 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Previous
article
| Next
article
This article is taken, with permission, from Third Way magazine, December 1999. ©Third Way Trust. We wish to express our thanks to their editor, Brian Draper. Selected writings are on their website at http://www.thirdway.org.uk.
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in
night:
God said, Let Newton be!
and all was light.(1)
When physics explores the workings of God’s universe, there seems to be a harmony between science and our ‘tolerant’ faith. When physicists venture onto theological ground, there is little opposition. But when it comes to biology, then trespass at your peril, you followers of Darwin!
Perhaps we need to show more humility when it comes to listening to what biologists have to say. We ought to consider their ideas carefully — after all, in these morally ambivalent times we need all the help we can get to define publicly a set of ethics for a post-Christian society. It is, therefore, time to examine the contribution of biology to the dialogue between science and religion and, in particular, to gauge the effect that evolutionary biology has had on the study of ethics.
The journey begins long before Darwin. The humanist tradition — which can be traced from Pelagius, Armenius and Erasmus through to John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine — became a mainstay of the Enlightenment. Philosophers were led by reason, and what they were led to was a faith in the innate goodness of human beings.
Yet experience tells us that reason alone is not to be trusted when the subject under consideration is our own behaviour. Understandably, we wish to believe in altruism — especially when we have removed God completely from the equation. If you have committed yourself to solving all the world’s problems through human effort alone, you really are left with no alternative but to believe in your own goodness.
Darwin, however, transformed this perspective. The harsh lesson of his theory was that we are just like the rest of the animal kingdom. From a biological viewpoint, Hobbes got it right and Locke and Rousseau got it wrong. The philosophical implications are that we are selfish animals struggling to survive in a hostile world. From this point onwards, biologists begin to take a leading role in the ethical debate.
By the mid 1970s, the arguments of Richard Dawkins were dominating the stage, with a yet more demoralising message: we are organic machines whose sole function is the propagation of competing genes. His three books The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986) are compelling. He explains the fact that we co-operate with each other by invoking the mathematics of ‘game theory’, as propounded by biologists such as John Maynard Smith, Robert Axelrod and William Hamilton, whose ideas suggest — rather depressingly — that we only ever co-operate with each other to get the best deal for ourselves.
Although not every biologist is hostile to the notion of altruism, even V C Wynne-Edwards’ theory of group selection — which proposed that the individual would make sacrifices for the benefit of others — can be interpreted as selfish when the group to which the individual belongs is genetically related. The geneticist J B S Haldane is reputed to have said, “I will lay down my life for two brothers, or eight cousins.”
As Christians, we would not, of course, wish to think this of ourselves. Perhaps people who embrace such mechanistic nihilism have a fundamentally different make-up to those who need to find comfort in more optimistic theories. According to the US writer Robert Wright, there is, in fact, a spectrum of ideas:
Some people call it the holist/reductionist spectrum, others the right-brain/left-brain spectrum. [Reductionists] find philosophical contentment in an utterly mechanistic universe, a universe devoid of souls, spirits and other ethereal things — a universe, moreover, that may well be devoid of ultimate purpose. [Holists] prefer to believe that there is more to the universe than meets the eye — specifically, something suggestive of overarching design.(2)
Most 18th-century philosophers gathered at the reductionist end of the spectrum; but, even though the reassurance of an omniscient Designer was fast fading, they nevertheless still clung to the idea of hope. For Denis Diderot, this was embodied in future generations. “Posterity is for the philosopher”, he wrote, “what the next world is for the religious man.”
After Darwin, however, serious pessimism set in, to the
point where today Dawkins sees little prospect of any
immortality. We are built
, he writes, as
gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But as each
generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved.
Our genes may be immortal, but the collection of genes which is
any one of us is bound to crumble away.
(3)
So much for eternal life. Dawkins looks instead to what he calls “memes” to offer both comfort and the incentive to make a positive contribution to society:
Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on.(4)
At the end of The Selfish Gene, he tries to salvage hope:
Even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight — our capacity to simulate the future in imagination — could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism — something that has no place in nature.(5)
The hope lies with ourselves — and in this Dawkins maintains the tradition of the Enlightenment. Axelrod developed this idea significantly in his book The Evolution of Co-operation(6), which contains a remarkably strong message from Dawkins in its foreword: “The world’s leaders should all be locked up with this book and not released before they have read it. This would be a pleasure to them and might save the rest of us. [It] deserves to replace the Gideon Bible.” Praise indeed!
The reason for his enthusiasm was a game which researchers called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is a ‘non-zero-sum’ game, because either player can gain advantage without necessarily inflicting disadvantage on the other. “Each has two choices,” the book explains, “namely co-operate or defect. Each must make the choice without knowing what the other will do. No matter what the other does, defection [by one player only] yields a higher pay-off than co-operation. The dilemma is that if both defect, both do worse than if both had co-operated.”
Axelrod devised a round-robin computer tournament and invited researchers from different disciplines to submit behavioural strategies. The surprise winner was one dubbed ‘tit for tat’, which requires you to co-operate as long as the other player does. Since you will therefore never be the first to defect, this is called a ‘nice’ rule. If the other player defects, you respond immediately in kind — but you start to co-operate again as soon as your opponent does so. It is, therefore, also called a ‘forgiving’ rule.
The simplicity of this appeals to biological determinists. In evolutionary terms, it shows that, if the conditions are right, co-operation can actually spread through a population quite naturally. It is hardly surprising that Dawkins found hope in this, for it takes as its starting-point a world of self-seeking individuals and assumes just two fundamentals: reciprocal action and an eye to future interactions. With this basic formula, co-operation can evolve.
The question for us is: Where does the idea of morality enter? Does even the possibility of such co-operation mean that we have risen to a higher plane, or are we forever condemned to be waging what Hobbes called a “war of all against all”? The use of moral terminology in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is telling: “Be nice! Be forgiving!” The idea of ‘tit for tat’ even echoes the Old Testament ethic of an eye for an eye. Could it be that in this simple game there is the basis for a naturally evolving code of ethics? Axelrod admits that reciprocity is not a good foundation for morality, but he claims that “it is more than just the morality of egoism.”
Egoism, however, remains the driving force. All action is conditional upon what has happened in the past and on what is expected to happen in the future. Co-operation comes under the scrutiny of the actuary. Whether we care for someone or not depends on whether they have cared for us in the past and on what the prospects are for mutual care in the future. We ought to be nice because it pays to be; we ought to forgive because it is in our own interests to do so.
Such a morality is based on a calculating, legalistic view of the consequences of our actions. Axelrod believes that we should teach people to care about each other, and from a practical point of view alone this is clearly beneficial. And Dawkins concedes that “we have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests”.
At the very least, the Prisoner’s Dilemma represents a workable system of ethics, if within a secular context. The difference between this and Christian morality lies in the concept of altruism, a form of behaviour in which help is given at the expense of the helper. In biblical terms, it means to give and not to count the cost, to labour and not to seek for any reward. In the words of John 15.13, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lays down his life for his friends.”
Biologists have compromised this definition. They recognise three different types of altruism: ‘reciprocal altruism’ (as in the Prisoner’s Dilemma), ‘kin selection’ (which gives help to individuals who are genetically related) and ‘signalling’, which is the apparently selfless behaviour of unrelated individuals to indicate their status to future mates. (This is the behavioural equivalent of the peacock’s tail: anyone who is able to sacrifice valuable time helping others must be fit and worth sharing our genes with).(7)
But if society is to construct some kind of secular ethical system based on these biological understandings of altruism, it is likely to be very different from Christian morality, which goes against the grain of our natures and negates our biology. The biological imperative is “Save yourself!” The Christian imperative “Deny yourself!” instead resists the selfish gene through what Dawkins calls “disinterested altruism”.
This is “something that has no place in nature”. You will not find such an instruction written into any genetic code or evolutionary algorithm, because it is, biologically, unsustainable. The program for life is based on the survival of the fittest. If it were otherwise, biological systems would not exist.
The clearest command to deny the self is found in the Sermon on the Mount. It is remarkable, given the biological imperative, that it is even remembered to this day. Perhaps it is because we recognise the need for a moral standard, which we hold as an ideal, albeit one we can never achieve. Or perhaps it is the only evidence that we can choose how to behave: to deny self even though we are programmed to preserve it. It is ironic that Dawkins’s model of ‘pure, disinterested altruism’ already exists, at the heart of the Christian faith. Here is the archetypal selfless meme.
Where does all this leave us as we try to plot our moral course? Do we seek help from God or from our biology? The choice is uncompromising — selfless meme or selfish gene — and we can at least thank biologists such as Dawkins for defining that choice so clearly. Yet many Christians will wonder how far a science that espouses Game Theory and the selfish gene can really help us in our quest for public ethics.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is an important example of cultural evolution whereby co-operative behaviour can invade a competitive world. That is a significant contribution. But when it comes to deciding whether an action is right or wrong in itself — when we consider morality without conditions — that is a different matter. It is at this point that Christians ask for God’s help.
So, must we conclude that biology can contribute nothing to Christian ethics? One significant finding has been overlooked: it offers support for the notion of sin, of our selfish nature, and recognises that there is a universal problem that needs to be addressed.
According to Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain andpleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as what we shall do.”(8) In the language of theology, hedonism has long been regarded as a ‘sin’, but now it can be recognised by evolutionary biology as a ‘problem’ resulting from the natural expression of the selfish gene.
In bringing us this far, biologists have unwittingly focussed our attention on a crucial issue: Is morality relative or absolute? If we accept that the problem of sin can be redefined in terms of the selfish gene, we abandon the arbitrary language of theology and confront the non-arbitrary concepts of science. We deal not with the subjective notion of sinfulness but with the hereditary unit of selfishness — the universal absolute that is programmed into every one of us.
It is a problem that cannot be sidestepped. If we embrace the Sermon on the Mount, we must recognise that Christian morality is the negation of that absolute. And, in any language, the negation of such a universal principle must itself be an absolute. If we are to rise above our mere biology, if morality is the hallmark of what it means to be human, we must accept that we are dealing with a type of behaviour that is beyond the natural, even beyond the rational.
Is this just a matter for the theorist? Let us hope not! When faced with a moral choice, we should not ask what is in it for ourselves, but take the direction that denies our selves — and thank biology for pointing the way.
Previous
article
| Next
article
|
|
|
|
|
Last modified: 25th November 2005