The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [52]
IF CORE MORALITY IS AN ADAPTATION,
IT MUST BE GOOD FOR US.
SO WHY NIHILISM?
Grant the two premises—moral norms make a difference to fitness and there is a universal core morality. Then the road to nihilism becomes a one-way street for science and for scientism.
The core morality almost everyone shares is the correct one, right? This core morality was selected for, right? Question: Is the correctness of core morality and its fitness a coincidence? Impossible. A million years or more of natural selection ends up giving us all roughly the same core morality, and it’s just an accident that it gave us the right one, too? Can’t be. That’s too much of a coincidence.
Remember Plato’s problem. God gave us core morality, and he gave us the right core morality. Coincidence? No. There are only two options for the theist. Either what makes core morality right is just the fact that God gave it to us, or God gave it to us because it is the right one.
Of course, there is no God, but science faces a very similar problem. Natural selection gave us morality, and it gave us the right morality, it seems. So, how did that happen? The question can’t be avoided. We can’t take seriously the idea that core morality is both correct and fitness maximizing and then claim that these two facts have nothing to do with each other. That’s about as plausible as the idea that sex is fun and sex results in reproduction, but these two facts have nothing to do with each other.
Is natural selection so smart that it was able to filter out all the wrong, incorrect, false core moralities and end up with the only one that just happens to be true? Or is it the other way around: Natural selection filtered out all but one core morality, and winning the race is what made the last surviving core morality the right, correct, true one.
Which is it?
It can’t be either one. The only way out of the puzzle is nihilism. Our core morality isn’t true, right, correct, and neither is any other. Nature just seduced us into thinking it’s right. It did that because that made core morality work better; our believing in its truth increases our individual genetic fitness.
Consider the second alternative first: Natural selection filtered out all the other variant core moralities, leaving just one core morality, ours. It won the race, and that’s what made the last surviving core morality, our core morality, the right, correct, true one. This makes the rightness, correctness, truth of our core morality a result of its evolutionary fitness. But how could this possibly be the answer to the question of what makes our core morality right? There doesn’t seem to be anything in itself morally right about having lots of kids, or grandchildren, or great grandchildren, or even doing things that make having kids more likely. But this is all the evolutionary fitness of anything comes to.
The first alternative is the explanation for the correlation that we’d like to accept: core morality is the right, binding, correct, true one and that is why humans have been selected for detecting that it is the right core morality. But natural selection couldn’t have been discerning enough to pick out the core morality that was independently the right, true, or correct one. There are several reasons it had little chance of doing so.
First, there is lots of evidence that natural selection is not very good at picking out true beliefs, especially scientific ones. Natural selection shaped our brain to seek stories with plots. The result was, as we have been arguing since Chapter 1, the greatest impediment to finding the truth about reality. The difficulty that even atheists have understanding and accepting the right answers to the persistent questions shows how pervasively natural selection has obstructed true beliefs about reality.
Mother