Some thoughts about Epigenesis and ID.

This was inspired by a short dicussion on Uncommon Dissent.

1) Epigenetics (non-genetic inheritance) is fascinating and important, but keep a sense of proportion. Mendelian/DNA based inheritance is understood in great detail, accounts for an enormous amount of what we observe in the way of inheritance, supports detailed predictions, and even allows us to control inheritance to a limited extent. None of this true of epigenesis. There is no reason to believe that epigenesis is more fundamental or in some way controls genetic inheritance. It is more likely to be just one of those heath robinson additions to the process going on in parallel that evolution inevitably produces. It works - so it remains.

2) You could imagine that epigenesis might be the route for some Lamarckian inheritance to take place. For example, the individual uses certain functions a lot and this increases the amount of mRNA created for the proteins required to support those functions, and the RNA in some way gets inherited even though the DNA responsible for the mRNA in the first place is not inherited. (It might even eventually affect the DNA of the germ line of the offspring). There is nothing designed or teleological about this - unless you think of the organism itself as the unconscious designer. (This is probably complete biochemical rubbish - it is the just the logic I am trying to illustrate.)

3) Lamarckian inheritance means that some variation is not random but is also not designed. This makes all estimates of the probability of certain proteins arising through random mutation irrelevant.

Atheism and faith (revised)

This little essay is the result of a dialogue on the Intelligent Design Blog Uncommon Descent. My responses became too long for this format while still being incomplete so I decided to take my last response and try to round it out into an essay.

The essay is in response to this post by Barry Arrington (to be found at http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1137 post number 8):

The most astounding thing about this to me is the statement, “The process of non-thinking called faith.” The implication is that religious people have faith commitments and Dawkins does not. This is patently absurd. Dawkins, like everyone else, accepts certain things on an a priori basis. Another way to say the same thing is “on faith.” Dawkins seems to be saying that his faith commitment (in metaphysical naturalism) is not faith. One can say a lot of things about Dawkins, but he is not stupid. He does not believe that, which means he is a deceiver.


Also, people always act on their faith commitments, whether that faith commitment is to theism or naturalism. Dawkins implies that only religious people’s faith commitment leads to violence. This, too, is absurd. Has Dawkins never heard of the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, Hitler’s Germany? Every one of these regimes was militantly atheistic – i.e., they had the same faith commitment to metaphysical naturalism that Dawkins does.

This represents a common position among proponents of Intelligent Design and the US religious right in general. It can be summarised as:

1) Atheism (or possibly naturalism which leads to atheism) is as much a matter of faith as any religion.

2) Atheists have no foundation for morality and therefore anything is permitted which makes atheists even more prone to evil than followers of other faiths.

3) The atrocities of Communism and Nazi Germany in the 20th century are proof that atheism is worse than religious faith.

I disagree with all three statements. I will respond to them in reverse order.

Are the horrors of the 20th century due to atheism?

This is a question of history, not logic. I am not a historian and so I will confine myself to a few comments. I should make it clear that I fully accept that the communist and Nazi regimes in question were awful and did lead to many tens of millions of deaths. I do not seek to defend the regimes – only to dispute the central role of atheism.

The case against atheism appears to be based on:

• Communism includes atheism as one of its core beliefs. There is less certainty about the role of religion in the Nazi regime.
  
• Some of the leaders above were heavily influenced by atheist thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche.
  
• The communist regimes (Mao, Pol-Pot, and Stalin) explicitly tried to stamp out religion.
  

The most obvious comment is that there is a big difference in the situation with the Communism regimes and other regimes including Nazi Germany. Communism is explicitly atheist and anti-religious. Hitler made extensive use of Christian imagery in supporting his ideas and it was not part of the National Socialist programme to eliminate religion. See, for example, (http://www.nobeliefs.com/hitler.htm). Mussolini tried to cooperate with the Catholic church and largely succeeded, and Franco’s fascism lead to the restoration of the Catholic church as the state religion. Japanese nationalism, also responsible for many millions of deaths, was very closely linked to Shintoism.

However, even if we concentrate only on Communism this still leaves some of the worst mass murderers in history. But communism comprises many things besides atheism. It includes for example the one party state; common ownership of the means of production; and the requirement to give according to your abilities and receive according to your needs. There are two main ways in which atheism might feature in this:

• Communist leaders might have killed tens of millions of people because they were religious. I am not aware of any evidence for this. It appears that most of these mass murders were attempts to brutally enforce communist economic policy or in reaction to imagined possible uprisings or rebellion.
  
• Communist leaders might have acted without conscience because of their atheist beliefs. This is a statement about their psychology and almost impossible to prove one way of the other. There have been plenty of non-atheist leaders who were prepared to commit mass murder – although not on this scale. Does religion cause a mass murderer to pause when he (they are usually male) gets to too large a number? It seems unlikely.
  

In the end the case that atheism was a prime cause of 20th Century mass murder is unproven and probably unprovable.

Does being an atheist remove any basis for morality?

This is, of course, a very long-standing debate and I am conscious of recycling a well worn argument. But the argument seems to be ignored - so I guess there is merit in repeating it.

The argument against atheism is based on an assumed need for an objective source of moral guidance. So in another post Barry asks:


“If an atheist’s subjective desire to have sexual relations with a child is stronger than his subjective desire for “compassion and fairness,” on what principle should he choose “compassion and fairness?”


Hume dealt with this (see http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/humemora.htm#H2 for a summary). His point was that we all have what he called virtuous or vicious character traits i.e. we are inclined to do both good and evil things. The goodness of virtuous things lies in our approval of them and our knowledge that others will have roughly the same attitude. That is the way we are built. We are subject to moral emotions such as pity and a desire for fairness, just as we have a desire to look after our own children and preserve our own lives. You don’t need a principle to choose compassion and fairness. They are principles. Choosing to ignore them is breaking those principles and is wrong. Religions and other cultures may modify these principles – so, for example, the relative merit of courage over compassion has probably changed since ancient Rome – but there is enormous commonality in moral attitudes in all cultures at all times. We can all identify with the moral dilemmas of the ancient Greeks long before the advent of Christianity or the spread of Judaism.

Any attempt to try and provide some “transcendental ethical system” to support these principles runs into the well-known problem: is X good because God says X is good, or vice versa. It is essentially circular. Whatever objective justification we produce (be it God’s word or what is written in the constitution) we can always ask – yes but what justifies that justification? I might ask BarryA “If a priest’s desire to have sexual relations with a child is stronger than his desire to do God’s will, on what principle should he choose God’s will?” Any attempt to derive an “ought” from an “is” – even if the “is” is “this is what God commands” will eventually fail. So why not recognise that there are some things we recognise we ought and ought not to do – and that is part of human nature.

Is atheism different in kind from religious faith?

In one sense this is obviously true, It is a negative belief, while all religious faiths are positive in that they believe some things does exist. But also atheism is different from religious faith in the type of evidence required to support this belief. Faith, in its religious context, relies on different rules of evidence from other types of belief. The logic of atheism rejects these different rules. This rejection might be what is meant by metaphysical naturalism. In any case it is a different type of judgement from religious belief and, importantly, it is the approach to belief and evidence that underlies science. Those who equate metaphysical naturalism or atheism with faith are equating an approach to evidence with a belief in a deity which is absurd.

In this context it is important to distinguish the psychological question – what kind of events and observations in practice cause people to become atheists or to adopt a religion – from the logical question – what kind of evidence is logically required for atheism as opposed to a religion. The psychological question is beyond the scope of this essay. It requires a survey of atheists and believers and a detailed analysis of how they came to their position.

Addressing the logical question - what counts as evidence in the case of religious faith?

In his second post Barry also says any child can see the evidence for a deity. But he doesn’t specify what that evidence is and this seems to be common to most believers. In practice I have observed three types of evidence for religious belief. None of these would be acceptable as evidence in science or for our day-to-day beliefs.

1. Religious texts such as the Bible. This clearly should not be accepted as evidence in a non-religious context. We do not generally accept that X must be true just because someone wrote that in a book, particularly one written hundreds of years ago by many authors of which very little is known. We do not, for example, take the Odyssey as evidence for the existence of Cyclops.
   
2. Miracles. For example, Barry above says that if it were shown that Christ did not rise from the dead then his faith would be shattered. So presumably the miracle of the resurrection is a key item of evidence for his faith. I will ignore his reasons for believing in the insurrection in the first place. Even if he were able to observe the resurrection himself (or any other miracle) what kind of evidence is this? Making bodies vanish is a fairly trivial trick. And doctors are already able to revive bodies that have been dead for some minutes. Suppose that in a few hundred years they can do this for bodies that have been dead for days – do they then become divine? This is the trouble with using any miracle as evidence for belief. Essentially, a miracle is the appearance of the impossible – but we are bombarded by apparently impossible things all the time – some are performed by men, others are just inexplicable phenomena. We do not normally accept an apparently impossible event as evidence of anything much – rather we regard it as a phenomenon we don’t understand for which we seek explanation. It is peculiar to religious faith to argue “I don’t understand how that could have happened. Therefore, God must have done it.”
   
3. Logical arguments - such as the argument from first cause, the ontological argument or the argument from design. Each of these has their weaknesses which are discussed extensively elsewhere. But the big point is that you would not use them as evidence for anything else. They are peculiar to faith. Incidentally the argument from design is by far the most convincing of these arguments and this may explain the very large role of intelligent design in religion today.
   

Now compare this to atheism. The argument for atheism is simply that I will only use the same standards of evidence that I use for all other phenomena. I am not convinced by what people write in stories, apparent impossibilities and specious logical arguments. Show me repeatable, observable evidence for your hypothesis.

I do not seek to deny people’s justification for faith. Most people of faith describe it in terms of commitment, trust and loyalty. They talk of turning to God and accepting his presence. This is fine if it works for them. But don’t put atheism in the same category like some alternative commitment, trust or loyalty. The essence of atheism is doubt and a desire for evidence. You can’t show commitment, trust or loyalty to nothing.