Evolution and ethical thinking

Over the years I've been quite interested in how ideas of morality and ethics undermine the utilitarian notion of natural selection. The doctrine of natural selection is a cornerstone of Darwinian thinking. According to this model the various species evolved their differences largely through a process where advantageous attributes are preserved which improve chances of survival and reproduction. An ecological niche is found and the species evolves a strategy for exploiting it. Leaving for later the problem this raises of irreducible complexity (of what use is half a wing?) or exactly how the chemistry of a cell translates into physical structure, let's go to the question of behavior. At a deeper level than utilitarianism is the logical positivist view that "mind is an attribute of matter." By mind they mean behaviour. Living things have behaviours unlike inanimate matter. They have preferences, even at the most rudimentary level. Darwinians think this behaviour is determined by genetics. On the other hand I have thought for years that they had it backwards. Somehow, I don't claim to know how, I think that behaviour influences genetics. In other words, I think birds sing because they like to sing and that only as a side effect has that behaviour also become useful. Because for a small animal like a sparrow is it really so utilitarian to advertise its location to every predator within earshot? When Darwinians try to explain such things they become contortionists.
A sense of beauty and aesthetics in birds is rather hard to swallow for a logical positivist. They go through similar contortions trying to cram altruistic behaviour into the Darwinian box. We aren't the only species to practice altruistic behaviour but I'll only talk about human morality here.
As one of humanity's oldest documents, the Biblical narrative provides us with a record of an evolution in ethical thinking that spans 2000 years. You don't have to believe in god or Adam and Eve to be impressed by it. Critics point to various places in the bible that justify violence, such as Jehovah's injunction to kill every man, woman and child of the Canaanites but they miss the point. It is normal in all tribal societies to regard outsiders as non human. That's why the ten commandments given to Moses didn't apply to Canaanites. They didn't count. They weren't people in exactly the same way that Jews don't count to Muslims. Jews aren't human beings. They are children of apes and pigs. A Jew (or a Christian) can be beaten in the street with impunity by any Muslim. Greeks of ancient times thought that people who spoke other languages only made rude noises and could not be considered civilized. It's a well known fact that hunting and gathering societies only consider their own tribesmen to be human beings. I'm not very familiar with east or south Asian thinking on ethics and morality, but in the west a vast leap forward was made with the transition to Christianity. I don't mean to say that people instantly stopped murdering and torturing each other, but if they did it was contrary to the teaching of the Church. The early Christian thinkers spent a lot of time thinking about whether war could ever be justified when Jesus expressly stated that we were to love our enemies and turn the other cheek when injured instead of retaliating. There was nothing like this in Greek thought. The poet Archilochus (a soldier) probably formulated the standard Greek attitude when one of his poems told how if there was one thing he knew how to do it was to avenge a wrong done to him.
It's hard for modern westerners to imagine how callous we human beings can be to the suffering of others even in our own culture and not too far in the past. As recently as the beginning of the 19th Century people still gathered at Newgate in London to watch public executions. The method was hanging, but not using the technique of breaking the neck to assure a quick death. Instead the miscreant was hoisted into the air by his neck. Death came by slow strangulation. People from every level of society showed a strange fascination with the spectacle of life departing a living body. American cavalrymen on the western frontier got good and plastered before a fight because they dreaded what would happen if they were injured in battle and left to the Indians. It was usually the Indian women who prowled the battlefield and they liked to cut off certain parts of any soldier left alive. Any soldier brought back to camp by them knew that the Indians had developed a fine art out of inflicting a maximum amount of pain while keeping the victim hanging on to life by a thread.
These sorts of behaviours conform fairly well to the utilitarian model. Life is competitive. Fear and intimidation have 'survival value.' Of what use is turning the other cheek? If I were a Darwinist I would suggest that such behaviour, while of no advantage to the individual, is of benefit to the group. It would reduce internicine conflict and allow cooperation for the common good.
But the trajectory of ethical thinking, especially in the Christian tradition, is to confer equal humanhood on everybody regardless of race, language, social status or even species. It's a well known fact that people nowadays seem more shocked by cruelty to puppies than to humans. This kind of thinking has led to ideas of social equality, abolition of slavery, idealistic notions of the "noble savage," and now concern with the survival of frogs and toads. What makes all this possible is the human capacity for imagination, which I believe is also a prerequisite for religious faith. Imagination is the faculty humans have of picturing things that don't exist yet in the real world. It's not only necessary for religious faith but for invention of all sorts. Humans have been imagining for thousands of years what it would be like to fly like birds, to swim under the sea, to travel to the moon.
Similarly, when we humans imagine what it would be like to be that person on the cross, what it would be like to go hungry, what it would be like to be a fish on a hook, we put ourselves in that place and actually feel pain. resumably we have had this capacity ever since we became fully modern humans. But in the struggle for survival in a hunting and gathering technology it was not possible to accumulate sufficient surplus to assure life for any length of time. Agriculture improved things and provided enough surplus to sustain a small class of aristocrats. That was when record keeping, priesthoods, writen history, cities and a vastly more sophisticated organizational capacity developed. And it was precisely then and in the Middle East, Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, now called Iraq where this seemingly spontaneous combustion took place. And it is to this time that our bible traces its pedigree, and it is through that bible that we obtained a divine commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." By the time that the Romans put Christ to death on the cross the emphasis changed from being a law of god, to "Imagine what it would be like to die on a cross. Feel his pain. And he died for us out of love all the while forgiving his executioners."
I was thinking of this in connection with Islam. The god who spoke to Mohammed had nothing to say about forgiveness. And ever since Mohammeds followers took over the ancient source of our civilization it has ceased to be a factor in human progress. To mohammed there was only force and conformity. There was only the outsider who must convert or be killed. Sympathy for the foreigner and his ways was extirpated. Jews are only pigs and apes. In spite of what many writers try to tell us, wherever Islam went it inaugurated a dark age.

City of God

I've been hors de combat with the flu this week, but maybe I can return to the front lines now even though I am being distracted by a young woman suckling her child. I don't find that at all offensive and mother needn't be so discreet to cover herself. Both mother and infant are very attractive and give unmistakeable signs of intelligence and alertness. And yes, they're white. Wish I was less shy as I would very much like to take their picture. So glad to see them reproduce.
So today, with the main legacy of that vicious and unmannerly virus is a set of ribs that feel as if Mike Tyson has been practicing his left and right hooks, my initial act after returning to consciousness and being out and abroad was to purchase a copy of Augustine's City of God. It's one of those tomes I always knew I would have to read and dreading it. Three factors conspired together to make this the moment: first, it was 20% off, second I had the requisite $20 in my pocket, and lastly the first paragraph my eyes fell on after opening it up at a random page which said, "Now if wisdom is identical with god, by whom all things wer made, as we are assured by divine authority and divine truth, then the true philosopher is a lover of god." This is from the beginning of Book VIII on Natural theology, so in the next paragraph he explains that theology signifies reasoning or discussion about the Divinity,
The first thing that catches the attention is that while he is speaking about something known through faith he wants to reason about it. Although he was a Latin speaker from North Africa and could not read Greek, this is an entirely Greek thought. Faith is there, certainly, but in reason, not a deity. I take this to mean that he largely equated reason with the deity, to be an aspect of it...that wisdom is identical with God. His idea of Natural Theology apparently comes from Varro (about whom I know nothing) who would "extend his 'natural' theology as far as the visible world, or the World-Soul, but no further."
With such a discussion leaping off the first page I looked at, how could I resist plunking down my 20 bucks?

The voyage

One of my regular web reads is The New English Journal and one of the reasons I read it is because Theodore Dalrymple often appears there. He and Paul Johnson were the main reasons I liked to read The Spectator. But while Paul Johnson, a Catholic, is very religious it turns out that Dalrymple is an atheist. This surprising (to me) news he revealed in a NEJ article in a previous issue, and now elaborates on in the current issue. It surprises me because I don't understand how an intelligent person can not believe in God. There's lots of room for disagreement on the nature of God- whether he is good or not, male or female or does not apply, omniscient and omnipotent or limited in powers and knowledge just as we are but at a higher level, but that our reality could be anything other than the product of some great thought by a great being I don't even question anymore. That our physical being is not animated by some empyrean spark is impossible for me to believe whether it's called the soul, spirit or what. John Donne put it precisely in Air and Angels,

But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,


To me the ultimate questions revolve around why we and the world were made, and while it may be nice to benefit from scientific reasoning which brings us airplanes and computers and such, its main interest to me is to help me pursue those ultimate questions. Atheists always demand proof. If God exists, prove it, they say, and since proof of the kind they want is wanting they say gottcha. One of the reasons I have come to believe in God is precisely because I cannot prove it. In fact, I cannot prove anything by their rules of the game. Where is yesterday, for example? Can I really prove by direct measurement and observation that there is such a thing as the past? If, as so-called philosopher Daniel Dennett explains, science -ie, proof- consists of things that can be weighed and measured, then what happens when I die? I won't be able to weigh and measure anything then, will I. No, just about everything we believe we believe on faith. The only things we know are the things we feel...pain and pleasure. Everything else is a constructed image in our thoughts and we believe the truth of that image because our senses convince us.
Even the most atheistic scientist has to believe in certain principles, among them that the universe always and everywhere has a consistency of behavior that can be calculated using mathematical reasoning. I happen to believe they are right in this assumption, and I also believe science to be the most precise instrument so far invented to examine the works of God. Unlike Muslims, I am convinced that he wants us to examine his works.
I also believe that God is good and loves us all. How is that possible, some atheists ask, when even innocent children suffer? Some religions have noted that the world is filled with suffering. Animals kill and eat each other in most horrific ways. I always think of a monstrous tarantula injecting its poison into a beautifully coloured song bird, cutting short his lovely melodies. The venom is actually digestive juice that liquifies the victim's insides which the spider then sucks out. It does seem as if a principle of evil has triumphed over a principle of beauty and goodness, doesn't it? And it isn't simply an accidental, contingent event. To live on this planet one must kill to eat. It's built into the system. So the Manichees (my label for what are usually called gnostics) erected an elaborate belief system on the premise that God (the God who created this world) was an evil being, a falolen angel, Satan, but that we humans were created by him using divine sparks of the real God. This theology has survived into recent times taking the forms known as Bogomils, Cathars and others.
In his latest article, I am glad that Dalrymple is at least an honest atheist, the only honorable kind. He is suspicious of theories that try to explain everything. The subject of his piece was a lecture on neuroscience that he lauded for its excellence. But he had reservations about the professor's confidence that neuroscience would soon explain everything about human behaviour, comparing it to previous secular theories-of-everyrthing such as Marxism and Freudianism which he rightly compares to religious fundamentalism.
He ends the article thus: Ergo, self-understanding is not around the corner and never will be. We shall never be able seamlessly to join knowledge and action. To which I add, not in a religious sense: thank God.
But isn't that a circular argument that comes around and bites its tail? Acting without principle is impossible. We do what we do for reasons, never mind how strange they may seem. And do I detect a sneaky version of a liars paradox in his statement? In saying we cannot join knowledge to action isn't he doing precisely that and making a liar out of himself?
Actually, I do not really believe that the only things we know are the things our senses tell us. There is something else. Why do we want to live if life is more often than not a terrible ordeal? We do, and we know instinctively that taking one's own life is very wrong. Not only do we desire to live, but we desire certain things of life. Mere eating and screwing is not enough. Accumulating worldly goods is not enough. Achieving great power and wealth is not enough. (or so I've heard) There is something else we desire from life- beauty, fulfillment, love, accomplishment, wisdom. We have an inborn knowledge of something we cannot satisfy through worldly means. Some take that lesson to heart and renounce the world. I believe we are not meant to renounce it. I believe life is precious and important..not just my own but life itself, your life, the life of the world. And we are meant to see it and learn about it and try to understand it even though we are doomed to always fall short.