Author: Ophelia Benson

Darwin wrote to Asa Gray in 1860: “With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.–I am bewildered.–I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me …. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.”

In a letter to Gray later in 1860 he added: “One word more on “designed laws” & “undesigned results.” I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun & kill it, I do this designedly.–An innocent & good man stands under tree & is killed by flash of lightning. Do you believe (& I really shd like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most person do believe this; I can’t & don’t.–If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow shd snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man & the gnat are in same predicament.–If the death of neither man or gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production shd be necessarily designed. Yet, as I said before, I cannot persuade myself that electricity acts, that the tree grows, that man aspires to loftiest conceptions all from blind, brute force.”

I’ve just discovered, in looking for that first letter, that Cambridge makes what looks like all of Darwin’s letters through 1859 available online. That’s very nice of them. The project’s homepage is here.

Janet Radcliffe Richards has an excellent chapter on moral relativism in Human Nature After Darwin, including this on pages 198-9:

Any set of moral standards must include, as part of those standards, criteria for the appropriate treatment of other people…This means there are necessarily conflicts, when some people think they should do what other people think they should not be allowed to do. And, indeed, the essence of what it is for people to have different moral principles is disagreement: if there were no disagreement, there would be no difference. And since there is disagreement, it follows that not everyone can be given the freedom to follow their own principles.

This is what I was talking about the other day in ‘Gain and Loss’. There are different moral principles; there is disagreement; there are different people with competing interests, wants, needs; they are inevitably going to be in competition with other people’s interests, wants, needs. My desire for quiet competes with your desire to mow the lawn (and loses, every time); I’m not free to make off with your lawn mower in order to prevent your making a noise with it. But, on the plus side of the ledger, you’re not free to sell me into slavery.

That’s the whole point of rights: to limit certain freedoms. Rights entail limitations on the freedom to mistreat people or to interfere with certain of their freedoms (but not others). They have to do that in order to be effective rights. That’s why the whole subject is difficult and why bills of rights are a new idea and not (to put it mildly) universal yet; that’s why they have to be codified rather than implicit, and that’s why they’re needed. The freedom to mistreat people, to exploit them and use their labour, to dominate and confine and impregnate them, to subordinate and segregate and revile them, is a highly prized one. Naturally rights aren’t something that just get granted with no problem. Rights amount to a recognition that, left alone, the strong will bully the weak (see the discussions in Plato’s ‘Republic’ and ‘Gorgias’), and after millions of years we’ve decided we don’t want that. The price is a limitation on the freedom of the strong. There’s no free lunch.

Simon Blackburn, not surprisingly, talks about this matter of metaethics in his short introduction to ethics Being Good. He starts right off with the question of god as the backer or guarantor or prop for ethics.

For many people, ethics is not only tied up with religion, but is completely settled by it. Such people do not need to think too much about ethics, because there is an authoritative code of instructions, a handbook of how to live.

But the trouble with that, of course, is that the code is only as good as it is. If the code in question is a bad code, then this business of not thinking too much is not good.

Blackburn goes on the mention some of the not so good parts of the Bible, then adds,

Obviously there have been, and will be, apologists who want to defend or explain away the embarrassing elements…What is interesting, however, is that when we weigh up these attempts we are ourselves in the process of assessing moral standards. We are able to stand back from any text, however entrenched, far enough to ask whether it represents an admirable or acceptable morality, or whether we ought to accept some bits, but reject others. So again the question arises: where do these standards come from, if they have the authority to judge even our best religious traditions?

Then he cites the Euthyphro, and quotes from it, which, since it is available online, I will do too.

Euth. Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.

Euth. Yes.

People keep on getting that back to front. Approving something, thinking of it as holy or good, and thinking also (because they think god is good) that god agrees with them, but then getting the whole arrangement turned around so that they think god started the whole process. But no. Suppose god said you and some friends should go round up a few random people and torture them for fun. Would you conclude that would be a good thing to do? I can only say I hope not. It’s not god saying what’s good and you agreeing with god, it’s you thinking what’s good and also thinking god agrees with you – only without realizing you’re doing it.

Here, for instance. A moral issue (an issue because some people have made it an issue, though that wasn’t inevitable): a moral issue being discussed with arguments and reasons rather than with invocation of a deity or of Christian/Muslim/Hindu morality.

Last week British scientists announced a revolutionary screening process for inherited diseases in embryos. It will be quicker and more accurate than the existing method and it will detect thousands more genetic defects than previously possible…Those who don’t know about it can perhaps hardly imagine the drawn out suffering of Huntington’s disease or Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Prader-Willi syndrome or Fragile X, both for the people affected and for their families, until death puts an end to it…It will be easier and better in every way to get rid of a tiny collection of cells. This is indeed playing God, as all the usual campaigners were quick to point out last week. But…whatever we may think about playing God and defying nature, we are doing it already and even though we don’t necessarily recognise it, we approve of it…There will always be absolutists, who claim the right to life for even the most infinitesimal scrap of tissue. But there are others who oppose screening on what seem to me to be even more irrational grounds.

Which she proceeds to counter with arguments. Those arguments will fail to convince many – or perhaps all – of the people who oppose screening on irrational grounds. That’s how these things go.

Simone Aspis of the British Council of Disabled People said last week that she was opposed in principle to such screening on the grounds that it sent the signal that being born disabled was a bad thing…It sent a message, she said, particularly to young people with disabilities, that their lives were worth less than everyone else’s. This seems to me to confuse a disability with a person with a disability. (This is a confusion that people with disabilities normally resent, understandably.) To say that a disability is undesirable in itself is not to say that a person with that disability is undesirable in herself, or her life worth less than someone else’s. The disability is not the person. It is to say that her life would be better without that disability.

That seems right to me, but it seems a safe bet that it won’t alter the conviction of Simone Aspis. That’s unfortunate; if people who oppose the screening succeed in blocking it, that’s very unfortunate indeed, as it was (in my view) unfortunate that the assisted suicide bill got postponed again in the House of Lords a few weeks ago. But pointing to god wouldn’t help. All the theists would simply say that their god supported their view and not the other one. That’s how these things go.

Norm quotes Freeman Dyson reviewing Dennett’s new book.

There are two kinds of atheists, ordinary atheists who do not believe in God and passionate atheists who consider God to be their personal enemy.

No, that doesn’t cover it. There’s more to it than that. There are atheists who, independent of what they consider god to be, are (probably, in terms of what Dyson is talking about) not ordinary atheists who do not believe in god and are not fussed about it: there are atheists who, whatever they think of god, feel a certain sense of outrage, or perhaps violation, at being urged or commanded to believe in something there is no good reason to believe. It’s not so much god that is their personal enemy (though that may also be the case) as the presumptuous demand that they accept a belief that there is a lot of good reason to think is false, that is their (our) enemy. Now, it’s true that the god of the Bible and the god of public belief and discourse (the one that punishes some people with hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis while saving a few, the one that answers some prayers and not others, the one that hates fags, the one that’s a man and has a low opinion of women, the one that didn’t lift a finger during the Holocaust or the Great War or King Leopold’s romps in the Congo or centuries of slavery in the US – that god) strikes me as being a repulsive guy; yes, he’s my personal enemy, but of course that’s really the doing of the people who dream him up and then try to force him on everyone; so he’s my personal enemy only in a rather peculiar sense. But the hostility to the demands for belief is much more straightforward. I don’t think people ought to chastise or rebuke or lecture or whine at people who refuse to accept truth claims about a giant powerful person who really exists in the world and really makes things happen, on the basis of no proper evidence. That is where the, shall we say, vehemence of my atheism comes from. I do not like being ordered to believe fairy tales. It pisses me off.

The first example Dyson gives actually seems much more like an example of the kind of atheism I’m talking about than what Dyson calls it. In short, his illustration doesn’t illustrate his own claim: the guy he’s talking about, he says, “had always disliked religion in general and Simpson’s piety in particular.” But disliking religion and piety is not the same thing as considering god one’s personal enemy. In other words, there are other reasons for disliking or indeed hating religion than considering god an enemy. Dyson’s formula conceals and belittles those other reasons. It’s an irritating little bit of rhetoric. I noticed it when I linked to that review in News on June 9th, and made unpleasant faces at it, but didn’t bother commenting. But that is just the kind of thing that makes atheists of my kind just that little bit more the kind of atheist we are – that rather sneering implication that we can’t have any good or rational or understandable reason for disliking religion and its attempts at imposition. So we get that bit more hostile, and the Dysons get more sneering, and round we go.

Norm points out that there is another issue:

But for both believers and unbelievers there’s another issue that is probably more important in determining their belief and unbelief, respectively. It’s the issue of the truth or otherwise of religious belief. Here Dyson opts for a standpoint that puts the issue beyond the reach of any rational adjudication. These are just two incommensurable types of knowledge…

It is indeed the issue of the truth or otherwise. I think it would have been more civil if Dyson had taken that aspect into account. But it’s the fashion to talk as if atheists are more or less loony.