Stop Saying Atheists Think The Universe is Purposeless (And Other Complaints About Ross Douthat)

So, as reported by Kevin Drum, Ross Douthat apparently has some new column or blog post or something that basically beats the old "how can you have morality without religion?" drum. Kevin Drum's response to Douthat is that secular ethics are in fact older than Christianity and are humming along just fine. Mine is slightly different. Here's the central passage from Douthat:

"The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals [the biblical or the spiritual world pictures], because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss."

Can we just stop this already? It's hard to actually get to the bottom of how bad this is. I could go through it line by line. There is no sense in which the modern scientific-atheist cosmology describes the universe as "purposeless." Now, it is true that, as best we can tell, our universe was not created by anyone in particular, and therefore not for any particular purpose. It is also true that the universe was not aiming to create human beings, that instead they just arose from a not-particularly-random evolutionary process over millions of years and that they just as easily could not have. But, so what? Who said that the universe has to have been created for the purpose of having humans in it in order for anything to be meaningful or for individuals' sense of self to be real? Oh, that's right: religious people. That's entirely their idea. For most of us secular-scientific intelligentsia types, the quasi-miraculous facts of life and consciousness create plenty of purpose and meaning all by themselves. And they make it seem, well, pretty bloody obvious that the well-being of us conscious living types is important, and that people should generally act so as to increase it.



But more broadly, my biggest problem with this entire passage is the word "proposes." Because we're not proposing anything! Sorry, Ross Douthat, but as best we can tell, the universe really is like that. And it's like that whether you like it or not. It was like that before the first amoeba crawled out of the ooze, and it will be like that long after the last human is dead. The universe is not our choice! The scientific "world picture" is simply the determination to try and ascertain what the universe is like by letting the universe tell us, and in particular by letting it tell us when our current view of it is wrong. Once you adopt that mindset of open-minded empiricism, the precise nature of your cosmology is no longer up to you. Scientific-minded atheists do not choose to believe in a universe filled with stars and planets and nebulae and black holes and galaxies and liquid water and, in at least one tiny little corner of it, living beings. We choose to do our best to figure out what the actual universe is actually like, and as best we can tell it's like that. Perhaps there's also some sort of metaphysical, spiritual stuff going on; maybe there is an immortal god who created the universe, maybe that god even meddles in how the universe progresses, and maybe human beings do have immortal souls that live on after death. But, since there isn't any observable evidence for any of that stuff, we have little choice but to consider it all somewhat unlikely, whether we're happy about that or no. (It's worth pointing out, by the way, that what Douthat calls the "biblical world picture" claims that there used to be plenty of observable evidence about god, but that there just happens not to be anymore. Convenient how that works.)

Now, there is something that we scientific-secular types do kind of choose, and that's morality. We choose it because we believe, not for any logically provable reasons, that it is the better choice to make. And what I mean when I say we choose morality is that we choose to treat the well-being of other humans (and perhaps some non-humans as well) as good things. That's it. Once you accept that postulate, you can construct a whole system of ethics, any way you like, though one can certainly argue about the proper method of construction. Believing in morality for an atheist is perhaps something similar to the belief of a religious person, in being ultimately not dependent on the same kind of empiricism I described above, except that it doesn't also include a bunch of non-empirical beliefs about things that are in principle subject to empirical inquiry and which turn out to be wrong. The biblical and spiritual world pictures Douthat tries to describe both tie their concept of what is with their concept of what should be, or perhaps vice versa, and apparently for many who hold those beliefs it is then confusing when some of us don't connect those two things.

There appears to be some sense that one must either have non-empirical beliefs taken as a matter of faith about both reality and morality, or about neither; that insisting on rigor and empiricism as to scientific inquiry should make one also insist on those qualities as to the totality of ethical philosophy. (By totality I mean that this supposed insistence must include the postulated underpinnings, because obviously once you've got that pre-logical foundation rigor and empiricism can take you more or less the rest of the way.) As it happens, however, one but not the other of these areas is appropriate for that kind of approach, so we secular-scientific types adopt that approach as to that area and not as to the other one. And it seems to work rather well. There is no chasm to be bridged; it is therefore entirely non-troubling that the two ropes Douthat disparages fail to provide some connection between the positive and normative sides of the worldview. Evolutionary explanations for why we feel altruism are not properly construed as justifications for morality; utilitarianism, meanwhile, freely concedes that it only works once you accept that social utility is a good thing, i.e. once you accept (a certain concept of) morality as given.

So the "secular world picture" isn't really the same thing as its purported competitors. It is rather their opposite: the decoupling of cosmology and morality. The result is beliefs about the actual configuration of the universe that are demonstrably superior to those you get from confusing the two, and beliefs about ethics broadly speaking that are at the very least not systematically any worse. So yes, I object to the way Douthat ascribes to secularism a belief in the purposelessness of the universe; it's basically the equivalent of a meat-eater assuming that what vegetarians eat is just the non-meat side components of his own meals. But more fundamentally I object to the equivalence he draws between the way religious people think about the subjects typically compassed by religion and the way non-religious people do. The two approaches are categorically opposite from one another. Secularists believe the universe is the way it is because they have no choice, and they believe that we should behave with kindness toward each other because they think that the best choice. It's really quite simple.