Manchester University’s latest insights on the origins of life on Earth seem to have prompted some of my friends to start defending their religious views even when unprovoked. This makes one wonder if they don’t feel compelled to do so just because they feel this kind of discovery poses a serious threat to their beliefs. Indeed, it does, but so does the theory of evolution and yet most people …ahem…most sensible people (the figures in the US don’t look so good) accept evolution and even will go as far as interpreting the Bible a little bit more metaphorically in order for their beliefs not to contradict Darwin’s amazing theory. But it’s true that this discovery; that life can indeed emerge spontaneously given the right ingredients in the right environment, pushes God further away from the stage. Of course, for a lot of us, there is nobody standing behind the backstage curtain. But of course, it’s hard to come to this conclusion when your parents and the local church have continually slammed God’s story into your head as a child.
It’s typical for believers to try and fill every gap there is in our scientific knowledge with God. Carl Sagan describes this progressively limited Deity as the God-of-the-gaps. The genesis of life was one of those gaps that was asking to be filled. Ever since Darwin’s theory took over Paley’s intelligent design hypothesis in the minds of people, making the mythical watchmaker a blind one, the life genesis mystery was the last place in Biology to be available to be filled with a puddle of wishful thinking. The idea was that God didn’t make every living organism, but did make the first organism so that millions of years later, with 90% of the species ever to have existed extinct, we would emerge. Well, scratch that. Confirming what most scientist believed and what, to be honest, a lot of people expected, life has be shown to be able to emerge spontaneously. Not a big surprise when Chemistry teaches that different molecules of matter interact with each other and make other molecules of matter. If you had already thrown out the idea that human being had souls, then why be surprised that life emerged from basic laws of physics and chemistry like the rest of matter?
I’ve already drifted too long from the point I was intending to make, the one I’m hinting towards in my title: the idea that without God we have no morals. Of course I’d just be tempted to point towards a country with a prominent number of atheists (like Sweden, or my own, France), but then I’d get some sort of answer in the lines of “well, our society reflects religious morals and applies them into law”. But that’s forgetting all the farfetched laws that exist in the Bible and that nobody follows. So how do we know which laws to follow in the Bible? Do we chose which ones to follow and which ones not to? Yes. But what do we base that choice on…mmmmh…maybe some pre-existing morality inherent to us ? Well, so much for the idea that the Bible is our source of goodness. Although, to be fair, our society does very much reflect our religious heritage. How else could you explain why gay rights are still so limited, even today?
Well you may now challenge me to explain where these inherent morals come from. Simple, they evolved. In the context of evolution though, the concepts of morality come under different names. The most obvious one is altruism. The kind of altruism you find in Humans and other primates. One of my friends has suggested that chimpanzee might have God in their lives too (we just don’t know it) and that would then explain why they also appeared moral. The only useful information I get from that kind of pathetic argument is that my opponent is clutching at straws at this point. But to make him happy, I’ll point towards a dumber animal that shows a primitive form of altruism: social ants. Come to think of it, the example I’m about to use is readily applicable to most living species on Earth. A common claim is that, without moral being delivered by the divine, there is just no way we could have morals and therefore if God didn’t exist, we should be killing, stealing and generally being an ass to everyone else. In fact, evolution favors certain kinds of altruism. Take a population of animals divided into two groups, those who help each other and those who don’t (Take in account that whether they help each other or not is not a conscious choice of theirs but a product of their evolution, in this example they can’t swith). Let’s say that those animals have a capacity to remember who was helpful and who wasn’t and bear a grudge. Say that these animals become incapable to fend for themselves for whatever reason at given points in time. Altruist individuals will initially help everyone. Selfish individuals will help no one but let others help them. From a utilitarian point of view, the selfish life looks like a good life, since you do not waste energy and time on others but let others waste time and energy on you. However, as I have stated earlier, those animals have some form of memory and can bear a grudge. When an altruist discovers that his services are not being reciprocated, he will boycott helping the selfish individual in future. As a selfish individual’s entourage slowly discovers his selfishness, that individual is left with no one to support him through his hard times, neither his altruist or selfish peers will come to help. So while altruists continue getting occasional help in their hard times when they are lucky to be acquainted with other altruists, a selfish individual gets no help and therefore suffers a greater chance of dying. Thus the altruistic mode of life comes on top of selfishness, a position that is more prone to lead to death of the individual. This is but one, in a vast amount of examples in which altruism is favored. In nature, we tend to see a lot of cooperation within species and even in between species (most notably symbiosis, where two animals of different species are so bent on helping each other they evolve to become inter-dependent on each other).
So clearly, many facetes of what we call morality and what scientist interpret as altruism, empathy and the like, can be explained through our evolutionary heritage. But even without going as far as showing it in evolutionary terms, the idea that without God’s judgment we would go around killing people is slightly strange. Sure it sounds valid to many, but if you really think about it, you’re much better off coming to an agreement with someone not to try to kill him in exchange for him not trying to kill you than attempting to kill him. That way, not only are you saving time and energy and possibly your life, but you’re also saving yourself from the risk of being wounded and therefore being killed by the next freak that showed up at your doorstep or your inability to feed yourself. Clearly, if you think about it really hard, an amoral humanity where everyone went around killing each other for sport would have its population diminished by some ghastly amount. But, evolution favors genes that can be passed on successfully from generation to generation. Would the previously described scenario be an ideal one for this trend? Of course not, most people having perished under someone else’s hand, would dissapear leaving no genetic trace. But say in this horrible, horrible world, a bunch of people decide to cooperate, helping their wounded and being assured that they will get the same treatment. Because of numbers they are stronger and their individual chances of surviving are augmented. Not to mention that, being in a little community of their own, they can reproduce more easily. So while others mutually erase their genetic material from the world, the cooperating people successfully thrive and rebuild a society. Of course, this is never going to happen, because we already are the cooperating beings. And many species of animals nicely cooperate with each other regardless of whether they belong to the same family or not. Just look at those voracious lions, satisfying their hunger by eating a bunch of gazelles. It would probably be easier to just jump on another Lion and eat it, that would save an individual a lot of time. But it just doesn’t happen for all the reasons I’ve stated.
In brief, a chimpanzee doesn’t need God to be good to his peers and neither does a human being. And calling upon the 5 most horrible atheists in history is a weak argument. You’ve heard that one before haven’t you, the Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot thing…and you spend the first 5 minutes explaining that Hitler didn’t show any sign of atheism and how the people who participated in the genocide like Goebbels were religious. There’s a reason that the belt of SS soldiers said “God is with us”, it wasn’t just fancy dress. But we don’t blame Goebbels religiosity to the massacre because there is no correlation. Same with atheism, the fact that Stalin or Mao were atheist is as much to the point as the fact that they were both born in December. However, where there is correlation (and this is probably the reason why the prior shit argument even surfaced to start with) is in the massacres that are done clearly in the name of religion. The crusades is the prime example. Can we think of something more recent? Islamic terrorism. You can also bet there are a few people in Iran who are really suffering right now from “God’s moral code”. And is it moral for the Pope to promote unrealistic demands of abstinence, at the expense of people who could hardly no better, causing many preventable deaths? Which raises an interesting question for Catholics, if God’s morals are so solid and the Pope supposedly talks to God, how come some people disaprove the new Pope so much? Sounds like in fact no one is really convinced by their own stories to me or they aren’t actively trying to think about how it all doesn’t make sense. Come to think of it, the latter option is probably the most valid. However, living in denial can ever do so much…
