This eponymously named professor of philosophy and zoology from Florida State is simply addled-brained: There is no murder rate among lions. Lions do not commit murder; that would mean they are killing other lions. Lions kill for food; and lions generally do not consider other lions to be a food source. The murder rate in Detroit has nothing to do with acquiring suitable nutrition: Men kill other men for other reasons. Ruse’s is an utterly mindless analogy.
All his argument reduces to simple assertions; i.e., statements that are completely unfounded on the basis of logic or evidence which he does not intend for you to challenge. Indeed, you are forbidden to do so. If any one of them were successfully challenged, Ruse’s entire argument would collapse like a house of cards.
Here is Ruse’s “argument”:
1. God is dead — an assertion not proven, because unprovable. You can’t “prove” the non-existence of God; you can’t “prove” a negative.
He does acknowledge this: “God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good.” At least Ruse gets that right: Without God, there is no standard of good; thus nothing can be either good or evil.
Dostoyevsky makes this point brilliantly through his character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. As Marc Slonim says:
Ivan lacks simplicity and warmth; he has neither faith nor love. His schemes are cerebral, and his conduct is founded on purely intellectual premises. If there is no immortality of the soul, if man is abandoned to his own devices and there is no reconciliation between heaven and earth, then everything is permissible — including crime. ... Ivan rejects the common moral code and places himself beyond good and evil. “What is conscience?” he asks. “I myself made it. Then why do I torment myself? Through sheer habit, through a universal habit which is seven thousand years old. But let us get out of this habit and become gods.” In his vision of a godless society and of an unlimited freedom for man Ivan makes a step toward the concept of Superman: the highest ideal of Nietzsche, who acknowledged Dostovevsky as one of his masters.(2) It is only by “recognising the death of God” that we can “possibly do that which we should.” But the problem is, with God gone, where would that “should” come from? “Should” and “ought” pertain to the moral realm — but Ruse contradicts himself here, relative to his earlier statement; i.e., “God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good” [if God is dead].
(3) Ruse says that humans “are naturally moral beings.” How so? He seems to be saying that it is the nature of man to be a moral being. But how can we reconcile this with the expectation that, with God “dead,” man becomes unlimited? (Indeed, that’s the whole point of bumping Him off in the first place.) How can something “unlimited” simultaneously have a specific “nature?” He further argues that morality only “looks” objective; it is in reality relentlessly subjective. It is actually only an emotion. But let him speak for himself here: “morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers.”
So morality has to be made into something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective. “Why should I be good? Why should you be good? Because that is what morality demands of us. It is bigger than the both of us. It is laid on us and we must accept it, just like we must accept that 2 + 2 = 4. I am not saying that we always are moral, but that we always know that we should be moral.”How do we know that?
Note the passive construction, “it is laid on us and we must accept it.” Whatever is laying morality on us must be the same as what constitutes the “should” in (2) above. Note also the suggestion that nature has to fool us in order to make us moral (“So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective.” And as we all know, subjective things — to the post-modernist mind — are always “bad things.”
And yet he does admits this:
It has to pretend that it is not that at all! If we thought that morality was no more than liking or not liking spinach, then pretty quickly it would break down. Before long, we would find ourselves saying something like: “Well, morality is a jolly good thing from a personal point of view. When I am hungry or sick, I can rely on my fellow humans to help me. But really it is all bullshit, so when they need help I can and should avoid putting myself out. There is nothing there for me.” The trouble is that everyone would start saying this, and so very quickly there would be no morality and society would collapse and each and every one of us would suffer.Here Ruse seems to acknowledge the problem that man cannot be the source of the moral code, not himself the definer of right and wrong, of good and evil. So Ruse puts the source in blind natural processes. But the laws of nature tell us only what happens, not what’s supposed to, or ought to, or should happen. The natural world is about what exists, not what OUGHT to be.
Ruse concedes we need morality after all. Yet he says that the domain of “ought” and “should” is an evolutionary development. Yep. I guess it’s an evolutionary construction. Just like 2 + 2 = 4 is an evolutionary construction — NOT!!!
And then, the pièce de résistance, the summary clarification given in Ruse’s concluding remarks:
God is dead. The new atheists think that that is a significant finding. In this, as in just about everything else, they are completely mistaken. God is dead. Morality has no foundation. Long live morality. Thank goodness!Well, that clears up everything, now doesn’t it?
Don’t people ever get sick and tired of intellectual swindlers like this?
Incorrect. The first thing that a male African lion does when he takes over a pride is to kill all the cubs of his predecessor, thus maximizing his own reproductive success.
Thank you oh so very much for your brilliant essay-post, dearest sister in Christ!
Ruse is a simpleton. He is a simpleton who has abused his free will to opt for an anti-free will, anti-mind, anti-conscience, anti-soul, anti-creation mythos that reduces him to a trousered ape at the mercy of unseen forces of nature. Whatever takes place in his material brain is the accidental by-product of the movement of chemicals and/or the firing of neurons.
The question is: Why ought anyone in their right mind listen to the nonsense spouted by an obvious schizophrenic like Ruse?!?
When man chooses to deny what he can’t help but know is true, free will for instance, he falls into stupidity and depravity, for his willful choice is to both deceive himself (stupidity) and to deceive everyone else (depravity).
Michael Ruse is both stupid and depraved.
You are referring to _Guardian_ subscribers, aren't you? You answered your own question.
Read the essay. Bleh. Shaftesbury cocktail with a Darwinian chaser. Something to numb the senses of the ignorant so that rassenhygiene programs can get going -- again -- without too much trouble.
The twit forgot Easter. As usual.
More on this later, it's a "honey-do" day today after a 20-mile bike ride into the teeth of 25 mph winds.
My God, how I adore Minnesota weather!
Cheers!