Is a Modern Myth of the Metals the Answer?
| November 12, 2009 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
In the post below Andrew Sibley links to an extraordinary article in The Times about the link between Darwinism and the recent spate of school shootings, and in the comments Leviathan steps up to give us the obligatory “this doesn’t disprove Darwinism” response.
Leviathan, you are missing the point. I read the article and there is not one word in it that attacks Darwinism per se. For all you or I know the author could be a Darwinian fundamentalist. I take it that the point of the article is that some school shooters are influenced by Darwinian theory. That is undeniable.
Actually, I take that back. I am sure there are Darwinian fundamentalists out there who would deny that any school shooter has ever been influenced by Darwinism, but that just goes to show that Darwinian fundamentalists will deny propositions they know to be true. I should say that the proposition cannot be denied in good faith.
The author obviously wants his readers to consider not the validity of the theory itself but the implications the theory has for ethics. When we teach our children that their existence is an ultimately meaningless accident and that morals are arbitrary byproducts of random genetic fluctuations and mechanical necessity, should we be surprised that they place a lower value on human life than someone who is taught that all humans have inherent dignity and worth because they are made in the image of God?
What to do? What to do? In considering this question, I am reminded of Plato’s “noble lie.” In The Republic Plato proposed a special class of guardians trained from infancy to rule over the other classes. But how do we persuade the guardians to rule for the common good instead of using their power to advance their personal ambitions? Plato comes up with the “noble lie,” specifically the myth of the metals. The answer, Plato says, is to make the guardians believe the gods have mixed a particular type of metal with the souls of the members of the different classes of society. While common people have bronze or iron mixed with their soul, the guardians have gold mixed with theirs. And here is the kicker: The guardians are to be taught that they must never acquire wealth for themselves, because the gods frown at mixing earthly gold with spiritual gold. Talk about chasing your tail. Plato proposes a system in which the city spends years training the guardians in all the knowledge and wisdom they have, all the while making sure that at the end of the process they are still dumb enough to believe the myth of the metals.
There are three and only three options.
1. We can continue to fill our children’s heads with standard Darwinian theory (which Dennett rightly calls “universal acid”), understanding that at least some of them are going to put two and two together and realize that the acid has eaten through all ethical principles – and act accordingly.
2. We can try to come up with a secular noble lie. “OK kids. You might have noticed that one of the implications of what I just taught you is that your lives are ultimately meaningless and all morals are arbitrary, but you must never act as if that is true because [fill in the noble lie of your choice, such as “morality is firmly grounded on societal norms or our ability to empathize with others”].
3. We can teach our children the truth – that the universe reveals a wondrous ordered complexity that can only be accounted for by the existence of a super-intelligence acting purposefully. And one of the implications of that conclusion is that God exists, and, reasoning further, He has established an objective system of morality that binds us all, and therefore the moral imperatives you feel so strongly are not just an epiphenomenon of the electro-chemical states of your brain.
Looking around I see that for the last several decades we have tried options one and two, and we have gotten what we have gotten. I vote to give option three a run.
129 Responses to Is a Modern Myth of the Metals the Answer?
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Oh, and did you see post #114? There are a lot of unanswered questions in there.
How is that going to help me further my genes?
Darwinism would show Genghis Khan to be the benchmark of morality
Allen_MacNeill, You say that there is no such thing as Darwinian morality, and, in a way, you are right. However, there is such a thing as the lack of morality, and that is the key problem of our Post-Christian Post-Rationalist society. In this moral vacuum, where morally immature and uneducated individuals, (sometimes unkindly called moral imbeciles), are easily influenced by anything they fancy right, the predominant Darwinian or “scientific” world-view has had a huge impact. You can see it everywhere from the Darwinian economics, politics, sociology, to interpersonal relations. No wonder some or many of these immature individuals adopt Darwinian “survival of the fittest” notions as their personal ethics.
With respect to the nature of ethics, you are muddying the waters. True, as the history of ethics shows, it has always been the trickiest area of human reasoning. Its essence is the proper and intelligent understanding of what is “good” or “truth”. But that is why one must sincerely and humbly learn, reason and ponder the ethical foundations, the history of ethics, and what each of the sages has said or done.
Referring to G.E. Moore, as sincere and honest philosopher he was, is simply an oversimplification of the problem, since Moore was a common sense ethical intuitionist. There is nothing wrong with such an approach, providing one’s intuition is right. However, if it isn’t, one, and the whole society, is in huge trouble. That is why even an intelligent and educated person will humbly take advice and guidance of prestigious social institutions, of which Christianity is the foremost.
(Example: I watched the Glenn Beck town hall meeting program with black African-Americans a few days ago and it was good and eye-opening to see that many black Americans consider Christianity the key to their emancipation and human dignity.)
Allen_MacNeill, you have been critical of “creationist ID blogs”. One such charge can be found of your blog:
“However, other misrepresentations are apparently part of a deliberate and ongoing effort to distort the public record and deliberately misrepresent the relevant scientific information for political and religious purposes.” Etc.
http://evolutionlist.blogspot......t-and.html
You have brought up Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, and it is in this context that I will lob the charge back at you. I will use the Preface by Michael Ruse to his new edition of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics. (Princeton 2009) This preface is worth reading, because Ruse explains in it quite well what actually happened. The bottom line is that T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s Bulldog, or the Pope Huxley, was not only indifferent to ideas of Darwin (p xii), but Huxley knew very well that “evolution had little basis in fact and, more than this, was a sloppy notion…” (p. xi) Ruse points out this conundrum, and explains that Huxley was trying to move away from the prevalent Spencerian notion & attitude which actually did create a Darwinian morality, a “moral message of evolution” (p. xvii), which was based on the Darwinian struggle in the animal & plant kingdom, based on some “animal force” that leads to greed and violence. This was scientism, or pseudo-science, plain & simple.
Whether Huxley knew what he was doing, i.e. his hypocrisy and his deliberate intention to create an evolutionary “Secular religion” (as Ruse calls, it p. xiii) to help the poor working masses, is perhaps open to debate. But the fact is that since his first famous lecture on Darwinism, when Huxley was so cold and shunning of Darwin’s pigeons, with his further program of discrediting Owen, his X-Club, etc., it is quite clear that Huxley knew quite well what the problems were and that Darwinism was just a useful tool to bring about the education & betterment of the masses. (One could seek parallels to this in the current US political situation.)
Anyway, in this final essay, Huxley did try to dissociate himself from the Darwinian morality, he wanted to dismiss such “evolutionary ethicizing”, and many, like G.E. Moore with his Principia Ethica welcomed such a departure. Huxley tried his best to explain the nature of ethics, but there was a mixed reaction and many were not impressed by Huxley’s own ethicizing. But, what is really interesting in this essay, is that Huxley did realize that there was a “beast within us” which needs to be fought and cultured. This sounds very much like the “original sin”, which is the central idea of Christianity. In his essay Huxley also pointed out that there was another aspect of this cosmic evolution, a kind of an anthropic principle, art (which needs an artificer), with perhaps even a hint of design:
“But there is another aspect of the cosmic process, so perfect as a mechanism, so beautiful as a work of art. Where the cosmopoietic energy works [51] through sentient beings, there arises, among its other manifestations, that which we call pain or suffering. This baleful product of evolution increases in quantity and in intensity, with advancing grades of animal organization, until it attains its highest level in man.”
Unfortunately, as Ruse pointed out, the evolutionary or Darwinian morality came back despite Huxley’s effort to thwart it. Many, including Huxley’s own grandson Julian embraced it. This morality made inroads even into the Catholic Church via the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, to whose Phenomenon of Man Julian Huxley wrote and enthusiastic introduction.
I do think we derive ought from is, even in biology. Consider pathology or any other practice that judges something is not functioning as it ought to.