AC Grayling has chimed in on the Japan disaster. Grayling is a militant infidel philosopher. Grayling is everything that a social climber like John Loftus aspires to, but never will be.
Before commenting on his op-ed, I wish to back up and put his strictures into context by first comparing what he says here with something he wrote elsewhere:
Given that human beings have evolved by natural selection (with genetic drift and some other factors perhaps assisting), and are ethical creatures, it follows ab esse ad posse that ethics can be derived from evolution by natural selection.
That, though, might not be to answer the purport of the question, which asks: would natural selection be sufficient to produce creatures with a consciousness of ethical principles and a tendency to wish to observe them and see them observed?
The idea might be that whereas other social animals have evolved behaviours that subserve the interests of their sociality—dominance orderings, co-operation in hunting and watching for predators—this does not amount to ethics, the idea of which at least premises an awareness of the demands and responsibilities ethics involves, and the possibility of their non-observance, not least deliberately. Among other animals the evolved social behaviours are largely invariant and automatic; a putative “ethics” that is choicelessly a result of hard-wiring could not be ethics.
Immediately one says this, one has begged what is possibly the hardest question known to metaphysics and moral philosophy: that of free will. Almost every indication from sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and neurophilosophy supports the deterministic side of the argument, entailing that our sense of being choice-makers, deliberators, option-possessors, who could have done otherwise in most of our actions, is an illusion. On the evidence flooding in from these sources, we are as other social animals, only worse off in that we operate under an enormous error theory about our own nature, falsely thinking that we have free will and that we are therefore genuinely ethical creatures. It was from this error—if it is one—that Spinoza sought to free us by arguing in his Ethics that once we recognise that we live by necessity, we cease to repine, and thus are liberated from unhappiness.
For of course the very idea of ethics premises freedom of the will. There is no logic in praising or blaming individuals for what they do unless they could have done otherwise, any more than one would praise a pebble for rolling downhill upon being dislodged by rain. So this month’s question becomes, by these selective pressures: could natural selection, resulting in the adaptations otherwise distinctive of human descent, have produced free will?
To answer that requires a clearer conception of “free will.” Its formal identifier is the “genuinely could have done otherwise” requirement: but not only does that itself require unpacking, we also need to look for the fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) traces that suggest which structures in the brain import novelty into the world’s causal chains, making their possessor a true agent, and not merely a patient—a sufferer—of the universe’s history. So the question evolves yet again: could finding such a thing even be a possibility?
i) He seems to be claiming that libertarian freewill is a prerequisite for moral responsibility.
ii) Or perhaps his claim is narrower: that if we are hardwired by natural selection, then our evolved social behaviors aren’t truly ethical.
iii) On whichever interpretation, he also denies that we have libertarian freewill, rendering morality an illusion. Praise and blame are meaningless.
iv) He also says we “operate under an enormous error theory about our own nature.”
With that in mind, let's turn to his comments on the Japan disaster:
Someone told me that there were to be special prayers in their local church for the people of Japan. This well-intentioned and fundamentally kindly proceeding nevertheless shows how absurd, in the literal sense of this term, are religious belief and practice. When I saw the television footage of people going to church in Christchurch after the tragic quake there, the following thoughts pressed.
It would be very unkind to think that the churchgoers were going to give thanks that they personally escaped; one would not wish to impute selfishness and personal relief in the midst of a disaster in which many people arbitrarily and suddenly lost their lives through ‘an act of God’.
i) It’s hard to see how he moves from the premise to the conclusion. A degree of self-interest is not unchristian. The Bible uses warnings and rewards as incentives and disincentives. In addition, Christians, like other human beings, are needy, contingent creatures. We feel vulnerable.
ii) What’s wrong with expressing personal relief? If my son survived a traffic accident while his best friend died in the accident, I will be both grateful that my son survived, as well as grieve the death of his friend. Where’s the inconsistency?
We have an obligation to be thankful to God for the good he has done us regardless of whether someone else as been so favored. If my wife kisses me, should I be thankless unless my neighbor’s wife kissed her husband?
iii) For that matter, what’s wrong with selfishness? Doesn’t Grayling discount moral ascriptions? Don’t they arise from “an enormous error theory about our own nature?” In that event, why is he assigning praise or blame to the conduct of Christians?
If they were going to pray for their god to look after the souls of those who had died, why would they think he would do so since he had just caused, or allowed, their bodies to be suddenly and violently crushed or drowned?
Other issues to one side, that’s a non sequitur. What befalls someone in this life is not a necessary, or even probable, indication of what awaits him in the next life. A common theme in Scripture is the suffering of the righteous and the reversal of fortunes.
Indeed, were they praising and supplicating a deity who designed a world that causes such arbitrary and sudden mass killings? An omniscient being would know all the implications of what it does, so it would know it was arranging matters with these awful outcomes. Were they praising the planner of their sufferings for their sufferings, and also begging his help to escape what he had planned?
But that argument cuts both ways. Because we, unlike God, are not omniscient, we don’t know all the implications of what God does. Consider the law of unintended consequences. What appears to be a worst-case scenario in the short-term may be for the best in the long-term.
Perhaps they think that their god was not responsible for the earthquake. If they believe that their god designed a world in which such things happen but left the world alone thereafter and does not intervene when it turns lethal on his creatures, then they implicitly question his moral character. If he is not powerful enough to do something about the world’s periodic murderous indifference to human beings, then in what sense is he a god? Instead he seems to be a big helpless ghost, useless to pray to and unworthy of praise. For if he is not competent to stop an earthquake or save its victims, he is definitely not competent to create a world.
That’s a fair criticism of open theism and other suchlike.
And if he is powerful enough to do both, but created a dangerous world that inflicts violent and agonizing sufferings arbitrarily on sentient creatures, then he is vile.
Yet Grayling, by his own admission, regards ascriptions of praise and blame as meaningless. So he’s disqualified himself from rendering value judgments about God’s character.
Either way, what are people thinking who believe in such a being, and who go to church to praise and worship it?
Yet Grayling, by his own admission, denies the freedom of Christians to do otherwise. They are hardwired to praise and to pray. So his disapprobation makes no more sense than faulting “a pebble for rolling downhill upon being dislodged by rain”?
