Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Marriage of Science and Religion 195
entific ethics. Clearly certain kinds of statements purporting to describe
what is the case can have ethical significance. The statement “God detests
adultery,” accepted as an assertion of fact, leads to inescapable conclusions
about what one ought to do. A more careful description of what people
mean when they say that “is” does not imply “ought” is that one cannot
logically derive conclusions about values from a frame of reference that is
value-free. Statements of fact, themselves value-free, can certainly influence
moral judgments. If you believe that the soul of your father or
mother may inhabit a chicken or steer, you may reasonably conclude that
you ought to become a vegetarian but only if you already had convictions
about how you ought to behave toward your parents. The mechanistic laws
of science, however, are value-free; by themselves they do not imply moral
conclusions. Darwinism, being the description of a purely mechanical process,
cannot provide us with a guide to correct living. Even if it could be
shown that natural selection invariably favors selfishness, that would not
mean that selfishness is in any sense “good” or desirable.
If you do not delve too deeply into metaphysical questions, this solution
seems at first to work reasonably well to protect ethics from simple Hobbesian
egoism, although it does tend toward some form of utilitarianism.
The most obvious difficulty is that it does not allow us any basis at all for
our values. If natural selection, operating on the random products of
physical law, is the sole determinant of the forms and behaviors of living
things, ourselves included, is it not reasonable to conclude that our moral
convictions and religious beliefs are themselves the products of random
forces shaped by a nonrandom but utterly valueless principle called natural
selection? Viewed this way, values become intrinsically meaningless.
They exist only because they are favored by the blind and mechanical operation
of natural selection. It thus becomes apparent that if the sociobiologists
were true to their basic principles and did not insist on egoism as
the one true virtue, their position would be far more formidable. They
could merely declare that all values, whether altruistic or egoistic, are illusory.
They exist, to be sure, but they have no intrinsic justification. The
human conscience has precisely the significance of the tortoise’s shell: created
at random, it was selected by the mechanical sorter of natural selection.
This is why many humane and conscientious people, who also happen
to have probing and analytical minds, react with horror to Darwinism. It
entails a universe without meaning.
Thus liberal Darwinists like Gould are right to maintain that the sociobiologists
incorrectly derive values from the paradigm of natural selection,