For reasons I don’t fully understand, Michael Egnor—a pediatric surgeon in New York and an advocate of Intelligent Design (he’s a senior fellow at the ID Discovery Institute)—is obsessed with me, combing my posts regularly to find instances of what he thinks is hypocrisy. (Google “Michael Egnor Jerry Coyne” for a panoply of obsessiveness.) Perhaps it’s because in 2009 I went after an article he wrote in Forbes, calling him out for his egnorance of evolution. (His article, replete with ID boilerplate, can be seen here.)
Here are two paragraphs from my critique:
There are no observations in nature that refute Darwinism, but there are plenty that refute Egnor’s creationist alternative. How does he explain the persistence of “dead genes” in species (like our own broken one for making vitamin C)–genes that were functional in our ancestors? What explains those annoying hominin fossils that span the gap from early apelike creatures to modern humans? Why do human fetuses produce a coat of hair after six months in the womb, and then shed it before birth? Why didn’t the creator stock oceanic islands with mammals, reptiles and amphibians? Why did He give us vestigial ear muscles that have no function? Why do whales occasionally sprout hind legs? Did God design all creatures to fool us into thinking that they evolved?
The good news is that Egnor is just one benighted physician. Far more disturbing is Forbes’ ham-handed policy of “balancing” the views of evolutionists by giving a say to Egnor and four other creationists. (Their articles, found here, are at least as misleading as Egnor’s.) Perhaps Forbes sees Darwinism as “controversial.” But it’s not, at least not in a scientific sense. Scientifically, evolution is a settled issue–a fact.
I don’t know if Egnor is holding a grudge after 14 years, or is simply evincing an obsession with someone who opposes his dumb intelligent-design ideas. Regardless, he’s gone after me once again. As is often the case, the subject is my belief in determinism, which he sees at odds with what I write. You can read his lubrications in the new article below on the ID site Evolution News, published by the Discovery Institute. (It does not allow comments.) Click below to read:
Egnor has two complaints about things I’ve said, but in both cases I never said what he claims! In fact, I’ve said the opposite. The topic is my denunciation of Hamas’s butchery of Israelis.
His first wrong claim is that I think morality is objective, and that there can be no “objective moral law” without God, whose existence I reject. Egnor:
Which brings me to the Hamas atrocity. I am perplexed by Coyne’s view that Hamas culpably violated objective moral law, considering Coyne’s metaphysical commitment to atheism, determinism, and free will denial. After all, if there is no God, there is no source for objective moral law at all. Nature is a collection of facts; without God nature has no overarching values, and the only values on tap are the separate values of individual human beings. Without God, value judgments are merely individual human opinions, akin to individual preferences for flavors of ice cream. There is no factual basis to prefer Coyne’s value judgments to Hamas’ value judgments — values like “don’t kill innocent people” are not facts of nature. But Coyne clearly (and rightly) holds Hamas to the moral responsibility not to kill innocents. If there is no God, from where does Coyne get this objective moral law that he invokes? Who is Coyne to judge?
Clearly Dr. Egnor has not done his research, as I’ve repeatedly argued that morality is subjective, not objective. For one example, see my 2013 article on this site, “Why there is no objective morality.” Here’s another of mine from 2021, “The absence of objective morality.” I’m not going to repeat my arguments here, as they’re in these two articles. Suffice it to say that Egnor didn’t even Google “Jerry Coyne objective morality”, which would have yielded those sites in two minutes. The conclusion: Egnor is making up stuff about my beliefs in a failed attempt to show that I’m self-contradictory and hypocritical.
As for morality, yes, I do believe that actions are moral or immoral, but that’s according to one’s preferred code of morality, not to the dictates of a god. “Morality” is a codified view of what one thinks is right and wrong. I happen to be largely a consequentialist, judging things as “right or wrong” based on their overall effect on well being, So yes, I think that, at bottom, morality reflects preference: preference for what kind of society you want and what behaviors are good or bad. (Unlike Sam Harris, though, I don’t think this consequentialism is objective due to different people’s weighing of consequences.) By these lights, Hamas’s butchery is wrong and immoral.
His second false and made-up claim is that I hold people morally responsible for their actions.
In Coyne’s view, Hamas and (Raoul) Wallenberg are moral equals — they must be moral equals, if determinism is true. How can Hamas be held morally culpable, and Wallenberg lauded, when both lack free will and both are just involuntarily running the primordial determinist program of the universe?
I can’t see how Coyne as a determinist, an atheist, and a free will denier can hold Hamas morally responsible for their atrocities, any more than he could hold the wind morally responsible for deaths in a tornado. Perhaps Coyne will comment on the glaring cognitive dissonance in his condemnation of the murder of innocents and his embrace of a metaphysical perspective that reduces such murder to a value-free maelstrom of atoms.
Again, Dr. Egnor hasn’t done his homework. While I do believe that people have “morality” and views that involve morality, I have never maintained that someone can be held “morally responsible” for their actions. Why? Because the phrase “morally responsible” implies that you’ve done something that you could have chosen not to do. And, as a hard determinist (viz. Robert Sapolsky), I don’t believe people can make such choices. I thus feel that people are responsible for their acts, but not morally responsible. All you have to do to see these views is Google “Coyne morally responsible” and you’ll find article like this one and this one. In the second, I say this (bolding is mine):
I responded to Burgis’s post on this site, making four points in my reply (each point is discussed in more detail in my piece):
1.) You are always acting under compulsion.
2.) This does not mean that external circumstances surrounding an action should not be taken into consideration.
3.) The concept of “moral responsibility” is outmoded; we should simply retain the idea of “responsibility” since whether you are irresponsible or morally irresponsible are both results of the laws of physics.
4.) The concept of “moral responsibility” is injurious because it underlies a vindictive and retributive view of punishment.
So you can be responsible for a murder, but never morally responsible, for that implies you could have refrained from murder. I hasten to add that this notion of “responsibility” does not enable us to escape punishment, for determinists like Sapolsky and me think that if a bad actor does an injurious thing, he can be punished for several reasons: to keep a bad actor away from others, to deter that actor and others from doing similar bad acts, and to help reform that bad actor. Determinism does not lead to a world in which nobody gets punished, for even in a deterministic world people do bad things and it’s necessary, for society’s well being, to punish them.
I have to recount a tale from 2018, which I posted about here. In that year, after the “Moving Naturalism Forward” conference, Dan Dennett and I drove back from Stockbridge to Boston, just the two of us in his car. We disagreed about moral responsibility, with Dennett, a compatibilist, seeing it as a meaningful concept, while I argued the position I give above. The argument lasted nonstop for nearly three hours, and here’s what I wrote about it:
For me the epic bit [of the conference] was my battle with Daniel Dennett over free will (with the Great Man shamelessly insisting that he go first after we’d agreed otherwise), a battle that continued during the entire three-hour post-meeting drive from Stockbridge to Boston (remember the song with that phrase in it?). Dan, who can be rather forceful, insisted that a). compatibilism was good and b). it gave us true moral responsibility. I’m still proud that I, a puny worm, held out against his stentorian lucubrations, and I remember well the last words Dan said to me when I exited the car in Cambridge: “I’M NOT THROUGH WITH YOU YET!”
And he wasn’t, but he didn’t change my mind.
The upshot: Michael Egnor is a shameless liar who makes up stuff in an obsessive attempt to show that I’m a hypocrite. I hope the evidence above shows that he’s wrong. He’s not just ignorant, in fact, he’s duplicitous. And what’s worse is that he’s duplicitous in the name of his God, a god who surely thinks that Egnor is objectively wrong and morally responsible for lying.
*****
By the way, last night I read the first 30 pages of Robert Sapolsky’s new book on determinism and it’s superb. At the beginning he clearly lays out his position and what he’s opposing (including compatibilism). And his writing style is engaging and at times funny. All readers must read this book, whether or not you’re a determinist or a free-willy.
Egnor seems to be afflicted with an obsession to criticize you. (But, alas, he can’t help himself.) It’s hard to know whether it’s better to fight back or to ignore him. Your brief statement here probably achieves the right balance. These creationists can suck up all your precious time if you let them.
And, no, hard determinism doesn’t nullify morality, which is a set of culturally established—not God-given—norms. Determinism doesn’t eliminate responsibility either, and Hamas is surely responsible for the atrocities they have committed. They need to be nullified so that they can’t cause any more destruction and to discourage other terrorist aspirants to cease and desist.
Obsession with criticizing legit scientists is part of the profile of a Discoveroid. Just look at how they can’t let go of Professor Dave Farina. https://youtube.com/@ProfessorDaveExplains?si=XA6JN_tTZv2w9_2H
Is Egnorance a mistake or a purposeful choice? Perhaps it’s because in 2009 I went after an article he wrote in Forbes, calling him out for his egnorance of evolution.
If you’re not going to, I’d love to trademark ‘Free-Willy’…..
Did you notice what Jerry did at the end of the first paragraph, too? 🔥
Sticking up for compatibilism here, it seems that once again the difference between us compatibilists and in-compatibilists such as Jerry is only semantics.
We all (all of us who consider that our decisions have prior physical causes, rejecting dualism) accept notions of “responsibility”, and notions of “morality” (defined as Jerry does above), and we all accept the principle of deterrence, holding people responsible for their actions in order to deter behaviour we deplore.
We compatibilists simply put those concepts together, without adding any woo. Thus we reject the idea that “moral responsibility” requires un-caused choices, instead we regard people as “moral agents” purely on the pragmatic grounds that they are susceptible to deterrence, and thus hold them “morally” responsible if their behaviour is deterimental to the sort of society we want.
It seems strange to me to accept a naturalistic account of “morality” and a naturalistic account of “responsibility” but then reject a naturalistic account of “moral responsibility”.
Yes, and morality evolved gradually; other animals have their moral codes, in how they treat conspecifics. These moral codes aren’t the same as ours.
I believe most philosophers think there exists objective morality. I’ve understood this to mean that the history of moral progress is evidence that we seem to be converging on some basic principle of morality – even if it’s not clearly defined yet. Although morality varies from place to place, it seems that changes occur in the same direction. Perhaps the autonomy of individuals is the basic rule we move toward. Thus, objective morality does not depend on a God. Actually, God, an intelligent being, specifying moral law would be a subjective morality because it is the opinion of a conscious being. Egnor is a fool.
What’s the closest thing? What seems strange to you about what has happened during evolution?
Not just whether there’s anything strange about the life forms that have evolved, but the ones that haven’t, or their distribution, or convergent evolution or evolution that hasn’t converged when one might expect it to, etc. etc.?
The examples that evolutionary biologists can come up with, are probably stranger than the ones that ID advocates do.
I know this will probably sound solipsistic. For some reason, I find the harm done when people’s intents are not that evil (indifference)to be more bothersome than the idea that the suffering was caused by an actor with hate in their heart. Jesus’ “lord forgive them for they know not what they do,” is more bothersome, for some reason. I was contemplating this, a few days ago, and have to think it’s because it leaves me feeling like the universe is less knowable than I’d like to think. It suggests that much of our suffering, even when perpetrated by others, is just a little hiccup in the ether, rather than proportional to the hate others feel. Maybe “the banality of evil,” fits.
“So you can be responsible for a murder, but never morally responsible, for that implies you could have refrained from murder. (snip)….Determinism does not lead to a world in which nobody gets punished, for even in a deterministic world people do bad things and it’s necessary, for society’s well being, to punish them.”
How does this logic apply to Crimes Of Negligence?
Because the logic of criminal negligence often rest on identifying not what someone “did do” but what they “didn’t do…but should have done.” It’s what they didn’t choose to do that matters. It therefore inherently assumes the concept “the person could have done otherwise.”
For instance in the trial of a nanny who left a child to die in a hot car. The case against the nanny clearly must assume she “could have” taken the child out of the car. But she didn’t, and is therefore criminally negligent. What if her Lawyer argues on these grounds: “We don’t hold a doctor negligent for not using his physic powers to heal someone dying of rabies because that action isn’t actually possible for the doctor. We don’t say you SHOULD have done something it is impossible for you to do! The principle is clearly: Nobody can be held negligent for not doing something that it was impossible for them to do in the first place! And yet my client is being charged with FAILING to do something the court implies she should have done: taken the child out of the hot car. But that implies she could have done other than she actually did. Which as good determinists we know to be IMPOSSIBLE.
And since it was in fact IMPOSSIBLE for her to have taken the child out of the car, my client can not be charged as responsible for the child’s death!”
How do you respond to the Lawyer’s gambit? Even putting aside moral responsibility, the only reason to be concerned with the behaviour of the negligent seems to rest on identifying what the person COULD HAVE done, but chose not to do.
It’s treated the same way. Not doing something carries responsibility as well as doing something, and if you leave a child in a hot car and the child dies, you’re responsible for that and have to experience some sanction, though it would not be as harsh, of course, as deliberately killing a child. There was no choice about leaving the child in the car, just as there is no choice if you deliberately kill the child, but the punishment should be different. I don’t think you grasp that not doing something is an act that is not only determined, but, if it causes harm, needs some sort of punishment to prevent other kids from being killed the same way. The person should be sanctioned in a way that deters others from leaving kids in hot cars, teaches them a lesson, but not necessarily puts them in jail. There might be some sort of short reformation process, but deterrence and lesson-giving.
I think this is a good question and good response.
Inaction is action, of a sort. Oxymoronic as I probably sound, or just moronic.
But this is a tricky example.
Accepting that we (society) can’t do it any other way anyway, as it’s all determined already, if we could click our fingers and make it so murder wasn’t punished there’d be a lot more murder. The “initial” conditions (when we clicked our fingers) set up a different set of circumstances from which determinism will be played out, this time without the deterrent effect of not wanting to pick up bars of soap in the showers of HMP Belmarsh.
But with a kid dying in a hot car, the punishment has already been meted out if the person leaving the child has any conscience at all. And I’m not deterred from leaving my child in a hot car because of this carer’s jail sentence. I’m deterred by the horror of what happened and will take steps to not forget a child (leave my shoe or phone in back seat with child). I won’t think “I’ll put my left shoe in the back with my kid so I don’t forget him/her and he/she does because I don’t want to go to prison.” Perhaps those people do, sadly, exist.
But hang on – I think I might be arguing a different circumstance. As not entirely clear from the above. I’m thinking of the nanny (or parent or whoever) who doesn’t realise they have left the child in the car. Has this nanny in question deliberately left the child in the car? Because I’d say that certainly is an action and one that is certainly punishable.
None of these examples refute creationism.
It would be a credit to creationism or ID if it *were* falsifiable.
But once you conceive a super-intelligence, able to do anything it wants (that isn’t self-contradictory), and with plans and motives that are unknowable to us mortals – it could do any damn thing in the service of those plans, or anything that struck Its fancy on a slow morning.
It could play games with people’s minds if It wanted.
It could write holy books to sieve out the people who are credulous enough to believe them, let those people decay after death, and save the rest for a leisurely discussions in Heaven (a kind of God-selection for reason).
Who knows what.
I like where you’re going with this, Laura, a reductio ad absurdum that is an indirect proof of evolution. Creationism and ID don’t even get out of the starting blocks as science, so let’s not honor them by treating them as such.
I watched this right before I read Jerry’s post and your comments. I think it’s related to this topic and offer it for your consideration.
https://youtu.be/SMLrfRRLwGI?si=FJu2tkBLho9EJ0ha
Not my intention, but rather playing around to illustrate just how unfalsifiable miraculous intervention in the universe is. And, just to have fun 🙂
The best we can say is, there doesn’t seem to be a need for miracles to explain the ways in which life has evolved, since natural selection and science fits the facts pretty well. Occam’s Razor can trim away the rest, if one chooses to use it.
Sorry, but you have to specify what kind of miraculous intervention that God was supposed to have done. Most creationists adhere to Biblical or Qur’anic creationism, and that can be falsified.
Once you have a super-intelligent, super-powerful God with plans and motives that are unknowable to us mortals – It could do any damn thing in the service of those plans that strikes Its fancy.
You gave examples that supposedly falsify creationism. But somebody could explain those examples by saying that “God” wants to fool us into thinking evolution happened by natural means. “God hides” or whatever.
The hypothesis of divine intervention is not sufficiently specified to be falsifiable, in other words.
That’s how these religious concepts survive.
You didn’t answer my question. You believe in something that is unfalsifiable, and therefore you can adduce no evidence in favor of it. In other words, you believe in something that NO evidence can refute, and in which there is no evidence in favor of. If babies die of leukemia: that’s the way God wants it. And so on. To my mind that’s a ridiculous thing to believe.
And the soul is an empirical question. Are you going to answer that by saying, “We have a soul because God gave us one”? Then I could say, “Well, I have an invisible pizza in my chest”, and you’d BELIEVE IN THAT because God could have done it.
Sorry, but you have implicitly said my book didn’t make its case because there is one hypothetical response that could say that THERE CAN BE NO EVIDENCE IN FAVOR OF EVOLUTION. As I said, what you adduce is not the form of creationism that I am attacking.
I’ll give you one more chance to define a “soul,” as I asked you in the first place.
“The best we can say is, there doesn’t seem to be a need for miracles to explain the ways in which life has evolved, since natural selection and science fits the facts pretty well. Occam’s Razor can trim away the rest, if one chooses to use it.”
I like your thinking, Laura, though a religionist could simply reply,” “You’re right: a belief in God is not necessary. And that’s just the way He likes it.”
“…a religionist could simply reply,” “You’re right: a belief in God is not necessary. And that’s just the way He likes it.”
I have never met or even heard of a religionist (maybe you?) who would say or believe in such a statement. I have heard that argument in the movie The Usual Suspects about satan…his greatest trick was to fool the world he didn’t exist. Putting god in satan’s shoes is a new twist. Equally dumb, I must add.
Sorry but many creationists (and some IDers) are BIBLICAL creationists, so there are tons of evidence that refute that.
Other claims, that God made the world LOOK AS IF it evolved, are desperation claims that buttress the view that evolution occurred. To say that “God has deceived us all by making the world look as it it evolved”, are not accepted in general by the religious because it implies a trickster God.
Sorry, but I wrote a book on the truth of evolution and the falsity of creationism, and your response is “You didn’t accomplish anything because God could fool us all by making things look as if they evolved.” But most people don’t believe in that kind of creationism, so yes, I refuted the non-trickster view.
Moral responsibility doesn’t depend on something or somebeing that is capable of miracles, or on determinism or the lack of it.
You can see an elementary kind of morality in the way nonhuman animals treat their conspecifics, so as to further their species. Tigers have a moral code for how they treat other tigers, although a lot of it is hardwired.
And the more flexible an animal’s behavior, the more it’s possible for the animal to do right or wrong, according to its morality.
And humans are *very* flexible and adaptable. So morality and the lack of it are very important in our societies, and we have criminal justice systems, etc. to try to keep our flexibility within reasonable bounds.
Different species’ different moral codes suggest that morality isn’t absolute.
“His first wrong claim is that I think morality is objective, and that there can be no ‘objective moral law’ without God, whose existence I reject.”
If, as you’ve stated elsewhere, you and Salpolsky and Sam Harris can feel like and act like you have free will even though you know otherwise, what prevents you from feeling like and acting like there is an objective moral law even though you know otherwise? Or, for that matter, feeling like and acting like there is a God even though you know otherwise. This would be consistent and therby refute charges of hypocrisy from critics like Egnor.
I don’t feel or act like there’s an objective moral law. What keeps me from thinking that, or believing in God, is REASON.
Just as one data point, I do not “feel” as though I have libertarian free will. That is, I don’t “feel” that I am making un-caused decisions, I feel that my physical brain is computing those decisions.
People make decisions in a representation of reality where both choices are available to them.
Our mental models of reality, not reality itself, are the arena in which we make choices, and our freedom in those mental models is the “freedom worth having”.
We do have a soul that transcends reality and can make its own decisions, from the point of view of our mental model of reality.
Please provide evidence that “we do have a soul that transcends reality and can make its own decisions.” This is an empirical claim that you must answer before you post again.
Free Will cannot exist – but I like to think of Free Will as a useful fiction or an algorithm. The idea of it gives us a means to deal with other people efficiently, ignoring all the hidden prior causes and by observing only their current behaviour.
Similarly I don’t think that objective morals exist. But ‘relative morals’, as useful fictions, provide summaries of approved social behaviours which enable us to also deal with other people efficiently.
Isn’t it good enough reason on morality grounds to reject Egnor morality simply by asking, which gods moral laws are we following, some aren’t particularly moral. His harping on about free will is just trying to dig at our host as noted, to scratch his irritability.
I received the Sapolsky book a couple days ago. Looking forward to reading it. I’m in the middle of Neil Stephenson’s 900+ page Cryptonomicon and must finish before pursuing any further reading.
To offer some Sapolsky in regards to a few of the comments. The opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of hate is not love; the opposite of both is indifference. Wise words…