"Humanity could only have survived and flourished if it held social and personal values that transcended the urges of the individual, embodying selfish desires - and these stem from the sense of a transcendent good"
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Peacocke is trying to pull off a careful synthesis: to defend moral realism without pretending humans are angels. The line pivots on a shrewd evolutionary concession - individuals are driven by “urges” and “selfish desires” - then refuses the fashionable conclusion that morality is therefore mere social camouflage. Survival and flourishing, he argues, required values that “transcended” the individual, and the kicker is that even our selfishness is downstream of something bigger: “the sense of a transcendent good.”
The intent isn’t to scold desire; it’s to reframe it. Peacocke suggests that what we call conscience, duty, solidarity, even shame, are not accidental add-ons to human nature but the very conditions that made a social species viable. That’s a theological move dressed in evolutionary language: morality emerges in history and biology, yet it still points beyond them. He smuggles transcendence in through the back door of practicality: if ethics works this well, maybe it’s tracking something real.
The subtext pushes against two rival stories. Against hard Darwinian reductionism, it insists values are not just strategies for gene propagation. Against a purely authoritarian religion, it claims the “good” is sensed, not merely imposed - an interior orientation rather than external policing.
Context matters: Peacocke wrote in a late-20th-century Britain where science-and-religion debates were often staged as zero-sum. His signature move was to treat evolution not as an enemy of God-talk but as the medium through which moral and spiritual awareness becomes thinkable. The sentence is an attempt to keep both the teeth of biology and the authority of ethics.
The intent isn’t to scold desire; it’s to reframe it. Peacocke suggests that what we call conscience, duty, solidarity, even shame, are not accidental add-ons to human nature but the very conditions that made a social species viable. That’s a theological move dressed in evolutionary language: morality emerges in history and biology, yet it still points beyond them. He smuggles transcendence in through the back door of practicality: if ethics works this well, maybe it’s tracking something real.
The subtext pushes against two rival stories. Against hard Darwinian reductionism, it insists values are not just strategies for gene propagation. Against a purely authoritarian religion, it claims the “good” is sensed, not merely imposed - an interior orientation rather than external policing.
Context matters: Peacocke wrote in a late-20th-century Britain where science-and-religion debates were often staged as zero-sum. His signature move was to treat evolution not as an enemy of God-talk but as the medium through which moral and spiritual awareness becomes thinkable. The sentence is an attempt to keep both the teeth of biology and the authority of ethics.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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