July 18, 2007

What Theists Can't Answer

Michael Gerson recently wrote an article in the Washington Post, What Atheists Can't Answer.
The question he states that atheist can't answer is:

How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it.


He goes on with some assmonkey rhetoric:

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: "Obey your evolutionary instincts" because those instincts are conflicted. "Respect your brain chemistry" or "follow your mental wiring" don't seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: "To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I'm going to do whatever I please." C.S. Lewis put the argument this way: "When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains."


The reality is that not only is the atheist answer to the question simple, it is also based on reality.

We have evolved a mindset that allows us to be inclined to be able to survive and procreate and to do our best for our offspring to survive as well, just like every other animal on this planet. By survival, I am talking about food, shelter, getting along with mates, and avoiding predators which includes doing stuff that will make someone else want to kill us with certainty.

Yes, we are conflicted, the selfishness that comes with our individual survival (which could lead to "bad" behavior) versus doing things that appear good or altruistic in order not to piss others off, and even doing good things on the expectation that "if I open the door for you, you will open the door for me."

Culture does add rules as well. Laws that remind us to be good or pay the consequences (jail not hell). Culture norms that keep us in good standing in the culture as well, influence us. Most norms and laws are just common sense that benefits our evolutionary survival written down on paper.


Good and bad instincts are constantly being weighed in our brains, mostly subconsciously. Good instincts win out usually, because we would be extinct by now if they didn't.


Now for the question that theists can't answer. I am defining theists in this case as anyone who thinks we need a belief in God to be able to choose between right from wrong:

How do chimpanzees decide between good and bad instincts?

Before you say they don't. Read this:

Chimps may display genuine altruism

CHIMPS are not known for their manners, but it turns out they are more civilised than we give them credit for. They seem happy to help both unrelated chimps and unfamiliar humans, even if it means exerting themselves for no reward.

True altruism - completely unselfish acts for somebody else's benefit - was until recently considered uniquely human. When animals help, the theory went, they either help relatives, thereby increasing chances of passing shared genes to the next generation, or they count on having favours returned in the future.

Now Felix Warneken and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have found that 12 of 18 semi-wild chimpanzees went out of their way to help an unfamiliar human who was struggling to reach a stick. They even did this when they first had to climb into a 2.5-metre-high ropeway and for no reward. Equivalent experiments ...

or this

Chimps get angry but not spiteful, study finds

LONDON (Reuters) - An angry chimpanzee will take revenge but -- unlike a human -- it will not do so out of spite, according to a study published on Monday that offers insights into how people perceive what is fair.

The study showed chimpanzees would seek retribution when wronged but did not punish others out of spite, for instance if another chimpanzee was better off, said Keith Jensen, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, who led the study.

Scientists had debated whether a sense of fairness and social comparison applied only to humans and the study was an attempt to answer some of the questions, Jensen said in a telephone interview.

"Like humans, chimpanzees retaliate against personally harmful actions, but unlike humans, they are indifferent to simply personally disadvantageous outcomes and are therefore not spiteful," he and colleagues wrote in a study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.

The study suggests that anger is an important motivational force but what causes it differs greatly between chimpanzees and humans, Jensen said.

"Humans and apes both get upset at theft but humans are more likely to get upset at unfairness," he said.


For more reaction to Gerson's article check out Rank Atheism and also An Atheist Responds by Christopher Hitchens.

Big H/T to Internet Infidels News Wire, a great place for what is hot in the world of belief and atheism.

23 comments:

  1. The "where does good and evil come from?" is of course a question the religious have obsessed about from day one. In the Xtian tradition it involves a "War in Heaven", a renegade angel turned bad (Satan), a talking serpent and more phantasmagorical nonsense. Their latest offensive is really another feeble rear-guard fight.

    Trying to define right and wrong in "moral" terms really skews things: what is good for one is often bad for another, depending on the respective gain-loss balances of both parties.

    Although chimps are good examples as they are genetically close to us, you can see many, many examples of how animals (that haven't got the slightest notion of theoretical morality) behave "morally". For instance in the animal kingdom, inter-species fights, disputes and conflicts regarding resources (food, territory, sexual mates etc) are very common yet rarely lead to death or even serious injury because such outcomes aren't beneficial to the species. Simply put, it might be beneficial for a cat to drive another cat from his/her territory but not to actually try and kill the competitor.

    Viewed in this way the most "moral" species [us] in the kingdom is actually the least moral, despite all our futile religious and semi-religious rationalisations...

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  2. BEAJ --

    Excellent post: on point and well-argued. I think I'm going to have to copy it into Word and keep it for future arguments against silly theists like Gerson. Incidentally, I tried to Digg this post and received this ERROR message,

    "URL blocked
    This URL has been reported by users to be in violation of Digg's Terms of Service and cannot be submitted at this time."

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  3. Infidel, I tried to Digg it earlier and I got a message that my url is blocked by Digg. Do I suspect Muslims for flagging me thanks to my last two posts? You bet.

    Gert, I've made the point that every social animal appear to behave morally more than immorally. And yes I've also argued the point that good, bad, and morality are completely subjective terms.

    I tried to keep it simple for the average Fundy to at least try to understand by focusing only on chimps here.

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  4. Of course, this is all for the benefit of the lurkers. May many come to lurk!!

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  5. Beaj,

    I'm sorry to hear that some jerk blocked your site from Digg. I submitted your article to reddit instead - and will link to it from my site too.

    Thanks for the fascinating stuff about Chimps.

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  6. You're arguing from the conclusion you want to the premises. Selfishness and concern with survival are bad, altruism is good. You selectively identify acts as ethical in nature if they match that conclusion.

    What you call "assmonkey rhetoric" is completely correct with regard to instincts as a source of moral knowledge. They are in conflict with one another, and we have to use reason to determine which path to follow. People can decide how to act in any number of ways, but if we're discussing the question in terms of reason, we have to ask: What set of principles will a rational person, thinking as clearly and consistently as possible and understanding all the relevant issues, choose to live by?

    The answer "principles which benefit others" is absurd. I live to sustain and enjoy my life, not anyone else's. I can feel good will to people, but I do so as they relate to my life, not because they're the goal or justification of my life.

    "My life" means more than my physical existence; it means my wholeness as a person, loyalty to self, integrity. I've been working on an essay on ethics this week; I'll post a link to it on my blog when it's ready.

    Choosing among instincts by "subconscious weighing" begs the question. Unless that's done by some standard, it's just yielding to whichever instinct is stronger at the moment. We have to have conscious, reasoned standards for action.

    Sorry if this makes me an "assmonkey." :)

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  7. Gary, I've stated that "good and bad and morality" are relative terms.
    I have also posted in the past that I don't think there is a such thing as true altruism. We do things that seem altruistic, but they just enhance our chance of survival and/or a brain rush is associated with doing an altruistic act (so pleasure is found either consciously or subconsciously).

    I'll give an example of how we don't act totally selfishly. Men could have sex a lot more if we completely disregarded others. What prevents us from raping? Besides the law, I would argue that consciously and subconsciously we know that it would hurt someone else needlessly and that it would make us hated by others in our group/society.

    Even though we walk around with a full sac and we are evolutionally motivated to dump those seeds and keep the species going, we don't go around like raving sex fiends, nor do most of us have the ultimate urge to rape women on the street.

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  8. Gary:

    "What you call "assmonkey rhetoric" is completely correct with regard to instincts as a source of moral knowledge. They are in conflict with one another, and we have to use reason to determine which path to follow. People can decide how to act in any number of ways, but if we're discussing the question in terms of reason, we have to ask: What set of principles will a rational person, thinking as clearly and consistently as possible and understanding all the relevant issues, choose to live by?"

    Complete and utter poppycock. You're putting the cart before the horse in a feeble attempt to rationalise.

    Using reason leads to conflicting "ways to lead your life" as well, see for example raging religious wars. There is no real universal set of principles we can rationally arrive at, without conflicting other worldviews.

    The world is a murky place simply because our instincts (for want of a better term) can lead us to various courses of action, courses that may be conflicting.

    We all (well most of us) try and live by some ethical or moral paradigm or other, presumably because of some deep-seated human need for rationalisation and clarity and because these paradigms are the framework of some (hopefully benign) form of social control.

    And although different paradigms may look differently on the face of things, when you dig a little they tend to be very closely related. For instance Judaism, Xtianity and Islam share much more than the ways in which they differ.

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  9. Complete and utter poppycock. You're putting the cart before the horse in a feeble attempt to rationalise.

    Using reason leads to conflicting "ways to lead your life" as well, see for example raging religious wars. There is no real universal set of principles we can rationally arrive at, without conflicting other worldviews.

    The world is a murky place simply because our instincts (for want of a better term) can lead us to various courses of action, courses that may be conflicting.

    We all (well most of us) try and live by some ethical or moral paradigm or other, presumably because of some deep-seated human need for rationalisation and clarity and because these paradigms are the framework of some (hopefully benign) form of social control.

    And although different paradigms may look differently on the face of things, when you dig a little they tend to be very closely related. For instance Judaism, Xtianity and Islam share much more than the ways in which they differ.


    Feel free to support your claims - you have offered no argument other than rhetoric so far - it is quite clear what beaj is saying, but you need to be more specific if we can provide a substantive response.

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  10. "Good" and "Evil" are garbage can terms. There is ethical, and unethical behavior, and either one can have unforseen consequences. The terms good and evil are so mired in personifications, superstition, and manipulated emotion, that they are difficult to apply at best.

    Was Hitler evil? Most will say "yes". This is a value judgment. Hitler was not motivated to do what he did because he delighted in seeing people murder each other. He was working toward a very different end than he achieved, and he unethically believed that the end justified some very horrible means. Besides this, his belief system was so warped as to prove that he was criminally insane. "Evil" is the boogyman under the bed. It does not adequately describe reality.

    People collect clothes and send them to third-world countries where they are sold cheaply. Is this good? Was it good when Japan dumped electronic products on the US below cost? We have destroyed fledgling industries and economies in third world countries by removing their money from the local economy. "Good" is an equally lazy descriptor.

    How moral are you if your actions are solely based on the belief that an angry god will cause a demon to piss on you for all eternity if your behavior doesn't measure up to his standard? I suppose I should not complain. This system works so well that we have no need of secular laws, and we have no humans that break those laws we don't need.

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  11. alan mackenzie:

    If I'm offering nothing but rhetoric then it should be all the more easy for you to refute what I wrote. Frankly, your only argument so far is that it's just rhetoric. That doesn't impress me much either.

    In summary my argument is that human morality is largely a rationalisation, canonisation even, of gain-loss balances between members of the same species, as well as the gain-loss balances interspecies. I think that's a fairly clear position to take.

    I agree largely with breakerslion, although shifting "good"/"evil" to "ethical"/"unethical" simply shifts the false dichotomy from one set of terms to another.

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  12. I think that what Gersee is trying to say (as are lots of folk who "think" as he does that belief in God serves a very practical purpose that's beneficial for the masses of humanity more than is the belief in natural selection. If you believe that GOD told you to be nice to your little sister you're more likely to be so rather than if you believe that you're just a bundle of interesting instincts that evolved (somewhat haphazardly) over time and that are dependant for the color of their manifestation on the particulars of your environment.

    And of course he's right.

    If you're quite confident in the naturalistic explanations for your existence you're less likely to be moral (however your particular society defines that term) than if you believe that God Almighty commands you to be moral and that your soul will soon be in his hands forever where he will deal with you in accordance with your chosen level of morality during your mortality.


    But yeah - Gersee didn't actually SAY that, let's just assume that's what he did mean to say where he able to think honestly.


    Oh, and for the record, I've found that most atheists with whom I've spoken (including one very famous one) fail to think straight as well and generally refuse to concede that according to their point of view life has no true meaning beyond what you chose to create through your imagination and that, similarly, there is no such thing as "good" or "bad", etc.

    For the most part, people are dumbasses - regardless of what theistic camp they decide to belong to.

    mnuez

    www.mnuez.blogspot.com

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  13. Mnuez, if your statement that atheists are less likely to be moral because we don't buy into God, why are atheists under represented in prisons?

    We are most likely more moral, because we know this is our only chance at life, and we appreciate that it is your only chance too. And I don't want to spend it behind bars.

    I don't know of any atheists who say that life has meaning outside of how we individually give it meaning. All atheists I've seen address this issue state that the meaning of life is what we give it as individuals.

    I've yet to see a theist give me a meaning of life if God and heaven exist. Oh, I've heard, "to be closer to God" But how is that meaning?

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  14. The theist position of mnuez (and many others like Gerson) sounds like a two-phased fallacy to me: first they have to talk themselves into believing the Supercop in the Heavens actually exists, then abide by the rules of this imaginary friend ("Serve and Protect", isn't that the newspeak motto of most police forces today?), or else they'll go on a rampage of rape, killings, lootings and such like, to satisfy their innate desires...

    BEAJ:

    "[...] why are atheists under represented in prisons?"

    You keep bringing up that chestnut but what's your evidence for this? Let's assume there are such statistics and that a correlation between criminal tendencies and religiosity exists. Well, correlations in themselves prove nothing whatsoever. The GDP of Brazil and the population of the UK are also correlated (quite closely even) but surely no one would suggest a causal link? There may (or there may not) also exist a negative (inverse) correlation between, say, being liberal and criminal tendencies but what would this prove without an underlying mechanism that would prove this relationship to be causal?

    No, then I prefer Hitchen's position which doesn't imply being religious or atheist/agnostic makes you necessarily a "better person" either way. The only thing I find safe to say about the atheist/agnostic position that it's a damn sight more intellectually honest than the outdated, rear-guard battle theist position, which requires in some circles now also to tell your kids that dinosaurs walked in the Garden of Eden...

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  15. Gert, there is a lot of info on atheists being under represented in prison. Do a search. Here is one link for starters.

    Also, those in prison tend to be of lower socio economical status. And there is a correlation between that and belief in God.

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  16. "[...] And there is a correlation between that and belief in God."

    Same problem though: correlation does not imply causation.

    See the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy...

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  17. Actually your link is pretty convincing but has contentious sides as well. To compare like with like, you'd have to do it pro capita. If I assumed (for sake of the argument) that there is no meaningful correlation between criminal tendencies and religiosity it would still be entirely logical to expect to find far more religious criminals in jail than non-religious one, simply because the religious in society far outnumber the non-religious.

    If we assume a 10% ratio of atheists/agnostics in society then, based on the link's figures, it would still be reasonable to state that A/A are under-represented in jails.

    But the methodology is sloppy: how to define religiosity for instance? In jail this would typically be done by "ticking a box" but that doesn't necessarily say much about a person. In Britain often there is no box for "no religion" (in surveys and such like).

    The idea that those who quest for knowledge and truth and don't rely on dogma, will be less inclined to criminal behaviour is a seductive one, but it's far from proved... Not much more proved than "religion makes you a moral person"...

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  18. There could be another reason why atheists are underrepresented in prisons.

    Since we're smarter, we're less likely to be caught! :-)

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  19. "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
    --Albert Einstein

    Great minds?

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  20. If one is to remove God from morality we are left with one of two considerations.

    Firstly, we must consider the fact that instinct dictates certain actions for both the individual and as well as the collective. The latter overpowers the former and demands conformity to standards which best suit the survival of the collective. The immediate question that arises is this: on what basis is the individual obliged to follow the rules dictated to him by the collective? Is it because he is obliged to ensure the survival of the collective? This is a tautology and is completely unsatisfactory as an explanation.

    Secondly, one is forced to consider this point: if the human species has figured out that being morally right is the most conducive method to achieving continued survival, then why has “moral wrong” perpetuated to such an extent without at any point hindering the survival of the species? To present a crude illustration of this point, a single act of genocide may prevent a single instance of over-population thereby increasing the chances of survival of those who remain. Cannibalism for the sake of survival is another such example. And there the argument falls apart. Unless of course we are to conclude that morally right and wrong acts balance out against each other to ensure greater survival.

    This is where it can get confusing, so read carefully. The fact that both morally right as well as wrong acts may positively impact on the overall survival of the species is a curious observation. This is because the inter-relationship between morally conflicting acts is completely beyond the control of both the individual as well as the collective. It is in fact persuasive evidence that there is an external design which causes human beings to act in morally contrasting ways, which has the cumulative result of ensuring survival.

    To say that only morally right acts lead to survival is as naive as saying "if everyone was good, then everyone would be happy."

    Thank you for reading.

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  21. Archangel, what is the definition you use for morality? For good and bad?

    What basis do chimps use to determine if killing within its tribe is good or bad?

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  22. This is useless speculation, but how do we know the chimpanzees aren't acting for the greater glory of God? Has anyone asked them what their religion is?

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  23. Jim, I thought most theists believe that even fruit flies and slugs act for the greater glory of God.
    The thing is that the more we learn, the more we find out there is no evidence for God, and the holes that theists use to fill with God are filling up very quickly.
    As for religion, chimps aren't intelligent enough to invent a God and bible. Though they might believe in some spiritual beings as they've been known to do rain dances when they need water.

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