“Today, when patterns of mutual trust are quite securely established in modern democratic states independently of any shared religious belief, the bristling defenses of religions against corrosive doubt may begin to look vestigial, like fossil traces of an earlier epoch. We no longer need God the Policeman to create a climate in which we can make promises and conduct human affairs on their basis, but He lives on in legal oaths – and in the imaginations of many who are terrified of the prospect of abandoning religion.”
- Daniel Dennett, from Breaking the Spell

 

Atheists do have some clout when religion is the subject of discussion, and in particular about claims that we ought to object to the continued acceptance of religion in modern culture. No other force in the past four to five thousand years has caused or at least been accomplice to as many atrocious crimes as religion, and particularly so since about the time that Christianity became a significant force in world politics and in the world of belief. From the Crusades to modern-day conflicts between Islam and much of the rest of the world, crimes have been compelled by individual religions and have been justified based on religious claims. The possibility that this introduces for atheists is the suggestion that there is something inherent in the nature of religiosity that lends to violence and injustice, all in the name of a God or gods. But is religion really the source of this violence, and should it be discarded? The first question foreshadows appeals to ethical premises, while the second will rely strongly on whatever ethical claims we can make in relation to questions about religion and violence. We can directly ignore the first question. Nobody really cares whether religions are violent; they care whether they are justified. We cannot just object to violence; we must have reasons. So what we are hunting after is a set of ethical answers to religion, and the evolutionary attempts of philosophers of science such as Daniel Dennett must answer these two question: Is there an ethical basis for condemning religion on the grounds of violence? Does religion necessitate unethical behavior? Failing that, there will be no momentum for a push to reject religion.

The question of whether religion necessarily compels these acts of violence is an entirely separate question from the question of whether religion has served as a compulsion to these acts of violence. First, one cannot deny that there certainly are some religions that do compel their followers to do violent acts. For example, the Islamic concept of God and salvation only guarantees salvation in the case of death while killing infidels – jihad. For all other adherers to Islam, there is only the possibility of salvation by the grace of Allah. No guarantees exist without dying in jihad. So there is some vitality to the claim that religion can cause violence. Second, though, other religions such as Christianity do not have fundamental tenets that necessitate violence as a trade-off for salvation. So in cases such as these there is no foundational link between religion and violence: some religions will have a tendency to violence, others will not.

The problem with violence is always a claim or system of claims about ethical truth. Is it ethically wrong for religions to promote violence? Atheists and theists answer this claim using fundamentally different justifications. Although atheists and theists might come to similar conclusions, accepting or rejecting theism as a concept has definite, marked implications for how one answers this question. By limiting one’s beliefs in this regard one eliminates the variety of statements or propositions they can use in their justification for their conclusion. And atheists are almost certainly more limited in the propositions they can make use of because they limit themselves to what they can observe. Theists, if we are to hold to atheist perceptions of beliefs about the supernatural, can make use of an almost infinite number of principles because they can pull whatever wild claims they want to out of the “supernatural” ether, using faith as a justification. These are often remarkably less believable because there is no objective examination that one can make of the divine revelation. How could we empirically test for claims of divine revelation? Whether things such as prophecies come to pass is sometimes a good indicator of whether the “divine revelation” had a basis in reality (whether there was a real supernatural source behind the claim) but even then it is next to impossible in many cases to determine whether this was merely good luck or an actual revelation from the supernatural.

In Daniel Dennett’s view, to ask what the defining feature of evolution consists in is a question that “should be considered asked askance” (Dennett 7). Any “essential” feature will be found in some religions but not all, especially if we consider spirituality in general. The primary concern, when attacking religion as a mindset is an acceptance of the supernatural and the explanation of the unexplainable. I don’t really care to address spirituality here, for I don’t think spirituality holds any import for the discussion of ethics and evolution, so I am limiting myself to the religions that have a lengthy historical past, many adherents, and not only have this historical past but have had historically significant interactions with the culture(s) in which they find themselves. Furthermore, the fact that these “big players” have survived means that they are probably more likely to result in a solid ethical system than iffy new-age spirituality. These big players consist of religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. A number of smaller but still no less significant religions such as Mormonism and other informal religions such as Confucianism and Daoism exist, but these typically are variations or offshoots of other religions that thrive on the religious histories of other religions with more historical, philosophical, and ethical import. But in any case, these are the types of religions that most people are concerned about. They have both the history and the necessary size to harm masses of individuals.

Dennett’s examination of religion, Breaking the Spell, is an attempt to explain religion as a natural phenomenon: something that arose and has continued to play a role in our lives because of significant evolutionary benefits it conferred upon those who adhered to religion or superstition. In addition, he considers the role that he believes religion should play today, given the presumption that it can be explained as natural phenomena. I am largely going to concern myself with his particular views of ethics and religion, even though he only briefly touches on it in chapter 11 of Breaking the Spell.

In his opening win-them-to-my-side chapters, Dennett at least makes one good point: We can objectively analyze religion, looking at the data that we have and comparing different religions, cultures, and cultural traditions to see what benefit this is currently giving the individuals and groups who utilize these religions and cultures for their evolutionary benefit. And if we find that it is no longer beneficial, this might mean that we should abandon it. But Dennett simply goes too far after this. Following the opening chapters of the book he spends several chapters focusing on “explanations” of religion as a natural phenomenon. He is a victim of the conditioned belief that one can posit an explanation that requires confirmation in the past – without evidence from the past. This is the sort of explanatory paradox that evolutionary biologists find themselves in: they want to provide an explanation, but they have no basis to do so. They usually have, at best, wishful thinking supplemented by bits and pieces of the past – relics. This is not only an act of overstepping the bounds of biology; it is overstepping the bounds of philosophy. There simply is no way to prove or disprove Dennett’s ideas on how religion arose in primitive culture. Therefore it is untenable to accept his explanation. Only if we could actually confirm that such events actually did happen would we be in a place to seriously consider these baseless explanations of religion. In scientific, empirical terms, Dennett fails to do any better than those who posit actual divine revelation by God in explanations of religion as supernatural phenomena.

But even though the majority of the first half of Dennett’s book is spent on useless “explanations” of the development of religion, he does eventually touch on the one important concept that he needs to, if only briefly: religion and morality. How did morality somehow become linked to religion, as if religion were necessary for morality? Is it necessarily linked to religion? This question has played a central role in the quibbles and spats between the philosophical and theological disagreements between evolutionists and creationists. Creationists complain that evolution irrevocably leads to a dearth of morality; atheistic evolutionists deny this and suggest that creationists don’t have a valid basis for their ideas on morality either. Theistic evolutionists form a middle of the road sort of a group, with two distinct possibilities available: God did or did not have a role that God played in creation via evolution. So theistic evolutionists in some sense inherit these conflicts, albeit to a lighter degree. Sorting out the origins of morality and what presuppositions such standards necessitate will do much to resolve some of these conflicts.

Creationist claims about the ethical implications of adopting evolution as an explanation of our origins usually go something like, “If evolution is true, then we just evolved from primordial ooze. There is no God behind evolution. And we cannot infer anything ethically valid from coming from this state, except that we are just like other animals. So there is nothing special about humanity, no ’sanctity of human life’, and no reason to value human life any more than we value animal life. We are all just individual sacs of cytoplasm with an electric current flowing through our cranial regions, thrown into the rat race. Therefore we are just as justified in murdering, stealing, eating people from our species, and any other currently unacceptable behavior as any animal is.”

Creationists have a valid argument concerning the relation of their assumptions about evolution to the conclusion that a solid, normative system of ethics is impossible. If all propositions they present as premises are true, then the conclusion that we are justified in committing ethical atrocities follows from these conditions. However, even though this argument is valid, the conclusion it makes is false because it is flawed on one essential point: the premise that we must come from something other than a deity if we evolved, the premise that evolution inherently excludes God. What this means for their argument is that they are automatically assuming that there is no God in the case of evolution, or that if there is, that God had no role in our creation. The fundamental flaw then, is that a theist would have a hard time arguing that evolution necessitates the non-existences of God – which is just as impossible an argument coming from a theist as it is coming from an atheist. There is no inherent attribute of evolutionary theory that makes it mutually exclusive to a system of explanation for the development of life that happens to include a deity in its schema, and most religious concepts of God are not inherently at odds with the idea of evolution either.

But it is not enough for the atheist to merely point out this flaw. Obviously, having to assert the existence of a God is not something that is acceptable for an atheist to do in order to get to a justification of ethics. But I’m not really sure where an atheist can go from here. Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris all have a large number of complaints about theistic, religious claims about the underpinnings of ethical laws, but none of them can posit the existence of an objective ethics that justifies their outrage against religious “wrongs.” For Dawkins and Dennett, it seems like these things are more like ethically phrased expressions of endearment to their own desire for security than they are actual, justified ethical claims. In other words, the best answer they can provide is their own preference for safety.

This is the weak point in atheist claims about evolution. The Achilles heel of atheistic polemics utilizing evolution as an argument against religion is the fact that it cannot be used to support a “biologicized” form of ethics. This is the only justifiable conclusion of the work of people such as Ruse and Wilson: they cannot develop ethics as a normative, biology-based concept because there are no such claims to be found in biological truths. Biology only looks at what exists and tries to form conclusions from these observations. It is subject to the classical problem of how to move from “This is what is” to “This is how it ought to be.” If one tries to argue from biology to ethics, what we get is relativist mush, not the full-bodied, solid system of normative ethics that we want to find and that atheists need to condemn religion.

When contrasting this atheistic evolutionary account with religious accounts (regardless of their acceptance or rejection of evolution) religion no longer appears to be the less feasible position, at least if we are to go by what is better for our culture. A relativist system makes ethics applicable only insofar as one wants them to be applicable: how do we say that all people should behave in the same way? There is no way to condemn the terrorists who plotted 9/11, or to justify our punishment of those who would do likewise. On the grounds of relativism even the law itself cannot stand. With relativism finding ethical truth is like trying to jump out of a bottomless pit. All of a sudden, even horrible religions that have a complete disregard for the dignity of non-adherents (and even subgroups of adherents) look better on paper. At least they can points us toward some concept of right and wrong.

There is a fundamental problem in all of this, then. Unless atheists can posit an ethical standard that doesn’t show signs of being a Judeo-Christian hangover (at least in the West; elsewhere the ethical norms will be characteristic of the primary religions in those areas), they can make no normative claims. If we accept an atheist evolutionary viewpoint, we are going to have to agree with the animals. We are going to have to fold ourselves into “nature”, even though we feel so strongly that the person stealing our car or murdering our family is in the “wrong.” The best we can do is merely fight back. Or alternatively, we might develop a social contract. This works for a while, and it may solve some of our problems but it ultimately fails because it still lacks the normative push that must be present. The best that one person or group of people can do is threaten, threaten, threaten. This is what I will call an ethic of fear, and it is all that comes of trying to accept evolution on the implausible grounds of atheism.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with an atheist simply accepting this and moving on. But the effect that this has for atheists is that they are no longer in a place to say anything relevant about religion that will be applicable to society or societies in general: they become irrelevant because they can find no common ground with any other individual or group.

So we have found the answer to the first of the two questions I posed at the beginning of this assay. Atheists are not on ethical grounds to criticize religion, at least not yet. If there had been a solution to the problem of the relation between atheistic evolutionary accounts and ethics, we would have long ago found it. The fact that we do not all find the atheistic evolutionary account very convincing (or at least desirable) is because it fails in this regard.

But are there still ethical grounds on which we might reject religion in general or certain particular religions? There is a small dilemma in asking this question. By what standard should we answer this question? It seems that we might remain just as trapped in subjectivism as if we turn to evolution for our answer. There are a number of approaches we might take to compare religions. One approach might consist in using a benefit-based mindset, justifying religion on ethical grounds by comparing the effect that a religion has on its constituents and the surrounding culture(s). This approach no doubt would satisfy atheists as well as theists, and so it is a better approach. But at the same time, adherents to these religions are going to have a problem with this approach because it does not presuppose the existence of their God, gods, or other various and sundry theological and philosophical tenets. I personally have take up this objection. “It is not my responsibility to address the atheist on his grounds,” I might say. This mainly stems from a presuppositional understanding of the concept of God. Any system that does not presuppose itself is going to have a hard time arguing for the existence of its brand of supernatural because all the traditional arguments for the existence of a God or supernatural suppose that a non-adherent can be sound and rational without presupposing such a belief. This has been the claim of many modern apologists (at least in the Christian theological tradition): “All other traditions suppose that our God is unnecessary to found the hidden premises of these arguments (for example, that logic is valid.)” In order to make this simple and put it into the context of my subject, evolutionary explanations of religion, I am going to address this issue with the former of the two possible methods of argumentation (the analysis of religion based on benefit) for the sake of simplicity.

I want to briefly digress to make use of Dennett’s argument for some of the reasons he finds religion unconvincing on the basis of ethics. This will form the basis for showing a better argument that he could have made, after which I will address comparison of religion and ethics.

Dennett says in Breaking the Spell,

I have uncovered no evidence to support the claim that people, religious or not, who don’t believe in reward in heaven and/or punishment in hell are more likely to kill, rape, rob, or break their promises than people who do. The prison population in the United States shows Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and others – including those with no religious affiliation – represented about as they are in the general population. Brights [Dennett’s term for atheist/agnostics] and others will no religious affiliation exhibit the same range of moral excellence and turpitude as born-again Christians, but, more to the point, so do members of religions that de-emphasize or actively deny any relationship between moral behavior “on earth” and eventual postmortem reward and punishment. And when it comes to “family values,” the available evidence to date supports the hypothesis that Brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest (Barna, 1999). Needless to say, these results strike so hard at the standard claims of greater moral virtue among the religious that there has been a considerable surge of further research initiated by religious organizations attempting to refuse them. (Dennett 279-280)

The problem that Dennett’s claim has is that it ignores possible other explanations, and furthermore ignores research published more recently (and before the publishing of his book) by the same group. In the updated study (The Barna Group 2004) the release reads, “George Barna noted that one reason why the divorce statistic among non-Born again adults is not higher is that a larger proportion of that group cohabits, effectively side-stepping marriage - and divorce – altogether” (The Barna Group 2004). Since these people are never legally married, they are left out of the research. So the problem is that marriages never get started in the first place. Therefore there is nothing there to count as a divorce when Brights and other non-Christians simply break up (The Barna Group 2001). Including this data in a study would have significant implications for Dennett’s objection: 25% of Christians have cohabited or currently cohabit, while 51% of atheists do the same thing (The Barna Group 2004).

But Dennett’s misuse of this data is not sufficient to discredit him. Regardless of his statements, the fact that people who, according to many religions, are fallen people, people incapable of perfectly following the ethical standards that their deity has provided is no indicator of whether a religion is good or bad. And the fact that imperfect people imperfectly follow a perfect standard is no indication of whether that standard is perfect. Dennett’s argument is bad because it is so easy to reject on religious grounds. I am going to attempt to show in what remains of this assay that even using a much a stronger argument than that which Dennett employs, there will be no evolutionarily-based claims for believing that religion in general is an unsatisfactory solution.

The stronger argument that Dennett could have made is that the only method we have available of discovering which religions are best is going to be a comparison of what sort of behavior the religions command. This utilizes the method I mentioned above – comparing the effects of religions to see which ones are the best – without falling into the trap of analyzing the actions of people who may or may not be perfect adherents of the religion. If it is people we are attacking we can examine their actions. But if we want to attack religion as a concept or individual religions, we need to attack the things of which religion consists, and hopefully these will point us to a better analysis of the effects of religion than what has been observed so far.

To examine all the individual sorts of commands that different religions attribute to their God or supernatural force here would be next to impossible. But I think that there is an indirect sort of shortcut that one can take. I mentioned earlier the relativist sort of ethics that can and almost certainly will result from any evolutionary account of ethics, which atheists must constrain themselves to. The reason for this is that by constraining their beliefs about one sort of category, theism, they necessitate the acceptance of other principles. The sort of ethical beliefs we accept are not accepted in a vacuum far away from our other beliefs. Because of the need to maintain a coherent system of beliefs on the grounds of remaining rational, we constrain certain beliefs in accordance with our other pre-established beliefs.

This same fact will hold true in any case in which a person exists who holds beliefs. On the same grounds of remaining rational, we must necessarily reject one belief in favor of another. We cannot believe a proposition such as P & ~P. It is impossible to do so and remain rational. Since all beliefs can be summed up as a P, it is therefore impossible to also maintain the opposite. This will hold true regardless of our beliefs about theism, metaphysics, logic, and any other infinite number of possibilities.

So religion is not exempt from this wonderful bit of reality. And if atheism is constrained in its ethical choices, why won’t we find the same kind of necessary constraint in beliefs about particular kinds of deities? We can make some very interesting propositions about the bearing that certain types of deity will have on ethics.

Any deity that we can accept in examinations of religion will have to fit certain definite descriptions in order to carry the weight with which to make certain ethical claims a necessity. I do not intend to show that all religions fall under this constraint, nor do I intend to show that religion is inherently good. Many religions are very harmful. But I do intend to show at least one religion where Dennett will be powerless to say that it is ethically bad on the basis of the character of the deity. Of course, this is going to be the religion with which I am most familiar, Christianity.

I’m not aware of what sort of theological claims have been made in the past by Christian theologians and scholars about this, but recently I was exposed to presuppositional apologetics. The central claim of this system of belief is that the Trinitarian God of Christianity is necessary for a number of widely held beliefs about our nature – namely, that we can have knowledge, that we can be rational, and that we can be ethical or moral. This belief involves, more specifically, a belief that these things are rooted fundamentally in the Trinitarian nature of God. Christianity in particular is unique because it has an interesting way of showing that a good ethical system (i.e. one that benefits those who follow it) is a necessary consequence of its deity: it is a trinity, and each person in the trinity necessarily loves the other persons. From the nature of the internally, consistently, unchangingly loving God, Christianity finds it ethics. If this is the case then, if there is the possibility of a God that necessitates an ethic based on love, rather than an ethic of fear and intimidation, then Christianity is a suitable counter to the expressions of ethical outrage found particularly in the writings of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.

So where does this leave us? I have attempted to show that there is significant reason to doubt that we can maintain any solid system of ethics on the grounds of evolution alone. A deity or supernatural compulsion of some sort is necessary for ethical claims that have any practical import. But of course most atheists and non-religious individuals will object to this: feelings about morality hold very strong sway over most people (excluding small subgroups such as psychopaths and sociopaths.) So I have also shown that we cannot object to religion on ethical grounds because the system of moral laws of any particularly religion will vary in relation to the sort of God that is believed in. And in the case of Christianity we can see at least a plausible type of religious claim about God that would bring us to an ethical system that is better than both evolutionary arguments for ethics and the worse sorts of religions to which Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris in particular object (Islam, etc.)

Of course I do not pretend that atheists are inherently bad people. Dennett has picked up on a common attitude among some groups of religious people: “Without the divine carrot and stick, goes this reasoning, people would loll about aimlessly or indulge their basest desires, break their promises, cheat on their spouses, neglect their duties, and so on” (Dennett 279). That we already do this does not help Dennett’s case, as we are now living in a fairly secular society, but it is a mistake to say that believing that evolution provides no basis for ethics means that atheists will suddenly reject ethics. This has never been the case. Ethical claims are too deeply ingrained in our cultural past, and a rejection of these would be, from an evolutionary perspective, a significantly non-adaptive pattern of behavior. I am not worried that this will result: but if evolution and creationism are to be reconciled, the proverbial ball is now in the evolutionist’s court. Dennett might choose to see religion as a natural phenomenon, but he is building his pyramids on quicksand, not only because he has no ethical basis on which to evaluate religion, but because religion can adequately account for what we see in ethics. I hope that I have shown, at least from an intellectual standpoint, that religion has upped the ante for evolutionary studies: can we have evolution-based law and order? Probably not, but maybe – just maybe – atheists will become more intelligent through mutation and intense selection, and will prove me wrong.