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

196 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
but because they affirm their allegiance to the central principle of Darwinism,
that life is shaped entirely by the blind force of natural selection operating
on random events (random because produced by the equally blind
laws of physics), they are left without a basis for any morality whatsoever.
If the sociobiologists say that we “ought” to be selfish because natural
selection requires us to be so, they are wrong; but if they simply concluded
that all morality is an illusion and that ought is a word devoid of intrinsic
meaning, their position would be unassailable, given their Darwinist assumptions.
Darwinism is objectionable to many people because part of its
meaning is the trivialization of value, not because it entails egoism—
which it does not do.
There is a deeper difficulty. Darwinism trivializes values by making
them the product of blind mechanical forces, but it assumes that they have
agency—that values cause behavior. If they did not, they would have no
effect on reproductive success and thus would be ignored by natural selection.
But if science insists that the physical world is governed exclusively
by blind mechanical law, where does human purpose fit in? If purpose does
not matter, neither do values. What difference do our values make if they
have no power to affect our world? If they cannot supersede mechanistic
laws? If Darwinism in any form trivializes value, strict mechanistic reductionism—the
claim that ultimately everything in the universe can be explained
by the laws of physics—would appear to make it meaningless. The
liberal scientists take refuge at this point in “holism,” which maintains
that when the systems under observation reach a certain level of complexity,
entirely new laws, laws not deducible from physics, must be called
on. They reject both mechanism and anything that smacks of vitalism.
Holism is, unfortunately, an ambiguous term. Some thinkers attempt to
make peace between the two camps by espousing something called “descriptive
holism,” which holds that whether a reductive or a holistic view is
appropriate depends on the level of description. In other words, the mating
behavior of animals may ultimately be completely governed by physical
laws operating on hadrons and leptons, but it would be ridiculous to attempt
to describe it at that level. No one doubts that a forest is composed of
trees, but it is not appropriate to discuss forests in precisely the same way
that one does trees. Critics maintain, with reason, that this is a distinction
without a difference, a verbal concession to holism that gives up nothing
the holists find objectionable in reductionism. True holism, they say, is
emergent holism, which holds that entirely new laws, irreducible to more
elementary laws, emerge in sufficiently complex systems. This explana-