Atheists and Easter

ixoy

Thought this was a nice opinion piece about atheism, Easter, and the soul from the Sunday Times URL="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6058898.ece"]link[/URL:

”He died to save us all,” we’re told. But what if, like me, who does not believe a word of it, you are not one of this “all”? What do atheists have to look forward to on Easter morning? When I’m dead, what’s going to happen to my soul?

You may think that as an atheist I obviously don’t have a soul (or at any rate, don’t deserve one). So why worry? But that’s not right. The soul is a biological invention that long predates religion. The human mind evolved by natural selection to have a conscious self at its centre: a self that, while a product of the material brain, thinks of itself as something else — an immaterial soul. My atheist soul is up there with the best of them. And the souls of atheists, no less than those of religious believers, aspire to live on indefinitely and fear oblivion. That’s a main part of the job for which natural selection has designed them.

The evolutionary story is a crooked one. We all worry about the future of our individual consciousness. But let’s be clear: Darwinian theory is tough-minded about the worth of individuals. From the gene’s-eye view, all individual organisms, including humans, are survival machines whose only purpose is to help the genes they carry make it into future generations. True, individuals can be said to be doing well or badly according to how they are performing this appointed task. Yet whether the life of an individual is worth living has no answer from this perspective: a life cannot be considered an end in itself, only a means to promoting the success of genes.

Of course, you and I would argue that as humans we have another equally valid — even more valid — way of judging what’s worthwhile. And no doubt we do: precisely because we are heirs to a biological invention that has ensured that the genes view has been supplemented — and challenged — by a rival one. Yet, unfortunately, the new “independent” viewpoint that we treasure is not all it seems.

What happened in the human case (although it may be in the human case alone) is that the genes came up with a remarkable trick for persuading individual survival machines to fulfil their less-than-glorious role. This was to endow each individual with the mental programmes for developing a conscious self that grows to see itself existing as very much an end in its own right: a self that, besides doing all it can to ensure its own basic comfort and security, typically strives for self-development. It aspires not only to be itself, through continually affirming its presence in the world, but to make more of itself through learning, creativity, love, spiritual growth, social influence, symbolic expression and so on.

And how does this benefit the genes that set it up? The simple answer is that, by putting a soul with these kinds of ambition in the driving seat, the genes have effectively created a new class of survival machine, with not only unprecedented intellectual skills but unprecedented interest in its own biological survival. As it turns out, such “selfish souls” do indeed make wonderful agents for “selfish genes”.

But it’s a trick, I said. And there has always been a catch. Naturally designed survival machines are not, as the name implies, machines designed to go on surviving for all time: instead they’re machines designed to survive only up to a point — this being the point where the genes they carry have nothing more to gain (and even things to lose) from continued occupation of an increasingly decrepit body. It suits genes, therefore, that the survival machines they create should have a limited lifetime and then be scrapped, while the genes take passage in a new one.

Thus the situation, if we choose to see it this way, has all the makings of tragedy (if not a tragic farce). Natural selection has, on the one hand, been shaping up individual human beings at the level of their souls to believe in themselves and their intrinsic worth, while it has on the other hand been taking steps to ensure that these same individuals, on the level of their bodies, grow old and die and — since by this stage of a life the genes no longer have any interest in ameliorating it — most likely die miserably and in a state of dreadful disillusion.

Given this betrayal of the soul by the genes, what consolation can Darwinian theory offer? Not perhaps as much as we would like. But as principal beneficiaries of natural selection, we humans should recognise what the deal is: since life on Earth began, the death of the individual has always been the precondition for evolutionary progress. If bodies did not die, we would not have souls at all. So, to wish for personal immortality is to wish away the process responsible for everything else that we hold dear.

For Christian believers, Easter Sunday is a day when oblivion makes way for joy. Darwinian atheists, if they can see beyond the scandal of personal annihilation, have perhaps better reason to look on the bright side of starting life over again.

CerebralCortex

Dr Aubrey de Grey might have something to say about evolutionary design towards limited life span. Check this out.