Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart
Page 21
9. Exodus 3:2.
10. Joshua 10:13.
11. Exodus 14:21–22.
12. Matthew 14: 22–33.
13. John 11:1–46.
14. This does not include Deists, who believe that the only property of God is the creation of the universe (or setting the cosmological constants that made possible the existence of the universe). Deists do not believe that God intervenes in the world and do not have any specific other beliefs about God’s attributes.
15. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966).
Chapter 6: Putting Factual Beliefs to the Test
1. This example is discussed by Michael Shermer in his book The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (New York: Times Books, 2012).
2. We recommend John Perry’s A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).
3. The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s paradox, asks whether an object that’s had all of its components replaced is still the same object. The paradox asks whether a ship which was restored by replacing each and every one of its wooden parts remained the same ship or was just a copy of the original ship.
Chapter 7: From Beliefs to Behavior
1. This principle is referred to by philosophers as “psychological egoism.”
2. Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 1. Bentham was by no means the first to address the question. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asked, “What is the ultimate purpose of human existence? What is that end or goal for which we should direct all of our activities? Everywhere we see people seeking pleasure, wealth, and a good reputation. But while each of these has some value, none of them can occupy the place of the chief good for which humanity should aim. To be an ultimate end, an act must be self-sufficient and final, that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else” (1097a, 30–34).
3. This is consistent with the standard psychological model espoused by the philosopher David Hume, as well as Herbert Simon’s “bounded rationality” model.
4. R. A. Wise and P. P. Rompre, “Brain Dopamine and Reward,” Annual Review of Psychology 40 (February 1989): 191–225.
5. Elizabeth A. Phelps, “Emotion and Cognition: Insights from Studies of the Human Amygdala,” Annual Review of Psychology 57 (2006): 27–53.
6. Elizabeth A. Phelps, “Human Emotion and Memory: Interactions of the Amygdala and Hippocampal Complex,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 14, no. 2 (2004): 198–202.
7. John Campbell Oman, Mystics, Ascetics, and Saints of India (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905).
8. Randi Fredricks, Fasting: An Exceptional Human Experience (San Jose, CA: All Things Well Publications, 2013).
9. David A. Leeming, Kathryn Madden, and Stanton Marlan, eds., Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion (New York: Springer, 2009).
Chapter 8: How “Ought” One Behave?
1. Walter Mischel, E. B. Ebbesen, and A. R. Zeiss, “Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972): 204–18.
2. W. Mischel and R. Metzner, “Preference for Delayed Reward as a Function of Age, Intelligence, and Length of Delay Interval,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 64, no. 6 (1962): 425–31.
3. We couldn’t. Even if we harnessed every CPU in existence, this would still not be possible given the complexity of the problem. But let’s pretend.
4. An average human body is estimated to be composed of approximately 7 × 1027 atoms. See Robert A. Freitas Jr., Nanomedicine (Austin, TX: Landes Bioscience, 1999). Accounting for the larger size of typical basketball players, ten players on the court, the ball, the court, the hoops, and the air in the stadium easily brings us to a lowball estimate of 1030 atoms involved in a basketball game. The numbers get even more absurd if you include the number of collisions that would be constantly happening between all these atoms every second of the game.
5. Sean Carroll, “Free Will Is as Real as Baseball,” Discover Magazine (blog), http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/07/13/free-will-is-as-real-as-baseball/#.UjyLCn_B_Sh.
6. One of the stranger implications of objective morality is that moral facts existed before any creatures existed that could follow those moral laws and will persist even after those creatures go extinct. As a result, a belief in objective morality means that there were moral laws before there was an earth or even a universe in which these laws could exist and that these moral laws would continue to exist even after the earth ceases to exist. As a result, objective morality tacitly depends on a supernatural lawgiver to provide the laws or the belief that objective morals are themselves supernatural and can exist both before and after the universe came to be.
7. Even if objective moral truths exist, what if human beings don’t have a way to perceive them? For example, many people who believe in moral truths don’t think that animals experience morality in the same way we do. As a result, when a male lion jumps on a female lion and bites the back of her neck during coitus, we don’t describe that as “rape.” We also don’t draw the conclusion that because lions don’t perceive rape as immoral, we shouldn’t either. So not only does the moral objectivist have to assume that eternal moral truths exist apart from nature, he also has to assert that we have a reliable way of perceiving and evaluating those moral truths.
8. Richard E. Creel, Philosophy of Religion: The Basics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
9. Ronald L. Eisenberg, The 613 Mitzvot: A Contemporary Guide to the Commandments of Judaism (Rockville, MD: Schreiber, Shengold, 2005).
10. Louvre, Law Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, http://www.louvre.fr/en /oeuvre-notices/law-code-hammurabi-king-babylon.
11. W. W. Davies, trans., The Codes of Hammurabi and Moses with Copious Comments, Index, and Bible References (Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham, 1905).
12. Dawkins discusses the moral zeitgeist in detail in chapter 7 of The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
13. It’s an arresting thought to realize that many of the behaviors we hold as neutral or good today may be seen as obviously immoral in later eras: “Can you believe that people back in the twenty-first century didn’t allow children to work until they were sixteen? Parents gave them set incomes called ‘allowances.’ And they kept animals imprisoned in their homes for their own entertainment, giving them demeaning slave names like Mr. Sprinkles!”
14. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).
15. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1863).
16. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
17. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Rawls’s philosophy was greatly inspired by Kant.
18. Even a partial list of a few of the dizzying diversity of proposed moral codes would include Kantianism, Neo-Kantianism, Rule Utilitarianism, Act Utilitarianism, Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, Rawlsianism, Care Ethics, Social Contractarian, Communitarianism, and many more.
19. We are not using duty in Kant’s technical sense but, instead, in the colloquial sense of the term.
20. “Duty,” Random House Dictionary (New York: Random House, 2012).
Chapter 9: Moral Happiness
1. William James, “The Will to Believe: An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities,” New World (June 1896): 7.
2. While it may seem obvious, it’s important to note that Pete wouldn’t have any opinion of cheesecake if he hadn’t been exposed to it. This is most obvious when Western children are exposed to Indian, Chinese, an
d Japanese foods for the first time. The more experiences you have, the more freedom you have. It is unfortunate but true that children born in better socioeconomic circumstances often have more freedom than less privileged children as a result of wealthy parents’ ability to expose their children to more experiences. While wealthy parents can’t necessarily guarantee that their child will pick up piano or fall in love with international travel, children whose parents aren’t wealthy enough to provide them access to experiences such as trips around the world or expensive musical instruments simply won’t be exposed to those experiences. Fortunately, technology can help us by driving down the costs of certain experiences. For example, while a child may not be able to visit the Louvre, he or she can see the paintings on the Internet and read articles about them on Wikipedia. Organizations such as the Khan Academy democratize knowledge by making school lessons available to anyone with an Internet connection. While the technological proliferation of knowledge and learning is by no means a panacea, it offers new vistas of experience to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to those experiences.
3. These two concepts (identification with others and enlightened self-interest) are explored in Peter Singer’s book, How Are We to Live: Ethics in an Age of Self- Interest (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995).
4. This type of behavior is also often called “reciprocal altruism.”
5. For a more comprehensive discussion of game theory, we highly recommend the chapter “Tit for Tat” in Singer’s How Are We to Live? as well as Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s book, The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future (New York: Random House, 2009).
6. The societal desire to keep track of how people behave has resulted in systems designed specifically for this purpose, such as permanent criminal records and sex offender registries.
7. Consider a mother or father who cares for the happiness of his or her child. Parents have been known to make enormous sacrifices for their children, from sleep to their social lives, and to endure financial costs to make their children happy.
8. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–92.
9. “The capacity for making moral decisions is innate—the sympathetic circuit is hard-wired, at least in most of us—but it still requires the right kind of experience in order to develop,” from Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 188.
10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (Paris: Methuen, 1948).
Chapter 10: Societal Happiness
1. Okay, not exactly. Technically voters in the United States vote for electors in the Electoral College, who in turn vote for the candidates. But in practice, the result has been the same. So far.
2. Colossians 3:22 (New Living Translation).
3. For example, the Athenian democracy around 550 BCE used a lottery system to decide which citizens would serve in which government positions.
4. It should be noted that we differ from Harris in some ways when it comes to his views about “moral truth” or “moral realism.” Harris asserts that we can ascertain facts about morality through biology, chemistry, or neuroscience. He argues that just as we can research the chemistry of the food to determine if it is more or less healthy for us, so too can physiological knowledge yield objective facts about morality. In the food example, we would contend that facts about the nutritional value of food are legitimate forms of knowledge, but they only produce objective facts about what to eat if we assume that nutrition is the overriding purpose of consuming food. That isn’t always the case. Much of the time we consume food for taste (such as at a fine restaurant), paying little attention to the nutritional content of the food. For many of us, nutrition is often a secondary concern, so the facts do not create an objective preference. Prioritizing between taste and nutrition turns out to be a preference, just as balancing one’s personal desires and one’s “well-being” is ultimately a preference. So while we might be able to easily demonstrate that stealing is highly correlated with imprisonment as a fact, when a thief contemplates whether or not to steal, the thief’s appetite for risk is a preference-based decision. Even if objective facts might be useful in predicting expected outcomes of an attempted heist, there still exists no “moral truth” to determine what the risk appetite of the thief “should” be.
5. Sociopathy is another area of moral concern that raises interesting questions. Just because some psychologically deviant people commit ethical atrocities like murder or rape doesn’t mean that we can’t expect reasonable adults to adhere to certain basic moral principles. It merely highlights the fact that not everyone is psychologically healthy (some people lack innate empathy) or has the ability to make rational decisions regarding the life-happiness of others or even of themselves. We react in shock and disbelief when atrocities are committed by seemingly “normal” people because we find it so unfathomable that someone who appeared reasonable—someone who it seemed should be in touch with these ethical principles—could ever take such actions.
6. PolitiFact, “Obama’s More Right Than He Knows,” http://www.politifact .com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/apr/15/barack-obama/obamas-more-right -than-he-knows.
7. Indeed, some of our laws have nothing to do with morality, such as laws that establish that we drive on the right-hand side of the road. After all, motorists in the United Kingdom and Japan drive on the left-hand side with equal success. On the other hand, many past laws around ethics are immoral by the ethical standards of today. Examples in the United States include laws banning interracial or same-sex marriage. At the same time, many immoral acts aren’t illegal by law. Consider that the UK government only recently (in the last thirty years) made spousal rape a punishable crime.
Chapter 11: Putting Ethical Beliefs to the Test
1. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,” Yale Law Journal 94, no. 6 (1985): 1395–415.
2. Another classic example of an impossible clash of absolute principles: “What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?” The solution involves dismantling the absolutes. If there is such a thing as an unstoppable force, there can’t exist such a thing as an immovable object, and vice versa.
3. K.I.N.D., http://www.msnbc.com/kind-fund.
4. This topic was explored in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, chapter 8, “Instinct. Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection as Applied to Instincts: Neuter and Sterile Insects” (London: John Murray, 1859). See also R. A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930): 159; and W. D. Hamilton, “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7, no. 1 (1964): 1–16.
5. There are a few parallels here with a branch of moral philosophy called “care ethics,” which views morality through the lens of human relationships and the context of social interactions. However, care ethics differs from the subjective moral theory we are describing in that it sees caregiving as the fundamental driver of morals, whereas we see a person’s happiness preferences as the main moral driver.
6. Innocence Project, “DNA Exoneration Nationwide,” http://www.innocen ceproject.org/Content/DNA_Exonerations_Nationwide.php.
7. John Eligon and Michael Copper. “Blasts at Boston Marathon Kill 3 and Injure 100,” New York Times, April 15, 2013.
8. Grand jury indictment, http://cache.boston.com/multimedia/2013/06/27indictment/tsarnaev.pdf.
9. The Chesterton quote provides a final, ironic proof of this concept because, as it turns out, Chesterton never said it. The source was Belgian playwright Émile Cammaerts, writing in a book about Chesterton. But because people preferred that the quote come from the famous theologian rather than a little-known playwright, it was quickly misattributed, and the error was passed down through the years uncorrected, like countless other unexamined beliefs.
1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1602), act 2, scene 2.
Appendix A: Common Religious Objections
1. Parts of this chapter, as well as parts of the introduction, come from a paper titled “On religion” written by the author, Lex Bayer, in a writing class at Stanford University.
2. John Hick, God and the Universe of Faiths (London: Macmillan, 1973), 140.
3. David Hume, Section X, “Of Miracles,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
4. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Books, 1995). See also Jeff Jordan, Pascal’s Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006).
5. James Cargile, “Pascal’s Wager,” in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, ed. Steven M. Cahn and David Shatz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
6. Exodus 3:2.
7. Joshua 10:13.
8. Matthew 14:22–33.
9. From David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 74.
10. Joshua 10:13.
11. John 10:11.
12. Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010), 138.
13. Harris, Moral Landscape, 139.
14. Legatum Institute, “Legatum Prosperity Index,” http://www.prosperity .com/#!.
15. Gallup Global Reports, “What Alabamians and Iranians Have in Common,” http://www.gallup.com/poll/114211/Alabamians-Iranians-Common.aspx.
16. For an example of such a situation, see Liz Szabo, “Doctor Accused of Selling False Hope to Families,” USA Today, January 8, 2014.
17. Ewan Palmer, “Russia Road Accident Baby Dies after Parents Choose ‘Emergency Baptism’ over Hospital,” International Business Times, November 28, 2013.
18. Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae (1597).