I.

On page 534 of Volume 2 of On What Matters, Parfit writes¹:

If our normative beliefs were mostly produced by evolutionary forces, we would expect that we would have beliefs that were reproductively advantageous, by making it likely that we would have more descendants.

If we ask which normative beliefs would be most likely to have this effect, there are some obvious answers. We would believe that we have strong reasons to try to have as many surviving children as we can, as an end in itself, and not merely because having children would promote our own well-being. But most people do not believe that they have such reasons. When people have become able to use artificial birth control, most of them have chosen to have fewer children.

We can similarly claim that, if our moral beliefs were mostly produced by evolutionary forces, we would expect people to believe that they have a duty to have and raise as many children as they can, and that deciding not to have children would be wrong. But this is not what people have believed. Those who decide to have no children have often been revered or admired. If our normative beliefs were selected to maximize the number of our descendents, and of other people who have our genes, these various facts would be hard to explain.

II.

I was rather disappointed with this argument.

I.

It’s difficult to imagine anything that better emblematises the conflict between science and religion than the image of an unrepentant Galileo, scowling as he is forced by the Church to recite his abjuration of heliocentrism. Galileo’s conflict with the Church was so dramatic that it’s tempting to view interactions between science and religion as zero-sum, where science gains ground to the extent that religion loses territory.

Before the Enlightenment, however, direct conflicts where people tried to use science to supplant religion were extremely rare; most conflicts were about the correct way to integrate religion and science.

II.

The 8^th century marked the beginning of the “Islamic Golden Age”, where the Islamic world rapidly translated and assimilated the philosophical and astronomical texts of other cultures. The translated Aristotelian corpus, combined with a pragmatic religious motivation¹, helped Islamic astronomy progress rapidly during this era.

The influence of the Aristotelian corpus was not limited to astronomy, however. Aristotelian physics deeply influenced Islamic philosophical cosmology, particularly the Peripatetic School, of which Ibn Sina (Latinised as Avicenna) was the most influential . Ibn Sina was enthralled with the Aristotelian framework, and his cosmogony was a distinct synthesis of Islamic and Aristotelian thought, positioning the universe as the necessary and eternal product of God. This was a radical departure from the creation ex nihilo advocated by classical Muslim theologians, and al-Ghazali, an influential 11th-century Islamic theologian, argued forcefully against these claims in The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

al-Ghazali’s issues with Peripatetic doctrine were deeper than mere cosmogony, however. al-Ghazali advocated occasionalism, a manifestly anti-Aristotelian theory of causation that places God as the direct cause of all events. For occasionalists, the existence of secondary causation would entail that “the hand of Allah is chained”², contrary to His omnipotence.

I was reading about a lipogrammatic novel called Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter “E”, by Ernest Vincent Wright, when I wondered how the lack of an overt letter “E” affected the pronunciation of the work.

A bit of Googling¹ led me to NLTK, a natural-language toolkit for Python. I typed:

import nltk

and the hard part was already done for me.