God's Will

In my last post, I made a simple point - human beings, and indeed all species, seek to flourish. This is their primary motive, their “prime directive”, the organizing principle of their lives as individuals, as a species and as living creatures.

However, if we accept this simple point and follow it to its logical conclusions, the assumptions of philosophy and religion are revolutionized. Let me explain.

First of all I must make clear that I learned about the importance of human flourishing from Aristotle. He said the purpose of human life is “eudaimonia”. Through the centuries that term has been typically translated as “happiness”, but in recent decades a translation closer to “human flourishing” has become increasingly preferred.

The problem with the early translation is that manifestly people do not seek happiness. For example, a recent series of studies showed that people who have children are not made happier for it – in fact the opposite is true.

So why do people continue to make having children one of their life goals? Because they are not seeking happiness, they are seeking to flourish, and flourishing, seen from an evolutionary perspective, means reproducing. Happiness is a serendipitous by-product of flourishing, something that happens to you if you are flourishing.

Another problem with viewing mere happiness as the purpose of life is that it assumes an individual purpose. In fact, like childbirth, education, prosperity, or pretty much anything else associated with happiness, human flourishing is a collective effort. As humanity flourishes, so does the individual.

What the theory of evolution and the study of life have taught us is that the goal of every species is to flourish. So we must understand the prime directive of humanity to be eudaimonia: human flourishing, not individual happiness. Human flourishing seen from the point of view of evolutionary philosophy is the flourishing of the species.

If there ever was a species that did not seek to flourish, it would face extinction almost immediately. This fundamental drive, the mainspring of all living activity, the purpose of it all, the meaning of life, is the drive to flourish.

The so-called “New Atheists” tend to two mistakes. Firstly, they tend to say life has no purpose. The fact that every living thing greets every day with one over-riding goal, namely to flourish not only as an individual but primarily as a species, is apparently lost on them. The second mistake, and here Dawkins is perhaps the worst offender, is to view religion as irrational, unscientific, and probably resulting from a virus-like infection called a “meme” that is either a useless spandrel or an actively harmful parasitic idea to the species.

Religion should not be viewed as anti-scientific. Science is our attempt to explain the world. There are methods that have gained a lot of support because they provide reliable and effective explanations of the world, led by what is called “the scientific method”. And there are methods of explaining the world that are full of holes, such as mythology and religion.

Religion is an attempt to make sense of the world. That it does not use scientific methods means only that it is bad science. But religion exists because it makes sense of some natural phenomenon that real people really experience, and for which there is no generally accepted scientific explanation.

Science is here surrendering ground to ignorance. Science needs to step up to the challenge and instead of denying that there is a purpose to it all, something that is obvious to religious believers, it needs to provide a rational explanation of that purpose.

For the devout, purpose comes from God, and all that happens is “the Will of God”. It’s a simple formula. We mortals are not privy to the motives and logic of God. We are insects on the planet’s face, subject to an immense and somewhat inscrutable force. Our role is to respect that His will is law. Our role is to submit, as Islam in particular makes so clear.

When religious people speak of the Will of God, the scientist needs to recognize they are speaking in metaphors about the laws of physics, they are speaking of time and motion, they are speaking about the natural world as if it were a watch created by a master craftsman. God’s will is a metaphor for the logic of the universe. The Holy Spirit is a metaphor for the life-force that motivates us all, the drive of all living species to flourish.

We should be reminded that the first sentence of the Bible reads, “In the beginning was the logos”, where the Greek word “logos” has been translated as “the Word”, but could just as easily be translated as “the point” or “the logic”. The religious are using mythology, superstition, and bad science to explain the logic of the universe.

The scientist must approach religion as bad science, a science that encourages us to submit to the world as we find it instead of making it a better one, to surrender to nature instead of taming it. In the end what religion really tells us is to submit to the real human beings – the priests, rabbis, and imam – who take on the role of interpreting God’s will, and arrogate the power that this role confers.

The logic of the universe that we find ourselves in directs us as a species to flourish or perish. The great debate, between science and religion, between all good science and all bad science, comes down to this question: what is humanity’s surest path to flourishing?

Religion has one answer – can science provide a more rational and compelling one?

The Intelligence of the Hive-Mind

A recent article in National Geographic highlights a foundational concept of my understanding of intelligence – “swarm theory”. Swarm theory is a cross-disciplinary field of behavioural studies that has proven that animals behave more intelligently as a collective than they can possibly do as individuals.

The exemplary species for swarm behaviour is the ant. Collectively ants perform extremely complex tasks and behave in an apparently highly intelligent manner – they grow and harvest food like farmers, they engage in complex wars with their neighbors, they attack and kill animals much larger and stronger than themselves, they tend other insects like cattle and use them for food, they take slaves from other ant species, and so on. Yet the ant has a brain not much larger than the head of a pin.

How does the ant do it? There are apparently only a limited number of rules an ant follows in its daily life – but in combination with other ants, the resulting behaviour is highly efficient and highly intelligent.

Similarly, the bee hive has been shown to make intelligent decisions about, for example, which new home to move to, on the basis of a collective appraisal by dozens or hundreds of scout bees. Each scout bee makes its own decision about which location would make the best home. A study cited in the above article from National Geographic has shown that when 15 scout bees reach a consensus on a new home, the entire hive accepts that decision and makes its move. At the same time, there may be five other homes available with only five or ten scout bees at each. They lose the vote, so to speak, and rejoin the hive at their new home.

The remarkable thing the study proved was that the chosen home was always the best choice for the hive, based on criteria identified beforehand by scientists who have studied bees. The implications of a study such as this are far-reaching, for they point at a biological basis for a theory of democracy.

If we take evidence such as this and combine it with work done with human beings, such as the various studies cited in the recent book by James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, we gain insights into how human intelligence and human political democracy work. Each of us seeks our own path, and though few of us ever walk a straight line, we arrive collectively at a better solution than we might have working alone.

I’ve argued in an earlier post that the basis for morality is the best long-term interests of humanity. If you wish to act in what could be called a moral fashion, if you wish to act morally, you must act in a manner that you consider will advance the best long-term interests of humanity.

The counter-argument is typically, “who decides?” What you consider to be in the best long-terms interests of humanity might be the opposite of what someone else thinks. So who decides who is right?

The answer lies in the parable of the ant or the bee. By pursuing individually what each ant or bee considers the “right” thing to do, the individual may be wrong but makes an essential contribution to the collective intelligence – and the collective morality – of the whole.

This is also the central argument in favour of diversity. As individuals we are incapable of holding numerous conflicting points of view. It is only collectively, socially, that we can do so. As Surowiecki points out, groups with a diversity of opinions and viewpoints almost invariably make better decisions than homogenous groups or even individual experts.

A Simple Theory of Morality

The average person operates on the assumption that the moral sphere is somehow quite separate from the ordinary concerns to which we apply the language of “right” and “wrong”.

We speak of the right way to cook rice and the wrong way to carve a roast, the right way to kick a football and the wrong way to throw a baseball, or of the right time of year to pick blackberries and the wrong time of year to plant sunflowers, and so on. We find these everyday uses of terms like “right” and “wrong” useful to refer to things that are correct or incorrect, reasonably efficient or not very efficient, best proven practices or not likely to produce desirable results.

We use the concepts of right and wrong hundreds or even thousands of times each day to guide our most pedestrian acts, including the literally pedestrian acts of where to place one’s feet when walking, or whether to jaywalk or cross the street at the intersection.

And yet when we apply concepts of right and wrong to questions like when to speak the truth and when to lie, when to steal and when to show generosity, when to offer peace and when to quell with violence, we seem unconsciously to enter another realm, the realm of morality, which is apparently immune to the logic of efficiency, effectiveness, and best practices.

This split, the dividing line, is reflected in moral philosophy unquestioningly. One apparently does not decide moral questions on the basis of what works best – works best for what? Instead we consult the oracles, we ask the Gods for guidance, we attempt to define oughts, and universals, and the greatest good for the greatest number – we search for a morality gene!

Why can’t moral decision-making be as simple as the other daily decisions we make in our waking lives? Is it a matter of weight?

A common argument from religious moralists is that there is no scientific basis for morality. Theologians typically contend that Darwin and evolutionists see no point in existence, see it as just an accident of evolution, and see therefore no underlying principle and no rock on which morality can be built.

Unfortunately there are some prominent evolutionists who agree with them – Dawkins being the prime example.

But of course humanity does have a point, and does operate according to very visible and very profound principles, as does every species on earth. The point of life, as I have argued in an earlier post, is to persist. What living creature is not motivated by the desire to persist and not to perish? What species is not motivated by desire to reproduce and therefore to create the conditions for its genetic materials, the very blueprint of its existence, to persist through the generations?

The over-riding principle of existence is persistence. This is the rock of ages upon which the strong foundations of morality can be built.

In real terms, this principle guides our every action – we seek to persist as individuals as well as to persist as a species. Tellingly, those acts which are interpreted as supporting and advancing the long-term persistence, survival, and flourishing of the human species are those that are regarded by our culture as moral.

A maxim for a scientific theory of morality would therefore be: to act everywhere and always in the best long-term interests of humanity.