The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (62 page)

Thanks to such discoveries we will eventually be able to say, objectively, that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, because once we put religion in its place, “[w]ell-being captures all that we can intelligibly value.”
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Harris argued from the failures of the kibbutzim in Israel that some forms of social life are less moral than others; that conservative societies have higher rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy and pornography; that it is societies whose members are allowed to maximize themselves and others that are the most successful. We
are
changing morally, and improving, he emphasized—for instance, we are less prepared than we used to be to accept collateral damage in conflict situations. One of his prime conclusions was that “there may be nothing more important than human cooperation.”

This was the conclusion, also, of Matt Ridley, a British polymath who combines being a scientist with a number of other roles, including chairman of a bank. In his book
The Origins of Virtue
(1996), he argued that “moral sentiments are problem-solving devices to make highly social creatures [us] effective at using social relations to ensure their genes’ long-term survival.” Moral life, he concluded, is based on the fact that “selfish genes make us social, trustworthy and cooperative.” There was morality before
the church, trade before the state, exchange before money, social contracts before Hobbes, welfare before the rights of man, culture before Babylon, self-interest before Adam Smith, and greed before capitalism. The main element in cooperation, he said, is trust, “a vital form of social capital.” Where authority replaces reciprocity, the sense of community fades. For trust to grow, we must reduce the power of the state and devolve our lives into parishes, computer networks, clubs and teams, self-help groups and small businesses—“everything small and local.”

In
The Rational Optimist
(2010), Ridley argues that, in contrast to what many people think, in the last thousand years life expectancy has increased dramatically, indicators show a decrease in violence, and average income has increased exponentially. Humans are the only living beings, he points out, to have been able to continuously increase their quality of life. No other species with a prominent brain, such as dolphins, chimpanzees, octopuses and parakeets, have achieved this, so it cannot be simply a matter of brain size. His answer is trade. It is trade between
unrelated
parties that has increased our collective intelligence, to the benefit of all.
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More open trade should be the faith of the future.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, very largely agrees. In
The Blank Slate
:
The Modern Denial of Human Nature
(2002), he explores what he thinks are humanity’s greatest fears so far as human nature is concerned—the fear of inequality, the fear of imperfectibility, the fear of determinism and the fear of nihilism. Against this, religions have traditionally provided “comfort, community and moral guidance” to countless people, and according to some biologists the sophisticated deism toward which many religions are evolving “can be made compatible with an evolutionary understanding of mind and nature.”

Furthermore, with increasing knowledge our moral circle has in fact been expanding. Instead of religions focusing on their own kind, greater biological understanding has led to the entities worthy of moral consideration being “poked outward” from the family and the village toward the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race and, most recently (as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), toward all of humanity. Nor will it stop there, as some seek to include within their orbit certain animals, zygotes, fetuses and the brain-dead. The latest cognitive science has agreed upon a
list of “core intuitions,” he reports, on which we base our understanding, such as an intuitive physics, intuitive engineering and psychology, spatial and number sense, sense of probability and intuitive economics. We once had an intuitive sense of the soul, which it is no longer possible to reconcile with biology, and that means we now need to reconfigure our moral understanding, which is better understood as a system of trade-offs according to circumstances. This is, in effect, a return to situation ethics, first encountered in chapter 19.

Pinker himself tends toward a “tragic” intuition of life, rather than a “Utopian” one, which contains these elements at least: the primacy of family ties; the limited scope of sharing and reciprocity which leads to “social loafing”; the universality of dominance, violence and ethnocentrism; the partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness and antisocial tendencies; the prevalence of defense mechanisms; biases in the moral sense toward preference of kin and friends; and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness and beauty. In
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
(2011), Pinker identifies six periods in which violence decreased significantly, proving, he argues, that we
are
getting more moral.
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Though Pinker has been widely criticized, as was Ridley, for his Panglossian tendencies, and though Pinker thinks that the advent of a strong state has a lot to do with the decline in violence, he also believes that another major factor has been commerce, “a game which everyone can win.” “As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism.”

For Harris, Ridley and Pinker, then, moral progress has been and is being made—it has nothing to do with religion and never has. Trade is perhaps not usually pitched against religious values as much as science has been; but the effect is much the same. Trade is a horizontal activity, carried out between people on the same level, and by definition it is a this-worldly activity. Like most other human activities, it has evolved.

George Levine’s aim is different, but not unrelated. In
Darwin Loves
You
(2006), he aims to introduce us to a “kinder, gentler” Darwin, a man who was a romantic at heart, a nature lover, a man who helps us understand the world as a more—not less—enchanted place. Through Darwin, he says, we get a deep sense of the power of nature, which he equates to a religious feeling, going so far as to say that evolutionary theory is a form of nature worship—and a “more effective” one because it embodies a different
relation
to nature, one of which humans are a part rather than being somehow separate from it and receiving it as a gift from God, as Christianity has it.

He sees Darwin’s attention to minutiae as a moral act, and a model, because “this is where non-theistic enchantment begins.” He argues that Darwin’s inspection of the “lower” animals was important for understanding hierarchy and the human place in nature.
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Darwin’s contribution was as both participant and observer—again, an excellent model. “Darwin offers us no mysteries, no transcendence, but an earth that is room enough. We have been misled by 2,500 years of monotheism into expecting some larger meaning, meaning that is not material. That is too bad.”

Each of these biologists writes combative prose, born of a conviction that evolution is, as Dennett puts it, “the most important idea, ever.” Indeed, they have been accused, as we shall see presently, of being the new dogmatists. But that hardly applies to the doyen of evolutionary biologists, the Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson, who has been by far the most inventive and positive evolutionist of modern times and also the most stylish writer.

Raised as a Southern Baptist in Alabama (where he read the Bible from cover to cover, twice), he lost his faith suddenly on being introduced as a young man to evolution. (“It seemed to me that the Book of Revelation might be black magic hallucinated by an ancient primitive.”) It also seemed to him that the biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all—they had made no provision for evolution. “Could it be,” he asked himself, “that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? Might the pastors of my childhood, good and loving men though they were, be mistaken?” It was all too much, and he was a Baptist no more.

Even so, he had no immediate desire to purge himself totally of his religious feelings. “I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit,
people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end.”
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Viewed in one way, Wilson is as uncompromising as his biologist colleagues, but he also has the distinction of coining three words that were to prove influential, and which address our subject. These were “sociobiology,” “biophilia” and “consilience.”

In
Sociobiology
(1975), he proposed that the biological principles which we now know govern animal life could be profitably applied to human societies. But if these premises were correct, he insisted, then humans were presented with two great spiritual dilemmas. “The first is that no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. [Everything,] even the capacities to select particular aesthetic judgments and religious beliefs[,] must have arisen by the same mechanistic approaches [that is, according to biological principles]. . . . The first dilemma, in a word, is that we have no particular place to go. The species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature. . . . Educated people everywhere like to believe that beyond material needs lie fulfillment and the realization of individual potential. But what is fulfillment, and to what ends may potential be realized? Traditional religious beliefs have been eroded, not so much by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival. Religions, like other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners.”

The similarities among the early civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mexico and Central and South America, he said, cannot be explained away as the products of chance or cross-fertilization. The way that chronic meat shortages in history have (allegedly) shaped religious beliefs, why certain animals are treated as sacred, the way that inmates in prisons organize themselves into extended “families,” with surrogate mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles—all this suggests, he says, a “stubborn
core of biological urgency.” Although, as he puts it, God’s immanence has been pushed to somewhere below the subatomic particles or beyond the farthest visible galaxy; thanks to the relentless advances of science, new theories of what God is still keep coming. But, Wilson adds, mankind has produced, according to one authoritative account, in the order of a hundred thousand religions, a statistic that depresses him: “Men, it appears, would rather believe than know.”
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The practice of religion, he acknowledges, is one of the major categories of human behavior that is unique to the human species and constitutes a major challenge to sociobiology, because religion requires individuals to subordinate immediate self-interest to the interests of the group, meaning that they operate by motivations that are partly rational and partly emotional. “When the Gods are served, the Darwinian fitness of the members of the tribe is the ultimate if unrecognized beneficiary.” Wilson suggests that there is a genetic predisposition to conformity and consecration because the highest forms of religious practice “can be seen to confer biological advantage,” not least in the sacralization of identity, in which myths of origin “explain a little bit of how nature works and why the tribe has a favored position on earth.” He goes on to note, what other scholars have noted since, that belief in high gods is not universal, that the concept of a high god most commonly arises with a pastoral way of life: “[T]he greater the dependence on herding, the more likely the belief in a shepherd God of the Judeo-Christian type.”

Religion is a sociobiological/anthropological category, not a theological one. This is our second great spiritual dilemma.

RELIGION WITHOUT THEOLOGY

This biological explanation of faith in God, says Wilson, leads to the crux: the role of mythology in modern life. We now live with three great myths: Marxism, traditional religion and scientific materialism (he was writing in 1979).

The mythology of scientific materialism was for Wilson the most powerful. Until now it “has always, point for point in zones of conflict, defeated
traditional religion. Its narrative form is the epic: the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang of fifteen million years ago through the origin of the elements and celestial bodies to the beginnings of life on earth. . . . Most importantly, we have come to the crucial stage in the history of biology when religion itself is subject to explanations of the natural sciences.” As a result, he says, “theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline. But religion itself will endure for a long time as a vital force in society.”

Because the evolutionary epic denies both immortality to the individual and divine privilege to the society, he thought that humanists could never enjoy “the hot pleasures of spiritual conversion and self surrender.” Therefore, he asked, “[D]oes a way exist to divert the power of religion into the services of the great new enterprise that lays bare the source of that power?”

His answer: hope. The hope of the future resided in the laying of a proper foundation for the social sciences so that they would be consistent with the findings of biology. Although natural selection has been the prime mover, it works through a cascade of decisions based on secondary values that have historically served as enabling mechanisms for survival and reproductive success. “These values are defined to a large extent by our most intense emotions: enthusiasm and a sharpening of the senses from exploration; exaltation from discovery; triumph in battle and competitive sports; the restful satisfaction from an altruistic act well and truly placed; the stirring of ethnic and national pride; the strength from family ties; and the secure biophilic pleasure from the nearness of animals and growing plants.”