As a Calvinist, I’m not going to take a glorified view of man’s free will. But I find it interesting that atheists proudly hew to such determinism. Determinism is the only honest position for a materialist to take, but it’s ironic that the atheists are so proud of this position. The topic generally comes up in discussions of justice (“How can God be just if he predestined me to evil?”) or in discussions of the stupidity of Christians (“Those stupid Christians talk about free will, but we atheists don’t believe in such illusions!”).

Evolutionary biology suggests that altruism is a sort of “costly signal” which signals one’s suitability as a mate. Standing up for something we believe to be true, at great cost to ourselves (and especially in the face of universal opposition) is sexier to women than a peacock’s feathers are to a peahen. Such intellectual honesty is the sexiest thing in the known universe. A man’s willingness to extinguish his own ego in service to the truth of determinism is, therefore, the most costly signal man could give to a woman. It is the ultimate altruistic “costly signal”, right?

The problem is, costly signals are, by definition, signals that cannot be faked. If you can fake it, it’s not a properly costly signal. And the atheist’s commitment to determinism is nothing if not fraudulent.

Atheist materialists like to explain that there is no such thing as free will. They want you to know that they are totally cool with that fact. They want you to find them to be sexy and courageous (or at least, they want you to admit yourself superstitious and delusional for believing in free will). But it’s all a bunch of posturing. For all practical purposes, these proud atheists operate under the same delusion, and adopt the same lie, that they claim to reject.

What, exactly, is different about the atheist who professes determinism on the Internet, and the Pelagian who professes free will? In practice, how is the life of the professed determinist different? Do these atheist determinists “cut to the chase” and commit suicide, since “all ends in death”? Do they reject “atman” in daily practice, and fully realize “anatman”? Hardly! Every act of the atheist determinist belies his professed belief, proving that his profession is a sterile, impotent, and purely intellectual assent; far removed from any practical manifestation. Indeed, the only practically measurable difference between the atheist and the Pelagian is the belief about free will that each professes on Internet message boards! And this professed belief has no impact on actual behavior.

In species where female sexual selection is operative (e.g. peafowl and humans), any public forum which includes females is a platform for lekking. In such forums, women need to be extraordinarily skeptical of any feather displays, and need to ensure that feather displays are authentically costly (i.e. not fraudulent). The best females do not tolerate male beliefs which are fictional, imaginary, and which impose no cost. In practice, any professed belief in determinism is virtually indistinguishable from a belief in free will, and is therefore useless for signalling.

This “principle” makes no sense to me. DNA is sort of like a compression algorithm, from which an entire organism is constructed. Compression algorithms are efficient to the extent that they factor out redundancy, so a sufficiently advanced compression algorithm creates output that is virtually indistinguishable from random data.

Imagine that you’ve written an epic story for you grandchildren, and you ZIP up the file to save space. Your grandkids grow up, and are perfectly able to unzip the file and read the story. One day, one of the grandkids gets the idea to analyze the raw bytes of the ZIP file, and concludes that “the bytes are essentially random — the story has no author”. Huh?

When DNA is uncompressed, it has given us the Psalms of David, the works of Shakespeare, and countless other treasures. It’s even given us what we need to decode our own DNA. If Slartibartfast were truly a brilliant designer, he would’ve created planets which would support creatures who would eventually write comedies about a designer who says “Slartibartfast was here”. And he would create creatures who could understand how funny and absurd the idea is. That would be a signature!

Few atheists seem to realize that this implies the immortality of the soul. Computer programs can be run on a new computer, even if the old computer passes away. For a small handful, this is an exciting fact, promising a future where we can upload our souls to the singularity. But for most atheists, this is a disturbing implication. These atheists want to believe that we can obliterate our souls forever by destroying our bodies. As if we can make a troubling computer program disappear forever, simply by frying the CPU of the machine that’s running it.

The most popular theist alternative to materialism is dualism, which asserts that the universe is composed of both the material, which follows the laws of physics, and the immaterial (e.g. “spiritual”), which doesn’t follow the laws of physics. You can see how the dualist could invent a soul that is not immortal. The “spiritual” plane could theoretically devise anything, including a soul that disappears without chance of reconstitution.

It’s hard to imagine a materialist mind that could not be reconstituted. If you reconstruct the exact physical configuration, you’ve reconstituted the mind. If you buy the theory that the mind is like a computer, you don’t even need to reconstruct the exact physical configuration — you need only create a functionally equivalent substrate and upload the mind. It’s the difference between replicating a running computer atom-for-atom and copying a program from one computer to the other.

Theists often criticize atheists by pointing out that materialism has no explanation for intentionality. That is, materialism has not yet explained how the physical layer can be composed into intentionality. Committed materialists insist that this leap will eventually be made. Even if we don’t have an explanation for intentionality today, we will, they say. But the day that we do, we will have proven immortality of the soul in a manner than is stronger than any dualist could make.

Once the atheists prove that our minds can be wholly composed of atoms, they will face the insurmountable task of proving that our minds can never be re-composed of atoms. Proving that the soul can be composed of atoms will make it infinitely more difficult to prove that the soul can be eternally extinguished, and it’s the latter that most atheists want desperately to prove.

Interestingly, the evidence shows that this phenomenon started right when black separatism began to take hold. Prior to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, black educational achievement was lauded by other blacks. As separatism took hold, educational achievement soon became identified with “being white”. In my experience, this antipathy towards education was not official, since children I knew of committed “Nation of Islam” (Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan’s organization) members would often be high achievers. Unfortunately, the separatism was interpreted by the common man as an antipathy towards intellectual achievement.

In reading Bobby Seale’s “A Lonely Rage” many years ago, I was struck by the parallels to American Fundamentalist separatism. But the leaders of Young Earth Creationism are even more damnable than the leaders of Nation of Islam, IMO. They officially preach an anti-intellectual and anti-science agenda, and smear anyone who dares to attain scientific achievement. If you study evolutionary biology, geology, or astrophysics, you are a traitor to fundamentalism, and guilty of trying to “act scientific”. Considering that fundamentalism began it’s existence in a commitment to Scottish Common Sense Realism and Baconian empiricism, the current climate is especially tragic. Separatism becomes idolatry, and when this idolatry is officially endorsed by the leaders, it is shameful indeed.

This behavior in the bimatured orangutans is called “sneak-and-rape” by evolutionists, and implies that these orangutans are in the same class as the guy who contacted Craiglist “erotic services” providers, then pretended to be a police officer and raped them. 

It’s interesting to see people identifying with the dominant male Orangutan as the “good guy”.  People tend to look at Gorilla mating patterns and perceive the dominant male to be little more than a rapist, while the female who sneaks away from the dominant male to mate with horny weaker males is anthropomorphized as being a real force for women’s liberation.  The obvious inconsistency in empathy here doesn’t seem to disturb most people.

The real problem, which I pointed out to my friend, is the irresponsible use of words like “sneak” and “rape”, which practically guarantee that readers will anthropomorphize.  In humans, both words immediately invoke a sense of judgment, a sense of morals, a sense of fairness.  But such sentiments are meaningless in the case of apes.

Free will implies consciousness and memory.  It isn’t clear that apes have developed the requisite consciousness and memory to have the ability to make free choices, so it is a bit presumptuous to speak of an orangutan being forced to do something against his or her will.  And even if the orangutans had free wills, the phrase “sneak and rape” implies further that male orangutan has a Theory of Mind (ToM) in which he would be aware of what the dominant male and the females’ willed.

The evidence for apes possessing any Theory of Mind is very weak and speculative.  If they do, it’s not a primary force.  Chimpanzees are the most promising, and even in the case of chimps, the research shows:

“although 8-15 year-old chimpanzees showed more self-directed behavior in the presence of mirrors than 1-5 year-olds, the frequency of this behavior declined sharply between ages 15 and 39. The latter finding suggests either that, unlike humans, (1) chimpanzees typically acquire a self-concept as children and then promptly lose it on reaching adulthood, or (2) that self-directed behavior in the presence of mirrors is not a valid measure of self-conception.”

Finally, the research into Theory of Mind suggests that apes such as Orangutans can, at best, operate within two orders of intentionality.  Morals require at least 4 orders of intentionality.  So even in the most enthusiastically anthopormophized scenario, it’s a form of sneaky mind-rape to use such morally loaded words when discussing Orangutans.

People love to point to Gorilla and Bonobo research to prove that humans are simply horny primates dominated by evolution.  And when I pointed out the imprecision of “sneak-and-rape” in this context, the retort was predictable: “Humans don’t really have free will, either!”, “Choice is an illusion!”, and so on.

Regardless of our sophistry about predestination, it is an empirically established fact that humans are the only creatures who possess higher-order intentionality.  This unique capacity to know good and evil is exactly what Dickie Dawkins employs in his crusades against anyone who dares to question the orthodoxy of materialistic reductionism.