Greg Graffin is the lead singer for the punk rock band Bad Religion. He's also the owner of a Ph.D in Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University and is currently working on a study of the philosophical beliefs of prominent evolutionists. Graffin believes that philosophical naturalism is a highly satisfying substitute religion. He writes:
The most important feature of evolutionary biology is its integrated view of humankind's place in nature that easily lends itself to a deeply satisfying metaphysics based entirely on materialist principles. This provision, coupled with the observation that theology has lost so much of its appeal to the average citizen, leads to the controversial conclusion that, in the modern world, Naturalism is a substitute for, and provides all the benefits of, traditional religion. If the naturalists have their day, theism is effectively dead.
He is surely right that naturalism is a religion, but he is just as surely wrong that it is as metaphysically satisfying as traditional belief, and his claim that it provides all the benefits of traditional religion is incomprehensible. Here's why. If naturalism is true, i.e. God either doesn't exist or is irrelevant to the cosmos, then death is almost certainly the end of personal existence. If that is so, then there can be no ultimate meaning or significance to our lives, there can be no non-arbitrary ground for moral judgment, there can be no basis for human dignity or human rights, there can be no hope that true justice exists, there can be no reason to think that love is anything more than a biochemical epiphenomena, and there can be no answers to life's biggest questions, except that "life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." We live for a moment and then we're gone, and nothing we do will have mattered in any truly significant way. Naturalism, in other words, is the overture to nihilism.
Graffin states that: Theists do not appreciate hearing the vulgar truth of evolutionary theory, that mankind is no fallen angel, has no immortal soul, nor free will, and was not specially created. This may be the truth, and it is certainly vulgar, but one strives in vain to see the "benefit" in it. If it is true then it is a truth which brings us to the brink of the abyss of absurdity. It inspires nothing but despair. It sucks away all meaningful hope out of the life of anyone who bothers to reflect upon it for more than a few minutes.
Graffin continues by claiming that: By polling evolutionary biologists on these issues, the project will yield very satisfying results. It will tell us the degree to which evolutionary biologists believe in naturalism, and whether evolutionary biology can form the basis for an ethical system that is devoid of supernatural reasoning. This is a very odd sentence. After having categorically denied that we have free will he seeks an ethical system where ethics is impossible. There is no morally binding ethic to be found in natural selection. Mindless material forces cannot impose an ethic, and neither humans nor animals can be moral agents if their behavior is determined by their genes and their evolutionary history. If we have no free will our moral sense is an illusion, and the attempt to ground an ethics in evolution is a chimera. It inevitably reduces to an egoistic "might makes right" and can give no answer to the question why I should not harm my neighbor if doing so is in my self-interest.
It will be interesting to see the results of Graffin's study.
