wrong.

I have directed this advice specifically toward mainstream biologists, not because I think ID proponents have no biases, but because I don’t know of a single ID proponent who says evolutionary science should be discouraged from moving forward. ID is not standing in the way of this cultural correction process. Mainstream biology is. The dominant culture is always the one that needs the most reminding that it is not necessarily right. This too is a widely recognized fact of human nature.

This applies to the question of origins more than to any other science, because in most other sciences, direct contact with experimental results provides strong corrective power. This is not so for historical sciences. Archaeologists may interpret a certain pattern of artifacts as having religious or sexual significance, but if their view is mistaken because of cultural conditioning, the dead will not rise and tell them their prejudices have led them astray. The science of origins is the ultimate in historical sciences. Correction to biases will not come by watching the universe, or life, or the various species appearing anew all over again. It will come through good philosophical work, a commitment to honesty in research and reporting, and cross-cultural challenges.

Such challenges also come through the progress of time, as I’ve already said. It is very difficult to give up our usual ways of looking at things, but time has a way of helping make that happen, in cultures if not always in individuals. Discovering truth is partly a matter of patience as the work proceeds, and partly a matter of holding somewhat loosely to our scientific conclusions, especially those that cannot be tested by experiment. If the goal is to reach truth more quickly, the best way to speed the process is to encourage respectful confrontations between research programs with differing cultural starting points. If biology includes a search for what is really true about origins, biologists ought to be encouraging work on intelligent design.

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.

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.

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.