Category: morality

Bucky Catt, “free won’t,” free will, Dan Dennett, and Templeton

November 3, 2014 • 7:04 am

The concept of “free won’t” was, I recall, floated by researcher Benjamin Libet, the first person to show that our brain can make simple but predictable “decisions” that can be detected and predicted by researchers (using brain scans) before the subject is conscious of having made a decision.  Although, said Libet, we may not be able to exercise “free will,” we can somehow override the “decisions” made by our brain in an exercise of dualism called “free won’t.” That, of course, is completely bogus: if your actions are determined by the laws of physics, then “overriding a perceived decision” is also determined by the laws of physics. If there can be no libertarian free will, then there can be no libertarian free won’t.

Here, in Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy, Bucky Catt and Satchel engage in a muddled discussion of the issue. Still, it’s pretty philosophical for a comic strip!

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While I’m on the topic, Dan Dennett has published a review of a new book that, he says, refutes simplistic notions of free will (i.e., the book defends “compatibilism”, the notion that we can still have free will even though our decisions are determined). The book is Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will, by philosopher Alfred Mele, and Dennett’s review, “Are we free?: Neuroscience gives the wrong answer”  is on the Prospect Magazine website.

Dennett, as usual, defends his compatibilist view that despite the reign of determinism, we can still have free will and be morally responsible. Dennett’s view of “free will” is simply that the human brain is a complicated device, and must take in many inputs before it reaches the “output” of a decision. (That requirement for multiple inputs is presumably evolved.) Yes, that output could be predicted given perfect knowledge and the assumption that quantum mechanics doesn’t apply in the brain (even if it did, that doesn’t give us any “freedom”), but it’s still complicated.  My own refutation of this notion is to admit that the wiring and operation of human brains (sometimes called “rumination” when it is accessible to consciousness) is complicated, but that there’s still no freedom in the output, just as there’s no freedom in the output of any complex computer program. So although the lab experiments showing pre-conscious decisions are simple ones, I have little doubt that, with refinement of brain-imaging techniques, we’ll be able to predict with appreciable accuracy even more complex decisions. In the end, any kind of dualistic free will is ruled out by naturalism, and any kind of compatibilism is just a sop foisted on the public to let them continue believing that they can “choose otherwise.”

Seriously, I don’t know why philosophers occupy themselves with this arcane and diverse exercise in compatibilism, which resembles theology more than philosophy (it’s motivated, as Dan has admitted for himself, because some philosophers think society would disintegrate if we thought our decisions were all predetermined by naturalism). To me it seems far more important that philosophers impress on the average person that determinism reigns, something that philosophers seem reluctant to do.  After all, it’s determinism, not compatibilism, that carries the important lessons about how we should change our views of responsibility, punishment, and reward.

And, at any rate, Dennett, I, and nearly all philosophers agree that for any decision, we could not have decided otherwise.  So there is no real “freedom.” The rest is semantics and commentary.

I’ve amply aired my disagreements with Dan on free will in previous posts on this site, so I won’t dissect his piece further except to say that he repeatedly makes statements that appear to give us some kind of “autonomy,” which of course can mean only that the entity who makes a decision is identifiable as a named human (my emphasis below):

. . . people can be manipulated into doing things they know better than to do; people’s introspective access to their own thought processes is far from foolproof, and you shouldn’t play poker if you can’t maintain a relatively inscrutable poker face. People who don’t know these home truths are perhaps too benighted, too naïve, to be granted full responsibility for their actions, but the rest of us, wise to these weaknesses in our own control systems, can take steps to protect our autonomy and be held responsible for doing just that.

Science may someday come up with some further line of investigation that does indeed show we are deluded about our capacity to make responsible choices, but to date, the cases made are unimpressive, and that is all that Mele modestly attempts to show.

Certainly we must be held responsible for our choices: to protect society if we make bad ones (showing our brains have “faulty” wiring), to deter others from thinking they can get away with antisocial behavior, and to help rehabilitate those who engage in such behavior.  But I deny that this responsibility for is a “moral” responsibility. What does the word “moral” add to that? And if we don’t have a choice in how to act, what is “moral” except the label that predetermined actions comport with social norms? Imputing “moral” responsibility is no different from saying “this person did that thing for reasons we can’t completely understand.”

But I do agree with Dan’s piece in one respect: he says that we must worry a bit about Mele’s conclusions because they comport with the goals of the organization that funded them: the Templeton Foundation. I quote Dan in full here:

This review could similarly end on the mild, modest verdict that Mele has done his job and done it well. But there is a larger context worth considering. Suppose you were reviewing a scientific report that drew the conclusion that a diet without fat was in fact unhealthy, and that butter and cream and even bacon in moderation were good for you, and suppose further that the science was impeccable, carefully conducted and rigorously argued. Good news! Yes, but the author acknowledges in fine print that the research was financed by a million dollar grant from the Foundation for the Advancement of Bacon. We would be entitled—obliged—to keep that fact in the limelight. The science may be of the highest quality, honestly and sincerely reported, but do remember that the message delivered was the message hoped for by the funder. This is not reporting a finding contrary to the goals of the fact-seekers.

So it is important to note that Mele’s research, as he scrupulously announces, and not in fine print, is supported by the Templeton Foundation. In fact, Mele is the director of a $4.4m project, “Free Will: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations,” funded by the Templeton Foundation, almost certainly the most munificent funding of any philosopher in history. The Templeton Foundation has a stated aim of asking and answering the “Big Questions,” and its programmes include both science and theology. In fact, yoking its support of science with its support of theology (and “individual freedom and free markets”) is the very core of its strategy. The Templeton Foundation supports, with no strings attached, a great deal of excellent science that is otherwise hard to fund. The Foundation supports theological and ideological explorations as well, and it uses the prestige it garners from its even-handed and generous support of non-ideological science to bolster the prestige of its ideological forays. It could easily divide itself into two (or three) foundations, with different names, and fund the same research—I know, because I challenged a Templeton director on this score and was told that they could indeed, but would not, do this.

Alfred Mele is in an unenviable position, and there is really nothing he can do about it. Was his decision to stay strictly neutral on the compatibilism issue a wise philosophical tactic, permitting him to tackle a more modest project, demonstrating the weakness of the scientific argument to date, or was it a case of simply postponing the more difficult issue: if, as science seems to show, our decision-making is not accomplished with the help of any quantum magic, do we still have a variety of free will that can support morality and responsibility? The Templeton Foundation insists that it is not anti-science, and demonstrates this with the bulk of its largesse, but it also has an invested interest in keeping science from subverting some of its ideological aspirations, and it just happens that Mele’s work fits handsomely with that goal. And that, as I persist in telling my friends in science whenever they raise the issue, is why I advise them not to get too close to Templeton.

h/t: jsp

Dan Fincke responds to me, claiming morality is objective

September 8, 2014 • 7:54 am

I previously wrote about Dan Fincke’s talk at the Pittsburgh Atheist and Humanist meetings, in which he claimed that there is indeed an objective morality: one based on “human flourishing.” It was only a 20-minute talk, as were all of them, so he couldn’t lay out his thesis in detail, and I had to respond here based on what I heard, and our dinnertime chat afterwards. You can read my response at the link above, but it was basically that, at bottom, “human flourishing” was still a preference, not some objective criterion for what is moral or immoral.

I think that people feel that there is an objective morality because we mostly share a sense of what is a good or bad thing to do, and that may have been partly instilled in our brains by evolution. But of course that sense isn’t universal: worldwide, people  differ on things like capital punishment, abortion, the treatment of women, and so on; and I don’t see how those differences can be resolved “objectively.”  Further, I’m not sure why we need to decree that morality is objective, or go through all kinds of tortuous philosophical lucubrations to show it (none of which I’ve found very convincing).

We all agree on two things: 1. Even if there is an objective morality, we won’t be able to use it to answer many of our hard questions (is a third-trimester abortion immoral?), for usually such moralities involve criteria that are difficult or impossible to measure. Seond, morality of any sort, even if not “objective,” can almost always be informed by empirical findings, and that might settle some of our differences. So, for example, if you feel that capital punishment is not immoral because it’s a deterrent and good for society in that way, and then you later find out that it’s not a deterrent, well, then, you’ve used objective facts to change your mind. But that doesn’t mean that your view that what is moral is what’s “good for society” is objectively right.

At any rate, Dan has written a long piece on his website Camels with Hammers at the Patheos network, defending his view of what he calls “Empowerment ethics,” a supposedly objective brand of morality. His post is called “Objective human flourishing: a first response to Jerry Coyne about ethics.” Clearly Dan, whom I like and respect, is a First Responder, but I’m not sure I have the time or energy to respond to any posts after the first one!

I will try to respond briefly here, as the Albatross is squawking at me and, truth be told, I’m not sure I understand everything that Dan has said. If I mischaracterize him, my apologies; and I urge readers to read his entire piece. I am perfectly aware that I’m a tyro and not a professional philosopher.

Dan’s thesis, I think, can be summed up in these paragraphs:

As to the nature of human flourishing, my basic view can be briefly boiled down to this. What we are as individuals is defined by the functional powers that constitute our being. In other words, we do not just “have” the powers of reasoning, emotional life, technological/artistic capacities, sociability, sexuality, our various bodily capabilities, etc., but we exist through such powers. We cannot exist without them. They constitute us ourselves. When they suffer, we suffer. Some humans might be drastically deficient in any number of them and there’s nothing they can do about that but make the best of it. But in general our inherent good is the objectively determinable good functioning of these basic powers (and all the subset powers that compose them and all the combined powers that integrate powers from across these roughly distinguishable kinds).

The good of our powers thriving is inherently good for us because we are our powers. And the inherent good of a power thriving is objectively determinable in the sense that it has a characteristic function that makes it the power that it is. The power of mathematical reasoning functions better when it can do certain kinds of operations and others worse. Powers of creation are measurable by their skills with the kinds of tasks that usually produce effective technologies or art that does what it is intended to do, etc.

The powers that are constitutive of our being are roughly knowable. It’s not entirely arbitrary, even if there are rough estimates involved, in assessing relative abilities.

Morality comes in at the stage of where any people who live lives impacting each other develop implicit or explicit rules and practices and judgments, etc. geared at cooperative living. Each of us has an interest in morality because we are social beings in vital ways.

. . . So, I think that an enlightened self-interest should lead anyone to realize that their own maximal empowerment according to their constitutive powers is ideal for them as the beings they are and that the more they empower others beyond them, the more their own powers actually grow.

. . . So, moral rules and practices and behaviors are a practical project. What objectively constitutes good instances of these are what lead to our objective good of maximally empowered functioning according to the abilities we have and what leads us to coordinate best with others for mutual empowerment on the long term.

That is, each of us has powers and abilities, and it is objectively good for us to not only maximize those “excellent powers”, which enable us to flourish, but also to use them as best we can to help others flourish. This, Dan says, is objective, because we not only know our powers, but we have some ability to measure “human flourishing.” (This, I think, is equivalent to the objective standard of “well-being” adumbrated by Sam Harris, another believer in objective ethics.)

The problems with this seem insuperable to me. First, “flourishing” is not defined, and I don’t think it can be, at least in an objective way.  What constitutes “flourishing” for one person may constitute “not flourishing” for another. Take a third-trimester abortion.  One could argue that society and the pregnant woman “flourishes” when women are allowed to make their own choices about abortion, no matter when it is. On the other hand, some could say that those are viable fetuses, and their entire flourishing lives are extirpated in such an abortion: they could be removed by Caesarian (as was the fetus in Ireland). Further, what do you say to the religious people who claim that all fetuses have souls and human flourishing is better when we act according to God’s will, which is to preserve those fetuses? I myself hold the free-abortion option, but how could I possibly convince a religious person that a better society will ensue if everyone adopts my view? How could I possibly convince them that there is no soul and no God? Would Dan say that that is “irrational,” and therefore off the table? If so, then it’s true for most people on this planet, and those people don’t see themselves as irrational.

And how do you weigh the different forms of flourishing? What about animals, for instance? Is it moral to do painful and lethal experiments on a thousand chimpanzees to save ten human lives? Is it moral to kill sentient mammals to slake our hunger for meat? How can we possibly resolve those questions through the “flourishing” criterion? How can we know what animal flourishing even means, since we can’t know their minds?

Are most of us immoral because overall “flourishing” would increase if each of us gave about 50% of our incomes to starving children and adults in the Third World? Surely that would reduce our own flourishing a bit (face it, most of the readers here, including me, earn far more than they need to survive), but the increase in flourishing among those whose lives are saved would be immeasurably higher than our the minor degradation of our quality of life. Some (I think Sam might have said this) could argue that, in contrast, a society in which we can’t keep our wealth and give it to our own kids is not a flourishing society.  That is a measurement problem, but one that Dan’s metric can’t solve. It will be adjudicated the way we always do: subjectively, but adducing evidence to support our preferences.

And what about those of us who simply don’t want to use our “excellent powers” to help society, because we’re lazy or are hedonists? What if I don’t want to do science, or write, but prefer to eat and travel? I would flourish more, but others would flourish less (assuming that I do some good!). Is that immoral? One could say that a society in which you’re forced to use your powers and help others is coercive, and people will flourish less in such a society. What if I want to do what I like, like photography, rather than what I’m really good at, say teaching (this is a hypothetical!). Is it immoral for me to give up teaching for photography?

Dan adds this rider to his system:

We have general standards—the rock bottom one I think should be maximum empowerment of the maximum number of people possible while making provisions that the minimum anyone lives under is not insufficient for minimum well being.

But that last caveat undermines his system, for it is possible for overall flourishing to be better if one person has their well being reduced below the minimum.  That, for instance, is the question of whether it’s okay to torture someone, even to death, if there is a high probability that by so doing you could save thousands of others. How do you adjuducate that? How do you measure an individual’s well being versus society’s well being? You can do it by counting lives, of course, in which case the answer is fairly clear, but some say that torture leads to the brutalization of society. How do you weigh “brutalization” versus life? There is no metric for that, because there’s no agreed-on metric for “flourishing.”

Here is why Dan thinks his system is objective:

Objectivity is in the reasoning process’s objective standards, comparable to how it is in science. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be hard cases where you need to make rough assessments reasonable people can disagree about in lieu of complete information. That happens in science too. Is medicine not a science because doctors sometimes disagree about hard cases with inconclusive data about what the best treatment is? Are physics or biology not sciences because there are always anomalies and areas for further research and areas where scientific competence is required to assess the virtues of one account over another?

No, objectivity doesn’t mean simple settled answers all the time. It means that the process of reasoning has well established goals and standards that can force people to conclusions they don’t like. Morality is not invalidated if people don’t like its results (in fact it’s vindicated if sometimes people are forced to admit that they really are being immoral or participating in an immoral system whether they like that or not).

Well, that sounds reasonable, except at bottom there is a big difference between morality and science: there are criteria for morality that are not universally agreed on, even by philosophers. In contrast, all reasonable physicists would agree that, say, we don’t know whether string theory is correct or not.

To my mind, “flourishing” is what Dan prefers as a criterion for morality. Most of the time that criterion will indeed give us moral guidance that corresponds to our reason and intuition. But it won’t always do so, and reasonable people, even philosophers, will disagree about whether “maximal flourishing” is the best criterion for morality. How can you settle who’s right? In science, we can appeal to empirical observation as the sole criterion for truth: either the rocks tell us that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, or they tell us something very different. There is no preference involved there.  Yes, we may not have all the data in hand to settle scientific questions, but even if we had all the data in hand about some moral questions, that wouldn’t resolve them (think about abortion); for in the end different people weigh the data in different ways—according to their preferences.

In the end, I don’t think Dan has proposed a system that is objective. He simply asserts that “maximal flourishing without taking anyone below minimal flourishing” is an objective criterion for what’s moral. I would say that that is his preference—one that, granted, will usually coincide with other people’s preferences as well. But it is not objective, at least in terms of morality. We can imagine situations in which, for some rational people, things that leads to maximal flourishing don’t necessarily correspond to what’s seems right. Maybe Dan would say that in such cases we need to reassess our criteria for what “seems right,” but I would counter that who is he to tell us what the objective criteria really are? Will other ethical philosophers bow down before him and admit that he’s shown that morality is objective? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Dawkins decries taboos in discussions about society

August 5, 2014 • 6:17 am

If you pay any attention to internet atheist sites, or to reporting about atheist brouhahas by the likes of the Independent and the Guardian (for whom Dawkins is a favorite whipping boy), you can hardly be unaware about the fracas surrounding Dawkins’s latest tweets.

I suppose he was fed up by a segment of the atheist blogosphere whose ideology is so rigid that not only is dissent from its views prohibited, but mere discussion of some issues, particularly around gender, is also prohibited. To engage in such discussion immediately brands one as a sister-punisher, a misogynist, a rape-enabler, and various other nasty creatures. Richard, always an advocate of free speech, made several comments on Twitter which seem related to that. The first involved simple logic: if you think two acts are bad, saying that one is worse than the other doesn’t justify the lesser evil: Screen shot 2014-08-04 at 2.58.17 AM

Unfortunately, he chose as an example one of the most hot-button issues around: Screen shot 2014-08-04 at 2.58.39 AM Well, that last tweet is not quite accurate, I think, because the trauma of being raped by a stranger, even at knife-point, may be less than of being raped by someone you knew and trusted. And some people feel that, unlike murder, all rape is equally bad. It would have been better had Richard, say, mentioned consensual statutory rape, in which both partners assented but one was six months below the legal age of consent, and then compared that to more violent forms of rape.

But his point was that, among bad acts, there are degrees of badness, and this is recognized by the courts (“first” vs “second-degree” murder, for instance). He hastened to clarify this with other tweets and with a piece on his website. But it was too late. Using the rape example, for which there do seem to be degrees of badness (I’ve just given one) instead of, say, slapping someone versus beating them within an inch of their life, was not a tweet that, in the present climate, would inspire cool-headed and rational discussion.

But, in a new piece at HuffPo UK, “Are there emotional no-go areas where logic dare not show its face?“, Dawkins explains that he used those issues precisely to demonstrate his point about emotion overcoming reason.  And his tweets about rape (and pedophilia) were also based on his personal experience, since he’s been accused in the past of trying to soft-pedal both (he was a childhood victim of pedophilia). Unfortunately, the reaction he got demonstrated his point about taboos, and in the HuffPo piece he admits it:

I didn’t know quite how deeply those two sensitive issues had infiltrated the taboo zone. I know now, with a vengeance.

I could have told him! But nevertheless, the firestorm had begun. He was accused of saying that some rapes aren’t too bad (prompting further “X and Y” tweets), and was accused again of misogyny.

While he could have used a better example, I was still disturbed by some of the reaction. To me, it seemed, there was a lot of intellectually dishonest pretend-misunderstanding of what Richard (and Sam Harris and others) were actually saying, for there are some people who constantly play a word-parsing game to try to find offense. Such offense is what some bloggers thrive on: it drives traffic, the lifeblood of the Internet.

Richard is clearly not condoning any form of rape or pedophilia, and as his friend I can assure you that I’ve never detected a scintilla of that attitude in him. Nor have I detected misogyny: the overweening hatred of women. I’ve spent a lot of time in his company, and if he’s a woman-hater or rape-enabler, I can assure you that he keeps it completely hidden from his friends.

Perhaps Richard’s a bit ham-handed on Twitter, but let’s remember what point he was making, even if less aptly than I’d prefer:  asking people to think about a question is not the same as asking people to come to a specific conclusion about it. It’s the difference between sharpening a knife and stabbing someone with it. Sam Harris, I think, has, among prominent atheists, suffered the most from this confusion, and in his piece Richard discusses the opprobrium that Sam has experienced.

I’ll be in the air most of today, and so am leaving this piece as an open thread for discussion. Please be civil, and don’t level insults at fellow commenters.  And try to avoid insulting Richard, even if you aren’t keen on him, for he’s my friend. What I’d really like is a demonstration of our ability to discuss calmly and thoughtfully the issues raised by Dawkins in this piece. Taboos are pervasive in US and UK society, and, as Steve Pinker has repeatedly argued, should not be part of intellectual discourse. To discuss a taboo subject is not the same as condoning invidious sentiments. One of the academically taboo subjects I’ve encountered is “human race”: no matter what I say about genetic differences between human groups, I’m sure to be excoriated for not only bringing up the subject (and thus supposedly enabling racism), but not recognizing that race is clearly a “social construct.”

So discuss, and I’ll ask someone with keys to the website to moderate the discussion.  Here are some relevant quotes from Richard’s piece, but you should really read the whole thing before commenting. See you in the U.S.!

I believe that, as non-religious rationalists, we should be prepared to discuss such questions using logic and reason. We shouldn’t compel people to enter into painful hypothetical discussions, but nor should we conduct witch-hunts against people who are prepared to do so. I fear that some of us may be erecting taboo zones, where emotion is king and where reason is not admitted; where reason, in some cases, is actively intimidated and dare not show its face. And I regret this. We get enough of that from the religious faithful. Wouldn’t it be a pity if we became seduced by a different sort of sacred, the sacred of the emotional taboo zone?

. . . I hope I have said enough above to justify my belief that rationalists like us should be free to follow moral philosophic questions without emotion swooping in to cut off all discussion, however hypothetical. I’ve listed cannibalism, trapped miners, transplant donors, aborted poets, circumcision, Israel and Palestine, all examples of no-go zones, taboo areas where reason may fear to tread because emotion is king. Broken noses are not in that taboo zone. Rape is. So is pedophilia. They should not be, in my opinion. Nor should anything else.

I didn’t know quite how deeply those two sensitive issues had infiltrated the taboo zone. I know now, with a vengeance. I really do care passionately about reason and logic. I think dispassionate logic and reason should not be banned from entering into discussion of cannibalism or trapped miners. And I was distressed to see that rape and pedophilia were also becoming taboo zones; no-go areas, off limits to reason and logic.

. . . Nothing should be off limits to discussion. No, let me amend that. If you think some things should be off limits, let’s sit down together and discuss that proposition itself. Let’s not just insult each other and cut off all discussion because we rationalists have somehow wandered into a land where emotion is king. It is utterly deplorable that there are people, including in our atheist community, who suffer rape threats because of things they have said. And it is also deplorable that there are many people in the same atheist community who are literally afraid to think and speak freely, afraid to raise even hypothetical questions such as those I have mentioned in this article. They are afraid – and I promise you I am not exaggerating – of witch-hunts: hunts for latter day blasphemers by latter day Inquisitions and latter day incarnations of Orwell’s Thought Police.

By the way, I am one of those who has been afraid to discuss certain issues, cowed into silence for fear of being pilloried. I am ashamed of that, and the sole reason for my hesitation is that I am a bit of a coward: afraid that what happened to Richard could happen to me, and that my epidermis is not thick enough to take it. (Of course, I’m not nearly as prominent as he, so I shouldn’t worry so much.) And that’s all I’ll say about that.

The bonobo and the atheist-basher, part 2

August 3, 2014 • 6:30 am

I’ve now finished Frans de Waal’s book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, and my final evalution is what I said yesterday: it’s a decent disquisition on the evolutionary “roots” of human morality–roots discerned in behaviors like empathy, altruism, and concern for equity in our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. The book is useful reading for its eye-opening tales of ape “morality,” with the creatures evincing forms of compassion that we might not have expected.

Did I learn something from the book? Well, there are anecdotes about chimp compassion and altruism that are new to me, but I had already accepted the proposition that humans evolved an innate set of moral “rules” and emotions based on our millions of years of living in small groups of hunter-gatherers. It’s not at all hard to believe that natural selection would mold not just behaviors, but emotions (which of course underlie many such behaviors) that would impel us to take care of others, and to be better to those who behave better, while punishing “free-riders” and miscreants. And it’s not news to me that other primate groups have “proto-morality,” though it might be to others who haven’t read de Waal’s other books.

I disagree, though, that the behaviors and genes that make chimps and humans compassionate to “in-group” members are homologous–that they are genes inherited from our common ancestors. As I learned at a recent meeting in Oakland University, primate “morality” does not map neatly onto primate phylogeny. Orangutans, for instance, don’t show the sense of equity demonstrated by capuchin monkeys, even though orangs are more closely related to us than are capuchins.

It seems likely, at least to me, that natural selection independently molds behaviors based on how a species lives: orangs are solitary, capuchins gregarious. And other species, distant from us, show behaviors that look altruistic (whales, dolphins, dogs, and so on). So if we’re innately solicitous to members of our in-group, as I think we are, this may have evolved in our own lineage after we separated from the chimp lineage, and chimp and human behaviors are convergent, not homologous. This is supported by the very different forms of altruism and caring shown by bonobos vs. chimps, who diverged only about 1-2 million years ago, versus the 5-6 million years ago that our lineage diverged from that of both species of chimps. Social behavior is evolutionarily malleable. We may be able to learn about the evolution of altruism and cooperation in chimps by studying them, but not necessarily learn much about the evolutionary basis of morality in our own species. Remember that we did not descend from modern chimps or bonobos, but from common ancestors whose social system may have differed from all of ours.

What I learned most forcefully, though, was de Waal’s strong animus against “neo-atheists,” which he appears to define as atheists who actually criticize religion in a public or passionate manner. He sees that as an unseemly disturbance of people’s private behaviors, as an exercise in futility (“religion will always be with us”), and an unnecessary diversion from humanism, which he sees as the “right” way to effect change.  de Waal, apparently, can decry the foolish beliefs of religion but almost never mentions the harm it continues to do to the world. Indeed, he sees even the morality of nonbelievers as being based on that of their religious forbears. I deny that. I come from a long line of people who barely believed in God, and most of my moral education has been secular. That’s just an anecdote, of course, but time will eventually tell. Whatever “moral” influence religion exerts on nonbelievers (and de Waal claims, rightly, that religion is not a source of morality but can help perpetuate it), will wane as society becomes more secular. If you want to say that Danes and Swedes, though largely nonbelievers, are still moral because of their Christian ancestors whose ethos remains in their society, all your work is before you. For humans were, I think, moral long before they were religious.

At any rate, de Waal’s continual dissing of atheists may sit well with the public, but it detracts from the message of his book. After all, atheists largely stand with him on the source of morality. It is the religious people who make the claim that morality comes from God, and that religion is largely a moral enterprise. Why, then, de Waal’s obsession with running down people like Hitchens, Dawkins, and Sam Harris (I also get a swipe)? Who knows?

Things get pretty bad in the book’s last section, itself called “the bonobo and the atheist”. In the last few pages, de Waal imagines what a smart and loquacious bonobo would tell an atheist. It’s the usual blather: religion is with us, tread gently, be an “advocate” rather than a “protester,” and so on. It’s condescending, especially putting de Waal’s own sentiments in the mouths of a bonobo. If a smart bonobo really could talk to an atheist, it would probably say, “Give me some bananas, you heathen!”

Is the book worth buying and reading if you’ve read de Waal’s other works? My final judgement is “no.” de Waal’s earlier books have the same message without the annoying and superfluous atheist-bashing. The book is curiously disconnected and could have used considerable tightening. It is also infused with a kind of hubris that may be more detectable if you’re a scientist, for it’s clear to one in the field  how de Waal holds himself up as the paragon of the insightful and middle-of-the-road scientist, unswayed by extremists about human nature, and a forger of the reigning “consensus” view about human nature. That, too, I found annoying, especially because he takes others to task so often. de Waal has a very high opinion of himself.

But if you want to read nice anecdotes about bonobos, be my guest.  And do remember that my reaction may be conditioned by de Waal’s continually use of what I see as misguided arguments to attack my own form of nonbelief. But, of course, he’s an unbeliever, too! There is fertile material here for a sociologist: why do some atheists love to attack other atheists more than the religious beliefs that all atheists reject?

I close with two quotes from the book that got my dander up. The first is de Waal’s reaction to the television exchange between conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly and David Silverman (president of  the American Atheists); it’s the exchange in which O’Reilly infamously said that the tides could be explained only by God.  But de Waal also sees problems on the atheist side.

(pp. 88-89) All I get out of such exchanges is the confirmation that believers will say anything to defend their faith and that some atheists have turned evangelical. Nothing new about the first, but atheists’ zeal keeps surprising me. Why “sleep furiously” unless there are inner demons to be kept at bay. [JAC: in another place, de Waal imputes the zeal of “neo-atheists” to earlier trauma!] In the same way that firefighters are sometimes stealth arsonists  and homophobes closet homosexuals, do some atheists secretly long for the certitude of religion? Take Christopher Hitchens, the late British author of God is not Great. Hitchens was outraged by the dogmatism of religion, yet he himself had moved from Marxism (he was a Trotskyist) to Greek Orthodox Christianity, then to American Neo-Conservatism, followed by an “antitheist” stance that blamed all the worlds troubles on religion. Hitchens thus swung from the left to the right, from anti-Vietnam War to chneerleader of the Iraq War, and for pro to contra God. He ended up favoring Dick Cheney over Mother Teresa.

Some people crave dogma, yet have trouble deciding on its contents. They become serial dogmatists. Hitchens admitted, “There are days when I mis my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb,” thus implying that he had entered a new stage of life marked by doubt and reflection. Yet, all he seemed to have done was sprout a fresh dogmatic limb.”

It is this brand of grandfatherly tut-tutting, equating new causes and changes of mind as “serial dogmatism,” that infuriates me about this book. de Waal, of course, is above it all: never wavering, never wedded to a “dogma” (what we would call a “conviction”)—because, of course, that would make him as bad as both the religionists and atheists he decries.

On the next page he talks about a debate at the Ciudad de los Ideas conference I went to in Puebla, Mexico: Hitchens and Sam Harris debated religion against Dinesh d’Souza and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach:

(p. 90.) The circus-like atmosphere left me with my original question about evangelical atheists. It’s easy to see why religions try to recruit believers. . . But why would atheists turn messianic? And why would they play off one religion against another? Harris, for example, biliously goes after the “low hanging fruit” of Islam, singling it out as the great enemy of the West. Throw in a few pictures of burqas, mention infibulation, and who will argue with your revulsion of religion? I am as sickened as the next person, but if Harris’s quest is to show that religion fails to promote morality, why pick on Islam? [JAC: Maybe because some religions are more harmful than others? And Harris hardly leaves other religions alone! Remember the title of his second book: Letter to a Christian Nation?] Isn’t genital mutilation common in the United States, too, where newborn males are routinely circumcised without their consent? We surely don’t need to go all the way to Afghanistan to findf valleys in the moral landscape.”

Note the inflammatory language (“biliously,” “low hanging fruit”) as well as the willfully ignorant claim that all religious harms are equal. If you had the choice to be a Muslim male circumcised at birth or a Muslim female subject to genital mutilation, is it six of one, half-dozen of the other? If you think so, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel. Is Islam no worse than Quakerism? Give me a break. Perhaps the lowest-hanging fruit is the most poisonous fruit, as it was in the Garden of Eden. It is this painting (or rather tarring) atheism with a broad brush, this deliberate mischaracterization of its “militant” opponents, and the deliberate avoidance of New Atheist arguments, that makes de Waal seem less of a scientist and more of a sophist.

But the chimp stories are good, and de Waal’s speculations about the source of morality are worth pondering.

 

 

The bonobo and the atheist-basher: Frans de Waal disses atheism

August 2, 2014 • 5:41 am

I’m not sure I want to provide a full, free-standing review of Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist, but I can give some excerpts and thoughts, especially because I’m four-fifths of the way through the book. But unless it changes drastically in the last 40 pages, I think I’m on pretty good ground in saying that while the book is interesting, and has some good stuff on animal behavior, not much of it is new (having been covered in de Waal’s previous books). What is new–his repeated attacks on atheism–are jarring, inaccurate, and devalue the book considerably, at least to me.

The strange thing about the book is its lack of a coherent message. Much of it consists of anecdotes about and experiments on primates and other vertebrates, showing that these species have a rudimentary “morality”– that is, they show evidence of caring for strangers, empathy, a sense of fairness, and other aspects of what humans think of as ethical behavior. His point, which is a good one, is that our “innate” feelings of morality and empathy don’t come just from human culture, but are also genetically rooted in our ancestors.  Considering actions that look as if they’re motivated by morality occur in our relatives, as in chimps caring for unrelated chimps that are ill, de Waal argues that the genes behind these behaviors (if there are genes) are homologous: the same genes that cause similar behaviors and feelings in us.

That is, our morality is partly derived from our evolution in small bands of individuals who knew each other intimately. When that was the case, “reciprocal altruism” could evolve, and led to the kind of “innate” moral feelings that people like Francis Collins think can come only from God.  de Waal, admirably, wants to dispel the notion that only religion can make us moral. (He’s an atheist, but was raised as a pretty pious Catholic.)  And he’s not wedded to a purely evolutionary explanation, either, recognizing (as Paul Bloom and Jon Haidt have as well) that human culture acts to both tame and filter out the more inimical behaviors that evolved to keep primate groups in harmony.

Some of the best parts of the book are de Waal’s description of animal behavior in both zoos (he works at Yerkes Primate Center in Georgia) and the wild. With his evolutionary background, he’s one of the best people to raise the evolutionary implications of the behaviors he sees at work every day. For this perspective the book is worth reading.

What is strange about the book , however, is its recurrent focus on atheism, or rather,its  persistent denigration of atheism.  While it’s perfectly proper, given de Waal’s desire to debunk the notion that morality must come from religion, for him to question religious “morality” (he doesn’t do that, by the way), it’s not at all obvious why he has to come down repeatedly–and hard–on atheism. It’s not as if atheism claims that morality comes from the divine. Indeed, most of us, I think, would agree with de Waal: morality comes from some secular combination of evolution and learning, the latter often based on rational consideration.

Nevertheless, the tone of the book is marred by not only the constant dissing of atheism and de Waal’s perception that it’s like religion, but also by his assertion that everyone but he misperceived the nature of animals–mostly seeing it as innately bad. It was not until de Waal came  alone, he implies, that the scales fell from everyone’s eyes and behavioral biologists realize that social species have a core of goodness.  (Of course he studies mostly social primates, precisely the group in which evolution would promote reciprocal altruism and the genetic trappings that could be the nucleus of our own morality. Tigers aren’t so “moral”!)

Further, but I’ll talk more about this tomorrow, de Waal often engages in the form of faitheism that is meant to level the ground between science and faith: pointing out the problems with science and scientists. At times, he almost seems to say that there is little difference between the two.

I am not a psychologist, but Anthony Grayling, in a critical review of this book in Prospect, has imputed some of de Waal’s softness toward religion to his Catholic upbringing. I can’t say I disagree, but that’s speculation.  It also seems that de Waal, like Steve Gould in Rocks of Ages, has a strong desire to be perceived as the “nice guy middle-of-the-roader,” neither hard-line atheist nor religious, but someone who sees more clearly than others, and is sympathetic to both sides. Of course, that’s the point of writing a book: to advance one’s own ideas, but the claim that de Waal saw more clearly than others, both in biology, morality, and the science/religious debates, comes all too often, and is annoying. It’s as if he’s standing on nobody’s shoulders, but reached the heights on his own.

The classic xkcd cartoon is apposite:

atheists

Here are a few of de Waal’s quotes on atheists:

(p. 84) “In my interactions with religious and non-religious people alike, I now draw a sharp line, based not on what exactly they believe but on their level of dogmatism.  I consider dogmatism a far greater threat then religion per se. I am particularly curious why anyone would drop religion while retaining the blinkers sometimes associated with it. Why are the “neo-atheists” of today so obsessed with God’s nonexsitence that they go on media rampages, wear T-shirts proclaiming their absence of belief, or call for militant atheism? What does atheism have to offer that’s worth fighting for?

As one philosopher put it, being a militant atheist is like “sleeping furiously?”

That last quote, by the way, was from an interview of Grayling in which he makes fun of the term “militant atheist.” His sentiments were precisely the opposite of de Waal’s.

But what has all the atheist-bashing to do with de Waal’s thesis: the roots of human morality? Exactly nothing. It is meant to show that he’s more perceptive than other people.

As for what atheism has to offer that makes us passionate about something like nonbelief, Grayling lays that out admirably in his own review, and I have little to add:

Well: here is the answer to de Waal’s question. Some atheists are evangelical because religious claims about the universe are false, because children are brainwashed into the ancient superstitions of their parents and communities, because many religious organisations and movements have been and continue to be anti-science, anti-gays and anti-women, because even if people are no longer burned at the stake they are still stoned to death for adultery, murdered for being “witches” or abortion doctors, blown up in large numbers for being Shias instead of Sunnis… One could go on at considerable length about the divisions, conflicts, falsehoods, coercions, disruptions, miseries and harm done by religion, though the list should be familiar; except, evidently, to de Waal.

Indeed, de Waal may say a few negative things about faith, but he has far more negative things to say about atheism. A good editor would have prevented these unseemly digressions, but of course atheist-bashing sells (after all, the title is “The Bonobo and the Atheist”). One is still forced to wonder why, exactly de Waal took this tack.

But that’s only one de Waal quote of many. Here’s another, distinguishing “private” versus “public” atheists (there’s no doubt which one de Waal favors:

(p. 87): Those in one group are uninterested in exploring their outlook and even less in defending it. These atheists think that both faith and its absence are private matters. They respect everyone’s choice, and feel no need to bother others with theirs. Those in the other group are vehemently opposed to religion and resent its privileges in society. THese atheists don’t think that disbelief should be locked up in the closet.  The speak of “coming out,” a terminology borrowed from the gay movement, as if their religiousness wa a forbidden secret that they now want to share with the world.

And another:

(pp. 18-19) Over the past few years, we have gotten used to a strident atheism arguing that God is not great (Christopher Hitchens), or is a delusion (Richard Dawkins). The neo-atheists call themsleves “brights,” thus implying that believers are not as bright. They have replaced St. Paul’s view that nonbelievers live in darkness by its opposite: non-believers are the only ones to have seen the light. Urging trust in science, they wish to root ethics in the naturalistic worldview. [JAC note: so does de Waal!] I do share their skepticism regarding religious institutions and their “primates”–popes, bishops, megapreachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis–but what good could possibly come from insulting the many people who find value in religion?

Hold on, Dr. de Waal: the atheists you mentioned, and most other “militant” ones, don’t spend their time insulting people, but questioning, and yes, sometimes insulting, their misguided and harmful beliefs. I find it hard to believe that de Waal doesn’t recognize the difference between insulting people and questioning their creeds. Believers may see no difference, but academics and rationalists like de Waal should!

But wait! There’s more!:

(p. 102) But all this talk about how science and religion are irreconcilable is not free of consequences. It tells religious people that, however open-minded and undogmatic they may be, worthy of science they are not.  They will first need to jettison all beliefs held dear. I find the neo-atheist insistence on purity curiously religious. All that is lacking is some sort of baptism ceremony at which believers publicly repent before they joint the “rational elite” of nonbelievers. Ironically, the last one to qualify would have been an Augstinian friar growing peas in a monastery garden.

He’s referring to Mendel, of course. de Waal is curiously unreflective here. Even “hard-liners” like me don’t say that one can’t do science and be religious at the same time. Apparently de Waal hasn’t pondered another kind of incompatibility: the incompatibility of discerning truth through reason, experiment, and observation versus through revelation, dogma, and wish-thinking–with the obvious differences in outcome of what one considers “truth.” There is one brand of science with general sets of (provisional) consensus truths in each subfield, while there are thousands of religions, all with different “truths,” many of them diametrically opposed. Presumably there is a reason why de Waal is an atheist, though he never tells us. (He says only that he left religion behind when he went to college.)

And one more:

(p. 204): To insist, as neo-atheists like to do, that all that matters is empirical reality, that facts trump beliefs, is to deny humanity its hopes and dreams. [JAC: Yeah, we just LOVE to do that!] We project our imagination onto everything around us.  We do so in the movies, theater, opera, literature, virtual reality, and yes, religion. Neo-atheists are like people standing around outside a movie theater telling us that Leonardo diCaprio didn’t really go down with the Titanic.  How shocking! Most of us are perfectly comfortable with this duality.

And there you have, it, ladies and gentlemen: the double indictment of scientism and the characterization of scientists as unimaginative, cold, robotic, and eager to destroy the life of romance and emotion.

What all this is doing in a book on the roots of human morality is beyond me. Not only does de Waal take gratuitious swipes at “neo-atheism,” but they’re incorrect.  His characterization of neo-atheism is completely off the mark.  Why de Waal feels compelled to drag this stuff into a book that is largely about chimps bespeaks a not-so-hidden agenda. Where it comes from eludes me; it lies in the real of psychology, psychiatry, and perhaps, as Grayling insists, in the realm of childhood indoctrination with Catholicism. But never mind. The stuff simply doesn’t belong in his book.

Tomorrow, if I can take it, I’ll discuss de Waal’s disquisition on the harms inherent in science.

 

 

 

 

The best argument for God? Really?

June 27, 2014 • 9:15 am

Either a reader called my attention to the articles discussed below, or I found them on my own; I am aged and forgetful. If someone pointed them out to me, my belated thanks. Both articles deal with what is claimed to be the best argument for God’s existence—one based on the existence of moral agents, i.e., us.

I’m always a sucker for “best arguments” arguments: they are a box that I cannot help but enter. So when I heard about a post on Jefferey Jay Lowder’s Patheos site The Secular Outpost that was written two years ago—a post called “The best argument for God’s Existence: The argument from moral agency”—I could not help but enter. Lowder, who examined a series of arguments for God back then, is the founder of one of the first atheist internet sites, Internet Infidels.

Lowder’s piece is really a summary of a longer (and much more confusing) paper by Philosopher Paul Draper, “Cosmic fine-tuning and terrestrial suffering: Parallel problems for naturalism and theism,” (reference and free download below), published in The American Philosophical Quarterly. I’ve read the longer one, and Lowder’s summary is accurate but much easier to read, so I’ll deal with that. If you want to read the original paper, you’re going to have to wade through stuff like this:

Screen shot 2014-06-27 at 6.45.32 AM

This is philosophy of religion, and I have to agree with Peter Boghossian that the bulk of work in that field (indeed, nearly all of it) is worthless. I am a fan of philosophy as a whole, or at least branches of it (especially the philosophy of science and ethical philosophy), and don’t think it’s worthless by any means, but I have no use for the philosophy of religion. Look at the above: the author is telling us that it’s likely that God, had he created the Universe, would have created a multiverse (that’s what Draper means by “many worlds”)! If you want a real laugh, go see why God would have been likely to create many universes. It’s garbage: pure mental masturbation. But such is the philosophy of religion, for it’s the philosophy of a nonexistent construct. It’s like a field called “the philosophy of fairies.”

But on to the “best argument for God”. Here’s how Draper’s argument goes, as summarized by Lowder:

1. There are moral agents in the world, i.e., us. By “moral agents,” Draper means that humans have a code of morality and can freely make moral choices.

2. A naturalistic theory of our origins is less likely to explain our status as moral agents than is the existence of God, who made us moral agents.

3. Moral agency requires moral responsibility.

4. To be morally responsible, one must have libertarian free will, that is, at any time one must be able to choose between moral actions and immoral or neutral ones.

5. Such libertarian free will is much more likely to exist under theism than under naturalism.

6. Therefore, moral agency is a strong argument for God.

Draper and Lowder drag the “fine tuning” argument into this issue, but it’s not necessary. Draper’s paper was written before physicists had provided a number of possible naturalistic solutions to the fine-tuning argument (see here or here, for instance), and, at any rate, even if you accept fine-tuning as an argument for God, it doesn’t do anything except make the “existence of moral agents” claim (#2 above) even less likely under naturalism. The argument for God based on morality remains the same.

I’m surprised that Lowder considers the argument above so good. This is what he says about it:

I’ve thought about this argument often since I first read Draper’s paper many years ago. I’m inclined to believe this is the strongest argument–by far–for theism I have ever read. It is surprising that so many theists continue to press boilerplate fine-tuning arguments when the argument from moral agency is so vastly superior (or, at least, so it seems to me). It is equally surprising that the argument has not garnered the critical attention of atheist philosophers.

But to me the argument falls down like a deck of cards, for its train of logic is weak. For one thing, it presumes that theism has at least a reasonable probability; that is, that there’s enough independent evidence for God that we can somehow put it into Bayesian probability statements with an appreciable value.  But I don’t see such evidence, and so one must begin without assuming the possibility of God, which is begging the question. The purpose of Draper’s argument is to show that the data ineluctably drive us to the conclusion that God exists, for naturalism simply can’t explain moral agency, free will, and the like. If it can, then I see no need to consider theism, even if we don’t fully understand the evolutionary or psychological origins of morality. God doesn’t become a reasonable alternative hypothesis until there’s at least a soupçon of evidence for God. We’ve had centuries to acquire that evidence, yet none has surfaced. One might as well argue that the existence of creative space aliens accounts for our status as moral agents.

Here’s my refutation of the above, point by point (I use the same numbers as above):

1. Yes, people do have a moral code and consider themselves moral agents.

2. There are perfectly adequate explanations for morality involving both evolution and secular reason. We have some evolutionary evidence, for instance, for rudiments of morality in our relatives like capuchin monkeys, as well as in less related species like dogs. And even rats were recently found to show a form of empathy toward caged fellow rats, releasing them from confinement even when they got no reward for so doing. In most of these cases the behaviors that look “protomoral” must have evolved independently, since they’re not highly correlated with the tree of evolutionary relatedness.

For example, capuchins show a sense of fairness, but chimpanzees do not, so protomorality probably evolved at least twice independently in primates. And it appears in animals that live socially, as one might expect if morality is partly an adaptation to facilitate living in groups. (Orangutans, for instance, which are solitary, show far fewer protosocial behaviors than do chimps or gorillas, who live in groups.)

Indeed, humans are not born with a fully-fledged code of morality. As Paul Bloom has shown, we are born with a sense of empathy only towards those with whom we’re familiar, like parents. We’re selfish towards strangers. Empathy and altruism towards unfamiliar individuals develop later—through learning. This is exactly what you’d expect if empathy was evolved through reciprocal altruism. In that case, you’d help out only those whom you recognize, for those would be members of your group (for millions of years, humans lived in small groups of a few dozen individuals at best). You would have evolved to be wary towards strangers, which is what we see in babies.

Further, there are secular explanations, based on reason, why humans would learn to develop a code of conduct if they live in groups and can recognize individuals. (Interestingly, rats are empathic only toward members of their own breed, and won’t free caged rats from other strains.) There are of course good reasons for people to develop ways of behaving that lead to a harmonious society. Those ways involve reason rather than genetic evolution, and can be passed on by cultural evolution. The immense increase in morality in our world in the last five centuries, documented in Steve Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, cannot depend on genetic evolution, simply because those changes have appeared so quicky. Recognition of the moral equality of gays, for instance, has happened largely within my own lifetime. Such changes must depend on cognition and learning. If they reflect God’s will, then God is pretty mercurial and changeable!

3 and 4.  I don’t believe in moral responsibility because, as Draper notes correctly (and contra Dennett and others), I think that true moral responsibility requires libertarian free will. How can we hold someone morally responsible for making the wrong choice if she had no ability to choose otherwise? So while I believe in holding people responsible for  their acts for purely social reasons (deterrence of others, rehabilitation, and removing miscreants from society), I don’t believe in holding them morally responsible.

The above depends on my belief that we don’t have libertarian free will. Nearly all rationalists agree that we lack that faculty, even Dan Dennett, who has confected his own meaning of “free will.” (How Dennett comports determinism with moral responsibility has always baffled me.)

5.  Since we don’t have libertarian free will, there’s no need to argue that it’s best explained by theism. If we had it, it would indeed be a kind of miracle, defying the laws of physics, and therefore would require a metaphysical explanation. (The only exception would be if “free will” is completely indeterminate, as through quantum-mechanical events in the brain. In such cases, given the configuration of molecules in our brain at a given moment, it might be possible that we could have behaved otherwise. But that doesn’t mean that we could have consciously chosen to behave otherwise. For even in those “quantum” cases behaviors can hardly result from “conscious choice,” and could never been seen as making us morally responsible.

6. Since morality has a perfectly reasonable naturalistic explanation (involving both evolution and rationality); and science is increasingly eroding the notion of libertarian free will (few now accept it except for theists); and because we have no independent evidence for a god, then the existence of “moral agents” is not even a remotely compelling argument for God, much less a knockout punch. If it is, then the existence of empathic rats is also a very powerful argument for God. For how do we know that rats aren’t made in God’s image?

QED

___________

Draper, P. 2004. Cosmic fine-tuning and terrestrial suffering: Parallel problems for naturalism and theism, Amer. Philosophical Quarterly 41:311-321

Cat adopts baby squirrel, proves existence of God

May 18, 2014 • 1:34 pm

The Dodo reports a mother cat, with kittens, who happens to have adopted (and suckled) a baby squirrel.  I have a feeling that I posted this before, but I realized that it bears on one of the arguments for God: the Argument from Altruism. This has been made by many, most prominently by Francis Collins, who maintains that our instinctive moral feelings (what he calls “the Moral Law”) can’t be explained by evolution. Nor can human altruism, which, in biological terms, is the sacrificing of your reproductive output for a nonrelated individual.  A soldier who falls on a grenade to save his buddies could be one example.

Now of course there are biological and social explanations for such altruism. The soldier, for example, could be acting on instinctive feelings to save those familiar to him, which, in our early evolution, might be related—a type of kin selection.  Or it could simply be enculturated (not divine!) compassion, which we exercise towards those we know. Soldiers are, after all, trained to regard the members of their platoon as “brothers.” In other words, such sacrifice may be highjacking our evolutionary “help our friends and relatives” detectors.

One example of such altruistic highjacking is this cat (see below) who has adopted a squirrel. That’s the ultimate form of altruism, because she’s not even helping a member of her own species, and cross-species fostering is not something that evolution could ever favor. What is likely going on is that the cat is suffused with maternal hormones like oxytocin, and the squirrel is simply riding that wave of hormones. (Human adoption, an altruistic behavior, is similar).

Here’s the video:

It’s labeled as the cat teaching the squirrel to purr, but I’m not sure that’s true. What do you think.

In fact, after I watched the movie and wrote the above, I then read the article, which makes one of my points:

So why (if you are a bird or cat or other animal…hmmm, even human) would you put time and energy into caring for another animal’s offspring? Isn’t the point to promote your own genes? It could be that the risk of not caring for a hungry face that presents itself to you is greater than the cost of doing some extra nursing or care, just in case that baby animal has some of your genetic material. Hormones may play a key role in this as well, as oxytocin produced in mother cats after kittens are born help make caregiving a priority– and this caregiving may extend to baby squirrels, if they are presented at the right time (while the mom is nursing her own babies). And we humans, well, we are very susceptible to cuteness, which could in part explain why we take pets into our homes (but that’s a topic for another time!).

In the end, though, my point is that if human altruism proves God because evolution supposedly can’t explain it, then so does this kind of cross-fostering. It can’t be explained directly by evolution, but Collins’s mistake is assuming that naturalism can’t explain it. It can, just like it can explain this cross-fostering.  So, of course, my title is sarcastic, but the point is that we can see “maladaptive” behaviors in humans and other species due to the highjacking of evolved—or, in our case, also culturally inculcated—feelings and instincts. The existence of behaviors that evolution can’t directly explain is no evidence for God.

h/t: Joyce