Gunning for God (16 page)

The New Atheists take a different tack of course. Richard Dawkins cites the work of Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, who suggests that morality is hard-wired into human nature very much as language appears to be.
⁷
In collaboration with Peter Singer, Hauser found that there is no real difference in the way in which people of different faiths respond to moral dilemmas.
⁸
Dawkins argues that this finding is evidence that we do not need God in order to be good — or evil.

However, the hard-wiring of morality into human nature is entirely consistent with the biblical view that human beings are created in the image of God as moral beings. For this would mean that all human beings possess an innate sense of morality, whether or not they actually believe in God — which is precisely what we find. In other words, Christianity supports the findings of Hauser’s research, but not the atheistic conclusions drawn from it. This argument — that the pool of common morality observed around the world in the most disparate ethnic groups is consistent with the existence of God — was presented long before Hauser’s work, by C. S Lewis in his seminal work
The Abolition of Man
.
⁹

However, there is a deeper consideration that diminishes the plausibility of Dawkins’ view, which comes to light when we ask how atheism proposes to ground the concepts of good and evil. Logically speaking, there is only a limited number of possible sources on which to base morality. Traditionally, in the West, at least, God has been the transcendent ultimate guarantor and source of morality. If there is no God, then we are left with raw nature and society, or a mixture of both to source morality. It is here that the problems begin.

First of all, there is widespread acknowledgment on all sides that it is very difficult to get a base for morality in nature. Albert Einstein, in a discussion on science and religion in Berlin in 1930, said that our sense of beauty and our religious instinct are: “tributary forms in helping the reasoning faculty towards its highest achievements. You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn round and speak of the scientific foundations of morality.” According to Einstein, therefore, science cannot form a base for morality: “Every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulae must fail.”
¹⁰

Richard Feynman, also a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, shared Einstein’s view: “Even the greatest forces and abilities don’t seem to carry any clear instructions on how to use them. As an example, the great accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behaviour has a kind of meaninglessness about it. The sciences do not directly teach good or bad.”
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Elsewhere he states: “Ethical values lie outside the scientific realm.”
¹²

Dawkins, also, has thought the same until recently: “It is pretty hard to defend absolute morals on anything other than religious grounds.” He has also admitted that you cannot get ethics from science: “Science has no methods for deciding what is ethical.”
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However, it would appear that Dawkins has been persuaded to change his mind on this issue by Sam Harris’s latest book,
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
.
¹⁴

Holmes Rolston points out:

Science has made us increasingly competent in knowledge and power, but it has also left us decreasingly confident about right and wrong. The evolutionary past has not been easy to connect with the ethical future. There is no obvious route from biology to ethics — despite the fact that here we are… The genesis of ethics is problematic.
¹⁵

DAVID HUME AND THE “IS TO OUGHT” PROBLEM

One of the main reasons why the genesis of ethics from biology (or indeed, from any other aspect of nature) is problematic was pointed out long ago by the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711—76). Here is the famous excerpt:

I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions,
is
, and
is not
, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an
ought
, or an
ought not
. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it should be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.

Hume here observes that authors on moral philosophy often advance arguments for what
ought
¹⁶
to be on the basis of factual statements about what
is
. They appear to derive imperative conclusions from indicative premises. According to Hume, this is just not possible.

Furthermore, in claiming that there was no rational basis for ethics in nature, Hume pointed out that, in the first place, nature tended to give conflicting signals and, secondly, and more importantly, to attempt to deduce ethics from nature was to commit a category mistake: observations of nature are first-order activities, whereas value-judgments are second-order; that is, they do not belong to the same category. In his opinion a statement was either true for logical reasons or empirical reasons, a disjunction commonly known as “Hume’s Fork”. Therefore, since he thought ethical statements could not be seen to be true for logical reasons, he held that they could only hold on the basis of experience. He thought, in fact, that sympathy was a key factor in human nature and that ethics depended on that sympathy. Hume thus sought in some way to ground ethics in human nature and psychology and so could be said to espouse a version of naturalism.
¹⁷
However, this does not succeed in avoiding the “is to ought” problem. He is still trying to get, as C. S. Lewis puts it, “a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premises in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible”.
¹⁸

It is important to state at this point that I am not suggesting that science cannot help us to make ethical judgments. For instance, knowing about how much pain animals feel can help shape judgments on animal testing. But the judgment is made on the basis of a prior moral conviction, that pain and misery is a bad thing. Science can tell us that if you put strychnine in your grandmother’s tea it will kill her. Science cannot tell you whether you ought or ought not to do so in order to get your hands on her property.

Sam Harris’s attempt to get moral values from science does not escape this problem. There are two main reasons for this. The first has to do with the meaning of science. In the English-speaking world the word “science” normally means “the natural sciences”. This usage contrasts with, for instance, the German usage of the parallel term “
Wissenschaft
”, which includes not only the natural sciences but also the humanities — history, languages, literature, philosophy, and theology. That is,
Wissenschaft
is much closer in meaning to the Latin term “
scientia
”, “knowledge”, from which the word “science” is derived. Harris, in an interview with
The Independent
,
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says that he is using “science” in the broader sense of “rational thought” — that is, in the sense conveyed by
Wissenschaft
. But if that is the case, then there is no problem in “deducing” morality from “science” since theology is a perfectly rational activity — although, of course, Harris cannot concede this and maintain his stance.

Harris then links another sleight of hand (or, rather, of mind) to this as follows: “We simply must stand somewhere. I am arguing that, in the moral sphere, it is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible misery for every one.”
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Thus Harris
begins
by assuming a
moral
conviction
then
brings his science to bear on deciding on whether a given situation conforms to it. That is a very different matter from what is implied by the subtitle of his book:
How Science Can Determine Human Values.
²¹

There is more to say. In his
New York Times
review of Harris, Kwame Anthony Appiah asks: “How do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn’t, then the premise of Harris’ all-we-need-is-science argument must have non-scientific origins.”
²²

Biologist P. Z. Myers elaborates:

I don’t think Harris’s criterion — that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals — is valid. We can’t. We can certainly use science to say
how
we can maximize well-being, once we define well-being… although even that might be a bit more slippery than he portrays it. Harris is smuggling in an unscientific prior in his category of well-being.
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Harris’s response to this is illuminating:

To use Myer’s formulation, we must smuggle in an “unscientific prior” to justify any branch of science. If this isn’t a problem for physics, why should it be a problem for a science of morality? Can we prove, without recourse to any prior assumptions, that our definition of “physics” is the right one? No, because our standards of proof will be built into any definition we provide.
²⁴

Quite so; but if the unscientific prior is a
moral
assumption, then Harris cannot claim to deduce morality from science. By the same token, we note that Harris cannot rule out the prior assumption of God.

Harris has not avoided Hume after all.

Nevertheless, such attempts to defy Hume have been and are constantly being made, particularly to try to find a pathway from biology to ethics. Historically, since the time of Darwin, these efforts have been made in essentially two waves. There was, first of all, the period of what has come to be thought of as traditional evolutionary ethics, now called “Social Darwinism”;
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although it was really developed by Herbert Spencer (1820—1903), whose explicit aim was to establish a “scientific” morality. The theory was characterized by a great confidence that evolution gave a direction to progress: evolution was progress and therefore could, in some sense, ground ethics as that kind of behaviour that advanced progress.
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The second “sociobiological” wave started in the middle of the last century, with the molecular biological revolution inaugurated by the discovery of DNA with all its implications for genetics and heredity. By contrast with the first wave, some at least of its major scientific promoters (though not all) insist that the new understanding of the mechanisms of inheritance leaves no room for any idea of progress in which to ground ethics. We shall discuss some of the implications of this below.

SOCIAL DARWINISM

Michael Ruse describes the essence of traditional evolutionary ethics succinctly: “One ferrets out the nature of the evolutionary process — the mechanism or cause of evolution — and then one transfers it to the human realm, arguing that that which holds as a matter of fact among organisms holds as a matter of obligations among humans.”
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Ruse himself points out the move from “is to ought” lies at the heart of the methodology of Social Darwinism — and yet it does not seem to trouble anybody: “traditional evolutionary ethicists seem to be supremely untroubled by charges of fallacious reasoning. They are even inclined to agree that the move from is to ought is fallacious:
^[28]
save only in this one case!”
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Ruse asks reasonably why they are so confident about making this move that David Hume claims is impossible. Could there be a missing premise? His answer is that there is indeed a missing premise: social Darwinians believe that evolution has a direction, that it spells progress, ever upward, ever onward, getting better and better. We see this attitude in Spencer, Haeckel, Fisher, and Julian Huxley. In that sense, they are humanists and regard human beings with their intellectual powers as evolution’s supreme product so far. For them human beings were very special and, because of their capacities, clearly superior to all non-human animals. Peter Singer might well have accused them of speciesism! Ruse sums up the position: “Evolution leads to good and to things of great value. Hence it is the source of our moral obligations.” Ruse is far from happy with the traditional view, and we shall look at his own take on the matter later.