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The time has come to take seriously the fact that we humans are modified monkeys, not the favored Creation of a Benevolent God on the Sixth Day. In particular, we must recognize our biological past in trying to understand our interactions with others. We must think again especially about our so-called “ethical principles.” The question is not whether biology—specifically, our evolution—is connected with ethics, but how. As evolutionists, we see that no [ethical] justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will.... In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance.
Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.
-Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” in Religion and the Natural Sciences: The Range of Engagement, ed. J. E. Hutchingson (Orlando, Fl.: Harcourt and Brace, 1991)

So you disagree with the scientific finding that we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees?

Although the number and meaning of this finding can vary depending on the source, the ‘scientific’ philosophical implications remain.

With that in mind, consider the following representative statements made by leading sociobiologists. Richard Dawkins, easily the best-known spokesman for this movement, writes that ‘we are . . . robot-vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes',[1] and again that we are ‘manipulated to ensure the survival of [our] genes’.[2] The same writer also says that ‘the fundamental truth [is] that an organism is a tool of DNA’.[3] (That is, of the DNA molecules which are the organism’s genes.) Again, Dawkins says that living organisms exist for the benefit of DNA’.[4] Similarly, E. O. Wilson, an equal or higher sociobiological authority, says that ‘the individual organism is only the vehicle [of genes], part of an elaborate device to preserve and spread them…The organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA’.[5]
Royal Institute of Philosophy

The question is not whether biology—specifically, our evolution—is connected with ethics, but how. As evolutionists, we see that no [ethical] justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will.... In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding....

Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference.

Hi Heartlander! Jeepers, that's just what evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker says: “Ethical theory,” he writes, “requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused.” Yet, “the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.” It's all matter in its motions, according to physical laws. (Not that science has yet defined what matter is, nor has it given a plausible origin for physical laws. No matter! Smuggle in the presuppositions and just go on from there.) Pinker, too, obviously thinks that ethics cannot have a ground in traditional understandings.

Well, of course this would perhaps be true if ethics were reducible to material causes, which is what science investigates. The fallacy is to believe that the universe reduces to what science studies. There are very real things in the world that are non-phenomenal, ethics beings one of them. This is true even in the sense that Wilson gives; for he sees this non-phenomenal thing called ethics as having positive selection value for reproduction and therefore the survival of species. Yet he cannot directly observe "ethics"; it's not something you can put under a microscope, or view through a telescope. The scientific method -- which involves a subject (observer) intending an object for investigation -- is not equipped to deal with the issue, since ethics is not an object that can be "intended" in this sense.

And neither is God. Neither, in fact, is the whole of the universe, which cannot be observed in its entirety, as it is in and for itself; for observers have only perspectival views of it, given that they are bodily-located consciousnesses at given space-time coordinates within the whole, and thus can never stand outside of the whole of which they are the parts and participants, so to view it "entire," spatially and temporally.

Plus arguably that part of the universe which we do directly observe is confined to three spatial dimensions and one of time. At least, that seems to be our general expectation. But then humans are strongly visually oriented/conditioned, and so may just naturally tend to doubt the existence of things that cannot be visually detected.

Yet many mathematicians and physicists -- unlike most biologists I gather -- conjecture there are more than four dimensions in the universe. Though they show up "in the math," so to speak, they have thus far not been observed directly. (Certainly string theory advances this idea.) Such extra dimensions may possibly include dimensions that we simply cannot observe owing to the limitations of the human mind.

I am amazed at the "arrogance" of thinkers such as Wilson, Pinker, et al., who suggest we might just as well accept the "fact" that ethics is an illusion, rather than simply admit that it is something that science cannot "get at" with its method.

In short in the italicized remarks at the top and Pinker's comment, we are here dealing with a fallacy that Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." I gather it arises because modern science assumes and then asserts that everything there is in the universe is amenable to scientific description and explanation. So in effect, with this expectation, they must shrink the universe to fit their method.

But this, of course, is an assertion not yet proved.

Only philosophy and theology have methods to deal with things that, though real, are "unseen." It takes a deliberate act of intellectual oblivion to not see the reality of non-phenomenal things has empirical validation through the the intellectual activities and products of man over the course of some three millennia of human history, at least.

I gather, however, for some modern-day scientists, the human past no longer "counts." And if they keep going on with their "ethics is an illusion" business, soon the human present and future will not "count," either.

Well, FWIW. Thanks so much for writing, Heartlander!