Our working plan is to address four main topics. These are:
1. What does evolutionary science teach about morality and intentional behaviors?
The main target is to characterize the relation between group discipline and moral behavior. According to evolutionary science, group discipline is an emerging property of social mammals: basic behavioral mechanisms among individuals develop early (from a taxonomical viewpoint) into complex social relations of dominance, obedience, and empathy. All of these are ruled by basic social norms. Do such phenomena constitute the transcendental ground for the acquisition of moral behaviors? Otherwise, does human morality show irreducible features?
2. Does such a science matter to theological ethics?
Theological ethics broadly construed is any theory making theistic assumptions. A dominant feature of theological ethics is the claim that both God and human beings do have free will. That is, theological ethics prima facie adheres to a kind of libertarianism and rejects determinism, although has an unclear attitude towards compatibilism. Contrary to such assumptions, the neodarwinist reading of evolution is strictly determinist. Can the evolutionary theory on the emergence of morality provide a non determinist account of morally relevant behaviours? Are the Gaia Hypothesis, the Multilevel Selection Theory, or Epigenetics the natural setting to argue scientifically for the consistency of the theory of evolution and theological ethics?
3. Panentheism, evolution, and Divine Command Theory.
We would like to test whether panentheism constitutes a non determinist account of the natural history of the universe. Panentheism is deeply rooted in the heresiologist literature, it is reinvigorated into process theology by C.Hartshorne, and it has recently received attention in the works of theologians as J.Moltmann and A.Ganoczy. Can panentheism be the more adequate account for the compatibility of God’s ethical projects and the emergentist approach to morality? Can the biologic rootedness of morality be conceived as a way to make human beings sensitive to divine commands?
4. Panentheism, the evolutionary argument from evil, and the Divine Command Theory (again).
Traditional arguments from evil concludes from the existence of ordinary and extaordinary evils that the classical theist notion of God is not consistent with our moral standards. As a consequence, the argument from evil appears supportive to skepticism towards God’s existence. Now, if the evolution is an instrument to the production of morality in human beings, does all the evils related to the evolutionary processes provide evidence for an evolutionary argument against God’s existence? We want to inquiry how to develop such an argument, and we would like to check whether it is possible to dismantle it.