Many times, I’ve come across arguments positing that morality cannot exist without religion, and variants thereof that assert that the tenets of Western law and civilization are themselves born of religious teachings (aka The Ten Commandments in the Public Square). I don’t find the latter compelling, for reasons I’ve detailed before and, in looking across the world and across history, I find ample reason to conclude that those arguments have it backwards: that religious teachings are themselves born of a morality that’s innate in human nature. This reverses the standard theistic religious premise that morality is “external,” i.e. defined by a higher power or greater being, and undermines the conclusion that religion is a necessary element in establishing and anchoring against drift a moral code upon which to build a legal system.
There are, by one count (itself subject to somewhat arbitrary definitional parameters), 4200 religions and variants in the world. Many of these follow what we in the West might call a “traditional” model, in that they postulate the existence of an interventionist Creator deity (or perhaps multiple deities collected into a Pantheon), but many do not. Some are more deistic, in that they postulate a non-interventionist Creator (i.e. a clockmaker God, that created the universe and then left it to run as it would), and some are nontheistic. There are also many religions that have died out, or that exist primarily as relics of history.
Religion and religious belief/practice in some form is found in the vast majority of history’s cultures, which tells us… something. I’m partial to the conclusions posited in J. Anderson Thomson’s book Why We Believe in God(s), that there are elements of human nature (i.e. our evolutionary DNA encoding) that strongly bias us to belief. That our behaviors and tendencies are driven by our DNA is obvious. We prefer sweet foods over bitter. We react, near-instantly, via chemical reactions and not conscious thought, to external stimuli, whether they be a lion charging, a twitching blade of grass that might be a lion about to charge, a person we find attractive, a toddler about to fall down a well, or the scent of a cinnamon bun wafting through the airport. That human cultures throughout history nearly-universally contain religions, but religions of widely disparate forms, leads us to a conclusion that we tend to religion itself, not the teachings of a particular religion.
With a sorta-caveat: that tendency towards religiosity is an outcome, not a foundation.
Successful societies throughout the world and throughout history have several common elements. They include proscriptions against murdering each other, against stealing from each other, and against doing other unjust things to each other. There are exceptions and “work-arounds,” of course, often put in place by people whose desire for power dominates, but in general, we witness a basic set of rules that societies, in order to survive, find their way to codifying.
This all makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Human babies are born wholly unable to fend for themselves, for a loooong time. In order for their DNA to propagate, they must be cared for and protected until they can, i.e. more than a decade. For this and for other reasons related to survival and the propagation of genetic code, human tendencies toward tribal living emerged. We are more likely to live long enough to procreate if we live in a group than if we live alone or in a pair. This is all beyond dispute.
Here’s where I diverge from those who believe that the moral values that keep societies functional are informed in us by a higher power. It’s evident that murder, theft, and false accusation work contrary to the success of a tribe. Across tribes? Well, that’s another story, and there are evolutionary benefits in tribe-vs-tribe hostility, which prompt other behavioral tendencies, but hold off on those for just a moment. Within the tribe, the person who murders another, or steals from another, or spreads lies about another, works against the well-being of the tribe, and reduces both his own chances to pass along his DNA and those of everyone in the tribe. This is an evolutionary pressure that will favor those who are, of their own inherent nature, less likely to murder or steal or perjure. The moral tenets reflected in the Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Commandments are born of human nature, not declared from on high to codify proper behavior. They’re wired into us by evolution, not written by an external Creator to guide otherwise-rudderless humans.
This explains why we find the same principles in every successful society, no matter that its prevalent religion is theistic, deistic, or nontheistic. If humans were inherently rudderless, then societies would emerge with wildly divergent moral codes, but we don’t see such out there. Yes, many tribal societies have had no problem with killing those of other tribes, but as I noted, that’s the spawn of a different set of evolutionary drivers, drivers that explain the ubiquity of war throughout history (and, indeed, countless wars informed by religious beliefs). Once a tribe reaches a certain size, the benefits to genetic propagation bestowed by allegiance to community reach a peak, and the benefits to genetic propagation from defeating or co-opting other communities come into play. This can explain why we’re so averse to harming our own, but often have far less problem with the collateral damage of war waged upon others.
The answer to this essay’s question, “whence morality?,” is innateness. The basic moral behaviors, the things we might do or not do that are codified into both religious teachings and secular law, are born of human nature as it has evolved over millennia. That innateness is why I don’t accept the arguments that, without religion, society will drift away from morality and devolve/dissolve into chaos. It’s why overt atheist Penn Jillette can say with total honesty and conviction:
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.
We don’t need a culture born of religious dogma to establish morality or anchor it against drift. Our human nature, which evolves far more slowly than cultures do, serves to keep things pointed in a consistent direction. That doesn’t mean it’s an ideal direction, just that the nature of humans is not going to change in any relevant time frame, and that we can reliably predict and try to manage human behaviors based on that unchanging nature.
A person of faith may rebut this conclusion, and may argue that the tendencies I assign to genetic coding are themselves bestowed upon us by God (and indeed there is a tenet in Islam that posits we are all born with an innate submission to God). If so, that actually bolsters the case that morality is innate, and not subject to drift without belief in a deity or higher power.
I’d also ask that person of faith, “which religious teachings are the ones that define morality?” Is it the Judeo-Christian ethic, as embodied in the Ten Commandments? And, if so, which is it, Judeo- or Christian? The Bible contains substantial contradictions, and contains numerous teachings apart from those contradictions that run against what a secular person of today would deem moral, including human sacrifice, slavery, the subjugation of women, the sale of children; and some teachings that make no sense or seem oddly trivial. Religious teachings are not supposed to be a menu from which to choose. They are a body of work that expects full obeisance, if they are to be deemed an immutable and foundational basis for morality. You can’t just choose Commandments 6, 7, and 9, and dismiss a good chunk of the Old Testament (as well as a number of New Testament teachings) in your declaration that morality is derived from God’s teachings.
And, what of all the other religions of the world, religions that have spawned the same moral basics against murder, theft, and perjury? Did they just luck into the same rule set as that of the Abrahamic religions? This, again, takes us back to the conclusion that, if God inhered into us a moral compass, we don’t need to hold that faith or religious teaching is necessary.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe that morals were imbued by an anthropomorphic and interventionist Creator, or by a watchmaker deity, or arose via evolutionary pressures. The result is the same – you don’t need a religious ethic to have an anchoring basis for society’s morals. Whether we’ve been wired to morality by a God or by evolution, the wiring is there, and it’s not going to go away if you don’t profess a faith in a God.
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I thought no religion sprang up to explain why things are and why we do c drain things. Which is easier to explain – don’t eat pigs because they carry parasites and diseases that humans are susceptible to because of our similar physiologists OR drought by eat pig because God said.
My other thought is that many people believe in ufo aliens because of a desire for a higher power that will save us or punish us.
I have come to believe that the proscriptions against homosexuality by peoples and religions worldwide predate organized religion and are part and parcel of human personal and tribal need for heterosexual relationships to propagate our DNA. It’s truly Who We Are.
Sylvia Bennion Bennion Education 3689 Racquet Club Circle Salt Lake City, Utah 84121 801-231-0311
‘Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.” ~Bono
I have often wondered why I have never felt the slightest inclination toward religion. I understand that as people face a high risk of death by sickness, accident, or aggression many have a need for something to ease their fear of death. But my Vietnam era military dog tags list my religion as “Atheist”, and the only person who claimed to have every right to kill me because of my lack of religion was a born-again Christian.
How can you trust anyone who’s only moral limit is the fear of punishment in an imaginary afterlife?
One element I deliberately avoided in the OP was the question “who’s more moral, the person who acts a certain way because it’s the right way to act, or the person who acts a certain way due to an external reward/punishment system?”
It’s not germane to the point I’m making, but it’s a valid question.
I’m in my eight decade and have been struggling for an answer to Whence Morality for nearly seven of those decades since I began reading about the Second World War and the Holocaust. My conclusion is that deep down we are still animals ready to pounce on each other at the slightest provocation or reason.
Although I’m aware that the explanation of our more developed animal brain is no longer captured well enough by the lizard or triune brain model—the triune brain consists of the reptilian complex, the paleo-mammalian complex (limbic system), and the neo-mammalian complex (neocortex), viewed as structures sequentially added to the forebrain in the course of evolution; wiki—I like to work with it to understand better the social evolutionary aspects of our behaviors as social animals.
In the model I’ve developed to go along with the lizard model, we survive better by cooperating. To be able to cooperate we need rules. Even as hunter-gatherers we need rules for who hunts, who gathers and then how the product is distributed. As we improved our rules and cooperated more we were able to grow and live together in ever greater numbers. In that way we continued specializing and growing into ever larger groups, but the more we specialized the more rules became necessary.
That also required that we have arbiters and enforcers and eventually a leader to oversee it all. Those leaders had to have authority to allow them to exercise their functions, but that authority also required trust of impartiality. In time the body of rules developed into religions and the authority figures first into dead ancestors and eventually into metaphysical gods. In the older religions certain rules gained ascendance through an evolutionary process. Thus, the Golden Rule and Ten Commandments as rules that seemed to work best for large bodies of people.
Back to our lizard model, as man evolved and was able to live under more rules, so did their limbic system and their neocortex. For some religions or sets of rules these worked better than others at keeping us from going after our fellow men. One thing is certain. Those rules allowed us to work more independently as individuals in the West, and thus be freer to learn by trial and error and advance most. It would seem, however, that the neocortex still has a ways to go for at least some segments of Western civilizations, including in our very own country, and obviously even as we are all equal we are also quite different as individuals.
That’s how in my opinion morality is a product of evolution but still a very iffy product if we go by how relatively easily so many have been mobilized to torture and kill their fellow men by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and more recently Al Qaeda and ISIS. Because it is still so iffy after so many centuries of evolution, I have grave reservations about relying on a morality that with the passage of time and our own human evolution is supposed to have become innate.
What about God, you ask. If we can agree that the laws of physics, the known and unknown ones, have been around since the “beginning,” whatever that is, then why can’t we posit that God, even the God of the three major monotheistic religions, created the basic particles and forces along with the laws of physics, gave them a little push, and voila the universe including humans. Being Almighty He could have then made a few teaks along the way, first to create consciousness, then to save us from ourselves through his Son, and so on.
I am perfectly at ease with that model both for religion and for society. It’s a rules based model. It allows for all kinds of different societies, and depending on the particular characteristics of each set of rules, the environments and constraints with which they were developed, and whether and how they are complemented by secular constitutions with different sources of authority, they will obviously perform differently. I could build further from there because I’ve also spent most of my life trying to understand why some societies and their economies function better than others (I’m fairly advanced on that) but for the purposes of Whence Morality I think this should suffice.
In a nutshell, my larger model starts with the proposition that development and growth are driven by change, that at the core of change is specialization, and that specialization requires new rules to coordinate the various new parts. Not only are hunting and gathering, and agriculture classic examples, but specialization happens even in machines. Thus the steam engine was the product of separating and specializing the heating and cooling cycles, and the key to success, which took Watt more than ten years, was coordinating the two. No surprise that Watt was an instrument maker and that it took new materials to finally get the job done.
Of course with progress we have had continuous specialization and an explosion of rules to coordinate the growing number of specialized entities at the product, company, and government level. You can see where that leads us to, including why I tend libertarian and try to be very humble when it comes to the issues. With respect to the different religions it also explains why some are more rigid than others, including within Christianity, and why some are able to lead the societies in which they reside to be more successful or not.
Beyond that my expanded model tries to figure out how to best manage change as a process. Since my basic training is in chemical engineering, I’ve broken down successful change into seven dynamic Unit Operations, a concept I took from CE. These are (1) change; (2) reconcile differences; (3) relieve stress; (4) discard failure and obsolescence; (5) learn, modify, readjust; (6) refine new rules; (7) homogenize, train, educate. These can be applied even to religion in one way or another depending of the change. Try it starting with the lizard and then hunters and gatherers. I’ll leave it there.
Xavier’s comment is superb. Mine is less superb but here it is anyway.
Immanuel Kant’s perspective on Morality is that duty leads to morality; doing a thing that needs doing even when you don’t want to is pure morality. If there is a reward, it contaminates the purity of the morality. I have a doubt I agree with him simply because of different personality types that do things, even “right” things, for very different reasons and I cannot think of a cosmic justification that one motive is better than another. What matters is what one does; its motive is a thing best left to God.
Peter Venetkolis writes: “you don’t need a religious ethic to have an anchoring basis for society’s morals”
But you DO need police for the simple reason that not everyone subscribes to the same morals. The power of religion is alignment of morals. Can you think of a society that evolved out of dozens of diverse moral codes? Neither can I.
“I’d also ask that person of faith, which religious teachings are the ones that define morality?”
All of them. If it isn’t about morality it also isn’t a “teaching”.
“Is it the Judeo-Christian ethic, as embodied in the Ten Commandments? And, if so, which is it, Judeo- or Christian?”
What Judeo-Christian ethic? There is no Christianity in the Ten Commandments; and vice versa, Christianity is free to ignore the Ten Commandments as originally given. They were largely restated in the New Testament just in case one decides to not even read the Old Testament, but also condensed to the two great commandments, which if understood and obeyed renders the ten (and the thousand) moot.
“The Bible contains substantial contradictions”
Indeed it does, and it is in those contradictions one can learn wisdom or at least the boundaries of applicability of the general; as limited by the specific. Thou shalt not kill, unless I tell you to. Thou shalt not bear false witness, unless you are a spy for Moses or Abraham saying his wife was his sister (which could still be true). These seeming contraditions resolve when the more correct understanding is applied; “kill” means murder, one person to another, for passion or gain. I have not encountered an exception for that. False witness means testifying against you, falsely, in a court where you are accused of a crime for which you are actually innocent. There’s no exceptions to THAT (that I know of). Ordinary lying, “Does this make me look fat?” “No” (because something else does! — a prevarication) appears not to violate the ten commandments, but might violate the two. The problem with telling the truth is that it is not as easy as it sounds and telling the truth will typically not align with you hearing or comprehending accurately what I have truthfully said or written, except in the rare case where all of the “referents” for the words I use are common to both of us.
“Religious teachings are not supposed to be a menu from which to choose.”
Says who? That sounds like just another teaching!
“your declaration that morality is derived from God’s teachings.”
I declare that the morality that will count in the next life, and to a certain extent in this one, is defined by God, the bus driver of the next life and the one who will inspect your tickets.
Obviously any person can declare morals and attempt to impose that morality on others which is essentially what happens in all cases anyway, including and particularly religious morals. Maybe any particular commandment came from God, maybe not; odds seem to be against it.
“And, what of all the other religions of the world. Did they just luck into the same rule set as that of the Abrahamic religions?”
In a sense, yes, that is exactly correct. Two views seem to rise above others: (1) There is a God that imbued all people with at least a hint of universal morals or (2) Darwinism: There is not a God; all possible moralities have existed at one time or another and those that facilitate “society” survived and those whose moral codes tend to be destructive of society result in small societies or none at all.
I sense both at play for the simple reason that God either cannot, or is choosing not to, impose a moral code that has no chance of surviving a Darwinian struggle.
“if God inhered into us a moral compass, we don’t need to hold that faith or religious teaching is necessary.”
Necessary for what, exactly? If I declare an observation out of my inherited moral compass, I have just published a “religious teaching”. Is it necessary? Good heavens, what a silly notion! No, it’s just me blurting out what I believe.
“It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe that morals were imbued by an anthropomorphic and interventionist Creator, or by a watchmaker deity, or arose via evolutionary pressures. The result is the same”
So it seems. Which means the existence of common (but hardly universal) morals cannot be used as proof or disproof of God.
“you don’t need a religious ethic to have an anchoring basis for society’s morals.”
True; you need POLICE. That’s true even in a church, and is necessary simply because not everyone was imbued with the SAME morals.
Rosseau speaking of the social contract includes that this “contract” can be shaped by religion; such that largely-Christian Americans had sufficiently similar beliefs about morality to be ABLE to construct a society.
The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was an imposed society and eventually fell apart. No GLUE and vastly different moralities among its many constituent societies.
You explore many interesting themes here, but several of them stray far afield from the limited scope of this essay, which my answer to the question as to where the moral codes that exist in our and other societies originate. This is born of the assertion I’ve seen, time and again, that atheists cannot have a moral code, because such a code is externally decreed by a Creator.
I am familiar with arguments surrounding atheism and morality. Of course atheists have morality; and some of those moralities are loosely aligned with other atheists and sometimes with theists.
What they lack is an alignment mechanism, and without alignment it is like unmagnetized iron; the domains point in all directions and so do moral compasses.
As it happens in most western nations, religion aligns society, and society aligns its members, even those without religion. I grew up without religion, and yet I believed the earth was created in 7 days, until the day came as a teenager when I sat on a rock composed almost entirely of conical shells. It was obviously ancient. It had been under a sea but was now at 7000 feet elevation. I remember almost a jaw-dropping moment of insight; the Earth is old, like really, really old.
Some people can become unhinged at that point, a phenomenon that atheists worry about with some, but not a lot, of merit. If there’s no God then anything goes because there can be no meaningful morality. I emphasize “meaningful” because of course there’s “morality”, but what it is and how it came to be has no meaning, it’s just chemistry and DNA. Your “right” might be my “wrong” and who can possibly say who is correct when the very concept of “correct” itself ceases to have meaning?
But I ask of atheists, what aligns your moral compass? I have at least got an alignment; like the compass rose at an airport that pilots use to align their magnetic compasses. I don’t have to invent my entire moral code from scratch. I revisit it regularly but that’s quite a different thing than supposing a human being born and raised without guidance is going to have ANY kind of predictable moral compass.
Some philosophers have explored this very thing, Immanuel Kant of which I have mentioned, also Rosseau and if I remember right Plato also explores it in “The Republic”. All are exploring the source, or ultimate authority, of right and wrong. At best it seems to be an “emergence”, a phenomenon purely of numbers.
In American jurisprudence the authority is found in a jury. A group of 12 is considered sufficient to reveal the probable collective morality. Each persons moral compass will point in its own direction but collectively there will presumably be some sort of alignment.
Unfortunately, raw morality (limbic system, mirror neurons, empathy, sympathy) can be manipulated rather easily; and you might well mistake sympathy for “innnocence” in a legal sense.
One of my grandmothers voted for Bill Clinton because he “looked nice”. The other voted against Bush because Bush hung Ollie North out to dry, and Ollie North “looked nice” (that he did, I’ll admit).
Is that “morality”? Yeah, it is. Mirror neurons to the rescue.
Having a codified guide helps to avoid being manipulated.
Charity, for instance, is personal. I choose what to give and who receives. I do not have a duty, or a right, to take your money to give to the poor. But if I did not have the guidance of the Good Samaritan example then I might mistake that I not only have a right, but a duty, to take from everyone and give to someone, feeling righteous in my power to take from you. Fly, virtue signals, fly!
“What they lack is an alignment mechanism”
The crux of my essay is that there *is* an alignment mechanism, born of evolution. An individual can choose to override the basic tendencies called “human nature,” but that doesn’t mean they go away. They’re not invented from scratch, which is why they are consistent across thousands of societies, with thousands of forms of religion, theistic, deistic, and atheistic. And, as I wrote, religion is itself a consequence of human nature.
And, therefore, I disagree with your assertions about “meaningful,” as I wrote.
Also, to your previous comment:
“”Religious teachings are not supposed to be a menu from which to choose.”
Says who?”
To start, we have the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Suggestions. Beyond that, every religion with an afterlife requires certain behaviors for attaining that afterlife, and many offer afterlife punishments for straying from those “suggestions.”
“”if God inhered into us a moral compass, we don’t need to hold that faith or religious teaching is necessary.”
Necessary for what, exactly? ”
For having a moral compass. If it’s coded into us by a Creator, then we are not fabricating it out of whole cloth, nor are we lacking an alignment mechanism.