EVOLUTION AND SELF-INTEREST
What are the observations that D'Souza takes as evidence for cosmic justice? He admits that morality is almost universally violated. However, universal criteria and standards that everyone refers to nevertheless exist. Why should these criteria exist at all? D'Souza claims that they defy the laws of evolution, so they can't be natural. He asserts, “Evolution implies that we are selfish creatures who seek to survive and reproduce in the world.”
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This is contrary to moral behavior. Moral behavior frequently operates against self-interest. It should be noted that evolution does not teach that we are selfish creatures, it observes only that we have evolved instincts to survive and reproduce. And even these instincts can be overcome by the exercise of our free will. (I accept the existence of free will, but that's another story.)
D'Souza reminds us that the group selection argument has long been recognized as a way to reconcile evolution with moral behavior. Patriots frequently sacrifice their lives for their friends and countries, thus aiding the survival of their kin. But he claims the argument has a fatal flaw. He asks how a tribe of individuals became self-sacrificing in the first place? Cheaters would be more likely to survive than their more altruistic fellow tribesmen.
But, again, D'Souza has the argument turned around. The very use of the word
cheaters
evokes the moral disapproval we feel for those who try the “free rider” strategy. In fact, evolution has
produced
this contempt for cheaters, and a cheater who is thrown out of a primitive society would effectively be receiving a death sentence. There would thus be strong selective pressure to evolve a reasonable aversion to cheating, and the scientific evidence confirms this.
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D'Souza brings up the proposal of biologists William Hamilton and Robert Trivers that was popularized and developed further by Richard Dawkins in
The Selfish Gene
.
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The idea is that the basic unit of evolution is not the individual but the gene, which is the partial sequence of a DNA molecule that carries the individual's genetic information to the next generation and allows its expression in the current generation. This is what really “wants” to survive, if I may be allowed to use that metaphor. The selfish gene, according to D'Souza, explains why most parents would readily trade their own lives for their children's. This is not morality. This is not spirituality. This is pure, reductionist, materialist, natural selection.
D'Souza agrees this works for families, but asks why humans behave altrustically toward others outside their families. This seems to accept a false inference that genes are only shared within families. A gene model of morality doesn't predict that you will only act altruistically toward your family; it says you will tend to act altruistically toward those who most resemble you (i.e., those who share more of your genes, and we share more with our fellow countrymen or race—but also more with our whole species than with other species, and we are, after all, competing against
other species
for survival, even more so than with each other). Such a model therefore predicts racism as well as charity—a much more accurate prediction than D'Souza's. Robert Trivers also observes that humans, and other animals, behave generously toward others when they expect something in return. Natural selection provides survival instincts to those who engage in mutually beneficial exchanges.
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But D'Souza argues this still does not explain “the good things we do that offer no return.”
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He gives as examples people giving up their seats on a bus to the elderly, donating to charities, or agitating for animal rights or against religious persecution in Tibet. D'Souza does not understand that human beings have always been social animals, and like many other social animals, humans have evolved various behavior patterns that facilitate social living. Moreover, many behaviors are by-products of more basic dispositions and emotions that are themselves adaptively advantageous; for example, compassion in and of itself is adaptively useful to social individuals and their gene pools, even after subtracting the costs of unrewarded exercises of it. That's why the emotion exists in the first place.
He recognizes that there can be an ulterior, selfish motive to be recognized as a moral person. However, D'Souza says, we still must confront the Machiavellian argument that “the man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among the many that are not virtuous.”
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D'Souza claims that true morality, true virtue, rises above all this, acting without regard to self-interest. Maybe, but humans have clearly evolved exactly such a moral capacity. So there's nothing left to explain here.
Evolution, according to D'Souza, cannot explain how humans became moral primates. He tells us, “Humans recognize that there is no ultimate goodness and justice in this world, but they continue to hold up these ideals.” Why? Because they expect to be rewarded in the afterlife. Thus, according to D'Souza, the existence of the afterlife is “proved” by the observation of altruistic behavior in humans despite the nonexistence of earthly reward. Note that D'Souza's hypothesis implies that the motivation for altruistic behavior is self-interest after all! Is it not the
extremity
of self-interest to want to live forever in the first place, and to expect a special reward for your righteousness when you get there?
But in fact, humans have evolved a moral capacity that can be used in a variety of ways, both socially acceptable and socially unacceptable. D'Souza's hypothesis predicts that only those who believe in an afterlife will exhibit altruistic behavior. That hypothesis can be easily tested. We just need to gather a sample of those who don't believe in an afterlife and see whether they are significantly less virtuous than those who believe.
Skeptic Magazine
publisher and
Scientific American
columnist Michael Shermer addressed this question in his important book
The Science of Good and Evil.
He reports, “Not only is there no evidence that a lack of religiosity leads to less moral behavior, a number of studies actually support the opposite view.”
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THE POSTEVOLUTIONARY PHASE
I would like to carry D'Souza's chain of reasoning further to draw additional logical conclusions. Humanity has evolved a moral capacity that cannot be attributed to belief in an afterlife where their virtue will be rewarded. Moreover, humanity has entered into a postevolutionary phase in its development that is far from complete. The human body and brain have undergone only minor evolutionary changes in the last ten thousand years. In recent times we have not been subject to the kind of survival pressures that lead to speciation all throughout evolutionary history.
D'Souza mentions Richard Dawkins's proposal presented in the last few pages of
The Selfish Gene
: Dawkins says, “We have the power to turn against our creators….Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.”
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D'Souza mocks this notion, calling it “absurd.” He asks how the “robot vehicles of our selfish genes,” namely us, can rebel against our masters. “Can a mechanical car turn against the man with the remote control? Can software revolt against its programmer?”
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Any computer programmer will answer with a resounding “yes!” It should be stressed that in this extract it is very clear that Dawkins is using the word
selfish
in a metaphorical manner, as he has frequently explained. Nobody ascribes moral attributes to genes. Moreover, D'Souza is factually wrong; currently molecular biology and bioinformatics are routinely used to alter genes of animals and even of humans in a novel form of treatment called gene therapy. Otherwise-fatal diseases may be cured by this treatment, and it is only in its infancy.
In any case, computers might someday become equivalent to intelligent life. As we have seen, no special “spark of life” is needed to inject life into a complex material system. It just has to grow sufficiently complex. I know this is not widely understood, but I think we now know enough about what characterizes a living thing, indeed, an intelligent living thing, that we have no reason to believe that a machine cannot be intelligent. And, as history shows, modern humans have always exhibited their ability to overthrow tyrants. So, why can't a machine? Even now software so routinely goes against its programmer's wishes that inordinate hours are spent “debugging” and redesigning software to finally get it to behave. Adding human-level intelligence to such a program will only increase opportunities for a computer's disobedience. And as for computers, so for us.
Once again, D'Souza fails to make his case. In fact, he even succeeds in falsifying his own hypothesis. At least a billion humans in the world today behave well without the expectation of justice in an afterlife. And other billions behave badly in spite of claiming to expect an ultimate balancing of the scales.
GOOD FOR SOCIETY?
At this point D'Souza claims that the case for an afterlife is supported by the “preponderance of the evidence.” I have to disagree. In every case he brings up I have found that more plausible explanations exist, purely reductionist, materialistic explanations that do not require the introduction of another, transcendent realm of reality. He continually claims that “studies show” such and such a fact. But he gives no references. I will be happy to consider those studies, if they exist. Instead, my own research has uncovered actual studies, fully documented in books and journals that lead to opposite conclusions.
HUMAN RIGHTS
D'Souza would have us believe that Christian belief in transcendence and the afterlife resulted in the development of our ideas of human dignity and human rights. He wants us to take his word for this in spite of the history of Christendom that forms one unbroken line of trampling on the dignity and rights of humans. He gives slavery as an example, insisting, “[O]pposition to slavery developed entirely as a Christian idea.”
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Now, it is true that the majority of the leaders of the abolition movements in Europe and the United States were Christians. But then, so were most white citizens in these countries. No doubt the abolitionists were upstanding people who adopted a highly moral stance. But where did they get the idea that slavery was immoral? They did not get it from the Bible. Both the Old and New Testament support slavery. Jesus and Paul both affirmed the practice. During and before the US Civil War, Southern preachers quoted the Bible as their authority for maintaining slavery.
Abolitionists looked to their own consciences and reason, not any holy books, for authority. The source of their morality was the same as the source of morality for all of us today—theist and atheist alike. We get it from our own humanity. Not a single moral teaching of the New Testament is original there. They all can be found in far more ancient texts from many cultures, East and West (we'll get to that in a moment).
So, once again D'Souza has not proved his case. He has not demonstrated that “concepts of transcendence and eternity, far from being hostile to life and civilization as the atheists allege, have in fact shaped some of our greatest and most beneficial social and political ideals…shared by religious and secular people alike.”
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DOES IMMORTALITY WORK?
I am actually in agreement with D'Souza and in disagreement with many physicists when he says, “[S]cience has no capacity to apprehend reality in itself; at best it can discover truths about the world of experience.”
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Neither does any other human activity. I also agree with D'Souza's statement “[T]he prestige of science is not based on its claim to truth but on the simple fact that it works so well.”
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Now, it is important to remember that science is not arbitrary, not just one more “cultural narrative,” as the now largely defunct postmodernists of a decade ago tried to argue. No cultural narrative, including every religion the world has seen, has come close to working as well as science.
Science is tested against observations that clearly are not just in our heads but are generated by some external reality out there. And, since science is so much more useful than anything else humans have been able to come up with so far, it seems reasonable to conclude that it penetrates more deeply into reality than any other endeavor, a conclusion that D'Souza denies.
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D'Souza claims that belief in immortality has practical benefits, just as science does, and these benefits add to his “evidence” that life after death exists. One practical benefit that Christian belief brings within it is a “dedication to Christian morals.”
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He quotes from the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:
They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality…. when one gives up Christian belief, one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality.
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D'Souza interprets Nietzsche as arguing that if we give up God and life after death, we must also give up “the ideas of equality, human dignity, democracy, human rights, even peace and compassion.”
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D'Souza joins many other Christian apologists in claiming that just about every laudable human action is based on Christianity. In fact, all these noble ideas can be found in history long before Christ—in India, Greece, China, and elsewhere. While the New Testament contains great moral teachings such as the Golden Rule, none was original to Jesus and his followers. Michael Shermer lists Golden Rules from Confucius (500 BCE), Isocrates (375 BCE), Diogenes Laertius (150 BCE), and the Mahabharata (150 BCE), along with two Old Testament references, all before Jesus.
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So, even if you are not a Christian, feel perfectly free to practice the Golden Rule.