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Writings on Derbyshire; and Derbyshire admits he’s an atheist
I was recently told by a reader, who is himself a respected writer, that my critical articles on John Derbyshire (though I haven’t written any in quite a while) are potshots that cheapen me as a writer and needlessly divide conservatives, particularly on the life-and-death issue of immigration. Evidently under the impression that I have been merely attacking Derbyshire as a person (though, since the Derb puts his personality front and center in everything he writes, his personality is a legitimate target), my critic seems to have no notion that I object to Derbyshire on intellectual grounds, as a proponent of nihilism ensconced at the leading so-called conservative magazine, who, among other things, mocks Christian believers and contemptuously dismisses Islam critics who say that Islam is inherently a threat to the West. So, who’s dividing the conservative movement?
Those interested in seeing the quality of VFR’s discussions about Derbyshire might check out this selection, which is also linked permanently on VFR’s main page under From VFR’s Archives. Particularly recommended is Derbism Unveiled, posted in August 2007 (most of which, by the way, is written by VFR commenters, not myself).
- end of initial entry -
October 1
Gintas writes:
There was something recently at NRO about a meeting of Heather Mac Donald and Michael Novak. Naturally Mac Donald and Derbyshire are beating the atheist drum.
Derbyshire:
I was at the Michael Novak book event, too. I agree with Mike Potemra that Heather Mac Donald’s closing shot went right home. Irreligious people cannot forget, though the religious would dearly like us to, how the disciples of Universal Love, Compassion and Brotherhood behaved when they had real power over people’s lives. The Christian churches (Islam is, of course, a different matter) no longer have real power, and have become meek as lambs. What a surprise. Last night’s event was terrifically genteel. It was good to hear Heather remind us that three hundred years ago, things went somewhat differently.
It looks like Derbyshire sees Christianity as the religion of “Universal Love, Compassion and Brotherhood”, that is, Liberalism on Earth. This is probably why he abandoned and despises it.
One Mike Potemra praises Heather MacDonald:
But I found Heather Mac Donald the pleasant surprise of the evening: She was highly intelligent and brutally honest, but never left the path of politeness and civility. She was a credit to her side of the argument, and we need more people like her.
and even flourishes a bit of “dhimmitude to atheists”:
It is proverbial that God works in mysterious ways. He sometimes works through the “outsiders”—as He did through the non-believers influenced by the Enlightenment, and as He does through such people as Heather Mac Donald today. We should be very grateful to them, for keeping us honest.
It’s important work keeping Potemra honest, not that I even know who he is.
[LA replies: and it’s actually rude. It’s like American leaders saying, “Yes, we want to trade with China, but it’s because we think that by trading with her, China will be tricked into becoming a free country, like us.” Hey, if you’re going to trade with someone, at least have some respect for them. Same with debating. If you’re going to debate with someone, don’t be so smug as to say that your adversary is really just an unconscious tool serving your purpose. Have some respect for him, or don’t debate him. But then Potemra combines the smug self-congratulation with the gushing approval.]
Paul Gottfried adds his two bits over at Takimag:
As for Derbyshire, I am shocked that he would try to make a case for unbelief by citing the special pleading of Michael Novak. Outside of neocon-financed Catholic front organizations, Novak has no record, as far as I know, as an acute theological or philosophical mind. Having seen him on several occasions make a total fool of himself when asked elementary historical and philosophical questions, this AEI luminary hardly fits the job of being a suitable debating partner for someone as cerebral as John Derbyshire. …
Can’t John find other minds to test his wits against, such as brainy theologians and philosophers, who have strenuously argued for the premise he rejects?
LA replies:
It’s true. The idea of Michael Novak being a spokesman for religion is pathetic. I haven’t read this latest exchange, but when Novak replied to Mac Donald’s anti-theist (not just atheist) articles a couple of years ago, he combined his usual bending over backwards to be nice attitude with an inability to reply to her challenges. The best he could muster to Mac Donald’s questions about God’s seeming injustice and other issues was to mutter, “It’s a mystery.”
Jacob M. writes:
Notice also this snippet from the recently linked Derbyshire post at the Corner:
Belief is anterior to facts and reason. They believe because they believe because they believe. Reading religious apologetics—I am currently reading my way through a stack of them, for (of course!) nefarious purposes—this impression grows and grows.
“Nefarious purposes?” Whenever Derbyshire has written something like this in the past, it’s been an allusion to a critical piece of writing he’s working on. This indicates that he’s probably writing an article, or maybe even a book, attacking religion or Christianity in particular. Could John Derbyshire be trying to join the ranks of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris? Wouldn’t that just be the final nail in the coffin in terms of the rightness of such a person writing for America’s flagship conservative magazine? Well, it should be, anyway, if the editors of that magazine had any principles. As it is, I’m sure that when The Conservative Case Against God by John Derbyshire hits the bookstores, we can look forward to more silence from Lowry and Lopez—and more praise from Michael Novak.
Jacob M. continues:
And what do you know! Look at Derbyshire’s latest article in NRO:
I mentioned in “The Corner” that I have been reading books of religious—so far, only Christian—apologetics. That brought in more e-mail than the average ten comments about politics. Yes, my purpose here is subversive. I have the vague idea of writing a sort of vade mecum for the conservative unbeliever. “Why should the Devil have all the best tunes?” asked William Booth. Well, why should the Left have all the good hearty atheist manifestos? American liberalism and American conservatism have both in turn been debauched by presidents filled with religious zeal (J. Carter and G. W. Bush respectively). Perhaps atheism may yet be the salvation of the Republic.
LA writes:
Derbyshire’s continued presence at that magazine is a disgrace to its editors, if it’s possible to apply the word disgrace to intellectual and moral prepubescents.
And outside VFR, has any conservative publication or writer criticized National Review over this? Everyone goes along with it. The disgrace is on the conservative movement.
Whoops, there I go again, “dividing” conservatives!
When Ronald Reagan said that he didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left him, was he “dividing” Democrats?
LA continues:
Wait—hasn’t Derbyshire been insisting all along that he’s NOT AN ATHEIST? And I’ve been saying all along that he’s lying, that of course he’s an atheist. And now he comes out and admits it, not only admits it, but says he says he’s working to create an atheist America.
Also, Derbyshire keeps talking about readers who complain to him about his anti-Christianity. That’s wasting their efforts. They should be writing to NR’s editors about it. The trouble is, that even if they did so, being nonjudgmental modern people none of them would say what needs to be said, namely that according to the founder of that magazine, an aggressive atheist who opposes religion and thinks religious believers are psychologically flawed cannot be a conservative. Therefore John Derbyshire is not a conservative. And therefore that magazine’s editors need to explain why he is at that magazine.
At the same time, it also doesn’t matter, since, as we at VFR have pointed out over and over, NR is not a recognizbly conservative magazine itself anymore. Therefore the argument that Derbyshire’s presence at NR is questionable collapses. Instead, his presence there is simply the strongest sign that it is no longer a conservative magazine but something else.
Yet (to reverse myself yet again), to the extent that NR’s editors insist that NR is a conservative magazine, they need to explain why they provide a platform for an aggressive atheist whose announced program is to turn America into an atheist country.
Furthermore, even if we at VFR think that NR is not conservative, most people do not agree with us. To the generality of people, NR is conservative. Therefore the presence there of an aggressive atheist, or, more precisely, an anti-theist, sends the message that aggressive atheism or anti-theism is a part of conservatism. This is bad, and should be resisted.
M. Mason writes:
It should be pointed out that Derbyshire could prevaricate about his atheism without his conscience being stricken, in the same way that Muslims lie to infidels because it’s not against Islamic law for them to do so. The only difference is that since he has no theistic worldview, he believes man is the master of his own ship; the only “rule” is that each individual live according to the rules he has set for himself. Now Derb could have arbitrarily made a rule for himself that lying would be morally unacceptable to him, but there is obviously nothing whatsoever intrinsic to his atheistic belief system that would require him to do so, and evidently he had no such moral constraint when it came to speaking truthfully about his own beliefs. And if he did have such a moral rule of his own against lying, then he’s been breaking it by, as you say, “insisting all along that he’s NOT AN ATHEIST.”
While I do not for a moment excuse his behavior, this sort of thing really isn’t surprising coming from him, for even Nietzsche couldn’t justify making a rule against lying an inter-personal normative one. But then, Derb’s a consequentialist, just making morality up as he goes along anyway. So what, after all, does a little lying matter if it will help to eradicate a conservatism that he thinks has been “debauched by presidents filled with religious zeal”?
Such “Ethical Atheists” are perfectly complacent and satisfied with their hopelessly conflicted moral positions all down the line because they’re perfectly blinded by their own shallow, insular self-righteousness. To put it at the sort of level Derbyshire often argues from, in one sense this attitude can indeed be summed up as: “Why can’t everyone else be as “terrifically genteel” as we unbelievers are?” Well, a group of atheists and agnostics complimenting each other about their cultivated manners is one thing, but there is a series of very big philosophical questions they need to answer intelligently first if some of us on the other side are going to take their arguments seriously. When the members of “the club” have their next get-together to congratulate themselves, such an outsider might raise his hand and begin the probe by asking: “And the atheism you espouse provides the solid grounding—metaphysically or epistemologically—for the objectivity and normativity of those ethics of yours how, exactly?”
LA replies:
I would take Mr. Mason’s argument further. If Darwinism is true, and if, as John Derbyshire has insisted, all human qualities, abilities, and dispositions are the result of random genetic mutations naturally selected, then it’s absurd even to talk about lying and truthfulness, right and wrong, good and bad. According to Darwinism, there is only one reason why everything exists: accidental genetic mutations, plus the ability of a mutation to help its possessor have more offspring. Even if we add to this picture sexual selection at the human level, the only reason why human qualities and dispositions exist is that they were considered sexually desirable by a member of the other sex. But a fundamental problem with the theory of sexual selection, as I’ve pointed out before, is that for a quality in, say, the male sex to be selected, then (1) a female had to have had a chance random mutation that made her desire that quality in men, and (2) there had to be men in her neighborhood who had a chance random mutation giving them that quality, otherwise neither the woman’s attraction to that male quality, nor the male quality itself, would have been passed to offspring and survived. Furthermore, even if those two mutations, i.e., the male quality and the female attraction to it, had survived to a second generation, unless those qualities assisted in survival, they would have died out. So, at least as far as my understanding of this issue goes at the moment, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is not fundamentally different from Darwin’s theory of natural selection and provides no escape from the insuperable problems raised by it.
In any case, if everything human has come into being because of its ability to help people survive and reproduce, then there can be no such thing as the love of good for its own sake. Indeed, there can be no such thing as the good. There can be no such thing as the right. There can be no such thing as avoiding lying because lying is inherently wrong—because there is no such thing as inherently wrong or inherently right. If people avoid lying, it’s not because they believe and feel that lying is wrong, but because they’ve been programmed not to lie by a previous chance random mutation in one of their ancestors which made the ancestor not lie, and this genetically programmed behavior of not lying somehow helped the ancestor have more children than other people, and so the tendency not to lie spread through the population. According to this Darwinian scenario, telling the truth is not a moral or volitional behavior but a mechanical behavior implanted in a person by a chance genetic mutation inherited from his ancestors. It has nothing to do with any moral sense of or choice of the good.
Spelling out what the Darwinian theory really entails not only shows it to be an unsustainable and indeed fantastic falsehood, as I have demonstrated over and over. It helps bring us back to the reality that there is such a thing as the good, and that, as Plato said, every human being, every moment of his life, is either following it or turning away from it, becoming either more attuned with it or less attuned with it. At the same time, as Mr. Mason argues, a person who believes that Darwinism is true must reject the notion that lying is inherently wrong, or, indeed, that ANYTHING is inherently wrong. This doesn’t mean that all believers in Darwinism are without a moral sense, for the simple reason that the Darwinian denial of a moral sense is FALSE. It simply means that on the basis of their own beliefs Darwinians cannot explain the existence of the moral sense in man or why one should follow it. Yes, they can try to explain these things in utilitarian terms, such as that not lying helps one get along better with other people in the same society. But then, from a Darwinian point of view, why should one CARE whether one gets along with people in the same society, given the Darwinian teaching that the only thing that forms living organisms, including humans, is a ruthless war for survival against the rest of one’s own species? [LA adds: Of course this point is an incorrect characterization of the Darwinian view, since Darwinians also say (i.e., they fantasize, spin out scenarios, speculate in the absence of evidence) that human society developed through random accidental mutations of “altruistic” genes which were then selected according to the criteria of “inclusive fitness” according to which groups that cooperate better among themselves out-compete and out-breed other groups that lack such cooperation, and so the genes for cooperation and other social behaviors spread through the human population and became dominant.]
LA continues:
Mr. Mason writes:
Such “Ethical Atheists” are perfectly complacent and satisfied with their hopelessly conflicted moral positions all down the line because they’re perfectly blinded by their own shallow, insular self-righteousness.
I think it’s an untrue, unfair, and overblown generalization to say that all “ethical atheists” are blinded by self-rightouesness. There are plenty of atheists who are moral and upright and adhere to the good. Their problem is simply that, as atheists, they have no solid basis for believing that there is a good to adhere to.
Jacob M. writes:
He seems to have quietly stopped repudiating the atheist label some time ago, without ever announcing that he was doing so. I found an email exchange from last March between him and blogger Vox Day, in which the latter wrote, “Yours seems to be a very Christian atheism,” and he replied, “Well, duh it’s a Christian atheism,” thus implicitly accepting the atheist label.
Paul K. writes:
You wrote: “If Darwinism is true, and if, as John Derbyshire has insisted, all human qualities, abilities, and dispositions are the result of random genetic mutations naturally selected, then it’s absurd even to talk about lying and truthfulness, right and wrong, good and bad.”
This brings up another point, and I apologize if it seems obvious, but it only recently struck me. Most atheists, Heather Mac Donald being an example, argue for atheism on the basis that it is impossible to reconcile a loving God with the evil that exists in this world. But having dismissed God, how can atheists talk about evil? There is no evil, just people doing things that other people may or may not not like. Who cares, since ultimately the strong will prevail? Does it make sense to call people evil, anymore than to call an AIDS virus evil? In what atheistic, Darwinian sense was Hitler evil? Wasn’t he just nudging natural selection along?
Kristor writes:
Paul K. writes, “Most atheists … argue for atheism on the basis that it is impossible to reconcile a loving God with the evil that exists in this world. But having dismissed God, how can atheists talk about evil? There is no [such thing as] evil [so far as Darwinism is concerned] … ”
Not only that: if atheism is true, so that there is really no such thing as bad or good, then how does Heather MacDonald justify her conviction that her difficulty in reconciling the idea of a loving God with the fact of evil is a problem? If atheism is true, then why would it be a problem to believe in logical contradictions?
It wouldn’t, of course. Does this explain why so many liberals seem so blithe about their unprincipled exceptions?
LA replies:
I’m not sure about this. A person can believe in the laws of logic without believing in God. And even if a believer demonstrated that the laws of logic depend on God, that is not the logical atheist’s position: she believes in logic, and therefore for her it’s not a contradiction.
Richard W. writes:
While would not trust Wikipedia to explain Christian belief accurately, it is obvious that many have worked hard to make this a good description of secular ethics. As such it is the best available answer to your question.
It all still seems rather tortured though, doesn’t it. This leads me to notice that if God is only a concept, as secularists claim, it is still a most excellent concept, like “zero,” that makes many things possible that are fiendishly difficult without him.
Or as Pope John Paul II told Oriana Fallaci when she told him she was an atheist: “In that case act as if you believe in God.”
October 2
Chris B. writes:
That’s an easy one.
Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil:
4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.
It’s completely self-defeating of course.
LA replies:
I’m not sure what Chris’s precise point is in quoting that famous Nietzsche passage. (It always helps if commenters will reference the point in the discussion to which they are replying.) If he is suggesting that the Pope in his comment to Fallaci was treating an untruth as a truth, I don’t think that that’s the case. Rather he was trying to get her to treat the truth, which she didn’t believe in, as though it were the truth for her, because this would bring her closer to the truth without her explicitly having to affirm the truth that she didn’t believe in or wasn’t ready to affirm.
Off-topic, Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche’s first work after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the passage quoted by Chris repeats a central idea of the book that immediately preceded Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Gay Science, my favorite of Nietzsche’s books (I think he said it was his favorite too). In a follow-up to the idea in The Gay Science that untruth is a condition of life, Nietzsche writes:
A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to also be a life-preserving error. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference…. To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question, that is the experiment. [The Gay Science, Sect. 110.]
LA wrote to Richard W.:
You wrote: “As such it is the best available answer to your question.”
Which question?
Richard W. replies:
Your question; “If Darwinism is true, can there be such a thing as wrong?”
Yes, if Darwinism is true there can be such a thing as wrong, assuming you can sort out the claims of “Secular Ethics.” In practice we see that even among secular ethicists (ie: atheists desiring morality) there is not a clear cut explanation for why some things are bad, but none the less they are trying hard to have some theory that holds together.
This is the best they have in terms of an answer. I believe most people reading the article would feel that they have still, despite the heroic effort, failed to answer the question.
Mack writes:
I must admit to some surprise that someone as well-considered and rational as you would pose this question.
This leads me to ask you—as I have done in the past—to clarify your own perspective; are you saying that Darwinian evolution is false?
This criticism of Darwinian evolution has been posed so many times and has been answered ad nauseam by evolutionary psychologists. The answer to this is so well developed that it is part-and-parcel of contemporary evolutionary theory.
Even if you believe that Darwinian evolution is false, the question you pose implies that you don’t understand the theory—and I have a hard time believing that you don’t.
Where are you coming from?
LA replies:
You suggest you are familiar with my writings, yet you express surprise that I question Darwinism and you ask me if I regard Darwinism as false, when of course I’ve written at great length that it is false. So I must admit to some surprise that you would ask this question.
Please see Anti-Darwinism: a collection.
Kristor writes:
You write, “I’m not sure about this. A person can believe in the laws of logic without believing in God.” Yes, to be sure. My point was not that Heather MacDonald could not believe in logic until she had accepted theism, but that she could not justify her belief, or by extension her preference for being logically consistent, unless she had accepted theism. If atheism is true, then everything that happens is merely happenstantial; however orderly it may appear, in reality it is all just stuff happening for no ultimate reason. And this holds also for every instance of human ratiocination. Under the atheist hypothesis, thought, like every other event, is just a chaotic stew, and nothing that happens in that stew is really either orderly or disorderly, good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. Rather, all these qualia, as the epistemologists call them, are mere epiphenomena, that tell us nothing about reality. For the atheist, all phenomena are epiphenomena, and the idea that we need to justify our beliefs is simply inapposite: if they survive, they survive, and that’s all there is to say. Thus although Heather MacDonald may have the feeling that it is better to be logically consistent than not, under her doctrine of reality that feeling can’t matter outside the nexus of illusions that is her inner life. She feels discomfort when she entertains at the same time the notions, “God is perfectly good and omnipotent,” and “There is evil.” But she can’t consistently argue that the discomfort is a problem, because under the atheist hypothesis, there is really no such thing as a problem. Rather, there is just stuff happening. Atheism is the zero of discourse. Atheists who are still arguing about theism are presupposing it. They are behaving as if God exists. For only if God exists can arguments or beliefs matter, or refer to reality, or mean anything.
Mack replies:
I don’t purport to be familiar with your writings. I read you sometimes when I think it’s relevant, interesting, objectionable, etc.—if you pique my interest.
I search your site when I have a question before I send it to you. I went through your “bullet points” but didn’t find an answer as it relates to the question at hand—Darwinian evolutionary theory and the concept of truth.
I think I get where you stand in terms of a general view on Darwinian theory but if you have specifically addressed this aspect, it’s not included in your summary.
You suggest that you accept that the process of natural selection has resulted in morphological differences between human populations—but I feel that your statement about truth rejects the results of natural selection on complex phenotypes—including psychology, behavior, and socialization. My feeling is that it’s difficult to accept one without the other—therein lies my question on your position.
I am guilty however of being somewhat vague—I’ll do my best to refrain from that lazy vice.
LA replies:
The question of whether Darwinism is compatible with the existence of moral truth and a teleological view of existence has been addressed several times in previous discussions. I can’t put my finger on such discussions instantly, but if you start with the entries that have “teleology” in the title, or use the Google utility on the main page to search for VFR entries that contain the words teleological and darwinism, that should get you started.
The basic idea, as stated in this present entry, is that according to Darwinism EVERYTHING ABOUT LIVING THINGS comes into existence by sheer chance and is kept in existence because it helped its possessor have more offspring. There is simply no place in this scheme for a moral truth transcending the organism’s programmed desire to survive and propagate.
However, that’s not your main question. Your main question is:
You suggest that you accept that the process of natural selection has resulted in morphological differences between human populations—but I feel that your statement about truth rejects the results of natural selection on complex phenotypes—including psychology, behavior, and socialization. My feeling is that it’s difficult to accept one without the other—therein lies my question on your position.
I have said that I while I reject the Darwinian theory of evolution, which says that random mutations and natural selection resulted in new life forms, I accept as a possibility that random mutation and natural selection played a role in differentiation within a species. I have never said that I accept the sociobiological idea that changes in psychology, behavior, and socialization, and thus the development of culture, religion, and the moral sense, are the result of random mutation and natural selection.
LA continues:
However, I see that I still haven’t addressed your core point:
My feeling is that it’s difficult to accept one [i.e., morphological differences between human populations] without the other [i.e. results of natural selection on complex phenotypes—including psychology, behavior, and socialization]—therein lies my question on your position.
To restate your question, if random mutation and natural selection resulted in, say, the appearance of the Semitic peoples, with their qualities, cultures, and moral codes, or the Nordic peoples, with their qualities, cultures, and moral codes, then wasn’t the culture and the morality a result of the random mutations and natural selection that brought those morphologically distinctive peoples into existence?
Look at this way. The Hebrews and the Canaanites were presumably very closely related Semitic peoples. Yet the Hebrews had a belief in one transcendent creator God and the moral instructions he had given them, and their belief was incompatible with that of the Canaanites. God repeatedly told the Israelites: You shall not be like those people that live around you, those people who believe in a multiplicity of nature gods, and have temple prostitutes, and child sacrifice, and homosexual sodomy and so on.
The Hebrews believed in a God who created the universe and has a personality and is the moral exemplar to man.
And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect. [Gen. 17:1.]
Tell me how random mutation and natural selection “explains” the evolution of the characteristics that gave the Hebrews such a vision of God and truth.
Or read Genesis chapter one, and tell me how can random mutation and natural selection can “explain” the evolution of the psychology and sociology that led people to the vision of God creating the universe.
Now, I will grant that the physical morphology of a people may predispose them to have certain psychological characteristics and moral dispositions, and the more developed their physical and mental qualities, the higher their culture and moral sense will tend to be. But the physical morphology does not explain the existence of mind itself, the existence of morality itself,
To illustrate what I mean, let’s say that through Darwinian evolution one group of humans develops stronger eyesight and can see the world more clearly. Does that mean that Darwinian evolution created the world that they are seeing and created the light by which they are seeing it? Of course not. Their enhanced sense of sight enables them to perceive the world better; but the world and the light by which it is made visible exist independently of those people and their sense of sight. In the same way, natural differentiation of morphology within the human species may result in a human group with a distinctive moral sense or a more acute vision of the good. But the differentiation of morphology did not create the good. It created or improved the human faculties by which the good can be perceived.
Bill Carpenter writes:
As a reader of Nietzsche you know his answer: God is dead, so right and wrong are now seen to be creations of the human will. Which is not to say they are consciously and rationalistically determined—intuition, imagination, even inspiration survive the death of God, and the religious genius like Zarathustra (or the hero, or the Fuehrer) still dives into the “belly of being” to seek “revelations” regarding morality. According to Nietzsche, there is still right and wrong after the death of God, but they are a product of the human will, as God was, and may change as we come to understand our godlessness. A Nietzschean might hold everyday utilitarian mendacity in contempt and judge it wrong from the point of view of those who seek to transcend man, but would not judge it wrong from the point of view of God’s commands or the permanent nature of man. So, according to Nietzsche, after Darwin there is wrong, but it is totally different from wrong pre-Darwin.
120 years after Zarathustra, a Nietzschean might well conclude that orthodoxy in religion and traditionalism in politics are better guides to transcending human weakness than the alternatives, including atheism.
LA wrote to Kristor re his previous comment:
Formidable.
(That’s French.)
Kristor replies:
Why, thank you, sir.
Lawrence, in your most recent entry on this thread, which is—sorry about the sycophancy here—just brilliant, you have arrived at the threshold of an idea that I have been trying to communicate in several long tortured messages, but unsuccessfully. You write, “natural differentiation of morphology within the human species may result in a human group with a distinctive moral sense or a more acute vision of the good. But the differentiation of morphology did not create the good. It created or improved the human faculties by which the good can be perceived.” This is a key insight; it is absolutely critical. For, notice that an improved apprehension of the good would confer no advantage whatsoever unless the good were really out there, prior to and irrespective of any creaturely apprehension thereof. If the good is really out there, then it makes sense to go to the trouble of searching for it, because then there can be such a thing as a payoff to finding it; there can be such a thing as an advantage. If the good is not out there, then searching for it is foolish waste of resources, and will incline the searcher to destruction—will not, that is, survive. If the good does not objectively exist, then natural selection will kill off the search for it. But, also—and this is the really perverse part—if the good is not out there, then not only is searching for it a foolish waste, but so is not searching for it. If there is no such thing as good out there, then everything is equally a total waste, and there is no such thing as an advantage, upon which natural selection can differentially operate.
[LA replies: I don’t think I’m with you on this point; the relevant advantage is defined by the brute fact of the organism producing more offspring, so that the mutation that gave it the ability to produce more offspring spreads through the population and becomes dominant. The advantage has nothing to do with any value, it purely has to do with numbers of offspring relative to other organisms of the same species. Remember, I was not referencing the idea of the good in relation to the evolution of all life forms in general, but in reference to evolution as it purportedly relates to the development of human culture, which was the point that Mack brought up. However, I’m not sure of what I just said, because, after all, we see also animals progressing toward greater excellence, greater “good.” The good that a dolphin can experience, beautifully leaping out of the ocean and joyously playing under the waves, is of a different order from the good than an ant or an earthworm can experience.]
If the good, in all its various permutations, is really objectively out there, then and only then it is possible to design a search procedure that a physical system could execute that would seek to discover it. Random variation and natural selection is one such search procedure. If the good is out there, then random variation and natural selection has a shot at doing some work. Otherwise, not. But this is just to say that random variation and natural selection, and in fact the very idea of a search of any kind (and thus, of a physical procedure of any kind) presuppose the objective, concrete existence of the good.
Thus we see that if the good does not exist ab initio, natural selection cannot get started. Generalizing, again: if the good does not exist, no kind of selection can happen. [LA replies: Again, you may be right, but I’m not quite with you on this for the same reason I gave above.]
But notice also that if you are going to perform a search, it must be a search for something. The goal must be defined, at least in part, before the search gets under weigh, or you won’t have a search, but rather just Brownian motion, mere chaos. To perform a search, a system must have a goal, an objective; it must be aimed at a situation in which, having discovered the values for which it sought, it may come to rest.
Now, the goal constrains and organizes and orients the entire search procedure. It must, or it is not really doing anything, is not really effectual—is not real. For example, when it comes to random variation and natural selection, the very nature of things, including the facticity of the good, constrains and organizes and orients the search in the direction of living forms that can retain their structure through time, and despite the assaults of entropy. But this is to say precisely that “random variation” is not really random at all. Rather, it is partially ordered; which is to say, that it is aimed. It is teleological; and it presupposes the prior existence and desirability of its telos.
I wrote:
“But the differentiation of morphology did not create the good. It created or improved the human faculties by which the good can be perceived.”
I would add that this idea highlights the inadequacy of the Catholic pro-Darwinist view that reached its apogee under the previous pope. According to this “theo-Darwinism” (its very name reveals its absurdity), all of evolution proceeds by Darwinian chance mutations and natural selection, until it reaches the human stage, at which point God plants the soul in man. Thus all of evolution is due to randomness and natural selection, all of evolution lacks a teleological direction, except for that final step when the soul is planted in man.
This idea shows the embarrassing poverty of thought that results from accepting Darwinism. Why do I say this? Because In order for the soul to be implanted by God in man, man already had to possess the physical features, including the physical organs of consciousness, to experience and express the soul. And for evolution to get to the point where a living being had the organs that made it “ready” to receive the soul, means that evolution could not have proceeded by random mutations and natural selection, but rather that evolution had the telos of arriving at the physical form of anatomically modern man, which alone of all species has the full complement of organs of consciousness, speech, creativity, innovation and so on, to enable it to incarnate the soul and to believe in God.
Mack replies to LA’s previous reply to him:
I have a hard time understanding how you justify a separation between:
“… natural selection played a role in differentiation within a species.”
AND
“… never said that I accept the sociobiological idea that changes in psychology, behavior, and socialization, and thus the development of culture, religion, and the moral sense …”
I’m trying to understand how deeply you reject Darwinian theory—correct me if I misstate your positions: according to you, natural selection could play a role in intra-species variation BUT has nothing to do with variations in psychology, behavior, socialization, etc. Do you believe in the so called “Blank Slate” then? Or do you think that phenotypic variations amongst humans that are expressed as variations in psychology and behavior are attributable to some other mechanism?
I’m also getting the idea that you are either misunderstanding Darwinian theory or are consciously proselytizing when you make statements like “… according to Darwinism, EVERYTHING ABOUT LIVING THINGS comes into existence by sheer chance …” I’m sure you’re familiar with the analogy of a tornado going through a junkyard and blowing together a 747—and you understand that that’s not the kind of ‘chance’ that Darwinian theory suggests.
LA replies:
Re your first question, see my follow-up to my earlier reply to you. If that’s not enough, then you need to read my past articles. I gather that you are basically coming from a materialist reductionist point of view, so naturally you will see my statements as simply odd and strange. I am presenting a different way of seeing things, and you need to “get” my angle, which you can only do through more reading.
On your second question, no, of course not, I am not using the tornado in a junk yard analogy. How can you misunderstand me like that? Almost every time I reference Darwinism, meaning every time even within a given blog entry or comment, I define it as random mutations plus natural selection, so that no one can misunderstand what I’m saying. However, while natural selection selects the genetic information that survives, natural selection does not create that genetic information. The genetic information, and thus the features and qualities that make up living beings, are all originated from sheer chance. That’s what I meant when I said that according to Darwinism “EVERYTHING ABOUT LIVING THINGS comes into existence by sheer chance.”
You wrote: “I’m trying to understand how deeply you reject Darwinian theory.”
The Darwinian theory says that new species, new life forms, come into being from random genetic mutations and natural selection. Therefore if the coming into being of new life forms by random genetic mutations and natural selection is unproved / disproved / shown to be impossible, then the Darwinian theory of the origin of species is unproved / disproved / shown to be impossible.
I do not accept the intellectual trick that is played by the Darwinists, of conflating differentiation by natural selection within a species with the theory of differentiation by natural selection leading to new species, and calling differentiation by natural selection within a species “evolution.” Thus they take something that is readily seen in nature, differentiation within a species, and piggy back onto it the much more controversial idea of differentiation leading to new species. It is an intellectual fraud of the first order by which the Darwinians fool the general public into believing that Darwinism is an established fact.
To repeat, evolution in the Darwinian sense means the evolution of new species by Darwinian mechanisms. Therefore, if random mutation and natural selection lead to changes within a species, but do not lead to new species, then the Darwinian theory is false. Since the evolution by Darwinian mechanisms of new species has not been demonstrated, AND there are insuperable objections to it, AND (as I’ve demonstrated in various articles) it is literally impossible, therefore the Darwinian theory is (take your pick) unproved/disproved/impossible.
Mack writes:
You wrote:
Tell me how random mutation and natural selection “explains” the evolution of the characteristics that gave people such a vision of God and truth.
I’ll answer—and pose another question. Like another system of beliefs or religion—the practices don’t come about instantaneously—they too evolve over time. There are so many examples; the shifts in Egyptian religion over the course of thousands of years, the acceptance by Christians of a New Testament, the appropriation of pagan rituals and holy days into Christian tradition etc. So the vision of God and truth that the Jews of the Old Testament had can be seen as part of the lineage of the Semitic people—just as you could say of Islam and Christianity. [LA replies: this is just standard Darwinian “filler”: evolution explains everything because evolution explains everything.]
This can be said of any ideology really—how did Marx and Engels come up with such a vision of the truth? Can we really make statements relating to people’s understanding of God or truth solely based on whether we agree with them? Of course we can, and we do it all the time—it’s part of the very evolutionary mechanism that’s responsible in the first place!
You wrote:
To illustrate what I mean, let’s say that through Darwinian evolution one group of humans develops stronger eyesight and can see the world more clearly. Does that mean that Darwinian evolution created the world that they are seeing and created the light by which they are seeing it? Of course not. Their enhanced sense of sight enables them to perceive the world better; but the world and the light by which it is made visible exist independently of those people and their sense of sight. In the same way, natural differentiation of morphology within the human species may result in a human group with a distinctive moral sense or a more acute vision of the good. But the differentiation of morphology did not create the good. It created or improved the human faculties by which the good can be perceived.
But that’s not the way it works—Darwinian theory would state that there are variations in a trait within a species—say for the sake of your example, a different ratio of rods and cones in the eye. The people who derived a benefit from their morphology are more successful and pass on their traits more effectively. That’s pretty basic—and no one suggests that the universe and physics are the result of natural selection—what you are doing by making a comparison between a physical thing like photons and something metaphysical like ‘the good’—is creating a false dichotomy—those two things aren’t closely enough related to be compared! [LA replies: They are as well related as any two terms in an analogy can be. Each involves a “perceptual apparatus,” in one case the eye, in the other case man’s moral sense, and each involves something external—external to the organism’s consciousness—that is perceived. The devastating poverty of the Darwinian view is shown in the fact that you simply skipped over the fact that the improved eye is better because it sees the objective world better; for you, the improvement is only measured by the fact that the organism endowed with the better eyes has more offspring. The Darwinian analysis blocks out the actual objective world, the world as experienced by living beings including man. So, having ignored my example of the real world that is seen better by the improved eye, you naturally also ignore the thing that it analogizes: the moral good that is perceived by man’s moral sense. Darwinians cannot face the reality that human beings experience certain things as objectively good and choose them for that reason. Darwinism can only be advanced and defended by ignoring and blocking out that which is most important and meaningful in life.]
The “good” in the Darwinian sense is that which best secures an organism’s genes a place in the future—of course the naturalistic fallacy will tell us that this cannot be equated with a moral sense of good. However, the cultural concepts of good have generally arisen in support of a biological good. Sometimes a belief or a concept of truth serves it’s purpose by simply making delineations between groups, sometimes it’s directly related to the survival of individuals.
Laura W. writes:
You said, “There are plenty of atheists who are moral and upright and adhere to the good. Their problem is simply that, as atheists, they have no solid basis for believing that there is a good to adhere to.”
I don’t believe atheists can follow the rules of logic in their exploration of morality. Of the many upright atheists I’ve met, I’ve never met one who believed in traditional sexual morality. Not a single one. The idea of an ethical atheist who didn’t approve of, say, contraceptives is an absurdity. In this area, their investigations of the good dramatically differs from the reasoning of theists. On one hand, this is strange. A purely logical approach strongly favors traditional sexual mores if one looks at the overall effects on society of a breakdown in these mores. But, it’s not so strange when one realizes that the logic of atheists is hampered by their belief that there is no ultimate judge over human affairs. Most ethical atheists have no strong natural impulses to lie or steal, but they do have normal sexual desires and these obviously also get in the way of their ability to reason clearly. It is easy for most ethical atheists to say, “Look, I don’t lie or steal so I don’t need God to make me good.” But, you won’t likely hear them say, “Hey, I don’t have sex outside marriage because I don’t need God to make me good.”
Aside from its appeal strictly on a logical basis, traditional sexual morality has an undeniable beauty. Even this seems to escape atheists.
Julien B. writes:
I think there the discussion about Darwinism and ethics is riddled with bad reasoning. No offense. As you say, one does not have to be a theist to believe in the laws of logic. Well, in exactly the same way, one does not have to be a theist to have a consistent, well justified belief in objective ethical rules. It seems self-evident, for instance, that it is wrong to cause needless, intense suffering. That is as obvious and basic a truth as anything could be, just as much as any truth of logic.
Kristor says that only a theist can “justify” his belief in these claims, but that doesn’t work either. Kristor probably knows about Plato’s Euthyphro problem: if needless, intense suffering is bad only because God thinks it is or wills it to be, then that makes moral truth arbitrary. (God could have just willed something else to be bad.) So in that case, the theist has the same problem that, according to Kristor, the atheist has. On the other hand, if God could not have willed needless, intense suffering to be good, because God is perfectly good AND such suffering is intrinsically evil, then there are moral truths that are somehow prior to God (or theism at least). Just as the laws of logic are in some sense prior to God: even most theists will admit that God couldn’t have made a world in which 2 + 2 = 5, and God couldn’t (because of his own nature) intend to do evil, etc.
So in the end the theist has no more “justification” than the atheist or agnostic. But then why should anyone have to “justify” self-evident truths? It’s too much to ask, and it doesn’t really make sense. Justifications have to come to an end somewhere—with some proposition that seems self-evident, one hopes. If the end of my justification is the proposition that moral truths like the above just are objectively true and binding (the way that 2 and 2 just are (4), and yours is the proposition that it’s objective and real because God exists, I don’t see that either of us is being more or less rational than the other. (Maybe the theist is being a tad less rational, in fact, since his purported explanation adds nothing to the bare self-evident assertion that it’s wrong to cause needless suffering.)
If I understand your general argument, it is that if Darwinism is true there can be no objective good (or evil) because every fact about living things is the result of random mutation, etc. But there is no contradiction in saying that (i) every fact about living things comes from random mutation, etc., but that (ii) some of those facts are objectively good and some are objectively bad (or evil). The argument you’re making here seems to be a genetic fallacy: since (according to Darwinism) living things and all their traits and behaviors originate in something that is intrinsically meaningless and valueless, those living things and all their traits and behaviours must also be meaningless and valueless. But that would be like saying that, if we evolved from algae, which could do photosynthesis, we must be able to do photosynthesis. If there’s some other argument it needs to be stated more clearly and fully.
LA replies:
Julien writes: “… in exactly the same way, one does not have to be a theist to have a consistent, well justified belief in objective ethical rules.”
For me, the immediate point is not that God in the traditional sense is necessary for people to have a well justified belief in objective ethical rules, but rather that something beyond matter, something of a transcendent nature, is necessary for people to have a well justified belief in objective ethical rules. The Darwinians deny anything beyond matter. For the Darwinians, everything that is has come into being through mindless and purposeless material processes. This belief is incompatible with a belief in objective ethical rules.
As for Julien’s argument that God wills things, including moral good, arbitrarily, this idea is not part of the Jewish-Christian traditions or of any mature religious teaching that I am aware of. God, goodness, and truth are one. God is perfect being, not a dictator handing out fiats.
Finally, Julien says (and this is his most relevant and challenging argument) that even if human beings arise from chance mutations, that does not preclude the existence of an objective good that these randomly evolved humans might experience. In other words, according to Julien, there could be an objective good that pre-exists the randomly evolved humans who come along and discover its existence. But if such a good exists, and humans then appear by an evolutionary process who discover it, doesn’t that very strongly suggest that evolution is not random but directed toward an end, which is the human experience of the good? Otherwise you have the absurdity of a universe which contains a pre-existing spiritual and moral reality, the good, and which also contains life that evolves with no relation to this pre-existing spiritual-moral reality, life that only by pure chance—plus the preservation of the chance events that help organisms produce more offspring—happens to evolve a species that has the organs of consciousness and conscience that enable it to perceive this pre-existing moral-spiritual reality.
The absurd scenario I’ve just described is similar to the theo-Darwinian view held by many Catholics, which says that Darwinian evolution by random mutation and natural selection is true right up to the human level, when God suddenly enters the picture and plants the soul in this randomly evolved being, this being who by pure chance plus natural selection just happens to have upright posture, hands with opposable thumbs, a body not covered by a pelt, a noble form, a beautiful expressive face, organs of consciousness, and organs of speech, and thus, by pure chance events plus the survival of the “fittest” chance events, happens to be a suitable vehicle for the soul.
Kristor writes:
It is good to see Julien B. contributing again to VFR.
The traditional response of theologians to the Euthyphro problem is that, since God is in his ultimate nature necessary and omniscient, he therefore necessarily—i.e., always and everywhere—knows the necessary truths to be true. Thus his primordial knowledge of the laws of logic, math, and morality is the opposite of arbitrary. Likewise, because they are eternally known by a necessary being, those laws are the opposite of arbitrary. Neither God in his ultimate nature nor the necessary truths can be other than they are.
That God eternally knows the necessary truths to be true does not make those truths somehow prior to him. Because he is necessary, nothing can be prior to him. Recall that a necessity by definition is uncaused; it cannot possibly fail to exist. So the necessary truths and God both necessarily exist, and nothing can be prior to either of them.
This does raise the interesting question of the ontological status of the necessary truths. God’s ontological status is no great mystery: he concretely exists, he is an actual being—an entity, or as the Saxons say, a thing. Are truths things, or are they something different? Most philosophers have held that truths, and more generally propositions (whether true or false), are ideas. How do ideas exist? As states of minds, which are concrete entities (whatever we may say about their embodiment). It is difficult to see how the necessary truths could exist apart from any mind, so for a few millennia most theists have thought that the necessary truths have their existence by virtue of the fact that they are states in, or aspects of, the necessary mind of God.
That the necessary truths are God’s ideas does not mean that God is prior thereto. Since he necessarily knows the necessary truths to be true, his priority to them would be tantamount to his priority to himself, an obvious absurdity. By the same token, the necessary goodness of God is not prior to God himself, despite the fact that he has eternally known of his own goodness. Like the goodness of God, the propositions God necessarily knows to be true are not separate from him.
Julien B. asks why anyone should have to justify self-evident truths. Good question! No one should have to, because no one can. But we were not asking Heather MacDonald to justify the Law of Non-Contradiction. Rather, we asked whether she could justify her feeling that a violation of that Law is somehow problematic. This is not something an atheist can do, because for an atheist there is no ultimate—and thus ultimately authoritative—Lawgiver, ordaining and everywhere effecting the necessary truths of morality. For the atheist, it is as if there were a law book sitting on a bookshelf somewhere, but no judges. The thief could say, “I know that it is against the law to steal, but nevertheless, so long as I don’t get caught, why does that matter?” And this captures the problem exactly. Unless there is an ultimately authoritative Judge, the fact that the Law is written on the page of the neglected book doesn’t matter; it has no causal cash value, doesn’t materialize as an ineluctable causal factor in the history of the world. At best, it materializes as an eluctable causal factor, also known as a matter of merely personal preference. But if there is no ineluctably effective moral law, then so far as the causal order is concerned there may as well be no moral law at all. Indeed, if a moral law is the least bit eluctable, how does it make sense to characterize it as a law? If the moral laws are eluctable, then the Ten Commandments are really the Ten Recommendations.
The moral order of the universe is a special case of its general orderliness. If there be no Lawgiver, no law is given; likewise, if there be no Logos, then there is no order. Without a Lawgiver, a Logos, everything is a chaotic stew of entities going every one to his own way; not astray, for in the absence of a law and a logos there can be no such thing as wandering, or coherence.
Julien writes, “The argument you’re making here seems to be a genetic fallacy: since (according to Darwinism) living things and all their traits and behaviors originate in something that is intrinsically meaningless and valueless, those living things and all their traits and behaviors must also be meaningless and valueless. But that would be like saying that, if we evolved from algae, which could do photosynthesis, we must be able to do photosynthesis.” I think Julien has misconstrued the argument. Darwinism does not say that all life arises from meaningless and valueless procedures, and somehow acquires meaning and value as it goes. It says that all life is totally meaningless and valueless, through and through. In fact, naturalism, of which Darwinism is a part, argues more generally that all of nature is meaningless and valueless, through and through. It says that meaning and value are simply inapposite to reality—are in fact meaningless terms. This it has to do, or else it would face the problem of explaining the origin of the meaning and value we experience at every moment of our lives. Naturalism says, never mind your experience, in fact there is no meaning or value present in the universe, so there is nothing to explain. “Beauty” and “goodness” and “;orderliness” are not real, they are merely chance agglomerations of events. If anything persists or survives from one moment to the next, that is only due to the fact that it has not happened to fly apart.
Julien B. writes:
According to the LA/Kristor view, Darwinism “denies anything beyond matter” and “says that all life is totally meaningless and valueless.” That just seems false to me. Again, there seems to be no contradiction between believing that species originate in the way the Darwinists claim and also that there exist, e.g., immaterial minds somehow conjoined with some creatures. Certainly lots of Darwinists believe in these other things, such as naturalism. But they couldn’t possibly give a good argument for those other views on the basis of Darwinism, which is just a biological theory, and says nothing about the metaphysics of value, mind and matter, etc. Belief in Darwinism tends to go along with these other intellectual trends, but that’s probably best explained sociologically or psychologically rather than logically. Maybe Darwinism makes it seem less likely that there is a moral order, as LA argues, so that if one believes in a moral order one should become skeptical of Darwinism. But that’s different from saying that it is logically incompatible with the belief in an objective morality.
LA replies:
You’re not offering any counter arguments to my view that Darwinism logically means the nonexistence of an inherent moral order. You’re just saying that it doesn’t necessarily seem true to you.
Further, to say that Darwinism “is just a biological theory, and says nothing about the metaphysics of value, mind and matter,” is obviously untrue, unless one denies the undeniable implications of the materialist reductionist view of existence of which Darwinism is the most thoroughgoing and famous expression. For the same reasons that Darwinism and God are incompatible (an issue that’s been discussed to death at this site and I’m not going to revisit it), Darwinism and an objective moral order are incompatible. I’ve shown over and over the radically reductionist meaning and implications of Darwinism. If people don’t agree with me on that, they don’t agree. But in the absence of some new and compelling argument from their side, I consider it pointless to keep entertaining the notion that a radically reductionist view of existence is compatible with the existence of a transcendent moral order.
(This discussion continues in the entry, “Logically demonstrating why Darwinism precludes an objective moral good.”)
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 30, 2008 01:40 PM | Send
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