The Problem is not New
We have some allies in the battle against Ruseism and Evansism. PZ at Pharyngula is kind enough to say that I’ve been on a tear lately. Pardon me while I blush and simper. But then who could help being on a tear, with so much provocation around. Anyway PZ is helping with the tearing and shredding, which is good, because my desk is about to collapse under the weight of work I have on hand.
Evans has this idea that religion is a kind of symbolic art, and that atheists are criticizing it as a bad painting, while all the good religious people are sharing his view of it as an elaborate metaphor for life. That is false. Atheists can appreciate the religious music of Bach, the quality of some of the books of the Bible—I even have a favorite book—and that the concentration of wealth in the religious hierarchy has supported a lot of great art and literature and thought. Most atheists are not interested in taking a flamethrower to the next choir singing Handel’s Messiah. Likewise, it is ludicrous to imply that religious people are largely sensible of the metaphorical nature of religion and share his view of it. Face it: most religious people in the western world believe that god is real. Heaven and hell are real. Jesus is god. Etc., etc., etc. They do mistake the art of religion for reality, and as he condescendingly puts it, must be “only a child”.
Indeed they do. If they didn’t (bless their hearts) there wouldn’t be any problem, would there. If everyone agreed that this was all just a story, there would not be any problem! Obviously! There aren’t any campaigns to force schools to teach that Hamlet was King of England from 1555 to 1603. There is no Osama bin Laden-equivalent who wants us all to live according to the morals and manners of The Tale of Genji. There is no Pat Robertson who wants us all to model ourselves on Dorothea Brooke. There is no pope who spends her time issuing edicts and encyclicals about what really happened in Pride and Prejudice. There are no settlers building houses in disputed territory because they think it was promised to them by a character in Little Dorritt. There is no guy in the White House who thinks he doesn’t have to think about anything carefully because King Lear wants him to be where he is and do whatever he decides to do. If the whole mess were art and nothing else – then it wouldn’t always be telling us what to do and peddling ignorance every chance it gets. It wouldn’t be threatened by everyone who doesn’t buy its fantasies.
PZ also commented on the Michael Ruse article. And I did a search at B&W to find some other Ruse material. There’s this review in the LRB of a book of his on the supposed relationship between science and religion. Sounds ghastly, as Marvin would say.
Attempts to reconcile science and religion are usually doomed to failure, as in the Radio 4 exchange, because nearly all religions make claims about the real world – the domain of science – that don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. Faced with these difficulties, advocates resort to circumlocution, sophistry or absurd speculations that offend both scientists and believers. Despite the difficulties involved, however, reconciling science and faith remains a popular project…Michael Ruse’s book is an astonishing contribution to this literature. It astonishes because of the bravado of its thesis. Instead of espousing Gould’s tame view that religion and science are distinct but complementary, Ruse, a philosopher and historian of science, maintains that at least one form of science (Darwinism) and one form of religion (Christianity) are mutually reinforcing. They are reconcilable, he asserts, because virtually every tenet of conservative Christianity, including original sin, the immortality of the soul and moral choice, is immanent within Darwinism and an inevitable result of the evolutionary process.
Hoo-boy. Read the whole thing – it’s interesting. The reviewer is polite but deeply unconvinced.
Perhaps aware of the weakness of his arguments, Ruse makes a final evolutionary plea to sceptics: ‘We are middle-range primates with the adaptations to get down out of the trees, and to live on the plains in social groups. We do not have powers which will necessarily allow us to peer into the ultimate mysteries. If nothing else, these reflections should give us a little modesty about what we can and cannot know, and a little humility before the unknown.’ One can only wish that Ruse had heeded his own advice. In the words of the physicist Richard Feynman: ‘I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.’
That’s enough for the moment. There’s a lot more Ruse, but there aren’t a lot more hours in the day. More later.
Michael Ruse is sharp and accomplished in many ways, and utterly wrong-headed in some ways. I think that, on the whole, he makes a much better historian of biology than philosopher of biology. I find his analysis of the relationship between Victorian progressivist ideology and early evolutionary thought to be nuanced and plausible, for example (q.v. his book Mystery of Mysteries.)
Mostly, though, reading Ruse makes me wish Elliott Sober would take up the task of writing wider-audience books rather than narrow-audience papers and edited anthologies.
I found his essay collection “Is Science Sexist?” in a used bookstore years ago, and enjoyed it very much.
Checked out the LRB (and Ruse’s letter of reaction). Very problematic. In essence, he wants to show that science and something extremely unscientific don’t have to be mutually exclusive. So we have two great incompatibles here, one of which has a method based on examining and evaluating evidence and observations, while the other makes a virtue of belief in spite of how unlikely it all is. I suppose it would be fair, in trying to reconcile these two, to come up with a method for doing so in between those two extremes. Except that that is precisely what cannot be done. The moment you start trying to force what you would like to be true to fit a preconceived notion (and have to contort your thinking processes to do it), you’ve said goodbye to science (instead of asking whether science supports the idea of, for example, an immortal soul, he’s asking whether science can be made to support it – horse most definitely wrong side of cart there). It’s not just that the attempt fails; it’s doomed in advance because it can’t be done without destroying what scientific method is. There is no middle road here; if you take something even you yourself claim not to believe in and try to show how this nonsense can co-exist with rational thought, you’ve practically announced that what you want to prove means nothing anyway. And Ruse makes no secret that what is motivating him is not demonstrable scientific reality, but the very different reality that the people believing the nonsense are in a vast majority and unlikely to go away any time soon, which is the only reason to go through all these mental gymnastics in trying to accomodate them, instead of bravely sticking with what makes sense, offensive as some may find it.
maybe I’m dense but how does the following make sense?
‘including original sin, the immortality of the soul and moral choice, is immanent within Darwinism and an inevitable result of the evolutionary process.’
How the heck can a scientist by that? Did the first humanoid form commit sin? How exactly would that work?
seems silly.
I can buy “original sin” and “moral choice” as immanent in evolutionary biology in the following (highly metaphorical) sense: Social organisms like humans still pass on their genes the old-fashioned way, to their own offspring, so fundamentally selfish behavior as well as altruistic social behavior are BOTH a part of our heritage — the products of different levels of selection, if you buy multi-level selection theory. Since facultative behavior which affects our fellow humans’ welfare amounts to moral choice by any reasonable standard, it isn’t completely crazy to say that various aspects of morality as religiously conceived are also conceivable as the inevitable result of the evolutionary process.
That said, I don’t understand two things. (1) How one could possibly get any meaningful conception of immortality of the soul out of any scientific model of human nature. (2) Why the heck a scientist should give a shit what religion has to say about morality when engaged in generating and testing evolutionary hypotheses about the structure and origin of morality.
G:
Just to answer your last question, perhaps because “morality” is a cultural, rather than a biological phenomenon, however it might be inflected by biological capacities and tendencies. Perhaps because “morality” is not something that can be stuffed back into the pre-given and subjected to causal hypotheses and “empirical” testing, without taking account of the level of emergent reality where the “problem” occurs,- without begging the question. Sorry to go all weak-kneed and humanistic on you.
John, to say that morality is a cultural rather than a biological phenomenon surely suggests that culture is not a biological phenomenon? I take your point about morality being emergent, but I think it can be subjected to causal hypotheses and empirical testing (why the scare quotes?) precisely by taking account of the level of emergent reality. Isn’t this precisely what psychologists do?
Mike S:
Of course, culture is not a biological phenomenon, because its condition is language, which, though it might be taken to have emerged out of natural history, perhaps quite contingently, is a distinctly different and much more open-ended mode of “information processing” than biological processes. Culture is not reducible to biological adaption and reproduction for all that material survival is necessarily taken up into its framework and reproduction inevitably “results” from it. As for “morality”, there are several senses to the word, and it can, in part, be viewed empirically in the sense of a system of social regulation, “mores”, but it only ever comes on the scene with language, since only with linguistic communication is there thematically intentional relations with others and are there others qua other. Hence, the scare quotes around “empirical”, because the “problem” of “morality” is always also a normative, hence counterfactual, matter rather than just and empirical, factual one, a usual distinction. It might be legitimate to inquire into biological, or for that matter “psychological”, antecedents to “morality” and to the dispositions that feed into it, (that legitimacy depending on just how the inquiry is conducted), but it would scarcely be plausible to claim to discover the biological “essence” of “morality” thereby. That would be a reification that I think should be avoid, as substituting one thing for another, that it seems to be, but is not.
‘I can buy “original sin” and “moral choice” as immanent in evolutionary biology in the following (highly metaphorical) sense: Social organisms like humans still pass on their genes the old-fashioned way, to their own offspring, so fundamentally selfish behavior as well as altruistic social behavior are BOTH a part of our heritage’
Right, but is selfishly making sure YOUR genes are passed on a sin? How could it be construed as such? It is simply a carryover from our ancestors, so when would such an activity officially become sinful?
‘Of course, culture is not a biological phenomenon’
I disagree, culture is a direct product of the biological capabilities of a particular species.
Uber,
Like I said, “highly metaphorical.” Self-interest as such isn’t a sin or any other sort of failing when defined evolutionarily any more than when defined religiously. Rather, it is in the conflict between self-interest and altruism (the interests of others) where difficulties arise – from either perspective.
John,
There’s a difference between recognizing the difference between facts and values on the one hand, and outright mysticism about morality on the other. I’ll grant that there is an important sense in which language/culture is not a simple biological phenomenon – because ideas are not passed down through descendant lineages, cultural evolution is necessarily different from biological evolution. But even if it isn’t a biological phenomenon, it is still a phenomenon – and is therefore subject to empirical study.
You say, “Hence, the scare quotes around ’empirical’, because the ‘problem’ of ‘morality’ is always also a normative, hence counterfactual, matter rather than just an empirical, factual one, a usual distinction.” This obfuscatory Kantian way of discussing the traditional fact/value distinction hides a fundamental idea, one which can be uncovered even in deontological ethics: What is valuable to humans as humans is a fact about us, a component of human nature. The arguments offered in support of any ethical theory are only as convincing as the arguments offered about what humans do as a matter of fact value.
What I am suggesting here is that every ethical theory is logically dependent on a prior theory of human nature – even Kant’s. A theory of human nature, in order to ground an ethical theory at all, must make value claims of some sort – specifically, claims about what is valuable to humans, i.e. facts about what we do value. For example, Kant argues that humans must of necessity, by their very nature, value rational will: This is a factual claim about human nature, and the argument in support of Kant’s ethical theory is only as strong as the case he makes that humans do necessarily value the rational will.
For my part, I find Kant’s definitions of key terms like “rational” and “will” obscure, and his arguments unconvincing. Call me crazy – and if you don’t, someone will – but I think ethical theorists would be well-served by grounding their theories of human nature in solid empirical science instead of manufacturing them whole cloth out of flimsy gauze of a priori speculation.
Uber:
There is a difference between the preconditions and the substrate of a capacity and the development and exercise of a capacity. [ed]
John, I’m not even going to try to address *everything* you just said – but I can’t let it pass entirely either, or I’d have to give up my APA membership :-)
There is absolutely no part of the assertion that human nature is the product of evolution that in any way implies fixity or instinct or whatever odd ideas about human nature you are mistakenly attributing to me. The Gehlen-derived discussion of human nature you present is not at odds with anything I said, and in fact I’ve recently been studying the German philosophical anthropology tradition to see what insights it has to offer.
Your misconception of what I mean by the words “human nature” are understandable, as the phrase has been used in all sorts of ways. (Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for an evolutionary psychologist? *shudder* I hope not!) I thought the minimal nature of my use of the term was pretty clear, but I can try again.
Everything you claim about the nature of morality – insofar as I can pull your meaning out of the jargon – hinges on an understanding of human nature in exactly the way I was talking about. Even all that stuff about the flexibility and context-dependency of our behavior, which I do not in any way deny, follows from some account of what kind of critters we humans are.
You claim, and pardon my pronoun substitutions and ellipses to summarize, that “…ethical norms and values… occur at the level of recognitions between persons, which may or may not obtain. In a sense, that is a level of emergent reality, that inflects human affairs.” If this is true, IT IS A FACT ABOUT US. This claim about the nature of norms and values necessarily hinges on humans being the sorts of creatures that are persons in the relevant sense, creatures that are capable of having such recognitions that may or may not obtain, etc. It is a fact about human beings that we either are or are not this sort of creature. If we are not, then your ethical theory is unsupported. Thus, your ethical theory, like any ethical theory, is only as convincing as the claims about human nature upon which it rests. So nothing you have said here undermines my reasons for thinking that ethical theorists go wildly astray when their conception of human nature is generated by armchair speculation rather than empirically grounded research.
G:
It depends on what you mean by “empirically grounded research”. I tend to hear a deferral to theories there. But ethics is borne of response and can not await theoretical results. On the other hand, if you include in the “empirical” actual historical experience, however you define the repositories and agencies, then you’re on the right track. But any idea that ethics can derive from some sort of “complete” calculus of consequences or effects would belie the “problem”; that is why “forgiveness” is one of the constituents of ethical action and why taking account of a broader conception of “experience”, including that of others, precludes any appeal to the given. The main objection here is to the metaphysical gesture of stuffing back any “development” into the “necessity” of the pregiven, under the rubric of biology, as a means of “justification”. (But jargon aside, the translation of Levinasian “exteriority” into “exogenous effects” was a deft move, eh?)
Morality is mostly for thinking reeds. It’s effects upon the “great” world are minimal. But then, one never knows where thinking reeds might grow.