[Last of the trio. After this, I promise, something brand new. Enjoy.]

Here is the link to the district court ruling in the Dover, PA trial about so-called Intelligent Design. It is worth reading in full. Basically, the judge threw out the claim by the defendants, that evolution is “merely a theory” and that Intelligent Design is somehow legitimate science.

This, of course, settles nothing in the long run. The true believers who pulled this stunt to begin with will not be persuaded, nor will they long shut up. That’s fine, that’s their prerogative, and it’s as should be in this country. My hope is that this will not be the last shot fired in defense of science and reason, against irrationalism and spiritual chicanery.

The critics of Judge Jones’ decision have come out screaming that he has overstepped his authority. He has written a pretty scathing and detailed decision. I can certainly see that he has hopes it will be used in other districts, as a means to settle this—at least legally—where and when it crops up. I personally see his response as fairly restrained, considering the clear frustration behind it. He has invoked the ground state complaint of the conservative—it has been a waste of tax payer money.

The profoundest irony, politically, is that Jones is a George W. Bush appointee. The right-wing Jesus faction of the Republican Party must be seized with apoplexy at this. One of their own—one anointed by their own prophet-in-power—has turned on them, delivering a rational verdict.

The point that is still lost on many people, I’m sure, is that what Jones said, and what was demonstrated in the trial, is that Intelligent Design simply is not science. I am not at all surprised at this misunderstanding, because people have such a poor understanding in general of what science is, be they fundamentalists who reject it on doctrinal grounds or just an average citizen who hated the subject in high school because it ran afoul of blithely partying one’s way through curricula. But it is at the core of the kind of civilization we have and it is at the core of the kind of philosophy by which we have dragged ourselves out of the past.

Science concerns itself with the testable. If you can’t put it on a table, dissect it, measure it, compare it physically to something else, and make both positive and negative statements about it with which to demonstrate its properties, then it is not a subject with which science is concerned. That leaves religious concerns out. Period.

Now, the one disturbing aspect of the trial, personally, was the way the witnesses for the plaintiffs took pains to say that there is no conflict between science and religion. There clearly is. Those striving to shove Intelligent Design into the classroom make it so. Their assertion—those driving the heart of this movement—is that if you believe in god, you cannot accept science.

I know, I know, they’re only talking about evolution, not all of science. But in fact, they are talking about science in general. They admitted in Dover that unless the definition of science is changed, Intelligent Design won’t hold up. But just changing the definition of science over one thing doesn’t mean you haven’t simply changed it—for everything. I doubt most of them have thought about this, but really science is their enemy, and for a very simple reason—the habit of critical analysis engendered by the disciplined application of science subverts the capacity of the bull shit artist to sway people to believe in garbage. In other words, it’s a cure for gullibility, and frankly the embrace of fundamentalist religious doctrine requires a certain level of gullibility. That fish is big, man, and swallowing it takes a lot of lubrication and a large mouth with very little discrimination behind it. For fundamentalism to succeed in its aims, people must be kept from developing critical thinking.

I disagree with those who seek to appease the religious by stating that religion and science can exist in harmony. This is not quite the same thing as saying science and religion can exist simultaneously. Harmony implies an almost symbiotic relationship and I do not see that as viable. I am one with Richard Dawkins, who stated that the problem with religion is that it makes “existence claims”—it states that such and such IS and this and that HAPPENED, very materially and very solidly, which puts it in the realm of study and scientific analysis. Religion, in other words, offers alternative explanations about how the universe works, and that puts it in conflict with science, which also offers explanations of how the universe works. And, of course, they are different explanations.

Whenever someone says to me that I must accept something on faith, without any hope of proof, I put one hand on my wallet and smile politely. That’s crap. I must, to be extreme about it, accept nothing. There are many things of which I am ignorant—that doesn’t mean I don’t believe they may exist. There are also many things I accept as real for which I have no direct evidence, but my acceptance is always provisional. If it turns out that the Taj Mahal, in spite of thousands of images and personal testimonials, were shown not to exist, my world wouldn’t stop. I would find it curious and perhaps a little disturbing because of the mass delusion and fraud that had gone on for centuries, but I would not suffer a crisis of profound spiritual estrangement because the world turned out not to be as I had always thought it was. (An extreme example, I admit, but some things require extreme examples.)

All that said, I do not accept the flip side of the public debate, that there is no god and that we would all be better off without religion. I do think we’d be better off without extremism, of which fundamentalism in religion is a form. We’re seeing the consequence of the intractable nature of extremism now, with suicide bombers thinking they’ll go straight to paradise because they die killing people they don’t like. We see it in the willingness of self-proclaimed “christians” to subvert truth in order to win a debate, who have accepted that winning is all that counts. We see it in the intransigence of custom, the intolerance of accepted ideology, the ready brutality of genocide. But not all religion is extremist, and history shows that all too often the generosity of spirit engendered by a religious viewpoint has been the only thing standing between what is right and desolation. Too often, religion has been the only repository of moral instruction for the vast majority of humans on the planet. It must not be dismissed lightly by anyone, nor should it be mistaken for that which it is not. Therein lies the problem.

I think a lot of people, at least in the West, probably in many other places (but I don’t know, so I won’t claim with anywhere near the same conviction on their behalf), manage on an almost instinctive level to parse the difference between materialism and spiritualism, and keep them separate where they would interfere with each other. The old dictum “god helps those who help themselves” holds. You have to manage your life, make choices and decisions, act on conviction. Reliance on the lessons taught through religion helps. I am an atheist, but I admit that my basic moral education came through the Lutheran Church. There is no Church of Atheism, as such. It’s an oxymoron. The closest thing we have to something like that would be in Philosophy courses in university and college. For me, my present moral condition was reached through religion—religion as a phase through which I passed—rather than by any path outside of it. There’s nothing odd about this—we all pass through stages of maturity in which different levels of discourse hold sway. We believe in Santa Claus until a certain age, when we “know better” but recognize the utility in the fiction. We have heroes who must not be less than wonderful, until we grow up a little more and learn that they, too, are human, with faults. Thus, for me, religious teachings were “true” until the point at which I recognized the essential truths couched within the stories, and relegated the stories to the shelf along with Santa and the Tooth Fairy and the Lone Ranger.

See, I write fiction, and I understand something about it which I think most people accept intuitively without consciously recognizing it. Fiction was condemned a couple of centuries ago as somehow immoral, because it is lying. Fiction is “not true” in the way that history or science or what happened last week at Aunt Milly’s is true. Fiction is something made up. A lie.

But that confuses fact with truth, something with which even philosophers have had to contend for a long time. The two are connected, but they aren’t the same thing. Because there are two questions about any event—what happened (fact) and what does it mean (truth). You can tell the truth without there necessarily being anything “factual” to compare it to. Yeshua knew this, hence he told parables—stories. He probably made them up, tailored them to the moment. Were they lies? Of course not. They are a third category of conditional statement. The three conditions would be That Which Is, That Which Is Not, and That Which Is True. Telling the truth about something…well, good writers do it all the time. They tell the truth about the human condition. They give lessons. They make connections with the way we feel and think and how the world is. We do this thing which has nothing to do with lying, because we aren’t trying to establish what Is or Is Not in the sense of facts presented in a court.

Science concerns itself with the first two categories. Religion traditionally deals with the third.

It’s philosophy. And it’s fluid, which is what makes it so difficult for fundamentalists, because they want their truth absolute and unchanging. But they can’t really have that and have it be Truth. Because the nature of Truth is its adaptability and its capacity to interpret. Truth deals with Meaning, and Meaning is a living thing. If you nail it to a tree so it doesn’t move, you kill it, and Meaning is lost.

You can arrive at the Truth of facts, by connecting meaning to What Is. You can’t really attach meaning to What Is Not, and hence there is no truth where there is nothing. Of course, that’s provisional. And frustrating.

But Meaning itself can be a fact. How we behave and why. How we see the universe and why. To arrive at Meaning is a journey, and we must not discard tools lightly.

So while I proclaim myself an atheist, I do not dismiss religion as an encumbrance. I would actually pity the world if religion disappeared. It is all too often the only bulwark against the unrefined, brutish impulses of human beings, especially humans in large groups. Religion is a force for good in the world.

But it’s not science.

The so-called mainstream religions have reconciled—sometimes uncomfortably—with science. Even the Catholic Church has finally conceded that Galileo was right (something they knew all along, but there was a question of Authority to deal with). There’s not much problem with them. It’s these fundamentalist groups—of which we’ve never been rid, nor probably ever will be—who are causing a lot of the problem, and will continue to, because they cannot figure out the difference between Truth and Fact. I would go so far as to say it is a certain lack of sophistication. But it must not be allowed to dominate public discourse at the level of policy. We must talk about it, certainly, but it must be labeled for what it is—extremism. The most damaging aspect of extremism is its intensely distorting effect on all other discourse.

So I applaud Judge Jones’ decision and I think his decision ought to be read and used. But I caution those who think they’ve won something to be very careful about what it is they think they’ve won, and to draw back from extremist positions.

[The second part, still a repost.  Next week I’ll repost part three, and then on to something new.]

I’ve been prompted to do a follow-up on this by the events in Dover, PA and Kansas.  Not news anymore, but to recap, the trial in Dover over the school board’s insertion of Intelligent Design into public school science curriculum is over.  The judge won’t hand down his decision till January, probably, but in the immediate aftermath, the citizens of Dover ousted the entire school board and replaced them with less insidiously doctrinaire people.

I say insidious, because this can no longer be seen as well-intentioned people blundering into controversy unawares.  We’ve been having to put up with this crap now for a couple of decades at least, in Kansas back in the 90s, and the issue is well-enough known and the stakes thoroughly understood by enough folks on both sides that anyone moving to circumvent the Supreme Court decision (Edwards vs Aguillard, 1987) is doing so with the knowledge that they are being duplicitous.  They have decided that, as they cannot win their case on the basis of fact and reason, and since they believe they are right and everyone who disagrees with them is wrong, any tactic by which they may advance their cause is just fine.

Science, meanwhile, is hamstrung by its in-built integrity—not that scientists themselves are not often duplicitous or even insidious, but they work with a process that, sooner or later, outs the B.S.  This self-policing, self-correcting aspect is a point the Creationists seem to miss about science.  Or maybe they don’t, but they just don’t care.  Scientists, in other words, end up having to play by the rules, because the rules are well-defined and function well enough that fraud is inevitably discovered and error corrected.  Bad science doesn’t stand because of that process.

While it is true that there have been scientists whose work has been vilified by fellow scientists, this proves nothing about the nature of science as such.  Eventually, if their work is sound, they are vindicated by the very process that will then discredit that bad or incomplete science (or, more generally, dogged human stubborness against yielding to a new paradigm) blocking their work.  This has happened time and time again.

Likewise, it proves nothing to hold science up as some sort of religion with its own dogma, barring the radical and guarding the gates of orthodoxy like Cerberus, because in time the watchdogs are put down and good work has its day.  Consider the rather shameful episode of Immanuel Velikovsky, whose book World In Collision suffered censure and open censorship when it was published.  The scientific community reacted so negatively to the book that it went through its own period of HUAC-like stupidity in its treatment of Velikovsky.  Carl Sagan, in an exercise of integrity, righted this by having a forum of scientists give Velikovsky and his work serious consideration.  The result was the book Velikovsky Reconsidered, which is a collection of papers done on Velikovsky’s ideas.

Velikovsky was shown to be in error.

But some good science came out of the forum, most especially with regard to the planet Venus.

Point being, science changed its mind.

Religion can’t really do that.  At least, the religiously dogmatic can’t, not without throwing over their dogma and admitting what they believed was in error.  And that’s why it doesn’t mix with science.

On the opposite side of the Dover issue, Kansas once more entered the field by reinserting Intelligent Design in their curriculum and changing the description of science as it is to be taught in the schools along the way.

It prompts one to ask: What Is It With These People?

Now you must ask, then, which people am I talking about?

There are two elements involved in this specific issue that can’t get around each other.  The specific issue I refer to is the place of religion in public education.

One element—those who are pushing the Intelligent Design aka Creationism inclusion—believe that part of our problem today is a lack of religious instruction.  We have, they say, banned god from the classroom.  This has led to immorality and decay, degeneracy and national weakness.

The other element is comprised of those who adamantly refuse to allow religion into public schools at any level, anywhere.  They fuel the fires of the debate—the barred will clamor for inclusion till the gates break down.  This is Americanism at its core, we can’t deny it or avoid it and we try to maintain an exclusionary posture at our peril.  Because if we can’t hold those gates shut—and we can’t—when they do finally give way, we’ll have no control whatsoever on what comes through it.

I take issue with the false syllogism of the religious advocates that we are in the grip of immorality because of the ban on teaching religion in public schools.  I take issue with it because I can’t think of a single period in our history when we haven’t been in the grip of degeneracy and decay.  We know this because there isn’t a single period in our history when the critics of society haven’t loudly pointed this fact out to us.  We have always lived in a stew of sin and corruption.  Even when we did teach religion in the schools.  The presence of school prayer, catechism, evangelism, and god in the public schools has made no difference in the level of so-called immorality in our society.  None.  You can find tracts written at each decade of our nation’s history attesting to the fact that we are Sodom, we are Babylon, we are doomed.  Taking religion out of the public schools has had no real impact at all.

Now, it can be argued that the kinds of immorality have probably changed.  We didn’t have drug peddlers pushing Ecstacy to grade schoolers in 1890.

But wait a minute—a lot of that is simply opportunism.  Still, when you look at the culture at large, you can see that the roster of national sins has changed a bit.  Not much.  I’d argue that for a lot of people, things have improved, and perhaps we have a level of common morality more in evidence on the individual level today than ever before.  Just check the donations to charity, the kinds of charity being donated to, and the range of civil tolerance we experience today that was impossible to expect in, say, 1954.

So that argument, to anyone with any smattering of historical perspective, is patently false.

But there’s another argument that can be made to support a contention that religion ought to be included in school curriculum.  We pride ourselves on tolerance, and it is true, we can’t get around it, that the basic principles of tolerance in the West are fundamentally Christian principles.  Not church principles, but the ideas that came from Yeshua–Jesus, for those who don’t know who I mean.  In fact, the codification of tolerance has its earliest manifestation in religion—everywhere.  The idea that we should respect others, that we should regard our fellow creatures as no better or worse than ourselves, is a religious idea.

The irony, of course, is that secularists have in recent times been the best practitioners of it, at least in a public forum, and is lost on most religious ideologues.  Pat Robertson and the rest of his ilk wouldn’t be half so irked at Dover, PA, if they weren’t well aware of this seeming contradiction.  Consider this quote from the “illustrious pastor” on the occasion of the Dover decision:

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover, if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city, and don’t wonder why he hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin, and I’m not saying they will. But if they do, just remember you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, then don’t ask for his help, because he might not be there.”

Wonderful.

But I do have a problem with banning religion from public education and it is that we live in a world of religion, and to ignore it is to invite the abuses of ignorance.  You could argue, I suppose, that it is desirable to “protect” children from strong ideologies until they are of an age and a sophistication not to be overwhelmed by them—but we certainly don’t do that with regards to other aspects of the world.  We underestimate both children’s’ capacity to handle complexity and our own ability to present a subject in such a way as to open a child’s mind to possibility and choice along with reason.

So I would put religion in school curriculum—as part of history (I don’t know how you teach about the Crusades and avoid deep religious discussions) and as a part of some form of civics.

This is unacceptable to the Creationist advocates.  They don’t want religion taught as a Subject, they want it taught as Truth.  They want it to have dominance over all other subjects.  To do this, though, would require a distortion of those other subjects, especially science.

Which brings the other element in as counter.  Those who would blindly bar religion in toto.  Seeing the intent of the first group, the latter, in an argument we have seen time and again in politics, claims that to let a little in is to eventually yield the field.  This is sometimes called the problem of the camel’s nose.  You can’t let the camel poke his nose into your tent, because before you know it the whole camel is in and you’re sleeping in the open desert.

So they sue and countersue and the country must stand by and watch as the issues mangle the subjects.

Now, I won’t be coy about where I stand.  Religion is not compatible with science.  Sorry, it just isn’t.  Faith is subverted by a process demanding proof, and science is nothing without that very process.  I think religion is both inevitable and unfortunate in this regard.  People seem to require it.  If we managed to stamp it out in one generation, the next would rediscover it.  It’s my opinion that religion is a kind of emergent property of communities.  There is not one culture on the planet ever found that lacked a religion.  In all the wild variety human creativity offers, they multiply, and appear as if out of nowhere.  The binding commonality of our humanity is indicated by the concerns all these religions share—where did we come from?  What is truth?  What shall we do?  What shall we not do?  Is there an afterlife?  Who are the gods and why do they have anything to do with us?

More than that, though, a religion is the strongest form of group identity.  Everyone believing the same thing, worshiping the same thing, claiming descent from ancestors who also believed and worshiped the same thing—when politics and economics change and even language is suspect one generation to the next, this is a powerful bond.

Of course, it’s based on faith as much as any other element of a religion—how do we know we believe the same way our great great grandparents did?—but the nature of faith being that which cannot be analyzed, proven, or disproved, the bond is potent and all but unassailable.

But it doesn’t stop at belief.  It spills over into everything else.  Not only do we believe like our distant forebears, we’re no different from them in any way!  There is a continuity of conscience and values and even physicality implicit in the religious view.  From Abraham to Jesus, The People did not change, outwardly or inwardly, except for the waxing and waning of their faith.  But they were in all things essentially the same people.  No discovery, no insight, no invention altered them qualitatively in any way.

And there seems to be some comfort in that.  Certainly a kind of validation.

That’s gone.

Enter the Industrial Revolution.  From the 18th Century till today, the one thing for certain is that we are never the same one generation to the next.

At least, that’s what it looks like.

Here’s where the core assault on Evolution enters.

First we realized that humans are just one more species on the fecund body of the Earth, biologically no better or worse than any other.  An opportunistic organism hell bent (he chooses his words carefully) on dominance of the biome through any means available, the first line of assault being reproduction.  We secured a position through a particularly large neocortex overlaid on a big brain, and after building cities and colonizing the entire globe, thought of ourselves in our fevered imagination as the ultimate pinnacle of creation—an idea we invented as well to explain the hierarchy we assumed to be “natural”, which idea itself is perverted by the notion of special creation, with human beings at the crest of it.  Our ideology itself was employed in the battle to dominate—our hubris is probably an evolutionary benefit, since it obliterates the kind of humility and sensibility that would check our nature-driven surge for dominance, a dominance not only over the so-called Animal Kingdoms, but over arbitrarily-designated “lesser” human breeds.

Right nasty piece of work.  When we understood that we were just part of nature and not the divinely-appointed landlords, it didn’t take long for some among us to start looking closely at the long trail of human history and trying to figure out alternative answers to the thorny questions.  Many were wrong.

But just questioning that continuity was a chancy practice and got a lot of individuals killed along the way.

Something was awry, though, because the animal kingdoms we thought we understood turned out to be a lot more…unique…than we suspected, and begged more questions than we’d been offering.

When Darwin came along with his little notion of natural selection, well, the whole thing revealed itself to those with clear eyes.  There was no “special creation”—the whole thing was a continuum, a ongoing round of cede and supercede, new species displacing old, whole genomes transforming, disappearing, transmuting.  The animal kingdoms we knew were johnny-come-latelys, emerged in the space left behind by far older kingdoms that had never know Humans at all—because we didn’t exist when they held sway.  Which meant that we were only another phase in an age-old process of change and replace and recombine and…evolving.

Which destroyed the cozy sense of eternal continuity we assumed for millennia.

Which has driven certain people crazy.

It amazes me that we still hear the rejection we heard in the 19th century and even in Dayton, TN—”I am not descended from an ape!”

The man in the 20th Century who came to exemplify the fundamentalist response to evolution, William Jennings Bryan, said in his famous Menace of Darwinism speech: “…our chief concern is in protecting man from the demoralization involved in accepting a brute ancestry…evolution in plant and animal life up to the highest form of animal might, if there were proof of it, be admitted without raising a presumption that would compel us to give a brute origin to man.”

As it has transpired in the course of the 20th Century, science has pretty well established that evolution occurs.  All the arguments mustered against it, from gaps in the fossil record to the intricacy of the eye and its impossibility of emerging by evolutionary process, have been answered.  We have ample evidence in the fossil record and are finding more all the time.  That is simply not an issue anymore.  The eye has been explained.  More than that, in the laboratory evolution has been witnessed on the single cell level for decades.  The only way to make sense of viral mutation is through an evolutionary model.  Humans themselves have been instrumental in evolutionary process through selective breeding of cattle, pets, and the manner in which we change environments and displace species.

Plus, we keep finding new species.  They are emerging all the time.

But the bone of contention (if you will allow me the pun) is with the descent of Man.

Up to the present day, beginning with Bryan, people have made a link between special creation and morality—as if without the hand of god having made us in a separate manner from all the rest of creation, we could not possibly evince a single moral principle.  I addressed this in the previous essay.  Based on a historical reading of our conduct as a species, there isn’t a shred of evidence to support the contention that more religion equates to more morality.

But that isn’t where all the fury at evolution is coming from, I think.  I think that’s a dodge.

The issue is obsolescence.

The view that religion gives us is that Man (humankind) was the last living thing created, and that it was an act of special creation, different from all the rest of the living world, and furthermore the model used was the Creator Himself.  The inescapable implication of this is that we—human beings—-are the pinnacle.  We’re It.  The Best.  The supreme, end result of six heady days of creative exuberance performed by a Being of Infinite power and knowledge and imagination.

Better could not be done.

Well.  If true, then Evolution is the democratic revolt dethroning us from that position.  Because evolution states that we’re just one more species among millions and we have as much chance of surviving to the end of time as the dinosaurs—which is, none to speak of.  We aren’t special.  We can be replaced, and, by the logic of evolution, will be.

The king has no throne.

Whether people consciously react to this or not is beside the point.  Unconsciously, I’m certain they do.

And some reject this process of replacement utterly.

We will not be made obsolete.  We will not be shoved off the top of the hill.  We will not be replaced.

Our provenance, as descended from a long, long line of other primates, must therefore be rejected, because to accept it is to accept the possibility of our being just a stop along the way to something else.  Not even, if we read Darwin correctly, something superior—just something else.  We can’t even look forward to a more human human.

The passion of rejection exhibited here suggests no less than a personal stake on the part of those who would see evolution denied.

In my humble opinion, this is pathetic.

There are always people who take credit for their ancestors’ accomplishments, people who rely on family name and honor to supply them with the dignity they otherwise haven’t earned.  For such people who get by on the stories of greatness achieved by grandparents or great grandparents, people like me—who really could care less what the family did a century ago—must appear odd.  To me, they appear ridiculous.  Likewise those who plead social incapacitation based on transgression done to forebears, as if the transgression had been done to them.  My name indicates a German origin.  That does not make me heir to the crimes of the Nazis or the absurdities of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Reich.  Nor does it suggest anything about my work ethic, my sense of humor, or my tendencies toward dress, decorum, or music.  Yet I have heard this kind of thing throughout my life.  “Oh, that’s the German in you!”

How?  I am an American by birth.  Characteristics that have to do with socialization do not transfer genetically—that’s Lamarckianism and it’s demonstrable false—yet there are people who assume they do.

All this is part and parcel of a process of borrowing self-worth—or special pleading —from lineage.  If that lineage is long and immutable, well…

But it’s not.  To pretend it is is a perspective born of centuries of human habit, passed from one generation to the next not by genetic processes but by the stories and customs we carry with us, handed down through families, towns, nations.

Yet there are American born Irish who will pick fights about slights done by the British against the Irish a hundred years ago.  Examples abound.  This is false self-importance, indulgence in claptrap.

And the granddaddy of such claptrap is Special Creation.

Ultimately, if it’s not true, then we’re responsible—utterly and alone—for our own situation.

I suppose that really frightens some people.

[This is another repost.  Some of the material in this is a bit dated, but the arguments are not.  In fact, with an approaching election, I think a lot of this needs be considered.  This battle will not go away.  There are three parts to it.  I’ll repost the others in due course.]

I stumbled this past Sunday morning on a preacher on television.  The reason I stopped to listen was that on the screen he was scrolling through a litany of famous scientists, their fields and contributions, and noting that each was a Great Christian.  Then the preacher–I don’t know who he was, sorry–ended his litany by making the claim that science and religion are inextricably linked, that they must have each other to work, that there is no dispute between them–

–and that evolution is wrong.

This was a week after I listened to an NPR interview with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania in which he makes the claim that it is vital to settle this question of where “we” (meaning humans) came from because if evolution were true, then we would have no basis for morality.

This is one of the most perverse false syllogisms I have ever heard, and it baffles me no end.  Underlying it is the assumption that morality only ever comes from a god, that without a deity we are too dumb, puerile, self-serving, and just plain hopeless to ever do anything right–for ourselves on anyone else.  That atheists are a priori immoral and that evolutionists, who reject special creation, are necessarily atheists, and therefore, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, likewise immoral.  They can’t help it.  They have no god giving them direction.

A minute of clear thought shows how this is substantively untrue.  A few more minutes and you might begin to see that this is one of the foulest assaults on our civilization ever mounted.  By linking the two things in this way, you automatically create a Sisyphean task for anyone who doesn’t fit the fundamentalist christian mold.  Not only do we have to demonstrate how such arguments are false, we must first demonstrate how we have a legitimate basis from which to make our counter argument, a basis automatically designated immoral, godless, groundless…

Even christians should be afraid of this.  The logical result following from it is to set a standard from which one may never deviate without fear of being labeled atheist and moral threat.  It shuts the door on any possibility of examining the universe in new ways, discovering new explanations for existence, and indulging in the wonder of examining life.

One hesitates to engage the argument because it seems so infantile.  But when someone of Santorum’s stature makes such pronouncements—along with all his other rants about homosexuality, family planning, and the Liberal Agenda—it’s not a crackpot on the corner standing on his soapbox that one can ignore, though ignore him we should.

What the basic argument comes down to is this: god—in this instance the christian god—supposedly created Everything.  By his will alone the universe exists and all that is in it.  By his will alone we strive to be Good.  That without him, we have no reason to be Good.  That, contrary to this, evolution proposes that the universe just Happened and everything in it arose by processes independent of conscious intent.  And therefore, as this is an impersonal process, all the creatures within the universe have de facto no basis for being Good.  Morality, therefore, cannot pertain and we would all be lost.

So.  The question comes to mind: if tomorrow it was demonstrated beyond any possibility of counter argument that god was gone—dead, left the building, or never existed—would you, Mr. Santorum, embark on a life of debauchery and self-satiation?  Would you rape?  Take drugs?  Go on a drinking binge?  Steal, murder, slander, and otherwise let your barely-suppressed immoral urges have free rein?

I doubt it.  You’ve grown up living according to certain standards, standards which I’m sure you have found useful simply on the face of them, regardless of their provenance.

Of course, if I’m wrong, and you would go on a major party rampage, flouting every standard you ever had, I would then ask: Why?  Didn’t you understand the utility of those standards?  Or are you so corrupt to begin with that you require divine muzzling?  (If that’s the case, why would anyone  have elected you in the first place?)

You have to make the argument that morality cannot exist outside a religious context, which is demonstrably untrue.  No, let me be clearer—it’s flat wrong.  Clearer still—that’s a lie.  It’s slander, in fact.

But to make the case we have to ask a more fundamental question: what is morality?

Depends who you ask, but the most common feature of any explanation is that Morality is the impulse to live in accordance with beneficial principles.  Maybe that’s a bit dry, but I think it’s accurate.  Ethics represents a codified approach to appropriate living within a community, and more often than not entails negotiations about terms of interaction.  These are processes and can vary from place to place, culture to culture, time to time.  What is ethical now was not always and what was ethical once is often quaint or repugnant now.

My Oxford Companion to Philosophy, interestingly, doesn’t have one segment on “morality” but rather several segments on the various aspects of it—moral judgment, sexual morality, slave morality, morality and art, etc.  A common theme in all is that the person acting from a moral sense does not see such action—or the necessity for such action—as optional.  In other words, it is a given that morality defines what ought to be done regardless of circumstance.  Kant called this the Categorical Imperative.

Ethics, on the other hand, is more conditional.  Ethics gives leave to weigh issues and choose among options which might be appropriate.  In our traditions, ethics is informed by morality, but often there is a break point between them.  For instance, morally one can argue that slavery is under no circumstances a moral activity.  But in the face of it, when it becomes a question of property rights and restitution to those who have paid out money, an ethical barrier may arise to freeing slaves.  (Absurd, you may say, yet a lot of sound jurisprudence was once based on the ethics of universal manumission.)
To compound that particular argument, though, if the moral standard is taken and the slaves are free, are we not then morally obligated to accommodate those newly-freed persons and make sure they can survive and flourish?  Historically, there is no moral imperative to secure the well-being of disconnected groups, even while one could argue that ethically it would be prudent to do all one could to alleviate the worst consequences of a sudden social transition.  Certainly those who have lost their property may feel no obligation to provide benefit to the group(s) responsible for their loss of property, since, in their view, they have been victims of robbery, and there is a moral imperative against that.  Ergo, the situation remains in flux and no clear hierarchy of action emerges that might be called prescriptive—namely, free the slaves, educate and house them, find a place or circumstance under which they may assume acceptable lives

You can see how this leads into a tangle of definitions and clashes of will.

The fact is, slavery did exist, and existed among people who counted themselves in all other regards among the most moral (i.e. religious) people on the planet.  Others no less moral made sound arguments against slavery, condemning it as fundamentally immoral, even though passages of Paul in the New Testament could be found that seemed to support slavery.  If in the foundational book of christianity one could not find a clear statement of moral imperative about this issue—written by those presumably close to the source—then how are those two millennia removed supposed to figure it out?

In the hindsight of 150 years, it is clear that the ethical arguments against slavery—namely, that it is ultimately an unsupportable institution that eventually will damage the community indulging it—offers a more sound critique and standard that the muddied waters of so-called morality ever did.

My point is, that if morality is supposed to be god’s law written in the heart for all to know, then those who need it most often seem to be functionally illiterate.  It does not do what it is supposed to do.

At least, not the way those pushing the fundamentalist argument suggest it does.

At this point I should be clear: do I believe there is such a thing as morality?

Yes.

Do I believe it is divine in nature and origin?

No.

We have to figure it out just like we have to figure everything else out.  Moral law is a result of millennia of humans trying to work out what is right and what is wrong universally.  You can see the attempts, the rough drafts, the marked-out texts, the failed experiments strewn through history.

We still don’t have it right.

The reason we don’t, I think, is because we keep expecting it to come from without.  We’re still waiting, many of us, for god to send a clearer, revised version of the ten commandments.  Anything short of that is just ethics and we’ve seen where that gets us.

But we’ve also seen where a reliance on morality can get us.  Just about in the same sort of fixes.

Kant, among others, wanted to find a method of defining universal principles that could be held to be Morals.  The categorical imperative, fine tool that it is, fails to do this.  What it does do is allow us to determine what is not universalizable, and therefore not a moral principle.

Morality shares in common an attribute held by both science fiction and pornography–that is, people know what it is when they see it, but find it next to impossible to define concretely.  (Why, for example, is Lady Chatterly’s Lover considered literature and Debbie Does Dallas pornography?  Granted, some people consider the former to be pornography as well, but barring the willfully blind who refuse to look at it, there is a clear difference between the two—but how to describe that difference in moral terms?)  Essentially, it is a category of judgment concerning things that ought not to be negotiable.  Things one should or should not do under any circumstances.  What we have learned from history (if nothing else) is that Ecclesiastes was wrong–there are always new things, and most of them come in the form of unpredicted circumstances.  The 20th Century—and now the 21st —have handed us more of them in more unexpected ways than any other time.

The sanctity of marriage is a case in point.  Marriage—never mind how it has actually played out—is a bulwark against illegitimacy.  People have sex.  It’s natural.  We have to do it in order to survive as a species, but the consequences—babies—are expensive and need tending.  Ergo, marriage.  The so-called family unit.  In its ideal formation, it’s a fine notion.  But very little in human activity is ideal.  There are always people—and circumstances—that simply won’t conform to our solutions.  (Note also that “legitimacy” concerning progeny is not a natural idea—it is a human one.  Nowhere else in the animal kingdom does one see any evidence of concern over the “legal” status of the parents.  Legitimacy is not about caring for the child—it is about inheritance, and, among those with no property to inherit, an easy yardstick to determine “suitability”, whatever that means.  Legitimacy, therefore, is also what we say it is when we point at it.)

Nevertheless, the rule was for centuries that before you can (legally) have sex, you have to get married.

Birth control methods were notoriously fickle and unreliable for centuries before the advent of vulcanized rubber.  There simply was no way to avoid marriage under most conditions, except through a life of celibacy (chiefly affecting women–men always screwed around, stated vows notwithstanding) or ignominy—running from ones responsibilities.  Not a good lifestyle, really.

But now Circumstance—and human ingenuity—have handed us a number of practical methods to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

So why do we have to get married in order to have sex?  And if the consequences are containable, where’s the downside?

Well, there are downsides, but you see my point.  Circumstances changed.  And we can now see that a hard and fast rule that had a certain practical utility for a long long time, has become an option for some, in fact a burden to many, and begs the question of its ultimate utility.

It is optional.

Which drives a certain crowd nuts.

The same argument can be made in many instances.  Racial equality is a biggie.  Education is another one.

But the one that drives me to distraction—at least in the way it’s batted about in public discourse—is the quandary over killing.

Now here’s an instance where morality and ethics part company in so many ways it’s laughable, and where the loudest proponents of so-called Moral Virtue trip over themselves so often it amazes me they can stand and walk across a room.

Thou Shalt Not Kill.  Commandment number six.

There was an academic debate over whether or not the word is “kill” or “murder”.  If it could be settled, then the arguments engendered under this commandment might clarify a bit, but the last I heard people still opted to say “kill”, which if followed strictly (religiously) would make christians into Hindus, at least concerning the hierarchy of life.

The taking of other human lives is what concerns this essay, though, so let’s stick with that rather than add the murk of vegan morality.

Clearly, Yahweh didn’t mean it.  At least, according to the Old Testament, after handing that dictate down, he then named as his favorites some of history’s great butchers.  Joshua, Saul, David, Samson, Tobit.  David in particular, setting aside the whole issue of military actions, qualifies as a murderer.  He manipulated the rosters of troops so Uriah died and David could make his move on Bathsheba.  So not only a murderer, but an adulterer.

It can be argued, of course, that there was a war on, and Uriah might have died anyway.  That’s beside the point.  David intentionally put him in harm’s way to achieve that end.  If Uriah had lived, what next?  But he didn’t.  David knew the odds and relied on them.  That’s murder.

(You could make a larger point about military action in general—when is an officer/leader guilty of murder and when is it just the outcome of the vicissitudes of war?  Was Robert E. Lee a murderer when he ordered Pickett’s Charge?  Everyone—including, apparently, Lee—knew it would fail.)

So Yahweh plays favorites.  You can find many instances in Scripture where these hard and fast rules of behavior—morals—are set aside because Yahweh decided they didn’t apply in a given instance.  So his own laws he deployed according to Circumstance, more like ethics than morality.  (Abraham knew it was immoral—heinous indeed—to be ordered to kill Isaac.  He was going to do it anyway.  Yahweh was “testing him”.  One reading of that is, Abraham holds loyalty to Yahweh higher than all else, which is the traditional reading.  My take on it was that he failed.  The law obviously had not “taken root” in his heart.  The test was whether or not he could make moral judgments and act on them regardless of circumstance.  But of course that’s not a popular reading.  However, if a moral virtue is to have the force claimed for it, shouldn’t it apply no matter who is telling you different?)

Killing is one of those acts which falls into a category of choices which may from time to time be necessary—but can never be defended as moral.  Self defense is a case in point.  Your life or the life of your loved one is under imminent threat.  You kill to end the threat.  We classify it legally as justifiable homicide in those instances where clearly the choice came down to you or them.

Does that redefine the act as moral?

No, categorically not.

But is it therefore immoral?

Maybe.  It depends on how it stacks up against your own metric.  You may do it anyway and then loathe yourself for committing an immoral act.  Yet to not do it, to abide by your own moral code, would have meant the sacrifice of your life—which is a legitimate trade—or someone else’s, which is not yours to weigh.

Then of course there’s the instance of war.  What is it in the decree of your state that makes killing suddenly “all right”?  Or at least acceptable?  If, to be a moral law, an action is wrong under any and all circumstances, from where does a state derive the authority to set such law aside in the instance of war?  And how can that decision be relevant to your own personal moral code?

If, as seems to be the assertion by the chief purveyors of a “return to moral values”, morality is an absolute standard, then by what authority do some of these same people claim to establish exceptions to that standard—which would make it somewhat less than absolute?

Expedience.

Easy answer, complex phenomenon.  Obviously, absolute standards will get you in trouble just as quickly and thickly as no standards at all.  At least, they will if your notion of a standard is a hard and fast rule, like Thou Shalt Not Kill.

Consider: a rule like that doesn’t give leeway to circumstance.  It’s a Law.  You may not violate it.  Strict adherence means you will find yourself in positions where killing may be the only way to survive and you will therefore not survive.

What is the point of handing down such rules to people who will not survive?

This quickly becomes redundant.  The blatant impossibility of living by absolute codes of conducts undoes the asserted necessity of them.  We get into a round of begging exceptions which are only practical and often necessary to the survival of the species.

(Let’s take a biggie—incest.  Now I’m not about to advocate it, but there’s a Bible story* that has always bothered me: Lot’s daughters.  Here in this one saga we see all manner of exception to hard and fast moral conduct being indulged.  The part of the story that gets me, though—never mind the mass destruction of two cities who had no warning and never knew they were on trial—is the aftermath, when Lot and his two daughters hide in a cave.  Genesis 19: 30-38.  They became the mothers of two tribes, which fared well, and no taint of the sin of incest followed them.  Now, they seemed to think the world was over, and that they had some responsibility to repopulate—circumstance, survival of the species.  But these were also the two Lot had offered to the mob in Sodom.  The question is: is incest immoral or not?  In point of fact, it’s not listed in the Ten Commandments.  Adultery is a question of marital priority.  The ten commandments hold forth on covetousness, but actually don’t  say a lot about premarital sex.  All the prohibitions about that come from the long, long list of proscriptions and rules in Leviticus, and we tend to pick and choose among them as suits our circumstance.  But if incest does represent a moral proscription, why the exception here?  In fact, it seems that the ban on  incest is a biologically determined behavioral pattern which does not necessarily apply to blood relations.  There is something called the Westermarck Effect (Edward Alexander Westermarck), which showed that the sharing of living quarters from birth to a certain age seemed to establish a later psychological barrier to sexual interest.  This applies to adopted children as well as family members and, in the instance of those separated at birth, showed no barrier later in life.  It is, apparently, an Evolved  psychobiological condition, which brings me to one of the main points of this essay.)

The tangle over what constitutes a moral principle, as opposed to ethical standards and practice, may well be a problem of language.  How to describe an effect that cannot be universally codified.  Law is, on one level, all about this problem.  Something occurs which we know is wrong, but attempts to define why it is wrong—and wrong in all instances—fail.  Does that failure mean the thing done is not wrong?  Maybe.  Maybe it’s just the circumstances around it that conspire to make it wrong.  (For instance, Speculation.  In times of prosperity, no one sees this as particularly heinous, but when economic conditions are constrained, speculation becomes a matter of condemnation.)

But if that’s the case, then is it fair to say that there are no moral standards?

No.  Because we know better.  We just can’t quite describe it.

As in the case of the Westermarck Effect, however, it may be that moral standards are what might be called deep programming.  Psychobiological structures which have become part of our operating systems over time.

In other words, they are standards which have evolved.

Clearly, we can see this in terms of sociology.  What was once morally acceptable is not now, and perhaps vice versa.  Why?  If a standard is a god-given, absolute imprint, then there would be no shift, no reassessment.

In some ways, there hasn’t been.  We’re still arguing over some of the same issues now as we were four thousand years ago.  This makes sense because societies have to have standards just to survive.  People have to get along with each other, especially when shoved into close proximity in cities.  It is the effects of human interaction that must be managed, and we rely on the idea of a moral code to underpin the surface rules.  We do these things because they are good, we do not do these other things because they are bad.

Being reasonable about this doesn’t seem sufficient inducement for many people.  So we bring in a threat.  Do this or else.  The Or Else, to be truly effective, needs something that transcends the day to day.  So, god.

Not a new argument, but I haven’t heard a sound counter argument yet—except this debate over the provenance of morality.

So we return to the assertion made by the far right that if Evolution is true, then there is no basis for morality.

In fact, I suspect that the reverse is true.  Yahweh–our example here in the West–has a history of playing fast and loose with his own moral codes.  This actually creates an unreliable basis for our own behavior.  If it’s okay for god, why shouldn’t I?  The old “do as I say not as I do” idea that backfires on parents all the time.  The Greeks understood that the gods were a fickle bunch of unruly, all-powerful, self-indulgent forces that had to be appeased.  Law had to come from Man.

There’s some suggestion that this was the original idea in the Torah.  Christian editors re-ordered the Old Testament Books so that the prophetic books appear right before the birth of Yeshua, but the traditional arrangement has the prophets disappearing about when people start fending for themselves.  Yahweh appears less and less as the books progress.

Okay, I’ve danced around this for a while so I could lay the groundwork for my main point.

A moral standard is not a set of rules.  The rules, rather, measure themselves according to the standard, which is an inbred compass that allows us to make judgments from one situation to the next.  It is just that—a compass.  A compass points—it doesn’t tell what will be there when you follow it to a destination.  It says “This Way Is North” but it doesn’t tell you what North means or what to expect from North.  It doesn’t even say how to get to North.  But it will tell you when you’re not going North.  It doesn’t say to us that “this is what is always wrong” and “this is what is always right”.  Instead, it says there is a wrong and there is a right, but you won’t know it until you come into a situation and assess it.  You can’t say killing is always wrong.  You can’t say sex outside marriage is always wrong.  You can’t say working on a certain day is always wrong.  Life doesn’t hand us conditions in which we can make those sorts of absolute pronouncements.  Rather, it’s a case by case process, which means we have to think it through.

But the standard has apparently been brought with us, wired into our deep psyches by ages and ages of experience, which has changed and modified over time.

It has evolved.

So it seems that if evolution is true, it is demonstrated by the fact that we have a moral standard.  Morality is the result of long processes of learning and incorporating that learning into a mechanism whereby we can make decisions for the well-being of the species and the individual as circumstance requires.  Quite the reverse of the Right’s assertion would appear to be the case—that if evolution is wrong, then we have no basis for morality.

So by teaching evolution—combined with, say, cultural anthropology—we can discuss and disseminate a sound moral standard, one with an actual basis in nature.  Not something dependent on a supernatural force that, if the stories are to be believed, breaks its own rules regularly.

It kinda makes you wonder.

I hope.

* You may ask why I keep picking on the Bible here.  Are there not other holy writs wherein these examples might be found and pounced upon?  Sure.  But we here in this country, for the time being, base our haggling over this issue on the so-called Judeo-Christian Ethic.  People who would tell me how to live rely on the Bible as their source of authority.  So, that’s what I’ll pick on here.