Category: morality

More email from evolution-haters

March 11, 2019 • 8:45 am

Well, maybe “evolution hater” is too strong a term for this woman from Virginia, who wrote me an email this morning. She said “there is no need to respond,” but given that she sent me an unsolicited email, I’ll send her the link to this post, along with the comments. Feel free to respond, but again—be polite. (I informed the retired Air Force officer who wrote me yesterday of the readers’ responses.)

Dear Professor Coyne,

I read with interest your review of Behe’s book.  As a nonscientist, I am not in a position to make any critical judgment on either view.  As the mother of five and grandmother of seven, I know what the younger generation is seeking- authenticity without vitriol, Truth without preaching and a genuine desire to tackle the “Tough” questions of our time- which include  open discussions of the Four big questions- Origin, Meaning, Morality and Destiny.

Personally, I find evolutionary theory sorely lacking in any meaningful answer to any of theses questions and the attempts to address them fall into the hubris and arrogance of scientism rather than the humility that stems from wonder at the order of the universe and a willingness to admit we do not know everything.There is no need to respond.

There was a postscript:

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing.  Pascal

My comments:

1.) It saddens me to see a non-scientist claim that they’re not capable of making a critical judgement of ID. The arguments are not that arcane and have been addressed in many popular venues. I think this is just intellectual laziness, or perhaps an unwillingness to engage with the criticisms of ID.

2.) Why is a scientific discussion, or promoting evolution, which happens to be true, “preaching”?  In fact, any attempt to say something that contradicts another person’s religious beliefs is always construed as “vitriol.”

3.) Evolutionary biology doesn’t really deal with the questions of “Origin, Meaning, Morality, and Destiny” except insofar as abiogenesis (the study of how life began) can be considered part of evolutionary biology, and insofar as some aspects of morality—its roots in our animal ancestors—can be examined scientifically.

But, of course, religion, while it may tackle these tough questions, doesn’t answer them. For example, what is the proper moral behavior? If you’re a Christian it’s one thing (actually more, depending on what kind of Christian you are), if you’re a Muslim it’s another thing, and if you’re a Scientologist it’s still another.  The fact is that evolutionary biology actually answers the questions it asks, while religion does not. (Is there a God? Who knows? If there is one, is it the Christian God, Allah, or Shiva? Who knows?) Or if religion does provide answers, there are better (and more consistent) answers provided by secular humanism and ethics.

4.) Once again we see the scientism canard leveled at people like me (at least I presume it’s me, since she’s reacting to my book review). Well, I admit that we don’t know everything, and I know of no scientist who disagrees. The thing is that in 100 years we’ll know more about biology and evolution than we do now, while theologians and believers won’t know one iota more about the divine. It is not the scientists who have hubris, but the believers. And any changes and improvements in morality will, as Steve Pinker argues, come not from religion but from humanism.

 

Are some truths not worth knowing?

November 18, 2018 • 11:30 am

I was listening for the first time to the famous “Four Horseman” video discussion with Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, and noted that, near the end, they discuss the possibility that some scientific facts might not be worth knowing, or even be dangerous to know. (Dan mentions determinism, though he doesn’t think that it should be hidden from the public). Above that discussion hovers another question: would it ever be good to delude people about the truth (this is regularly suggested by religion-friendly atheists)? And there’s a third question: should we not pursue some lines of research because they might yield truths that would be harmful?

I’ve thought about this question a lot, and touch on it in Faith Versus Fact, but haven’t come up with any examples of truths that should be hidden, or research that shouldn’t be done—unless that research itself involves palpable harm, like the Tuskegee syphilis study. It seems to me always better to know the truth than not know the truth. I don’t like the fact that I’m going to die, for instance, and sometimes I wish I were a squirrel or a duck with no knowledge of my own mortality; but since we are rational beings, it’s better to know what’s going to happen to us. I don’t want someone to tell me I’m going to be immortal—even in the afterlife.

The only instance of a truth that, to me, even comes close to something that would harm society involves studies of genetic differences between groups. Do ethnic groups differ in IQ? Do men and women differ in innate interests and capacities? Such questions certainly could cause huge offense depending on what the results are, but only to the extent that the offended think that those facts will lead to bigotry, racism, and sexism.

They needn’t. As I’ve always said, the morality that we construct, while it should be informed by empirical fact, should not heavily depend on biology. Whether groups or individuals should be treated as equals in terms of opportunities, respect, and so on, should not depend on genetic differences in their behaviors or “talents”. And it is interesting, for example, to know if there are innate differences in preferences and behavior between men and women.

Some truths aren’t worth knowing, I suppose, because the results are boring and trivial. One example is knowing how many blades of grass are there on the University of Chicago quadrangle. I would say that answering that is a dumb and meaningless endeavor of no interest to anyone. But that’s not in the class of the “dangerous” studies I mention above.

I’m just throwing this question out to readers. Are there any scientific truths that, if we knew them, we should keep from people? Are there any questions that could be answered that we shouldn’t try to answer. I await a discussion.

The New Yorker once again slams New Atheism

November 16, 2018 • 10:45 am

About two weeks ago I dissected an interview at Vox in which Sean Illing talked to John Gray about Gray’s new book, Fifty Shades Seven Types of Atheism, and both interviewer and interviewee embraced each other in their hatred of New Atheism. Their mutual beefs (both are atheists but are “atheist-butters”) include these four:

1.) Religion is not mainly about factual assertions but about other things, and ignorant New Atheists fail to recognize that.
2.) Atheism is just an attempt to replace conventional religion with other forms of “religion”, and contains its own mythology.
3.) Religion answers the questions that science can’t, and tells us about meaning and purpose.
4.) Science is seen by New Atheists as a substitute for religion, and a bad substitute, because science can cause harm.

You can see my response to these canards (an insult to ducks) at the link above.

The New Yorker, which like Vox is a left-wing website that dislikes New Atheism, recently published an article that is a combination of a review of Gray’s book (along with some history taken from Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick’s new book Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life) along with the New Yorker‘s usual overwritten bloviating on the topic of atheism. You can read the article by clicking on the screenshot below:


The potted history of atheism won’t tell you much you don’t know (e.g., “In God we Trust” was added to currency only in the 1950s), but may interest those not involved with atheism. But much of the article is an uncritical presentation of Gray’s ideas, which include a critique of New Atheism and a denial of progressivism. One gets the strong idea that author Casey Cep, identified as “a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland”, is a big booster of Gray’s ideas. (Cep also appears to have no expertise in religiosity and its denial.) Her long and uncritical exposition of Gray’s ideas begins, of course, with a shot over the bow of New Atheism, demonstrating where Cep’s allegiance lies:

[Gray’s book] is also a refreshing look beyond the so-called “new atheists” who have lately dominated the conversation surrounding unbelief. Gray does not brook what he describes as their “tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion,” and, in contrast to Moore and Kramnick, who believe that new atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have generated an “Atheist Awakening,” Gray dismisses them in a single chapter. “New atheists have directed their campaign against a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand even that small part,” he writes. By Gray’s account, they ignore polytheism and animism almost entirely, while insisting on reading verses of Genesis or lines of the Nicene Creed as if they were primitive scientific theories. Not all monotheists are literalists, and, for many of us, both now and throughout history, the Garden of Eden is not a faulty hypothesis about evolution but a rich symbolic story about good and evil.

Here again we have a Sophisticated Believer asserting that he is representative of most believers in not being a literalist and in not accepting that Abrahamic religions are based on factual assertions. Try telling a Catholic that Jesus wasn’t divine or can’t forgive your sins; try telling a Southern Baptist that Adam and Eve are lovely symbols of good and evil; try telling a Muslim that Muhammad’s “night flight” from Mecca to Jerusalem and back on the steed Buraq is just a lovely but a false story, or that the Qur’an wasn’t really dictated to Muhammad by an angel in a cave. I’d love for Gray to go to, say, Tehran and give a lecture about how the Qu’ran is a “rich symbolic story about good and evil.” Well, actually, I wouldn’t, because he’d be dead within a day or so.

As I’ve shown repeatedly on this site, and in my book Faith Versus Fact, a huge fraction of believers in both the UK and US take things like the existence of an afterlife, Heaven and Hell, angels, Jesus’s resurrection, and so on as literal truths. Granted, not all religionists take the whole Bible or Qur’an literally (though a higher proportion of Muslims than of Christians are literalists) but, as I’ve said in one of my few bon mots, “Some believers are literalists about everything, but every believer is a literalist about something.”

You can hardly call yourself a Christian if you don’t believe that Jesus existed, was divine, and was crucified and resurrected. And so on and so on and so on. As the Bible says, in fact, “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). In claiming that religion has very little to do with literal (i.e., “scientific”) truth, Gray and Cep are simply ignoring how religion works, and how, at bottom, it depends on literal adherence to at least a few supernatural assertions. It is not a “small segment” of religionists who have some literal beliefs in the supernatural!

Another claim of both Gray—and by extension, Cep—is that atheism doesn’t offer a solid ground for morality. Here’s Cep osculating Gray:

Gray’s larger complaint is that the new atheists fail to offer a more coherent moral vision than the one they want to replace. The strategy they champion, scientific ethics, has been tried before, with a notable lack of success. Auguste Comte and his fellow nineteenth-century positivists envisioned a Grand Pontiff of Humanity who would preside alongside scientist-priests; unfortunately, scientists at the time were practicing phrenology. Later on, evolutionary humanists and monists replaced God’s order with “scientific” anthropologies, then constructed racial hierarchies and put white Europeans on top. Today, the voguish version of science as religion is transhumanism, which claims that technology will overcome human limitations both physical and mental, perhaps through bioengineering or artificial intelligence or cyborgs that can carry around the contents of our brains. Gray is not sanguine about such developments, should they ever occur, because we already have a model of the mayhem that takes place when some mortals are granted godlike powers: “Anyone who wants a glimpse of what a post-human future might be like should read Homer.”

Umm. . . . the only New Atheist who champions scientific ethics, as far as I know, is Sam Harris, who claims there are empirically determinable “right” and “wrong” statements. I disagree with him, though I think most versions of morality do rely on a consequentialist view of what constitutes greater or lesser “well being.” But defining “well being” is slippery, and in some cases the currency of morality might not be “well being.” In the end, I maintain, as do other New Atheists, that morality is grounded on what kind of world you prefer, which is a subjective judgment. As for transhumanism, that’s irrelevant.

True, consequentialists know that empirical data does play a role in secular ethics (as oppose to the divine fiat of religious ethics). But really, isn’t it better to base your morals on how they affect people’s lives rather than on propitiating the dictates of a God who, to even Gray, doesn’t exist? In the end, why does having a God in your sights give you a better morality than relying on reason and preference? After all Plato showed with the Euthyphro argument that even religious morality has an extrabiblical (i.e., nonreligious) philosophy behind it.

Cep goes on:

On the whole, Gray is a glass-half-empty kind of guy, and what others regard as novel or promising he often sees as derivative or just plain dumb. He argues, for instance, that secular humanism is really monotheism in disguise, where humankind is God and salvation can be achieved through our own efforts rather than through divine intervention. Unlike the linguist—and new atheist—Steven Pinker, Gray regards the idea that the world is getting better as self-evidently silly. “The cumulative increase of knowledge in science has no parallel in ethics or politics,” he points out. Religions are still thriving, as are wars between them, and secular regimes have wrought as much, if not more, havoc under the auspices of Jacobinism, Bolshevism, Nazism, and Maoism.

Secular humanism is the philosophy that humans can find moral and material fulfillment without the need for gods. In what respect is that “monotheism” in disguise? Does it put humanity as a sacred and numinous object, like God? No way! There’s a big difference between saying we have to help ourselves on one hand, and saying on the other that we need the intervention of a being for which there’s no evidence. Gray should know this, and Cep, as a supposedly savvy New Yorker writer, should know that difference even better. But she falls for Gray’s “sophistication”, offering not a word of critique.

As for the statement that it’s “self-evidently silly”, to say the world is getting better, that statement itself is arrant nonsense. Clearly we’re materially better than we were a few centuries ago (would Gray like to live as a medieval peasant with infected teeth?), and you can see the evidence for that in Pinker’s last two books. And we’ve improved not just materially (here I count “health and well-being” as material goods), but also morally. Attitudes towards gays, women, minorities, children, and other once-oppressed groups have changed much for the better. Slavery is no longer tenable, and we have much more concern about the welfare of animals.

Finally, I needn’t address the canard (a word that’s an offense to ducks) that “secular regimes” are fraught with “havoc.” From Nazism to Bolshevism, the state simply replaced God with Dear Leaders, and Nazism wasn’t even atheistic. Perhaps Gray and Cep should be pointed toward Scandinavia to see that “secular regimes” in the modern world, so long as they’re democratic, need not be bastions of immorality or oppression.

Cep goes on to note that Gray’s version of “good” atheists include those atheists who (like him) have no faith in humanity, as well as “apophatic atheists” who simply shut up about their unbelief and, indeed, accept some kind of numinous philosophy like pantheism.

At the end, Cep alludes to the specious claim that all of us, atheists and nonbelievers alike, are similar in having faith. We’re all brothers and sisters under the skin!

Still, as Gray might have predicted, it is difficult, in this particular political moment, to believe that the circle of rights is expanding for atheists or for anyone else. Moore and Kramnick, who have written a thorough and useful history of the legal and political status of atheists in America, unsurprisingly believe that such work is salvific—that understanding the bias against atheists in the past can help end it in the future. Gray holds no such hope, and yet his book offers a way forward. In it, he helps us understand how those who do not believe in God, or, for that matter, those who do, have oriented themselves in the universe. Faith, after all, drove the Puritans to Plymouth Rock but then led them to execute three of their Quaker neighbors; it inspired American slavers but also American abolitionists; and, whatever else atheism is accused of doing in this country, it sustained the scientific curiosity and profound pacifism of the two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, and the art and activism of Lorraine Hansberry. All of us, nihilists included, believe something—many things, in fact, about ourselves, the cosmos, and one another. In the end, the most interesting thing about a conscience is how it answers, not whom it answers to. ♦

This conflates “faith” as “a belief in a proposition not well supported by evidence”, with “optimism” (the Puritans) and “confidence based on data and reason” (i.e. Linus Pauling, the abolitionists). Saying that Jesus was resurrected does not lie on the same playing field as the statement that “Slaves are better off not being slaves.” “Belief” can be based on wish-thinking, as it is in religion, or on data and experience, as it is in science and many other areas. Those simply aren’t equivalent ways of determining what’s true, or equally valid supports for what you believe.

And the last sentence is classic New Yorker nonsense: a nice-sounding Deepity that, if taken seriously, dismisses religion as of no importance whatsoever—after Cep and Gray have just told us why religion remains important.

 

Free will and moral responsibility: Gregg Caruso vs. Dan Dennett

October 4, 2018 • 10:30 am

The Aeon website has a good discussion between Dan Dennett, a free-will compatibilist, and Gregg Caruso, who calls himself a “hard incompatibilist”. (Caruso doesn’t call himself a “hard determinist” because he admits that some behaviors might be influenced by fundamental indeterminism, presumably of the quantum-mechanical sort.)

The piece, called “Just deserts: Can we be held morally responsible for our actions. Yes, says Daniel Dennett. No says Gregg Caruso. Reader, you decide” can be accessed by clicking on the screenshot below:

The discussion is good because it clearly delineates the difference between the two men’s views. It’s also clear and mutually respectful.

I, of course, am on Caruso’s side, believing that we have no “free will” in the classical sense—the libertarian, could-have-chosen-otherwise sense which most people think of as “free will”). Note, too, that most people think that in Caruso’s deterministic/naturalistic universe, people are not morally responsible for their actions.

The difference between the two men here turns on three issues, which I’ll try to summarize briefly.

a.) What is free will? Caruso accepts the libertarian definition, but rejects that we have that kind of free will. Dennett thinks of free will as the behavioral actions of someone who is competent, reasonable, and subject to rational persuasion. His quote:

 In fact, if your past is roughly normal, it contains the causal chains that turned you into an autonomous, self-controlling agent. Lucky you. You weren’t responsible for becoming an autonomous agent, but since you are one, it is entirely appropriate for the rest of us to hold you responsible for your deeds under all but the most dire circumstances. As [the American country singer] Ricky Skaggs once put it: ‘I can’t control the wind, but I can adjust the sails.’ To suppose that some further condition should be met in order for you or anyone else to be ‘truly deserving’ is to ignore or deny the manifest difference in abilities for self-control that we can observe and measure readily. In other words, the rationale or justification for excusing someone, holding them not deserving of criticism or punishment, is their deficit in this competence. We don’t try to reason with bears or babies or lunatics because they aren’t able to respond appropriately. Why do we reason with people? Why do we try to convince them of conclusions about free will or science or causation or anything else? Because we think – for good reason – that in general people are reasonable, are moved by reasons, can adjust their behaviour and goals in the light of reasons presented to them. There is something indirectly self-refuting in arguing that people are not moved by reasons! And that is the key to the kind of self-control which we are justified in treating as our threshold for true desert.

I agree with Dan that some people are subject to rational persuasion and others aren’t, although the distinction isn’t as clear as he’d like. Some people are subject to rational persuasion about some issues but not others. Do they have free will in those areas where they’re subject to rational argument, but not in the other areas? If they agree to abide by some of society’s rules but not others, do they have free will? Clearly someone who’s irremediably insane isn’t subject to rational persuasion in most cases, but whether someone is insane or rational depends, of course, on the laws of physics. Both the persuadable and unpersuadable are made so because of their genes and environments, and can’t have turned out otherwise.

That said, yes, these non-persuadable people need to be treated differently if they commit crimes. This is an empirical matter: you don’t deter people, or promote rehabilitation, by putting someone who’s insane in prison. Yet both people need rehabilitation, just of different sorts.

The main issue for me is that nobody makes a decision to be responsive to rational persuasion and thus their choice to, say, commit a crime is no freer than someone who commits a crime as a psychopath.  Every human who does something bad had no choice about whether to do it, and therefore the factors behind that choice need to be examined and treated.

It is the issue of determinism that one must consider when constructing an enlightened judicial system; this is something that Dennett doesn’t dwell on but Caruso does. Dennett does, however, say that his view of “free will” mandates changes in judicial punishment, including the lack of retributive punishment. I applaud him for that, but given that Dennett thinks people deserve to be punished in the “just deserts” sense (see below), it’s hard to see why he’s opposed to retributive punishment. For it is the idea of “deserts” that is behind retributive punishment. Caruso calls him out on this (see below).

b.) Is one morally responsible for behaving badly? This is one issue that isn’t explicitly discussed by Dennett and Caruso. The word “responsible” is tossed around a lot, but it means different things to the two men. To Dan, it means “morally responsible” if the miscreant falls into the class of “someone who is rational and has agreed to play by society’s rules.” To Caruso it means, as it does to me, simply “you’re the person who did the crime and must undergo punishment for that”. Caruso:

. . . . let me reiterate that the kind of moral responsibility I reject is basic-desert moral responsibility. Of course, there are other conceptions of moral responsibility that are perfectly consistent with free-will skepticism – such as Waller’s notion of take-charge responsibility, the attributability responsibility I referenced in the Einstein example, and Pereboom’s forward-looking notion of responsibility that focuses on three nondesert-invoking desiderata: future protection, future reconciliation, and future moral formation.

Dan seems to accept “basic-desert moral responsibility.” I reject it because the very notion of “moral responsibility”—one promulgated, of course, by religion—implies that one could have chosen to do otherwise. A murderer, for instance, could have chosen not to pull the trigger.

And this is what most people in four surveyed countries think, too: the majority feel that in a society in which there is no libertarian free will, one cannot be morally responsible. I agree, although of course I think that lawbreakers and wrongdoers are still responsible for their actions. It’s the words “morally responsible” that I abhor, and Caruso says why:

The system of desert keeps alive the belief that if you end up in poverty or prison, this is ‘just’ because you deserve it. Likewise, if you end up succeeding in life, you and you alone are responsible for that success. This way of thinking keeps us locked in the system of blame and shame, and prevents us from addressing the systemic causes of poverty, wealth-inequality, racism, sexism, educational inequity and the like. My suggestion is that we move beyond this, and acknowledge that the lottery of life is not always fair, that luck does not average out in the long run, and that who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control.

I do of course use the word “moral”, but in the sense of “adhering to society’s code of conduct.” Thus I might occasionally used the words “immoral act” or “moral system”, but I mean those as “conforming or not conforming to what society considers right behavior.” But I try to avoid saying that someone is “morally responsible” for the reasons above.

Whether someone “deserves” punishment is ambiguous here. “Deserve” can be construed, as Dennett does, as “receiving one’s deserts”, while I and Caruso conceive it as “requires praise or blame for one’s good and the good of society”. This may seem a semantic issue, but remember that the illiberal “Just World” view of politics, in which poor people are seen as deserving to be poor because they don’t make the effort to acquire money or escape their circumstances, hinges on a notion that one can make a free choice.

c.) Will society fall apart if people don’t adhere to some notion of free will? Dan says yes, Caruso (and I as well) say no. Dan has argued this several times in various speeches and talks, and I don’t think it’s true. In fact, saying that we need to embrace some version of free will as a necessary social glue comes perilously close to theologians’ and accommodationists’ claims that one needs to embrace some version of God to have a moral society. Here are two earlier quotes from Dennett:

. . . we [Dennett and Erasmus] share the doctrine that free will is an illusion is likely to have profoundly unfortunate social consequences if not rebutted forcefully.”

And below Dan is talking about the kind of responsibility that comes from accepting his compatibilist form of free will:

If nobody is responsible, not really, then not only should the prisons be emptied, but no contract is valid, mortgages should be abolished, and we can never hold anybody to account for anything they do.  Preserving “law and order” without a concept of real responsibility is a daunting task.

I don’t know any hard determinist, though, who thinks that their views will make society fall apart if adopted widely. We’ll always feel as if we can make free choices, but we can rationally accept that we can’t, and take actions upon that rational belief. Further, under my and Caruso’s non-compatibilist definition of “responsibility”, society will be fine with that non-libertarian definition. I cannot see people becoming wild and crazy criminals if they accept determinism.

Caruso has also picked up on Dennett’s quasi-theological use of free will, and on Dan’s charge that one can have no stable society without an appeal to moral responsibility. He calls for Caruso to specify how this could be, and here is Caruso’s answer (note that it starts with a further quote by Dan about the dire consequences of abjuring the idea of “moral responsibility”):

Finally, I do not agree that rejecting free will and basic-desert moral responsibility will ‘return humanity to Hobbes’s state of nature where life is nasty, brutish and short’. You write: ‘If you have some other vision of how a stable, secure and just state can thrive without appeal to moral responsibility, you owe us the details.’

First, let me reiterate that the kind of moral responsibility I reject is basic-desert moral responsibility. Of course, there are other conceptions of moral responsibility that are perfectly consistent with free-will skepticism – such as Waller’s notion of take-charge responsibility, the attributability responsibility I referenced in the Einstein example, and Pereboom’s forward-looking notion of responsibility that focuses on three nondesert-invoking desiderata: future protection, future reconciliation, and future moral formation. Second, I agree that I owe you and others an account of how to maintain a stable, secure and just society without basic-desert moral responsibility. Fortunately, my good friend Derk Pereboom has already provided most of the details for such an account in his two books Living Without Free Will (2001) and Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (2014). And I have further developed a detailed account of how to address criminal behaviour without basic-desert moral responsibility – it’s called the public health-quarantine model. While I wish we could debate the merits of it here, it unfortunately looks like we have run out of time. The details of my account, however, are readily available for anyone who is interested (see here, here, and here).

I’ve said many times that the discussion over how to construe “free will” is likely to be unproductive given that most people on the street define the phrase one way and Sophisticated Philosophers™ another. What we should be doing is working out the consequences of behavioral determinism, a determinism on which Dennett, Caruso, and I all agree.

That is a valuable and worthwhile task; redefining free will to be compatible with determinism—not so much.

Pinker’s latest TED talk: Is the world getting better?

May 25, 2018 • 12:45 pm

In case you don’t have the moxie to read Steve Pinker’s two latest books—The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now—you can see a summary of both in Steve’s new 18.5-minute TED talk. Posted three days ago, it concisely summarizes his theses that the world is getting better in almost every measurable way, that many liberals hate this progress as well as the general notion of progressivism, and that pessimism about the future is dangerous. He also analyzes what’s responsible for the progress he documents with endless data, and discusses why people simply don’t recognize that progress. It’s a good talk, dotted with humor, and also shows some defensiveness that’s come from Steve’s books being attacked by anti-progressives like the dolorous John Gray.

It’s hard to imagine that there are those who, in the face of data like these, think that the world’s getting worse. Yes, we face new challenges like global warming (these are discussed in Steve’s latest book), but would you choose, say, to have lived 200 years ago rather than now? You’d be a fool to make that choice.

h/t: Bryan

Does religion promote morality?

November 28, 2017 • 12:15 pm

Today’s New York Times op-ed features a piece with a provocative title (click on screenshot to read the article):

The author, Mustafa Akyol, is described as “a contributing opinion writer. . . the author of “The Islamic Jesus” and a visiting fellow at the Freedom Project at Wellesley College.” Unfortunately, while Akyol properly calls out Turkey’s new, Islamist rulers as immoral, he’s wishy-washy about the title question. In fact, it’s answered simply and wishy-washidly in the subtitle, and that is all ye need to know.

On Turkey:

This political revolution has had an inadvertent outcome. It has tested the ostensible virtues of these religious conservatives — and they have failed. They have failed this test so terribly that it raises the question of whether religiosity and morality really go hand in hand, as so many religious people like to claim.

The religious conservatives have morally failed because they ended up doing everything that they once condemned as unjust and cruel. For decades, they criticized the secular elite for nepotism and corruption, for weaponizing the judiciary and for using the news media to demonize and intimidate their opponents. Yet after their initial years in power, they began repeating all of the same behavior they used to condemn, often even more blatantly than their predecessors.

This is a familiar story: The religious conservatives have become corrupted by power. But power corrupts more easily when you have neither principles nor integrity.

Well, we all know that no religion, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, the like, is completely populated by moral believers. We also know that religion becomes dangerous when wedded with political power. But I suppose it’s useful for a Turk to point this out, though he’ll never be able to go back to Turkey after this.

But here’s what Akyol says about morality and religion in general:

On religion and morality:

Does religion really make people more moral human beings? Or does the gap between morality and the moralists — a gap evident in Turkey today and in many other societies around the world — reveal an ugly hypocrisy behind all religion?

My humble answer is: It depends. Religion can work in two fundamentally different ways: It can be a source of self-education, or it can be a source of self-glorification. Self-education can make people more moral, while self-glorification can make them considerably less moral.

Religion can be a source of self-education, because religious texts often have moral teachings with which people can question and instruct themselves. The Quran, just like the Bible, has such pearls of wisdom. It tells believers to “uphold justice” “even against yourselves or your parents and relatives.”

. . . But trying to nurture moral virtues is one thing; assuming that you are already moral and virtuous simply because you identify with a particular religion is another. The latter turns religion into a tool for self-glorification. A religion’s adherents assume themselves to be moral by default, and so they never bother to question themselves. At the same time, they look down on other people as misguided souls, if not wicked infidels.

For such people, religion works not as cure for the soul, but as drug for the ego. It makes them not humble, but arrogant.

But this is all bloody obvious—at least to us nonbelievers. What Akyol does here is conflate the source of morality with the promotion of morality. Certainly religion can promote morality, though it often doesn’t. But, as Plato pointed out nearly 2500 years ago, God cannot be a source of morality. That’s because most people don’t automatically take God’s dictums as being intrinsically moral just because they come from God, but because God is conceived of as good. That is, there’s some preexisting source of morality to which God conforms, and that’s why what He’s supposed to have said constitutes “morality”. My view is that the real source of human morals is a combination of evolved sentiments and the lesson’s we’ve learned to keep a thin veneer of civilization over the plywood of our ancestry.

There are a few exceptions, of course. One is the slick William Lane Craig, who believes in the “Divine command theory” holding that whatever God says is moral because it comes from God. But few people, on reflection, would agree with that. The realization that God is not the source of morality is, I think, one of the great contributions of philosophy to clarifying human thought.

Now saying this would have immensely improved Akyol’s piece, and believe me, it needs saying.  Yes, it’s meet and proper for him to point out the immoral self-aggrandizement and corruption of Turkey’s rulers. But does that need saying more urgently than that America’s Christian rulers aren’t exactly promoting a Jesus-like morality?  For that’s been said by the Left over and over again. (That’s the same Left that recoils from noting the perfidy of Islamism.)

Instead of saying the obvious, we, at least, can talk to people about where morality comes from, and point out the relentless logic of the Euthyphro argument. It’s worked for me with several Christians and ex-Christians.

Is religion good even if it’s not true?: A deceptive piece in the Daily Beast

September 4, 2017 • 12:30 pm

Reader Saul called my attention to a Daily Beast article called “Can you be good without God?” (subtitle: “New research raises questions about whether people can be truly good or truly bad without religion”) by Brandon Withrow, who teaches religious studies at the University of Findlay.

I call the article “deceptive” in the sense that both the tile and subtitle, designed to draw attention to the piece, imply that it will try to actually answer the two questions posed. But it doesn’t even deal with those; rather, it describes work on (and gives comments about) worldwide attitudes towards atheists and their ability to be moral.

The article is actually about the findings reported in a new paper on worldwide attitudes towards atheists in Nature Human Behavior (itself a new journal) by Will M. Gervais and others. (Reference below; free access.) Here’s the study’s abstract, which pretty much tells you what you need to know:

Mounting evidence supports long-standing claims that religions can extend cooperative networks. However, religious prosociality may have a strongly parochial component . Moreover, aspects of religion may promote or exacerbate conflict with those outside a given religious group, promoting regional violence, intergroup conflict and tacit prejudice against non-believers . Anti-atheist prejudice—a growing concern in increasingly secular societies—affects employment, elections, family life and broader social inclusion. Preliminary work in the United States suggests that anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from deeply rooted intuitions about religion’s putatively necessary role in morality. However, the cross-cultural prevalence and magnitude—as well as intracultural demographic stability—of such intuitions, as manifested in intuitive associations of immorality with atheists, remain unclear. Here, we quantify moral distrust of atheists by applying well-tested measures in a large global sample (N = 3,256; 13 diverse countries). Consistent with cultural evolutionary theories of religion and morality, people in most—but not all— of these countries viewed extreme moral violations as representative of atheists. Notably, anti-atheist prejudice was even evident among atheist participants around the world. The results contrast with recent polls that do not find self-reported moral prejudice against atheists in highly secular countries, and imply that the recent rise in secularism in Western countries has not overwritten intuitive anti-atheist prejudice. Entrenched moral suspicion of atheists suggests that religion’s powerful influence on moral judgements persists, even among non-believers in secular societies.

They assessed the degree of prejudice by asking people this question:

. . . participants read a description of a man who tortures animals as a child then as an adult exhibits escalating violence culminating with the murder and mutilation of five homeless people. Then, participants are judged whether it is more probable that the villain is (A) a teacher or (B) a teacher who either (manipulated between subjects) is a religious believer or does not believe in god(s).

Since the correct answer must be “A” (there are more “A”s than “B”s, no matter whether Bs are believers are atheists), the relative frequency of the two “B” answers give an idea of the degree of moral prejudice against either believers or atheists. (The idea that “B”s are more probable than “A”s despite their relative paucity is known as “the conjunction fallacy.”) As you might expect, the authors found universal prejudice against atheists. As they note, ” . . . people overall are roughly twice as likely to view extreme immorality as representative of atheists, relative to believers. Importantly, the effects hold even after adjusting for country variability in the strength of intuitive moral prejudice and individual-level variability in demographics.” And this holds whether the countries are mostly Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or even secular! People just don’t like the godless. But that’s old news.

So the Gervais et al. study tells us something we already know: people are prejudiced against atheists. But that doesn’t answer the question posed, which is “how likely is it that atheists are immoral compared to believers?” That question requires empirical study, and not just college psychology experiments that show how much people cheat on a test after reading either religious or secular passages.

What we need are studies of the per capita rate of criminal behavior by believers versus nonbelievers, somehow controlled for the fact that believers may, for instance, come from milieus that, for different reasons, inculcate them with religiosity and promote moral behavior—a correlation without causation. (It would be much harder to measure general immorality, which is want we really want, versus criminal behavior unless you used answers on psychology tests, a dubious procedure at best.) I’ve heard of studies showing a much lower percentage of atheists in prison than in the general populace, but that is contaminated by both prison “conversions” to faith as well as any correlative factors promoting both religion and immorality.

And we just don’t have those data. We know that whole societies that are nonreligious, like those of northern Europe, can certainly be “good”, so the title question is answered in general. You can be good without God. The empirical question of whether on average you’re less good without God remains unanswered, though as a heathen I’m biased to think that we’re just as good as the faithful, if not better, and certainly have better motives for being moral. (I won’t mention the Euthyphro argument here as it’s not relevant: even if people are wrong in thinking they get their morality from God’s dictates, they could still become more moral simply as a consequence of religiosity.)

The authors recognize that their work isn’t relevant to what the Daily Beast asks:

Our results highlight a stark divergence between lay and scientific perceptions of the relationship between religion and morality. Although religion probably influences many moral outcomes and judgements, core moral instincts appear to emerge largely independent of religion. Additionally, highly secular societies are among the most stable and cooperative on Earth. Nonetheless, our findings reveal widespread suspicion that morality requires belief in a god. For many people, including many atheists, the answer to Dostoevsky’s question “Without God … It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?” is “Yes”, inasmuch as ‘everything’ refers to acts of extreme immorality.

But a “widespread suspicion” isn’t the same thing as answering the Beast’s title question, and secular humanist James Croft worries that the last sentence could be used to smear atheists as immoral.  Read that sentence on its own, and see if you don’t think it makes a conclusion about real morality rather than perceptions of morality.

The Nature paper’s authors are aware of this issue; as the Beast reports,

When asked about Croft’s concerns, Gervais reiterates that the study is only descriptive of individual intuitions.

“It’s really important to note that our paper focuses on people’s perceptions of a religion-morality link,” he says. “Perhaps most people on Earth intuitively feel that morality requires belief in a god or gods. But at the end of the day, morality is a really complicated beast, built upon various prosocial intuitions and cultural processes, including—perhaps, in some cases—religions.”

. . . “Morality is 100% possible without religious belief,” Gervais clarifies. “Just look at Scandinavia, where you see some of the least religious, most peaceful, most cooperative societies in the history of humankind.” “And yet,” he adds, there is still a paradox. “The intuition that moral evildoers must be atheists seems to persist, even among atheists in largely secular countries.”

But even the last sentence of the second paragraph (“But at the end of the day. . . “) sort of implies that religion has a positive effect on morality. But never mind: the lesson is that a liberal magazine has misled its readers (after all, one decides to read based largely on a title, and readers may not read carefully) by giving this article a title and subtitle that are completely deceptive.

To be fair, the Beast does quote some atheists trying to answer the title question (the question that the Nature study didn’t ask!). Maggie Ardiente, for instance, says this:

“Even though we shouldn’t have to prove ourselves to anyone, it’s important to demonstrate that atheists can be good, just like religious people can be good. And atheists can be bad, just like religious people can be bad. It’s as simple as that, and we should call out prejudice against atheists wherever we see it.”

Monette Richards of  Secular Woman adds:

“People are, in general, good,” insists Richards, who sees the motivation as something shared by all humans regardless of where they stand on religion.

“It’s how we have managed to have civilizations. Most people don’t want to hurt others, regardless of their religious faith. I have worked with non-religious, religious, converts and de-converts, all of them wanting to make the world a better place, not because it will get them into heaven, but because it is, simply put, the right thing to do.”

Clearly, you needn’t be religious to be good, and atheists have and can articulate their reasons for doing good. But that still doesn’t answer the question whether, on average, atheists are as “good”, or moral, as believers.  That question remains unanswered. But even if the answer is “no, believers are better”, the fact that there’s no evidence for the truth of religious claims promotes the patronizing attitude that we should promote a falsehood if it makes people behave better.

And if it does, should we?

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Gervais, W. M. et al. 2017. Global evidence of extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists. Nature Human Behavior 1, Article number: 0151 (2017); doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0151