How the Good Emerges Out of Evolution (Second in the Series, A Better Human Story) – Blue Virginia (press release) (blog)

The first installment of this series can be found here.

Secularization and Its Disconnections

I claimed, in the first entry of this series, that a meaningful story about our kind (about the human saga) is largely missing in contemporary societyat least in its secular components. That phrase about secular components was an acknowledgment that our traditional religions do continue to offer stories that, if believed, provide an account of what we are as human beings and, at least in some respects, the meaning of the human saga.

But over recent generations, in the Western world, much of the world of serious thought has split off from the world of traditional religion. For people who feel that intellectual integrity requires that conclusions be based on applying reason and logic to the totality of the evidence and for whom beliefs based on received authoritative texts fail to meet that test the stories told by the religions of our civilization no longer provide convincing answers.

This process of secularization has left some important empty spaces. An important aspect of such empty space is that, to many, the requirements of intellectual responsibility have seemed to block the way toward firm moral beliefs and spiritual conviction.

But I maintain that there is a secular and intellectually responsible way to fill those empty spaces, or at least some of those that matter most.

Most of secular thought, for example, operates from the conclusion that judgments of value are lacking in a solid basis in reality. (You cant get ought from is.) Statements about value, many have felt compelled to conclude, are just matters of opinion, and thus cannot be taken fully seriously as saying things that are true.

Additionally, according to much of the rational-secular world, there is no meaningful and valid way of speaking of the sacred.

It has seemed to many that one can EITHER be intellectually responsible (meaning believing only what evidence and reason lead one to believe) OR one can feel hold moral and spiritual truths with full conviction. But not both.

That way of thinking, I maintain, is both dangerous and invalid.

Those empty spaces left empty by the way secular thought has developed have contributed to the peril of our times by interfering with the ability of many good people to connect fully with their moral and spiritual core.

That is a significant loss, as that core is a place from which comes much of the passion required to contain the forces of destruction at work in the world.

(Heres a dangerous combination that might serve as a very approximate description of the heart of the current crisis in the American body politic: while a large component of the church-going part of America, which does believe in such things as good and evil, has been deceived and manipulated into giving support to a force of destruction; and meanwhile, a large portion of the secular-minded, liberal part of America has proved incapable due to its blindness and weakness of seeing and combating that force.)

If it is true that the disconnection, among many with a secular worldview, from a moral and spiritual core is part of the reason that destructive forces have gained so much power in our times, it would be hard to over-estimate the importance of this issue.

And if a different and valid path for secular thought were available one that demonstrates that there is no need to choose between maintaining intellectual integrity (in rational, scientific terms) and having full commitment to some fundamental moral and spiritual truths then that different way of thinking could have an important and beneficial effect on the quality of our civilization.

It is the belief in that different and valid path, and its potentially beneficial effects, that is the motivating force behind this series on A Better Human Story.

So, to return to my sales pitch for the integrative vision being offered in this series:

Would you be interested in a way of understanding our humanity that offers a well-reasoned, empirically-based, intellectually responsible way of understanding that offers a meaningful way to see the realm of value categories like good and evil, right and wrong, and even the sacred as an essential and real part of our human reality?

****************************

Evolution As a Meaningful Story

To begin to chart the way toward filling those empty spaces.

At the heart of the secular understanding of who we are, and how we got here, is the story of the evolution of life on earth. Science says clearly, this is how we came to be.

For many, this evolutionary view in which the living world is shaped by a process with an apparently wholly impersonal and opportunistic modus operandi has seemed to strip our being of some of its important meanings. Like the reality of good and evil. Like a dimension worthy of calling the sacred.

But theres another way of comprehending that evolutionary view.

The story of evolution, far from closing off our access to the important moral and spiritual spaces that religions have filled with their different stories, provides us a meaningful way to understand the reality of the good and the sacred.

It is on those positive dimensions that this installment will focus. But in a subsequent entry, I will show how that same perspective provides the necessary context for understanding how as a consequence of our species rather recent breakthrough into civilization, after four billion years of the story of life on earth humankind inadvertently unleashed a force that might reasonably be called evil into our world.

There are two reasons that it is the positive part of that pair how evolution gives rise to the good that should come first. It comes first chronologically, in terms of how value gets built into the organic structure of creatures such as ourselves. And it should come first also logically, in terms of laying the necessary foundation for seeing how the subsequent breakthrough into civilization of a culture-creating animal like homo sapiens would inevitably generate a force of brokenness.

***************************

The Good as an Emergent Reality

From the secular perspective, it appears that values like the good and the sacred are not built into the cosmos, out there. But those values are emergent realities arising out of the evolutionary process. Realities that have been instilled, by that process, into our very being.

In a nutshell, here is the argument for how one can get from the realm of objective reality, that science presents, to the realty of the good.

(Those first two points are fairly basic in the realm of evolutionary thought, though the language about choosing life over death and finding fulfillment are my own way of framing those ideas. The third idea has a degree of kinship with the philosophical idea of utilitarianism. Taken together, they form the framework for an argument well, I wouldnt know how to counter it!)

What is selected for, in biological evolution, are those creatures that do what survival requires. At a certain point in evolutionary development, that required doing starts being driven by motivation. Wanting to do whats necessary for survival helps. Wanting to avoid what threatens survival is also a plus.

Along with motivation, then, comes this wanting. Which, in turn, means emergence of an experiential dimension of things mattering. To the motivated creature, some outcomes and some experiences are preferred to others.

In this way, evolutions choosing of life over death leads directly to the next step in the emergence of value. That step brings us to that third and crucial point above the one about the connection between value and the fulfillment of sentient creatures.

The Central Reality of the In Here

It mystifies me how so many smart people have stumbled over this movement from this step from the out there domain of objectivity to the in here domain of experience. As if value could not be real unless it was out there. But it seems clear enough to me that value could only make sense in terms of the (subjective) experience of sentient beings, and that it is no less real for that.

The idea that for something to be real it must be objective, like the stars in the heavens or the rock on the road, seems to me a complete non sequitur.

Value means that some things are better than other things. In a lifeless universe, devoid of any beings to whom things matter i.e. for whom some things are experienced as better than others how could there be any kind of value? (A God could count here as one such being, if He were well pleased with one thing, and displeased with another.) But in the absence of any such creatures, and any such experiencing, how could anything be better than anything else?

There can be no value unless something matters something is better or worseto someone.

(In a universe with a God who makes pronouncements about the better and the worse, would that mean that it matters to Him? That He thinks it will be good for His creatures? And for His creatures to accept such pronouncements, would that not have to mean that they accept that Gods assessments. Unless, that is, it is just out of fear or deference to authority. Only in an authoritarian framework does the positing of God solve any problem about value not equally solved in a secular framework.)

And in a universe without a God the universe as cosmological science has been able to see it then one can say that value is an emergent reality in the universe, once creatures (like us, but not only us) emerge to which some experiences are preferable to others.

In sum: Value is inherent in the experience of creatures like us, and value must necessarily register in the domain of experience.

At this point, we might encounter the challenge according to which experience, being subjective, cannot be really real. To which my response is: To say that value is not real, because its merely based in experience, makes as much sense as to say that pain is not real.

Nor does subjective mean merely idiosyncratic. Just as it is fallacious to argue from the fact that we each have different bodies that theres no such thing as human anatomy.

Beneath our differences between individuals, between cultures there is a fundamental stratum of our experience, and of our sense of how things matter, on either the positive side or the negative, that is grounded in how evolution has shaped our human nature.

*********************

The Two-Level Game of Evolved Human Life

As it follows from evolution understood as a process that chooses life over death, that the nature of a sentient creature is molded such that its experience of well-being tends to correspond to what, in the history of the species, has been life-serving, so also does it follow that the life-serving and the fulfilling are two sides of the same evolutionary game.

The game of life operates, then, on two levels. The overall system operates mechanically as if animated by the purpose of yielding survival. The sentient creatures the system creates are built to seek fulfillment. From the point of view of the system, that fulfillment is a means to an end. But from the point of view of the sentient creatures, the fulfillment is an end in itself.

************************

Out of the impersonal processes of evolution, there emerges value, which is to say, there emerge creatures who experience things in terms of the better and the worse.

It matters to a baby whether it is lovingly cared for our callously neglected or cruelly abused. It matters to a kitten whether it is stroked or tortured. (Pleasure and pain are a gross way of expressing the inherent dichotomy. But I think the experiential good is richer than pleasure connotes. The word fulfillment captures more of that richness.) It matters to a human community whether the people flourish or are mired in misery.

The emergence of creatures who directly experience that things matter is the entirely logical one might say inevitable outcome of the process of natural selection. Once life begins to develop out of a cosmos in which, at least as far as science can tell, there was previously no meaningful way in which one thing could be better than another, the good will eventually arise as an emergent property.

Filling Those Empty Spaces in an Entirely Secular Way

Thus does a scientific, secular perspective provide a meaningful way of recognizing the reality of value. This way of establishing that reality seems by no means inferior logically to any of the religious stories that claim to illuminate the good and the evil.

As the human good consists of human flourishing, this secular way of establishing value is fully capable of establishing the validity of such principles as Love thy neighbor as thyself, said by Jesus, or Rabbi Hillels precursor to the Golden Rule, What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. For the practice of such precepts will maximize the fulfillment of the human beings within any community that practices them. Their rightness is affirmed by the experiential reality of sentient creatures.

As value is an emergent property in the evolving system of life, so also is the sacred.

Just as value cannot have meaning except in terms of experience, so also with the sacred. (Unless within a basically authoritarian outlook, in which anything the Supreme Being declares, His creatures must agree to.) Consider the sacred as what occasions a special form of the experience of value value to the nth degree. Value in excelsis.

Many with a secular perspective regard the concept of the sacred as meaningless, as not corresponding to anything in reality. But to deny the meaningfulness of the idea of the sacred is to deny an experiential human reality.

The reality is that it is a human universal that people have special kinds of experiencesexperiences that give rise to a sense of sacredness. We need some such concept, because it refers to an experiential reality that people talk about in such termsin terms of its breaking through into a deeper, more illuminated, bigger dimension of reality.

The sacred the capacity for this kind of experience seems to be an inherent part of our humanity. Just as music and laughter which are also found everywhere human beings are to be found are part of what we humans are by nature. Evolution, evidently, put it there.

To deny the reality of the sacred because it is grounded in experience makes as much sense as denying the reality of excruciating pain.

Not every human being, it seems, has such Wow way out there blown away deeply illuminated kinds of experience of value. But I gather its a substantial portion. (Not every human is musical, or has a sense of humor either.)

The sacred seems to be a human universal in the sense that such experiences arise in virtually every human culture. And, in virtually every human culture, people attribute profound importance to such experiences. Indeed, historically and cross-culturally, it would seem that human cultures have organized themselves around such experiences.

And perhaps in that major orienting role that these experiences play, we get a clue to how it may be that the evolutionary process which instills value in all sentient creatures has apparently instilled that experiential capacity in humankind. One might presume that it has proved life-serving for the animal that embarks on the path of culture to possess a capacity for experiences of value so profound that those experiences serve as major guideposts for the organization of cultural life.

Indeed, what peoples through history and across the world have tended to experience as sacred are things that are profoundly life-serving: the sacredness of holding ones infant in ones hands, the beauty of the natural world from which we draw our sustenance, the solidarity of the social group, the family gathered around the Thanksgiving table, ones hearth and home, a well-ordered and just social order.

The sacredness, in other words, of those things that contribute to human flourishing.

The Sacred: A Case in Point

Which will lead, in the next installment, to my talking about the latest space Ive been working on fleshing out for this ambitious integrative vision of a Better Human Story.

In contrast to that fleshed out piece mentioned in the previous piece the darkness ascendant in American in these timesthis new project is about something worth celebrating in human life.

The name of the new project is The Sacred Space of Lovers.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

NOTE: Do you want to follow this series? If so, please sign up for newsletter here to be informed whenever a new entry in this series is posted.

Are there people you know who would answer yes to the question with which this piece began? If so, please send them the link to this piece.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

NOTE: The comments that follow, below, are from people Ive asked to serve as my co-creators on this project, i.e. to help me make this series as good and effective as possible.

They are people who have known me and my work. And my request of them is that when the spirit moves them to contribute they add what they believe will help this series fulfill its purpose and give the readers something of value. Ive invited them to tell the readers what they think will serve the readers well, and to pose questions or challenges they believe might elicit from me what I should be saying to the readers next.

I am grateful for their attempting to help me find the right path.

Margee Fabyanske:

Im ready to accept a new way of understanding that offers a meaningful way to see the realm of value (right/wrong, good/evil, or sacred/fulfilling) as an essential and real part of our human reality. But should we group people into two vast categories of secular intellectual vs. religious fundamentalist?

If evolution has shaped our human nature should we jump to the conclusion that all humanity is looking for the sacred or fulfilling life as part of our DNA? Do we all, deep down, want to flourish?

Andy Schmookler responds:

On your first question:

Reality is of course more complicated than our categories. But our understanding does seem to require that we notice differences, and one important difference is that different people reach their beliefs by different means. In other words, they have different epistemologies.

This series is dedicated to the approach to knowledge/belief that is about evidence processed through reason. The belief in biological evolution grows out of a veritable mountain of evidence of many different kinds.

The religious approach and please note that I said nothing about fundamentalism is usually different. Certainly scientific proof of Gods existence is lacking. And the purely logical attempts to prove it as attempted by Aquinas for example fail to pass logical muster. I expect that most people who believe in God (or believe, say, that one can find salvation in Jesus Christ) have arrived at that belief by means quite other than evidence processed by reason.

It is true that a person might believe in God through that means. If, for example, one had the experience that Moses is reported to have had with a voice speaking to him out of a bush that burned but was not consumed, that experience would constitute for that person evidence (even if not of a publicly available sort), and reason might lead him/her to conclude that indeed, God does exist. (Or they might conclude that theyd been hallucinating.)

I myself would like to believe that the universe is ruled by a God who is just, merciful, good, powerful, wise, etc. as our traditional Western religions have posited. For me, however, the evidence does not seem to support that belief. On the other hand, I also have had some experiences that I have difficulty integrating into my general worldview, and leave me open to the possibility that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in my (natural) philosophy.

On your second question:

I am in general against jumping to conclusions. But if there are people who are inherently indifferent to the pursuit of happiness, I would be at a loss to explain why. And that would be for the reasons articulated in the piecei.e. how selection has crafted us to do what survival requires, and to feel rewarded (fulfilled) for doing those things.

There certainly seems a wide range of human variation. It seems to me quite plausible that seeking experience of the sacred value to the nth degree is not a human universal, just like not everyone responds deeply to music. (Also, there can be birth defects of all kinds.) And certainly people can be damaged by their experience so that they do not remain alive to the possibilities of happiness, pleasure, fulfillment.

But how would it come to pass that someone would by inborn nature not be inclined toward that which his/her ancestors were selected for being motivated and rewarded for pursuing?

************************

Fred Andrle:

Atheists and agnostics I know admittedly a small number have firm moral beliefs and a motivation toward altruistic action based in compassion for their fellows. I dont find them at all hesitant in this regard. Perhaps they base their beliefs in a kind of thought process similar to yours. I will inquire.

One atheist friend holds that we have developed our sense of altruism, our sense of compassion, even love, out of a need to function as a human society. Without that development, he says, societies would collapse in an orgy of personal greed and comprehensive exploitation of others.

So I wonder why some who dont subscribe to a religious outlook find it so difficult to leap to a firm secular code of ethics. I wonder whats missing for them.

And one atheist friend who has had an ecstatic experience of the sacred looks back on what was for him at the time a religious experience, and now calls it brain chemistry. That seems enough of a value for him. Sufficient in itself because the experience was intensely life affirming.

Excerpt from:

How the Good Emerges Out of Evolution (Second in the Series, A Better Human Story) - Blue Virginia (press release) (blog)