Lying Robots and Blind Watchmakers

Robert Wright has a new op-ed in today's NYTimes that addresses an area of commonality between atheists and believers. He claims that both camps need to acknowledge their ignorance when it comes to foundational questions of our existence. Rather than clinging to dogma - religious or scientific - in the face of new information, they both need to adapt and, yes, EVOLVE.

For example, in trying to resist the science of evolution, believers point to humanity's "moral sense" as an irrefutable sign of God's hand in our creation:

Of course, to say that God trusted natural selection to do the creative work assumes that natural selection, once in motion, would do it; that evolution would yield a species that in essential respects — in spiritually relevant respects, you might say — was like the human species. But this claim, though inherently speculative, turns out to be scientifically plausible.

For starters, there are plenty of evolutionary biologists who believe that evolution, given long enough, was likely to create a smart, articulate species — not our species, complete with five fingers, armpits and all the rest — but some social species with roughly our level of intelligence and linguistic complexity.

And what about the chances of a species with a moral sense? Well, a moral sense seems to emerge when you take a smart, articulate species and throw in reciprocal altruism. And evolution has proved creative enough to harness the logic of reciprocal altruism again and again.

Vampire bats share blood with one another, and dolphins swap favors, and so do monkeys. Is it all that unlikely that, even if humans had been wiped out a few million years ago, eventually a species with reciprocal altruism would reach an intellectual and linguistic level at which reciprocal altruism fostered moral intuitions and moral discourse?

This makes me think about the article I read recently that described how robots that were programmed to cooperate in the collection of resources, eventually began "lying" to one another and hoarding the resources at the others' expense. But Wright addresses the development of morality/ethics - particularly as it relates to religion - as a Zero Sum/Non Zero Sum paradigm in The Evolution of God. I found it very compelling.

(Back to the article)
Atheists, on the other hand, refuse to acknowledge any possibility of a "higher purpose" that eludes empirical analysis. A closer look, however, suggests that, in some cases, there isn't any other way to explain things. Here, Wright is describing how Richard Dawkins handled the famous "Watchmaker" anecdote:

As Mr. Dawkins pointed out, we can now explain the origin of organisms without positing a god. Yet Mr. Dawkins also conceded something to Paley that gets too little attention: The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation.

The reason is that, unlike a rock, an organism has things that look as if they were designed to do something. Digestive tracts seem to exist in order to digest food. The heart seems to exist in order to pump blood.

And, actually, even once you accept that natural selection, not God, is the “designer” — the blind watchmaker, as Mr. Dawkins put it — there is a sense in which these organs do have purposes, purposes that serve the organism’s larger purpose of surviving and spreading its genes. As Daniel Dennett, the Darwinian (and atheist) philosopher, has put it, an organism’s evolutionarily infused purpose is “as real as purpose could ever be.”

In sum, Wright wants to suggest that believers open their minds to the possibility that Natural Selection may have guided the development of humanity's "moral sense", and wants atheists to concur that some notions of a "higher power" may not be in conflict with empirical science. He closes with this comment:

William James said that religious belief is “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” Science has its own version of the unseen order, the laws of nature. In principle, the two kinds of order can themselves be put into harmony — and in that adjustment, too, may lie a supreme good.