elfs | Being Good without God.

Daniel Dennet, as old-timers to my blog know, is one of my favorite philosophers. Relentlessly materialistic and naturalistic, he nonetheless spells out a lot of excellent details regarding why human beings are the way they are. Dennet has a really good podcast on why it is possible to be good without God on meaningoflive.tv:

"Let's talk about "transcendent" and "morality". One of the things that we have evolved to discover on this planet is arithmetic. We didn't invent it, we didn't make it: we found it. It is eternal, a priori, true: it's just great stuff. And it's true everywhere in the universe; it's true everywhere in any universe. There's only one arithmetic. Now, is that transcendent? I would say, Yeah.

"If we discovered another civilization somewhere in the galaxy that was intelligent, what would it share with us? Well, it would certainly share arithmetic. Maybe not base-10 arithmetic -- that's anybody's guess. It might be base 12 or base 16 or base 8. Who knows? That's an accident. But it would still be arithmetic. Now, we can say: "And would it share ethical principles with us?" And I think, in some regards, "Yes, it would." Now, does that make those principles transcendent? Yeah."

Dennet here states clearly what has been a staple argument of the science fiction community for years, and why such silly things as Klingons and the aliens from V are more or less nonsense: in order to be a spacefaring civilization, one must first be civilized. The economics of scale needed to fund a "get off your planet" program require that people get along, that they understand the Golden (or at the very least Brass, "Do not do unto others as they have not done unto you") Rule, and that they comprehend reciprocity.

They certainly will not share any concept of God with those we have on our planet; it's even reasonable to believe that a majority of them may not believe in God at all. But given that we have evolved to have reciprocity as a measure of civilization, it is reasonable to assume that every civilization will have reciprocity (as well as arithmetic) as a sheer measure of civilization in the first place.

"Goodness" is part of the superstructure of the universe as surely as the physics that underlies evolution in the first place; this is evident in that we humans get along. Does that make it "transcendental," as Dennet argues? I believe it does. Does that necessarily make it theistic in orgin? I do not believe so.

In fact, I'll make the counter-claim: "goodness" is a much an accident of the way our universe is organized as we are ourselves. There is no reason to believe otherwise. More importantly, given what we know of the way various religions have independently discovered, codified, and implemented the Brass and Golden rules, it is reasonable to assume that one does not need any particular God or any god at all to know of them.

Yet, since religion is clearly a commonplace organizing instutition for civilizations, let's change things around: it is not that one must believe in a god in order to be good, but that one (and one's neighbors) must be good to begin with, in order to found a common belief in god. Without being good, all is chaos. Without god, all is still capable of good.