Hitchens went and got him some education. He writes,
Quo warranto is a very ancient question, meaning "by what right?" You ask me for my "warrant" for a code of right conduct and persist in mistaking my answer for an evasion. I in turn ask you by what right you assume that a celestial autocracy is a guarantee of morals..."
Here it at least looks like he might be dithering towards the only really satisfactory atheistic response to Wilson's question, which I pointed out some weeks ago. But he only gets a D+ or maybe a C-. He still seems to think that he himself can answer the question, that his former answers were not evasions, and so he tells us again:
My answer is the same as it was all along: Our morality evolved. Just as we have. Natural selection and trial-and-error have given us the vague yet grand conception of human rights and some but not yet all of the means of making these rights coherent and consistent. There is simply no need for the introduction of the extraneous or the supernatural
The only adequate atheistic response to Wilson's question is to admit that it can't be answered, by atheists or by Christians, followed by the suggestion that perhaps we can stand up for morality (without abandoning rationality), even if we can't answer the question, "quo warranto". But Hitchens thinks he can answer the question. He makes the queer claim that saying, "Our moral beliefs and behaviors evolved," justifies the assertion that those beliefs are true and those behaviors good, where "God gave us a conscience and requires us to behave accordingly" fails.
But the blind watchmaker, evolution, only knows how to make things that are good at surviving. It doesn't know how to make things that are good. If it gives them a "moral" sense, this will only be accidental -- the things they believe and the ways they behave will be directed to overall survival advantage, and the fact that the whole complex of our behaviors and attitudes ("good" and "bad") help us survive gives no warrant for the claim that some of those attitudes are authoritative, others reprehensible, some of those behaviors noble and virtuous, others base and detestible. As Wilson put it (and here he does what I wished he had done before -- he points to the difference between normative and merely descriptive claims):
Your notion of morality, and the evolution it rode in on, can only concern itself with what is. But morality as Christians understand it, and the kind you surreptitiously draw upon, is concerned with ought. David Hume showed us that we cannot successfully derive ought from is. Have you discovered the error in his reasoning? It is clear from how you defend your ideas of "morality" that you have not done so.
Pointed, eloquent, and compelling. Nicely done.
Posted by mccartney at June 6, 2007 11:28 PM | TrackBack