Atheist Morality: Ratcheting Forward

By Kristopher Hite 

As a person with no religion and no belief in any gods, it may come as a surprise that I spend considerable time thinking about the best source of moral guidance. Throughout history there have been people who maintain a good reputation, a high quality of life, and provide constant intellectual stimulation to their peers while actively questioning what is right and wrong. Who are these people in present day and what do they have to say?

Dr. Ken Miller is a cell biologist and professor at Brown University. He is famous for defending evolution as a fundamental subject in biology classrooms and has given testimony in several important court cases. The most recent being Kitzmiller v. Dover, PA.  By doing so he has elevated the quality of public education in the United States and helped ensure evolution be taught as a matter of fact.  Through his work he has upheld the establishment clause fo the US constitution and for this I applaud him.

As for moral thought, Dr. Miller has gone on record saying that "science can only take us so far." I was able to ask him to elaborate on this thought last week as part of a Google Hangout On Air moderated by the HuffPostLive host Josh Zepps. I asked him where atheists ought to get their morals and where he gets his. Here was his response.

If, in science, we found an absolute, testable, empirical source of morality then scientists everywhere would agree on all moral questions. The reality is I think our discussions of morality, in other words, what is right and wrong, have to be informed by science. I think we have to be literate in science, even people who are not scientists. But ultimately moral questions require a philosophical point of view in terms of what is the good life? How should we treat each other? What is the value of human life?  Now as a Catholic, I have to confess, I draw a lot of my moral sense from the religious teachings of my faith. But I also would argue that there is a moral sense that is present in everybody. Whether they are a person of faith, whether they are an agnostic, or whether they are an atheist. I completely agree with the idea that one can have an atheistic world-view. And informed by science, and by using logic, and by having a philosophical view on life, you can in fact, develop a moral code which is consistent and which provides the greatest good for the greatest number.

His answers only lead me to more questions. Which philosophical views help provide the greatest good? And what time-scale for good should we choose? If not from science then where do these ideas originate? And how are contemporary atheists doing on developing a moral code?

Fellow blogger, Cara Santa Maria chimed in via the Huffpost discussion informing me that she had recently recorded a pertinent episode of "the Point" a spin-off of the the Young Turks Network. The episode was essentially a panel discussion of exclusively atheists trying to answer the question "where does atheist morality come from?"

As part of the panel discussion, video comments were aired as food-for-thought. To me, the most striking guest was AJ Johnson, Development Director for the American Atheists organization. Here is her comment.

 

Physicist and blogger Sean Carroll responded to her comment with a plea to  atheists to heed her words and to try harder to actively participate in the process of developing an atheist morality. Here is Sean.

AJ Johnson brings up a really important point when she says secularists should "own" their superior morality. I think that we have been on the defensive for a very long time because traditionally the reason why things were "right and wrong" ultimately flowed from God. God was helping us explain what is good, and what is bad. Of course God does not exist. But we haven't, as secularists, really given a good explanation of where our morality comes from. And partly, it's because we don't know. Figuring out how to act in the world without guidance from outside anywhere is a very difficult problem. We say nice things about equality and liberty and things like that. But we don't agree on the underlying philosophy. We don't have the cheap out of saying "well, here's the holy book where its all been written down." We have to think about things. And I think we need to do a better job.

At this point you may say "we can look to evolution and neurobiology for our moral origins. We can see how justice plays out in animals. We can look to cognitive neuroscientists like Josh Greene who can tell us the average response to moral dilemmas in the fMRI scans of human brains. We can use this scientific data to rationalize a fair system for human society. Right?"  Wrong says Sean Carroll.

You do not want to commit the naturalistic fallacy. You do not want to say that because things happen in nature that they are the right things to have happen. We need explain the fundamental reason for saying that some behavior is good, some behavior is bad. I think that evolution helps us explain why we have the predilections we do. And evolution is certainly going to play a crucial role in an ultimate understanding of morality, but it does not GIVE it to us in any simple way. We should be able to do better than that.

If science can not tell us where morality comes from, then what can? As atheists shouldn't we be skeptical of any idea that can not be explained with the scientific method?  I'll give you my answer.  Yes we should be skeptical of pure moral philosophy but that does not mean we should shut our ears to it.  Much can be learned from living people as they have the highest probability of experiencing the same existential questions you have.  The very term "humanist" implies that we ought embrace our peers and draw our ethics from them.  There are currently very powerful  leaders in the atheist community, like it or not.  Though we do not hold these leaders as infallible vessels of an invisible sky-father there is a large collective of minds tuned-in to their thoughts via the internet. 

PZ Myers is one of these leaders. A professor of biology at the University of Minnesota at Morris PZ writes one of the most widely read blogs on the planet.  Being in the right place at the right time, PZ has the unique position of wielding a mighty horde or electronic followers numbering in the hundreds of thousands. When he asks them to do something, they do it en masse. This can be seen any time he asks them to crash some bogus internet poll which they do in throngs.  This kind of klout is not to be taken lightly. Though PZ has been dogged as being odious and even a "shepherd of internet trolls" by thinkers like Sam Harris, in my opinion PZ has made some excellent points lately. I think he has some moral guidance to offer in explaining secular morality more precisely as Sean Carroll has challenged us to do. The following passage penned by PZ  appears in the latest issue of Free Inquiry, titled Atheism’s Third Wave.

Professor and blogger PZ Myer

Science is neutral on moral concerns; it only describes what is, not how it ought to be. And this is true; science is a tool that can be used equally well for curing diseases or building bombs. But scientists are not and should not be morally neutral, nor should scientific organizations or culture be excluded from defining the appropriate uses of science. Science without humanist moral standards leads to Mengele or the Hiroshima bombing or the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

Similarly, atheism may be value-neutral, but atheists and atheist organizations should not be. Atheism sensu stricto may be a specific assertion about a fact of the universe, but atheism as practiced is a defining idea in a mind and a powerful foundation for a human community. It has meanings and implications that we must heed and use for achieving our goals.

And what should those goals be? Because I’m an atheist and share common cause with every other human being on the planet in desiring to live my one life with equal opportunity, I suggest that atheists ought to fight for equality for all, economic security for all, and universally available health and education services. Peace is the only answer; extinguishing a precious human life ought to be unthinkable in all but the most dire situations of self-defense. Ours should be a movement that welcomes all sexes, races, ages, and abilities and encourages an appreciation of human richness. Atheism ought to be a progressive social movement in addition to being a philosophical and scientific position, because living in a godless universe means something to humanity.

I went to see President Obama speak in Colorado last week. During his speech he echoed this sentiment of equality and inclusiveness. He pointed out that the history of the United States has seen protection under the law and participation in government become more and more inclusive. He described that process as a ratchet in which progress only goes forward. It is my sincere hope that unprecedented personal connectivity can couple to decentralized information and push the ratchet of progress even further. Maybe even so far as to see an open-atheist as a viable candidate for major political office one day.

Thank you for reading. I hope that as a peer you will leave a comment below and tell me where you get your sense of right and wrong so I might share your wisdom.

Morality without religion? Kenneth Miller fields my question

A little bird told me that Dr. Kenneth Miller would appear on the Huffington Post live this afternoon. I proceeded to create an account, log on, and record a video question for him. Lo and behold, Josh Zepp the HuffpostLive moderator aired my question. Skip to 21:25 in to see my question and subsequent answers. 

Where do we get morals? Each other.

BARP Goes the Weasel!

By Kristopher Hite

Looking back at discoveries of the past year the one that sticks out above all others to me was the identification of a single protein; a bacterial actin homologue dubbed BARP - Bacterial Actin Related Protein. The brilliance of this discovery comes from its directly contributing to our understanding of evolution, overturning decades of dogma, and providing a shiny new teaching tool.  The discovery was published in late 2009 as part of a massive sequencing project to fill in gaps of knowledge among bacterial and archael genomes.

With all the other sexy and more controversial stories about evolution - Ardi, Ida and so on, why do I pick this one? Aside from my biochemical inclination I thought this little piece of biological hardware deserved more exposure.  Though the paper was covered and lead author Jonathan Eisen interviewed for the nature podcast, it received relatively little coverage on the science blogs. Yes, the prolific science writer Carl Zimmer wrote a nice summary for the New York Times but the BARP bit is mentioned only briefly. I don't know if anyone realized what a great tool this discovery is to hammer even more nails in the coffin of the "irreducible complexity" argument for intelligent design. 

In January 2010 I had the pleasure to sit down and interview Eugenie Scott - executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NSCE).  As she explained the history of science education in the United States we came to an agreement on what one "take home" message should be for the average high school student - that all living things on earth share common ancestors, that all species have a common descent. This point may not seem earth-shattering to comprehend but I think many in America fail to realize the significance of this fact. The procession of science has uncovered an armory of teaching tools - fossilized trilobites, floating whale hip bones, and common DNA sequences. The more is known about the inner workings of the natural world the easier it should be for students to see and accept the facts. What then is the barrier to getting students to accept take-home messages like common descent? I would posit that fundamentalist opposition to evolution and the idea of the rapture have more than a little to do with it. Proponents of intelligent design often use a phrase coined by Lehigh University professor Michael Behe - irreducible complexity - in their defense of a necessary designer. This was a large part of Behe's arguments against teaching evolution as fact in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover, PA landmark court case.

Behe defines an irreducibly complex system as one "composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning." Brown University Biology Professor Ken Miller uses the analogy of a mouse trap to explain away irreducible complexity. Yes, all components of a mouse trap are necessary for overall function but each component can be have alternate uses.

In the logical chronology of evolution complexity emerges incrementally by the acquisition of functional structures that appear by chance and remain due to conferred advantage. Behe has tried over and over to use the molecular structure of the bacterial flagellum as an example of an irreducibly complex system.  In response Ken Miller did an excellent job explaining how the components of bacterial flagella could emerge incrementally.

So what IS actin and how does its showing up in a bacterial specimen add to the arsenal of teaching tools against irreducible complexity?

actin filament

As you move your cursor around this page your muscles are contracting and relaxing, your brain is sending signals along tiny electrified strands called axons guiding these contractions. Among the myriad things that make this possible is the little protein called actin.  Deriving its name from the word "activating" actin enables muscular motion, provides train tracks inside each cell for directional transportation of other tools, and gives shape to most cells in your body.  Like oddly shaped legos these tiny building blocks bind to each other and form long filaments that grow and shrink.  A mesh-work of actin filaments push on the perimeter of each cell establishing shape.  Those long axons I mentioned before are extensions of brain cells (neurons). During development neurons send out these long extensions and it is the mesh-work of actin that leads the charge enabling all those millions of electronic connections between brain and body to form. 

The gene that codes for this little protein exists without much variation in all eukaryotic organisms. Eukaryote means simply "true nucleus." The distinction is made because the more ancient but still surviving bacteria do not have "true nuclei" they are therefore dubbed prokaryotes. The moment at which the first eukaryote appeared on earth marked the beginning of an explosion of diversity, and a fundamental branch point in the phylogenetic tree of life.

(Haliangium ochraceum)

 Unlike the carefully crafted nuts and bolts you can pick up at the hardware store cellular machinery is not designed for a purpose, it just appears by duplication, mutation, or other spontaneous variations of genetic material.  If it works it is retained, if its merely eating up metabolic resources it usually goes extinct.  This represents an important variation on pure chance that the process of evolution carries with it.  Richard Dawkins has illustrated the power of evolving systems to accumulate positive variation in his classic "Weseal" thought experiment. Self-replicating systems have the ability to retain random variation in their code by copying themselves. When a variation carries a positive effect for the code carrier (organism) then that carrier is more likely to make more copies of that advantageous variation.  New variation is possible because there are usually redundant bits of cellular machinery.  This is exactly what we see in the case of BARP.

If you asked any professor of cell biology any time prior to a year ago "Do bacteria contain a gene for actin?" they would, without hesitation, say "of course not." It was understood that the gene for actin was one that separated eukaryote from prokaryote. Bacteria have an unrelated gene  - MreB - that has a scaffolding function. They don't need actin.   Now it is shown that the gene for actin may have shown up in  marine bacteria (specifically the one named Haliangium ochraceum) prior to the evolutionary branch-point. If this is the case it means that actin was later recruited to its now prolific function giving shape and motion to eukaryote cells. Actin was not designed then implemented like machined parts in human created contraptions. According to this research it probably appeared by chance in marine bacteria, served some other unknown function, then just happened to work later on in evolution.  This, I think, is why many mechanical engineers have an aversion to studying the slimy, oozing, organic structures in nature. They are inherently messy and imperfect.  This is because they are not designed! They are the result of chance events captured inside self-replicating systems - us included.

This post has been submitted to the NESCent competition for a travel award for the ScienceOnline 2011 un-conference January 13-15 in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.




  




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