EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the third of a three-part series on the morality of lying. Our first post came Tuesday from Deacon Jim Russell. Yesterday we hard from Patheos atheist blogger James Croft. Today we hear from Catholic blogger Leah Libresco.

"If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal." – 1 Cor 13:1

 
In his essay on the ethics of lying, James Croft correctly says he worries when humans aren’t unsettled by their moral laws. We are imperfect, so we should expect to jostle against ethical injunctions, either because we struggle to live them out, or because our limited vision has caused us to formulate them clumsily.

So when we run into a dilemma like “Nazis at the door, Jews in the attic” or the more quotidian “friend prompted me to give an unflattering opinion” it’s an opportunity to examine our moral assumptions. Croft concludes that truth-telling is good insofar as it promotes the common good. So, honesty may be correct most of the time, but we shouldn’t be rigidly committed to that ideal, lest we become blind to the harm we may do to the people we’re speaking to.

Lying to save a life is a bit like concussing the Gestapo officer at the door. It’s a solution, and it may be the best of a set of bad options, but there’s a wound involved. A sin is a sin, even if the outcome was, on net, good from a consequentialist perspective. You still breached a duty or ruptured the relationship you ought to have with the officer at the door. The fact that you’re lying is a cue that something has gone wrong, whether upstream of your present moment in time or in this instant.

The strict Catholic edict against lying also springs from an awareness of our audience as people, moral agents, or adopted children of God (however you’d like to phrase it). Deceiving is choosing to make it hard for your target to understand the world around them. You’re introducing noise and bias into their signal, interfering with their ability to perceive and respond to the world and people around them.

I like to think of lying (actively or passively) as a special case of a general problem. In her Young Wizards series, Diane Duane would call it being pro-entropy. I might call it interfering with the eschaton. The telos of humanity is to be healed of all divisions. The wounds we have inflicted on ourselves or on others will be closed up, and it will be possible to be wholly united with each other and with God. Lying to someone is creating distance between my target and the world-as-it-is. And I’m deepening the distance between myself and the person I am instrumentalizing.

So whether it’s by omission or commission, deception is a stumbling block. When we’re tempted to lead others astray, we should be suspicious of our own motives. And if it truly seems necessary, we should wonder whether we can fix the problem at the source. How did we end up so out of joint with our neighbor and is there anything we can do to diminish the distance between us? If you are lying to protect someone (from themselves or an external threat) can you also help make them stronger or address the danger?

Honesty is a starting point; you can take the duty to avoid passive deception much further. Humans are prone to any number of biases that make it hard to hear or notice the truth. You may be telling the truth when you use CAPS LOCK, but you’ve made it harder for your interlocutor to listen to you. Tone can be as effective a barrier to truth as misdirection. Chemist Linus Pauling suggested we need to do things that feel like overcompensation, in order to be effective. He wrote, “Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.”

Love begins by not placing any new obstacles in the way of our neighbors. And then we can go on to ask for help with the accidental and natural sources of confusion we encounter in our pursuit of truth.
 
 
(Image credit: 2elearning)

The second most incorrect thing people say about evolution is that it is the survival of the fittest. (The most incorrect award has to go to the claim "it doesn’t exist"). The problem with this framing is that it sets up a picture of evolution-as-craftsman, carefully scrutinizing genetic variations and selecting and nurturing the most promising variant.

But evolution isn’t selecting for, it’s selecting against. Instead of survival of the fittest, it’s the persistence of the just barely workable. If an organ or a social structure is stable, it has the potential to last. Put simple, evolution favors local maxima.

If you want to get to the higher peak, you need something more directed than evolution or some pretty brutal selection pressures. So even if we believed that evolution was favoring moral improvement, it would be easy for progress to come to a halt far short of its potential.

But it’s worse than that. The z-axis in the graph above isn’t ‘goodness of group dynamics’ or ‘considerate feelings for others.’ It’s simply successful reproduction. Evolutionary psychologists can come up with elaborate explanations of how altruism could be part of a local maxima (or a Nash equilibrium, if we’re talking game theory), but that’s a long way from claiming it’s a necessary property of all local maxes or just the global max.

It’s easy to find counterexamples of stable evolutionary strategies that strike us as morally abhorrent. This one comes from Science as excerpted by TYWKIWDBI, and concerns gelada baboons:

If a newcomer ousts the chief monkey, it’s bad news for the group’s females. A wave of death sweeps through the unit, as the new male kills all the youngsters whom his predecessor fathered...But that’s not all. Eila Roberts from the University of Michigan has found that the new male’s arrival triggers a wave of spontaneous abortions. Within weeks, the vast majority of the local females terminate their pregnancies. It’s the first time that this strategy has been observed in the wild...
 
It’s obvious why the incoming males kill any existing infants. Female geladas don’t become fertile until they stop raising their existing children. Assuming no abortions, they go for three years between pregnancies. That’s longer than the typical reign of a dominant male. So, a newcomer, having finally won the right to mate, has few opportunities to actually do so. To make things worse, his females are busy raising someone else’s children. His solution: kill the babies. The quicker he does this, the sooner the females become fertile again, and the sooner he can father his own children.
 
But why would a pregnant female abort her own foetus? Roberts thinks that it’s an adaptive tactic in the face of a new male’s murderous tendencies. Since the male would probably kill the newborn baby anyway, it’s less costly for the female to abort than to waste time and energy on bringing a doomed infant to term. Her future offspring, conceived more quickly and fathered by the incumbent king of the hill, will stand a better chance of survival.

It’s stable states like these that mean I have little patience for evolutionary psychology or some spins on natural law as a foundation for ethics and obligation. Evolution is a wholly amoral process, so why would I expect that it would preserve and amplify whatever signal points us to the Good and the True?

Some atheists seem to think evolutionary psychology will excuse us from thinking about metaphysics, and some natural law proponents think that by studying our own physical bodies, we can intuit their form and proper function. I’d love to hear commenters on either side explain how they can distill moral instruction from a blind process that can’t take ethics into account.

The one counterargument I want to dispatch in this post is the idea that evolution promotes moral behavior because it has given us an intelligence to recognize moral behavior and to modify ourselves appropriately. This is just saying that evolution has brought us to the point where we can actively and deliberately subvert evolution. This is true, and I’m glad to welcome you to the transhumanist club, but it does not suggest evolution is directed towards moral behavior or reflection.
 
 
Originally posted at Unequally Yoked. Used with author's permission.

Maybe you're an atheist who has been reading and commenting here for a while. Or perhaps this is your first visit to Strange Notions. Whatever the case, the question remains: what should you do if Catholicism begins making sense? Leah Libresco faced that question head on in June 2012 when, after months of wrestling with her lifelong atheism, she decided to enter the Catholic Church. In this article, Leah offers advice for those in the same boat today:
 

So you think you might be a Catholic?

Maybe you’re a former atheist who plans to convert to Catholicism, or maybe you’re still an atheist but are a little uncomfortable with how plausible Catholicism seems as an alternative hypothesis. Either way, you want to spend a little time exploring Catholicism and figuring out how and whether to convert. This article is for you.
 

But I don’t know what to decide!

Luckily, you don’t have to decide. Catholicism is either true or not, before and after you change your mind. Gravity doesn’t fluctuate between true and false depending on your beliefs, and neither does the Church. So your job isn’t so much about deciding as it is learning about and recognizing the world you already live in.

Recognition does carry certain responsibilities. If you try to ignore gravity, you’ll quickly find yourself bruised or worse. If Catholicism seems to be true, but you choose to ignore it, you deny yourself opportunities for healing and strength in the face of Man’s broken nature. So, if you think Catholicism might be true, due diligence calls for at least some further investigation.
 

Ok, what then? How do I investigate?

Sites like Strange Notions will certainly help, but you may also want to join a Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) class. Contact a nearby parish and ask to be connected with the RCIA teacher (the priest or office staff should be able to help.) If you’re looking on the parish website, you probably want to email the Director of Religious Education (DRE). RCIA classes are meant to help you understand Catholicism, so you can figure out whether you accept it. When you say ‘Amen,’ we want to make sure you know exactly what you’re getting into, and are consenting with a willing and joyful heart. RCIA classes cover basic Catholic theology and help you get a handle on how your new faith is lived.
 

But what if I’m not sure?

Enrolling in RCIA classes isn’t a promise to convert. The first time I attended RCIA classes, I didn’t plan to convert; I just wanted to learn about Catholicism directly from the Catholic Church. And I was still unconvinced by the time Advent rolled around. The other students in the class were making a public declaration of their intention to convert, so I dropped out of the class. The next year, after a bit more reading, arguing, and thinking, I enrolled again, this time meaning to stay to the end.
 

What should I tell my parents/friends/coworkers/cat?

It’s fine to take a little time before discussing your thoughts with friends and family. You’ll want to speak to them eventually, but you’re allowed a little time to come to peace with your decision before you wade into fights or discussions. Remember, there’s a lot of philosophical diversity among atheists, so the points that were convincing to you may not be compelling to someone who starts with very different assumptions. I find it helpful to approach stressful discussion not as debates, but as explanations. At the end of the conversation, I want my friend to understand what my reasoning was even if she may still disagree with.
 

But what if a friend brings up a question I don’t know the answer to?

It’s alright not to have answers to every question you get asked. If your friend says something like, “But isn’t the translation of the third word in the second Epistle contested?” It’s fine to say, “I don’t know. But that word isn’t really what my conversion hinged on. So I might be curious about looking it up, but I don’t know the answer now, and that’s not what changed my mind.” It can also be helpful, for you and your friend, to table a disagreement until you speak to an expert or consult a reference. If you weren’t already an expert in Church history or other specialized topics, you should expect to encounter a lot of questions you don’t know the answers to offhand. Your friend’s questions may help spur your interest, but you shouldn’t treat them as a high-stakes pop quiz.
 

What if my strained interactions are with the Catholics I’m newly meeting, not the atheists I already knew?

The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints, but that saying is a lot more comforting when we’re thinking about how we’ll be welcomed and healed, instead of about who we’re likely to encounter in the waiting room. The Church is small-c catholic—it’s for everyone—so you’re at least as likely to run into some people who rub you the wrong way as you are at a dinner party.

The Church is different, not because it promised that everyone you meet will be well suited to you or kind, but because it informs you that you have a familial relationship to all these strange, abrasive people, and they to you. Catholics across the world are brothers and sisters in Christ, and we sometimes struggle to live together as a family, but we always desire it.

When you enter the Church, you may find it easier to receive patience or to know how to love your less-than-neighborly neighbor when you can ask Christ for grace and light through the sacraments. For now, ask for help in prayer, and ask other people or priests for help navigating a difficult relationship.
 

What will happen after I convert?

I would say that the terrifying and wonderful thing is that you’re in direct, personal contact with the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Every moment of wonder you’ve experienced as the resolution chord booms in a symphony, every moment of humble awe as a stranger or friend went out of their way to show you love (or every moment of surprise as you discovered the depths of love you were capable of giving), and every moment you felt the sudden relief of pieces falling into place (whether doing a puzzle, writing a math proof, or reaching the denouement of a mystery novel) were all shadows and images that were trying to point you toward God, the Person they resembled.

Think of what you would do if you were trying to teach someone a new language. First you’d point to objects and declare the nouns that corresponded. You might be able to act out verbs. And, after a while, your student might begin to pick up grammar by trial and error.

God shares himself with us through these glimpses of the transcendent. He meets us where we are, and tutors us in the language we speak. But, as you cleave to Him and His Church, you begin to have the opportunity to speak back and learn what was always meant to be your natural language.