Evolution is Not Magic: In Response to Mr. or Ms. Anonymous

Dear Anonymous, thank you for your comment, but I fear that you grossly misunderstand evolution. Evolution is not a magic trick and does not occur by random chance. It is a systematic process of gradual adaptation that takes place over millions of years.
Do yourself a favor and pick up a science book! Try Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker.
Also, you suggest that I am “to(o) afraid” to believe in God because He will hold me accountable for my actions. This is a rather presumptuous allegation. I do not need a god to bee good. I am a humanist and as Kurt Vonnegut said, “Humanism is trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
If you have any doubts that a person needs to believe in God to have a moral compass, read Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds. Hauser presents a cogent argument for the evolution of a universal moral grammar.
Maybe it is you, Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, who is afraid. Maybe you feel that you can not be good without religion as your crutch. Maybe you are afraid of death and need to believe in an afterlife for comfort. Do not project your fear upon the rest of us!

Reason vs. Faith: Move Over Religion, Science is Moving In

I am sure that everybody remembers Kirk Cameron, the child star from “Growing Pains.” Well, he grew up to be a Christian Fundamental Bible Pusher. Kirk and his friend Ray Comfort are pushing a program called "The Way of the Master," which explains why all non-christians are doomed to hell. They are so inane that they have even gone as far as to reject the existence of evolution.

There is nothing I hate more than when religion buts its nose into science. Stephen Jay Gould once said that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria. I do not subscribe to this perspective. I side with Richard Dawkins, who suggests that faith and reason are incompatible. In fact, faith is defined as belief without reason.

And like Daniel Dennett, I believe that religion is a natural phenomenon that should be subjected to the same scientific scrutiny as all other phenomena.

It does not do any good to invoke a supernatural explanation (including God or gods) to explain a complex system. Explaining the existence of life as the work of a magician whose powers are beyond our comprehension does not enhance our understanding of how life came to evolve. Life did not appear on earth by some elaborate, inexplicable magic trick. Life evolved.

Anyway, I am done spouting off. If you want to see the Rational Response Squad destroy Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort’s argument for the existence of God, watch Nightline tonight (May 9, 2007) on ABC or check out the nightline website.

To read more about reason vs. faith or science and religion, check out Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian, Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World, Richard Dawkins’s God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and Sam Harriss’s The End of Faith.

The Evolution of a Moral Faculty

Some religious opponents argue that we need religion because it provides us with a moral compass. According to them, without religion we would be wicked, hedonistic creatures that only looked out for their own benefit. But what if we didn’t need religion to be moral? What if evolution endowed us with the components that we need to make moral decisions?

In Marc Hauser’s newest book, Moral Minds, he suggests that evolution has given us the tools that we need to make decisions about right and wrong. He compares this faculty to the evolution of language and describes it as a universal moral grammar. Much of Hauser’s book focuses on our ability to perceive intention and the intentional system’s role in producing decisions about right and wrong.

The crux of Hauser’s argument is based on research that uses a moral dilemma about a trolley that is out of control. Participants are given one of two scenarios:

In the first scenario participants are told that a trolley is out of control and 5 people are standing on the track unable to escape. The only way to avoid the death of the five people is to pull a lever that will cause the train to switch tracks, but there is another person on that track. They are then asked whether or not someone should pull the lever sacrificing 1 person to save the other 5.

In the second scenario participants are confronted with the same out of control trolley, but this time they are told that the lever will drop a large person in front of the trolley, which will cause the trolley to stop, thus saving the five individuals.

What Hauser and his colleagues found was that individuals confronted with the first scenario will, more often than not, say that it is ok to pull the lever. However, those who are given the second scenario will, more often than not, say that it is wrong to pull the lever. Hauser believes that the reason there is a difference between the responses to these two scenarios is because the victim in scenario one would be a foreseeable casualty, but the victim in the second scenario would be an intended consequence.

This, of course, is a simplified version of Hauser’s argument. Check out his book, Moral Minds, for his complete argument for an evolved moral capacity.