Where do morals come from?
Theists love to claim that morality comes from God. Actually it’s worse than that: they claim that morality can only come from God, and that without religion, the world would devolve into an amoral chaos of murder, thievery, and rape. To add insult to the claim, theists claim that atheists’ morality is borrowed from religion, that atheists grew up immersed in a Christian, Jewish and Islamic culture and absorbed their God-given morality. Atheists, they claim, are sort of unwitting Christians, Jews, or Muslims when it comes to morals.
Bullshit. Exactly the opposite is true. The truth is that theists have plagiarized their morals from human nature. The morals they claim came from God are actually words that humans put into God’s mouth.
The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Take any freshman college course in cultural anthropology and you’ll learn two things:
- Until the period of European colonialism, most people in the world had never heard of Yahweh, the Abrahamic god.
- Most human societies follow the same morals as Yahweh’s followers; rules about marriage, adultery, theft, child abuse, lying, stealing, and so forth are found everywhere, and always have been.
So in spite of having no knowledge of Yahweh, virtually every culture on Earth had a strong moral system almost identical to that of Western religions. Which raises the obvious question: If morality can only come from God, how did all those other cultures come up with the same rules?
The answer is simple: these are human morals, not God-given morals.
Which leads to the question: Where do human morals actually come from?
As primates evolved, emotions like love, fear, jealousy, anger, and lust became embedded in our brains. These traits helped ensure the procreation of children and protected them as they grew up. Late in our evolution, human brains evolved to support language, and we put words to these instinctive behaviors. As we organized ourselves into families, clans, villages, towns, and countries, our instinctive moral knowledge was codified into morality and laws.
Cultural evolution (the study of how ideas propagate across society, change, and mutate down through history) defines something you might call the “cultural-genetic ecology,” that is, the collection of human brains and the cultural information we load into them. Ideas “live” in this ecosystem, and just as in biology, an ecosystem has to be friendly for an idea to survive in it.
A fish can’t live in the desert, and a joke told in Russian can’t survive in Polynesia. Ideas, whether about religion, science, or art, can only thrive and propagate when the culture is friendly and accepting. If the “cultural ecology” is hostile to an idea, then the idea simply dies. It’s only when an idea resonates with a society’s culture that it will take off, “go viral” and spread throughout the society.
This leads to genetics and evolution: we’re pre-programmed by our genes to accept certain ideas and reject others. The cultural-genetic ecology in which ideas “live” is strongly dependent on human genetics.
Here’s an example: “Kill your third child.” Logically, this makes sense because overpopulation is a real threat. But it violates one of our deepest instincts: to protect children at all costs. So this idea dies in our brains before it can reproduce and spread across society. Infanticide has always been rare, and when it occurred, shocking.
But look at the opposite: ideas (morals) that resonate with our genes.
- Adultery is bad
- Rape is bad
- Theft is bad
… and many more. And perhaps more telling:
- Divorce is found almost everywhere
- Polygamy is common
- Male adultery is discouraged but tolerated, yet female adultery is widely condemned
- In spite of strong condemnation of female adultery, it is also common.
These last four are particularly interesting because they also reflect genetic realities: anthropologists tell us that polygamy, divorce, and both male and female infidelity are good evolutionary strategies.
So the real origin of the moral codes shared by most cultures is our own genetics. We have instincts that were built in by evolution over millions of years, and we put words to them once language evolved.
Human morality has been around far, far longer than Yahweh’s purported morals. Jews, Christians and Muslims simply hijacked morality and claimed it as their own. Then they went on to rewrite both our history books and our philosophy books, and have now convinced an awful lot of people that their revisionist claims are the truth.
And don’t ever let a Christian, Jew or Muslim claim otherwise. Theists are nothing more than plagiarizers, stealing and giving no credit to the original source.
Image: from THE DRAMA, ITS HISTORY, LITERATURE AND INFLUENCE ON CIVILIZATION, 1903, after an original painting by D. Etchevary
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