Evolution produces good and bad people

I discovered in http://plus.maths.org/latestnews/sep-dec08/gametheory/index.html a rather nice explanation of how evolution can bring about a balance in society between good and bad people. Society can have some trusting and some suspicious "Alices", and some trustworthy and some deceitful "Bobs". Encounters between the four possible combinations of Alice and Bob have different payoffs. The best payoff for Bob comes from being deceitful, which means that the best strategy for Alice is to be suspicious. But the best payoff for Alice and Bob combined comes from being trusting and trustworthy.

If people are simply one or the other, evolution would work according to the old "survival of the fittest" myth and produce suspicious and deceitful people. Mutations producing trusting and trustworthy people might produce a locally successful society but it would be unstable because deceitful individuals would still do better.

But then suppose we have social awareness, whereby individuals are able to observe the behaviour of others in previous social interactions and modify their strategies accordingly. It is better to trust a trustworthy person and it is better to be trustworthy so as not to be distrusted. Evolution will begin to produce more "good" people, or at least people who are good more often. But in the long term this will only work if there is the possibility of deceit and suspicion to keep the need for social awareness alive, and this requires the reality of at least a few "bad" people. So a stable society with the best overall outcome for all will have some bad people in it.

This does not rule out the possibility that matters can be improved by culture. Training people in social awareness can reduce the requirement for people to be tested by real-world deceitful or suspicious encounters.

Faith and belief

I'm not writing sermons at the moment so this post is a kind of substitute. I have the privilege of a wonderful cycle ride to work through the lanes of Hampshire and West Sussex. Time to collect my thoughts. The autumn colours have been glorious this year and I have rejoiced in them. I know that what I'm supposed to do is express the belief that this beauty is a pale reflection of God's glory. But somehow that doesn't cut it for me. It seems to me that what I am seeing really is the glory, complete with all the death and decay that makes autumn so beautiful. Not just a reflection, but the real deal, here and now.

Does this make me a nature-worshipper? I don't think so, unless I am pedantic with the often quoted meaning of worship - recognizing the worth of something or someone. It's possible that it makes me a panentheist - seeing God in everything.

What I am increasingly having problems with is subscribing to an elaborate system of beliefs, a construct, a set of rules. I don't mean rules for right living, but rules in the conservative Christian sense of a mechanism of sin, repentance, salvation. I am a man of (some) faith and try to be a disciple of Jesus, but I am finding it less necessary and even less possible to believe specific stuff.

The things I have been invited to believe during my Christian life fit into two categories: (a) beliefs that are expressed in a language that is borrowed from normal life but which is "overloaded" (computer programming jargon) with a spiritual meaning and (b) beliefs in things that we can never know one way or the other.

Examples of (a) - borrowed language - are phrases like "Jesus is the Son of God", "we are redeemed", "Jesus is alive", "God speaks to us". All these ideas are pictures borrowed from universally understood reality. Some people feel the existence of a spiritual dimension quite acutely. For such people, I imagine it might be possible or even quite natural to project the meanings of "son", "redeemed", "alive", speaks" and so on over into that spiritual plane and to make sense of them. But I have never really experienced or understood a division between secular and sacred, between temporal and spiritual, so such projections are quite meaningless to me. As poetic images, they give us language and ideas to help us talk about God, but that is a long way from a belief system.

Examples of (b) - things we can never know for sure - are concepts of an after-life and of God the Creator. I have always had difficulty with the first of these. Frankly, I don't think that believing in a personal life after death would make me a better person. But the concept of the Creator has been helpful. It brings a sense of stewardship, that the world is loaned to us on trust. And I have never had a problem with reconciling such a belief with the scientific model of evolution, the overwhelming evidence that evolution provides the most reasonable framework for understanding life on this planet. So one belief is helpful to me at the moment, the other is not. And this is clearly a personal matter. For some people, belief in life after death might make a huge positive difference to how they live. And, on the other side, there are many with a great sense of stewardship and care for the environment who do not believe in a Creator at all. Which begs the question for me: what matters more - what you believe, or how you live? Put so starkly, the answer seems obvious, but a big slice of organized religion seems to disagree.

Greetings

Greetings - this is my new blog. For many years I have had a website www.trikeshed.com but I have not been that good at keeping it up to date.

It may be a while before anything interesting appears here. Watch this space!

Mike