Along the way he offers his thoughts on several related questions such as the existence of minds, freedom of the will and objective morality.
The book is a little odd in that, being about purpose, it offers little in terms of substantive conclusions about the topic.
The author seems to realize, for example, that his atheistic Darwinian worldview is incompatible with conscious experience, since there's no good scientific explanation for how consciousness or sentience could've arisen from brute matter or how it could be explained in terms of chemical reactions in the brain. So, after some back and forth he concludes by simply waving the problem away, saying that we should take consciousness as a given and "leave the discussion at that."
He comes to a similar conclusion concerning free will. He seems to want to hold on to freedom (it's never quite clear where he stands on some of these questions), but freedom doesn't sit comfortably with his mechanistic view of the world. He bobs and weaves for a bit employing an "on the one hand, but then on the other" discourse, the upshot of which is that people have reasons for what they do so we should just "leave it at that."
Well, that's a suggestion guaranteed to satisfy no one. Are our reasons freely chosen or are they determined by prior reasons? When we act upon our reasons are we free to have acted otherwise or are our reasons determinative?
If we always act upon our strongest reasons how do we know which reasons are our strongest other than by the fact that those are the ones we acted upon? But if Ruse is saying that we always act upon the reasons that we act upon that's hardly helpful, and if we're just going to "leave it at that" what's the point of writing about the problem in the first place?
He wants to discredit religious answers to the questions of meaning and purpose, but in so doing he swats down a battalion of straw men about religious belief and invokes the Euthyphro Dilemma which has been thoroughly rebutted by philosophers for at least fifty years (see here, here and here).
He also poses nonsensical questions like "What if religion is false?" Religious propositions can be true or false, but it makes no sense to ask what if religions are false. It's like asking what if Science is false.
In his final chapter Ruse traipses uncertainly around the question of morality and how it can be grounded on an evolutionary view of things. He answers that it can't:
I argue that once you have given a Darwinian explanation of moral beliefs, you see that there is no foundation. Morality is a set of subjective beliefs, not a reflection of objective, human-independent reality.He goes on to quote himself from an earlier work, "Ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators."
I've argued on many occasions here on VP and in my books that, given Darwinian evolution and atheism, what Ruse says here is exactly right. There's no objective moral right and wrong, only our subjective preferences. But then Ruse tries to smuggle in moral values anyway:
An evolutionarily based morality will have a distinctive form. It would see an obligation to all in need, but would argue that we have a special obligation to some - our children and other relatives particularly.This is nonsense. Presumably Ruse is basing this on the sociobiological fact that we share more genes in common with our children than with others, but if so, it's a textbook case of trying to derive a moral value from a biological fact. What's the logical connection between being genetically close to someone and having a moral obligation to them?
I assume Ruse would say that the nexus is the proposition that we have a moral obligation to those to whom we're genetically close, but what's the evolutionary justification for that proposition? There is none.
And what basis does Ruse have for claiming that we have an obligation to "all in need"? Why would we? The only reason we have obligations to our fellow man is because the God who created us all and to Whom we must give an account insists that we do.
Ruse, who was raised a Quaker until he was twenty years old, at which time he became an atheist, is nevertheless still living off the moral capital of his Quaker upbringing. The atheistic Darwinism he has since adopted offers no sanction for making moral judgments of any kind.
The FSU professor seems to sense that his argument is unconvincing. He insists, without any support, that something like rape is just wrong and that's the end of the matter: " 'Rape is wrong' means rape is wrong - it's morally prohibited - even if the whole world thinks it's okay."
Well, if the whole world thinks it's okay then by whom is rape morally prohibited? These are the sort of tangles an atheist gets himself tied up in when he tries to affirm objective moral values while denying the existence of an objective moral authority.
Ruse adds this: "Because we think morality is binding on us, we do not cheat - at least, if we do cheat we know that it is wrong." But what does this even mean? What does it mean to say that something is wrong if it violates no objective principle and there's no accountability?
Is it wrong to drive as fast as you please if there's no speed limit and no law enforcement? Cheating is only wrong if there's an objective moral authority who holds us accountable, but on Ruse's worldview there's nothing to restrain our behavior beyond our desire to find approval in the opinions of others.
In the end Ruse seems to give up trying to make the case for a morality based on atheism plus blind, accidental chance (Darwinism) and concludes by saying, "You know what I mean. Let's leave it at that."
Which causes one to wonder, what was the purpose for writing a book on purpose in the first place?
