E.O. Wilson, Nothing but an Atheist

This would be an appropriate summary of Matthew Scully's review of E.O. Wilson's latest book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth for the NY Times book review.

So here we have Professor Wilson, writing to his intended audience, a southern baptist minister. He asks the minister to join him in a quest ... to help preserve our environment, help protect endangered species ... help rescue "God's Creation" from the excesses of human activity ... and what does Matthew Scully (a former speech writer for Bush) write?

In his own defense, however, the pastor might reasonably wonder just how Wilson managed to wring all of these praiseworthy moral sentiments from evolutionary biology. The "universal values," sense of "honor" and "inborn sense of decency" to which Wilson appeals are of no traceable origin in the blindly amoral operations of natural selection. And grandiose attempts to explain conscience and reason in purely biological and material terms still leave us with little in the way of moral guidance -- without a firm obligation to care for the earth and for our fellow creatures. It may be, the good pastor could reply, that Judeo-Christian thought itself is a kind of moral biosphere from which this and all good causes continue to draw, with or without acknowledgment, and that more deference is due from scientists on that account alone.

Wilson apparently can't be trusted, he is an amoral atheist (or the other dirty word, humanist) and apparently has no moral guidance. According to Scully morality can only come from God's pronouncements. He may have a point though, Wilson should have spent some time explainning that all humans have an innate sense of morality. As I've written in several posts last week, the religious community always accuses the rest of having no moral guiding principles, and thus can write off what we (the secular scientific community) have to say. And in fact this is the main thrust behind their cultural war. The right wing religious community has no respect or tolerance for us.

To give Scully some credit he does end the review on a bright note:

Such minor quarrels aside, "The Creation" is the wise and lovely work of a truly learned man, filled with a spirit that readers of every stripe will recognize as reverence.

So maybe there is hope, but we must demand for tolerance and we should actively dispel the myth that morality requires religion or a higher being. And some are recognizing that this is the REAL issue that is driving the culture wars. Daniel Dennett is advocating that we investigate the links between religion and "moral behavior", and cognitive scientists such as Marc Hauser are studying whether these "universal values" exists and how humans are predisposed to a moral instinct. If the myth is not investigated and corrected, it will be difficult to make any progress on the environment, education (i.e. the teaching of evolution) or any other issue that is currently tied up in the culture war.