There seems to be a lot of interest among members in Dawkins’ The God Delusion, so I thought I might comment on the book.

re the section titled, If there is no God, why be good? (p226):

Dawkins refers to Michael Shermer’s The Science of Good and Evil, and writes:

“If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would ‘commit robbery, rape, and murder,’ you reveal yourself as an immoral person, ‘and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you.’”

Dawkins says (p 215) that he “was mortified to read...that The Selfish Gene is the favourite book of Jeff Skilling...Guardian journalist Richard Conniff gives a good explanation of the misunderstanding:

http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/story/0,,1783900,00.html ”

In Conniff’s article we find:

“Enron's chief executive was Jeff Skilling, and his favourite book was The Selfish Gene, in which Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins argues that we are a product of our genes, and that these genes have survived by being as ruthless as Chicago gangsters.
Dawkins merely meant that the basic business of a gene is to get as many copies of itself as possible into the next generation, by whatever means. He has protested ever since that he never meant to advocate selfish behaviour as the best way to accomplish that.”

Dawkins is continuing to protest, so much so that he puts the words selfishness and selfish in quotes on page 216 of The God Delusion (seeing these words in quotes, I asked myself why the title of his previous work wasn’t The “Selfish” Gene).

My question is, why does Shermer says that
“If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would ‘commit robbery, rape, and murder,’ you reveal yourself as an immoral person...” If there is no God, if there are no divine commandants, why is it immoral to commit robbery, rape, and murder? I don’t mean this as a rhetorical question. It is a question I asked myself long before reading Dawkins’ latest book, a question that I have tried to bring up in discussions of bioethics.

If “the basic business of a gene is to get as many copies of itself as possible into the next generation,” well, I reckon that robbery, rape, and murder could be considered pretty good ways to do it. It’s a question of access to resources: with robbery and murder, you take resources from others; with rape, the advantage is obvious: as many copies of the gene as you can make through rape. Rape as evolutionary strategy has been discussed by Thornhill and Palmer in A Natural History of Rape:

http://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Rape-Biological-Coercion/dp/0262700832/sr=1-1/qid=1167507338/ref=sr_1_1/104-7333687-9977515?ie=UTF8&s=books

My point here is: if we can talk about an “immoral person,” we must have an idea of what is moral and immoral. Where does that idea come from? Not from religion, Dawkins says, and especially not from Catholicism. Dawkins seems to feel that it is wrong to cause suffering, whether human or animal. But why is it wrong? If causing suffering will ensure me greater reproductive success, who is Dawkins to tell me, or at least to imply, that what I am doing is immoral?

I was surprised when I saw Dawkins refer to Richard Lewontin (p164) as “the distinguished Harvard geneticist.” This is the same Dawkins who, in his review of Not in Our Genes

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Reviews/1985-01-24notinourgenes.shtml

wrote:

“This sort of writing appears to be intended to communicate nothing. Is it intended to impress, while putting down smoke to conceal the fact that nothing is actually being said?
The reader may have gained an impression of a silly, pretentious, obscurantist and mendacious book.”

It’s clear that Dawkins has finally decided to be received into the Church of Liberal Atheism. The God Delusion is his mea culpa.

eloi writes:

'My point here is: if we can talk about an “immoral person,” we must have an idea of what is moral and immoral. Where does that idea come from? Not from religion, Dawkins says, and especially not from Catholicism. Dawkins seems to feel that it is wrong to cause suffering, whether human or animal. But why is it wrong? If causing suffering will ensure me greater reproductive success, who is Dawkins to tell me, or at least to imply, that what I am doing is immoral? '

Where does morality come from? Um, how about society? Robbery, rape and/or murder doesn't lead to making/keeping many friends, and if one wants to live within a society (which may be a necessity for survival against predators, environment, etc, or you may have no choice, as human society is pretty widespead nowadays), than one has to deal with the notions of accountability, responsibility, and 'fairplay'.

Take an example from game theory. Say two people will be given a sum of money, as long as the 2nd person agrees with how the 1st person divides the loot. Logically, any division that gives them both some money, no matter how disproportional, will be a net benefit for both people, so if if guy #1 wants to split the loot 95% for him and 5% for guy #2, #2 should accept. 5% is better than nothing. However, people tend to 'stick it' to other people who try to divide the loot too greedily, and choose to cancel the deal altogether than let the 1st guy take such an advantage. The amounts most agreed upon tend to be anywhere from 75-25 to 50-50. The reason why this is done, the whole nature of the concept of fairplay, is that people are used to MULTIPLE future interactions, and they know that any action they take now will have bearing on how they are treated in the future. Kind of a variation of the 'golden rule'. This concept doesn't begin with religion or government, but both organizational structures can be used to reinforce it, for good or ill.

veritas writes:

But is religion the best way to reinforce these behaviors? And if it is bundled with other fundamental problems related to itself (possible false assumption that god exists, encouragement of outdated social norms, resistence to science/technological progress not because of the science, but because of conflicts with dogma and religious ideas, etc), then is religion even worth the effort?

I think some of what Dawkins was trying to get at was...religion ISN'T necessary, at least as far as morality in our culture is included. It's a tool. And if another tool can do the job better (or at least without as much baggage), then maybe we don't need religion in the role of 'moral authority' in the first place. Society will not crumble without it. Education, rehabilition, federal and state laws and penalties, civil lawsuits, media shame, and more secular methods seem to do the job too.

 

further reading on roots of morality...

Hardwired Behavior : Neuroscience Reveals Morality

Primates & Philosophers : How Morality Evolved

Good Natured-Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans & Animals

Moral Minds

eloi:

My point here is: if we can talk about an “immoral person,” we must have an idea of what is moral and immoral. Where does that idea come from?

Dawkins thinks, and he is not alone in thinking this and I agree with him, that morality is an emergent property of social mammals. As such morality is much, much older than humans.

Mammal cultures that didn't promote cooperation and rules of behavior tended to get wiped out pretty quickly. Jane Goodall found a lot of evidence for this in her studies of chimpanzees. Troublemakers in chimp troops tended to get cast out of the group whereupon they'd die very quickly from starvation or predators. She even found evidence for retributive killing among chimps. Troublemakers would sometimes be beaten to death for not following the rules of the group. Horses also play political games for who is alpha male and alpha female. Troublemakers have to find allies or they get cast out of the group to die. 

Where moral sense comes from is simple enough to answer but the ramifications of the answer are enormously complex. 

eloi:

Dawkins seems to feel that it is wrong to cause suffering, whether human or animal. But why is it wrong? If causing suffering will ensure me greater reproductive success, who is Dawkins to tell me, or at least to imply, that what I am doing is immoral?

Because there is at least one other counterbalancing force in play here. If you don't cooperate and play fairly by the rules, the group will cast you out. If you are alone, you don't have nearly as many chances to reproduce than you would if you are safely within a group. There might be some other outcasts wandering around out in the wilderness but since all the outcasts have poor cooperation skills to start with it is unlikely they will form lasting groups and ensure better chances to thrive and mate.

Groups, in general, tend to be tougher and more flexible than individuals. Stubborn malconents don't last for long on their own.

No, if you want to be a careless, heartless bastard the better, more tricky stragegy to pursue is be a sociopath and live parasitically on the good will of others. But even here, there are limitations. There can only be so many sociopathic parasites a society can support before the society dies.

Having a strong moral sense (Ultimately just having a good sense of cooperation and fair play.) tends to be strongly favored once brains get large enough to support culture and learning. It's inevitable. No god required. 

veritas wrote:

"But is religion the best way to reinforce these behaviors? And if it is bundled with other fundamental problems related to itself (possible false assumption that god exists, encouragement of outdated social norms, resistence to science/technological progress not because of the science, but because of conflicts with dogma and religious ideas, etc), then is religion even worth the effort?"

The norms that seem outdated might actually be adaptive; the modern norms might be maladaptive. Ditto for the science/technological progress. We don't want a science that puts Man at the service of technology, and not vice versa. 

"Education, rehabilition, federal and state laws and penalties, civil lawsuits, media shame, and more secular methods seem to do the job too."

Often, the laws and the media encourage behaviors that are actually quite maladaptive, both for the individual and the group. The academy-award-winning film American Beauty encourages drug use and irresponsible behavior. The law hauls a concerned mother into court because she has slapped her wayward daughter in an attempt to discipline her.

mr farlops wrote:

eloi:

Why do we accept this adaptive behavior in animals but are outraged when it occurs in humans?

We aren't. Most societies accept and use prisons and other forms of punishment.

eloi:

His science, if he sincerely accepted its ramifications, would put him beyond the pale of the liberal democratic society whose approbation and acceptance he so craves.

I disagree. Democratic society and the implications of evolutionary psychology are not as strongly at odds as you might think.

eloi:

There seems to be a lot of interest among members in Dawkins’ The God Delusion, so I thought I might comment on the book.

re the section titled, If there is no God, why be good? (p226):

Dawkins refers to Michael Shermer’s The Science of Good and Evil, and writes:

“If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would ‘commit robbery, rape, and murder,’ you reveal yourself as an immoral person, ‘and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you.’”

Dawkins says (p 215) that he “was mortified to read...that The Selfish Gene is the favourite book of Jeff Skilling...Guardian journalist Richard Conniff gives a good explanation of the misunderstanding:

http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/story/0,,1783900,00.html ”

In Conniff’s article we find:

“Enron's chief executive was Jeff Skilling, and his favourite book was The Selfish Gene, in which Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins argues that we are a product of our genes, and that these genes have survived by being as ruthless as Chicago gangsters.
Dawkins merely meant that the basic business of a gene is to get as many copies of itself as possible into the next generation, by whatever means. He has protested ever since that he never meant to advocate selfish behaviour as the best way to accomplish that.”

Dawkins is continuing to protest, so much so that he puts the words selfishness and selfish in quotes on page 216 of The God Delusion (seeing these words in quotes, I asked myself why the title of his previous work wasn’t The “Selfish” Gene).

My question is, why does Shermer says that
“If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would ‘commit robbery, rape, and murder,’ you reveal yourself as an immoral person...” If there is no God, if there are no divine commandants, why is it immoral to commit robbery, rape, and murder? I don’t mean this as a rhetorical question. It is a question I asked myself long before reading Dawkins’ latest book, a question that I have tried to bring up in discussions of bioethics.

If “the basic business of a gene is to get as many copies of itself as possible into the next generation,” well, I reckon that robbery, rape, and murder could be considered pretty good ways to do it. It’s a question of access to resources: with robbery and murder, you take resources from others; with rape, the advantage is obvious: as many copies of the gene as you can make through rape. Rape as evolutionary strategy has been discussed by Thornhill and Palmer in A Natural History of Rape:

http://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Rape-Biological-Coercion/dp/0262700832/sr=1-1/qid=1167507338/ref=sr_1_1/104-7333687-9977515?ie=UTF8&s=books

My point here is: if we can talk about an “immoral person,” we must have an idea of what is moral and immoral. Where does that idea come from? Not from religion, Dawkins says, and especially not from Catholicism. Dawkins seems to feel that it is wrong to cause suffering, whether human or animal. But why is it wrong? If causing suffering will ensure me greater reproductive success, who is Dawkins to tell me, or at least to imply, that what I am doing is immoral?

 This is what happens when philosophy attempts to provide metaphysical answers for a question that only the biological sciences can answer : reciprocity, compassion, empathy, understanding of social norms and rules, etc... - these are hard-wired phenomena.

Reciprocity is key to the understanding of why it is wrong to cause suffering to others - and is it an important component of an ethic that applies to all people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethic_of_reciprocity

All sentient beings inherently wish to be free of unnecessary suffering and achieve maximum happiness. In order to achieve this - we'll have to unify towards that end and make short-term compromises.

I don't believe nor do I need Religion or the belief of God to continue my day to day living as a moral individual. All morality is is an evolutionary step in our societal maturity; it is part of the equation for civilization.

 The three basic instincts that all humans are born with:

1.) The need to survive: Survival of the fittest (when it comes down to survival even the most moral person becomes immoral)

2.) The need to procreate: All humans are born with the inner need and desire that grows as one matures. That need to fulfill sexual coupling and to establish a family that need to produce offspring to further your line once you are gone.

3.) The need to believe in something higher or greater than yourself: Beliefs in something higher - (Evolution of Religious/Spiritual Belief); Great Animal spirits, Totem, Idols, Ancestral Spirits, Polytheistic gods, Monotheistic God. Higher Ideologies; Law, Justice, What is right, Morality, Human Progression, Utopian Society, ect.

#3 is what I believe is the stem of all religious belief. I for one am an Atheist. I refuse to believe in illogical conceptions like the immaculate conception and that all humanity came from two individuals called Adam and Eve. It is only natural that if a group of people say hey we believe in a greater being that created us all and we will call him God then there has to be the anti-God which turns out to be Satan the conceptual all evil bad guy. You want to hear what is the actual reason that we believe within ourselves that something is either wrong or right? It's not because that there is a God or that because we believe in God...it’s because that is a byproduct of intelligence/sentience, rationality, common sense and the list goes on. People become aggressive and antagonistic when their beliefs and religion is targeted for audit...that stems from FEAR. The fear of being alone, of not having an invisible all powerful being to speak to at night and pray to.

I for one would rather live in a society were Religion was not part of the equation. What I envision is the Technocratian Society: A society based upon Reason, Logic, Common Sense, Intelligence, Anti-Ignorance, and Progression. A society that upholds the concepts of Law/Justice/Morality, the belief in Humanity as a whole, belief in Technology & Science without the archaic belief in God or gods.

 

I will leave you with a few phrases that sums up my view on the whole God concept.

“If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.”
Epicurus

"Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. ... If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. ... If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?" (Epicurus, as quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief)

One example among many of a formulation of the problem of evil presented by Epicurus may be schematized as follows: - this form of the argument is called 'the inconsistent triad'

1. If God exists, then there is no evil in the world.
2. There is evil in the world.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.

Inductive argument from evil

1. All evil in the kinds of created entities are the result of the fallibility of one or more of its creators. (Premise)
2. The universe is a created entity. (Premise)
3. The universe contains evil. (Premise)
4. Evil is the result of the actions of a fallible creator(s) or is not the result of any creator(s). (From 1, 2 and 3 by predictive inference)
5. If god created the universe, then he is fallible. (From 4)
6. Therefore, god did not create the universe, is imperfect, or does not exist. (From 5)

 

 

 

 

 

Vondracos:

The need to survive: Survival of the fittest (when it comes down to survival even the most moral person becomes immoral)

Let's avoid oversimplifying the implications of this. Darwin, or more accurately, oversimplified views of evolution, should never be used as excuse to act like a bastard. The Nazis, the Social Darwinists and Communists all misinterpreted Darwin and millions suffered because of it. For example what do we mean by "fittest?" Invariably fitness depends entirely on context. Contexts always change. One solution doesn't work for every situation. Monocultures almost always fail. See? This simple and powerful idea is rife with chances for well meaning people to justify really stupid things.

Vondracos:

The need to procreate: All humans are born with the inner need and desire that grows as one matures. That need to fulfill sexual coupling and to establish a family that need to produce offspring to further your line once you are gone.

Or, now that we have  a  culture, to leave a cultural legacy. Newton, Caesar and many other famous figures of history never had kids but their influence on global civilization was immense. Let's not forget that  one of the basic  premises of transhumanist thinking is that culture trumps biology.

On to the subject of evolutionary roots of religion. 

As an atheist myself, I don't know if religion merely stems from our impulses towards group feeling--although it does play a part. As social mammals we have an engrained urge to belong to something, from this stems mob behavior, esprit d'corps, group think, nationalism, political ideologies, communal catharsis, communal healing, self-sacrifice during times of crisis, etc. etc.--noble and ignoble behaviors of all kinds. 

I think religion is just a side effect our rapid brain development over the last seven million years. Other higher mammals don't appear to have religion; it seems to be a particularly human hallmark. As we grew more and more able to understand and manipulate our environment and ourselves, our anscestors that were better able and pattern recognition and assigning meaning to things passed this ability onto their children. A feedback loop was established. The better we got at recognition and creation of meaning the better our cultures and species did. Pretty soon we were so singularly good at this and it was such a useful trait that our species didn't suffer when it occasionally misfired and we started to assign meanings and patterns when they didn't exist.

From this general trait grew religion, art, philosophy, logic, mathematics and eventually science. But at the same time, it gives us superstition, wishful thinking, selective memory, astrology, belief in ghosts, Santa Claus etc. etc. etc. 

There are lot of people in the world that need something to organize their lives around. For some this urge is so strong that they grasp at something illusory just give themselves meaning. Science, so far, seems to say nothing about personal meaning. It reveals tiny pieces of  a huge, perhaps infinitely complex, and beautiful universe around us. It's highly reliable and tells us a lot about how but almost nothing about why. It fails to answer questions like, "does it matter cosmically speaking if I get up and go to work today? Or was there some grand occult reason behind the death of a 120,000 people in the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2005?" 

On these questions science may be forever mum.  Haldane said it best, "It is my supposition that the Universe in not only queerer than we imagine, is queerer than we can imagine." Either there is a grand meaning we'll never understand or there is no meaning and we are fools to invent one. I fall in the latter category for emotional reasons. The justification for my atheism is no bigger than that.

"Let's not forget that one of the basic premises of transhumanist thinking is that culture trumps biology."

eloi:

"Let's not forget that one of the basic premises of transhumanist thinking is that culture trumps biology."

I suppose that's true, though I've never heard it so explicitly stated. Are there any transhumanists on this thread who would disagree with that?