Posted on 10/20/2006 8:52:20 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
Let's all stop beating Basil's car
Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.
More's the pity.... LOLOL!
Thanks so much for the link to Alister McGrath!
Nicely put, BB!
And thanks for the ping, A-G!
I totally agree -- it's a technical point!
(You) “If man were merely a machine, incapable of exercising free, rational decisions (machines do not modify their own programs as a rule), then the whole idea of personal responsibility and legal sanction for wrong-doing is absurd.”
Moreover, if, as you say, the scientific mechanistic view of life (therefore of the human brain) is that of an array of unguided chemical reactions and random neuron discharges, then that sort of life-view cannot claim anything as a matter of positive knowledge beyond its physical environment, and must confess it is helpless to believe anything other than what it does believe.
If I have stated anything which is substantially inaccurate or unfair, please enlighten me.
Exactly right..
Does/Do thoughts come from the human brain?..
-OR- from the human spirit?..
They cannot originate in both.. Some(people) attack that there even "IS" a human spirit.. and ultimately(I beleive) a Spirit(God) at all.. Evolution as a concept attacks indirectly ultimately "the Spirit(God)"..
Thank you both! What a blessing our fellowship! (:
The godless evolutionists secretly hail Dawkin's proclamations, yet they will just continue to pretend that their own coronation of godless evolution does not lead where Dawkins admits it leads.
Yet, many of us are glad to see that there is finally one somewhat honest evolutionist, that is, he is honest enough to stop pretending that this is not where his godless evolution obviously leads and has always led.
Your statement strikes me as spot-on, YHAOS. I question whether such a life-view is even capable of reasoning about its physical environment. For if everything is just random neuron discharges and unguided chemical reactions, how do logic and reason enter into the picture? How could logic and reason be the products of a long chain of antecedent accidents? Even if we could say they were (which I very strongly doubt we can), according to what principle could unguided chemistry and random neural activity access them?
Dawkins is undermining the very foundation of science itself by making the claims he does. His is an exercise in absurdity.
Thank you so much YHAOS for your excellent essay/post!
If the brain of Dawkins was programmed by a "blind watchmaker" [title of a book by Dawkins] why should he trust it?
Exactly, FreedomProtector! More to the point, why should we trust it?
As Eric Voegelin observed, a universe that contains intelligent beings cannot have a less-than-intelligent (e.g., "blind") cause.
Thanks so much for writing!
So very true. Thank you for your insights!
Or, they just imbibed copious amounts of alcohol or drugs.
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