Sources of Values

  Once again I've found myself trying to decode a philosophical writing, this time an article in The New York Review of Books, excerpted from Ronald Dworkin's forthcoming book Religion Without God.  It has more than a touch of metaphysics, so I probably wouldn't have finished reading it had I not been spurred on by my cousin G.  He is ever so much more into philosophy than I.

  Dworkin makes a case, already appreciated by some religions of the East but not sufficiently in the West, that being religious doesn't require belief in a deity.  He starts by defining "religious attitude"—in essence the conjoining of awe at the beauty of the universe with a faith that an objective set of values exists.  (As we shall see, the crux of this definition is the word objective.)  To Dworkin, being religious simply means having such a religious attitude, which can be theistic or atheistic.

  Abrahamic theists, for example, may be awed by God's creation of the cosmos from the void; atheists may be awed by creation from the Big Bang.  Theists might believe that cruelty is wrong because God says so from on high; atheists because they "cannot [have a conviction that cruelty is really wrong] without thinking that it is objectively true."  (There's circular reasoning here, which Dworkin later defends—see below.)  In thus virtually equating the nature of religious attitudes that theists and atheists may have, Dworkin makes the inclusion of God by the former and not the latter seem of little import.  History, of course, says otherwise. 

  Let's leave that contentious issue aside and go to the crux: the meaning of "objectivity." By objective values, Dworkin has in mind Platonic ideals that are independent of the mundane world.  They may be endowed by a transcendental deity; but he denies that they can originate from naturalism—the belief "that nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences."  Values, he maintains, "are real and fundamental … as real as trees and pain," and there is no way of discovering them by naturalistic inquiry.

  In thus rejecting naturalism, Dworkin a priori takes evolution out of the picture as a source of values.  He says, "Suppose we find undeniable evidence that we hold the moral convictions we do only because they were evolutionarily adaptive, which certainly did not require them to be true.  Then, in this view, we would have no reason to think that cruelty is really wrong."  (My italics, emphasizing Dworkin's insistence that objective moral truth cannot be grounded in natural inquiry.) 

  Instead, Dworkin relies on "ungrounded realism" to be in touch with moral truth.  He says that "the world of value is self-contained and self-certifying," which we accept as a matter of faith.  He admits to circularity here, but claims it is not much different from physical science, which ultimately depends on faith in assumptions such as causation.  "In each domain we accept felt, inescapable conviction rather than the benediction of some independent means of verification as the final arbiter of what we are entitled responsibly to believe."  (This is a misleading comparison, because scientific assumptions are always tentative and subject to invalidation; Dworkin's objective values, being self-certifying, are not.)

  Dworkin is of course entitled to define "religious attitude" as he wishes, including a definition that excludes naturalists from being capable of it.  Yet, materialist that I am and philosopher that I am not, I don't understand why he would insist on doing so.  Why can it not be that cruelty is considered wrong just because it tends to be deselected by the evolutionary process?  Recall from E. O. Wilson's book The Social Conquest of the Earth, which I discussed in a previous posting, the contention that human evolution proceeds by competition among groups as well as among individuals, the former trumping the latter in conformity with an "iron rule": selfish individuals beat altruistic ones, yet groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.  According to Wilson, different groups choose different sets of values with which to compete.  Some values, however, have become universal among groups and societies at large, which is not evidence that they are transcendentally objective truths, only that they have become pragmatically necessary for the competitive survival of a society in a given era. 

  A core set of universally accepted values therefore might well have arisen through the evolutionary process.  Philosopher Philip Kitcher, in his book The Ethical Project, looks on this evolution as a collective enterprise taken on by the species over tens of thousands of years as it sought ways to live successfully in larger and larger groups.  In this light, for example, the natural rights proclaimed during the Enlightenment are not a human discernment of objective values "endowed by their Creator"; rather they represent a stage in the evolution of values achieved by humankind during the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

  My response to Dworkin's article is twofold.  First, I think he has unnecessarily conflated two concepts: "religion," which in both common parlance and Dworkin's lexicon has preternatural elements; and "religious attitude," which—despite Dworkin's strange definition of it—need not have that tinge.  A naturalist, following Einstein, can have a religious attitude by simply being in awe of the sublimity of the universe, without also subscribing to a preternaturalness of values.

  Second, while again I am assuredly no philosopher, in my estimation a blending of Dworkin's and Kitcher's value constructs is possible, by replacing objectivity with universality.  Instead of demanding that values be "self-contained and self-certifying," beyond human jurisdiction, think of them as continuing reformulations by the species itself, under evolutionary pressure as it climbed out of savagery.  As Wilson points out, for example, proscription of incest is now universal among societies, initially dating well into pre-historic times.  Proscription of murder is more recent, dating at least to the Judaic commandment.  Proscriptions of slavery and cruelty are very much more recent still.  In this merged construct, Dworkin's "felt, inescapable conviction" that these values are true would itself stem from the same evolutionary forces as the values themselves.

  Thus, one can conceive of quasi-objective (in the sense of universal) core values that are evolutionarily modified with time.  As with objective values, they are ideals that humanity strives for in a given era, usually without total success.  They are the forward-looking what-should-be of value as opposed to what-is.  They are the substance of Kitcher's ethical project, which—as he points out—is a work in progress.  

  I'll end by apologizing for what may appear an unseemly posthumous quarrel with Professor Dworkin.  (Sadly, he died in February prior to the publication of both his NYRB article and the book from which it was drawn.)  He was an eminent philosopher and scholar of law, and I am a less than a novice in both those fields.  Yet I feel that a response to him is warranted from a materialist, someone whose awe at the universe's majesty is matched with a belief in evolutionarily rather than preternaturally derived values.

Gödel and God

    Kurt Gödel, whom some have called the greatest logician since Aristotle, undermined the very foundations of classical mathematics with his Incompleteness Theorem (and, by the way, thereby reaffirmed his belief in God).  To mathematicians, his work was nothing short of cataclysmic.  To most of the rest us, it is merely counter-intuitive, paradoxical and maddening.  I invite you down the rabbit hole into a realm of paradox worthy of Alice.

  Until Gödel proved his theorem, it was thought that mathematics—alone of the sciences—was self-contained, not having to refer to anything outside mathematics.  Mathematics was created by mathematicians as a complete, fenced-off entity, while other scientists had to discover the outside world.  More precisely, mathematicians held that any true statement in any properly set up mathematical system (say arithmetic or algebra) could be shown to be true by using solely the axioms and rules of that system.

  Gödel proved the opposite.  His theorem shows that any properly set up mathematical system containing arithmetic has true statements within it that cannot be proved true by using solely the axioms and rules of that system.  Mathematics is therefore not complete unto itself as was supposed.  Confirmation of the truths not provable within mathematics can only be found outside of what had previously been assumed to be a self-contained mathematics.  This is where God came in for Gödel—but more about that later.

  It all started at the turn of the twentieth century, when Bertrand Russell realized that mathematical logic would always contain contradictions.  He illustrated this by using a folksy paradox about a lone, male barber in a town where every male keeps himself clean-shaven either by shaving himself or being shaved by the barber.  Then, Russell asked, who shaves the barber?  There's the paradox: If the barber doesn't shave himself then he (the barber) must shave himself; if the barber shaves himself, then he (the barber) doesn't shave himself.

  Such paradoxes are called self-referential.  In this one, all males must refer themselves to the barber if they don't shave themselves.  The barber, being male, must thus refer himself to himself to be shaved if he doesn't shave himself, setting up the paradox. 

  The proof of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is very complicated, but its core consists of the construction of a true, self-referential arithmetical proposition that is shown to be unprovable within arithmetic.  A taste of the core argument can be found in a much simpler argument about a supposedly self-contained truth-telling machine:

1. Imagine a truth-telling machine M that can answer all questions allowing solely a yes or no answer about the truth of any statement submitted to it, but by axiom can only answer correctly; that is, it cannot lie.  (M stands in the stead of Gödel's starting point of arithmetic.)

2.  Consider the statement S, that “M will never say S is true.”  (This is akin to the self-referential proposition in arithmetic that Gödel constructed, for the statement S is defined in terms of the statement S.)

3.  Ask M if S is true.

4.  If M says S is true, then "M will never say S is true" is thereby falsified, so M has incorrectly answered a question.  Hence, M cannot say that S is true, since by axiom it gives only correct answers.

5. Step 4 confirms that M will never say S is true, verifying that the statement S in step 2 is indeed true.

6.  Here’s the dilemma:  S is true but M cannot say so.  M is consequently an incomplete truth-telling machine.  The answer to "Is S true?" lies outside of M. 

  Gödel's theorem, which rocked the world of mathematics, didn't shock Gödel.  He had been a lifelong Platonist, believing with Plato that anything we can see or conceive of is just a poor shadow of an eternal, objective ideal that exists beyond the real world.  It was hence no surprise to him that there are mathematical truths that mathematics cannot prove.  He concluded that proofs of those truths are part of the omniscience of an eternal God who is external to the real world, thus strengthening his long-held theism.  In his later years, Gödel even tried to construct a formal logical proof of God's existence.

  Gödel published his theorem in 1931, when he was just 25.  He fled the Nazis from his native Austria in 1938, and spent his last forty years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he became Albert Einstein's closest intellectual companion until Einstein's death in 1955. 

  As I suggested at the outset, understanding paradoxes like those I've described can be maddening—perhaps just reading this blog posting has had that effect on you.  Worse, they might quite literally drive mad those whose life work involves them, and perhaps that's what happened to Gödel.  In a great irony, Gödel died in 1978 in a self-referential sort of way, so convinced that people were trying to poison him that he refused to eat and died of starvation.

  If you want to read more about Gödel—the man, his life, his times, and details about his theorem and its proof—I recommend Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel by Rebecca Goldstein.

Musings on God and Cosmology

Originally published March 6, 2012

  This is a tale of the birth of an atheist, with cosmology as midwife.

  I was raised in a moderately observant Jewish family. My maternal grandfather, a great influence on my life, set the religious tone for us.  He was trained as a rabbi in the old country but left after seeing one pogrom too many.  Arriving in America in 1896, he found that rabbis were a dime a dozen, became a successful businessman, but remained an observant Jew. He was liberal in his Judaism, never imposing his way of practicing on his children or grandchildren.  I remember once asking him whether I should fast on Yom Kippur.  His reply: "That's between you and God."

  God as a presence just came along with my upbringing. I received about the same amount of religious training as was usual for boys in the same milieu in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It culminated in my bar mitzvah in 1943.  I suppose you could say that I was a God-fearing child, fearing the anthropomorphic and often-malevolent Yahweh of the Old Testament.

  As I aged in a secular society, doubts crept in of course.  I was learning about the universe, just then being understood to have more than only our Galaxy; we gradually found out that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars.  As a budding scientist/engineer, I couldn't help asking myself whether, as theists would have it, a Creator could be bothered with this speck of dust we call Earth.

  By my twenties I had adopted an Einsteinian view, that God is Order-in-the-Universe. Einstein couldn't abide by the idea that the universe contains the probabilistic maelstrom then being propounded by a new generation of quantum physicists. As he famously said, "God does not play dice with the universe."

  There matters stood with me as I pursued my career and raised a family.  When my children asked whether I believed in God, whether in fact there is a God, I would agnostically hedge by saying that I didn't know.  I asserted that acting in a godly manner would lead to a better life for them.  So I gave them religious training, much attenuated from my own, justifying it by telling them that the cradle of religion would serve them well, especially when they encountered the inevitable crises in their lives.  Even as my agnosticism grew, I continued my own observance, sometimes on Shabbat, always on Yom Kippur, both to set an example for them and because such observance within a community brought some sense of cosmic order and belonging to my own life.

  This pleasant existence was shattered when I hit my own life's worse crisis: my wife Helen was diagnosed with cancer fifteen years ago and died of it a year and a half later; she was only sixty-three.  The comforting structure of religion that I assumed would be the bedrock on which I could stand turned out to be quicksand. Shortly after Helen's death, while attending Yom Kippur services, I looked at the Ark in which God's presence is supposed to dwell and found myself engulfed in the rage of one who has been deceived, or has deceived himself.  Far from being comforted, I was plunged deeper into despair.

  When I emerged from my grieving, I had the time and need to consider more seriously my history of belief and then agnosticism. I felt I had to face the question that has puzzled millennia of humans: where did it all come from?  A standard argument against a Creator as prime cause has been the retort, "Then what was the Creator's cause?"  But cosmology seemed to have no better answer, for one had to ask what was the cause of the Big Bang.  Recent cosmological speculation is beginning to answer that latter question.

  I recently watched a splendid video lecture, then read an equally splendid book, by cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss, both entitled A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. I'm not sure that I get it all, but here's what I take from the book and the video, roughly and in very abridged form. (You should watch the video and/or read the book to get the fuller story.)

  There is a convincing case to be made that our universe is just one in a multiverse, which extends infinitely in time and space. This multiverse is seemingly mostly empty, but actually is filled on the quantum level with a theoretically indicated and experimentally verified quantum froth. In this froth, particle-antiparticle pairs constantly and spontaneously appear and then quickly annihilate each other.  (Einstein was wrong about non-randomness on the quantum scale; quantum phenomena are probabilistic.) 

  In this frothy multiverse, it is likely—in fact certain over a long-enough period of time—that there will be places and times where and when enough particle-antiparticle pairs simultaneously pop into existence that a new universe is born in a big bang such as that which engendered ours. These big bangs are unstable, undergoing the exponential inflation characterizing our own universe in its very early times, with most of the antiparticles (or in other cases possibly most of the particles) being annihilated, leaving a universe of only particles (or antiparticles). 

  Given the infinite extent of space and time in the multiverse, it therefore contains a huge number (even an infinity) of distinct universes. They are all beyond the light horizon from each other--i.e., unable to see each other--because during their inflation their spaces expand, as ours did, more rapidly than the speed of light. (This is allowed by general relativity for the fabric of space, although not for matter and energy.)  

  Krauss differentiates this very strange cosmology from equally strange sorts of theism by making two assertions: (1) so far every scientific measurement and observation we have made in our own universe allows--even points to--this cosmology, (2) no scientific measurements support the possibility of or need for a prime-mover God that started our universe at the time of our Big Bang 13.72 billion years ago (much less the Biblical 6000+ years ago). 

  
  In effect, Krauss answers the questions of when and from what it all started by the mind-blowing statements "never" and "from nothing." The multiverse has always been around, and every once in a while a universe such as ours pops out of the quantum froth.  As Alice might have said, "curiouser and curiouser." 

  But for me this very curious conclusion, or something like it, is much more comforting and coherent than requiring that a Creator or the Big Bang started it all at some initial time.  "It has always been and will always be" appeals more to my sense of order.

  Here's a final irony.  This past Yom Kippur, that solemn day of repentance and forgiveness, I was finally able to forgive God for having taken Helen so early.  After all, in his non-existence he could scarcely have been responsible.  So I was able to attend High Holiday services without animus, after a thirteen-year hiatus rejoining the community to which my grandfather belonged.