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Imagine!
Imagine another planet on which life evolves. Little bits of self-replicating material (equivalent to our genes) encase themselves through natural selection in a particular armor that exhibits behavioral flexibility. One species in particular--coincidentally a brainy, two-legged organism--becomes capable of exceptional feats like communicating with subtlety, creating artistic masterpieces, watching TV, playing computer games, and so on.
These organisms have another characteristic--they lack totally in consciousness, sentience, awareness. It isn't like anything to be like one of them. And yes, fire burns their hands and they are designed to pull them away to avoid damage. But they do not feel pain--or happiness, or anything.
They look and act just like us except everything is without passion or pride. They are just robots with an unusually good skin.
Such a world lacks those things that many of us believe make life meaningful--devoted love, allegiance, our triumphs and failures, the thrill of accomplishment, etc. Worse, their world is totally lacking in a sense of moral meaning.
These imaginary organisms of an imaginary world are really replicas of what many behavioral scientists assert us to be--machines that do as they do because they cannot do otherwise.
"Ask yourself this question," says the author, "Is there anything immoral about unplugging your computer? If not, how could there be anything immoral about 'unplugging' your neighbor by some convenient means if he/she is just an insensate organism and happens to be a nuisance to you for some reason?"
This is the kind of world we would live in if words like right or wrong had no meaning. The strangest thing about this imaginary world is that it is exactly the kind of world we would expect ours to become if it had evolved along a pathway in which consciousness and awareness were functionless epiphenomena and morality, goodness, and altruism were mental aberrations that have no effective function in real behavioral responses--as is claimed by so many behavioral scientists.
Taking our imagining one step further, why would altruism evolve or exist anywhere in any universe if no force or power of any kind pre-existed that would somehow foster its eventual appearance? Supposedly machines like us do as we do because we cannot do otherwise. What then drove robots such as us to 'imagine' all these things that have no reality. What could be the source of such imaginings?
This little story is from Robert Wright's book entitled "Non-zero. The Logic of Human destiny," previously reviewed in Innerface. It, too, challenges the rationality of the materialists' meaningless and purposeless creation from the nothingness.
While it remains true that certainty evades us, it also remains true that our uncertainty is blessed with the possibility of free will--a possibility that makes sense only when accompanied by faith in a loving and thinking Creator-God.
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