Those Mysterious Atheists
(Reading the first draft of this, I noticed that I had been obliged to qualify the words “atheist” and “atheism” several times, so I decided it would make things simpler if I explained myself in the beginning: when I use the word “atheist” below, I don’t mean the casually atheistic and areligious person who doesn’t give the matter much thought. I mean the doctrinaire atheists like Richard Dawkins who believe that nothing exists except physical phenomena and for whom evolution is not just a scientific theory but an all-encompassing explanation of everything, a religion for materialists.)
When I find myself feeling (and it is feeling, more than thinking) that atheism is actually more plausible than belief in God, it always helps to listen to the atheists and realize, once again, that although science has done a marvelous job of explaining physical phenomena it is utterly unable to explain the human person. I was brought up against this recently by an argument on National Review’s web site in which John Derbyshire, one of the resident atheists, gave this typically snide response to the charge that evolution cannot account for unselfish behavior:
The evolution of moral behavior has been an active field for over 40 years, since William Hamilton's 1964 papers. It has all been extensively explained to interested nonscientists—most issues of the New York Times Science section has something related. Or you could read up on the Prisoner's Dilemma in Chapter 12 of Richard Dawkins' excellent book The Selfish Gene. (The chapter title is "Nice Guys Finish First.")
Altruism and co-operation in social animals, including this one, are perfectly explicable by the laws of biology—what you call the "reductionist understanding of Darwinian natural selection." (I guess the Moon is maintained in her orbit by "the reductionist understanding of Newtonian gravitation.")
This isn't even God of the Gaps; the gap in question here is pretty well filled. Supernatural agents are no more required for explaining moral behavior than they are for explaining earthquakes (for which the wrath-of-Poseidon model is a dead letter, I'm afraid).
(This was a post on NR’s blog some weeks ago; I neglected to bookmark it and don’t want to take the time to find it now, but I assure you the three paragraphs above were copied and pasted directly from the NR page).
In the specific context here, Derbyshire is correct—evolutionists can provide plausible after-the-fact explanations for unselfish behavior. But “altruism and co-operation” are hardly synonyms for “morality.” They may or may not be elements of a particular set of moral principles, but they are not morality itself. To say that altruism and co-operation exist is one thing; to say that they are good is quite another. There is at least one philosophical system—objectivism—which has millions of adherents and which denies vehemently that altruism is good. To say that altruism can be accounted for by evolution says nothing at all about whether it (or any other human quality) is good. To say that it assists in survival is only equivalent to saying it is good if you believe that survival is good.
Anyone who wants to take a serious look at atheism and morality must ask this question: on what grounds can one say that even physical survival, much less co-operation, altruism, or any other mode of behavior, is good in any definite and permanent way?
The debate usually doesn’t get very far from here, because most atheists prove, upon examination, to have very fixed and definite ideas on some fundamentals of morality. They tend to believe, for instance, that it’s a self-evidently good thing for the human race to survive and prosper. But one can make a reasonable argument that this is not a good thing at all, that the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short and that most people are better off dead, or that we pose an unacceptable danger to the rest of nature and should be eliminated, and that the well-lived life is the one spent killing as many people as possible.
Or, at the individual level, one could quite reasonably conclude “To hell with co-operation; I want not just any human genes but my genes to survive, and to that end I devote my life to impregnating as many females, and killing as many males, as possible.”
At this point the atheist, unless he happens to be one of the very small number of people who actually believe things like this, usually begins to bluster and shout and appeal to what is obviously right, to some universal sense of what is decent, or to a presumably shared purpose such as “building a better world for everyone” (I saw that not long ago at the end of a furious denunciation of Christianity). But what are any of these except the sort of abstract moral principles that are by definition not accounted for by evolution—which is, we’re forever being told, a process that operates on the purest sort of pragmatism by preserving only whatever is conducive to physical survival? This is not my parody of evolutionary thinking but one of its proudest boasts, the assertion which is held to prove that moral principles have no metaphysical standing.
Evolution simply has no logical means for speaking of right and wrong, only of what works, and that only with reference to the production and survival of offspring. It can’t, as the saying goes, move from is to ought.
That we should concern ourselves with building a better world is either an abstract principle independent of our wishes or it is a mere subjective preference. And if it’s a subjective preference there is no reason why it should be binding on anyone other than the person doing the preferring. Atheists tend to say that moral questions are indeed a matter of personal preference until you come up with an example that they don’t prefer.
A very few atheists will go so far as to admit this: “All right, the rule against, for example, murder is just a subjective preference, but most people share it, and we will enforce our will upon you if you break the rule.” Well, that’s consistent, at least. But it is not morality. The appeal to morality as such is an appeal to the sense that some things are either right or wrong with reference to some general rule or standard. Not that they are either useful or un-useful, pleasant or unpleasant, but right or wrong.
The fact is that most people including atheists experience the sense that some things are simply right because they’re right and other things are wrong because they’re wrong. Of course there are many differences about the specifics, but almost everyone knows the sensation I’m describing, and the rare exception would be considered sick or evil in any society.
Evolution can offer an explanation of these feelings by asserting that they were conducive to survival, and insist that “right” and “wrong” are simply names for feelings of attraction or aversion to behavior that either does or doesn’t facilitate survival. It can’t say that anything is in fact right or wrong, and it must deny that the sense of right and wrong is what we all experience it to be: a reference to some standard outside our selves and our species. In short, the atheist must deny his own direct experience in order to maintain his intellectual consistency.
Another, similar wreck happens when the atheist confronts the universal direct experience of being a self, a conscious soul which is somehow in a body and is continually perceiving, desiring, deciding, and acting, and consci
ous of itself as doing so. But for atheism there can be no “ghost in the machine,” no entity which is distinct from the body and which is truly acting freely. Apparently a lot of effort these days is being put into research hoping to prove that consciousness is purely physical in origin and that the notion of the choosing and acting self is some sort of illusion. But this leads to the bizarre and self-contradictory notion of an illusion experiencing itself.
I wonder how evolution might explain the development of an entity that denies its own existence.
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