Neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists, of course, adhere to the tenet that science is the sole path to truth, a tenet, as we have seen, that leads to materialism, a philosophy that denies human beings have free will because matter cannot choose. Moral choice, then, is moral behavior produced by genes, brain physiology, instinct, cultural conditioning, or some other deterministic cause. What nonscientists call moral behavior is programmed into the ancient brain that inhabits their modern skulls. No matter how materialists try to gussy up their theories, they must hold that what human beings should do has no more meaning than it does for animals, plants, or rocks.
Present-day biologists are caught in a contradiction. The half of Edward Wilson’s brain that founded sociobiology tells him he is determined by his genes and to some extent by American culture and the other half of his brain passionately believes he is free. If genes are the controllers, then belief in free will must be a biological adaptation. Wilson claims without that belief, the mind would be “imprisoned by fatalism, would slow and deteriorate.” Said another way, biologists like Wilson hold that morals are invented by genes and thus have no ultimate foundation and, at the same time, these wise men of science maintain that they must live by the illusion that they are free.
Not just biologists are so committed to materialism that they deny that human beings have free choice and yet cannot give up the illusion they are free. Marvin Minsky, a computer scientist and a leading theorist of artificial intelligence, holds that “according to the modern scientific view, there is simply no room at all for freedom of the human will,” since everything in the universe, including what happens in human brains, depends only on “fixed, deterministic laws” and “purely random” events. Yet, Minsky argues that we cannot give up the “myth of voluntary choice”: “our social living depends upon responsibility” and in addition “we make use of the idea of freedom of will to justify our judgments about good and evil.” Minsky, too, concludes that each one of us must accept and also reject the myth that we can voluntarily choose: “We’re virtually forced to maintain that belief [voluntary choice], even though we know it’s false.”
Physicist and science writer Dennis Overbye gives an excellent visual representation of the view that the brain determines all human actions and the self believes it freely chooses. He likens the brain to a tiger and the self to a monkey riding on the tiger, but facing backwards. (See Overbye.) The tiger acts, and the monkey makes up stories about how he was the cause of what the tiger did. In the illustration accompanying Overbye’s article, the monkey holds a steering wheel that is not connected to anything. Like the monkey, we human beings are sophisticated automatons; our feelings of control and intention are epiphenomena with no casual power. The brain determines all human actions and the self believes it freely chooses. The self is merely along for the ride.
Sociobiologist Edward Wilson and philosopher-of-science Michael Ruse assert that ethics is a shared illusion of the human race, fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. Our biology makes us think that an objective higher moral code exists, to which we are all subject because natural selection has disposed human beings to be altruistic and to show guilt, anger, and resentment in just the way they would if universal moral claims were true. Ethics, at most, is an instrumentally useful illusion. The belief in a universal moral code is merely a biological adaptation to further reproductive ends.
According to this view, human beings are conventionally moral. Ethics is seen as an illusion, but scientists, themselves, are part of the system and cannot escape. Ruse concludes that the truth makes no one free; all we can do is accept that we are matter’s slaves. In the great game of life, human beings are pawns shuffled about by matter, evolving under the rule that the genes that leave for posterity the largest number of copies of themselves are the winners.
