But I ordered an ice cream!

Frank Turek somehow ended up on my radar this morning. I've been working on something that relates to Howse's latest strange conspiracy/fetish, one that seems to be picking up speed on the nut-o-sphere, but I digress.

It's called: "Evolution cannot explain morality". The thesis is...OK, I'm sure you can guess. He disagrees primarily with Hitchens and Dawkins, he says, when they assert that evolution can account for morality. Let's then look at the examples that Frank throws up as challenges to the notion that "Common moral sensibilities (Don’t murder, rape, steal, etc.) help ensure our evolutionary survival."

1) Rape may enhance the survival of the species, but does that make rape good? Should we rape?

So much wrong with this, and it's all in the unstated assumptions. 1) What evidence is there that rape enhances the survival of the species? I mean, a good way to take yourself out of a gene pool is to rape someone (getting arrested, on a sex offender list, murdered by her brothers, etc.). 2) You think that the Darwinian equation is X enhances the survival of the species, therefore, X=good. That's not what evolutionists would claim. What we would see is that more successful survival strategies flourishing at the expense of the less successful ones. I mean, if we accept that there was no preexisting morality before there were people, whatever was most generally practiced by the first of us who were sentient and reflective about how things should be, whatever social system emerged by which we regulated our lives would be the one we took as the default "moral" position. No?

2) Killing the weak and handicapped may help improve the species and its survival (Hitler’s plan). Does that mean the Holocaust was a good thing?

Again, you are saying that the Darwinian equation is "X enhances the survival of the species, therefore, X=good." As I just pointed out, what rot. It is a species of straw man.

3) Evolution provides no stable foundation for morality. If evolution is the source of morality, then what’s to stop morals from evolving (changing) to the point that one day rape, theft and murder are considered moral?

Who is to say they aren't changing? Child rape is now considered immoral, whereas in some places, say, oh Christ's time, it was hunky-dorey (and Jesus would have agreed is was swell--consider how young his mom was!). Yet you find child rape abhorrent. The world screams that morals are constantly in flux. Social history suggests little else. You are mistaking what you would like the world to be like with what the world in fact is.

4) Dawkins and Hitchens confuse epistemology with ontology (how we know something exists with that and what exists). So even if natural selection or some other chemical process is responsible for us knowing right from wrong, that would not explain why something is right or wrong. How does a chemical process (natural selection) yield an immaterial moral law? And why does anyone have a moral obligation to obey a chemical process? You only have a moral obligation to obey an ultimate personal being (God) who has the authority to put moral obligations on you. You don’t have a moral obligation to chemistry.

There is a truly, truly painful "ouch" factor to the description of evolution as chemistry, but despite that, let's try to look at this especially dense nugget of goof.

"Chemistry = morality?" Evolution is not a morality, and it's not the type of thing that you obey or disobey. The laws of chemistry will be followed whether you are aware of them are not, as is evidenced by the majority of all history. Similarly, evolution has marched along just fine without us being aware of it for most of humanity's tenure on this moist rock. I mean, you have spiraled off of the deep end here and made up a cult of scientific-principle worshipers.

Also, you are assuming that there must be immaterial moral laws that exist outside of man. Of course, this is what you are hoping to be able to prove, so you are begging the question. Why can't the "moral" be that set of practices that generally seem to be called "moral"? This certainly seems to be the case, given that moralities have evolved and are still evolving.

Now it is conceivable that there is a physiological basis to morality. Take, for instance, the mirror neuron. Many of the same regions in the brain light up when we see something being done as when we actually do it. This is a pretty nifty mechanism that has a lot of explanatory potential. For instance, when we see someone suffering, we may have no choice but to transpose ourselves onto the person whom we see suffering, to empathize, and find it undesirable either to witness or to participate in! This is a hypothetical, but at no point do I need to "decide" that this is wrong. Now, to make other people understand that I find that undesirable, it may be easier to convince them that we are all on the same page to behave "as if" there is a transcendent moral law that we all "get"--something we can talk about, even if it is not really there. Not really a "thing" or "entity." Imagination, baby! It's a powerful thing!

HJ