Francis Ayala and Morality as Exaptation

In a series of films made in the late 60′s and early 70′s that are now considered classics of the genre, Christopher Lee plays a Count Dracula who is reduced to dust by sunlight, impaled on crucifixes, and is otherwise discombobulated by all the standard vampire antidotes, only to be improbably revived just in time for the next film.  The Blank Slate is like that.  It is a wonderfully useful bit of quackery to utopians of all stripes, and so keeps rising from its own ashes in one guise or another.  An interesting variant, the theory of morality as exaptation, was devised by  Francisco Ayala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine.   In his words,

I propose that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature, whereas moral codes are products of cultural evolution. Humans have a moral sense because their biological makeup determines the presence of three necessary conditions for ethical behavior: (i) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one’s own actions; (ii) the ability to make value judgments; and (iii) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. Ethical behavior came about in evolution not because it is adaptive in itself but as a necessary consequence of man’s eminent intellectual abilities, which are an attribute directly promoted by natural selection. That is, morality evolved as an exaptation, not as an adaptation. Moral codes, however, are outcomes of cultural evolution, which accounts for the diversity of cultural norms among populations and for their evolution through time.

In other words, departing from the old Blank Slate orthodoxy, Ayala is conceding that there is such a thing as human nature.  However, it doesn’t matter.  Our moral behavior is still completely malleable, because moral rules are almost purely a product of culture, and can come in any flavor you like.  This, we are told, is proved by the diversity of human moral systems. According to Ayala, it’s all nice and legal according to Darwin himself.  For example,

After the two initial paragraphs of chapter III of The Descent of Man, which assert that the moral sense is the most important difference “between man and the lower animals” …, Darwin states his view that moral behavior is strictly associated with advanced intelligence: “The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man” (ref. 1, pp. 68–69). Darwin is affirming that the moral sense, or conscience, is a necessary consequence of high intellectual powers, such as exist in modern humans. Therefore, if our intelligence is an outcome of natural selection, the moral sense would be as well an outcome of natural selection. Darwin’s statement further implies that the moral sense is not by itself directly promoted by natural selection, but only indirectly as a necessary consequence of high intellectual powers, which are the attributes that natural selection is directly promoting.

There’s just one thing wrong with the above statement.  Ayala is completely ignoring the phrase “well-marked social instincts.”  What did Darwin mean by “well-marked social instincts?”  It’s worth quoting him at length to find the answer:

A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones. A dog acts in this manner, but he does so blindly. A man, on the other hand, looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires and recollections. He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts. If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide or conscience.

In other words, “social instincts” are other-regarding instincts or, as we would say today, predispositions, as opposed to such “sensuous passions” as the desire for food, sex, etc.  They are what modern scientists refer to when they speak of “hard-wired morality,” and were, for Darwin, as well as for many others since his time who have spoken of morality, not an “exaptation,” but an essential aspect of human nature, a precondition for the development of any manifestation of morality, whether in humans or other animals.  In other words, what Darwin was really saying is that “morality” is simply the expression of innate social or moral predispositions in creatures with a superior ability to reason about their subjective moral feelings or emotions.  That is how Darwin was understood by a long line of other thinkers, and, in fact, that interpretation would seem to be obvious.  Anyone who entertains any doubt on the subject need look no further than his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals with its many parallels between human behavior and that of other animals. 

Somehow, however, Ayala missed the point.  All that he will allow to the sphere of human nature is a “proclivity to judge” that somehow floats out there in the ether all by itself, with no basis upon which to make judgments.  In his words,

The question of whether ethical behavior is biologically determined may, indeed, refer to either one of the following two issues. First, is the capacity for ethics—the proclivity to judge human actions as either right or wrong—determined by the biological nature of human beings? Second, are the systems or codes of ethical norms accepted by human beings biologically determined? A similar distinction can be made with respect to language. The question of whether the capacity for symbolic creative language is determined by our biological nature is different from the question of whether the particular language we speak—English, Spanish, Chinese, etc.—is biologically determined, which in the case of language obviously it is not.

I propose that the moral evaluation of actions emerges from human rationality or, in Darwin’s terms, from our highly developed intellectual powers. Our high intelligence allows us to anticipate the consequences of our actions with respect to other people and, thus, to judge them as good or evil in terms of their consequences for others. But I will argue that the norms according to which we decide which actions are good and which actions are evil are largely culturally determined, although conditioned by biological predispositions, such as parental care to give an obvious example.

Here Ayala tries to leave himself some wiggle room by contradicting himself.  His norms are not purely culturally determined, but only “largely” culturally determined, and they are “conditioned” by biological predispositions, but just not enough to matter.  All but the wildest and craziest of the old blank slaters used to give themselves a similar “back door.”  For example, from zoologist, J. P. Scott,

There may be some biological basis for territorial behavior in people, but it is equally possible that it is a human cultural invention.

and from physical anthropologist Ralph Holloway,

Perhaps egoism and self-esteem are innate properties of the species man, but limited directions depending on the cultural milieu in which various peoples thrive or cope.

In the end, of course, as noted by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate, none of this mattered.  The inevitable conclusion was still that, for all practical purposes, the only thing that mattered in shaping human behavior was culture.  The same is true of Ayala and his “predispositions” when it comes to morality.  In his words,

Moral codes arise in human societies by cultural evolution. Those moral codes tend to be widespread that lead to successful societies. Since time immemorial, human societies have experimented with moral systems. Some have succeeded and spread widely throughout humankind, like the Ten Commandments, although other moral systems persist in different human societies. Many moral systems of the past have surely become extinct because they were replaced or because the societies that held them became extinct. The moral systems that currently exist in humankind are those that have been favored by cultural evolution.

In fact, Ayala is putting the cart before the horse.  Moral behavior is not predicated on a high intelligence, nor is it an “exaptation” of high intelligence, only possible in man.  Rather, morality is fundamentally emotional rather than rational.  The concepts of good and evil themselves are subjective,  predicated on the pre-existence of these emotions, and could not exist without them.  Far from suddenly emerging as the result of the previous evolution of high intelligence, and understandable as the outcome of some rational thought process, morality is utterly dependent for its existence on emotions that are entirely analogous to those experience by other animals.  Human morality is simply the expression of those moral emotions in creatures with high intelligence.  We have a greater capacity to reason about what we feel than other animals, and we can rationally interpret what we feel emotionally in different ways, but, in the end, we are still acting in accordance with those emotions, not based on the outcome of some disoriented logical thought process.

The fact that there must be many variations in the details of moral behavior in creatures such as ourselves goes without saying.  The predispositions fundamentally responsible for moral behavior could not be programmed into the brains of wolves or chimpanzees in the form of a string of complex moral rules expressed in terms of human language.  The fact remains that these predispositions exist, and are responsible for the many commonalities in human moral behavior across widely different cultures.

There is no need to take what I say on trust regarding these matters.  Read books such as “Wild Justice,” and you’ll see that the evidence is already weighty, and will become more so as our diagnostic techniques enable us to probe human emotions and thought processes with ever greater resolution.  In fact, Ayala’s theory was born dead, and it appears that, at this point, even he realizes it.  In his recent papers, he stubbornly refuses to part with his “exaptation” theory, but adds ever more caveats about what people like Frans de Waal, Jeffrey Masson, and Marc Bekoff have been discovering about animal morality, and ever more weasel words about “predispositions.”

In fact, being stubborn pays.  Ayala just won the 2010 Templeton prize, which includes a tidy award of $1.5 million.  The prize

… honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. Established in 1972 by the late Sir John Templeton, the Prize aims, in his words, to identify “entrepreneurs of the spirit”—outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to expanding our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality. The Prize celebrates no particular faith tradition or notion of God, but rather the quest for progress in humanity’s efforts to comprehend the many and diverse manifestations of the Divine.

Indeed, Ayala apparently considers himself, against all odds, a Trinitarian Christian.  All this comes as something of a surprise to his more orthodox fellow believers, who surely would have burned him as a heretic back in the day.  See for example, this and this.  And no wonder.  You could be a Pelagian, a Socinian, a believer in Communion in one or both kinds, or even a wild, unrecanting Arian, and Dr. Ayala can exapt a morality for you that’s as legit as the pope’s.  Apparently the Templeton Prize people weren’t so finicky about the minutiae of theology.

Vignettes from 1925

These are from various articles and authors in the May 1925 issue of H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury.

Politics:

What shall the end be? Will that race of men who for a thousand years have asserted the “right of castle,” rejected governmental interference in domestic affairs, proclaimed the right of the free man to regulate his personal habits and to rear and govern his children in accordance with the law of conscience and of love, now become subject to a self-imposed statutory tyranny which from birth to death interferes in the smallest cocerns of life? Shall we endure a legal despotism, the equivalent of which would have provoked rebellion amongst the Saxons even when under the Norman heel?

I doubt not these statutory bonds will be eventually broken. The right of the free man to live his own life, limited only be the inhibition of non-infringement upon the rights of others, will again be asserted. But before that day arrives, will the splendid symmetry of our governmental structure have been destroyed?

Alas, my friend, there is yet no light at the end of the tunnel.  Next, from an article about the Mexican border towns entitled “Hell Along the Border,”

I have studiously observed the viciousness and even the mere faults of decorum in Juarez, largest of the corrupting foci, in season and out for a least twelve seasons. I have had my glimpses at the life of the equally ill-reputed Nogales, Mexicali and Tia Juana. I have been in confidential communication with habitual visitors to Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, Piedras Negras, and Agua Prieta. And I can find in all these towns no sins more gorgeous than those enjoyed by every Massachusetts lodge of Elks at its annual fish-fries prior to 1920.

Regarding the evangelical clergy, the televangelists of the day, immortalized by Sinclair Lewis in his Elmer Gantry,

The net result, as I say, is to inspire those of us who have any surviving respect for God with an unspeakable loathing. We gaze on all this traffic and, without knowing exactly why, we feel a sick, nauseated revulsion. We feel as we felt when we were children, and had a bright glamorous picture of Santo Claus, with his fat little belly and fairy reindeer, and then suddenly came on a vile old loafer ringing a bell over an iron pot. It seems a blasphemous mockery that men can preadch such vulgar nonsense, call it religion, and then belabor the rest of us for not being washed in the blood of the Lamb.

Concerning the latest in the hotel trade,

Whatever I might write were the latest wrinkle would not be the latest wrinkle by the time these lines get into type. But one of the latest, certainly, is radio service in every chamber.

Of anthropology, from an article entitled “The New History,”

The anthropologists have paralleled the achievements of the archeologists by making careful studies of existing primitive peoples. Ten years ago we possessed in this field only the chatty introduction by Marett, and Professor Boas’ highly scholarly but somewhat difficult little book, “The Mind of Primitive Man.” Today we have admirable general works by Goldenweiser, Lowie, Kroeber, Tozzer, Levy-Bruhl and Wissler with several more in immediate prospect. These deal acutely and lucidly with primitive institutions.

As the cognoscenti among my readers are no doubt aware, this was written on the very threshold of anthropology’s spiral into the dark ages of the Blank Slate, from which it has only recently emerged.  The good Professor Boas played a major role in pushing it over the cliff.

Concerning the value of morality in regulating society,

Once we give up the pestilent assumption that the only effective sanctions for conduct are those of law and morals, and begin to delimit clearly the field of manners, we shall be by way of discovering how powerful and how easily communicable the sense of manners is, and how efficiently it operates in the very regions where law and morals have so notoriously proven themselves inert. The authority of law and morals does relatively little to build up personal dignity, responsibility and self-respect, while the authority of manners does much… I also venture to emphasize for special notice by the Americanizers and hundred-per-centers among us, the observation of Edmund Burke that “there ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

and finally, from the collection of anecdotes Mencken always included under the heading Americana,

Effects of the Higher Learning at Yale, as revealed by the answers to a questionnaire submitted to the students there:

Favorite character in world history: Napoleon, 181; Cleopatra, 7; Jeanne d’Arc, 7; Woodrow Wilson, 7; Socrates, 5; Jesus Christ, 4; Mussolini, 3. Favorite prose author: Stevenson, 24; Dumas, 22; Sabatini, 11; Anatole France, 5; Cabell, 5; Bernard Shaw, 4. Favorite magazine: Saturday Evening Post, 94; Atlantic Monthly, 24, New Republic, 3; Time Current History, 3. Favorite political party: Republican, 304; Democratic, 84; none, 22; Independent, 3. Biggest world figure of today: Coolidge, 52; Dawes, 32, Mussolini, 3; Prince of Wales, 24; J. P. Morgan, 15; Einstein, 3; Bernard Shaw, 3. What subject would you like to see added to the curriculum: Elocution and Public Speaking, 24; Business course, 8; Deplomacy, 7; Drama, 4.

Times change in 85 years.

Morality: The Persistent Delusion of Objective Good

Morality is a set of human emotional traits. The emotional responses we associate with morality exist because they evolved. Morality is, by its very nature, subjective. It can exist only in the form of feelings in individual minds, and has no independent existence as a thing in itself outside of individual minds. Its existence in our minds does not depend on any rational thought process or series of logical deductions. Rather, it is fundamentally emotional in nature. We consider a thing good because we feel that it is good. Computers can execute rule-based logical algorithms and arrive at true conclusions. However, they do not experience emotions. Therefore, they are not moral beings. The perception that something is “really” good corresponds to a fundamentally emotional response. Without emotion, there can be no morality, and without it we would not make moral judgments.  We do not perceive the good as a real, objective thing because it actually is real. We perceive the good as a real, objective thing, because perceiving it in that fashion made it more likely that our ancestors would survive and reproduce. Because the good is not a real, objective thing, it is not possible for moral judgments to be legitimate in themselves or in any way objectively valid.

The above conclusions are, in my opinion at least, the bottom line. In other words, they are true. We can reason about them and come to logical conclusions about whether they will have negative or positive consequences as they relate to some goal or aspiration we might have for ourselves, or for mankind in general, but the truth is indifferent to our goals and aspirations. It remains true regardless. In this post-”Blank Slate” world, as we sit on the shoulders of Darwin and gaze about us, it would seem these truths would be obvious. After all, if we see some rule violated that we associate with “the good,” our minds do not respond by executing a logical algorithm leading to the dispassionate conclusion that it is true that the rule has been violated. Rather, we respond emotionally. We may experience outrage, or become indignant. If we go to a movie, and see the bad guy bite the dust, our response is not limited to the rational observation that a human animal acted in a way that had a less than zero probability of leading to that outcome, and, as one of a set of potential outcomes, that outcome (biting the dust) actually did happen. Rather, we again respond emotionally. We may experience gratification, or, if we are really involved in the plot, exultation at the victory of “the good.”  In claiming the objective legitimacy of moral judgments, we are really claiming that emotions that evolved in animals with large brains for perfectly understandable reasons, and that are analogous to similar emotions in other animals, have now, for no apparent reason at all, magically come to life on their own, and become objective things independent of the minds that experience them.  Logically, that notion is absurd.

These truths, however, are not obvious.  They are not obvious to most of the people on the planet, nor are they obvious to those to whom it would seem they should be self-evident; the evolutionary psychologists, neuroanthropologists, ethologists, and others whose research is daily adding to the overwhelming evidence that morality is the result of innate features that are hard wired in our brains.  It’s not surprising, really.  If we shed the illusion of objective, legitimate good, there is much to be lost along with it.  We must free ourselves of the overwhelmingly powerful feeling that what we perceive as good is a real thing.  With it we must give up once and for all any claim to a logical basis for the immensely satisfying feeling that we are morally superior to others.  We must give up all the claims to wealth, status and power that claims to moral superiority or to a superior knowledge of the “real” good imply, whether as religious leaders, partisans of messianic ideologies, or recognition as ethics “experts.”  No wonder then, that the delusion of objective good is so hard for us to give up.  The problem is that it simply doesn’t exist.  No matter how passionately we embrace this falsehood, it will not be transmuted into truth.

Allow me to suggest that it would be wise for us to throw aside our blinkers and embrace the truth instead.  By doing so we will not suddenly plunge the world into chaos.  We are moral creatures, and will continue to act as moral creatures because that is our nature.  Understanding why we act as moral creatures, and the true nature of our moral emotions will not alter the fact.  In our day-to-day interactions with each other, we must act as moral creatures, if only because we lack the cognitive capacity to carefully reason out the logical consequences of every move we make in real time.  However, my personal opinion, and one which, it seems to me, follows logically from what I have stated above, is that we should stop trying to apply morality in politics, international relations, or any other modern form of collective interaction between large numbers of people that had no analog at the time our moral emotions evolved.  We should also resist attempts by others to apply morality in such situations, other than to the extent that we must take our own nature, and with it our moral nature, into account in constructing a society that is suited to the kind of creatures we are.  I suggest that this is a reasonable course of action, not because it is “really good,” but because I consider life a wonderful thing that I wish to savor while I have it, and because I cannot savor it if I am constantly threatened by other human beings.

How is it that I am threatened, or, for that matter, how is it that we are all threatened by continued attempts to apply morality in politics or to any of the other forms of mass social arrangements that have emerged in the modern world, and which are utterly different from anything that existed at the time morality evolved?  In the first place, quite obviously, because morality evolved for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the goals that massive political and other organizations, such as modern states, set for themselves.  Consequently, there is no apparent reason to expect that acting according to moral emotions will be an effective way of pursuing those goals.  There is abundant evidence in the recent history of our species to confirm that they are not only ineffective in pursuing those goals, but potentially extremely dangerous.

Consider, for example, Communism.  It was embraced by millions of the most intelligent and idealistic people on the planet as the path to “human flourishing,” confirmed as such by the most advanced “scientific” theories.  It was a quintessential attempt to apply morality in the context of modern states.  For its adherents it represented the incarnation of ”the good,” transcending the petty minds of individuals.  It ended in disaster, after having caused the deaths of tens of millions of people.  In many of the countries it controlled, those killed included a grossly disproportionate number of the most intelligent and productive members of society.  These countries, for all practical purposes, beheaded themselves.  How is it that this noble attempt to achieve a perfect state of human happiness via the revolutionary imposition of “the good” ended in a debacle?  For the same reason that most such attempts always fail.  Human morality is dual in nature.  Where ever there is an ultimate ”good,” there is always an ultimate “evil” to go right along with it.  In the case of Communism, the “evil” was the bourgeoisie.  To insure the triumph of the “the good,” it was necessary to wipe out “the evil.”  As a result, tens of millions who were unfortunate enough to have a little more than their neighbors, or whose clothes were a little too nice, or whose farms were  a little too productive, were murdered.  The lives of tens of millions of children were poisoned because their parents were supposed to have been in the wrong class.  They were often brutally punished for not taking care to be born into the right social class.

The other obvious example that dominated the 20th century is Nazism.  In this case, the German people and their welfare became “the good.”  Hitler hardly considered himself an evil man whose goal in life was to deliberately make everyone else as miserable as possible.  He passionately believed he represented the ultimate good, and that it was his destiny to lead the German people to a different version of “human flourishing,” thereby acting for the ultimate good of all mankind.  In this case, too, the “good” implied an “evil.”  The “evil” was the Jews, and the result was the Holocaust.

What about attempts to impose religious versions of morality on society?  Ask the tens of millions of victims of religious wars.  Ask the countless heretics who were burned.  Ask the hundreds of thousands of innocent women who were hung outside the gates of European cities over the centuries as “witches.”  Ask the miserable inhabitants of the Papal States in the 19th century.  Ask anyone in Iran today who happens not to be a devout Muslim.  Ask the victims of Islamic terrorism.

In spite of the monotonous repetition of these disasters, those of us who should know better still don’t get it.  They are so devoted to the illusion of their own moral goodness that, instead of coming to the seemingly obvious conclusion that morality itself is the problem, or, more accurately, the attempt to apply it in situations that are utterly divorced from those in which it came into existence in the first place, for reasons that have nothing to do with the reasons that it evolved, they conclude, against all odds, that the solution is merely a matter of “getting it right.”  They are cocksure that they are smarter than the myriads who have tried exactly the same nostrums for achieving “human flourishing” before them.  Finally, at long last, they fondly believe they have discovered the “real good,” and it remains only to stuff it down the throats of the rest of us poor benighted souls.  Open wide!

I have a better idea.  Let’s stop playing with fire.  What is the alternative to imposing some bright, new, freshly cobbled together version of morality on society?  We have large brains.  For starters, we might try using them.

Of John Locke and Atheist Billboards

Apropos John Locke, he’s usually considered an Enlightenment avatar of tolerance. Author of the famous A Letter Concerning Toleration, he argued that toleration of multiple religious sects deterred civil unrest and promoted an orderly society. However, he added some caveats to his plea for diversity. One of them applied to atheists. For example, from An Essay concerning Human Understanding:

And perhaps, if we should with attention mind the lives and discourses of people not so far off, we should have too much reason to fear, that many, in more civilized countries, have no very strong and clear impressions of a Deity upon their minds, and that the complaints of atheism made from the pulpit are not without reason. And though only some profligate wretches own it too barefacedly now; yet perhaps we should hear more than we do of it from others, did not the fear of the magistrate’s sword, or their neighbor’s censure, tie up people’s tongues; which, were the apprehensions of punishment or shame taken away, would as openly proclaim their atheism as their lives do.

Atheists have generally been a minority with “different” beliefs, and, as such, a predictable outgroup in a species, such as our own, with an innate tendency to hate, ostracize and despise outgroups. Specious “good-sounding” reasons have always been invented to justify that hate, and Locke had his own, but the Amity-Enmity Complex has always been the real reason. Fortunately, we have been making encouraging progress towards gaining an understanding of human nature in recent years. There is some hope that society at large will finally grasp the significance of the Complex and its disastrous role in promoting the war and violence against minorities that has been so ubiquitous in human history. Perhaps the day will come when most of us will be able to immediately recognize irrational manifestations of ingroup-outgroup behavior, and ostracize and condemn those who fail to control that most destructive aspect of our nature instead of their victims. However, that day has not yet come, and so we remain on the treadmill of trying to stamp out each of the potentially infinite ways in which the Complex can manifest itself as if it were something new under the sun. We invent new names for each of them as the evil they cause becomes intolerable, whether racism, or anti-Semitism, or xenophobia, or homophobia, never seeming to realize that they all have the same root cause, and new isms and phobias will always be waiting just around the corner to take their place until we finally tear up the root itself.

So it is with atheists. Things being as they are, we too must fight our own little piece of the battle in detail. Billboards are one recent manifestation of that struggle. The Friendly Atheist notes a typical reaction to them, in this case from Marcia Segelstein at OneNewsNow:

I guess I just don’t understand. Christians (along with Jews and Muslims) gather in groups to worship. Atheists don’t gather not to worship, so why seek out members? What’s there to be a member of? And why should atheists care about stopping worshippers who are just “going through the motions”? Do they think they might get their hands on money once pledged to churches?

Trying to tear down the belief system of the world’s foremost religion — Christianity — is what seems intolerant to me. Placing prominent ads declaring the birth of Christ to be a myth seems downright hostile. To my mind, these campaigns feel defensive, as though atheists are weighted down with chips on their shoulders, or feel left out of some club.

Well, Marcia, atheists gather in groups for the same reason other people with like interests gather in groups; because we are by nature social animals.   The billboard campaigns certainly are defensive, and rightly so.  If you still don’t understand why, read Locke’s remark above about the “magistrate’s sword,” or peruse the history of Spain under the Inquisition.  If you think “it can’t happen here,” Sinclair Lewis wrote a book with that title that might interest you.  There is nothing hostile about disputing Christian or any other religious beliefs.  Is it really unimportant whether we base our lives and actions on the truth or not?  If the truth is important, how are we ever to approach it unless we are allowed to think about and discuss it?

Jesus and the Ants

The Smithsonian’s “A Fire in my Belly” video exhibit, which depicts Jesus on the cross being eaten by ants, at least has the virtue of accurately reflecting what the Institution has become and the nature of the people who run it. Bill Quick’s take at Daily Pundit:

You think you’re so “transgressive,” so “daring,” so “cutting edge,” you cheap-ass poseur pieces of shit?

I’ll show you daring. I’ll show you cutting edge.

Switch out your ant-drenched Jesus for an ant-riddled Mohammed.

Go ahead, you gutless, cowardly pussies calling yourselves artists. I dare you.

I’d say that’s about right, although expressed in somewhat intemperate language.

Hitch and Blair Debate Religion

The televised event took place before a 2700 strong audience in Toronto. According to an article in the Telegraph,

(Hitchens) appeared to win over the audience, which voted two-to-one in his favour following the debate, which argued the motion “be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world”.

With all due respect to the former Prime Minister, this one must have been like shooting fish in a barrel for the likes of Hitchens. It’s hard to argue that Christianity has been “a force for good in the world” in light of the tens of millions who lost their lives in the religious wars it inspired, or the institutionalized intolerance and bigotry it has been responsible for, or the hundreds of thousands of innocent women hung or burned as “witches” in Europe during the Middle Ages, or its promotion of the mass torture of “heretics,” or its repeated massacres of Jews and other religious minorities. As for Islam, it is not the predominant religion in North Africa, or Syria, or Turkey, or parts of Europe because it is a “religion of peace,” but because it was imposed by force. Anyone with any doubt about whether it is a “force for good in the world” in spite of its bloody history, its institutionalized oppression of women, and its rejection of the separation of mosque and state must have been asleep since 911.

It doesn’t really matter, though. What does matter is whether these religions are true or not. If one of them is true (and they can’t both be true at the same time because they are mutually exclusive), then the question of whether it’s a “force for good” becomes moot. We then become the subjects of an absolute tyrant with a smiley face, and we can like it or burn in hell for billions and trillions of years, just for starters. As Hitchens puts it, “Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.” Edward Fitzgerald summed up our situation in similar, but more poetic terms, in his fanciful “translation” of the Rubaiyat. Don’t let the prospect depress you, though. For reasons set forth by a simple French priest named Jean Meslier in his Testament more than two and a half centuries ago, and improved on very little in the intervening years, the chances that we will sizzle in hell forever for the pleasure and edification of the elect are rather slim.

Jesus Interrupted: Bart Ehrman and the Contradictions in the Bible

The fact that there are many contradictions in the Bible has been known to scholars for centuries.  Martin Luther famously called the Book of James “ an epistle of straw” with “nothing of the nature of the Gospel about it . . . [It is] not the writing of any apostle,” added that the Book of Esther was “without boots or spurs,” and called the authorship of the Pentateuch and several other books into question.  The great 18th century atheist Jean Meslier cited numerous contradictions, as did Voltaire, and German scholars in the 19th century pretty much demolished the notion that the Bible is the “inerrant word of God.”  Enter Bart Ehrman and his remarkable book, Jesus, Interrupted.  Ehrman goes through many of the most important contradictions, noting how easy it is to see them if the books of the Bible are read side by side, or “horizontally,” as he puts it.  Beyond that, he guides the reader on a tour of the historical Bible, describing what we know about the authors, why they often weren’t who they claimed to be, and why it’s important to consider what each of them believed about Jesus and was trying to accomplish in writing their books.  In a word, he describes the Bible as very much a human rather than a divine product.

As I do not believe in supernatural beings myself, what surprised me about all this was not the fact that there are many contradictions in the Bible, but Ehrman’s claim that this historical-critical approach to it has been taught to most of the graduates of our religious seminaries for the better part of the last century.  Most of our clerics are well aware of the facts, accept them, but, for one reason or another, have decided not to pass the word along to their flocks.  In Ehrman’s words,

…the basic views that I’ve sketched here are widely known, widely taught, and widely accepted among New Testament scholars and their students, including the students who graduate from seminaries and go on to paster churches. Why do these students so rarely teach their congregations this information, but insist on approaching the Bible devotionally rather than historical-critically, not just in the pulpit (where a devotional approach would be expected) but also in their adult education classes? That has been one of my leading questions since I started writing this book.

Ehrman is a refreshing author to read.  He comes from an evangelical Christian background, but eventually became an agnostic, although not, as he claims because of any doubts about the divine authorship of the Bible.  Unlike some of the “new atheist” authors, he doesn’t write with his Amity/Enmity Complex on his sleeve.  In reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, for example, one often gets the impression spittle is literally flying off the pages as he rants about the “American Taliban” of evangelical Christians, getting so carried away in the process that he repeats an urban legend about how James Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, had  told the U.S. Congress that protecting the environment was not important because Jesus would come back soon.  Ehrman, on the other hand, not only does not condemn Christian belief, but claims that the realization that the authorship of the Bible is human rather than divine need not undermine those beliefs.  In his words,

Some readers will find it surprising that I do not see the material in the preceding chapters as an attack on Christianity or an agnostic’s attempt to show that faith, even Christian faith, is meaningless and absurd. That is not what I think, and it is not what I have been trying to accomplish.

I have been trying, instead, to make serious scholarship on the Bible and earliest Christianity accessible and available to people who may be interested in the New Testament but who, for one reason or another, have never heard what scholars have long known and thought about it.

I suspect many evangelical Christians will agree with my own conclusion that this is rather an understatement of the degree to which the conclusion that the Bible is not only not divinely inspired, but full of contradictions, undermines Christian faith.  To believe that is to believe that, for more than a thousand years, God stood idly by and did nothing in particular to prevent generations of clerical charlatans from bamboozling his moral flock regarding matters that would have a critical bearing on their fate in the hereafter.  It is to believe that, 2000 years after the time of Christ, one can be a Christian, independently of any reliable information about what the man actually said and what his appearance on earth actually meant, just by making things up as you go along. 

I personally prefer to apply Occam’s razor.  The simplest explanation for all these Biblical contradictions is the conclusion that Christ was just another Middle Eastern soothsayer, like legions of others who flourished in the region for hundreds of years before and after his death, differing from them only in the fact that he was the most successful of them all.  It’s unsettling and a little scary to think that the great majority of the human beings on the planet actually believe in imaginary super beings. It’s more or less equivalent to the realization that we’re inmates in a giant asylum. 

It didn’t take Darwin to reveal all these religious impostures for what they are.  Meslier did a perfectly adequate job of it in his Testament more than 250 years ago.  The writings of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the rest are really just afterthoughts.  In spite of all their repetition of the obvious, our religious disconnect with reality continues unabated.  If we set any value on our own survival as a species, apparently it will be necessary for us to somehow find a way to become more intelligent.

“The Good,” “The God,” and the Demise of Secular Religion

Ideas are significant in defining human ingroups. Among intellectuals and academics, those ideas often relate to a common conception of “the good.” “The good” evolves and changes rather quickly, but, at any given time, it is perceived as an absolute. Such ideological constructs can be understood as secular religions. Traditional religions are characterized by belief in an imaginary god, and the secular religion is characterized by belief in an imaginary good. This good is perceived as a real thing, having an existence of its own transcending individual minds. See, for example, “The Moral Landscape,” by Sam Harris, one of the secular religion’s high priests.

It’s been interesting to watch the reactions of the secular true believers as the evidence for innate human behavior, including moral behavior, accumulated over the years until continued denial became untenable. At first, like the old behaviorists, they reacted with rage and fury, demonizing such ideas as heresies associated with racism, fascism, etc. When the intellectual dams finally began to break, acceptance of innate behavior was led by “liberal” clergymen of the secular religion, who assured the flock that it really didn’t challenge their most cherished beliefs at all. Why, the whole idea had been “invented” by E. O. Wilson and, after all, he was one of them.

Their rationalizations have been entirely similar to those of the liberal clergy of traditional religions, who have, for example, rationalized the contradiction between the Book of Genesis and scientific fact by claiming that the book is allegorical. According to their apologetics, the days in Genesis are really “eons” of time, the firmament is really the “sky,” etc. Similarly, the secular clergy hold forth about the exemplary behavior of bonobos and assure the flock that belief in “the good” isn’t threatened at all by the fact that morality is a manifestation of traits that evolved in the distant past.

In their way, the fundamentalist clergy are more rational than their liberal brethren. There can be no accommodation between scientific fact and religious faith. If there is a God, he would not have bamboozled his children with obscure allegories. If the Bible is not literally true and the inspired word of God, the basis for faith disappears. And in their way, the old behaviorists who fulminated against the original sin of innate morality were right, too. It is the iceberg against which the Titanic of secular religion has foundered. The academic apologists of the Steven Pinker school are merely rearranging the deck chairs. Like Christianity and Islam, the secular religion will continue to be with us as a force for obscurantism into the indefinite future. However, it has become every bit as irrational to believe in “the good” as it is to believe in “the god.”

Papal Bigotry

Apparently the pope showed the now blunted fangs of the other “Religion of Peace” in an address to the Queen during his visit to the UK. The BBC quotes him as follows:

Even in our own lifetimes we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus a reductive vision of a person and his destiny.

The pope would do well to reflect on the record of the church he represents before he starts inveighing against “atheist extremism.” For example, it was responsible for the expulsion of Jews from the very country he was speaking in, not to mention his home country of Germany, as well as France, Spain and Portugal.  It was responsible for countless pogroms against Jews throughout its bloody history, murdering hundreds of thousands of them in massacres in Germany and many other European countries.  Other than that, it was directly responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of women as “witches,” countless bloody acts of repression against religious minorities, and the butchery of millions more in the wars it directly inspired.

As for the Nazis, the pope would do well to read “Mein Kampf.”  After all, it was written in his mother tongue.  In it Hitler invoked God many times, claiming, for example, that in fighting the Jews, he was doing the “Lord’s work.” 

The political right has a tradition of bigotry in matters of religion, most recently revealed in the prevailing fashion of blaming atheists for Nazism and Communism.  If the Nazis were atheist, how is it that Hitler constantly invoked God in his writings and speeches?  How is it that the millions of little memorial brochures the Nazis sent to the families of fallen soldiers with a picture of the deceased on one side always had Christian symbols and verses on the other?  Why did Nazi belt buckles and medals carry the inscription “God with us?”

Both Nazism and Communism were secular religions, differing from earlier versions only because they were unwise enough to promise heaven on earth, rather than pie in the sky when you die.  They were recognized as such by numerous contemporary writers, who often spoke of Communist and Nazi leaders as so many popes, bishops and priests. 

The Nazis and Communists didn’t murder because they were atheists.  They murdered because they were Nazis and Communists.  That remains a major distinction between atheists and Christians.  Atheists have never murdered simply by virtue of the fact that they don’t believe in God.  Christians have murdered millions by virtue of the fact that they do.

Jewish Expulsions in the Name of Christianity

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?”