Evolution of God Concept

All experiences of the divine must be filtered through cultural constructs, or symbols. God is beyond our understanding, thus beyond language. If we are talk about our experiences, however badly, we must filter them through culture.

RELIGION, although inherent in man, borrows its expressions from the setting or milieu in which man appears. The forms through which man expresses the supernatural are all drawn from the cultural heritage and the environment known to him, and are structured according to his dominant patterns of experience.In a hunting culture this means that the main target of observation, the animal, is the ferment of suggestive influence on representations of the supernatural. This must not be interpreted as meaning that all ideas of the supernatural necessarily take animal form. First of all, spirits do appear also as human beings, although generally less frequently; the high-god, for instance, if he exists, is often thought of as a being of human appearance. Second, although spirits may manifest themselves as animals they may evince a human character and often also human modes of action.[1]

Narrative is psychologically important to humans because it enables us to put things in perspective, to put ourselves into the story and to understand. Anything can be narrative. Even when events are taken as historical and the consciousness of myth falls away, the narrative is no less naratival. The resurrection of Christ, the existence of Jesus and his claims to be Messiah, all I take to be history and truth. Yet these are also part of the meta-narrative of Christianity. The meat-narrative is not closed or not an ideology or truth regime as long as it can be open to outside voices and to adult itself to them. For that reason the narrative hast to be fluid. The reason for this is that it has to explain the word in a new way to each new generation. To the extent that it can keep doing this it continues to be relevant and survives. This is equivalent to Kuhn’s paradigm absorbing the anomalies. Even when a certain set of fact is held out as historical and more that, but “the truth” such as Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection, there is still an interpretation, a spin an understanding of just exactly how to put it, that varies from time to time and culture to culture. The facts of the event don’t change, the historical significance of it doesn’t change, but the way of relating it to each generation anew does change. This is not say that ideology doesn’t change, but the change is much slower and less obvious and less fluid. Even when the meta-narrative of a given religious tradition features factual material it’s not closed in the sense that ideology is closed and it’s still fluid.

            This is not to say that religious traditions don’t get infected with ideology. When traditions take on ideology they usually form something more than Orthodoxy, something like “fundamentalism.” Orthodoxy is just the recognition of stable boundaries that ground the fluid nature of the narrative in expression of continuity. While ideology seeks to create a black hole, like the eternal conflict between communism and anti-communism, that absorbs all light and allows nothing to escape; the attempt to suck everything in one eternal understanding. Ideology in religious tradition probably is most often he result of literalizing the metaphors. When we forget that the metaphor bridges the gap between what we know and we don’t know—through comparison--and that it contains a “like” and a “not-like” dimension, we begin to associate the metaphor with truth in literal way then we begin to formulate ideology. Critics of religious thinking might be apt to confuse dogma with ideology. Religious ideas are not automatically ideological, dogma is not automatically ideological. It’s the literalistic elements in some religious thinking (not all of course) that closes off the realm of discourse and crates a closed truth regime. The danger of form ideology may be acute in a religious setting since it is easy to confuse the metaphor with literal truth by casting over it the aura of the sacred. We often associate the things pertaining to belief in God with God, and in so doing forger a literalism that closes off discourse. Yet religious belief as a whole is too fluid to be fully ideological. Ideology is self protecting and self perpetuating. Thomas Kuhn’s talk about damage control in paradigm defense is a good example of the self defending nature of ideology. While meta-narrative often reflects concepts of divine truth, it’s too changeable to be ideological. Even though theology resists change and novelty is a bad thing in theological parlance, meta-narrative changes in spite of it all. The fact of changed is noted in the many examples of different versions of the same myth. One such change turns upon a burning question that must be raised at this point, why did religious thinking move from numatic realization to a theocentric nature?

            Why “God?” The same can be asked of the female form? Why a pseudo-parental, suzerain figure who creates the world and is in charge of the cosmos? Why not, since this model is obviously a metaphor comparing the unknown with some aspect of reality we know well, why that aspect and not another? What did people worship before they worshipped gods? Anthropology tells us that the shamanistic style of animism is older than the concept of a creator god.[2] This form of belief dates back to the stone age. Native American tribe “Shosoni, like other hunting people in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, have an idea of a “master of the animals,” or an “owner,” a supernatural being who is in charge of the animals:

Hunting peoples in Africa, Europe, Asia and America have developed the idea of a supernatural owner of the animal species, or of all animals, who protects them, commands them, and at request from hunters delivers them to be slayed and eaten. The concept is not infrequent in North America. The master of animals is a spirit, generally figured as an animal. The Shoshoni have possibly in very remote times known the coyote, or rather the mythical Coyote, as a master of animals. With the impact of Plains Indian culture the buffalo and the eagle have halfway achieved the position as master of animals and master of birds, respectively. In all fairness it should be pointed out, however, that this type of concept is very little noticeable among the Shoshoni.[3]

We must be cautious but since “shamanism” is connected to animism this owner of the animals might imply a transition between animistic thinking and beliefs in gods. We can’t say that all religions evolved in the same way in every location, but it does seem that in general it was an evolution from nameless “spirits” to specific pantheon of gods. The development of the concept of God was probably influenced by thoughts of parents, of tribal chiefs, or the leader, long before they became complex enough to fit a suzerain model. Yet it does seem that the concept of God evolved out of an understanding of nature oriented religion and evolved slowly over time based upon comparison with the authority figures we know best in life.

            In his work The Evolution of God,[4] Robert Wright distills the work of anthropology over the last two centuries and demonstrates an evolutionary development, form early superstition that personified nature (pre-historic people talking to the wind)[5], through a polytheistic origin in pre-Hebrew Israelite culture,[6] to monotheistic innovation with the God of the Bible.[7]Wright is distilling a huge body of work that stretches back to the ninetieth century, the work of countless archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists. Another such successful distiller of scholarship in recent years is Karen Armstrong. In her work A History of God: The 4000 year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, [8] she presents a similar evolutionary story, focusing specifically upon the Biblical religions. She sees the pre-historical religious scene through the eyes of wonderment at the world around us. The cave paintings she understands as an attempt to record participation in the all pervasive aspect of the enchanted world.[9] The general agreement between scholarship, social sciences, and the work of anthropologists is that the concept of God is a product of the evolution of human thought.[10] At one time the concept was not, then it began and it has developed over time. Of course the great body of this work is coming out of naturalistic assumptions, especially in the ninetieth century. In the anthropological study of the evolution of religion those assumptions centered around the concept of projection in human thinking. People are projecting the relationship with the father or the king. This assumption can be traced to the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, social critic and precursor to Marxian analysis (God is the mask of money). He understood the concept of projection in terms of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit.[11] In The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach argues that superhuman deities are involuntary projections based upon the attributes of human nature.[12] How this thesis came to be the basis of modern anthropological understanding of religious evolution is not hard to seek. As Harvey puts it “It became the Bible to a group of revolutionary thinkers including, Arnold Ruge, the Bauers, Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Frederic Engles.[13] This circle became a major part of the basis of modern social thought. While modern anthropology has not necessarily played out Feuerbach’s actual inversion of Hegel it has taken its que from him by making assumptions about theoroes of prodjection of one kind or another.

            Hegel did not think of God as some projection of human imagination. Feuerbach inverted Hegel’s concept to produce the idea. Hegel understood stages of human culture as “moments in the unforlding of absolute spirit.”[14] Thus, as Harvey points out, the various stages in religious development can be seen as stages in the self manifestation of Spirit.[15] In other words, from the cave paintings, to the shamans and the wind talkers to the highest aspirations of Judo-Christian ethics, Spirit (God), is making himself aware of himself by moving through progressive revelation to humanity. “In other words, the history of religion culminating in Christianity was a progressive revelation of the truth that the absolute is not merely an impersonal substance but a subject.”[16] Feuerbach inverts this principal by asserting that finite spirit is becoming aware of itself through externalizing its own attributes and then projecting them into magnified from.[17]On Feuerbach’s part this was the result of a long struggle with idealism. Be that as it may, and for both sides, it’s clearly the roots of ideology. It sowed the seeds of ideology in terms of the social sciences naturalistic assumptions. Now we find those same kinds of assumptions being made with regard to the laws of physics. Paul Davies has been quoted to say that the traditional view of the laws of physics are just seventeenth century monotheism without God, “Then God got killed off and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their theological properties,”[18] The assumption of modernity is always that belief in God is dying out, religion is of the past, these are the things that are dying. Armstrong sounds the death knell and starts singing the dirge in first book. She observes that “one of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen.”[19] It’s so irrelevant she’s writing books about it.

We can just hear those atheists saying "yes this proves man invented God," not so fast. see part 2 on friday.

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 sources

[1] Ake Hultkrantz, “Attitudes Toward Animals in Shashoni Indian Religion,” Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 4, No. 2. (Spring, 1970) © World Wisdom, Inc. no page listed,online archive, URL:

http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/Public/articles/browse_g.aspx?ID=131, accessed 3/21/13

[2] Weston La Barre, “Shamanic Origins of Religion and Medicine,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, vol 11, (1-2) Jan. June 1979 no page listed, PDF, URL: http://www.cnsproductions.com/pdf/LaBarre.pdf  accessed 3/22/13.

[3] Hultkrantz, op. cit.  the author also cites other works by himself on the matter: Cf. Hultkrantz, The Owner of the Animals in the Religion of the North American Indians (in Hultkrantz, ed., The Supernatural Owners of Nature, Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 1, 1961). Hultkrantz, The Masters of the Animals among the Wind River Shoshoni (Ethnos, Vol. 26:4, 1961).

[4] Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, New York: Back Bay Books, reprint edition, 2010.  The book was Originally published in 2009. The company “Back Bay books: is an imprint of Hachette Books, through Little Brown and company. Wright studied sociobiology at Princeton and taught at Princeton as and University of Pennsyania. He edits New Republic and does journalistic writing of science, especially sociobiology.

[5] Wright, ibid, 9

[6] ibid. 10

[7] ibid, 11

[8] Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994.

[9] Ibid, 4-6

[10] T. M. Manickam,, Dharma According Manu and Moses, Bangalore : Dharmaram Publications,1977,6.

[11] Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and The Interpretation of Religion, Carmbridge: Press Syndicate for the University of Cambridge, Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought, 1995/1997, 4.

Harvey is professor emeritus, taught religious studies at Stanford Univesity. His Ph.D. from Yale in 1957. His thesis supervisor was H.Richard Neibhur.

[12] Cited by Harvey, ibid., 25.

[13] ibid, 26.

[14] ibid.

[15] ibid.

[16] ibid.

[17] ibid, 27

[18] Dennis Overbye, quoting email message from Paul Davies, “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown,” “Science” New York Times. December 19, 2007. on line edition URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& accessed, 3/25/13.

[19] Armstrong, op.cit. 4.

Is Science one Gene away From Defeating Religion?

Is Science one Gene away From Defeating Religion?

 


Colin Blakemore (Neuroscience, Oxford) argues that Science is just one gene away from defeating religion.[1] Despite his great advancement in that scientific field he demonstrates a very callow understanding of religion. Thus we must once again assume that is just another case of the golden ghetto. Or perhaps the ivory ghetto. A very advanced person in a scientific field is not necessarily qualified to apply scinece to religion. This post modern age reveals more and more the tower similarities between culture and the tower of Babel story.

Blakemore reveals in his opening paragraph that he says the relationship bewteen religion and science as "a ches match." It's adversarial, it's a combat. Thus advances in science are automatically viewed as detraction for religion. He intimates this when he says that the discoveries of Watson and Crick were a defeat for religion because previously life was a mystery that implied spiritual magic. So this guy is not on bard with understanding religion in modern terms. He wants to see it as some long ago thing that scinece is beating up on. This is obviously ideological. Just the frame in which he views the topic is an ideological framework.

 What really strikes me as amaturish in Blakemore's thinking is his assertion that Darwin destoryed the reason to believe in God:

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was certainly a vital move in that chess game - if not checkmate. In an interview for God and the Scientists, to be broadcast tonight in Channel 4's series on Christianity, Richard Dawkins declares: "Darwin removed the main argument for God's existence."[2]

 Of course it's Dawkins that prompted him to think this way. He admits that wasn't Darwin's intention. He's probably thinking religion means fundamentalism, inerrancy, conservative views.

 Science has rampaged over the landscape of divine explanation, provoking denial or surrender from the church. Christian leaders, even the Catholic church, have reluctantly accommodated the discoveries of scientists, with the odd burning at the stake and excommunication along the way.[3]

 He defines anything that is a scientific advancement as a victory over religion weather it disproves anything or not. He barely hides his utter contempt for relgion:

The process of Christian accommodation is a bit like the fate of fieldmice confronted by a combine harvester, continuously retreating into the shrinking patch of uncut wheat.
Ten days ago, on Darwin's birthday, Richard Dawkins, Archbishop of Atheism, and Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, conducted a public conversation in the Oxford University Museum, where Bishop Sam Wilberforce and Darwin's champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, had debated Darwin's ideas in 1860. The two Richards were more civilised. But inevitably, Richard H claimed for religion a territory that science can never invade, a totally safe sanctuary for Christian fieldmice. Science is brilliant at questions that start "how", but religion is the only approach to questions that start "why". Throughout history, human beings have asked those difficult "why" questions.[4]

I am sure the Christian filed mice are snug in their pretend sanctuary where they refuse to worship scinece as he does. Does he ever actually get down to business about the genetic thing? His segway is that he tires to connect the universality of religion to the universality of language. Language is genetic and universe. so therefore the universal nature of religion must also be due to genetics.[5] That does not follow logically, it's a argument from sign. It doesn't follow scientifically either but we will check in on that in a minute. The problem with the argument he's setting up is that it's a straight assumption that God can't work through genetics. Any religion gene is a disproof of God becuase it removes the only reasons to believe in God, which according to him seems to be unexplained naturalistic phenomena. The only kind of God he can figure out people believe in is the God of the gaps. In other words he's never read a major theologian and he has no sophistication in dealing with religion.

Now he recognizes the obvious answer as being that God can use genes. Yet he has an answer for this. We are social animals. We feel that we are in charge of our actions but more and more those who study the brain are coming to believe that we are not. Which in fact is a Non sequitur because it doesn't answer the issue of genes as a disproof of God or arguemnt from sign. But Blakemore's reticense is incapsulated in the final paragraph of his article:

I'm dubious about those "why" questions: why are we here? Why do we have a sense of right and wrong? Either they make no sense or they can be recast as the kind of "how" questions that science answers so well.

When we understand how our brains generate religious ideas, and what the Darwinian adaptive value of such brain processes is, what will be left for religion?[6]

So He's admitted that he doesn't' understand the basis for religious thinking but we are still supposed to assume he's right about it being disproved by these things that he can't prove are disproofs? The basic argument appears to be that if there's a gene for religion then our religious ideas are coming from genes, we have choice in thinking of them, that's supposed to disprove God. Actually I think it proves a Calvinistic God pretty well. With Calvin we are predestined. That would fit the bit about we don't think up our own ideas. Again the atheist/scientism agenda fails to offer real disproof. All if offers is another stab at deflating the fundamentalist view of God.

Science reporter Nicholas Wade offers insight into the real arguments for genetically based religion. The basic argument is the evolutionary nature of religion. Religion begins in the preparative states of humanity and grows up with the species become more sophisticated and various junctures from simple agricultural dances and decoration sophisticated astronomical observations.[7] So the advocates of the gentic basis for religion are making ideological assumptions about the nature of social evolution. They are assuming that all behavior is genetic and anything that becomes more complex with man must be the result of genes. That's still arguemnt from sign. No real proof exists for that view it's only tenable if you are a determinist. Moreover it's not really a disproof of God in any way.

Isn't there some science magic that you work in a laboratory wearing a white coat and you look into a test tube and it turns blue and you "yes it's evil reilgion gene alright." No that is not. It's far too complex to do that. It's all about theorizing and the theories for religious gene are largely concocted by people who want to destroy religion, such evolutionary psychology adherents.Dean Hamer tries to make an argument for God gene identifying a specific gene, VMAT2;[8]  There has been stiff scientific criticism of this claim even from people who one would think would support it. Atheist guru P.Z. Myers (who is a big named biologist) rejects it on the grounds that VMAT2 is just  "...a pump. A teeny-tiny pump responsible for packaging a neurotransmitter for export during brain activity. Yes, it's important, and it may even be active and necessary during higher order processing, like religious thought. But one thing it isn't is a 'god gene.^" [9]

There are two basic counter arguments that take care of this assumption about a religion gene:



1: no basis for religious gene

Blakmore himself tells us that our brains "light up" (respond by beginning to work more) when we hear God talk. That's really the basic idea, along with the universality issue, of proving a God gene. But that is not proof of a gene.

There are plenty of scientists who do not think that religion is an adaptation. The adaptations it view is one school, it is not a done deal. The counter argument among evolutionary theorists is that religion is a “spandrel” or a side effect of genetic structure but not produced by a gene for that behavior. There are plenty of scientists who disagree with the data on the “God pod” and don’t believe that there is a “God module” or that religious behavior is inherited through a specific gene or a part of the brain. Lee A Kirkpatrick, director of graduate studies in psychology at William and Mary, tells us:

In sum, the moderate habitability of religion, like the identification of a particular brain region, associated with religious experience, tells us virtually nothing about weather religion is the result of an adaptive evolved mechanism designed to produce it. In particular neither should be construed as evidence for an adaptive religion mechanism or system.[10]

According to Kirkpatrick it's way too early to claim there's a God Gene. There's no way to sort out that it's a real gene or just a combination of other genetic traits. Even if there is such a gene that is not a defeat for religion.

One of the main problems with arguing for a God gene is that the kinds of explanations often used to justify it are piecemeal and don't work in terms of genetic theory. For example a common one is cooperation. Religion makes people  more cooperative. So people cooperate and that is why they adapt becuase it's an advantage. Or gives hope it gets them through the winter.

 Considerable debate has surrounded the question of the origins and evolution of religion. One proposal views religion as an adaptation for cooperation, whereas an alternative proposal views religion as a by-product of evolved, non-religious, cognitive functions. We critically evaluate each approach, explore the link between religion and morality in particular, and argue that recent empirical work in moral psychology provides stronger support for the by-product approach. Specifically, despite differences in religious background, individuals show no difference in the pattern of their moral judgments for unfamiliar moral scenarios. These findings suggest that religion evolved from pre-existing cognitive functions, but that it may then have been subject to selection, creating an adaptively designed system for solving the problem of cooperation.[11]

 That sort of makes one think of genes as little guys holding committee meetings in your head and planning strategy. If it's that cut and dried why not just make a gene for cooperation and cut out the religious mumbo jumo? If it's just an alteration of existing function, then individual conscious decisions may be involved after all. Or, were we provided those functions that we might discover God? The kinds of explainations that require a purpose are counter to the nature of adaptation anyway. As Kirkpatrick explains: "Natural selection is blind to purely psychological effects because being happy in itself does not cause more copies of happiness causing genes to dominate subsequent generations."[12] They can't show adaptability because they can't show it enhances gene frequency. After all some aspects of religion counter to gene frequency such as celibacy?

 2: Religious Gene is good argument for God

Nicholas Wade tells us neither side is threatened by a God gene:

But the evolutionary perspective on religion does not necessarily threaten the central position of either side. That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned.[13]

So the explainations fall apart, the big coincidence is looming: the thing the atheists and evolutionary psychologists hate the most and seek to destroy with their worship of science is the one best answer to why there would be a gene for God: God put it there. It's counter to the nature of adaptation. Genes can't contrive to plan how to make us more cooperative or give us warm fuzzies to get us through the winter. The nature of adaptation is not a committee of homunculi that seeks to make human life happier and more efficient. Nor can genes understand concepts. We are not born with innate knowledge, that has been considered a primitive and false concept since the seventeenth century. We are born with instincts but that is not the same as innate knowledge. Evolution cannot plant ideas in our minds. So our brains reacting to God talk as they do is totally unexplained and constitutes a good reason to take as a hint the basic idea of a God designed aspect of human nature.

 Andrew Newberg, one of the pioneers in researching neural activity of religious experience and God talk tells us that none of the research disproves God, in fact it can't.

…Tracing spiritual experience to neurological behavior does not disprove its realness. If God does exist, for example, and if He appeared to you in some incarnation, you would have no way of experiencing His presence, except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality. You would need auditory processing to hear his voice, visual processing to see His face, and cognitive processing to make sense of his message. Even if he spoke to you mystically, without words, you would need cognitive functions to comprehend his meaning, and input form the brain’s emotional centers to fill you with rapture and awe. Neurology makes it clear: there is no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain’s neural pathways. Correspondingly, God cannot exist as a concept or as reality anyplace else but in your mind. In this sense, both spiritual experiences and experiences of a more ordinary material nature are made real to the mind in the very same way—through the processing powers of the brain and the cognitive functions of the mind. Whatever the ultimate nature of spiritual experience might be—weather it is in fact an actual perception of spiritual reality—or merely an interpretation of sheer neurological function—all that is meaningful in human spirituality happens in the mind. In other words, the mind is mystical by default.[14]

This article is a good indication of how ideologically laden the internet is with ideological babble from a social movement that seeks to destroy all forms of knowledge that it does not control. There is no basis for the assertion that neuroscience is destroying religion and yet scientism proclaims itself victorious over all religion merely becuase it exists. At the same time sound reasons exists in the same material assumed to destroy religion which supports beilef in God yet that possibility is totally ignored.




Sources

 [1] Colin Blackemore, "Science is Just One Gene Away from Defeating Religion." The Guardian.  Originally from the Observer. 21st of Febuary, 2009. On Line:
 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/feb/22/genetics-religion 
accessed 10/29/13.
 Colin Blakemore is Professor of Neuroscience at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick. He is a member of the UK Drugs Policy Commission, but the views expressed here are his own.

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Nicholas Wade, "The Evolution of the God Gene," New York Times: Week in Review. Nov 14 (2009). On linehttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/weekinreview/12wade.html?_r=1&
accessed 10/29/13
Nicholas Wade is a science reporter who writes about genetics.

[8] Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes. New York:Anchor Books Edition, 2004, 56-119.

[9] P.Z. Myers,  "No god, and no 'god gene', either". Pharyngula.(2005-02-13) Retrieved 2012-01-29.
http://web.archive.org/web/20090512101759/http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/no_god_and_no_god_gene_either/

[10]Lee A Kirckpatrick, “Religion is Not An Adaptation,” in Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion Vol I: Evolution, Genes, and Religious Brainm .Patrick McNamara (ed). London, Westport Connecticut: Praeger. 2006. 159-180, 164.

Kirckpatrick is associate professor of psychology at William and Mary.

[11] Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Marc Hauser, "The Origins of  Religion: Evolved Adaption or by Product." Science Direct: Trends in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, (March 2010), 104-109.
 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661309002897

[12]Kirckpatric Op cit, 167.

[13] Wade, Op Cit.


[14] Andrew Newberg, Why God Won’t God Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. (New York, Ballentine Books), 2001, 37,

Ethical Natualism and Value Systems: The Illusion of Moral Landscapes (part 1 of 3)

 

 E.O. Wilson

            The ideological tendencies of scientism seek to scrap traditional philosophically based ethics and produce a whole new ethical system based upon a scientific understanding of human biology. The official name for the school is “ethical naturalism.”[1] “Bio-ethics” implies the genuine ethical issues that emerge from biologically based intrusion of humanity into the natural processes of living; cloning, artificial insemination and the like. What I call “Ethical naturalism” is an attempt to actually replace the philosophical discipline of ethics with one derived from science.[2]Of course the major issue is that science has no mission to determine how we should live. Ethics is primarily about understanding how we should live, how we treat others, how we decide what actions to take in a given situations. These are not scientific questions they are philosophical questions. In their attempt to wipe out all other forms of knowledge the scientism movement seeks to eradicate philosophy from human thought. In this chapter I will argue that applying science to ethics is the fallacy of trying to derive an “ought” form an “is.” I also argue that the diversity of ethical theory is not a weakness but a strength and one that disproves the wisdom of this urge to reduce ethics to science.

Ethical thinking is divided into two major schools of thought: deontological ethics and teleological ethics. The former is based upon the notion that ethical thinking proceeds from rule keeping, that the good is derived from an understanding of duty and obligation. There’s a specific aspect of deontological thought called ‘rule deontology’ which says that ethical thinking should be understood in terms of rule keeping, or that the nature of duty and obligation is  best understood by an understanding of  rules. A lot of people think deontology is just a simple rule keeping mentality; just follow the rules and don’t understand them. That’s the simplistic version. The rules have reference to duty and obligation which is the real meat of deontological understanding. The latter school, the teleological says that ethical action should be judged by the “consequence” of that action. The outcome is where we determine the right or wrong, the “do” or “don’t” in a situation. This kind of thinking is also called ‘consequentialism.’ What both of these have in common is that they each seek to find the “good” in actions. That means they are about values. The good isn’t some natural substance we can discover in parts per million, it’s not a molecular structure; it’s a result of the valuations we place on concepts, ideas, and actions.

             Most ethical systems are going to be one or the other of these two schools. The attempt to make a scientifically determined ethical system from understanding human biology is a version of teleological ethics. They seek to derive the good from the outcome; that fits values of a utilitarian nature. So ethics is about values. We made ethical axioms based upon the values that we take to a given issue. It’s the subjective aspect of value-based thinking that scientism finds so objectionable. Ethics doesn’t give us clean neat little paint-by-numbers solutions. It’s not totalitarian. It requires reflection, it offers conflicting solutions. As Dorothy Emmett put it “morality is always contestable.”[3] Those who seek scientific precisions and no need to question further don’t like traditional ethics because it doesn’t yield neat easy solutions but requires a life-time of study and thought. Those who seek cold hard objective fortress of facts don’t want to have to spend years thinking about it and then still risk being wrong. James Rachels made a famous defense of ethical naturalism in which he expressed the idea that ethics not being based upon scientific fact is an oddity:

Ethical naturalism is the idea that ethics can be understood in terms of natural science. One way of making this more specific is to say that moral properties (such as goodness and rightness) are identical with natural properties, that is properties that figure into scientific descriptions or explanations of things. Ethical naturalists also hold that justified moral beliefs are beliefs justified by a particular kind of causal process. Thus C.D. Broad observed that ‘if naturalism be true, ethics is not an autonomous science, it’s a department or an application of one or more of the natural or historical sciences.’ [4]

We see there the tendency to crowd out all other forms of thought but the scientistic ideology. Rachels expresses surprise that no one thought this way before, for example in the early twentieth century. “During this period philosophy was thought to be independent of the sciences. This may seem a strange notion especially where ethics is concerned. One might expect moral philosophers to work in the context of information provided by psychology which describes the nature of human thinking and motivation.”[5] That would only be strange if one based right and wrong upon desires and motivations rather than something beyond human valuation, or if one based ought upon something other than what is (such as what should be). The ethical naturalists remove the transcendent grounding and based ethics squarely upon scientific data as though it’s perfectly natural to think science tells us how to live, or as the values are built into nature and all we have to do is get some scientific data. Examining the thought of three famous ethical naturalists this becomes apparent.

E.O. Wilson

            We can see this motivation in the thinking of E.O. Wilson, who in this generation is probably the grand daddy of scientific ethics:

Centuries of debate on the origin of ethics come down to this: Either ethical principles, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience, or they are human inventions. The distinction is more than an exercise for academic philosophers. The choice between these two understandings makes all the difference in the way we view ourselves as a species. It measures the authority of religion, and it determines the conduct of moral reasoning.

The two assumptions in competition are like islands in a sea of chaos, as different as life and death, matter and the void. One cannot learn which is correct by pure logic; the answer will eventually be reached through an accumulation of objective evidence. Moral reasoning, I believe, is at every level intrinsically consilient with -- compatible with, intertwined with -- the natural sciences. (I use a form of the word "consilience" -- literally a "jumping together" of knowledge as a result of the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation -- because its rarity has preserved its precision.)[6]

The first problem loaded into this quotation is the implication that there is no value in back of ethics; the value application is so obvious that just knowing the fact will obtain it for us. Notice that eliminates any sort of value-oriented thinking, such as philosophy and religion. It’s all just a matter of logic and facts. What facts, how do we interpret them? That seems not to occur to him. He brings it all down to religion vs science. Notice there is no philosophy in his world. It’s not a matter of philosophy, religion and science, but just religion and science. Philosophy has ceased to exist for him. It seems to be a matter of hard fast get it right with scientific precision vs. the shaky nature of religious faith which has nothing to offer apart from faith. He asserts in the second paragraph that science and religion are competing. Competing for what? They exist to provide two totally different kinds of knowledge. Science is about the workings of the natural world, which has nothing to do with determining what should be done and religion is there to give us an understanding of aspects of reality that are beyond scientific understanding. That would seem to be scientism’s point; there is nothing beyond their grasp. In the second paragraph he asserts that logic and empirical evidence will agree in the end. Is this a statement of faith? Logic can’t be decided by empirical matters. We can’t prove a universal principle with empirical evidence. Wilson says that “moral reasoning” will dove tail with scientific objective evidence, yet I say the implications of scientism will destroy ethical thinking altogether. Look at the ominous beginning to the subject; ethics requires a multiplicity of views it’s about the subjective issue of values yet these are the aspects Wilson sees as the problem that he wants to eliminate.

            Wilson seems to indicate that through scientific understanding we will bring together different disciplines. Of course the implications are clear that theology won’t be one of them and it seems as though philosophy doesn’t exist for him. So he’s really talking about bringing together different kinds of scientific disciplines to take over a form of thinking that has never been understood as part of the scientific domain (remember, as we said in chapter one, the title of his book—consilience—refers to the reduction of all forms of knowledge to science alone). In this sense there’s a strange reversal of roles. Traditionally the religious ethical thinking tends to be the one pursuing for objective ethics on the grounds that God’s word gives us a universal inviolable standard that makes moral decisions clear. The atheist is usually the relativist. Here the atheist takes over the objectivists’ ground; science will establish facts of ethics so we don’t need to wonder anymore. The religious thinker winds up recognizing the relative nature of a value based assumption. What we need to realize at this point is that conservative types of Christian thinkers have always made a mistake in thinking that the issues in morality are about objective proof. Because they have made an issue of objectivity, they have played into the hands of the biologically based ethicists. Objectivity and certainty are not the big issues in ethics. They never have been. He seems to assume that all religious ethics and philosophical ethics rely upon transcendence, nor does he seem to see the difference in transcendence and transcendentalism.  “The choice between transcendentalism and empiricism will be the coming century’s version of the struggle for men’s souls. Moral reasoning will either remain centered in idioms of theology and philosophy, where it is now, or it will shift toward science-based material analysis. Where it settles will depend on which world view is proved correct…”[7]

            The myth of ethical uncertainty and fear of ethical uncertainty are seen in Chruchland and Harris re-telling of the myth of the enlightenment. By re-telling the myth of the enlightenment I mean the old idea: religion is stupid and oppressive and stifles scientific knowledge and keeps us bogged down in superstition, while science frees us (from religion and superstition) for a bright shining future of gadgets and control of nature and getting things right.

Churchland

            Patricia S. Chruchland, (1943--) is a Canadian-American Philosopher who works in the filed of  neurophilosophy. She has taught at University of California, San Diego since 1984. In Braintrust: What Neuro Science Tells us about Morality[8] Chruchland’s basic argument is that morality is social, and social life is essentially the interactions of different sets of neurons. Values originate in the brain and grow out of the social interaction of these sets of Neurons. Thus there’s no trick to moral values, they are just imposed upon us by the goals our neurons set for us and the demands of social interaction. The title of the second chapter is “Brain Based values.” "Moral values ground a life that is a social life. At the root of human moral practices are social desires;  Since are brains are organized to value self welfare as well as welfare of kith and kin, …robust institutions about right and wrong take root and flower."[9]

 Neurons care. We don’t care, we just think we do, brains do. She goes on to ask “how do brains come to care about others?”[10] It’s actually the unseen pilot, the real us inside us that does the caring. She gives a naturalistic take on how caring forms as a biological urge, of course it’s totally divorced from even an ideal much less a spiritual reality of love. Her answer is rooted in self preservation, and somehow the sense is turned outward to others, probably because we depend upon others for our own survival.[11] .

            Thus what she’s doing is building a biological basis for social contract theory. The fact of it being grounded in nature and brain chemistry is supposed to give it a magic “ought” that makes it right. After all, the concept of right is nothing more than a chimera designed to cover up the practical need for social alliances. “Depending upon ecological considerations and fitness considerations, strong caring for the well being of offspring has in some mammalian species has extended further to encompass kin or mates or friends or even strangers as the circle widens. This widening of other caring in social behavior marks the emergence of what eventually flowers into morality.”[12] So caring is just an accident of having peptides like Oxycotin. [13] It doesn’t mean anything accept in pragmatic terms. Chruchland shows total unconcern for moral philosophy in her understanding of the moral dimension. She’s supposed to be informing us about what science tells us about morality but it sort of slips out that the moral thing is just a joke, charade, delusion or gimmick. “We could engage in a semantic wrangle about weather these values are really moral values (emphasis hers) but a wrangle about words is apt to be unrewarding.”[14]  A wrangler over words is apt to be quite unrewarding, especially when it might disprove your thesis. “Of course only humans have human morality. But that is not news only a [15]tedious tautology. One might as well note that only marmosets have marmoset morality…” Her whole concept of morality apparently is just a semantic game. At that rate informing us of what science tells us about morality is a joke; apparently it’s telling us that morality is just a word game. She goes on, however, in trying to construct a meaningful social contract theory.

            Indeed she does define morality as something basically akin to science:

Morality seems to me to be a natural phenomenon—constrained by the forces of natural selection, rooted in neurobiology, shaped by the local ecology, and modified by cultural developments. Nevertheless, fairness requires me to acknowledge that this sort of naturalistic approach to morality has often seemed insensitive to metaphysical ideas about morality, such as that morality is essentially dependent on a supernatural source of moral information and moral worth. Because this is a not uncommon view, it may be useful to consider what a supernatural approach can teach us.[16]

Of course there is also the idea that morality has a lot to do with such supernatural entities as Immanuel Kant, and we might also ask what concepts of duty and obligation and the kingdom of ends has to tell us about morality. Churchland doesn’t mess around with armatures in moral philosophy such as Kant, nor with Moore, Macintyre, or Rawls. Instead, she arbitrarily defines morality by the biological basis for behaviors labeled as “moral” rather than by the subject matter or the logic or some ontological basis. This relates to what we said about reductionism in that chapter (5) because it’s simply re-labeling and losing of phenomena. Any aspects of moral thinking not reducible to brain chemistry are just assumed not to matter and to merely be a matter of semantics.

            Of course when it comes to exploring what “a supernatural view has to teach us” she just plays the same trick again; reduces the supernatural out of existence and reduces moral thinking to biology. Rather than argue against the existence of God, however, she merely “deconstructs” morality by first taking apart conscience. Appealing to Socrates she points that conscience doesn’t always advise us the right way, it doesn’t always tell us the same things.[17] Of course there are not very many moral philosophers of the stature of Kant who tells us about conscience. Who is to say that Socrates didn’t take the right way given the circumstances?

Harris:

            Sam Harris wrote the Moral Landscape, subtitle: “how can science determine human values?” So it’s not going to just inform us of our values but “determine” them. Presumably regardless of what we do value, the priests of knowledge, those lucky enough to go to big name universities and major in genetics will determine what we want in the future. Harris begins by observing that he’s talked with thousands of people, most of them well educated, who believe that human values are not based upon truth content, and that well being and misery are so poorly defined we can’t know what they mean.[18] He warns that he’s not trying to give a scientific account of what people do in the name of morality. Nor is he suggesting that science can help us get what we want out of life. “Rather I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us understand what weshould do and should want –and therefore, what other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, such answers may one day fall within reach of maturing science of the mind.”[19] So apparently it’s not just a matter of understanding what human beings value and want, but of teaching them what they should value and want? Who is to decide this? Science can tell us what to think is, but it can’t tell us what is right. According to Churchland there is no true “right and wrong,” just brains wanting things. Science can make it seem right in our minds through control so that what we want is what science tells us to want. But of course this is “helping” we who are too feeble to help ourselves, we who are stuck in the religious thinking. He just told us science we can’t help us get what we want then he tells us that it will. How can this be? Because he wants to use science to change what we want to what he wants us to want. But of course he masks this in terms of what we should want. Then what does it mean that he includes telling others what they should want? Then falling within reach of the science of the mind? That’s not a hint about control? He wants science to reach beyond the mere ability to explain the physical workings of the world and to become the orbiter of values. Of course that means arbitration of values would be controlled by scientists. None of these would be Svengalis can ever explain how science can know what the proper values are in the first place. Presumably they will choose pleasure over pain for the greatest number, but how do they know that’s what should be?

            He goes on treading on the toes of ethicists. He says, “Once we see that a concern for well being (defined as deeply and inclusively as possible) is the only intelligible basis for morality and values, we will see that there must be a science of morality.”[20] In light of this quotation it is apparent that Harris’s ethics are basically teleological. He’s clearly a consequentialist if not a utilitarian.[21] In other words, it is the end result that makes an action moral, not duty or obligation to act, but how the action turns out. The extent to which it conforms to the desired goal is what makes it moral. The way he works it out is that science will tell us which of the problems is more devastating and which hurts more people that will tell us how to spend our resources. “…would it be better to spend our next billion dollars eradicating racism or malaria?”[22] So he’s already working from an implicit value system that’s based upon an ethical philosophy which has already put in place well being as the end toward which ethical thinking must strive, and the underlying value behind ethical theory, to the exclusion of deontology (duty and obligation) and all other theories. He does this before he has the scientific means to determine the value system. So this is really a shell game. He’s going to give us the means to determine what’s best for us but we have to determine it within a framework he’s already picked out that excludes alternatives. Not that we all wouldn’t agree that we should do “what’s best” but the issue is how we know what’s best. He’s already decided the supreme issue is the outcome in terms of physical comfort and avoidance of physical pain. He doesn’t recognize that this a value that he’s put in place as a philosophical underpinning, so we don’t get a answer to weather or not we embrace that as a value.

            He deals with the issue of the subjective nature of ethics, which is the basis of relativism. He distinguishes between subjective/objective in two senses, practice and principle. He’s opposed to ideals of good, such as Platnoic forms. He’s only speaking in terms of a diminished naturalistic sort of good that comes as a side effect of the way we do things. That’s good in terms of our value system, he assumes we all value outcome as a moral goal. His distinction between experience (practice) and ideal (principle) allows him to say that we can do things better without trying to establish the moral good, but then that’s supposed to give us a moral good.[23] When he brings religious views into it he thinks that ideas of heaven and hell prove that religious views are really based upon pleasure and pain too. They are not really concerned with the good for its own sake but with avoiding hell. [24] In this manner he seems to be attempting to reduce all value systems to his own. One of the major problems with his handling of value systems is the basis for adopting one. It’s obviously simplistic and self serving to just assume everyone is about the same value system I want. It’s also delusion to assume that there are not hidden subtexts in one’s value system.  One of the major problems in determining a value system is in assuming that the “ought” or “one should” aspect of a valuation of actions can be determined by factually ascertaining the nature of things. We see this assumption in Harris’s statement about science as coming to understand what’s going on in the universe. What do we mean by “going on?” There are multiple aspects to what’s going on, how we determine which of those is crucial? What if we decide that what’s going on is going on spiritually? We are not supposed to think that because that’s not what science tells us. Science isn’t going to tell us what’s “going on” in any but a materliasitc framework. So the reductionist view has so truncated reality that it dictates the disappearance of a whole aspect of reality embraced by the vast majority of people to suit the ideological framework put in place by a tiny elite who want us to accept their values as facts. This is the bias we set in place just by reducing the field of ethics to scientific proof.

            There is another troubling aspect to Harris’s take on science and ethics. Brain Earp, Research Associate, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics tells us that Harris tries to subsume ethics under the banner of science.[25] We can see that in the wording of Harris’s argument. In saying that science is about finding “what’s going on in the universe” that pretty much subsumes everything that isn’t excluded form existence. Earp talks about a lecture that Harris gave at Oxford, hosted by Richard Dawkins, called ““Who says science has nothing to say about morality?” When prompted by Dawkins interview that he was going up against questions with which moral philosophers had grappled for centuries Harris said: “Well, I actually think that the frontier between science and philosophy actually doesn’t exist… Philosophy is the womb of the sciences. The moment something becomes experimentally tractable, then the sciences bud off from philosophy. And every science has philosophy built into it. So there is no partition in my mind.”[26] If there is no ground between philosophy and science then he’s subsuming ethics under the banner of science and there need be no difficulty. The problem is he’s not content to just allow philosophy to continue doing it’s thing, he wants to take over its ground but then impose his reduction and re-label everything and replace real moral philosophy with ideology (see the C.D. Board quote fn 4). He takes out moral reasoning and replaces it with reduction to numbers. Imposes a surreptitious value system in the guise of “facts,” and replaces duty and obligation with teleological thinking. This view is supposed to carry the assurance of being factual proof of what’s “going on in the universe” yet this just transgresses one of the basic concepts of modern thought. This is a problem sometimes referred to as “Hume’s Fork”[27] but more commonly called ‘the is-ought. 

part 2

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[1] James Rachels, “Naturalism” pdf, http://www.jamesrachels.org/naturalism.pdf accessed 5/27/13. Originally published in Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, Hugh Lafollette, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 74-91, 2.

[2] Ibid. 2

[3] find Dorothy Emmett, morality is contestable.

[4] C.D. Broad quoted in Rachels, Op cit., 2. Original quotation by Broad, C. D.: “Some of the Main Problems of Ethics,” Philosophy, 31 (1946) 99-117

[5] Ibid.,1.

[6] E.O. Wilson, “the Biological Basis of Morality.” The Atlantic Online: The Atlantic Monthly Digital Edition (April, 1998) URL:http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98apr/biomoral.htm  visited July 25, 2012.

[7] E.O. Wilson, Consilience, New York: Knopf, Inc., 1998, p.240

[8] Patrcia S. Churchland, Braintrust: What Nueroscience tells us about Morality. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2011, 12.

[9] Ibid., 12.

[10] Ibid., 12.

[11] Ibid., 13.

[12] Ibid.,14.

[13] Ibid.,14.

[14] Ibid., 26.

[15] Ibid.,26.

[16] Ibid., 191

[17] Ibid., 193

[18] Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values.” New York: Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc., 2010, 28.

[19] Ibid. 28 (emphasis his).

[20] Ibid 28

[21] One difference in being a utilitarian as opposed to a general consequendtilsit would be that the utilitarian. would be that the utilitarian has the dictum of “greatest good for the greatest number.” Whereas a consequentialist who is not a utilitarian my try to forgo that idea.

[22] Ibid., 28

[23] Ibid., 30

[24] Ibid., 33

[25] Brain Earp, “Sam Harris is Wrong About Science and Morality,” Practical Ethics, ethics in the news, blog, University of Oxford, Nov. 17, 2011.http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2011/11/sam-harris-is-wrong-about-science-and-morality/  accessed 5/21/2013

The Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics  is at Oxford it’s a major think tank that deals with modern concerns of ethics and science.

[26] Ibid.

[27] “Hume’s fork” really refers to several things that all fall under the general category of “synthetic and a pripori.” The is-ought dichotomy falls under this rue brick in the sense that it’s a juxtaposition of a practical empirical sate of affairs “the is” vs a an ideal transcendent concept (the ought). The “is/ought” problem originally appears Hume’sTreatise on Human Nature, book III, part I, section 1.