Relativity of Theories
I don’t know how many readers of this blog check in at The Corner, but one of the regular features there is the Derbyshire vs. the Papists melee. Over the last couple of days, another one of these broke out over the Pope’s comments about relativism. If you’re interested in following this sort of thing, see here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here. The latest entry is from our own Jim Manzi here and I think the whole business started with this piece on NRO from David Klinghoffer.
This is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine, but I’m only going to ride it briefly now. So:
1. Nothing about the assertion that religion is a psycho-social phenomenon as opposed to something with scientific truth value (that’s what I take to be Derb’s position) implies anything about whether or not there is some kind of universal moral law. I know Derb doubts the existence of God or the gods; I know, as well, that he finds human consciousness to be deeply mysterious, though he doubts this mystery has any religious implications; but I don’t know whether he thinks there’s some sort of universal moral law accessible through reason.
2. Nothing about the denial that there is a universal moral law implies that societies have no ethics. A moral law would presumably exist without a society. An ethic cannot. If there are ethics but not morals, but if the ethics of human societies are meaningfully constrained by human nature, then there may be a natural foundation for much of what we want, socially, from a universal moral law. This is, in fact, what the evolutionary psychologists are trying to argue. They may or may not be wrong on either the science or the philosophy – but that’s what they are up to. It seems to me that if Derb is going to be attacked for not engaging with the specifics of Catholic history and theology (indeed, for dismissing both cavalierly) then Klinghoffer among others deserve similar derision for not engaging with the quite serious arguments about ethics coming from the evol-psych crowd.
3. Regardless of the above, I’m not sure that Jim’s question is a telling one, because it’s just not obvious to me that philosophy has those kinds of consequences. I’m not convinced that anyone becomes a psychopath because of lack of faith, and while I would suspect that some forms of psychopathy go together with a lack of awareness of the reality of other minds, I’m not convinced that there’s a therapy for this condition, and I’m quite convinced that philosophy is not part of that therapy. Indeed, I think his question is backwards: the question is not why, if there is no moral law, we don’t all go on killing sprees. The question is: why, if there is no moral law, and if we know that Joe is biologically disposed to go on killing sprees, we don’t just kill Joe and avoid having to deal with the trouble he’s likely to pose for us down the road. That is where, I think, the Nazi analogies have some force – and where, I think, those who want to construct an entirely contingent (or relativist) set of ethics have some work to do. But, by the same token, there are a few other ideas – nationalism and militarism come to mind – that are probably more readily and directly implicated in the Nazi experiment than Darwin.
4. I continue to believe that both sides of the Darwin vs. Christianity battle are missing the most telling point. We should all agree that religious dogma has no bearing on the truth or falsity of a scientific theory. Heliocentrism is true; geocentrism is false. There is an enormous weight of evidence behind the theory of evolution by natural selection. There is going to be more and more evidence behind new theories about the workings of the human mind, and the interactions of the human genome and human personality. All religion can do is react to these discoveries and, as part of that reaction, caution us about drawing unwarranted conclusions (political, moral, what-have-you) from the evidence. But I don’t think that’s the end of the story, because I think science does have implications for the persuasiveness of specific religious doctrines, simply as a psychological matter. And I think evolution through natural selection is extremely uncongenial to the central Christian story about the nature of sin and evil in the world. Why? Because the Christian story has the entry of strife into the world come about as the result of human sin, whereas the core idea behind evolution by natural selection is that our existence – and the consciousness and ability to sin that comes with it – is a product of strife. Put bluntly: natural selection is not the mechanism that the Christian deity would use to create man in His image. Or, if it is, I’d like to see the explanation. I think that natural selection poses similar but less-acute problems for Judaism and Islam; it poses the fewest problems, I suspect, for Hinduism. Again: I’m not speaking of science refuting religion. I’m speaking of scientific results making certain core religious claims less persuasive. That should have implication for religious affiliation of the small group of people who have truly understood the scientific theories in question – which, in turn, will probably have some social implications. And those social implications should be of general interest, independent of the validity of either the science or the religion.
It’s interesting that even in a quite reasonable attempt to distinguish ethics and morals, you seem forced into reflecting on the way that “nature” (in the guise of evolutionary moves) seems to impose itself on us. And though certainly Derb’s interlocutors wouldn’t buy off on the whole evolutionary psychology ball of wax, their Thomism allows for a very tight connection, as I see it, among “nature,” the “moral law” and “ethics.”
And I find it hard to believe that Derb believes in anything approaching a moral law – Ross Douthat had a post somewhere once in which he suggested that one of the “pleasures” of reading Derb was that he was fundamentally tribal, which I think is precisely what exasperates those who try and argue with him.
— Michael Simpson · Apr 23, 04:30 PM · #
Michael: I think you can get Aristotle and Darwin in a room together and they’d figure out a reasonable modus vivendi, but my final point was that if a latter-day St. Thomas tried to achieve something similar with Darwin to what the original did with Aristotle, he’d run into some serious problems. Do you disagree?
As for whether Derb believes in a moral law: one of the other pleasures of Derbyshire is his cheerful disdain for total consistency. (That, I think, is what exasperates some of his opponents, but if it does, that’s their problem; they could live very happily if they just tried to clarify the terms of disagreement and leave it at that.) Moreover, Derb has a pronounced distaste for philosophy, moral or otherwise. Whether or not he believes in a moral law, I am quite certain that the author of Seeing Calvin Coolidge In a Dream has a pretty solid moral sense.
As for tribalism: while Derb clearly perceives political and social reality as a matter of tribes, I’m not so convinced that his own mentality is an exclusively tribal one. Derb once speculated idly about how he’d handle living in an internment camp if and when the United States winds up at war with China, since he believed that the removal of American citizens of Chinese extraction – such as his wife and kids – would be both likely and justified in such an eventuality. That’s not, perhaps, the kind of moral law you or I would think of when we use the phrase, but it’s an impressively detached viewpoint on the matter, and not at all the kind of thing you’d expect from someone who is motivated by questions of “who, whom.”
— Noah Millman · Apr 23, 04:48 PM · #
Noah,
you might be interested in this short (online) work by Karl Rahner, S.J., which addresses many of these questions about evolutionary theory and Catholic theology:
http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=3367
The book was originally published in 1958. So it’s a bit dated. But it gives you a good sense of how one prominent Catholic theologian would handle the issues.
— David · Apr 23, 05:29 PM · #
Noah, I think this is, as always, an incredibly deep. This is a continuation of prior discussions we have had here at TAS. I think the root of it is the question of whether materialism implies nihilism.
I’ll use your framework of four questions.
I think it implies at least one thing: that religious claims that have been made about it are not a rational basis for accepting its existence or nature.
I agree with each sentence here. What remains unaddressed, however, is whether “right vs. wrong” has any meaning. If one (or every) human society has an ethic that says “If A, then do B”, but over time can always develop an ethic that says “If A, then do Not B” for any A and any B, in response to evolutionary or other pressures, and in each case we would say that it has “an ethic meaningfully constrained by human nature”, then that sounds a lot like all such rules are based on prudence or material self-interest, which sounds a lot like (what I mean by ) nihilism.
I’m not convinced that anyone becomes a psychopath because of lack of faith either, I’m not even convinced that anyone “becomes” a psychopath as opposed to just being born that way – I don’t know. I also don’t know if there is any therapy that would work in some or all such cases or not.
This is, I think, the crux of our miscommunication (or at least what I believe to be mis-communication). That is not the question I was trying to pose. In fact, I think there are lots of plausible evolution-based answers for this.
The question that I was trying to pose was not why don’t we all go on killing sprees, but why shouldn’t those of us who feel like going on killing sprees do so?
I agree with you both that the Nazi analogy is relevant here, but that (i) lots of other analogies within the general topic of objectifying others are also, and (ii) Goodwin’s Law – ‘nuff said.
I’ve written a long National Review article, for what it’s worth, on the exact question of whether evolution implies atheism, or even in weaker form, rejection of Christianity. Cliff Notes version: no; beyond that I’ll just link to it, rather than try to recapitulate it here.
I’m hoping to have another long thumb-sucker in an upcoming edition of National Review going into the exact issue of what is known / plausible about the reduction of mind to genetics.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 23, 05:54 PM · #
<i>I don’t know whether he thinks there’s some sort of universal moral law accessible through reason.</i>
The moral instinct is our genes’ way of keeping us together to keep us alive. Insofar as we can reify “keeping us together to keep us alive” into a system of principles and strategies, then yes, a universal moral law for humanity is theoretically accessible through reason (depending on how one defines that term).
It’s worth pointing out, however, that without science we never get to the ‘verifiable fact’ to be reified.
— JA · Apr 23, 06:37 PM · #
It’s also worth pointing out that nothing in “keeping us together to keep us alive” necessitates an introspective scrutability of moral judgment (this is known as the “principle of parsimony” in evolutionary theory). Genes usually stop after “good enough, often enough”.
— JA · Apr 23, 06:50 PM · #
David: that’s a very long piece, and I don’t know that I’ll get through it any time soon. But my recollection of the state of things with respect to Catholic views of evolution is that there’s nothing wrong per se with evolution but there is a problem with a belief in materialism. Where the rubber meets the road, though, is over whether random mutation plus natural selection equals evolution, or whether some kind of “vitalism” or evolutionary “directional arrow” needs to be posited. This choice has real scientific implications; it’s not just a matter of interpretation where one interpretation is more consonant with Catholic teaching than the other. In any event, so far the scientific consensus is overwhelmingly against vitalist theories that began to be posited before Darwin, and my own feeling is that the so-called “moderate” theory of evolution that the Catholic Church accepts as consonant with Catholic teaching is really a species of vitalist theory – but, again, I may be wrong, and it may not be a theory at all, just an interpretation of classic evolution by natural selection that I don’t comprehend.
— Noah Millman · Apr 23, 06:50 PM · #
Jim: I had forgotten that we had a back-and-forth about this before. You’re right: your concern is why we shouldn’t be murderers, not why we aren’t. But I’m not convinced that this is the key question either, precisely because we aren’t.
Posit that the world is divided into two kinds of people: people who really might go on killing sprees, and people who won’t. The latter don’t really need a reason; they already have enough moral sense not to go on killing sprees without knowing why not. Contra Raskolnikov, puzzling over the question, “why not?” might make them unhappy or might be tittilating to them or might seem to them a waste of time, but is exceedingly unlikely to turn them into the kinds of people who would go on killing sprees. These folks – the ones who really would kill for a thrill – can’t really be reasoned with. They are psychopaths. So for whom is the question “why not going on a killing spree?” really critical? What is the pragmatic significance of knowing the answer?
Here’s another way of stating my view. The most important pragmatic question is: how do you teach a child to behave in a manner we would recognize as ethical? When we actually talk to children, we do use what amount to philosophical theories: we say, for example, “how would you feel if somebody did that to you?” which implies the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative somewhere in the background. But we never bring the background to the foreground, and, as a matter of actual human psychology, it’s possible that we never do. It’s possible, in fact, that we’re hard-wired to do this kind of imagining-ourselves-as-others, and that socializing children involves making use of this inborn ability rather than providing a proper philosophical grounding from which right behavior could be deduced.
How important is a rigorous system of moral axioms to inculcating a moral sense? I’m not sure it’s enormously important, assuming it’s even possible. Which means the big question of why we shouldn’t go on a killing spree is, ultimately, not that big a question after all.
But we are now very far away from Darwin, or even from materialism.
— Noah Millman · Apr 23, 07:16 PM · #
JA: Yes.
As an aside, there’s a burgeoning literature of Darwinians arguing that the religious instinct is an accidental bi-product of our innate ability to model other conscious agents – on this theory, we’re promiscuous agent-identifiers who can’t help thinking there was a benevolent will behind the rain that came just in time to save our crops or a malevolent will behind the smallpox that took our children so young. But there are alternative social explanations for the persistence of religion, sufficient, I should think, to say that we don’t know whether or not the religious instinct is adaptive, but we might as well presume it is rather than not. But what’s the adaptive purpose of being able to do science? I can’t think of one. If anything is evidence that the human mind is more than merely “good enough” it’s the fact that we do do science.
— Noah Millman · Apr 23, 07:44 PM · #
I’m not really sure at all whether one could construct some agreement between Aristotle and Darwin; I think the former is too much a Platonist and has too much interest in human flourishing (as opposed to survival). As to Aquinas, well, yes, I do think there are some pretty basic conflicts, at least insofar as for Aquinas (at least so far as I understand him) was persistent in affirming the essential goodness of creation, something that’s hard to square with natural selection. But I’ve not thought in depth on the matter, so perhaps I’m all wet here.
As to Derb, I guess you can count me among those whom he exasperates, and I don’t think that “detachment” is quite the same thing at all as moral law. He’s just describing, so far as I can tell, what he thinks will happen and the fact that he calls such actions “justified” merely reflects, again, a kind of tribalism – what is it that a group of people will likely do under a certain set of conditions. That he’s clearsighted (or dystopian – the two are too often conflated) doesn’t really say much about his attachment to universal moral laws.
— Michael Simpson · Apr 23, 08:06 PM · #
Who doesn’t doubt the existence of God? How passe!
— Joules · Apr 23, 08:36 PM · #
Noah: “But what’s the adaptive purpose of being able to do science? I can’t think of one.”
Neither can I, really, though I suspect it has to do with the cognitive ability to hold two different, mutually exclusive scenarios in our heads and jump back and forth between them. Our ability to recognize loose regularities over time, to make analogies between distinct categories of things, and to force order on chaos via theory-making — I’m pretty sure they undergird the religious instinct, in addition to the agent-identification you mention (it’s been argued that morality — defined as an agent-judging and self-judging faculty, which valuates events primarily to infer worth to agents — is linked with this). It seems that science probably emerged “unselected” from a combination of these, maybe combined with curiosity, problem-solving, learning, memory, and the capacity to sit through multiple trials of error. But these are all guesses; even though quite a bit of literature is being built-up around these issues, the evidence doesn’t afford any direct conclusions.
I tend to think both science and religion are unselected byproducts of more quotidian adaptations, enabled in genes but frozen in culture, with religion being much closer to the essential end of the “culturgen” spectrum, and science much closer to the accidental.
— JA · Apr 23, 09:26 PM · #
Because the Christian story has the entry of strife into the world come about as the result of human sin . . . .
I think this depends on what you mean by strife. If you equate strife with a situation in which living things exist by eating other living things, so that before the Fall no living thing consumed any other living thing, then perhaps you’re right. But I don’t think “the Christian story” presupposes that.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 23, 10:43 PM · #
Also, Noah, you say that the primary problem the theory of natural selection poses for Christianity is that “natural selection is not the mechanism that the Christian deity would use to create man in His image.” And you say that this is less of a problem for Judaism, though still a problem. But the idea that human beings are created in the image of God is articulated in Genesis, so why would it be less of a problem for Jews than for Christians?
Interesting conversation, by the way. Or rather, not by the way at all.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 23, 10:55 PM · #
Alan: I may simply be insufficiently well-informed about Christianity, but I thought the whole business about natural evil coming about as a result of human sin was pretty important. I mean, that’s what the Fall is all about, isn’t it?
Anyhow, I don’t subscribe to a notion of a fallen creation, nor do I think such a concept is obligatory in Judaism (though Kabbalistic ideas of a “broken” creation clearly bear some comparison here). In the narrative of Genesis, God creates both a garden and a wilderness; we’re originally meant to live in the garden, but we’re sent out from there into the wilderness. It’s problematic, I think, to assert that human consciousness is itself a product of the wilderness; that’s why I say natural selection is a problem for Judaism classically understood as well as Christianity. But as I read it, at least God intentionally created the wilderness in the beginning, for purposes known best to Him. (As God says to Job out of the whirlwind: behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee . . . it is the beginning of the ways of God.) That’s the reason I drew a distinction. But it’s a problem for both, I think.
— Noah Millman · Apr 23, 11:26 PM · #
I thought the whole business about natural evil coming about as a result of human sin was pretty important.
Absolutely, in Christianity it usually (almost always) is. But we still have to define “natural evil.” Is it a case of natural evil when lions eat antelopes? How about when whales eat krill? Or when cows eat grass? I don’t think Christians have to be committed to the idea that before the Fall nothing ate anything else. This is a complicated issue, of course, and I’m not trying to solve it; I’m just pointing out that just how problematic natural selection is for Christians depends on how you define natural evil.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 23, 11:49 PM · #
This would be an example of the adaptationist fallacy (a scientific fallacy, not a logical fallacy). We are almost never justified in concluding any sort of universal law, even physical law, from the details of one species’ evolved form; evolution is as much or more about the accidental details of history than about any universals.
First, the use of “Darwin” is a little grating and pejorative, because it connotes an unhealthy attachment to the ideas of a single person. Darwin is honored by scientists and skeptics, but (unlike Marx, for instance) few if any of his specific ideas have survived in their original form. Also note that Christianity does not have a monopoly on evolution denial; the denial of evolution is a strong theme in Islam as well.
Second, the whole point of the scientific side of the scientific vs. religious battle over evolution is precisely that “religious dogma has no bearing on the truth or falsity of a scientific theory.” It is difficult, therefore, to understand precisely what telling point the scientific side is missing. The rest of (4) appears to describe the telling point that the religious are missing.
— The Barefoot Bum · Apr 24, 02:19 PM · #
Really interesting. Here’s a Mormon response to the bit about evolution:
http://www.timesandseasons.org/?p=4519
— Adam Greenwood · Apr 24, 07:34 PM · #
“So for whom is the question “why not going on a killing spree?” really critical?”
Well, people who kill just for the fun of it appear to be rather rare, thank goodness, but what about killing people when there is an incentive? You might not be tempted to throw an old lady under a bus just for the hell of it, but what if you were offered $50? $1000? $1 billion? With every dollar, more people would take up the offer.
Perhaps an even more applicable question might be “Why not pound away at every good looking girl you can get your hands on, regardless of what it takes to get them into bed?”. This is a far more universal moral temptation among men than random killing, and still very relevant. Guys who want lots of sex with lots of partners aren’t psychopaths, they’re just guys. As a fairly good looking man who is moving up career- and confidence-wise, this is a question I’ve had to confront almost every day: Why don’t I use my current looks/social position to do something that at least part of me really wants to do?
— Thursday · Apr 24, 07:58 PM · #
Noah Millman: “it poses the fewest problems, I suspect, for Hinduism.”
I’ve come across a few Hindu writers who are also anti-evolution. As I recall, some sects are committed to a cosmos only one or two million years. In a curious example of cultural cross-fertilization, both Hindu and Christian anti-evolutionists have recommended to me the book “Forbidden Archaeology.”
Noah Millman again: “whether random mutation plus natural selection equals evolution, or whether some kind of “vitalism” or evolutionary “directional arrow” needs to be posited. This choice has real scientific implications; it’s not just a matter of interpretation where one interpretation is more consonant with Catholic teaching than the other.”
I am not sure if the kind of “directional arrow” you’re talking about can ever be proved or disproved on scientific grounds. From Newton to Darwin and onward, the scientific excision of teleological concerns has been justified on both methodological and scientific realist grounds. As long as one is not a scientific realist, recognizing scientific findings as models rather than reality, there is still interpretative ground for non-empiricist metaphysics.
Barefoot Bum: “This would be an example of the adaptationist fallacy (a scientific fallacy, not a logical fallacy). We are almost never justified in concluding any sort of universal law, even physical law, from the details of one species’ evolved form”
Regarding deriving ethics from scientific views of human nature, I would think the so-called “naturalistic fallacy” would more apply, since in a value-neutral universe one really can’t derive an ought from an is.
Presuming a non-value neutral universe, I think nature could still suggest a kind of moral realism even absent moral universals. Is it fallacious to deduce(or rather, induce) that, since men are so evolved to perceive light, light exists? Why not then, an evolved moral perception in response to a moral environment?
— Kevin Jones · Apr 24, 09:05 PM · #
Noah, you write:
“And I think evolution through natural selection is extremely uncongenial to the central Christian story about the nature of sin and evil in the world. Why? Because the Christian story has the entry of strife into the world come about as the result of human sin, whereas the core idea behind evolution by natural selection is that our existence – and the consciousness and ability to sin that comes with it – is a product of strife. Put bluntly: natural selection is not the mechanism that the Christian deity would use to create man in His image. Or, if it is, I’d like to see the explanation.”
Look at the Bible.
That document is the product of countless acts of selection and retention. From the grandiose (Council of Nicea, Hampton Court Conference) to the mundane (monks copying bibles day-after-day in a cold monastery), the Bible was transmitted by a process whereby mutations (textual changes both large and small, substantive and insubstantive, voluntary and accidental) were occasionally introduced into the text of some Bibles, these changes were evaluated, and the most successful were able to reproduce (the less successful were branded as heresies, with attendant unpleasant consequences). The Bible, in other words, has been arrived at by a process of selection and retention often characterized by strife.
Is that really the mechanism the Christian deity would use to pass His truth on to mankind? If it isn’t, what does that tell you about the Bible?
— southpaw · Apr 25, 05:38 AM · #