FLAW 2: Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which aspects of biblical morality to take seriously has grown more sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some standards of morality that do not come from God in order to judge which aspects of God’s word to take literally and which aspects to ignore.
COMMENT: Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by our lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent with those values are objectively true in the same way that mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.
17. The Argument from Altruism
People often act altruistically-namely, against their interests. They help others, at a cost to themselves, out of empathy, fairness, decency, and integrity.
Natural selection can never favor true altruism, because genes for selfishness will always out-compete genes for altruism (recall that altruism, by definition, exacts a cost to the actor).
Only a force acting outside of natural selection and intending for us to be moral could account for our ability to act altruistically (from 2).
God is the only force outside of natural selection that could intend us to be moral.
God must have implanted the moral instinct within us (from 3 and 4).
God exists.
FLAW 1: Theories of the evolution of altruism by natural selection have been around for decades and are now widely supported by many kinds of evidence. A gene for being kind to one’s kin, even if it hurts the person doing the favor, can be favored by evolution, because that gene would be helping a copy of itself that is shared by the kin. And a gene for conferring a large benefit to a non-relative at a cost to oneself can evolve if the favor-doer is the beneficiary of a return favor at a later time. Both parties are better off, in the long run, from the exchange of favors.
Some defenders of religion do not consider these theories to be legitimate explanations of altruism, because a tendency to favor one’s kin, or to trade favors, is ultimately just a form of selfishness for one’s genes, rather than true altruism. But this is a confusion of the original phenomenon. We are trying to explain why people are sometimes altruistic, not why genes are altruistic. (We have no reason to believe that genes are ever altruistic in the first place!) Also, in a species with language- namely, humans-committed altruists develop a reputation for being altruistic, and thereby win more friends, allies, and trading partners. This can give rise to selection for true, committed, altruism, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of favors.
FLAW 2: We have evolved higher mental faculties, such as self-reflection and logic, that allow us to reason about the world, to persuade other people to form alliances with us, to learn from our mistakes, and to achieve other feats of reason. Those same faculties, when they are honed through debate, reason, and knowledge, can allow us to step outside ourselves, learn about other people’s points of view, and act in a way that we can justify as maximizing everyone’s well-being. We are capable of moral reasoning because we are capable of reasoning in general.
FLAW 3: In some versions of The Argument from Altruism, God succeeds in getting people to act altruistically because he promises them a divine reward and threatens them with divine retribution. People behave altruistically to gain a reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. This argument is self-contradictory It aims to explain how people act without regard to their self-interest, but then assumes that there could be no motive for acting altruistically other than self-interest.
18. The Argument from Free Will
Having free will means having the freedom to choose our actions, rather than having them determined by some prior cause.
If we don’t have free will, then we are not agents, for then we are not really acting, but, rather, we’re being acted upon. (That’s why we don’t punish people for involuntary actions-such as a teller who hands money to a bank robber at gunpoint, or a driver who injures a pedestrian after a defective tire blows out.)
To be a moral agent means to be held morally responsible for what one does.
If we can’t be held morally responsible for anything we do, then the very idea of morality is meaningless.
Morality is not meaningless.
We have free will (from 2-5).
We, as moral agents, are not subject to the laws of nature-in particular, the neural events in a genetically and environmentally determined brain (from 1 and 6).
Only a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere could explain our being moral agents (from 7).
Only God is a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere.
Only God can explain our moral agency (from 8 and 9).
God exists.
FLAW 1: This argument, in order to lead to God, must ignore the paradoxical Fork of Free Will. Either my actions are predictable (from my genes, my upbringing, my brain state, my current situation, and so on), or they are not. If they are predictable, then there is no reason to deny that they are caused, and we would not have free will. So, if we are to be free, our actions must be unpredictable-in other words, random. But if our behavior is random, then in what sense can it be attributable to us at all? If it really is a random event when I give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in what sense is it me to whom this good deed should be attributed? If the action isn’t caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other states, then in what way is it really my action? And what good would it do to insist on moral responsibility if our choices are random, and cannot be predicted from prior events (such as growing up in a society that holds people responsible)? This leads us back to the conclusion that we, as moral agents, must be parts of the natural world- the very negation of Premise 7.
FLAW 2: Premise 10 is an example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another. It expresses, rather than dispels, the confusion we feel when faced with the Fork of Free Will. The paradox has not been clarified in the least by introducing God into the analysis.
COMMENT: Free will is yet another quandary that takes us to the edge of our human capacity for understanding. The concept is baffling, because our moral agency seems to demand both that our actions be determined, and also that they not be determined.