Person

Michael Ruse

Michael Ruse (1940-2024) was a British-born Canadian philosopher of biology, one of the most prolific writers on Darwinism, evolutionary theory, and the science-and-religion question in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He is important to apologetics for two reasons that pull in opposite directions. First, he was a lifelong atheist and Darwinian who testified against creationism in the landmark McLean v. Arkansas trial (1981). Second, and more useful to the theist, he is the best-known modern exponent of the view that morality is an evolutionary illusion, a position he stated so bluntly that it has become a standard citation for the moral argument rather than against it.

Ruse is frequently named as the authority behind the claim that morality can be grounded in evolution, empathy, and human cooperation without God. That appeal misfires: Ruse's actual position is that objective morality does not exist, and that our sense of binding obligation is a trick our genes play to make us cooperate. See Evolution and Empathy Ground Morality (Defeater).

Biography

• 1940, Born in Birmingham, England, into a Quaker family; later became an atheist.
• 1962, Emigrated to Canada; long career at the University of Guelph.
• 1981, Served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, the trial that struck down an Arkansas "balanced treatment" (creation-science) statute. His testimony on what distinguishes science from non-science was influential and also widely criticized by philosophers of science (notably Larry Laudan).
• 2000s-2010s, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University; founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy.
• 2024, Died. Left a large body of work spanning evolutionary theory, the history of Darwinism, and the relationship between science and religion.

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The illusion thesis (why apologists cite him)

Ruse's most-quoted claim, written with the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, is that ethics is a survival mechanism with no objective truth behind it:

Ethics is an illusion put in place by our genes to make us good cooperators... morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes. (Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson, "The Evolution of Ethics," 1985)

Ruse restated the point in his own work:

Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction... and any deeper meaning is illusory. (Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm, 1989)

The structure of the view matters for apologetics:

• It grounds moral feeling, not moral fact. Ruse holds that natural selection installed our sense of obligation because cooperators out-reproduced defectors. The feeling that we objectively ought to be kind is, on his account, real as a feeling and false as a claim about the world.
• It is moral anti-realism, not a secular moral realism. Ruse is not offering a naturalistic foundation for objective right and wrong. He is denying that there is any objective right and wrong to be founded. This is the same family of views as J.L. Mackie's error theory and Richard Joyce's fictionalism.
• He thought the illusion was useful and even necessary. Ruse held that we should go on living morally, that the illusion is one we cannot and should not shed, which is precisely the lived-versus-stated tension the theist presses: he behaves as though morality binds while his theory says it does not.

Apologetic significance

1. He is the wrong witness for "evolution grounds morality." When a skeptic appeals to Ruse to argue that empathy and evolution can ground ethics without God, the appeal cites a man who says the opposite: that the ethics in question is an illusion of the genes. Quoting Ruse concedes the theist's central claim, that naturalism explains why we feel bound, not why we are bound. See Evolution and Empathy Ground Morality (Defeater) and Moral Argument.
2. He converges with atheist debunkers. Ruse's illusion thesis sits alongside Sharon Street's Darwinian dilemma and Richard Joyce's evolutionary debunking: a cluster of atheist thinkers who agree that evolution, if it explains our moral cognition, does not vindicate its objectivity. See Sharon Street and Atheist Moral Realism Defeater.
3. His demarcation testimony is contested even by atheists. Ruse's McLean account of what makes something science was challenged by Larry Laudan, an illustration that the "science versus religion" boundary Ruse policed is philosophically softer than popular usage assumes. See Methodological Naturalism Critique.
4. His compatibilism about science and faith cuts against New Atheism. Unlike Dawkins, Ruse argued that Darwinism and Christianity are not necessarily in conflict and publicly criticized the New Atheists' tone and arguments, which makes him an atheist witness against the strongest anti-religious rhetoric.

Selected works

• The Darwinian Revolution (1979)
• "The Evolution of Ethics" (1985, with E.O. Wilson)
• The Darwinian Paradigm (1989)
• Taking Darwin Seriously (1986)
• Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (2001)
• Darwinism and Its Discontents (2006)
• Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know (2015)

See also

• Evolution and Empathy Ground Morality (Defeater), the defeater that turns Ruse's own concession against the objection he is cited to support.
• Moral Argument, the positive case Ruse's anti-realism clears the ground for.
• Atheist Moral Realism Defeater, for atheists who, unlike Ruse, claim objective moral facts without God.
• Moral Anti-Realism Defeater, the response to Ruse's own position stated as a thesis to be answered.
• Sharon Street, the atheist author of the Darwinian dilemma that parallels Ruse's illusion thesis.
• Methodological Naturalism Critique, on the demarcation questions raised by Ruse's McLean testimony.
• David Hume, the origin of the is-ought gap Ruse's view presupposes.