The value of strategic lying does not mean it is ethical to lie

In Gordon Bonnet's post "Shame, Lying, and Archie Bunker" (Skeptophilia blog, November 9, 2021), he resurfaced a 2013 opinion piece. Creationists, specifically David F. Coppedge for Creation Evolution Headlines, responded to a 2013 science paper, "Cooperation Creates Selection for Tactical Deception," by Luke McNally and Andrew L. Jackson. They titled the response "Evolutionists Confess to Lying." In that response, they argue (as Bonnet paraphrased it)

that because the paper supports an evolutionary edge for people who are deceptive, it is equivalent to the evolutionary biologists stating, 'Ha ha! We were lying all along!'

Image by PicsbyFran from Pixabay

The creationists' response is interesting — in an embarrassing way, as Bonnet points out.

Of course, there's a crucial distinction between descriptive and normative accounts of behavior: observing what people actually do, contrasted with judging what they ought to do. When scientists talk about "survival of the fittest," they are speaking descriptively. (This bears saying, unfortunately, endless millions of times.) Obviously, lying is sometimes a tactical advantage, especially when you are no longer trying to build up a reciprocally altruistic relationship but you are instead prepared to consider this your "final interaction," steal the bag, and go home. Lying, stealing, etc. can be lucrative in the short-term and in the long-term, but that doesn't mean you should do it, since what is lucrative — for yourself, for your offspring, for your social group — is not always ethical. That is, I'd say, definitional/axiomatic regarding the meaning of ethics. The word "ethics" exists to mean something different from "self-interest," and neither word is identical with "natural selection" (since sacrifices may contribute to the group's survival, so they can be simultaneously altruistic and self-interested).

Fundamentalist theists often point to a book and say: That's ethics, right there. You don't have a holy book? Then you have no ethics. The secular humanist may respond that ethics is a very complicated discourse that exists in the world as a function of human thought and behavior, but such a statement does not satisfy the fundamentalist and only generates the response: See, you are ignorant. You can't point to "ethics" as a concrete thing that fits in a shoebox. Therefore, you have no ethics at all.

Creationists routinely misrepresent descriptions of natural selection as recommendations for what humans ought to do. However, evolutionary pressures might be better understood as a constraint: sometimes they help determine what ethics is (insofar as they promote survival and group loyalty), but sometimes we have to fight against them to live ethically (caring about others). Our brains are wired to do something (e.g. fight or flight), while our conscious ethical choices seek a better outcome (e.g. nonviolent elimination of the threat, which takes time and thought). Whatever has helped humans survive throughout a long evolutionary past, dating back to when we were amoebas or whatever, isn't identical with what we consider ethical behavior right now.

Under certain assumptions of "intelligent design" whereby God determines human interests and human ethics and also guides evolution, self-interest might equate to ethics — since, under that worldview, God could choose whatever he liked and make it come to pass. This would eliminate the need for ethical discourse, as then we would only be obligated to say and do whatever increased our own bank accounts, because, according to God's rules in this alternate reality thought experiment, selfish behavior is good behavior by definition. Then we could say that, if God had wanted us to behave in some other way, he would have made survival feel less wonderful. But no one is claiming this. Not "intelligent design" creationists (I don't imagine?), and not atheists, either, rather few of whom are amoralists.

Refusing or being "unable to distinguish between truth and lies" is the definition of a bullshitter (per Harry Frankfurt), not a liar. If no human being could distinguish truth from lies, no one could choose to lie; no scientist could identify someone else's lying as a conscious strategy (since it's not conscious); and no scientist could analyze their unconscious choice either, since (as Bonnet pointed out in ALL CAPS in his blog post) if the scientist doesn't know which statements are false, they can't analyze the outcomes of making true and false statements.

How does a person even go from the obvious truism of sometimes people lie for strategic gain to the misinterpretation/oversimplification of these falsehoods are always told unconsciously, i.e. people never know when they're 'lying' to the outright non sequitur of if you believe that, then you also believe there is no way for any third party to evaluate what is true or false because there is no objective reality?

The fundamentalists' rhetorical question "How can anyone overcome what evolution has built into them?" is not asked seriously. Simply identifying an influence or a tendency doesn't mean it can't be overcome. The same question could be turned around at the Christians: "How can anyone overcome what Satan is telling them to do?" and they would similarly dispense of it: Apparently we humans just ARE able to make choices. Because pointing out a specific existing force should not immediately lead to a discussion of determinism/free will. If someone wants to talk about materialism/idealism implying determinism/free will, OK, but the mere pronunciation of the word "evolution" needn't always take us there. If someone feels that determinism/free will is the only philosophical or scientific debate that matters, that's fine for them regarding their own special interest, but their urge to steer the debate in that direction doesn't reflect anything inherent in the word "evolution."

The fundamentalists' rhetorical question "How can [the atheists] know what is true?" is yet another deflection. The same question could be turned around at Christians. Christians ask how atheists/scientists know what is true; similarly, a scientist might ask how a theologian knows what is true. But right now, in this context, this debate is a deflection because knowledge sources weren't the original topic.

Neither of these two epistemological questions — How can anyone overcome a tendency? How does anyone know what's true? — inherently privilege theism/creationism over atheism/science, so Christian fundamentalists aren't justified in "dismissing" all of science on the grounds that atheists/scientists are "deceivers" about the very nature of truth and self-knowledge. Christian fundamentalists can try asking those two epistemological questions about their own worldview and see what happens. But, of course, it is the nature of fundamentalism to be unable to interrogate itself and to dismiss opponents out of the starting gate.

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Around 2016 various philosophers started describing Trump using Frankfurt’s technical sense of bullshit. But then it was pointed out Trump isn’t even a bullshitter: he doesn’t see propositions as truth-tracking at all. He sees words as things you just arrange in whatever way will ‘win’ an exchange.

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— Patrick Stokes (@patstokes.bsky.social) May 31, 2024 at 6:09 PM

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Still unconvinced that God exists: Holes in the argument from objective moral values

Within the "Conversations with Matt DeLockery" Christian podcast available free on iTunes, four episodes titled “Looking for a God” (Parts 1-4) deserve a little attention, although, as I show below, they fail to present a convincing argument for the existence of God. Together, the episodes total one hour, and they were released on four different dates in October and November 2017.

'1 - Intro to the Moral Argument'

The first episode is a solid introduction. DeLockery's stated intent is to examine whether human behavior implies God's existence. He believes that God’s existence is “probably the most foundational question there could possibly be on any subject, because it touches on everything else,” especially the question of whether human purpose is given to us or whether we invent it for ourselves and the question of the afterlife. He explains the importance of critical thinking and gives a brief overview of common arguments about God’s existence. He says that, in discussions about whether morality is objective or subjective, "we’re looking for an answer to the question: Are there any basic foundational principles that say how humans should operate in relation to ourselves, other people, the world around us, and so forth?"

'2 - Objective vs. Subjective Moral Values'

The second episode has some flaws.

He defines "objective" as "hard fact": something that is true for people regardless of what culture they belong to and regardless of who recognizes it as an objective truth or who may believe it to be a subjective truth or falsehood.

He defines "subjective" as preference or opinion. Throughout the episode, apparently unwittingly, he goes back and forth about whether such preference is personal or social, and unfortunately this detail leads to the failure of his argument.

In this passage, he says the subjectivity can be either personal or social.

“Subjective moral values are things that we feel or are socially right or wrong. [emphasis mine] These vary from group to group and can and do change. Think about the phrase ‘everything’s relative.’ If a particular moral value is relative, then it is subjective. Moral values being ‘relative’ and moral values being ‘subjective’ are really two ways of saying the same thing. However, if a particular value is not relative, then it is ‘objective’.”

But then he asks listeners to ask themselves what they personally feel, their "immediate gut reaction," about the question of sex trafficking. Specifically, when they examine the source of ther moral opinion that sex trafficking is wrong, he asks listeners to decide: is their belief due to “social pressure,” a “social ‘no-no’,” or is sex trafficking “actually wrong”? Here, DeLockery implies that you can determine that something is objectively right or wrong based on what you subjectively feel. This is confusing at best. An "immediate gut reaction" is practically the very definition of subjectivity and is not a good way to demonstrate hard facts about the world.

The confusion is repeated:

“Are there things that are really good or bad, and are not merely based on social preferences? In my opinion, I think that there are many more values that are subjective or relative. However, not all are. I think sex trafficking is morally wrong. I think taking advantage of poor people is morally wrong. I think loving and caring for others is morally good. And I don’t think these things are merely preferences. They are not relative; they are not ‘to each his own.’ I think there really are at least some moral values that are objective because I think that’s how the world is. It’s not because I want to believe that there is something right or wrong with certain things. It’s because when I look at the world, I see [my emphasis] that there really is[my emphasis] something right or wrong with certain things. That is how I perceive the world when I look around me.”

By starting with the individual or social definition of subjectivity and, by some conscious or unconscious sleight of hand, dropping off the individual so that only the social remains as the hallmark of subjectivity, DeLockery allows the individual to be the arbiter of the objective. Even had he started with a purely social definition of subjectivity, this schema would not endure long, because the question would arise how a number of infallibly objective individuals suddenly become fallible and subjective when they organize into a society or culture.

Another problem is revealed by his choice of "sex trafficking" as an example. He assumes that his audience is sufficiently educated to recognize the phrase "sex trafficking" (defined as kidnapping and selling or exploiting people, often minors and often across international borders, for sexual purposes); that they recognize it is illegal in most countries; and that they are aware that everyone around them shares values that place them in opposition to it (likely, since he speaks to an audience interested in modern Christian apologetics). His example works reasonably well and makes its point rapidly precisely because everyone in the room already knows everyone else's general orientation on this topic. There are, however, people who practice sex trafficking; there are places where it is considered culturally acceptable to give girls to older men for marriage or as a form of collective punishment, and people from those cultures might have different definitions of "sex trafficking"; there are scenarios, such as war, in which kidnapping and rape become commonplace when they were not so before; and there are sociopaths or rebels among us who might know the socially appropriate thing to say when asked for their moral opinions but do not actually hold these feelings. So, asking the room to examine their personal feelings on a given moral question does not prove that the answer to that question is universally held. It matters how you ask the question, who is in the room, and how they choose to respond. It is not at all like placing a rock and asking someone to kick it to prove that it is a "hard fact." Anyone, regardless of their belief, culture, situation, or capacity, will trip over a rock or walk into a wall placed in front of them, but they will not all agree on values, which makes it difficult to prove that any given value is indeed objective. My own "immediate gut reaction" to value statements can always be contradicted by someone else's gut reaction and it will be difficult to arbitrate between us. It seems better to say that our moral intuitions matter and yet are fallible.

It is also confusing why the objective value is said to be true regardless of what anyone believes about it, yet apparently the only way to investigate the value is to ask "What do you believe about it?"

'3 - Evolution and Morality'

Believing that he successfully demonstrated in the previous episode that objective values exist, he now inquires where those values come from. According to him, God is one option:

“Now, there really isn’t much of an argument that a god could create moral values, or objective moral values. It’s pretty simple: If there is a god who can create everything, then creating a specific way that he wants his creatures to function is pretty straightforward. God makes man. God can provide a set of operating instructions to explain how man best functions. Pretty simple.”

In my estimation, this is not, to the contrary, at all simple because there is little to compare it to. As a human, I can engineer nonliving objects and, through selective breeding or environmental control, tinker with or influence living beings. In so doing, I control how they do operate, but I do not control how they should operate. The only way I can change values and rules about how any object or being should operate is by changing the values and rules of the society in which we participate — which is, by definition, in the realm of the subjective. If I were "God," it is not obvious how that status would enable me to create values and rules that are objective, nor how a value or rule could possibly be a hard fact about the world rather than just my opinion (albeit a divine opinion) about what I want my creations to do. Thus the question of whether God can create objective moral values cannot be dispensed with so easily. But it is dispensed with, so onward we go.

Could values have evolved? In examining the possibility that objective values resulted from "biological evolution," DeLockery doesn’t start with any pre-human or non-human type of animal. He only asks about how social learning might have occurred to promote human survival. He believes it’s clear that evolution — assuming that evolution is a real process, a position to which he does not commit — can produce subjective values (those that can “vary from place to place, from group to group”) but cannot produce objective values. At best, evolution could somehow aid us to "discover” objective values.

Now he changes his definition of “objective.” An objective fact, he says here, is one that “cannot change.” This contradicts a nuance of an example he gave in Episode 2. There, he said that the statement “gas-powered cars need oil to function properly” is an objective fact because of “the way gas-powered cars are currently made [my emphasis]...This does not change, and will not change, until the ways cars are manufactured changes [my emphasis].” The objective fact indeed can change to reflect the underlying conditions that support its validity. But here in Episode 3 he declares that an objective moral fact cannot change.

He says that, while evolution may help humans discover objective moral values, it can only produce subjective moral values. The type of values generated through evolution meet “the definition of subjective because it’s everything about how it affects the other person, how it is perceived by the other person, not whether it’s inherently the way that the human machine was made to function.” Note the assumption that the human machine was made at all (by a creator) which was assumed indirectly in Episode 2 when objective moral values were discovered by immediate gut reaction.

He concludes that, since objective values exist (as asserted in Episode 2) but could not have evolved (as asserted in Episode 3), they must have been created by God. He does not consider any alternative origins of values — say, for example, the result of a careful reasoning process.

'4 - God, Morality, and Euthyphro'

He presents Plato's Euthyphro dilemma: Can God arbitrarily choose values or is God held to a standard above himself? Neither is attractive, so DeLockery solves it with a third option: God is identical with those values. The values reflect God's character. The objective values with which we concern ourselves reflect the values of our Creator just as a painting reflects something of its painter. This is all merely asserted, not properly argued, and this is the shortest of all four episodes.

How could God have created a world like this? When does it get better?

Daniel Dennett wrote in Breaking the Spell:

"I, too, want the world to be a better place. This is my reason for wanting people to understand and accept evolutionary theory: I believe that their salvation may depend on it! How so? By opening their eyes to the dangers of pandemics, degradation of the environment, and loss of biodiversity, and by informing them about some of the foibles of human nature. So isn’t my belief that belief in evolution is the path to salvation a religion? No; there is a major difference. We who love evolution do not honor those whose love of evolution prevents them from thinking clearly and rationally about it! On the contrary, we are particularly critical of those whose misunderstandings and romantic misstatements of these great ideas mislead themselves and others. In our view, there is no safe haven for mystery or incomprehensibility. Yes, there is humility, and awe, and sheer delight, at the glory of the evolutionary landscape, but it is not accompanied by, or in the serve of, a willing (let alone thrilling) abandonment of reason. So I feel a moral imperative to spread the word of evolution, but evolution is not my religion. I don’t have a religion."

The desire for the world to become a better place is sometimes expressed more bitterly, as Romain Gary did in his novel The Dance of Genghis Cohn:

"If I were a believer, I would say it was God trying to create the world at last, an idea which has not yet occurred to Him, unless you consider this world to be a creation, an insult which would not even spring to the mind of an atheist."

The mathematician John Allen Paulos wrote in Irreligion that "the uncaused first cause needn't have any traditional God-like qualities. It's simply first, and as we know from other realms, being first doesn't mean being best." If being first cause doesn't equate to being the best god, being the first creation probably doesn't equate to being the best planet.

The crankiest language on the subject is from Christopher Hitchens in God is Not Great:

"In this way they choose to make a fumbling fool of their pretended god, and make him out to be a tinkerer, an approximator, and a blunderer, who took eons of time to fashion a few serviceable figures and heaped up a junkyard of scrap and failure meanwhile. Have they no more respect for the deity than that?"

Sources

Daniel C. Dennett. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Penguin Group, 2006. p. 268.

Romain Gary. The Dance of Genghis Cohn. (1968) New York: Signet Books, 1969. pp. 101-102.

John Allen Paulos. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. p. 5.

Christopher Hitchens. God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007. p. 85.

The 'Evolution Academic Freedom Act' and the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools

The teaching of evolution in public schools in the United States has long been held in deep suspicion by a large portion of the population. More than half of Americans believe literally in the Biblical creation story (CBS News poll, 2004). This sort of belief varies widely by region. In the southern states of Alabama and Arkansas, three-quarters are Biblical literalists, whereas in the northeastern states of Vermont and Massachusetts, less than a quarter are Biblical literalists (Rasmussen poll, 2006). As public education standards are determined on the state level, certain states have repeatedly battled to keep evolution in their science curricula.

Attempts to replace the teaching of evolution with creationism "has been before school officials, legislators and courts in Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia" over the past several decades, according to CNN. Louisiana passed a law branded as "academic freedom" encouraging the "critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution." A similar law called the Evolution Academic Freedom Act passed the Florida Senate on April 2, 2008. Democrats had criticized that bill for demanding protections for teachers who discuss creationism but not for those who discuss birth control and abortion, which the bill's Republican sponsor had refused to include.

In recent years, opponents of evolution have promoted the idea of "intelligent design," which maintains that some intelligent force set evolution into motion. Most scientists reject this theory as vague, scientifically indefensible (91 percent, according to a Case Western Reserve University poll in 2002), and a front for religious ideology.

In Texas, amendments to the education standards initially proposed in January 2009 were debated at the Board of Education's subsequent meeting in March. The amendments included attempts to discount, highlight weaknesses in, or encourage debate on accepted scientific theories of the common ancestry of life, plate tectonics, radioactive decay, and the origin of the solar system.  On March 27, 2009, the Texas board decided to require students to study "all sides of scientific evidence."  The National Center for Science Education, which supports the teaching of evolution, called this a "flawed" approach. Finally, in July 2011, the board approved educational materials from nine publishers. One of the publishers, Holt, was under fire from a creationist, and as a compromise Holt agreed to work with the Texas Education Commissioner. The final version approved the next month supported the theory of evolution. Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network which exists "to counter the religious right," said: "The release of Holt McDougal's finalized materials puts an end to a campaign to undermine science education in Texas that began with the board's adoption of flawed science curriculum standards two years ago."

The Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal in 2008, allowed teachers to "use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique and review scientific theories"-in other words, to teach religious viewpoints in science classes-regarding theories including "evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." Supporters refer to this as "teaching the controversy." In April 2011, a Baton Rouge high school student protesting the LSEA presented a petition to the state legislature that had been signed by 42 Nobel laureates. On May 26, 2011, the Louisiana Senate Education Committee upheld the LSEA. A letter from a science professor supporting the LSEA and "academic freedom" argued that "LSEA does not permit teaching for or against any religious viewpoint."

It is unclear how a scientific approach, while presuming to base itself upon objective fact, can avoid offending or contradicting any religious viewpoint. Indeed, the LSEA itself only states that it should not be understood to "promote discrimination" based upon religious belief or the absence thereof. Even while eschewing intentional discrimination, it is hard to see how science teachers can avoid incidental disagreement with conflicting positions. For this reason and for many other reason, debates on the teaching of evolution remain unresolved in the public opinion and are likely to continue.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 27, 2011.

A flawed argument for 'intelligent design' in Ben Stein's film 'Expelled'

Dinosaur fight: Stegosaur vs. Allosaur. Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Image by Luke Jones from Yucca Valley. © Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Wikimedia Commons.

I used to have an article here. On September 13, 2025 I moved it here: "How did it get created? It meandered"

2023 addendum: A connection to 'gender critical'

By the way, yes, I am aware that since I wrote the 2008 article above, Richard Dawkins came out as a transphobe. See my article: "How did Richard Dawkins undermine transgender people?" It's a 36-minute read on Medium. Consider a paid membership on the platform.

He's also made comments supporting eugenics: