The October issue of Scientific American has a short column by Michael Shermer on why Christian conservatives should accept Darwinian evolution. A longer statement of Shermer's arguments can be found in Chapter 8 of his new book Why Darwin Matters.
I agree with Shermer. In fact, much of what he says conforms with what I have written in Darwinian Conservatism and elsewhere. But in some ways, Shermer makes his points more clearly and concisely than I have.
As Shermer indicates, many American Christians accept evolution, and this includes those Catholics who follow the lead of Popes such as John Paul II who have endorsed the theory of evolution as true and as compatible with Christianity. And yet opinion surveys indicate that many American evangelical Christians and many conservative Republicans do not recognize the truth of evolution.
In the attempt to persuade these Christian conservatives to accept evolutionary science, Shermer makes seven kinds of arguments. I will summarize each of his arguments in my own words and adding a few points along the way.
His first argument is that Christians should accept evolution for the same reason that they accept any scientific theory--because it is true. The Bible says that God ordered the sun to "stand still" for a day to help Joshua win a battle (Joshua 10:10-15). This was cited by the Catholic church authorities who condemned Galileo's heliocentric theory as contrary to the Bible, which speaks of the sun as moving around the earth. But, of course, now all Christians see this as a misinterpretation of the Bible, because they accept the truth of the Copernican/Galilean theory of the solar system. So why shouldn't this apply to Darwin's theory as well?
His second argument is that the magnificence of God's creation does not depend on exactly how He exercised his creative activity. If He chose to act through natural evolutionary means, His work is still glorious. Darwin himself made this point when He spoke of the grandeur of God in creating one or few forms of life at the beginning and then impressing His laws onto matter so that the formative powers of nature could unfold by evolution.
Shermer's third argument is that Intelligent Design Theory and creationism present a demeaning view of God by conceiving of Him as being like us, but just more powerful and more intelligent. God is reduced to working like a human artisan who must employ whatever materials are available to make his product, just as a watchmaker makes a watch.
Shermer's fourth argument is that the Darwinian account of human morality supports traditional morality by showing how the human dispositions to cooperation, sympathy, reciprocity, and social bonding generally could have become part of evolved human nature. Far from subverting healthy morality, Darwinian science shows how it can be rooted in human nature.
Of course, human beings are naturally bad as well as naturally good, competitive as well as cooperative. Christians would explain this as a result of the Fall and original sin. But as his fifth argument, Shermer suggests that evolutionary theory can explain the negative side of our evolved nature as well as the positive side. Our species has evolved to be both altruistic and selfish, and much of our moral experience has to do with finding ways to overcome the conflicts this creates. Darwin speaks of the moral experience of regret or remorse: we follow some selfish impulse of the moment, only to discover later that this contradicts our social nature, and we regret what we have done, which gives rise to guilt and conscience.
Shermer goes on, as a sixth argument, to indicate how evolutionary theory explains the need for moral and religious codes to manage the conflicts in our evolved natures. We evolved in small bands in which the members had to cooperate with and trust one another in order to compete with those outside the band. Moral emotions, such as love, guilt, and shame evolved to enforce cooperation with one's family and friends. But this cooperative behavior did not extend beyond the band or tribe. We are naturally inclined to cooperate with our in-group but not with out-groups. This is manifest in the Old Testament, which teaches trust and cooperation within the community of Israelites, while also teaching brutal attacks on those outside the community. Gradually, the advantages of extended exchange and cooperation in ever wider circles allowed human beings to live in larger communities. The Christian morality of the New Testament promotes principles such as the Golden Rule to sustain such extended cooperation. But even Christian morality shows in-group/out-group distinctions--as in the depiction of the extermination of the forces of evil in apocalyptic war in the book of Revelation.
We have evolved for monogamous mating. But we have also evolved to have inclinations to opportunistic promiscuity. In the long run, infidelity is harmful because it promotes distrust and conflict. This explains why religious morality gives so much attention to condemning and punishing infidelity and adultery.
Of course, some people think they can cheat without being punished because they think they can lie successfully. But, Shermer notes, if we have evolved to be good liars, we have also evolved to be good lie detectors. And so the best way to persuade others that we are moral people is actually to be moral people!
Not only does Darwinian evolutionary theory support the moral and religious positions of Christian conservatism, Shermer indicates in his final argument, it also supports the economic and political thinking of conservatism. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection parallels Adam Smith's account of economic order as arising spontaneously from competitive markets. Like Darwin, Smith thought that human beings were both cooperative and competitive. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith laid out his account of the moral sentiments as rooted in the natural capacity for sympathy or fellow-feeling by which we share in the experiences of others. Darwin adopted this thinking for his account of the evolution of the moral sense. And yet Darwin also saw the selfish side of human nature, and this would support the Smithian idea of channelling the selfish motives of economic agents through free competition. Moreover, the very idea of economic order as arising spontaneously from free exchange without design by central planners follows the same logic as evolution by natural selection without design. Friedrich Hayek saw this parallel between Darwin and Smith. In fact, he believed that Darwin's insight into evolution by natural selection was simply an application to the biological world of what Darwin had learned from the Scottish moral philosophers about the spontaneous order of social evolution.
I would reinforce this last point by saying that a Darwinian view of human evolution supports a realist view of human beings as limited in both knowledge and virtue, which contrasts with the utopian view of human beings as perfectible. The belief in human perfectibility runs through the history of the Left from the French Revolution to the present. The belief in human imperfectibility runs through the history of conservatism from Adam Smith and Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek and Russell Kirk.
So there you have it--seven reasons why Christian conservatives should be Darwinians.
Shermer's column can be found here.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Adam Smith and the Neurology of Sympathy
In 1996, some Italian scientists studying the neural activity of macaque monkeys reported a remarkable discovery. They had been recording the neural activity in the premotor cortex of these monkeys whenever they engaged in a manual behavior such as picking up a raisin with their hands. Then one day, one of the scientists casually picked up a raisin with his own hand, and he was startled to notice that electrodes in the brain of the monkey were showing the same neural activity that appeared when the monkey picked up raisins. This scientific report claimed that there were "mirror neurons" in the brains of these monkeys--neurons that would fire when the monkey performed an action or when the monkey observed the same action performed by some other agent. Ever since then, research has confirmed the apparent existence of such neurons in various parts of the primate brain that suggest a neural basis for imitative learning and social understanding.
Research using brain imaging technology has shown that similar mechanisms exist in the human brain. Recent studies have uncovered a mirror system in the human brain that is more extensive and more complex than that found in other primates. Some areas of our brain become active both in response to our own actions and in response to sensory information about the same actions performed by others. This includes hearing actions or hearing language that resports such actions. If I hear someone eating candy, my brain will show activity in the same area that would be active if I were eating candy. Or if I hear a report of someone eating candy, the same brain area becomes active.
It has been suggested that these mirror systems might explain the capacity for empathy. And, indeed, it has been reported that people who score high on tests for empathy show a stronger activation of these mirror systems than people who scored low for empathy.
It seems possible, then, that our human capacity for "putting ourselves in someone else's shoes (or mind)" is literally just that. We rehearse mentally what another person is doing or experiencing by going through the same mental activity that we would have if we were ourselves doing or experiencing this.
This is what Adam Smith called "sympathy," or "fellow-feeling with any passion whatever," in the first chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In Darwinian Conservatism, I show how this underlies Smith's account of the moral sentiments, and how Charles Darwin adopted this in his biological acccount of morality. Our natural sociality, our natural capacity for imaginatively putting ourselves in the place of others, and our concern for judging how people appear to us as well as how we appear to others provide the natural basis for human morality and culture.
Now, if the research on "mirror neurons" is confirmed and deepened, this would sustain my argument about how morality and culture are rooted in human biological nature, because this would uncover the neural basis for such moral experience. Moreover, this could suggest an evolutionary pathway for human morality--the evolution of mirror systems in the primate brain could have brought about the emergence of human morality in the human brain.
Aristotle declared that human beings are by nature more political than the other political animals because by nature they have capacities for language and reason that allow them to organize communal life around shared conceptions of expediency and justice. Now we are seeing confirmation of Aristotle's biology of political animals by seeing how this political biology arises in the human brain's capacity to imaginatively project itself into the brains of others.
Research using brain imaging technology has shown that similar mechanisms exist in the human brain. Recent studies have uncovered a mirror system in the human brain that is more extensive and more complex than that found in other primates. Some areas of our brain become active both in response to our own actions and in response to sensory information about the same actions performed by others. This includes hearing actions or hearing language that resports such actions. If I hear someone eating candy, my brain will show activity in the same area that would be active if I were eating candy. Or if I hear a report of someone eating candy, the same brain area becomes active.
It has been suggested that these mirror systems might explain the capacity for empathy. And, indeed, it has been reported that people who score high on tests for empathy show a stronger activation of these mirror systems than people who scored low for empathy.
It seems possible, then, that our human capacity for "putting ourselves in someone else's shoes (or mind)" is literally just that. We rehearse mentally what another person is doing or experiencing by going through the same mental activity that we would have if we were ourselves doing or experiencing this.
This is what Adam Smith called "sympathy," or "fellow-feeling with any passion whatever," in the first chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In Darwinian Conservatism, I show how this underlies Smith's account of the moral sentiments, and how Charles Darwin adopted this in his biological acccount of morality. Our natural sociality, our natural capacity for imaginatively putting ourselves in the place of others, and our concern for judging how people appear to us as well as how we appear to others provide the natural basis for human morality and culture.
Now, if the research on "mirror neurons" is confirmed and deepened, this would sustain my argument about how morality and culture are rooted in human biological nature, because this would uncover the neural basis for such moral experience. Moreover, this could suggest an evolutionary pathway for human morality--the evolution of mirror systems in the primate brain could have brought about the emergence of human morality in the human brain.
Aristotle declared that human beings are by nature more political than the other political animals because by nature they have capacities for language and reason that allow them to organize communal life around shared conceptions of expediency and justice. Now we are seeing confirmation of Aristotle's biology of political animals by seeing how this political biology arises in the human brain's capacity to imaginatively project itself into the brains of others.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Darwinian Conservatism and Divine Command Theory
In the The American Conservative, Heather Mac Donald has expressed the frustrations of a "skeptical conservative" who cannot understand why so many American conservatives assume that morality and good citizenship require religious belief. Catholic conservative Michael Novak has written a response. This opens up a fundamental issue for conservatives.
In defense of Darwinian conservatism, I have argued that although religious belief can be helpful in reinforcing morality, it is not absolutely necessary, because ultimately our morality depends on a natural moral sense rooted in our evolved human nature. Religious conservatives like Carson Holloway and Peter Augustine Lawler have criticized me for not seeing how morality depends on religious belief.
I have defended my position as a Darwinian version of traditional natural law reasoning. Human moral experience is natural insofar as it arises from those natural inclinations that we can know by reason alone. Of course, that natural moral law can be taught by religion, but it can stand on its own natural ground even without religion. Darwin shows how that natural moral law could have arisen by natural evolution.
Michael Novak seems to agree with my view of natural law when he says it is "the law discovered by reason alone, without revelation," although revelation provides a helpful "short cut" to this natural law. Here then would seem to be common ground for all conservatives: morality can be known by natural experience alone because it is rooted in the natural moral sense, but religion can reinforce this moral law for believers.
And yet there is still a strong inclination among religious conservatives to a divine command theory of morality that drives much of the criticism of my Darwinian conservatism. The assumption of divine command reasoning is that moral obligation must be grounded in the commands of a good and loving God. If God did not exist, there could be no moral obligations.
One of the best statements of this divine command theory of morality is C. Stephen Evans' book Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford University Press, 2004). (A paperback edition of this book is being published this month.). Evans has a chapter criticizing my reasoning in Darwinian Natural Right as an example of "evolutionary naturalism." Evans endorses what he takes to be Kierkegaard's divine command morality as founded on the command of Jesus to love our neighbors, understood as a universal and disinterested love of all human beings equally. Evans then criticizes my reasoning as flawed insofar as I don't acknowledge that all morality must be rooted in such a divine command.
Darwin sees a natural tribalism in human morality. We are inclined to be more cooperative with those close to us--relatives, friends, and fellow citizens--than to those far away. Human beings are naturally inclined to cooperate within groups so as to compete successfully with other groups. Darwin thinks a universal sympathy for humanity is possible, but only as an extension of social emotions cultivated first in small groups. He assumes that as we expand our social sympathies to embrace all of humanity, these sympathies become weaker as we move farther away from our inner circle of family, friends, and fellow citizens. And yet this extension of sympathy to embrace all of humanity is strong enough to support the Golden Rule as the foundation of morality. Still, the tribalism of morality can never be eliminated. Charity starts at home. And in war, we properly celebrate the virtuous courage of soldiers in killing the enemy.
Although Evans does not draw out the full implications of his view of universal love as a divine command, he suggests that this requires absolutely disinterested love for all human beings equally, which would require absolute pacifism (see pp. 319, 328 in his book). To favor our friends, relatives, and fellow citizens over strangers would violate this universal love commandment. To use violence against evil individuals would violate it. And to fight in war would certainly violate it. Such universal love might even require the abolition of private property and family life. Some kind of pacifist socialism would seem to be required. It is hard to see that many human beings could embrace this as morally acceptable.
Evans finds Gods commands in the Bible. But it is not clear that the Bible provides the clear moral teaching of universal love that Evans wants. God commanded Abraham to kill his son Isaac. Evans says that while God might have commanded human sacrifice in the past, we know that God cannot command that "today." He seems to assume that the love command of Jesus in the New Testament overrides the bloody commands of the God of the Old Testament. (The brutal commands of the Old Testament God include orders to slaughter innocent women and children as part of God's conquest of Canaan.) But even the New Testament concludes with the bloodiest book of the Bible--the Bible of Revelation with its vision of the apocalyptic battle of the saints against Satan at the end of history.
Evans criticizes my Darwinian arguments for the abolition of slavery and insists that the immorality of slavery arises only from its violating God's love command. But Evans says nothing about the fact that all the passages in the Bible on slavery endorse it, and thus the antebellum Christians in the American South were justified in believing that slavery was biblically sanctioned. (The recent book by Mark Noll on the theological debates surrounding the civil war tells this story well.)
As I have argued previously on this blog, the Bible lacks the authority, clarity, and reliability necessary for being a source of moral guidance. If the Bible reinforces morality, it is only because we pass it through our natural moral sense. We know that the biblical account of God ordering Abraham to kill his son must be somehow mistaken, because we know by natural moral experience that this is wrong. We know that the Bible's endorsement of slavery is mistaken, because, again, our natural moral sense condemns it. If we elevate the Golden Rule over other teachings in the Bible, its because we have arrived at the rule through natural experience. That experience also teaches us, however, that disinterested, universal love cannot be absolutely observed because we must favor family, friends, and fellow citizens over strangers. The Christian tradition of "just war" reasoning shows how our natural moral sense corrects the dangerous utopianism of a universal love ethic.
In defense of Darwinian conservatism, I have argued that although religious belief can be helpful in reinforcing morality, it is not absolutely necessary, because ultimately our morality depends on a natural moral sense rooted in our evolved human nature. Religious conservatives like Carson Holloway and Peter Augustine Lawler have criticized me for not seeing how morality depends on religious belief.
I have defended my position as a Darwinian version of traditional natural law reasoning. Human moral experience is natural insofar as it arises from those natural inclinations that we can know by reason alone. Of course, that natural moral law can be taught by religion, but it can stand on its own natural ground even without religion. Darwin shows how that natural moral law could have arisen by natural evolution.
Michael Novak seems to agree with my view of natural law when he says it is "the law discovered by reason alone, without revelation," although revelation provides a helpful "short cut" to this natural law. Here then would seem to be common ground for all conservatives: morality can be known by natural experience alone because it is rooted in the natural moral sense, but religion can reinforce this moral law for believers.
And yet there is still a strong inclination among religious conservatives to a divine command theory of morality that drives much of the criticism of my Darwinian conservatism. The assumption of divine command reasoning is that moral obligation must be grounded in the commands of a good and loving God. If God did not exist, there could be no moral obligations.
One of the best statements of this divine command theory of morality is C. Stephen Evans' book Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford University Press, 2004). (A paperback edition of this book is being published this month.). Evans has a chapter criticizing my reasoning in Darwinian Natural Right as an example of "evolutionary naturalism." Evans endorses what he takes to be Kierkegaard's divine command morality as founded on the command of Jesus to love our neighbors, understood as a universal and disinterested love of all human beings equally. Evans then criticizes my reasoning as flawed insofar as I don't acknowledge that all morality must be rooted in such a divine command.
Darwin sees a natural tribalism in human morality. We are inclined to be more cooperative with those close to us--relatives, friends, and fellow citizens--than to those far away. Human beings are naturally inclined to cooperate within groups so as to compete successfully with other groups. Darwin thinks a universal sympathy for humanity is possible, but only as an extension of social emotions cultivated first in small groups. He assumes that as we expand our social sympathies to embrace all of humanity, these sympathies become weaker as we move farther away from our inner circle of family, friends, and fellow citizens. And yet this extension of sympathy to embrace all of humanity is strong enough to support the Golden Rule as the foundation of morality. Still, the tribalism of morality can never be eliminated. Charity starts at home. And in war, we properly celebrate the virtuous courage of soldiers in killing the enemy.
Although Evans does not draw out the full implications of his view of universal love as a divine command, he suggests that this requires absolutely disinterested love for all human beings equally, which would require absolute pacifism (see pp. 319, 328 in his book). To favor our friends, relatives, and fellow citizens over strangers would violate this universal love commandment. To use violence against evil individuals would violate it. And to fight in war would certainly violate it. Such universal love might even require the abolition of private property and family life. Some kind of pacifist socialism would seem to be required. It is hard to see that many human beings could embrace this as morally acceptable.
Evans finds Gods commands in the Bible. But it is not clear that the Bible provides the clear moral teaching of universal love that Evans wants. God commanded Abraham to kill his son Isaac. Evans says that while God might have commanded human sacrifice in the past, we know that God cannot command that "today." He seems to assume that the love command of Jesus in the New Testament overrides the bloody commands of the God of the Old Testament. (The brutal commands of the Old Testament God include orders to slaughter innocent women and children as part of God's conquest of Canaan.) But even the New Testament concludes with the bloodiest book of the Bible--the Bible of Revelation with its vision of the apocalyptic battle of the saints against Satan at the end of history.
Evans criticizes my Darwinian arguments for the abolition of slavery and insists that the immorality of slavery arises only from its violating God's love command. But Evans says nothing about the fact that all the passages in the Bible on slavery endorse it, and thus the antebellum Christians in the American South were justified in believing that slavery was biblically sanctioned. (The recent book by Mark Noll on the theological debates surrounding the civil war tells this story well.)
As I have argued previously on this blog, the Bible lacks the authority, clarity, and reliability necessary for being a source of moral guidance. If the Bible reinforces morality, it is only because we pass it through our natural moral sense. We know that the biblical account of God ordering Abraham to kill his son must be somehow mistaken, because we know by natural moral experience that this is wrong. We know that the Bible's endorsement of slavery is mistaken, because, again, our natural moral sense condemns it. If we elevate the Golden Rule over other teachings in the Bible, its because we have arrived at the rule through natural experience. That experience also teaches us, however, that disinterested, universal love cannot be absolutely observed because we must favor family, friends, and fellow citizens over strangers. The Christian tradition of "just war" reasoning shows how our natural moral sense corrects the dangerous utopianism of a universal love ethic.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Biblical Darwinism
Biblical believers (like Carson Holloway and John West) often criticize Darwin for promoting a materialist view of morality that is morally corrupting. They argue that healthy morality requires biblical religion.
But I would say that in The Descent of Man, Darwin lays out a moral psychology that coincides with what one finds in the Bible.
Darwin sees moral progress in human history as a product of the complex interaction of innate sociality, cultural learning, rational reflection, and religious belief. "Ultimately, our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit" (Penguin Classics edition, p. 157).
In the primeval history of human beings, Darwin sees morality emerging through tribal conflict. Those tribes with more cooperative and courageous members would tend to prevail over those tribes that were less cooperative and courageous. Biblical believers criticize this as endorsing a crude morality of tribal brutality.
But the Old Testament confirms Darwin's history. Moses commands the people of Israel that in conquering the land of Canaan, they must put every town under "the curse of destruction"--every living thing must be killed (Deuteronomy 20:10-20). They must do this if they want to be successful in their conquest. They must cooperate among themselves to compete with enemy tribes with whom they cannot cooperate without being destroyed. Whenever Moses gives the reasons for obeying his laws, he explains that obeying these laws is the condition for the survival and reproduction of the people of Israel (Deuteronomy 30:15-20).
Of course, biblical believers might remind us that in the New Testament, Jesus offers a new moral law surpassing the Mosaic law. He teaches the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you (Matthew 7:12).
But Darwin quotes this verse from the Sermon on the Mount and endorses the Golden Rule as "the foundation of morality" (p. 151). He sees this as a moral conception that human beings had to learn over a long history of moral experience by which they learned to extend their humanitarian sympathy to ever wider communities. "As man advances in civlization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races" (p. 147).
This quotation from Darwin is the epigram for Robert Wright's book Nonzero. Wright argues that the moral and political history of human civilization is a history of cultural evolution in which human beings discover ways of expanding the range of tit-for-tat reciprocity to resolve "prisoner's dilemma" problems. Learning how to cooperate with those who are trustworthy while punishing those who are not trustworthy will be favored by both natural selection and cultural evolution.
Of course, Jesus' commands to "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies" would seem to subvert the moral logic of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which requires that cheaters be punished by retaliation. But generally Christians have read this non-resistance teaching as a teaching of perfection that is not attainable in earthly life, because most Christians understand the reasonableness of the Darwinian claim that the success of morality depends on punishing the immoral.
So it seems that in some respects, the moral teaching of the Bible is Darwinian.
But I would say that in The Descent of Man, Darwin lays out a moral psychology that coincides with what one finds in the Bible.
Darwin sees moral progress in human history as a product of the complex interaction of innate sociality, cultural learning, rational reflection, and religious belief. "Ultimately, our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit" (Penguin Classics edition, p. 157).
In the primeval history of human beings, Darwin sees morality emerging through tribal conflict. Those tribes with more cooperative and courageous members would tend to prevail over those tribes that were less cooperative and courageous. Biblical believers criticize this as endorsing a crude morality of tribal brutality.
But the Old Testament confirms Darwin's history. Moses commands the people of Israel that in conquering the land of Canaan, they must put every town under "the curse of destruction"--every living thing must be killed (Deuteronomy 20:10-20). They must do this if they want to be successful in their conquest. They must cooperate among themselves to compete with enemy tribes with whom they cannot cooperate without being destroyed. Whenever Moses gives the reasons for obeying his laws, he explains that obeying these laws is the condition for the survival and reproduction of the people of Israel (Deuteronomy 30:15-20).
Of course, biblical believers might remind us that in the New Testament, Jesus offers a new moral law surpassing the Mosaic law. He teaches the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you (Matthew 7:12).
But Darwin quotes this verse from the Sermon on the Mount and endorses the Golden Rule as "the foundation of morality" (p. 151). He sees this as a moral conception that human beings had to learn over a long history of moral experience by which they learned to extend their humanitarian sympathy to ever wider communities. "As man advances in civlization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races" (p. 147).
This quotation from Darwin is the epigram for Robert Wright's book Nonzero. Wright argues that the moral and political history of human civilization is a history of cultural evolution in which human beings discover ways of expanding the range of tit-for-tat reciprocity to resolve "prisoner's dilemma" problems. Learning how to cooperate with those who are trustworthy while punishing those who are not trustworthy will be favored by both natural selection and cultural evolution.
Of course, Jesus' commands to "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies" would seem to subvert the moral logic of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which requires that cheaters be punished by retaliation. But generally Christians have read this non-resistance teaching as a teaching of perfection that is not attainable in earthly life, because most Christians understand the reasonableness of the Darwinian claim that the success of morality depends on punishing the immoral.
So it seems that in some respects, the moral teaching of the Bible is Darwinian.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Has Anyone Seen Evolution?
Has anyone ever seen the evolution of a new species from ancestral species? This question points to the fundamental difficulty in Darwinian evolutionary theory, a difficulty stressed by creationists and intelligent design proponents. If the evolution of new species occurs usually over long periods of evolutionary history, then no human being has ever directly observed this history, and so the evolutionary scientist must spin out scenarios that are more or less plausible, but still open to doubt.
Darwin admitted that he could not lay out the step-by-step pathway of the evolution of species based on clearly observable evidence. In the concluding chapter of The Origin of Species, he wrote: "Any one whose disposition leads him to attach great weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory." Here he foresaw the rhetorical strategy of the intelligent design proponents who rely on negative argumentation--pointing to gaps in Darwinian science and then inferring that ID must be true by default.
Darwin recognized that the ID theorists were unable to offer a positive theory of their own that would explain exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer does his work. He asked: "Do they really believe that at innumberable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as full grown? And in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother's womb? Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation of every difficulty from those who believe in the mutability of species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence."
A few years ago, I lectured at Hillsdale College as part of a week-long lecture series on the intelligent design debate. After Michael Behe's lecture, some of us pressed him to explain exactly how the intelligent designer created the various "irreducibly complex" mechanisms that cannot--according to Behe--be explained as products of evolution by natural selection. He repeatedly refused to answer. But after a long night of drinking, he finally answered: "A puff of smoke!" A physicist in the group asked, Do you mean a suspension of the laws of physics? Yes, Behe answered. Well, that's not going to be very persuasive as a scientific answer. And clearly Behe and other ID proponents prefer not to answer the question.
Some Darwinian biologists would say that we have seen the evolution of new species--for example, in the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant studying Darwin's finches in the Galapagos Islands. There are 14 species of finches in the Galapagos. In 1977, there was a severe drought. As a result, finches with small beaks found it hard to eat the hard seeds that were left over from the drought. Finches with large beaks more adapted for eating these seeds were more likely to survive. So here, the Grants proclaimed, was natural selection in action!
The creationists and ID proponents say that this shows microevolution but not macroevolution. Natural selection was favoring some varieties of finches over other varieties. But this did not create a new species. In fact, the Grants saw that in 1983 the rainfall returned to normal, and the effect of natural selection was reversed. And yet they speculated that if there were at least one drought per decade over a 200 year period, this would push natural selection towards transforming the medium-sized ground finches into a new species. But the problem with this scenario is that it is only a speculative extrapolation that has not yet been observed.
Darwinian scientists insist that the difference between microevolution and macroevolution is only a difference in degree. As Darwin argued, every variety is an incipient species. At some point, the evolutionary change in a variety becomes so great that it becomes a new species. It's like the evolution of language. Every human language has various dialects. And eventually the cultural evolution of a dialect can turn it into a separate language, although it may be impossible to say when a dialect becomes a new language.
But then the Darwinians need to shift the burden of proof back on their critics. The species of finches found in the Galapagos are not found anywhere else in the world. But they resemble the finches on the mainland of South America. We might infer, therefore, that the ancestors of the Galapagos finches migrated from the mainland and then radiated out across the islands, so that eventually the evolution of varieties created new species. What's the alternative? If the intelligent designer did it, why did he specially create finch species unique to the Galapagos that resembled the finches on the mainland? Of course, we can't deny the possibility that this reflects some arbitrary choice of the designer that we can't explain. But Darwin thinks that his explanation is more inherently plausible.
As I have argued previously, none of this denies the work of the Creator in his original creation of the laws of nature--including evolutionary mechanisms--that could eventually bring about the evolutionary history studied by the Darwinian biologist. But it throws into doubt the assumption of special creationism and intelligent design theory that the Creator had to repeatedly intervene in the history of life to perform special miracles to create irreduciblly complex structures of life. Why do we have to assume that God was either unable or unwilling to employ the general laws of nature to carry out his creative plan?
I have written a post on the evolution of Darwin's finches in the Galapagos.
Darwin admitted that he could not lay out the step-by-step pathway of the evolution of species based on clearly observable evidence. In the concluding chapter of The Origin of Species, he wrote: "Any one whose disposition leads him to attach great weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory." Here he foresaw the rhetorical strategy of the intelligent design proponents who rely on negative argumentation--pointing to gaps in Darwinian science and then inferring that ID must be true by default.
Darwin recognized that the ID theorists were unable to offer a positive theory of their own that would explain exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer does his work. He asked: "Do they really believe that at innumberable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as full grown? And in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother's womb? Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation of every difficulty from those who believe in the mutability of species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence."
A few years ago, I lectured at Hillsdale College as part of a week-long lecture series on the intelligent design debate. After Michael Behe's lecture, some of us pressed him to explain exactly how the intelligent designer created the various "irreducibly complex" mechanisms that cannot--according to Behe--be explained as products of evolution by natural selection. He repeatedly refused to answer. But after a long night of drinking, he finally answered: "A puff of smoke!" A physicist in the group asked, Do you mean a suspension of the laws of physics? Yes, Behe answered. Well, that's not going to be very persuasive as a scientific answer. And clearly Behe and other ID proponents prefer not to answer the question.
Some Darwinian biologists would say that we have seen the evolution of new species--for example, in the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant studying Darwin's finches in the Galapagos Islands. There are 14 species of finches in the Galapagos. In 1977, there was a severe drought. As a result, finches with small beaks found it hard to eat the hard seeds that were left over from the drought. Finches with large beaks more adapted for eating these seeds were more likely to survive. So here, the Grants proclaimed, was natural selection in action!
The creationists and ID proponents say that this shows microevolution but not macroevolution. Natural selection was favoring some varieties of finches over other varieties. But this did not create a new species. In fact, the Grants saw that in 1983 the rainfall returned to normal, and the effect of natural selection was reversed. And yet they speculated that if there were at least one drought per decade over a 200 year period, this would push natural selection towards transforming the medium-sized ground finches into a new species. But the problem with this scenario is that it is only a speculative extrapolation that has not yet been observed.
Darwinian scientists insist that the difference between microevolution and macroevolution is only a difference in degree. As Darwin argued, every variety is an incipient species. At some point, the evolutionary change in a variety becomes so great that it becomes a new species. It's like the evolution of language. Every human language has various dialects. And eventually the cultural evolution of a dialect can turn it into a separate language, although it may be impossible to say when a dialect becomes a new language.
But then the Darwinians need to shift the burden of proof back on their critics. The species of finches found in the Galapagos are not found anywhere else in the world. But they resemble the finches on the mainland of South America. We might infer, therefore, that the ancestors of the Galapagos finches migrated from the mainland and then radiated out across the islands, so that eventually the evolution of varieties created new species. What's the alternative? If the intelligent designer did it, why did he specially create finch species unique to the Galapagos that resembled the finches on the mainland? Of course, we can't deny the possibility that this reflects some arbitrary choice of the designer that we can't explain. But Darwin thinks that his explanation is more inherently plausible.
As I have argued previously, none of this denies the work of the Creator in his original creation of the laws of nature--including evolutionary mechanisms--that could eventually bring about the evolutionary history studied by the Darwinian biologist. But it throws into doubt the assumption of special creationism and intelligent design theory that the Creator had to repeatedly intervene in the history of life to perform special miracles to create irreduciblly complex structures of life. Why do we have to assume that God was either unable or unwilling to employ the general laws of nature to carry out his creative plan?
I have written a post on the evolution of Darwin's finches in the Galapagos.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Peter Lawler's Review in MODERN AGE
Peter Augustine Lawler has written a review of Darwinian Conservatism in the summer 2006 issue of Modern Age. Unfortunately, that journal of conservative thought is not available online.
Last June 16th, I posted a reply to Lawler's most recent book--Stuck with Virtue. In that post, I anticipated the main ideas in Lawler's review.
In the review, I see again Lawler's ambivalence about Darwinian science--an ambivalence shown by many conservatives. He welcomes the way in which Darwinian science reinforces conservative ideas about traditional morality as rooted in human biological nature. He even rejects fundamentalist creationism as unreasonable. And yet he worries that Darwinism does not properly recognize the transcendent longings of the human soul for immortality as an escape from death.
As he says in his review, the "big issue" is "Darwin and death." Darwin's naturalistic view suggests that death is unavoidable. But human beings have a natural longing to live forever, a longing that is unique to human beings, a longing that leads them to religious belief in an afterlife.
As I indicate, Darwin recognizes that human beings really are unique in the living world in that they are the only animals that reflect on the meaning of life and death. And as I indicate in my books, I believe that the natural desire for religious understanding leads many human beings to long for some transcendent escape from earthly mortality.
But unlike Lawler, I don't see why all human beings must feel such transcendent longings. Some human beings will pursue an intellectual understanding of nature as the comprehensive order of the cosmos, and within that natural order, they will accept their mortality. For Lawler, this is a diversion from the inescapable longing for immortality and redemption from earthly life.
I don't see why conservatives have to agree on Lawler's Heideggerian existentialism and his claim that all human beings are "aliens" in the universe in that they desire a transcendent escape from death through immortality. Certainly, a skeptic like Friedrich Hayek would not agree with Lawler on this.
Darwinian science does not either support or refute Lawler's religious transcendentalism, which lies beyond the realm of natural human experience.
It's not clear to me why conservatives shouldn't embrace Darwinian conservatism as a position that all conservatives--religious believers as well as skeptics--can embrace
Last June 16th, I posted a reply to Lawler's most recent book--Stuck with Virtue. In that post, I anticipated the main ideas in Lawler's review.
In the review, I see again Lawler's ambivalence about Darwinian science--an ambivalence shown by many conservatives. He welcomes the way in which Darwinian science reinforces conservative ideas about traditional morality as rooted in human biological nature. He even rejects fundamentalist creationism as unreasonable. And yet he worries that Darwinism does not properly recognize the transcendent longings of the human soul for immortality as an escape from death.
As he says in his review, the "big issue" is "Darwin and death." Darwin's naturalistic view suggests that death is unavoidable. But human beings have a natural longing to live forever, a longing that is unique to human beings, a longing that leads them to religious belief in an afterlife.
As I indicate, Darwin recognizes that human beings really are unique in the living world in that they are the only animals that reflect on the meaning of life and death. And as I indicate in my books, I believe that the natural desire for religious understanding leads many human beings to long for some transcendent escape from earthly mortality.
But unlike Lawler, I don't see why all human beings must feel such transcendent longings. Some human beings will pursue an intellectual understanding of nature as the comprehensive order of the cosmos, and within that natural order, they will accept their mortality. For Lawler, this is a diversion from the inescapable longing for immortality and redemption from earthly life.
I don't see why conservatives have to agree on Lawler's Heideggerian existentialism and his claim that all human beings are "aliens" in the universe in that they desire a transcendent escape from death through immortality. Certainly, a skeptic like Friedrich Hayek would not agree with Lawler on this.
Darwinian science does not either support or refute Lawler's religious transcendentalism, which lies beyond the realm of natural human experience.
It's not clear to me why conservatives shouldn't embrace Darwinian conservatism as a position that all conservatives--religious believers as well as skeptics--can embrace
Monday, August 28, 2006
Was Charles Darwin Responsible for Adolf Hitler and the Columbine Killings?
To see the hysterical fear of Darwinian science, go here.
James Kennedy of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church has produced a television documentary entitled "Darwin's Deadly Legacy," which was shown on television stations across the United States over the past weekend. He has interviews with many of the leading proponents of creationism and intelligent design theory and critics of Darwinism, including Michael Behe, Ann Coulter, Ken Ham, Phillip Johnson, Carson Holloway, and Richard Weikart.
The documentary claims that Darwin was responsible for Adolf Hitler and for the killings at Columbine High School in 1999. The reasoning is that Darwin rejected all morality in teaching "survival of the fittest" in which the strong would destroy the weak. Hitler put this teaching into practice in his eugenics, his racism, and his anti-Semitism. The high school boys who killed 12 people and themselves at Columbine High School were also motivated by their belief in Darwinian science. One of them left a message on his website: "You know what I love? Natural selection! It's the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid organisms."
Darwin's responsibility for all this is supported by the interviews. Richard Weikart repeats the claim of his book FROM DARWIN TO HITLER that Hitler adopted Darwin's science. Ann Coulter says that Weikart's book opened her eyes to this ugly fact. And Carson Holloway speaks about how Darwin's science subverted traditional morality.
I have posted responses to Weikart, Coulter, and Holloway. I have pointed out that Darwin defended morality as rooted in a natural moral sense, and that he looked to the Golden Rule as the highest expression of this morality. Of course, none of this is mentioned by anyone in this documentary.
It is very disturbing that the people interviewed for this documentary would support such a crude and vulgar piece of propaganda.
James Kennedy of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church has produced a television documentary entitled "Darwin's Deadly Legacy," which was shown on television stations across the United States over the past weekend. He has interviews with many of the leading proponents of creationism and intelligent design theory and critics of Darwinism, including Michael Behe, Ann Coulter, Ken Ham, Phillip Johnson, Carson Holloway, and Richard Weikart.
The documentary claims that Darwin was responsible for Adolf Hitler and for the killings at Columbine High School in 1999. The reasoning is that Darwin rejected all morality in teaching "survival of the fittest" in which the strong would destroy the weak. Hitler put this teaching into practice in his eugenics, his racism, and his anti-Semitism. The high school boys who killed 12 people and themselves at Columbine High School were also motivated by their belief in Darwinian science. One of them left a message on his website: "You know what I love? Natural selection! It's the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid organisms."
Darwin's responsibility for all this is supported by the interviews. Richard Weikart repeats the claim of his book FROM DARWIN TO HITLER that Hitler adopted Darwin's science. Ann Coulter says that Weikart's book opened her eyes to this ugly fact. And Carson Holloway speaks about how Darwin's science subverted traditional morality.
I have posted responses to Weikart, Coulter, and Holloway. I have pointed out that Darwin defended morality as rooted in a natural moral sense, and that he looked to the Golden Rule as the highest expression of this morality. Of course, none of this is mentioned by anyone in this documentary.
It is very disturbing that the people interviewed for this documentary would support such a crude and vulgar piece of propaganda.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Biological Conservatism?
Many conservatives who object to Darwinian conservatism seem to be open to a biological conservatism that does not assume the truth of Darwinian evolution. I wonder whether this might offer a ground of compromise.
Although the proponents of intelligent design object to evolutionary explanations of the distant causes of human biological nature, they do not seem to object to biological explanations based on more proximate causes. To find common ground among conservatives for accepting a biologically rooted natural law, we could set aside the arguments from evolutionary biology and rely only on arguments from behavioral biology. Even if we cannot agree on the evolutionary causes of human nature, we might still agree on the proximate causes of human behavioral biology.
Evolutionary causes are difficult to judge because they often are not directly observable, and we have to infer evolutionary history from indirect evidence (such as the fossil record). By contrast, proximate causes are often open to direct observation. For example, we can measure fluctuations in hormonal levels and correlate that with behavioral changes.
So, for instance, we might get general agreement among most conservatives that the human propensities to sexual differences, sexual mating, familial bonding, and parental care are rooted in human biological nature, and this challenges the radical feminist's quest to establish androgynous behavior as the norm for human beings. Such propensities of human biology are directly observable. For example, we might study the differences in male and female brains that support differences in male and female behavior. Some of us would see this as a product of Darwinian evolution. But others would see it as the work of the intelligent designer. And yet we could agree on the observable proximate causes of human sexual biology.
Conservatives such as Harvey Mansfield, Peter Lawler, Carson Holloway, and John West all seem to agree with me that there are natural norms for human conduct rooted in human biological nature, even as they disagree with me about the evolutionary causes of this biological nature. Holloway can accept the fact of evolution by natural selection. He even asserts that "religious believers can accept that the physical and even the emotional and moral constitution of human beings has been shaped by natural selection." But where Holloway departs from my Darwinian conservatism is that he believes morality cannot be secure if it is not founded on a "religiously-informed cosmic teleology." So while Holloway might accept the Darwinian account of human evolution as true, he would want to see this evolutionary history as guided by a divine intelligence directing it to some cosmic purpose. In fact, theistic evolutionists believe that Darwinian evolution is compatible with a religious belief in God as the ultimate source of evolutionary order.
Those like John West won't concede this much to Darwinian science. They insist that the intelligent designer could not, or would not, employ evolutionary mechanisms to execute his divine purpose. But even West would say that the observable biological nature of human beings supports a biologically grounded natural law in which natural human desires become normative because they manifest the moral will of God.
In a way, Holloway and West fundamentally agree with me. We all agree in that we are biological conservatives, because we believe that human biological nature supports conservative principles such as traditional morality, family life, property, and limited government.
We disagree, however, about the Darwinian basis of biology. My biology is completely Darwinian. Holloway's biology is partially Darwinian. West's biology is completely anti-Darwinian.
I argue that for a biologically based conservative morality, Darwinian biology is sufficient in providing an immanent teleology. But Holloway and West argue that this is not sufficient. No healthy morality can survive, they believe, without a religiously-grounded cosmic teleology. Holloway provides that cosmic teleology by adopting the position of theisitic evolution. West provides that cosmic teleology by adopting the position of intelligent design theory that denies Darwinian evolution completely.
Some of this might come up at the APSA panel in Philadelphia with me, Holloway, and West as participants.
Although the proponents of intelligent design object to evolutionary explanations of the distant causes of human biological nature, they do not seem to object to biological explanations based on more proximate causes. To find common ground among conservatives for accepting a biologically rooted natural law, we could set aside the arguments from evolutionary biology and rely only on arguments from behavioral biology. Even if we cannot agree on the evolutionary causes of human nature, we might still agree on the proximate causes of human behavioral biology.
Evolutionary causes are difficult to judge because they often are not directly observable, and we have to infer evolutionary history from indirect evidence (such as the fossil record). By contrast, proximate causes are often open to direct observation. For example, we can measure fluctuations in hormonal levels and correlate that with behavioral changes.
So, for instance, we might get general agreement among most conservatives that the human propensities to sexual differences, sexual mating, familial bonding, and parental care are rooted in human biological nature, and this challenges the radical feminist's quest to establish androgynous behavior as the norm for human beings. Such propensities of human biology are directly observable. For example, we might study the differences in male and female brains that support differences in male and female behavior. Some of us would see this as a product of Darwinian evolution. But others would see it as the work of the intelligent designer. And yet we could agree on the observable proximate causes of human sexual biology.
Conservatives such as Harvey Mansfield, Peter Lawler, Carson Holloway, and John West all seem to agree with me that there are natural norms for human conduct rooted in human biological nature, even as they disagree with me about the evolutionary causes of this biological nature. Holloway can accept the fact of evolution by natural selection. He even asserts that "religious believers can accept that the physical and even the emotional and moral constitution of human beings has been shaped by natural selection." But where Holloway departs from my Darwinian conservatism is that he believes morality cannot be secure if it is not founded on a "religiously-informed cosmic teleology." So while Holloway might accept the Darwinian account of human evolution as true, he would want to see this evolutionary history as guided by a divine intelligence directing it to some cosmic purpose. In fact, theistic evolutionists believe that Darwinian evolution is compatible with a religious belief in God as the ultimate source of evolutionary order.
Those like John West won't concede this much to Darwinian science. They insist that the intelligent designer could not, or would not, employ evolutionary mechanisms to execute his divine purpose. But even West would say that the observable biological nature of human beings supports a biologically grounded natural law in which natural human desires become normative because they manifest the moral will of God.
In a way, Holloway and West fundamentally agree with me. We all agree in that we are biological conservatives, because we believe that human biological nature supports conservative principles such as traditional morality, family life, property, and limited government.
We disagree, however, about the Darwinian basis of biology. My biology is completely Darwinian. Holloway's biology is partially Darwinian. West's biology is completely anti-Darwinian.
I argue that for a biologically based conservative morality, Darwinian biology is sufficient in providing an immanent teleology. But Holloway and West argue that this is not sufficient. No healthy morality can survive, they believe, without a religiously-grounded cosmic teleology. Holloway provides that cosmic teleology by adopting the position of theisitic evolution. West provides that cosmic teleology by adopting the position of intelligent design theory that denies Darwinian evolution completely.
Some of this might come up at the APSA panel in Philadelphia with me, Holloway, and West as participants.
Monday, August 21, 2006
The Evasive Rhetoric of NCSE
The National Center for Science Education is the leading organization in the United States that defends the teaching of evolution in public school biology classes against creationists and proponents of intelligent design. I agree with the NCSE position that the evidence and arguments for the theory of evolution support this as strongly as any theory in science. I also agree that both young-earth creationism and intelligent design theory lack the support that would justify treating them as a plausible scientific theory.
I disagree with NCSE, however, in that I see nothing wrong with allowing students to study this debate and decide for themselves whether the weight of the evidence and arguments favor evolution over creationism and intelligent design. Although I believe that evolution can be compatible with religious belief, because it is quite reasonable to be a theistic evolutionist, I understand that some people who interpret the Genesis story of creation as a literal six-day creation cannot accept Darwinian evolution. So why shouldn't students with creationist beliefs be permitted to at least discuss this in a biology class? After all, Darwin himself framed his theory as an alternative to the theory of "special creation." So if students were reading Darwin, they could examine his reasoning and consider the implications for biblical religion.
The folks at NCSE are horrorified by my proposal. They insist that both creationism and intelligent design are positions of religious faith that have no place in a science class, because we need to keep religion and science clearly separated.
But in taking this position, NCSE has to employ an evasive rhetoric. On the one hand, they insist that the Darwinian theory of evolution is not contrary to religious faith. On the other hand, they implicitly concede that the theory of evolution really does deny some kinds of religious faith--such as the biblical literalist faith in a six-day creation.
This evasive rhetoric can be seen in the latest "evolution education update" at the NCSE website. They quote from Lawrence Krauss's New York Times op-ed column about the recent state school board elections in Kansas. According to Krauss, "the battle is not against faith, but against ignorance." Teaching the truth of evolution is simply a matter of overcoming ignorance, and this does not deny religious faith at all. But then in the story about the SCIENCE magazine article about "the public acceptance of evolution," it is noted that a substantial portion of the American public does not accept the idea that human beings developed from other animal species. The explanation for this is that they believe in a literal six-day creation by God, in which God created human beings separately. But here it is clear that there really is a conflict between the creationist faith and the theory of evolution. Biblical literalists cannot believe in human evolution by natural means from other animal species without denying their version of biblical faith. So here, contrary to the rhetoric of NCSE, the battle is against faith, not just ignorance.
The fundamental problem is the naive assumption that science and religion can be kept absolutely separated. It seems clear to me that while Darwinian science is compatible with some kinds of religious belief, it denies a biblical literalist belief in special creation. To refuse to face up to this problem in the biology classroom is dishonest and evasive.
I disagree with NCSE, however, in that I see nothing wrong with allowing students to study this debate and decide for themselves whether the weight of the evidence and arguments favor evolution over creationism and intelligent design. Although I believe that evolution can be compatible with religious belief, because it is quite reasonable to be a theistic evolutionist, I understand that some people who interpret the Genesis story of creation as a literal six-day creation cannot accept Darwinian evolution. So why shouldn't students with creationist beliefs be permitted to at least discuss this in a biology class? After all, Darwin himself framed his theory as an alternative to the theory of "special creation." So if students were reading Darwin, they could examine his reasoning and consider the implications for biblical religion.
The folks at NCSE are horrorified by my proposal. They insist that both creationism and intelligent design are positions of religious faith that have no place in a science class, because we need to keep religion and science clearly separated.
But in taking this position, NCSE has to employ an evasive rhetoric. On the one hand, they insist that the Darwinian theory of evolution is not contrary to religious faith. On the other hand, they implicitly concede that the theory of evolution really does deny some kinds of religious faith--such as the biblical literalist faith in a six-day creation.
This evasive rhetoric can be seen in the latest "evolution education update" at the NCSE website. They quote from Lawrence Krauss's New York Times op-ed column about the recent state school board elections in Kansas. According to Krauss, "the battle is not against faith, but against ignorance." Teaching the truth of evolution is simply a matter of overcoming ignorance, and this does not deny religious faith at all. But then in the story about the SCIENCE magazine article about "the public acceptance of evolution," it is noted that a substantial portion of the American public does not accept the idea that human beings developed from other animal species. The explanation for this is that they believe in a literal six-day creation by God, in which God created human beings separately. But here it is clear that there really is a conflict between the creationist faith and the theory of evolution. Biblical literalists cannot believe in human evolution by natural means from other animal species without denying their version of biblical faith. So here, contrary to the rhetoric of NCSE, the battle is against faith, not just ignorance.
The fundamental problem is the naive assumption that science and religion can be kept absolutely separated. It seems clear to me that while Darwinian science is compatible with some kinds of religious belief, it denies a biblical literalist belief in special creation. To refuse to face up to this problem in the biology classroom is dishonest and evasive.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Darwinian Liberal Education
We should all know what's wrong with higher education today. Teaching and research have become so specialized, fragmented, and incoherent that we cannot see that unity of knowledge necessary for sustaining general or liberal education. To renew the tradition of the liberal arts, we need a new unifying framework of thought. As far as I can tell, there is today only one plausible source for such a common ground of knowledge, and that is Darwinian evolutionary biology.
I began to move towards this conclusion as an undergraduate student at the University of Dallas in the late 1960s. My youthful excitement about philosophy was stirred by Aristotle's declaration that all human beings by nature desire to understand, a desire tht leads natural philosophers to search for the ultimate causes or reasons for all things. Fascinated by Aristotle's comprehensive investigation of nature and human nature, I noticed that much of his writing was in biology, and that even his moral and political works assumed a biological understanding of human nature. So I wondered whether Aristotle's biological naturalism could be compatible somehow with modern Darwinian biology, and whether this might support a general study of human life within the natural causal order of the whole.
The aim of liberal education is to use all the intellectual disciplines to probe how the complex interaction of natural human propensities, cultural traditions, and individual choices shapes the course of human experience within the natural world. Darwinian theory provides a general conceptual framework for such liberal learning grounded in the scientific study of genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and cognitive judgement.
This Darwinian view of liberal education has guided my teaching. At Northern Illinois University, I helped to organize "Politics and the Life Sciences" as a field of study at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Department of Political Science. Some of the courses in the program are cross-listed as biology courses. So my undergraduate courses typically enroll a large number of students majoring in biology along with others majoring in the social sciences and humanities. My graduate students apply Darwinian reasoning to issues in political philosophy and other areas of political science. All the students see how liberal learning at its best brings together ideas and methods from all the intellectual disciplines to illuminate the deepest questions of human life and its position in the universe.
At the core of my thinking is the idea of human nature. In today's academic world, it is common for postmodernist relativists to assert tht liberal education cannot be directed to the study of human nature, because the idea of human nature is an arbitrary social construction. But I believe that there really is a universal human nature that is constituted by at least twenty natural desires that manifest themselves throughout history in every human society, because these desires belong to the evolved nature of the human species.
These natural desires direct human behavior into regular patterns. Men and women will marry and form families. Mothers will care for their children. Young males will compete for mates and status. Societies will organize themselves as male dominance hierarchies. Competing societies will go to war. And human beings will use language and other symbols to try to figure out what it all means.
A broader model of this kind of Darwinian liberal education is David Sloan Wilson's Evolutionary Studies Program (EvoS) at Binghamton University. The website for the program can be found here. This is an integrated curriculum with a required introductory course "Evolution for Everyone" and a list of courses across the university from which students must earn a minimum number of credits. Wilson teaches "Evolution for Everyone" as the course in which all students are introduced to the central concepts of evolutionary theory as well as some illustrative application of those concepts to various fields of study. He emphasizes the application of evolutionary ideas to human nature.
Over 50 faculty members representing 15 departments are involved in the program. As a result, both faculty and students from across the university in many different departments are brought together with Darwinian reasoning as their common language to talk about questions of human nature and the natural world.
I hope to help organize a similar program at NIU. In the fall of 2007, I will be team-teaching a course on evolution with a philosopher and a biologist. We then will try to build an evolutionary studies program around this course.
Through such a Darwinian liberal education, we might renew the quest that began with Aristotle to satisfy our natural desire to understand the causes or reasons of all things.
I began to move towards this conclusion as an undergraduate student at the University of Dallas in the late 1960s. My youthful excitement about philosophy was stirred by Aristotle's declaration that all human beings by nature desire to understand, a desire tht leads natural philosophers to search for the ultimate causes or reasons for all things. Fascinated by Aristotle's comprehensive investigation of nature and human nature, I noticed that much of his writing was in biology, and that even his moral and political works assumed a biological understanding of human nature. So I wondered whether Aristotle's biological naturalism could be compatible somehow with modern Darwinian biology, and whether this might support a general study of human life within the natural causal order of the whole.
The aim of liberal education is to use all the intellectual disciplines to probe how the complex interaction of natural human propensities, cultural traditions, and individual choices shapes the course of human experience within the natural world. Darwinian theory provides a general conceptual framework for such liberal learning grounded in the scientific study of genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and cognitive judgement.
This Darwinian view of liberal education has guided my teaching. At Northern Illinois University, I helped to organize "Politics and the Life Sciences" as a field of study at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Department of Political Science. Some of the courses in the program are cross-listed as biology courses. So my undergraduate courses typically enroll a large number of students majoring in biology along with others majoring in the social sciences and humanities. My graduate students apply Darwinian reasoning to issues in political philosophy and other areas of political science. All the students see how liberal learning at its best brings together ideas and methods from all the intellectual disciplines to illuminate the deepest questions of human life and its position in the universe.
At the core of my thinking is the idea of human nature. In today's academic world, it is common for postmodernist relativists to assert tht liberal education cannot be directed to the study of human nature, because the idea of human nature is an arbitrary social construction. But I believe that there really is a universal human nature that is constituted by at least twenty natural desires that manifest themselves throughout history in every human society, because these desires belong to the evolved nature of the human species.
These natural desires direct human behavior into regular patterns. Men and women will marry and form families. Mothers will care for their children. Young males will compete for mates and status. Societies will organize themselves as male dominance hierarchies. Competing societies will go to war. And human beings will use language and other symbols to try to figure out what it all means.
A broader model of this kind of Darwinian liberal education is David Sloan Wilson's Evolutionary Studies Program (EvoS) at Binghamton University. The website for the program can be found here. This is an integrated curriculum with a required introductory course "Evolution for Everyone" and a list of courses across the university from which students must earn a minimum number of credits. Wilson teaches "Evolution for Everyone" as the course in which all students are introduced to the central concepts of evolutionary theory as well as some illustrative application of those concepts to various fields of study. He emphasizes the application of evolutionary ideas to human nature.
Over 50 faculty members representing 15 departments are involved in the program. As a result, both faculty and students from across the university in many different departments are brought together with Darwinian reasoning as their common language to talk about questions of human nature and the natural world.
I hope to help organize a similar program at NIU. In the fall of 2007, I will be team-teaching a course on evolution with a philosopher and a biologist. We then will try to build an evolutionary studies program around this course.
Through such a Darwinian liberal education, we might renew the quest that began with Aristotle to satisfy our natural desire to understand the causes or reasons of all things.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Carson Holloway in SCIENCE & THEOLOGY NEWS
Carson Holloway's book The Right Darwin? is a general criticism of any attempt to ground morality in human biological nature. His main idea is that there can be no morality without religious belief, and therefore any purely natural morality rooted in natural desires cannot work, because the natural desires are both moral and immoral. In particular, he criticizes my defense of Darwinian morality.
On January 9th, I posted a response on this blog to Holloway's book. Recently, he wrote a brief summary of his book's argument for Science and Theology News, which can be found here.
He implies that a Darwinian view of morality rejects religion as a source of moral instruction. This is not true, because as I have said on various occasions, Darwin emphasizes the importance of religious traditions as a source of moral principles. But insofar as morality is natural for human beings, morality can stand on its own natural ground even without religious belief. By contrast, Holloway insists that morality is impossible without religious belief. So it would seem that, for Holloway, atheists or those who don't have the right kind of religious beliefs cannot be moral. I disagree.
In this commentary, as in his book, Holloway is vague about what he means by "religion" and about exactly how religion supports morality. The only specific example he provides in his commentary is the moral debate over slavery. Darwin was a vigorous opponent of slavery. And I have argued that the human moral resistance to slavery was rooted in a natural human resistance to exploitation. Holloway suggests that this natural resistance is not enough without a religious ground for opposing slavery.
Holloway does not explain how exactly religion condemns slavery. He says nothing about the debate in the United States over the Biblical basis of slavery. The debate was so intense that some of the major Protestant denominations--such as the Baptists and Methodists--were split into northern and southern schisms, because southern Christians thought the Bible supported slavery, while northern Christians thought slavery was contrary to the Bible.
Slavery is never clearly condemned in the Bible. On the contrary, there are many passages that seemingly endorse slavery. Some recent books--such as Eugene Genovese's The Mind of the Master Class and Mark Noll's The Civil War as a Theological Crisis--have surveyed the Biblical arguments for slavery in the American South before the Civil War.
What would Holloway say about this? Would he say that the proslavery Christians misinterpreted the Bible? But where then does the Bible clearly condemn slavery? Does he really want to say that without the Bible it would be impossible to recognize the immorality of slavery?
This illustrates the implausibility of Holloway's argument. He assumes that religious texts such as the Bible provide a clear, reliable, and authoritative set of moral teachings that cannot be known by natural human experience. But it's hard to see how we could rely on the Bible for moral instruction if we could not pass it through that natural moral sense that Darwin saw as rooted in our evolved human nature.
On January 9th, I posted a response on this blog to Holloway's book. Recently, he wrote a brief summary of his book's argument for Science and Theology News, which can be found here.
He implies that a Darwinian view of morality rejects religion as a source of moral instruction. This is not true, because as I have said on various occasions, Darwin emphasizes the importance of religious traditions as a source of moral principles. But insofar as morality is natural for human beings, morality can stand on its own natural ground even without religious belief. By contrast, Holloway insists that morality is impossible without religious belief. So it would seem that, for Holloway, atheists or those who don't have the right kind of religious beliefs cannot be moral. I disagree.
In this commentary, as in his book, Holloway is vague about what he means by "religion" and about exactly how religion supports morality. The only specific example he provides in his commentary is the moral debate over slavery. Darwin was a vigorous opponent of slavery. And I have argued that the human moral resistance to slavery was rooted in a natural human resistance to exploitation. Holloway suggests that this natural resistance is not enough without a religious ground for opposing slavery.
Holloway does not explain how exactly religion condemns slavery. He says nothing about the debate in the United States over the Biblical basis of slavery. The debate was so intense that some of the major Protestant denominations--such as the Baptists and Methodists--were split into northern and southern schisms, because southern Christians thought the Bible supported slavery, while northern Christians thought slavery was contrary to the Bible.
Slavery is never clearly condemned in the Bible. On the contrary, there are many passages that seemingly endorse slavery. Some recent books--such as Eugene Genovese's The Mind of the Master Class and Mark Noll's The Civil War as a Theological Crisis--have surveyed the Biblical arguments for slavery in the American South before the Civil War.
What would Holloway say about this? Would he say that the proslavery Christians misinterpreted the Bible? But where then does the Bible clearly condemn slavery? Does he really want to say that without the Bible it would be impossible to recognize the immorality of slavery?
This illustrates the implausibility of Holloway's argument. He assumes that religious texts such as the Bible provide a clear, reliable, and authoritative set of moral teachings that cannot be known by natural human experience. But it's hard to see how we could rely on the Bible for moral instruction if we could not pass it through that natural moral sense that Darwin saw as rooted in our evolved human nature.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Do the Bible and the Koran Support Theocracy?
In his prophetic essay from 1990, Bernard Lewis warned that Islamic fundamentalism would bring a "clash of civilizations" with radical Islamists promoting theocracy and attacking the Western tradition of religious liberty and toleration. In this essay, Lewis argued that Islam did not share the Christian tradition of separating Church and State, a tradition based on the New Testament teaching about rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and rendering to God the things that are God's (Matthew 22:20-22).
Conservatives generally accept this principle of separating Church and State and support the idea that a free government of limited powers will leave people free to exercise religious liberty without enforcing any particular religious beliefs by law. But some Christian conservatives now reject the idea of Church/State separation as a "myth." And some--like the "Christian Reconstructionists"--want to establish a theocracy based on the Mosaic laws of the Old Testament. Recently, there have been a half-dozen books warning that the Christian Right promotes theocracy. Richard John Neuhaus and others at the journal First Things dismiss this fear of Christian theocracy as ridiculous. (An example can be found here.) But Damon Linker, a former editor at First Things claims in a recent article that Neuhaus's vision of a Catholic Chrisian America really is theocratic.
Some Christian conservatives are suspicious of the idea of religious liberty and toleration because they fear that it promotes atheism. They suspect that the philosophic defenders of toleration--like John Locke--were secretly engaged in an atheistic attack on Christianity.
But I would argue that Lewis is right in suggesting that the idea of religious liberty really is rooted in the New Testament, and therefore Christians should support it. I have come to this conclusion after spending the past academic year teaching a series of three graduate seminars on the political teaching of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran.
From these studies, I have been persuaded that Roger Williams was right in reading the New Testament as teaching that Christians must defend religious liberty and reject theocracy or any governmental supervision of religion. Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century for making this argument. In 1644, he published The Bloody Tenent of Persecution, in which he laid out his theological arguments for religious liberty as rooted in Christian doctrine. He established the colony of Rhode Island as a place where such religious liberty would be secured.
Williams rightly recognizes that the Old Testament is theocratic, because the Mosaic law enforced religious belief and practice by coercion. But he points out that the New Testament sets aside Mosaic theocracy by declaring that the spiritual salvation of Christians does not depend upon assuming earthly political power. The New Testament never presents the Christians as using political power to enforce Christian doctrine. Rather, the Christian churches enforced their beliefs on their members and expelled those that refused to obey, but they never used legal coercion.
Williams' point becomes clear when one notices that Christian theocrats--from the Puritans to the Christian Reconstructionists--always have to go back to the Old Testament to get their laws, because the New Testament provides no guidance for theocratic politics. (The early American Puritan laws drawn from the Old Testament can be found here.)
As only one example of how the doctrine of religious liberty enters the New Testament, consider Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians. He advises the Corinthians to enforce their Christian morality within the assembly of believers, but without trying to coerce those outside the church. "For what is it for me to judge those outside? Is it not for you to judge those inside? But God is to judge those outside" (I Cor 5:12-13).
Consider the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament in handling homosexuality. The Old Testament prescribes that homosexuals must be killed (Lev. 20:13). The New Testament condemns homosexuality but does not order that they be killed (Romans 1:26-27). The New Testament Christians have no desire to use the legal and political power of the state to enforce their religious prescriptions against homosexuality. By contrast, the Christian Reconstructionists want to restore the Mosaic law for stoning homosexuals to death.
Williams rightly reads the New Testament as separating civil authority and spiritual authority. All citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs, are subject to the civil authority of the state to enforce a peaceful social order (as indicated by Romans 13:1-7). But the spiritual authority of God over the believer is a matter of individual conscience that cannot properly be dictated by the legal power of the state (as it was in the Mosaic regime of the Old Testament).
Christian conservatives should look to Williams as providing a Christian understanding of religious liberty based on a strict separation of Church and State.
So what about the Koran? It's ambiguous on this issue. It declares that "there is to be no compulsion in religion" (2:256). And some Muslims see this as Koranic authority for religious liberty and toleration. Some argue for "minding one's own business," and they cite the Koranic verse that says: "O you who believe! Guard your own souls: If you follow right guidance, no hurt can come to you from those who stray" (5:108). But the Koran also speaks of the unquestionable authority of the Prophet in a manner that can be read as suggesting the rule of the Caliphate--the merging of political and religious authority (2:30, 4:59, 4:80, 38:26). And, of course, Muhammad--unlike Jesus--combined military and political power with religious authority.
The most disturbing part of the Koran to me is that the Old Testament stories are altered to remove any indication of the immoral weaknesses of those who ruled over the people of Israel. For example, the Koran speaks of King David without ever speaking about his commiting adultery and murder in the service of his sexual lust for Bathsheba. The Koran repeatedly denounces the people of Israel for their sinfulness, while praising their leaders as morally perfect (27:15-44, 38:26-40). This denies the fundamental premise of limited government--that human beings are too limited in their virtue to be trusted with absolute power. The Old Testament supports limited government by depicting the rulers of Israel as having all the moral defects of power-seeking men. The warnings about the despotic character of kingship (I Samuel 8) have often been quoted by the critics of monarchy. The Old Testament fails, however, to see that imperfect human beings are not to be trusted with political power over the religious beliefs of the citizens.
Conservatives generally accept this principle of separating Church and State and support the idea that a free government of limited powers will leave people free to exercise religious liberty without enforcing any particular religious beliefs by law. But some Christian conservatives now reject the idea of Church/State separation as a "myth." And some--like the "Christian Reconstructionists"--want to establish a theocracy based on the Mosaic laws of the Old Testament. Recently, there have been a half-dozen books warning that the Christian Right promotes theocracy. Richard John Neuhaus and others at the journal First Things dismiss this fear of Christian theocracy as ridiculous. (An example can be found here.) But Damon Linker, a former editor at First Things claims in a recent article that Neuhaus's vision of a Catholic Chrisian America really is theocratic.
Some Christian conservatives are suspicious of the idea of religious liberty and toleration because they fear that it promotes atheism. They suspect that the philosophic defenders of toleration--like John Locke--were secretly engaged in an atheistic attack on Christianity.
But I would argue that Lewis is right in suggesting that the idea of religious liberty really is rooted in the New Testament, and therefore Christians should support it. I have come to this conclusion after spending the past academic year teaching a series of three graduate seminars on the political teaching of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran.
From these studies, I have been persuaded that Roger Williams was right in reading the New Testament as teaching that Christians must defend religious liberty and reject theocracy or any governmental supervision of religion. Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century for making this argument. In 1644, he published The Bloody Tenent of Persecution, in which he laid out his theological arguments for religious liberty as rooted in Christian doctrine. He established the colony of Rhode Island as a place where such religious liberty would be secured.
Williams rightly recognizes that the Old Testament is theocratic, because the Mosaic law enforced religious belief and practice by coercion. But he points out that the New Testament sets aside Mosaic theocracy by declaring that the spiritual salvation of Christians does not depend upon assuming earthly political power. The New Testament never presents the Christians as using political power to enforce Christian doctrine. Rather, the Christian churches enforced their beliefs on their members and expelled those that refused to obey, but they never used legal coercion.
Williams' point becomes clear when one notices that Christian theocrats--from the Puritans to the Christian Reconstructionists--always have to go back to the Old Testament to get their laws, because the New Testament provides no guidance for theocratic politics. (The early American Puritan laws drawn from the Old Testament can be found here.)
As only one example of how the doctrine of religious liberty enters the New Testament, consider Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians. He advises the Corinthians to enforce their Christian morality within the assembly of believers, but without trying to coerce those outside the church. "For what is it for me to judge those outside? Is it not for you to judge those inside? But God is to judge those outside" (I Cor 5:12-13).
Consider the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament in handling homosexuality. The Old Testament prescribes that homosexuals must be killed (Lev. 20:13). The New Testament condemns homosexuality but does not order that they be killed (Romans 1:26-27). The New Testament Christians have no desire to use the legal and political power of the state to enforce their religious prescriptions against homosexuality. By contrast, the Christian Reconstructionists want to restore the Mosaic law for stoning homosexuals to death.
Williams rightly reads the New Testament as separating civil authority and spiritual authority. All citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs, are subject to the civil authority of the state to enforce a peaceful social order (as indicated by Romans 13:1-7). But the spiritual authority of God over the believer is a matter of individual conscience that cannot properly be dictated by the legal power of the state (as it was in the Mosaic regime of the Old Testament).
Christian conservatives should look to Williams as providing a Christian understanding of religious liberty based on a strict separation of Church and State.
So what about the Koran? It's ambiguous on this issue. It declares that "there is to be no compulsion in religion" (2:256). And some Muslims see this as Koranic authority for religious liberty and toleration. Some argue for "minding one's own business," and they cite the Koranic verse that says: "O you who believe! Guard your own souls: If you follow right guidance, no hurt can come to you from those who stray" (5:108). But the Koran also speaks of the unquestionable authority of the Prophet in a manner that can be read as suggesting the rule of the Caliphate--the merging of political and religious authority (2:30, 4:59, 4:80, 38:26). And, of course, Muhammad--unlike Jesus--combined military and political power with religious authority.
The most disturbing part of the Koran to me is that the Old Testament stories are altered to remove any indication of the immoral weaknesses of those who ruled over the people of Israel. For example, the Koran speaks of King David without ever speaking about his commiting adultery and murder in the service of his sexual lust for Bathsheba. The Koran repeatedly denounces the people of Israel for their sinfulness, while praising their leaders as morally perfect (27:15-44, 38:26-40). This denies the fundamental premise of limited government--that human beings are too limited in their virtue to be trusted with absolute power. The Old Testament supports limited government by depicting the rulers of Israel as having all the moral defects of power-seeking men. The warnings about the despotic character of kingship (I Samuel 8) have often been quoted by the critics of monarchy. The Old Testament fails, however, to see that imperfect human beings are not to be trusted with political power over the religious beliefs of the citizens.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Strauss, Darwin, and the Bible
Heinrich Meier's new book--Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2006)--includes two unpublished lectures by Strauss. One of them is a lecture--"Reason and Revelation"--that was delivered in 1948 at the Hartford Theological Seminary. One point of interest for me in this lecture is that is contains some remarks by Strauss on the Bible and Darwinian evolution.
The general theme of this lecture is summarized as follows:
"Why revelation cannot refute philosophy, and vice versa. Generally: a) human knowledge is always so limited that the possibility of revelation cannot be refuted, and need for revelation cannot be denied. b) revelation is always so uncertain that it can be rejected, and man is so constructed that he can find his satisfaction, his happiness, in investigation, in the progress of clarity" (p. 174).
Finding satisfaction in investigation is for Strauss the philosophic life, understood as the highest life for human beings. As he understands philosophy, it includes science, because he criticizes the modern distinction between philosophy and science (p. 144). If philosophy is the quest to understand the whole by reason alone, then science is part of philosophy.
This irreconciliable conflict between philosophy or science and revelation is manifest, Strauss suggests, in the conflict between the Biblical story of Creation and Darwinian evolutionary science (see pp. 155, 160, 171, 173).
One way to overcome this conflict is to say that the Bible is not a scientific book, but a book concerned with matters of faith, and therefore it need not contradict the Darwinian account of evolution. Strauss rejects this solution. If we cannot take the Bible seriously in its claims about the physical world--such as the stories of God's miraculous creation of the world in the book of Genesis--then we would have to dismiss the Bible as merely a mythic text.
And yet, Strauss says, neither side in this conflict--the Bible and Darwinian science--can refute the other, because both sides beg the question at issue. Darwinian science assumes that miracles are not possible. The Bible assumes that miracles are possible. The Darwinian scientist might present evidence from the geological record that life evolved over millions of years. But this would not refute the possibility that God created life in a few days through miraculous causes that are not detectable by science.
Strauss also suggests that the Darwinian account of human evolution must contradict the Biblical teaching about Adam and Eve and the Fall. If human beings evolved from lower animals, then there was no original state of perfection from which they fell.
It is hard for me to understand the implications of what Strauss is saying. He seems to claim that there can be no reconciliation between science and the Bible. But what he says about the mutual irrefutability of philosophy and revelation suggests that thoughtful human beings must be open to both.
Moreover, a fundamental assumption of Strauss's position here is that to take the Bible seriously as revelation, we must read it absolutely literally--so that, for example, the Genesis story of Creation in six days must be read as literal history. This seems dubious to me. Inevitably, even the most serious Biblical believer must distinguish between the literal and the poetic or metaphorical writing in the Bible. For example, Pope John Paul II endorsed Darwinian evolution as compatible with the Bible, while still insisting the the divine creation of the human soul required an "ontological leap" beyond natural causes.
What Strauss describes as the fundamenal alternative between philosophy and revelation--with neither side being able to refute the other--seems similar to what I describe in Darwinian Conservatism as the problem of ultimate explanation. The ultimate ground of explanation cannot itself be explained. The philosopher or scientist will appeal ultimately to the order of nature as the final ground of explanation. The Biblical believer will appeal ultimately to God as the final ground of explanation. The uncaused cause of everything is either nature or nature's God. Appealing to nature as ultimate satisfies our natural desire for intellectual understanding. Appealing to God as ultimate satisfies our natural desire for religious understanding. As far as I can see, there is no way to resolve this dispute by rational proof.
But it is not clear to me that this is what Strauss has in mind. I would be happy to receive help from others who know Strauss better than I do.
The general theme of this lecture is summarized as follows:
"Why revelation cannot refute philosophy, and vice versa. Generally: a) human knowledge is always so limited that the possibility of revelation cannot be refuted, and need for revelation cannot be denied. b) revelation is always so uncertain that it can be rejected, and man is so constructed that he can find his satisfaction, his happiness, in investigation, in the progress of clarity" (p. 174).
Finding satisfaction in investigation is for Strauss the philosophic life, understood as the highest life for human beings. As he understands philosophy, it includes science, because he criticizes the modern distinction between philosophy and science (p. 144). If philosophy is the quest to understand the whole by reason alone, then science is part of philosophy.
This irreconciliable conflict between philosophy or science and revelation is manifest, Strauss suggests, in the conflict between the Biblical story of Creation and Darwinian evolutionary science (see pp. 155, 160, 171, 173).
One way to overcome this conflict is to say that the Bible is not a scientific book, but a book concerned with matters of faith, and therefore it need not contradict the Darwinian account of evolution. Strauss rejects this solution. If we cannot take the Bible seriously in its claims about the physical world--such as the stories of God's miraculous creation of the world in the book of Genesis--then we would have to dismiss the Bible as merely a mythic text.
And yet, Strauss says, neither side in this conflict--the Bible and Darwinian science--can refute the other, because both sides beg the question at issue. Darwinian science assumes that miracles are not possible. The Bible assumes that miracles are possible. The Darwinian scientist might present evidence from the geological record that life evolved over millions of years. But this would not refute the possibility that God created life in a few days through miraculous causes that are not detectable by science.
Strauss also suggests that the Darwinian account of human evolution must contradict the Biblical teaching about Adam and Eve and the Fall. If human beings evolved from lower animals, then there was no original state of perfection from which they fell.
It is hard for me to understand the implications of what Strauss is saying. He seems to claim that there can be no reconciliation between science and the Bible. But what he says about the mutual irrefutability of philosophy and revelation suggests that thoughtful human beings must be open to both.
Moreover, a fundamental assumption of Strauss's position here is that to take the Bible seriously as revelation, we must read it absolutely literally--so that, for example, the Genesis story of Creation in six days must be read as literal history. This seems dubious to me. Inevitably, even the most serious Biblical believer must distinguish between the literal and the poetic or metaphorical writing in the Bible. For example, Pope John Paul II endorsed Darwinian evolution as compatible with the Bible, while still insisting the the divine creation of the human soul required an "ontological leap" beyond natural causes.
What Strauss describes as the fundamenal alternative between philosophy and revelation--with neither side being able to refute the other--seems similar to what I describe in Darwinian Conservatism as the problem of ultimate explanation. The ultimate ground of explanation cannot itself be explained. The philosopher or scientist will appeal ultimately to the order of nature as the final ground of explanation. The Biblical believer will appeal ultimately to God as the final ground of explanation. The uncaused cause of everything is either nature or nature's God. Appealing to nature as ultimate satisfies our natural desire for intellectual understanding. Appealing to God as ultimate satisfies our natural desire for religious understanding. As far as I can see, there is no way to resolve this dispute by rational proof.
But it is not clear to me that this is what Strauss has in mind. I would be happy to receive help from others who know Strauss better than I do.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Interview by Jamie Glazov
Jamie Glazov has posted an interview with me. The interview along with many comments can be found at the Free Republic. The comments show the wide range of conservative reactions to the idea of Darwinian conservatism.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
The Desire for War
Of the desires on my list of 20 natural desires, none is more controversial than the desire for war. On page 31 of Darwinian Conservatism, I write: "Human beings generally desire war when they think it will advance their group in conflicts with other groups. Human beings divide themselves into ethnic and territorial groups, and they tend to cooperate more with those people who belong to their own group than with those outside their group. So when the competition between communities becomes severe, violent conflict is likely. Human beings desire war when fear, interest, or honor move them to fight for their community against opposing communities. War shows the best and the worst of human nature. War manifests the brutal cruelty of human beings in fighting those they regard as enemies. Yet war also manifests the moral sociality of human beings in fighting courageously for their group. One of the prime causes for the emergence of large, bureaucratic states is the need for increasing military power. War is an instrument of politics, and like political rule generally, warfare is a predominantly male activity."
In Chapter 5 of The Descent of Man, Darwin saw warfare as a crucial factor in the evolution of "the social and moral faculties" through "natural selection, aided by inherited habit." "When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if the one tribe included (other circumstances being equal) a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danager, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other."
In recent years, a small but growing number of political scientists have applied this Darwinian view to explain war and international relations. This can be seen in three recent books: Bradley Thayer's Darwin and International Relations (2004), Stephen Rosen's War and Human Nature (2005), and Dominic Johnson's Overconfidence and War (2004).
War poses special puzzles for political scientists who employ "rational choice theory," which views human beings as rational maximizers of their self-interest. If human beings are rational egoists, it is hard to see why they would fight wars, because it would seem that rational egoists would negotiate a peaceful resolution of conflicts based on a rational assessment of comparative power, so that the weaker side would yield to the stronger. But instead, nations often show an irrational confidence in going to war and suffering losses that could have been avoided by a rational calculation of interests. It is also hard to see why rational egoists would risk their lives in warfare. Dying in war would seem to be the ultimate sacrifice of one's self-interest to others.
War might also be a puzzle for the Darwinian. After all, why would natural selection favor courage in war if this means that the dead soldier gives up his reproductive fitness?
The writing of some Darwinian political scientists explores these puzzles in ways that confirm Darwin's view of war as a factor in the social and moral evolution of the human species.
In a recent article, Dominic Johnson reports that some wargame experiments show that males show an overconfidence that inclines them to launch unprovoked attacks. Some Darwinian theorists have argued that a disposition to "positive illusions" might have been favored by the evolutionary history of human beings, particularly males. In any case, as Stephen Rosen has argued, a Darwinian view of human nature suggests that human beings are moved not just by a rational calculation of interests but also by emotional impulses inclining them to risky behavior.
In an unpublished paper, Johnson has shown that computer simulations of human evolution suggest that the disposition to heroic sacrifices in war would have been favored by group selection working through genetic evolution, cultural evolution, or gene-culture coevolution. Under certain conditions of competition for scarce resources, groups with courageous members would prevail over other groups with less courageous members. This seems to be exactly what Darwin suggested in his account of the evolution of war "through natural selection, aided by inherited habit."
This also indicates how our moral dispositions--courage, sympathy, cooperation for the good of society--might have been shaped by competition in war. We evolved to cooperate with people in our group in order to compete with others outside our group.
This evolutionary origin of morality in war is confirmed by the Bible, because Mosaic morality was shaped by the need to cooperate in war (see Deuteronomy 20:10-20, 30:15-20).
In Chapter 5 of The Descent of Man, Darwin saw warfare as a crucial factor in the evolution of "the social and moral faculties" through "natural selection, aided by inherited habit." "When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if the one tribe included (other circumstances being equal) a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danager, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other."
In recent years, a small but growing number of political scientists have applied this Darwinian view to explain war and international relations. This can be seen in three recent books: Bradley Thayer's Darwin and International Relations (2004), Stephen Rosen's War and Human Nature (2005), and Dominic Johnson's Overconfidence and War (2004).
War poses special puzzles for political scientists who employ "rational choice theory," which views human beings as rational maximizers of their self-interest. If human beings are rational egoists, it is hard to see why they would fight wars, because it would seem that rational egoists would negotiate a peaceful resolution of conflicts based on a rational assessment of comparative power, so that the weaker side would yield to the stronger. But instead, nations often show an irrational confidence in going to war and suffering losses that could have been avoided by a rational calculation of interests. It is also hard to see why rational egoists would risk their lives in warfare. Dying in war would seem to be the ultimate sacrifice of one's self-interest to others.
War might also be a puzzle for the Darwinian. After all, why would natural selection favor courage in war if this means that the dead soldier gives up his reproductive fitness?
The writing of some Darwinian political scientists explores these puzzles in ways that confirm Darwin's view of war as a factor in the social and moral evolution of the human species.
In a recent article, Dominic Johnson reports that some wargame experiments show that males show an overconfidence that inclines them to launch unprovoked attacks. Some Darwinian theorists have argued that a disposition to "positive illusions" might have been favored by the evolutionary history of human beings, particularly males. In any case, as Stephen Rosen has argued, a Darwinian view of human nature suggests that human beings are moved not just by a rational calculation of interests but also by emotional impulses inclining them to risky behavior.
In an unpublished paper, Johnson has shown that computer simulations of human evolution suggest that the disposition to heroic sacrifices in war would have been favored by group selection working through genetic evolution, cultural evolution, or gene-culture coevolution. Under certain conditions of competition for scarce resources, groups with courageous members would prevail over other groups with less courageous members. This seems to be exactly what Darwin suggested in his account of the evolution of war "through natural selection, aided by inherited habit."
This also indicates how our moral dispositions--courage, sympathy, cooperation for the good of society--might have been shaped by competition in war. We evolved to cooperate with people in our group in order to compete with others outside our group.
This evolutionary origin of morality in war is confirmed by the Bible, because Mosaic morality was shaped by the need to cooperate in war (see Deuteronomy 20:10-20, 30:15-20).
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
American Political Science Association Convention Panel
The 2006 meetings of the American Political Science Association will be in Philadelphia, August 31 to September 3. At 8:00 am, August 31, I will be presenting a paper on "Darwinian Conservatism" as part of a panel on "Darwinism, Religion, and the American Regime," co-sponsored by the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. Carson Holloway and John West will be presenting papers, and Joseph Bessette will be a commentator. Since Holloway and West are fervent critics of my position, it should be a lively session.
My paper summarizes my arguments for Darwinian conservatism and responds to criticisms from Holloway, Harvey Mansfield, Peter Lawler, and Ann Coulter. You can download a copy of my paper by going here.
My paper summarizes my arguments for Darwinian conservatism and responds to criticisms from Holloway, Harvey Mansfield, Peter Lawler, and Ann Coulter. You can download a copy of my paper by going here.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Charles Darwin
I have been reading The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, edited by Knud Haakonssen and just published by Cambridge. The concluding essay by Haakonssen and Donald Winch, "The Legacy of Adam Smith," confirms some of my thinking about how Darwin and evolutionary ethics (particularly in the work of Edward Westermarck) fits into the Smithian tradition of thought.
One of the strongest arguments for Darwinian conservatism turns on the intellectual links between Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Charles Darwin.
While libertarian conservatives look to Smith as their intellectual founder, traditionalist conservatives look to Burke. The intellectual friendship between Smith and Burke shows the fundamental compatiblity of libertarian and traditionalist thought. When Darwin worked out his theory of the social evolution of morality, he relied on the moral philosophy of Smith (as well as others in the Scottish Enlightenment). This continuity between Smith, Burke, and Darwin manifests the moral philosophy of conservatism as rooted in the evolved nature of human beings as moral animals. The work of conservative thinkers like James Q. Wilson (in The Moral Sense) builds on this ground.
Burke's first letter to Smith (September 10, 1759)can be found here. He wrote to praise Smith's book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. "I have ever thought that the old Systems of morality were too contracted and that this Science could never stand well upon any narrower Basis than the whole of Human Nature." He thought Smith's book had done that. "A theory like yours founded on the Nature of man, which is always the same, will last, when those that are founded on his opinions, which are always changing, will and must be forgotten." In his review in the Annual Register, Burke observed: "The author sseeks for the foundation of the just, the fit, the proper, the decent, in our most common and most allowed passions; and making approbation and disapprobation the tests of virtue and vice, and shewing that those are founded on sympathy, he raises from this simple truth, one of the most beautiful fabrics of moral theory, that has perhaps ever appeared." Burke then quoted the entire first chapter of the book entitled "Of Sympathy."
In The Descent of Man, Darwin elaborated his evolutionary theory of morality, which can be found here. He was guided by Smith's moral philosophy, and he quoted the opening remarks about sympathy as the natural power of the human mind for sharing the feelings of others as the ground of moral experience. He then showed how this natural human capacity and the moral sentiments could have evolved from social instincts and human reason.
So as I argue in Darwinian Conservatism, this shows us how a conservative defense of traditional morality can be rooted in a Darwinian science of evolved human nature.
The moral sense is not a product of pure reason alone but is rather a humanly unique capacity for moral judgment that combines social emotions and rational reflection. As social animals, human beings have evolved to feel social emotions and to seek social approbation. As rational animals, human beings have evolved the cognitive ability to reflect on present actions in the light of past experience and future expectations. Consequently, human beings can plan their actions to satisfy their social desires for living well with others.
Recent research in neuroscience is uncovering the neural basis of moral experience in the brain, and it confirms the moral philosophy of Smith, Burke, and Darwin in showing how morality requires a combination of moral emotions and moral deliberation in the service of our social instincts.
Contrary to those conservatives who fear Darwinian science as a threat to morality, Darwinism actually shows the natural grounds of human morality in the nature of the human animal. In this way, Darwinian science supports the conservative commitment to traditional morality.
One of the strongest arguments for Darwinian conservatism turns on the intellectual links between Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Charles Darwin.
While libertarian conservatives look to Smith as their intellectual founder, traditionalist conservatives look to Burke. The intellectual friendship between Smith and Burke shows the fundamental compatiblity of libertarian and traditionalist thought. When Darwin worked out his theory of the social evolution of morality, he relied on the moral philosophy of Smith (as well as others in the Scottish Enlightenment). This continuity between Smith, Burke, and Darwin manifests the moral philosophy of conservatism as rooted in the evolved nature of human beings as moral animals. The work of conservative thinkers like James Q. Wilson (in The Moral Sense) builds on this ground.
Burke's first letter to Smith (September 10, 1759)can be found here. He wrote to praise Smith's book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. "I have ever thought that the old Systems of morality were too contracted and that this Science could never stand well upon any narrower Basis than the whole of Human Nature." He thought Smith's book had done that. "A theory like yours founded on the Nature of man, which is always the same, will last, when those that are founded on his opinions, which are always changing, will and must be forgotten." In his review in the Annual Register, Burke observed: "The author sseeks for the foundation of the just, the fit, the proper, the decent, in our most common and most allowed passions; and making approbation and disapprobation the tests of virtue and vice, and shewing that those are founded on sympathy, he raises from this simple truth, one of the most beautiful fabrics of moral theory, that has perhaps ever appeared." Burke then quoted the entire first chapter of the book entitled "Of Sympathy."
In The Descent of Man, Darwin elaborated his evolutionary theory of morality, which can be found here. He was guided by Smith's moral philosophy, and he quoted the opening remarks about sympathy as the natural power of the human mind for sharing the feelings of others as the ground of moral experience. He then showed how this natural human capacity and the moral sentiments could have evolved from social instincts and human reason.
So as I argue in Darwinian Conservatism, this shows us how a conservative defense of traditional morality can be rooted in a Darwinian science of evolved human nature.
The moral sense is not a product of pure reason alone but is rather a humanly unique capacity for moral judgment that combines social emotions and rational reflection. As social animals, human beings have evolved to feel social emotions and to seek social approbation. As rational animals, human beings have evolved the cognitive ability to reflect on present actions in the light of past experience and future expectations. Consequently, human beings can plan their actions to satisfy their social desires for living well with others.
Recent research in neuroscience is uncovering the neural basis of moral experience in the brain, and it confirms the moral philosophy of Smith, Burke, and Darwin in showing how morality requires a combination of moral emotions and moral deliberation in the service of our social instincts.
Contrary to those conservatives who fear Darwinian science as a threat to morality, Darwinism actually shows the natural grounds of human morality in the nature of the human animal. In this way, Darwinian science supports the conservative commitment to traditional morality.
Friday, July 07, 2006
Spiritual Machines or Abolition of Man?
By the year 2045, we will have created robotic intelligence that will be one billion times more powerful than the biological intelligence of human beings. At that point, we will transcend our biology by uploading our human consciousness into "spiritual machines." That's the prediction of Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. He welcomes this prospect, because he foresees that by uploading his consciousness into a robot, he will become immortal, and his intelligence will be increased.
But many people fear this. Religious conservatives see this as what C.S. Lewis called "the abolition of man." The modern quest to conquer nature might lead us to conquer human nature, perhaps by using our technological power to transform our nature so that we might be immortal. But in doing that, we would actually annihilate ourselves.
This leads religious conservatives like Carson Holloway to warn that Darwinian conservatism provides no obstacle to such uses of technology to alter and eventually abolish human nature. After all, if our existing human nature is understood as a product of biological evolution that serves no cosmic purpose, then why shouldn't we use our power to bring about a technological evolution of our nature to improve it in ways that we might hope would make us happier and more secure?
But if one believes in a cosmic teleological order designed by God, as Holloway does, then it's hard to see why he worries about the abolition of human nature by technology. Such a worry suggests that God's teleological order is so fragile that it can be upset by human technology. That's why Peter Lawler suggests that to speak about the technological abolition of human nature is an exaggeration.
Like Lawler, I have argued (in the last chapter of Darwinian Conservatism and in my March 8th posting on transhumanism)that human nature will endure, and that both the fearful opponents of transhumanism and the hopeful proponents exaggerate the power of technology for changing human nature.
But what should be said about Kurzweil? He rejects the idea of "transhumanism," because he thinks that what makes us human--the software patterns of information that make us the people that we are--will be preserved in nonbiological hardware.
Kurzweil is famous as a successful inventor who has developed optical scanners and voice recognition software. He identifies himself as a "pattern recognition scientist." Rather than being a "materialist," Kurzweil insists that he is a "patternist" who believes that emergent patterns of information are more important than the materials that embody them. That's why he thinks the human patterns of conscious experience can be preserved even in the complex computational mechanisms of the future.
Kurzweil's main idea is "that there is a specific game plan for achieving human-level intelligence in a machine: reverse engineer the parallel, chaotic, self-organizing, and fractal methods used in the human brain and apply these methods to modern computational software" (Singularity, 439).
Since I have argued that the human mind arose by emergent evolution in the brain, I would have to agree that at least in principle it should be possible to duplicate human intelligence in machines that replicate the causal complexity of the brain. But while I concede this as true in principle, I am skeptical that it will ever be possible in practice, because I doubt that we will ever have the perfect understanding of the brain that will allow us to "reverse engineer" its activity and then replicate it in a machine.
Some religious conservatives would disagree. They would say that the human mind cannot even in principle be replicated in a machine, because the machine would lack the immaterial spirituality that constitutes the human soul as created by God.
But even if God has created the human soul, isn't it clear that He has chosen to exercise His creation through the natural causal powers of the human brain and nervous system? The human mind arises in a human individual when the brain has developed to a critical point of complexity while interacting with the social and physical world in the early development of the individual.
But if this is so, then in principle we could replicate human intelligence if we knew enough about the causal powers of the brain to replicate them artificially in a machine. And yet I think this is unlikely, simply because I cannot foresee that our understanding of those causal powers will ever be deep enough to make this possible in practice. Kurzweil says that "the principles of the design of the brain are simpler than they appear" (446). To me, this seems remarkably naive.
Nevertheless, some of Kurzweil's critics would say that I have conceded too much to him. For example, John Searle insists that no computer could ever replicate human intelligence. He uses his famous Chinese Room Argument to support this claim.
In Are We Spiritual Machines?, a book edited by Jay Richards and published by Discovery Institute Press, Kurzweil meets his critics. Searle has a chapter in the book in which he says at one point: "Suppose you took seriously the project of building a conscious machine. How would you go about it? The brain is a machine, a biological machine to be sure, but a machine all the same. So the first step is to figure out how the brain does it and then build an artificial machine that has an equally effective mechanism for causing consciousness. These are the sorts of steps by which we build an artifical heart. The problem is that we have very little idea of how the brain does it. Until we do, we are most unlikely to produce consciousness artificially in nonbiological materials" (72).
I agree with Kurzweil in seeing this as a fundamental concession to Kurzweil's reasoning. Searle admits that in principle a machine could replicate human intelligence if it could replicate the causal powers of the human brain. The only disagreement, then, is that Searle thinks our knowledge of the brain's working is too limited to permit this. Kurzweil is much more optimistic about future advances in neurobiology that will allow us to "reverse engineer" the brain and thus build "spiritual machines."
Darwinian conservatives should be skeptical about Kurzweil's vision, because they should be skeptical that human beings will ever have the perfect knowledge of how the brain works that would allow the creation of artificial intelligence with the complexity and flexibility of human intelligence. Human beings are uniquely endowed with a freedom of thought and action that comes from the emergent evolution of the soul in the brain. It is unlikely that we will ever know enough about the brain to artificially recreate the brain's causal powers in a machine.
But many people fear this. Religious conservatives see this as what C.S. Lewis called "the abolition of man." The modern quest to conquer nature might lead us to conquer human nature, perhaps by using our technological power to transform our nature so that we might be immortal. But in doing that, we would actually annihilate ourselves.
This leads religious conservatives like Carson Holloway to warn that Darwinian conservatism provides no obstacle to such uses of technology to alter and eventually abolish human nature. After all, if our existing human nature is understood as a product of biological evolution that serves no cosmic purpose, then why shouldn't we use our power to bring about a technological evolution of our nature to improve it in ways that we might hope would make us happier and more secure?
But if one believes in a cosmic teleological order designed by God, as Holloway does, then it's hard to see why he worries about the abolition of human nature by technology. Such a worry suggests that God's teleological order is so fragile that it can be upset by human technology. That's why Peter Lawler suggests that to speak about the technological abolition of human nature is an exaggeration.
Like Lawler, I have argued (in the last chapter of Darwinian Conservatism and in my March 8th posting on transhumanism)that human nature will endure, and that both the fearful opponents of transhumanism and the hopeful proponents exaggerate the power of technology for changing human nature.
But what should be said about Kurzweil? He rejects the idea of "transhumanism," because he thinks that what makes us human--the software patterns of information that make us the people that we are--will be preserved in nonbiological hardware.
Kurzweil is famous as a successful inventor who has developed optical scanners and voice recognition software. He identifies himself as a "pattern recognition scientist." Rather than being a "materialist," Kurzweil insists that he is a "patternist" who believes that emergent patterns of information are more important than the materials that embody them. That's why he thinks the human patterns of conscious experience can be preserved even in the complex computational mechanisms of the future.
Kurzweil's main idea is "that there is a specific game plan for achieving human-level intelligence in a machine: reverse engineer the parallel, chaotic, self-organizing, and fractal methods used in the human brain and apply these methods to modern computational software" (Singularity, 439).
Since I have argued that the human mind arose by emergent evolution in the brain, I would have to agree that at least in principle it should be possible to duplicate human intelligence in machines that replicate the causal complexity of the brain. But while I concede this as true in principle, I am skeptical that it will ever be possible in practice, because I doubt that we will ever have the perfect understanding of the brain that will allow us to "reverse engineer" its activity and then replicate it in a machine.
Some religious conservatives would disagree. They would say that the human mind cannot even in principle be replicated in a machine, because the machine would lack the immaterial spirituality that constitutes the human soul as created by God.
But even if God has created the human soul, isn't it clear that He has chosen to exercise His creation through the natural causal powers of the human brain and nervous system? The human mind arises in a human individual when the brain has developed to a critical point of complexity while interacting with the social and physical world in the early development of the individual.
But if this is so, then in principle we could replicate human intelligence if we knew enough about the causal powers of the brain to replicate them artificially in a machine. And yet I think this is unlikely, simply because I cannot foresee that our understanding of those causal powers will ever be deep enough to make this possible in practice. Kurzweil says that "the principles of the design of the brain are simpler than they appear" (446). To me, this seems remarkably naive.
Nevertheless, some of Kurzweil's critics would say that I have conceded too much to him. For example, John Searle insists that no computer could ever replicate human intelligence. He uses his famous Chinese Room Argument to support this claim.
In Are We Spiritual Machines?, a book edited by Jay Richards and published by Discovery Institute Press, Kurzweil meets his critics. Searle has a chapter in the book in which he says at one point: "Suppose you took seriously the project of building a conscious machine. How would you go about it? The brain is a machine, a biological machine to be sure, but a machine all the same. So the first step is to figure out how the brain does it and then build an artificial machine that has an equally effective mechanism for causing consciousness. These are the sorts of steps by which we build an artifical heart. The problem is that we have very little idea of how the brain does it. Until we do, we are most unlikely to produce consciousness artificially in nonbiological materials" (72).
I agree with Kurzweil in seeing this as a fundamental concession to Kurzweil's reasoning. Searle admits that in principle a machine could replicate human intelligence if it could replicate the causal powers of the human brain. The only disagreement, then, is that Searle thinks our knowledge of the brain's working is too limited to permit this. Kurzweil is much more optimistic about future advances in neurobiology that will allow us to "reverse engineer" the brain and thus build "spiritual machines."
Darwinian conservatives should be skeptical about Kurzweil's vision, because they should be skeptical that human beings will ever have the perfect knowledge of how the brain works that would allow the creation of artificial intelligence with the complexity and flexibility of human intelligence. Human beings are uniquely endowed with a freedom of thought and action that comes from the emergent evolution of the soul in the brain. It is unlikely that we will ever know enough about the brain to artificially recreate the brain's causal powers in a machine.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
George Gilder's Intelligent Design Creationism
The July 17th issue of National Review has an article by George Gilder, "Evolution and Me". Gilder is a conservative economist who joined with Bruce Chapman in founding The Discovery Institute, the leading conservative think-tank promoting "intelligent design theory."
Gilder tries to persuade conservatives to reject Darwinian science because it promotes a scientific materialism that is both morally corrupting and scientifically false. Darwinian materialism is morally corrupting because it "banishes aspirations and ideals from the picture," and because it advances a crude vision of capitalism "as a dog-eat-dog zero-sum struggle." It is scientifically false because in reducing all of nature to material causes, it denies the primacy of information (as in the DNA code)in guiding organic order in a manner that can only be explained as the work of the Divine Mind. The New Testament teaching that "in the beginning was the word" (John 1:1) is confirmed by modern information theory.
I have answered these and related criticisms of Darwinian science in Darwinian Conservatism. But I can make a few points here.
In asserting that Darwinism cannot support the moral aspirations of human beings, Gilder says nothing about Darwin's account of the natural moral sense or the work of others (like James Q. Wilson) who have shown how Darwinism sustains morality.
In particular, it's hard to understand Gilder's assertion that Darwinism assumes a "zero-sum" view of human life. Darwin emphasized the importance of cooperation in moral evolution. Darwinian theorists have used game theory to show how cooperation could have evolved because of the advantages of "non-zero-sum" cooperation. Robert Wright has written a book--Nonzero--arguing the entire history of life can be understood as the expansion of synergistic cooperation through the logic of "non-zero" collaboration to resolve "prisoner's dilemma" situations.
In arguing that Darwinian evolution cannot explain the emergence of information, Gilder repeats a standard argument of the Biblical creationists like those at Ken Ham's "Answers in Genesis." They distribute a book entitled In the Beginning Was Information, which argues that information can only come from an intelligent creator, and therefore the DNA code proves the story of Creation in the Book of Genesis.
As I have said, there is nothing in Darwinian science to deny the possibility of God as the First Cause of nature who works His will through the evolutionary process. But Gilder and other intelligent design creationists assume that God cannot do this, because evolution cannot create information such as we see in the DNA code. Gilder insists: "Everywhere we encounter information, it does not bubble up from a random flux or prebiotic soup."
But such talk about "random flux" ignores the power of natural selection for introducing information into the genome. For example, an article by Christoph Adami, Charles Ofria, and Travis Collier in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown how biological complexity could evolve by chance mutation and natural selection. Applying information theory to evolution, they indicate how random mutation creates variation on which natural selection works--favoring those variations that are adapted to the environment, so that information about the environment is transferred to the organism's genome.
Gilder makes much of the emergent hierarchical order of the universe, relying on a famous argument by Michael Polanyi. But he does not tell his readers that many Darwinian biologists agree with this idea that biological phenomena show an emergent order that is not reducible to physics and chemistry. I have a whole chapter on "emergence" in Darwinian Conservatism
This article is clearly an effort by the folks at the Discovery Institute to blunt the effect of Judge John Jones decision in the Dover case. Gilder ridicules Jones as a "gullible federal judge." But Gilder does not tell his readers that even the Discovery Institute has admitted that the policy of teaching intelligent design in the Dover school district was adopted by Biblical creationists on the school board who had no interest in science.
Gilder tries to persuade conservatives to reject Darwinian science because it promotes a scientific materialism that is both morally corrupting and scientifically false. Darwinian materialism is morally corrupting because it "banishes aspirations and ideals from the picture," and because it advances a crude vision of capitalism "as a dog-eat-dog zero-sum struggle." It is scientifically false because in reducing all of nature to material causes, it denies the primacy of information (as in the DNA code)in guiding organic order in a manner that can only be explained as the work of the Divine Mind. The New Testament teaching that "in the beginning was the word" (John 1:1) is confirmed by modern information theory.
I have answered these and related criticisms of Darwinian science in Darwinian Conservatism. But I can make a few points here.
In asserting that Darwinism cannot support the moral aspirations of human beings, Gilder says nothing about Darwin's account of the natural moral sense or the work of others (like James Q. Wilson) who have shown how Darwinism sustains morality.
In particular, it's hard to understand Gilder's assertion that Darwinism assumes a "zero-sum" view of human life. Darwin emphasized the importance of cooperation in moral evolution. Darwinian theorists have used game theory to show how cooperation could have evolved because of the advantages of "non-zero-sum" cooperation. Robert Wright has written a book--Nonzero--arguing the entire history of life can be understood as the expansion of synergistic cooperation through the logic of "non-zero" collaboration to resolve "prisoner's dilemma" situations.
In arguing that Darwinian evolution cannot explain the emergence of information, Gilder repeats a standard argument of the Biblical creationists like those at Ken Ham's "Answers in Genesis." They distribute a book entitled In the Beginning Was Information, which argues that information can only come from an intelligent creator, and therefore the DNA code proves the story of Creation in the Book of Genesis.
As I have said, there is nothing in Darwinian science to deny the possibility of God as the First Cause of nature who works His will through the evolutionary process. But Gilder and other intelligent design creationists assume that God cannot do this, because evolution cannot create information such as we see in the DNA code. Gilder insists: "Everywhere we encounter information, it does not bubble up from a random flux or prebiotic soup."
But such talk about "random flux" ignores the power of natural selection for introducing information into the genome. For example, an article by Christoph Adami, Charles Ofria, and Travis Collier in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown how biological complexity could evolve by chance mutation and natural selection. Applying information theory to evolution, they indicate how random mutation creates variation on which natural selection works--favoring those variations that are adapted to the environment, so that information about the environment is transferred to the organism's genome.
Gilder makes much of the emergent hierarchical order of the universe, relying on a famous argument by Michael Polanyi. But he does not tell his readers that many Darwinian biologists agree with this idea that biological phenomena show an emergent order that is not reducible to physics and chemistry. I have a whole chapter on "emergence" in Darwinian Conservatism
This article is clearly an effort by the folks at the Discovery Institute to blunt the effect of Judge John Jones decision in the Dover case. Gilder ridicules Jones as a "gullible federal judge." But Gilder does not tell his readers that even the Discovery Institute has admitted that the policy of teaching intelligent design in the Dover school district was adopted by Biblical creationists on the school board who had no interest in science.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Harry Jaffa and Charles Darwin
The debate among American conservatives over Darwinian evolution is evident in some recent writing by James Q. Wilson and Harry Jaffa. Wilson wrote an article praising Judge John Jones' decision in the Dover case. In the spring 2006 issue of the CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, Jaffa criticized Wilson. The summer 2006 issue of the CLAREMONT REVIEW has some correspondence on this debate.
It is hard for me to understand what Jaffa is trying to say in this article. But I would make three points.
First, Jaffa assumes that the school board policy in Dover, Pennsylvania, came from the school board members being persuaded by the arguments for intelligent design. In fact, the testimony at the trial made it clear that the board members who favored the policy knew almost nothing about intelligent design theory. They were Biblical literalists who thought intelligent design reasoning would support their Biblical creationism. The proponents of intelligent design at the Discovery Institute rejected the board's policy because it was motivated by a purely religious purpose.
My second point is that Jaffa is confusing in that he seems to both affirm and deny intelligent design theory. He seems to be defending it. But then he says: "there is . . . nothing in the theory of intelligent design--many intelligent design advocates to the contrary, notwithstanding--which necessarily implies a designer." Here Jaffa rejects the fundamental idea of intelligent design theory.
My third point is that--like many conservatives who criticize Darwinian science--Jaffa confuses ultimate and proximate causes in Darwinian explanations. If natural selection favors traits that enhance survival and reproduction, Jaffa suggests, then this must mean that all human desires are reduced to the desires for survival and reproduction, which is the crudest form of reductionism. But this is not so. For example, if mothers provide parental care because they love their children, this maternal love is comprehensible on its own terms as a proximate motivation for behavior. But this proximate motivation might also have been favored in evolutionary history because it enhanced human reproductive fitness in a species where offspring need extended care by parents. This explanation by ultimate causes is fully compatible with an explanation by the proximate causes of conscious motivation.
Most of what Jaffa says about the uniqueness of human beings as rational and moral animals is acknowledged by Darwin, who stressed the importance of deliberation, thought, and moral concern in distinguishing human beings from other animals. Jaffa says that we are "the only earthly species that can live outside the boundaries of the experience that is accessible only by sense perception." Similarly, Darwin says that "a moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions and motives,--of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who with certainty can be thus designated makes the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals" (DESCENT OF MAN, chap. 21).
As Jaffa intimates, Darwin agreed with Abraham Lincoln in condemning slavery as contrary to our natural moral sense. So it seems that Darwinian science can sustain human moral judgment. As Wilson has argued in his book THE MORAL SENSE, a Darwinian understanding of human nature supports morality as rooted in the natural moral sentiments of the human animal.
It is hard for me to understand what Jaffa is trying to say in this article. But I would make three points.
First, Jaffa assumes that the school board policy in Dover, Pennsylvania, came from the school board members being persuaded by the arguments for intelligent design. In fact, the testimony at the trial made it clear that the board members who favored the policy knew almost nothing about intelligent design theory. They were Biblical literalists who thought intelligent design reasoning would support their Biblical creationism. The proponents of intelligent design at the Discovery Institute rejected the board's policy because it was motivated by a purely religious purpose.
My second point is that Jaffa is confusing in that he seems to both affirm and deny intelligent design theory. He seems to be defending it. But then he says: "there is . . . nothing in the theory of intelligent design--many intelligent design advocates to the contrary, notwithstanding--which necessarily implies a designer." Here Jaffa rejects the fundamental idea of intelligent design theory.
My third point is that--like many conservatives who criticize Darwinian science--Jaffa confuses ultimate and proximate causes in Darwinian explanations. If natural selection favors traits that enhance survival and reproduction, Jaffa suggests, then this must mean that all human desires are reduced to the desires for survival and reproduction, which is the crudest form of reductionism. But this is not so. For example, if mothers provide parental care because they love their children, this maternal love is comprehensible on its own terms as a proximate motivation for behavior. But this proximate motivation might also have been favored in evolutionary history because it enhanced human reproductive fitness in a species where offspring need extended care by parents. This explanation by ultimate causes is fully compatible with an explanation by the proximate causes of conscious motivation.
Most of what Jaffa says about the uniqueness of human beings as rational and moral animals is acknowledged by Darwin, who stressed the importance of deliberation, thought, and moral concern in distinguishing human beings from other animals. Jaffa says that we are "the only earthly species that can live outside the boundaries of the experience that is accessible only by sense perception." Similarly, Darwin says that "a moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions and motives,--of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who with certainty can be thus designated makes the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals" (DESCENT OF MAN, chap. 21).
As Jaffa intimates, Darwin agreed with Abraham Lincoln in condemning slavery as contrary to our natural moral sense. So it seems that Darwinian science can sustain human moral judgment. As Wilson has argued in his book THE MORAL SENSE, a Darwinian understanding of human nature supports morality as rooted in the natural moral sentiments of the human animal.
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