The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [54]
Scientism cannot explain the fact that when it comes to the moral core, fitness and correctness seem to go together. But neither can it tolerate the unexplained coincidence. There is only one alternative. We have to give up correctness. We have to accept that core morality was selected for, but we have to give up the idea that core morality is true in any sense. Of course, obeying core morality is convenient for getting our genes copied in the next generation, useful for enhancing our fitness, a good thing to believe if all you care about is leaving a lot of offspring. If core morality is convenient, useful, good for any fitness-maximizing creature in an environment like ours to believe, then it doesn’t matter whether it is really true, correct, or right. If the environment had been very different, another moral core would have been selected for, perhaps even the dog-eat-dog morality Herbert Spencer advocated under the mistaken label of social Darwinism. But it wouldn’t have been made right, correct, or true by its fitness in that environment.
SCIENTISM STARTS WITH the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts—the facts about us, our psychology, and our morality. After all, we are biological creatures, the result of a biological process that Darwin discovered but that the physical facts ordained. As we have just seen, the biological facts can’t guarantee that our core morality (or any other one, for that matter) is the right, true, or correct one. If the biological facts can’t do it, then nothing can. No moral core is right, correct, true. That’s nihilism. And we have to accept it.
Most people want to avoid nihilism if they can. And that includes a lot of people otherwise happy to accept scientism. Anti-nihilists, scientistic and otherwise, may challenge the two premises of this chapter’s argument for nihilism: the notion that there is a core morality and the idea that it made a difference for survival and reproduction. The irony is that together these two premises, whose truth implies nihilism, also take the sting out of it. The next chapter sketches enough of what science now knows about human evolution to underwrite both premises and so make them unavoidable for scientism. At the same time, it shows that nihilism is nothing to worry about.
Chapter 6
THE GOOD NEWS:
NICE NIHILISM
TO NAIL DOWN NIHILISM, WE NEED TO BE VERY confident about how and why core morality is adaptive. We need to show why over the course of 3.5 billion years, relentless selection for fitness-maximizing creatures should have produced people with an almost universal commitment to a core morality. For evolutionary biology, this is the problem from heaven. Or at least it’s the reason why more people prefer God’s dominion to Darwin’s hell of cutthroat competition.
For a long time after Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, the existence of core morality made Darwinian natural selection apparently irrelevant to humanity’s history, its prehistory, or its natural history for that matter. No one gave natural selection a chance to explain how our core moral code is possible, let alone actual. On the surface, core morality looks harmful to individual fitness. Think about all the cooperation, sharing, and self-sacrifice it enjoins. Consider its commitment to fairness, justice, equality, and other norms that obstruct looking out for number one and number one’s offspring.
For over 100 years, Darwin’s own difficulty explaining how core morality is even a possible result of natural selection was the single