Stephen Hawking’s Issues with God

According to Reuters, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has deigned to inform the rest of us that it’s OK to be an infidel because, according to the most up-to-date physics models of the universe, God isn’t necessary:

In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

Hawking’s latest won’t be released until tomorrow, and I hesitate to commence panning him until I’ve read it, but this story smacks of a well-managed publicity stunt. In the first place, it’s a virtual carbon copy of the great urban myth about the exchange between the great French mathematician, Laplace, and Napoleon (hattip Wiki):

Laplace went in state to Napoleon to accept a copy of his work, and the following account of the interview is well authenticated, and so characteristic of all the parties concerned that I quote it in full. Someone had told Napoleon that the book contained no mention of the name of God; Napoleon, who was fond of putting embarrassing questions, received it with the remark, ‘M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.’ Laplace, who, though the most supple of politicians, was as stiff as a martyr on every point of his philosophy, drew himself up and answered bluntly, ‘Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.’ (“I had no need of that hypothesis.”) Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply to Lagrange, who exclaimed, ‘Ah! c’est une belle hypothèse; ça explique beaucoup de choses.’ (“Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.”)

Well, it’s not really that well authenticated, but it still captures the substance of Laplace’s thought on the subject accurately enough.  In the second place, if that’s really all Hawking’s got, he was beaten to the punch by the brilliant Frenchman Jean Meslier in his Testament by more than 250 years:

Is it not more natural and more intelligible to deduce all which exists, from the bosom of matter, whose existence is demonstrated by all our senses, whose effects we feel at every moment, which we see act, move, communicate, motion, and constantly bring living things into existence, than to attribute the formation of things to an unknown force, to a spiritual being, who cannot draw from his ground that which he has not himself, and who, by the spiritual essence claimed for him, is incapable of making anything, and putting anything in motion.

Indeed, all of the best arguments of the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, appear in Meslier’s work, along with much else besides.  As an infidel myself, I fail to see what, if anything, Hawking is contributing to the discussion, assuming he’s being quoted accurately.  After all, how do physical laws prove anything?  Laws can have no disembodied existence of their own, floating around in nothingness.  If they don’t apply to any real thing, then they cease to exist themselves.  If they do apply to something real, it still begs the question, why do the real thing(s) exist to begin with?  We’re still left to wonder, “How did all this stuff get here?”

The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality, Conclusion

The resistance of orthodoxies, secular as well as religious, to freedom of thought and the advance of human knowledge did not end with the persecution of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. As a species, we are predisposed to react with hate and hostility to the “out-group,” the “others” whom we perceive to be different from and a potential threat to our own “in-group.” Now, however, we live in a radically different world from the one in which the wiring in our brains responsible for such behavioral traits evolved. The boundary between our own “in-group” and the “others” is now as likely to be defined by ideas as by geographical features that separate the next group of hunter-gatherers from our own. As a result, furious hatreds accompanied by violent warfare have been spawned by now long-forgotten differences over such things as the role of images in religious belief, or the details of the ritual associated with the sacrament of Communion. In fact, human history is incomprehensible unless one grasps the significance of this in-group/out-group behavior of ours, sometimes referred to as the Amity/Enmity Complex. It is one of the more interesting phenomena of our own day that recognition of this most obvious and most inconvenient of all truths itself became one of the defining markers of the “out-group,” and a threat to the belief system of an ideological in-group that had gained control of and managed to impose its own orthodoxies in psychology, anthropology, and several other fields of scientific inquiry.

The hypothesis that innate mental traits or “human nature” plays a significant role in mediating human behavior has been around since long before the days of Darwin. However, beginning in the 1960’s with the popular works of thinkers like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz and continuing with the publication of “Sociobiology” and “Human Nature” by E.O. Wilson in the 1970’s, recognition of the significance of innate behavior gained a much wider acceptance. Such ideas were, however, a direct threat to the ideological orthodoxies then prevailing in the academic and professional communities. Those communities reacted in the time-honored fashion of human “in-groups” in all ages to this challenge from the “others;” with hatred, irrational hostility, and demonization. I will discuss the manifestations thereof in a later post. For now, suffice it to say that, unlike differences of opinion over whether Christ was the real or adopted Son of God, controversies over the factors that impact human behavior can be informed by the observation of repeatable experiments. In a relatively short time, the ideological orthodoxy of the 60’s and 70’s regarding human nature was buried under a mountain of facts. In the resulting paradigm shift, culminating only in the last decade or so, the profound impact of the innate on human behavior has finally gained general acceptance.

In a sense, however, the old defenders of the faith in “nurture, not nature” were right. The hypothesis of innate human behavior was a direct threat to their whole belief system. Then as now, by their own admission, the expert communities in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and related fields occupy ideological ground that is substantially left of center. They are predominantly, if not exclusively, characterized by an implicit or explicit belief in legitimate, objective good, more or less vaguely characterized by terms such as “human flourishing” and “human brotherhood,” and by a perception that they should play an active role in guiding the rest of us towards “the good.” However, once the significance of the innate on human behavior has been accepted, it follows that the evolutionary origins of these aspects of our nature must be accepted as well. It is quite obvious that they did not evolve because they had a “purpose,” and that “purpose” was to promote “human flourishing” in a world radically different from the one in which they evolved. It is also quite obvious that they evolved for reasons that had nothing to do with promoting the ideological goals of self-described “liberals” in the 21st century. Those facts have and will continue to have a highly corrosive effect on the belief system of the academic and professional experts who specialize in the study of human behavior, and particularly those who focus on that aspect of our behavior that comes under the general heading of morality.

In previous posts I have discussed the impact of all this on the thought of nine representatives of this expert community who were the keynote speakers at a recent conference on “The New Science of Morality.” As we have seen, all of them, whether explicitly or not, recognize “the good” as a real, objective, thing in itself, independent of what goes on in the brain of any individual human being. As any good Christian or Moslem could tell them, there is no logical basis for this faith of theirs in “the good.” The fact that they believe in it anyway is a testimony to the power of the emotions associated innate human morality in creating the perception of something real where none exists.

The result has been a kind of remarkable doublethink. The role of the innate on human morality is accepted, but it comes with the chimerical belief that, against all odds, those innate qualities of the human brain can be adjusted at will to achieve the kind of “human flourishing” that is the goal of latter day ideologues. The phenomenon was clearly in evidence at the Edge Conference. The keynote speakers all revealed their perception of “the good” as a real thing, and several of them spoke of morality as an adjustable tool for achieving “the good,” going so far as to speak of this form of toying with innate human behavioral traits as “moral progress.” There was an atheist who based his argument on the real existence of moral good on his own capacity for pious indignation, and a professor of psychology who asserted that morality exists to promote the better working of “the system” in the 21st century. A great deal of attention was paid to experimental evidence of innate human “kindness” and “niceness,” and commensurately little to the possibility that hatred, aggression, and demonization of “others” might also be behavioral traits with innate origins. It will be recalled by those who were around at the time that these were the aspects of human behavior that thinkers like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, who were generally recognized by the professional community at the time as the most significant and articulate proponents of the importance of innate factors in human behavior through the 60’s and early 70’s, wanted to draw attention to. It turns out that, as far as innate influences on human behavior are concerned, they were right, and the professional community of experts was wrong. Under the circumstances, it would seem unwise, if not foolhardy, to dismiss their hypotheses about those aspects of human behavior that aren’t “nice” out of hand.

One finds grounds for optimism that the prevailing illusions about “moral progress” will not be supportable for long in the remarks of the three speakers whose remarks we have not yet discussed. For example, psychologist Paul Bloom discussed experiments designed to explore the emergence of innate “niceness” in very young children and even babies, before such behavior can be taught or acquired via culture or environment. Among other things, he described the ability to infants to distinguish “good guys” from “bad guys” as early as six months of age. He notes work by others that points to the conclusion that “kindness” is “part of our hard-wired inheritance.” However, he is not quite so optimistic. As he puts it:

Our minds have evolved through processes such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. We should therefore be biased in favor of those who share our genes at the expense of those who don’t, and we should be biased in favor of those who we are in continued interaction with at the expense of strangers. Also, there is now a substantial amount of developmental evidence suggesting that this kindness that we see early on is parochial. It is narrow. It is applied to those that a baby is in immediate contact with, and does not extend more generally until quite late in development.

After citing some experimental work in support of this conclusion, he continued:

This shouldn’t surprise us. Maybe it’s even better than we could have expected. The dominant trend of humanity has been to view strangers – non-relatives, those from other tribes – with hatred, fear and disgust. Jared Diamond talks about the groups in Papua New Guinea that he encountered. And he points out, for an individual to leave his or her tribe and just walk into another, strange tribe would be tantamount to suicide.

It is noteworthy that Diamond, who is nothing if not politically correct by the standards of the current time, could have so casually written something like this. If he’d said it 45 or 50 years ago, anathemas would have reigned down from him on all sides, and he would have been dismissed as a heretic. As for Bloom, he continues,

So there’s a puzzle, then, because the niceness we see now in the world today, by at least some people in the world, seems to clash with our natural morality, which is nowhere near as nice. How did we end up bridging the gap? How have we gotten so much nicer? Note that I’ve been focusing here on questions of our kindness to strangers, but this question could be asked about other aspects of morality, such as the origin of new moral ideas, such as that slavery is wrong or that we shouldn’t be sexist or racist. These are deep puzzles.

It seems a great deal less puzzling to me. It can only be puzzling if you ignore the obvious fact that, as human culture and human knowledge have expanded and these new kindnesses have emerged as the ancient, innate and virtually unchanged human emotions associated with moral behavior have found expression in the new environmental context, new hostilities have evolved right along with them. The kindness of the French revolutionary proponents of human rights came with the guillotine, and the kindness of the universal brotherhood of Communism came with the deaths of tens of millions of class enemies. Now we see the kindness Bloom seems to so admire in our own day associated with furious hatred and hostility directed by the political left at the members of the Tea Party movement, representing a substantial proportion of the citizens of the United States and openly expressed desires for the deaths of prominent political opponents like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

Psychologist David Pizzaro discusses the influence of emotions in shaping what may seem at first glance to be judgments based on reason, focusing on the role of disgust. As he put it:

We’ve shown that disgust sensitivity, that is, people who are more likely to be disgusted, over time end up developing certain kinds of moral views. In particular, we’ve shown that not only are people more political conservative if they’re more disgust sensitive, but they specifically are more politically conservative in the following ways: they tend to adhere to a certain kind of moral view that the conservative party in recent years in the United States has endorsed, that’s characterized by being against homosexuality and against abortion.

Pizzaro goes on to consider the emotional component of liberal as well as conservative beliefs, thereby obliquely undermining the notion that they are logically consistent and legitimate. As any medieval churchman could have told him, such thoughts lead to heresy. We must hope they will do so in the future as they have in the past.

Philosopher Joshua Knobe begins his talk as if he’d been asleep for the last half century:

So far we have been talking about questions in moral psychology. So we’ve been talking about the questions: How is it that people make moral judgments? Do they make moral judgments based on emotion or reason? Is it a capacity that’s just learned or is it something that’s innate?

However, he goes on to describe recent work by philosophers that entailed leaving the ivory towers of pure reason and actually conducting experiments. The result:

But what’s really exciting about this new work is not so much just the very idea of philosophers doing experiments but rather the particular things that these people ended up showing. When these people went out and started doing these experimental studies, they didn’t end up finding results that conformed to the traditional picture. They didn’t find that there was a kind of initial stage in which people just figured out, on a factual level, what was going on in a situation, followed by a subsequent stage in which they used that information in order to make a moral judgment. Rather they really seemed to be finding exactly the opposite.

What they seemed to be finding is that people’s moral judgments were influencing the process from the very beginning, so that people’s whole way of making sense of their world seemed to be suffused through and through with moral considerations. In this sense, our ordinary way of making sense of the world really seems to look very, very deeply different from a kind of scientific perspective on the world. It seems to be value-laden in this really fundamental sense.

These, too, are conclusions that are fundamentally at odds with the notions of objective good and “moral progress.”

It would seem, then, that based on the sample we have been considering, while comfortable orthodoxies still prevail in the world of “expert” opinion about morality, general acceptance of the fact that innate, emotional components play a very significant role in moral behavior must inevitably undermine those othodoxies as long as freedom of inquiry prevails. There is room for optimism. Heretics will appear, as they always do, and will start doing experiments and studies of brain function that will demonstrate and establish the less “kind” aspects of human moral behavior. It is to be hoped that this happens sooner rather than later, and when it does, the “experts” will realize that attempts to foster “human flourishing” by manipulating human moral behavior are not only doomed to failure, but will continue to be extremely dangerous, as they always have been in the past.  If we really want to flourish as a species we would do well to finally learn to understand ourselves.  After a long struggle with obscurantist ideologues, we have finally gained general acceptance of the significance of the innate in human nature, but we seem to balking at the next logical step.  We have a marked preference for studying the “nice” and “kind” in human behavior, and ignoring the “not so nice.”  It is time we pulled our heads out of the sand, because unless we thoroughly understand the darker side of our nature, we will have no chance of controlling it.  In a world full of nuclear weapons, the need seems rather obvious.  It’s hard to flourish if you’re dead.

The Edge Conference on “The Science of Morality:” The Nature of Good and Evil

The Edge Foundation recently hosted a conference with the moniker, “The New Science of Morality,” It included addresses by nine eminent biologists, psychologists, and philosophers, all but one of whom were drawn from the ranks of academia. Their remarks, which can be found at the Edge website, were an interesting reflection of current thinking on the subject from a preponderantly left of center ideological perspective. As I share their interest in the subject I will post some comments on their talks on my blog. However, before plunging ahead, I will follow E.O. Wilson’s advice to those who would address the subject of morality, and “lay my cards on the table.”
Before one presumes to speak of morality and the categories good and evil that are associated with it, it is useful to first establish what morality is. As an atheist, I base my opinions on the subject on the following two assumptions:

• Morality depends for its existence on innate predispositions hard-wired in the human brain.
• The features of the brain responsible for morality exist because they evolved.

It follows from the first of these assumptions that morality, with its inherent categories of good and evil, has no objective, independent existence of its own. In other words, good and evil do not exist independently as other than mental constructs, nor would they continue to exist absent a mind capable of giving rise to them. As a consequence of this, good and evil cannot be derived or identified logically or scientifically as things in themselves, nor can they in any way acquire validity or legitimacy in their own right.

These conclusions seem counterintuitive to creatures like ourselves because good and evil seem real. We are wired to perceive them as real, presumably because they are most effective in promoting our survival when they are perceived as real. However, their only reality is as emotional responses derived from innate features of the brain. These emotional responses are present in nascent form even in human infants. They evolved in times utterly unlike the present for the sole reason that they promoted the genetic survival of individuals during those times. They can possess no intrinsic or transcendent validity or legitimacy not based on those origins, and it is questionable whether they even continue to promote our survival in the context of the modern world.

There is no such thing as “moral progress.” There can be no progress unless there is some goal towards which one progresses. In the case of moral progress, that goal can only be to approach the “real” good and move away from “real” evil. For that to happen, “real” good and “real” evil must necessarily have an independent existence and legitimacy of their own, but, as noted above, that is impossible. What we describe as “moral progress” is merely the expression of the evolved mental traits responsible for moral behavior in the context of rapidly changing human social organization, culture, and technological advances. The evolved mental traits in question themselves have changed little if any in the process.

It is interesting that conservative religious believers find it much easier to understand the reasoning behind and accept the above hypotheses than the type of people who attended the Edge conference. They, of course, base the legitimacy of their moral claims on the existence of a God. Remove God, and they have no trouble perceiving the fact that those who continue to claim that there can be such things as real good and real evil are sitting out on a limb with no tree attached to it.

In contrast, none of the academics and scientists at the Edge Conference, or at least none I am aware of, would argue that real good and real evil derive from a Supreme Being. In spite of that, they come from an ideological milieu that is heavily invested in the belief in its own moral superiority. Individuals in that milieu routinely refer to the actions and beliefs of others as “moral” or “immoral,” indicating acceptance of some moral standard that is applicable to everyone, and not just themselves. I am not aware of anyone among them who has explicitly rejected the notion of “moral progress.” However, if morality is the expression of evolved traits hard-wired in the brain, this presumption of moral superiority becomes indefensible. The extreme reticence of those at the conference to face these implications is quite evident in the remarks of the nine keynote speakers.

In later posts I will comment on the remarks of each of those speakers in the context of my own understanding of morality.

Noah and Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh was first written down by an unknown Babylonian scribe around 2000 B.C.  It relates the heroic adventures of the semi-legendary ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk about 2700 B.C.  At one point, Gilgamesh seeks out an ancient sage by the name of Utnapishtim in order to discover how to avoid death.  It happens that the gods awarded immortality to Utnapishtim after he survived a great flood that wiped out all the rest of humanity by building a large boat at the behest of the god Ea.  In the manner of Noah, he collected his family and all manner of living things and took them along for the ride.  As the waters subside, his boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.  Quoting from the epic,

Sound familiar?  And yet people still stumble around on Mt. Ararat looking for the remains of Noah’s ark. Every few decades or so, they even find them, although they do tend to move around a bit.  Go figure.

Is God Shy, or just Coy?

I’ve read a lot of religious literature in my day, and have never seen a coherent explanation of why, if God exists, he doesn’t just step out into the open and show himself.  Of course, the religious have several rationalizations for this objection to their belief systems, just as they have for any of the other obvious objections one might name.  The problem is, none of them make any sense. 

For example there’s the “mortal man cannot behold such glory” argument, which implies that God lacks the power to dim Himself down sufficiently to appear to us in a way that would convince the general run of mankind of His reality.  There’s the “He tried it once” argument, according to which he made a good faith effort by coming to earth in the form of Jesus Christ, but no one believed him anyway, so he gave up trying. There’s the “He couldn’t do anything that would make us believe, even if He tried,” argument, which applies similar shackles to the power of God, and requires Him to have a singular lack of imagination. Of course, there’s the “He’s just testing us” ploy, and the notion that by stepping out from behind the curtain, he would be violating our “free will.”

And the list goes on. The problem with all these rationalizations is that they’re unconvincing to anyone who hasn’t already make up their mind.  Is God really so limited that he cannot come up with a way to reveal himself to us without blinding us with his glory?  Was he really so demoralized by our incomprehension when he sent Jesus Christ (or Mohammed) to earth that he simply gave up and concluded it was impossible for Him to convince creatures He had created Himself that He existed?  Can there really be any question of “testing” creatures who have used the mental equipment He gave them to the best of their ability and concluded that He doesn’t exist?  Is there really some coherent reason why free will would disappear simply by virtue of Him showing Himself?

I have a suggestion for anyone who retains an open mind on the subject;  apply Occam’s razor.  If God doesn’t show himself in a way that is convincing to a species not known for its incredulity, in spite of the fact that he is supposed to be loving and merciful, and wants us to obey His will, and plans to punish us severely if we don’t, the most obvious and reasonable explanation is that He doesn’t exist.  That conclusion becomes all the more plausible in view of the fact that the two biggest religions on the planet are mutually exclusive.

Atheists Don’t Have Songs?

Apparently not. However, it doesn’t matter, nor does it matter that some people think religion is necessary for morality to exist, nor that some people think that religion is necessary to give us a purpose in life, nor that some people think that there are no atheists in foxholes, nor that some people think atheists cannot love their country or serve it loyally. In the end, what matters is whether there is a God or not. If God does not exist, then we are lamentable creatures indeed if we conclude with Voltaire that we must invent one and force ourselves to believe a lie because we are too weak to accept the truth.