Gunning for God (18 page)

Sociobiologists, led by Wilson, nevertheless think that they have found answers to this, “the central theoretical problem for sociobiology”,
⁵¹
by studying the social habits of non-human groups of animals, and comparing them with the behaviour patterns of humans. They start by observing that the idea, “nature is red in tooth and claw”, is highly inaccurate; and that in fact many examples of cooperation have been noted in animal (and of course human) behaviour. Cooperation of one organism with another to serve its own survival interests is called
biological altruism
, a technical expression that does not carry moral overtones. Thus, biological altruism is not to be confused with genuine moral altruism. The key question, then, is: what is the relationship between biological altruism and genuine moral altruism? We give Ruse’s answer: “Literal, moral altruism is a major way in which advantageous biological cooperation is achieved”, and in order to achieve it, “Evolution has filled us full of thoughts about right and wrong, about the need to help our fellows, and so forth.”
⁵²

But this is not an explanation of where these thoughts come from, or what the basis of their “morality” is. In fact it would appear from this that Ruse is essentially admitting failure to ground morality in evolution. Prominent evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala points out in the same symposium that what Ruse (and Wilson) are saying is that it is “not that the norms of morality can be grounded in biological evolution, but that evolution predisposes us to accept certain moral norms, namely, those that are consistent with the ‘objectives’ of natural selection”.
⁵³
And let us not forget that all of this is subsumed under a morality that is an illusion, fobbed off on us by our genes. The confusion seems almost complete. What resistance can the authors offer to us applying their own logic to themselves, and concluding that their theories are a genetically induced illusion?

Ayala goes on to draw attention to Wilson’s view of the function of morality: “Human behaviour — like the deepest capacities for emotional response which derive and guide it — is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable function.” As Ayala points out, it looks as if the naturalistic fallacy is being committed. Not only that, but one way of reading this (one surely far from Wilson’s mind) is that it is saying that the only function of a moral code is to preserve genes; and therefore could be understood as a justification for racism or genocide, “if they were perceived as the means to preserve those genes thought to be good or desirable, and to eliminate those thought to be bad or undesirable”.
⁵⁴
The upshot of all this is that attempts to ground ethics in biology seem as doomed as the efforts to construct a perpetual motion machine.
⁵⁵

Richard Dawkins nonetheless tries desperately
⁵⁶
to construct some semblance of a basis for morality in general and altruism in particular by saying that, even though man is nothing but his genes, he can somehow rebel against his genes when they would lead him to do wrong: “We are built as gene machines… but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
⁵⁷

We use the word “desperately” advisedly, for at the beginning of the very same book Dawkins says: “We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly-programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
⁵⁸
But then he appears to retreat from this position in the final chapter of the book: “For an understanding of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution”;
⁵⁹
and gives us as his grand conclusion the encouragement to rebel against a genetic tyranny.

But how can we rebel, if we are nothing but our genes? If there is no non-material, non-genetic, element or force within us, what is there in us that could possibly have the capacity to rebel against our genes and behave morally? Nowhere does Dawkins tell us about the origin of such a capacity or when it appeared. And where would we ever get any objective moral principles to guide us in that rebellion? Dawkins gives us no answers.

The attempt to derive morality from genes is reminiscent of the futile attempts to derive morality from instinct, as C. S. Lewis pointed out.

Suppose you are sitting in your home one evening, when you hear outside a terrified shriek for help. You immediately feel an instinctive urge to go to the rescue of whoever is in need. But then the contrary instinct of self-preservation surfaces and urges you not to get involved. Now, how shall you decide which of these two instincts to obey; in other words, what your
duty
is? It is clear that whatever it is that tells you what you
ought
to do, when your instincts are delivering conflicting advice, cannot itself be an instinct.
⁶⁰

THE ABOLITION OF MORALITY

The greatest irony in this saga is that it is Dawkins himself who confirms Dostoievski’s dictum, by delivering the death blow not only to the attempt to get a gene-based morality, but to the concepts of good and evil themselves on which morality is based. He writes:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless, indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
⁶¹

One would presume that these are carefully crafted words, representing the author’s considered opinion. Their implications for morality, or more accurately for the lack of it, are profound. Dawkins explicitly denies the very existence of the categories of good, evil, and justice in the name of a deterministic interpretation of the function of DNA. His naturalistic atheism leads him, quite logically, to conclude that not only is there no basis for morality, but that ultimately there is no such thing as morality.

Dawkins wishes us to imagine a world without religion. But just imagine his deterministic world of blind physical forces and genetic replication. In such a world we would have no other option than to say that the suicide bombers in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the schoolboy who murdered half of the teachers in his school in Erfurt, Germany in April 2002, the London tube and bus bombers of July 2005, and a seemingly endless list of others, were simply dancing to their DNA. The architects of genocide in the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Sudan were, likewise, following the dictates of their own inbuilt genetic programmes. How, then, could anyone blame them for what they did? Indeed, in such a deterministic world, the word “blame” would itself have no meaning.

And if some people felt that abusing or cutting babies to pieces was their idea of fun, would that simply be them dancing robotically to their DNA? If this is the case, then none of us can help being, what some people misguidedly call, morally evil. Indeed, the very categories of good and evil are annihilated into meaninglessness. They simply do not apply to a population of biologically preprogrammed robots.
⁶²

It is not hard to imagine the consequences of teaching such nihilistic ideas to young people, whose sense of responsibility is already being eroded by contemporary Western culture to the extent that the tragic toll of vicious juvenile knifings and shootings is mounting rapidly in country after country. To tell them that their behaviour is nothing but a dance to the music of their DNA, with the implication that they have no responsibility for their behaviour or its consequences, would be a recipe for social catastrophe. Do we really want to throw petrol on the fire?

SUMMING UP

If there is no eternal base for values external to humanity, how can Dawkins’, Hitchens’, or anyone else’s standards be anything but limited human conventions: ultimately meaningless products of a blind, unguided evolutionary process? Thus, far from delivering an adequate explanation for morality, this particular New-Atheistic acid dissolves it into incoherence.

Dostoievski long ago saw that the high cost of rejecting God was the destruction of morality. Sartre was so impressed with this insight that he made Dostoievski’s argument the starting point of his existentialist philosophy. Sartre wrote:

The existentialist… thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an
a priori
Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plain where there are only men. Dostoievski said; “If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.” That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.
⁶³

David Berlinski adds a sharp twist to the implications of Dostoievski’s
Brothers Karamazov
:

What gives Karamazov’s warning — for that is what it is — its power is just that it has become part of a most up-to-date hypothetical syllogism:

The first premise:

If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.

And the second:

If science is true, then God does not exist.

The conclusion:

If science is true, then everything is permitted.
⁶⁴

The New Atheists increasingly appear to be “soft atheists” who have not really begun to understand the implications of their own atheistic beliefs. “Hard” atheists like Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre would ask the New Atheists how they can rationally justify their absolute-sounding commitment to timeless values without implicitly invoking God. They would say that this is impossible: the existence of absolute values demands God. They might also say that the New Atheists are well aware of this, since their deterministic world, in which human behaviour is nothing but a dance to the tune of DNA, has no more moral significance than the dance of the bees.

In spite of Dawkins’ statement just quoted, by and large, the New Atheists do not appear to have taken on board the fact that their atheism removes from them not only their liberal values, but also any moral values whatsoever.
Consequently, all of the New Atheists’ moral criticisms of God and religion are invalid not so much because they are wrong but because they are meaningless.
If such a denial of ethics is the heart of the God-delusion hypothesis it does not take a rocket scientist to see where the delusion really lies. After all, if DNA neither knows nor cares and we dance to its music, how is it that most of us both know and care?

CHAPTER 5

IS THE GOD OF THE BIBLE A DESPOT?

“No one takes their morality from the Bible.”

Richard Dawkins

“Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”

Jürgen Habermas

The conclusion of the last chapter is simply this: the invective of the New Atheists against the morality of the Bible is invalid, since their atheism gives them no intellectual base for moral evaluation of any sort. Their criticism is as meaningless as they say the universe is. We could, therefore, reasonably discard all they have to say. Yet this would not be a helpful approach to the matter; for their criticisms appeal to many as having some validity in light of the common morality we all share as created in the image of God, whether or not we believe in him. Thus, it is inadequate simply to dismiss the atheist objections on the grounds that they cannot logically ground their morality. We must now consider, therefore, the content of what they have to say.

The first thing that strikes many about the New Atheist moral assessment of Christianity is its lack of balance. For instance, I mentioned earlier that Christopher Hitchens, in our debate at the Edinburgh Festival, made no bones about his abhorrence of a God who, in his view, is a tyrant and a bully, always watching us. Apart from anything else, describing God as someone who is constantly watching you is a sad caricature. Sad because, as I pointed out to Hitchens at the time, one might as well describe marriage as, “living with someone else who is constantly watching you”. That jaundiced view would leave out all that is wonderful about the deepest of all human relationships, just as Hitchens’ caricature of God leaves out the wonder of the deepest of all relationships, that of a human being with his or her Creator. The New Atheists appear not to have noticed that God is portrayed in the Old Testament as a God of compassion, of love, of mercy, and as companion, shepherd, and guide as well as a God of justice and judgment. Compassion and mercy are not noted characteristics of either tyrants or bullies. Nor is the notion that God watches us to be construed negatively, as we shall see.