Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 13 November 2009

We are moral because our genes, as fashioned by natural selection, fill us full of thoughts about being moral.

M Ruse

The Divine Command Theory of Ethics

Believers in some religion always say their beliefs come from a higher authority than any other types of belief. It has become a social custom, not only by proponents of a dominant religion, but also by opponents of it to grant religious leaders a privileged position in regard to morality. People still consider religion and ethics to be inseparable, that religion is the basis of ethics. Without religion there is no morality.

The belief that human morality requires religion is not true. It is a result of two millennia of Christian indoctrination, of children being taught it from an early age, taught to think moral rules come from the bible, from the “Ten Commandments” and the teaching of Christ. Those taught it, usually just accept it thereafter, even as adults. Edgar Dahl, a spokesman for the German Society for Reproductive Medicine and an editor and author, refutes it in an essay Imagine No Religion, in 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), edited by Udo Schuklenk and Russell Blackford.

According to the “Divine Command Theory of Ethics”, right is what God approves of, wrong is what God disapproves of. As the Greek philosopher Socrates noticed more than two thousand years ago, it is flawed reasoning. Consider a simple question:

Is charity good because God approved of it, or did God approve of charity because it is good?

1. If charity is good just because God approved of it, then, if God chose to approve of cruelty and decry charity, cruelty would be good and charity would be evil. Would we then have to approve of evil because God did?
2. If God could never approve of cruelty because He is good, what can saying “God is good” mean? If, by the first argument, “good” means approved by God, then God is simply approving Himself. It is circular reasoning, and so invalid.
3. Divine command theory means God’s commands are arbitrary—evil could be good, and vice versa, if God commanded it. Either that or the doctrine that “God is good” is tautological.
4. The tautology is avoided if God approved of charity because it is good. But the judge of charity’s goodness could not just be God, for the decision is then again arbitrary, and could be otherwise.
5. The judgement must have some objective basis, such as relieving human suffering and reducing the amount of misery in the world. When charity does that, God finds it is good, and so approves of it.
6. If then God is judged by us as being good, based on what He approves of as good for us as a whole species, the doctrine that God is good must be so.
7. Now, it is not God’s approval or disapproval that makes some actions right and others wrong. Rather, it is their effect on human welfare that makes some actions right and others wrong, and God uses that to approve or disapprove.
8. Once you accept a criterion of God’s goodness, there is a standard of right and wrong that is independent of God. The religious conception of ethics has therefore necessarily been abandoned. We do not need God to tell right from wrong. Instead we judge what is moral by reference to the welfare of humanity as a whole.

Contrary to what religious leaders claim, ethics and morality are independent of religion and theology. Clergymen and moral theologians have no greater claim on moral truth than anyone able to comprehend that we humans judge human behaviour in relation to human society.

Criticizing Religion, the Modern Pastime

Jason Giannetti (“Richard Dawkins: Vox Populi” in the Journal of Liberal Education) thinks Richard Dawkins, in his book, The God Delusion, is just attacking his own straw men concerning God and religion, as part of the modern intellectual pastime—“the critique of religion, its beliefs, its practices, and its all-too-frequent harmful consequences”. It just shows modern, secular, western assumptions about God and religion. Giannetti might claim to be a religious liberal but his tone is one of an inquisitor, furious that someone should question the Universal Church.

He begins with a few disparaging views of the man to put his reader in the right mood. Dawkins is a new priest of truth. He is a scientist with a “blind faith” in science, and its method, as the ultimate arbiter of truth, a symptom of modernity. It is a strange inversion of reality that religious types always categorize scientists as the ones with “blind faith”. They have so much faith in their religion that none of them can see that the virtuous feature of religion, its faith, they all say is what is blind, not the inquiries of scientists.

The modern scientific priests are, it seems, too well respected by the laity, while philosophers and theologians are not respected enough. Philosophers are imploring scientists to “contribute to the conversation of matters which impinge upon all of us as part of the human community”. Evidently scientists are not concerned with what impinges on humanity! They have to transcend their narrow disciplines and, well… look at things from the perspective of a philosopher or a theologian… really!

As evidence for this, he cites the “best scientists of the past”, from Aristotle—someone most of us think of as a philosopher, although he was among the early Greek philosophers who actually observed rather than just speculated—“through to Avicenna, Averroes, Moses Maimonides, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, and Einstein”, to name those he could think of who might count as scientists. Several were mathematicians and philosophers or theologians who lived before the scientific revolution, or early in it before science had differentiated itself and distinguished itself as a discipline. Only Einstein can count as a scientist in the modern sense, though he died half a century ago, and even he was a theoretician not a practical experimenter.

“Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” said Wittgenstein. It is “above or below the natural sciences, not beside them”. Either way, the philosopher considers philosophy superior to science, apparently, because it is the foundation of science, even if the scientists do not appreciate it, or it is in a superior position to be able to criticize it. That is why Giannetti feels able to criticize Dawkins. His three beefs are Dawkins’:

1. one dimensional caricature of God
2. uncritical and exclusive understanding of truth
3. quasi Hegelian dialectical understanding of morality.

Santa in the Sky with Bribery

Dawkins does not have a nuanced conception of God, but merely the idea of a “Great Santa Claus in the Sky”. Such great men as Michelangelo and William Blake saw God like this “in their iconic imagery”, Giannetti admits—an old bearded man sitting on clouds, knowing when you are being good or bad and assigning rewards and punishments accordingly. It is a curious thing that all believers know exactly what God is like. Each of them thinks they have the most nuanced understanding of the Almighty, even when even they have nothing much more than the mighty Santa concept, in practice. And however nuanced anyone’s concept of God might be, making it, in Giannetti’s view, superior to the Santa image, what is their evidence for it other than their own imagination? God does not exist, or, if He does, He has never shown His face or any other aspect of His nature or personality to anyone at all.

God has more nuances than the number of Christians in the world. They will all pick the nuance that suits them at any time, and all the others will nod sagely in agreement, then will produce their own fancy, and again get the sagacious nods. Dawkins does what any good observer would do, he observes the common features of the image of God most people have:

If the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is “appropriate for us to worship”.

A God is only appropriate for people to worship when it has the powers they expect a God to have. Without them, what would be the point of it all? Santa God must have the power to deliver the gifts and the scourging, as appropriate. He must hear and respond to prayers, and promise to punish the wicked in a suitably horrible way—horrible enough to deter them from being wicked if they are simple, but few criminals these days are as simple as Christian sheep, unless they are Christian shepherds!

The nuance that Giannetti needs seems to be some sort of morph or intermediate between the atheistic god—not one—and the popular idea of the Hebrew God, an all powerful, capricious, superbeing in some undetectable dimension from which he minutely surveys human existence. Giannetti admits that God as Santa Claus in the sky accurately describes many people’s vague image of what God is, their childhood belief in God. But many find the religious beliefs they received in childhood do not meet their needs as adults. We learn from the one who knows the actual believers’ God is a more subtle conception.

The skeptic will think immediately that children no longer need Santa as grown ups, so why should they need a more nuanced idea of God? Indeed, one would be inclined to believe that it is the abandoning of such childish notions that demonstrates the adult’s maturity. That it is the case is actually shown by the Christian propaganda that they must remain as children to properly receive God’s message. In short, they must not grow up, must not mature, but feel it is all right and even necessary that they should remain immature to have faith.

Giannetti, like most Christians at some stage, thinks God is acting through him, for he tells the 2 billion other Christians in the world that the biblical “name” of God, YHWH, usually given as Yahweh (Yehouah), and translated as “Lord” in the bibles, actually means “Being”. The bible tells us it means “I am that I am”, but Giannetti thinks that reflects the fact that Hebrew has no word for Being, and this is the best it can do. Putting Being for Lord in the bible gives important new insights. The Jewish Shema:

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,

Deut 6:1

becomes:

Hear O Israel, Being is our God, Being is one.

It is indeed a refreshing view on the meaning of the Jewish scriptures, which suggests a God as a universalizing rather than a divisive concept among believers, a pantheistic God that exists everywhere beyond the end of your nose, as Giannetti puts it. It does not gel with the exclusivity of the Old Testament God, although that was a distortion by the nationalistic Maccabees of the original universal god the Persians were trying to create to keep subjects subdued who might have been troublesome in such a big empire.

Though the innovative name seems impressive, Giannetti accepts it is far from new. Baruch Spinoza (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1:2), Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, 3), Aristotle, (Metaphysics, 1072), all understood God as Being. If God is Being, then all of us are manifestations of God as Being. Whether new or ancient, the argument hardly reflects anything that the Jews themselves thought, when the bible was put in its modern form in third century BC Egypt, nor the later Christians too, though they notionally translated YHWH as “Love”, themselves.

One’s own religion is always unique, but Giannetti wants everyone to realize, it is not the only way to God. That is a blasphemy to Christians, but most mystical traditions make this claim. For Giannetti, God as Being needs no proof:

To demand a proof of the existence of God is as nonsensical as asking for the proof of the existence of existence. Faith is the belief in something which cannot be proved. Since God’s “existence” is “proved” with each waking moment, there’s absolutely no need for faith.

That should be a great boon to many Christians—for whatever it is they have faith in, it is not what Christ himself taught—and it is not far from Dawkins’ “Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism”. Giannetti, who now states his stance as that of a “theistic existentialist”, for a while sounds like a plain vanilla pantheist like the rest of us atheists. The difference is that Wittgenstein is invoked to make Being itself into God. Atheistic pantheists, like Einstein and doubtless Dawkins too, think everything is wonderful, mysterious and awesome, and to discover more about it adds to our sense of wonder. Wittgenstein gets an additional frisson of wonder from knowing there is no reason for anything to exist. He thought religious language was simply a way of expressing our incredulity and wonder that the world does exist. It is unlikely to have been any such amazement per se, but the grateful acceptance that anything so amazing had been made by the eternal potter as a gift to mankind, just as the myth says.

In any case, modern physics suggests Wittgenstein was wrong, as Victor J Stenger shows from a statistical mechanical argument. There is only one state of nonexistence but very many states of existence. Existence is therefore much more probable. Giannetti does not want to know that. For him, existing is a gift, a complete act of grace and generosity, though, if God is Being, no God with a humanlike personality exists to offer the gift. To talk in terms of gifts, and acts of grace is to assume a God. Giannetti betrays his own yearning for an orthodox Judaeo-Christian God, whatever he might say about it being Being. We say:

Your phenomenological feel for God may lead you to believe in the existence of God, but it is no proof of it—though it might be so, it might be a poor foundation for such a belief—and however deeply felt it may be, your feeling for God does not stop us from inquiring into the subject more rigorously. Phenomenology alone cannot establish ontology.

Giannetti is, like so many Christian apologists, desperately trying to find a God amidst what they see as the unavoidable wreakage wrought by scientific discoveries. Thus, he continues to retain the ancient book of Jewish myths as some sort of primitive revelation, “a prolonged stammering attempt to express human awe before the universe”.

Despite Dawkins “error” in persisting in his Santa Clause notion of the Christian God, many brilliant thinkers, like Karl Jung, we are told, have opened up fertile vistas of the meaning of religion. Well Jung was certainly imaginative, but the brilliance is dazzling Giannetti and not too may others with a critical faculty.

Not mentioned, though is Emile Durkheim, who gave a pretty comprehensive hypothesis of the explanation of religion as an aspect of the culture of primitive tribes of a few hundred people, when humans came through the last ice age. Durkheim cuts away the need to keep up the childish Santa Claus idea in all of its supernatural nuances, and shows us how the supernatural grew around the evolved habits of small human groups coming to realize the habits they had, and finding them as mysterious as everything else in Nature they began to wonder at. It leaves God as a myth, a personification of the tribe itself, or rather the habits it had, its culture.

Anyone who does not appreciate this but sticks to God as a superhuman being, and the bible as His own diary is a simple minded fundamentalist or literalist, worthy of scorn and ridicule, just as Dawkins says. There really is no excuse for anyone choosing to believe an ancient book of Jewish myths rather than looking at what empirical investigation has shown in the last few hundred years.

Truth

Parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day, that is a different matter.

Franz Kafka, cited by Giannetti

Giannetti is not interested in science, though. He wants to believe in the allegorical interpretation of the bible, not in what we know to be true, or even have good evidence for suspecting to be true. He cites Maimonides as saying the Jewish scriptures has at least two meanings, a literal one, and a metaphorical one. Later traditions expanded it to four, literal, metaphoric, moral, and mystical meanings, all simultaneously speaking in the text. It means that any reader clever enough gets four meanings, but no one is clever enough to read any of them as the writers intended, even the literal meaning. No allegory can be properly read today, because the code of its meaning has long gone. Whatever is read is one speculation or another.

Yet this is what this philosopher prefers. It is Derridism, “post-Modernism”, but from 2,300 years ago, when the bible was written—perhaps postmodernism is simply another Jewish tradition. If every reading is valid then none is. The Jewish scriptures have no meaning at all, despite the persistence of people like Giannetti who thinks this is the “intelligent way of reading the Bible”. Dawkins wrote:

Irritated theologians will protest that we don’t take the book of Genesis [anything in the bible] literally any more. But that is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much as, or as little, as the atheist’s decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation.

The God Delusion, 238

It seems fairly comprehensive as a criticism, but of course, it cannot be for believers. Giannetti pooh poohs it, and seeks a defence. It is that interpretation is not a matter of personal choice, but is defined by a “tradition”. It seems that for a philosopher or theologian, a tradition is not a matter of personal choice:

Love the tradition or hate it, agree with it or disagree, there are rules of the game which, if one chooses to play the game, one must follow.

Jason Giannetti

Is there no choice involved in picking the tradition you wish to follow? And, if the tradition you choose does not bring forth whatever is personally acceptable, is it not within the bounds of free will to leave it and choose a new one that will yield an acceptable ethic? Modern pastors treat their churches like businesses, and their congregation as customers. They vary their brand of Christianity to pick up customers who do not like the other brands around. Believers are picking and choosing more than they ever could. Few people today have a tradition which they consider compelling, or there is no need for them to have.

Dawkins asks:

Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question with a definite answer in principle: yes or no. Did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead? Did he himself come alive again, three days after being crucified? There is an answer to every such question.

The God Delusion, 59

These are ridiculous questions, Giannetti objects, because it is preposterous to use scientific criteria to test assertions about religious belief. Giannetti likes the idea of NOMA, the nonoverlapping of religious and scientific beliefs, proposed by Stephen Jay Gould as he was dying. For Gould, science was to be confined to the material world, and religion to the spiritual, an idea that would have suited most atheists, but Gould also thought religion was responsible for morality, for questions of the meaning of life, and so on. That is where NOMA gets ridiculous. In 2000 years of existence in many forms, the Christian churches have little historical grounds for claiming authority over morals. And when it comes to hard questions like the meaning of life, of whether we live after death, and so on, the religions of the world have no answers at all. Their answers are old beliefs, but with no more authority than that of the individual people who perpetuate them. In short, they are a sort of chain letter passed down the centuries, with the rubric that the receiver must pass it on, or face an eternity of bad luck!

Just in case we do not know, Giannetti explains what a metaphor is. “John is like a deer”, is not a metaphor, but a simile, whereas “John is a deer” is a metaphor. Well, yes, we get this, but does it mean that, say, “Jesus rose from the dead” is not literally true, but a metaphor. If so, what it is a metaphor of, and why do so many Christians insist that it is literally true? Giannetti, like all Christians, wants his cake and eat it. He will tell us it is both, and a couple more besides! He goes on imagining that Dawkins would call any fiction a pack of lies, and be outraged. It is, of course, ludicrous, unless you are an habitual liar as a Christian. Dawkins would, however, be outraged if his children had been taught that some novel—Giannetti, likes Moby Dick—is true and must be believed if you want to avoid being boiled in sulphur for the rest of eternity. That is the not too subtle difference that this philosopher theologian cannot get.

Anyway, apparently “Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead three days later” is something so profound that we cannot express the reality of it, so we use metaphor. It is like trying to express true love—my love is a red red rose, say. So, we learn, certain realities behind the metaphors, though real, are not empirical facts. Giannetti’s love would not actually have a thorn to prick Dawkins when he met her.

Remarkable. It just makes you wish you were as clever as these people. What would we do without them? But despite going on in this childish way for a long paragraph, we do not learn just how “Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead three days later” is like love, or what it is a metaphor about. We do not even get to know what “my love is a red, red rose means”. Is it that love is like beauty? Or is it that love is likely beauty but is painful if you grab it? Poetic metaphor does not mean anything at all clear, so is it just a way of expressing our inadequate feelings, and we are really no wiser for having read the metaphor. It is like the Hans Christian Andersen metaphor of the emperor’s new clothes. Everyone felt obliged to admire them, but he actually wore nothing. Religion is this kind of social bonding taken to extremes in reality.

All speech and writing is metaphorical because we learn by describing new experiences metaphorically, then extending and refining these metaphors until we have a specialized language. There is, we find, nothing behind the metaphors of religious experience:

With regard to God or “the religious experience”, as both Campbell and Wittgenstein, among others, say, we are constantly talking in metaphors, but when we attempt to drop the metaphor we find that “behind” it are no “facts” in the same sense that there is a fact behind the sentence “John is a deer”.

J Giannetti

So there you have it. Religious language is meaningless. There is nothing behind it, at least nothing comprehendable. Why then pretend there is, and jabber on in this religious way? If it is some vague attempt to understand the incomprehensible then just stop it. It is saying nothing. In the end we get:

Thus, religious texts, instead of speaking about the truth of God, say rather that God is truth. But this again is just a metaphor.

So that is clear then? Emperor’s new clothes, my friend. Try this, then:

Thus, in both Eastern as well as certain mystical Western religious traditions, one is led to a realm beyond language in order to experience God for oneself.

Is that better? No? Well then you have to know that sitting…

…without thought, concept, or representation of Being, without will, without striving, without attempting to do something—is the experience of letting Being be and of fully being the Being that one already is.

Now that must be clear, surely? To comprehend God you have to sit there being empty headed. It certainly explains something about believers, doesn’t it?.

At this point Giannetti admits there is a risk in the nonliteral interpretation of the bible—a serious challenge to the religion itself. So far he has argued:

1. the bible is a metaphoric attempt to speak about the ineffable, about God as Being
2. the empirical concept of truth does not apply to the bible, which is composed of metaphors, so, to look for the Garden of Eden in Iraq, or Noah’s Ark on a mountaintop, or signs of a many Hebrew slaves in Egypt, though absurd, are attempted because readers of the bible do not comprehend the “register” of its language.
3. biblical injunctions, even one as clear as “an eye for an eye”, do not mean what they say, but are code which has to be deciphered to find in it an ethical system.

If the Jewish scriptures are to be read allegorically, then what of the literal meaning upon which the Jewish religion is based, not to mention the basis of the Christian religion, and the basis of the Moslem religion. Are the Jews the Chosen People? Is the communion wafer the body of Christ or not?

Dawkins quotes John Hartung’s essay “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality”:

The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instruction for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and rape. Many ancient works do that—The Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling The Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their lives. And it is, by far, the world’s all-time best seller.

The God Delusion, 258

)

The bible can therefore still be taught in schools, even completely secular ones as literature, alongside The Iliad and The Odyssey, Shakespeare and Milton.

Morality

The bible has many morally objectionable stories, and Dawkins focuses on the “Binding of Isaac”, noting that many people with a considerable political power take it to be a literally true story, but that, if it is not, then how should it be taken—“As an allegory? Then an allegory for what? Surely nothing praiseworthy. As a moral lesson? But what kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story?”. Giannetti recognizes here that those who do accept the tale as factually true “are as delusional as a person who reads the front page of the newspaper and looks for its deeper mythical and mystical meaning”. As for its meaning as moral or metaphor, Giannetti says every reader has its own answer. Again, like Derrida’s postmodernism, this is considered a boon, not a fault.

Giannetti suggests that from a Jewish viewpoint (he says he was brought up a Jew), it teaches that anyone can contradict, and question God. Dawkins says:

Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue.

The God Delusion, 306

It ought to be plain to anyone that indoctrinating kids into unverified, and largely fantastical, beliefs is not good. Giannetti denies that Judaism is like that. “If Abraham could question and challenge God, then a fortiori, we can, even should, do the same.”

Now, in fact, the way Abraham speaks to God rather shows that here is a bit of an ancient myth in which it is Abraham who is the God. Indeed, if it is not so, then the Jewish scriptures testify to a God who is far from moral, far from being omniscient as believers claim, and far from intelligent. Abraham boldly says to God:

That be far from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked, that so the righteous should be as the wicked. That be far from Thee. Shall not the judge of all the earth do justly?

Gen 18:25

The implication rather is that Abraham is a High God (perhaps El Elyon, God the Most High—Abram seems to mean the Father On High) questioning what a lesser God intends to do, to murder all of the citizens of Sodom. Abraham urges the lesser God to spare everyone in the city if 50 righteous people can be found in it. Giannetti thinks that Abraham is urging mercy, but that could be his modern interpretation based on the refined loving concept of a personal God. The older concept was that gods were not that bothered about human life, and, when they had decided to destroy the wicked in a city, the whole lot might as well be destroyed. It was partly this fear, at least, that motivated Romans to persecute Christians. Romans were not concerned about anyone’s religion, as long as it respected the gods in general, all of whom were considered to be capricious and rather short fused. If Christians annoyed some god, they imagined the god would not be choosy about who got the plague or earthquake he or she sent in anger.

Regarding the binding of Isaac, the intent of the passage seems clear. Before the Persians took over Canaan, the Canaanites practiced child sacrifice, and it seems clear that the this episode is given as a petition against it. In short, this was not an ancient tradition when the bible was set down but a modern one written by the Persians, with Abraham now reduced from being the High God in the earlier and ancient passage to an ordinary man following the customs of his people.

Abraham was now a humble man, following the religious tradition as prescribed, to sacrifice a much loved son in obedience to God, until it was God who intervened. If Abraham had been as bold as he had in the earlier quarrel, he would have argued the toss, but he did not, and God turns out now to be merciful.

Had Abraham taught God a lesson? Of course not. It simply shows what ought to be obvious to anyone, that the Jewish scriptures are a hotch potch of old and new writings intermingled by an editor with the overall intent of making out that the Jews were an unreliable and apostate people, all bar a remnant who, each time, would save the race—in the Sodom case, it was plainly meant to be the 50 righteous ones.

When Dawkins turns to cataloguing some of the occasions when religions have caused great human distress and suffering in God’s name, Giannetti responds:

I don’t propose to refute any of these accusations.

Some things cannot be refuted. What he tries to do is to counterpoint them with good deeds, but adding that people cannot live up to the good that is initiated:

On numerous occasions, US actions in the world have led to great suffering while the rhetoric at home has been to the contrary. As just one instance of this, though our political leaders herald democracy and claim that people have a right to vote for their representatives in government, and we are even sending troops to foreign nations to lay down their lives for this form of government, at the same time we refuse to acknowledge the democratically elected majority of Hamas by the Palestinians and we publicly and secretly support dictatorships such as the Saudi royal family.

Three cheers to that, but it is no defence of religion, is it? The US is the most religious country in the developed world by a large measure, yet it is the most belligerent and unjust to other people. As Giannetti suggests, it has supported endless dictators as long as they suited the US policy of world economic imperialism, and has fought wars continually in hundreds of places large and small in the last hundred or so years. And it is a 90% Christian country, we are told. The idea of God does not seem to confer holiness.

Now, we get Giannetti claiming that the three Abrahamic religions, despite their murderous record, have been responsible for tremendous good—the just war, fairness in the marketplace, women’s rights, and so on—only these three are listed.

It is hiding behind extra biblical advances, rather than on anything in the bible itself. It is his saving notion of tradition, which is actually an attempt to side step the fossilization of social norms in written codes and books like the Jewish scriptures, the Moslem Quran, and the Christian New Testament. The trouble is that the traditions simply become fossilized themselves. It is not that religion is advancing—religion is always immovably conservative—what moves is society, and eventually purely by social pressure, some religious believers have to move too. They do it only with the solemn curses of the traditionalists echoing behind them. In modern times, after the Enlightenment, we have been able to claw ourselves away from the shackles of religion, and make real advances in law and social justice. Yet the traditionalist and their defenders like Giannetti are still cursing in the background, quite unable to see that we are better off without these fossilized traditions.

Evolution Explains Morality

There is evidence from human studies pointing to uniformities of moral beliefs beneath all the cultural variations and that these uniformities are innate rather than learned.

M Ruse

Morality can be satisfactorily explained by evolution, and Dawkins says so, inevitably to be criticized by Giannetti, who begins with the usual—a definition. Science does not begin by making definitions, but by observation, and, by observation, practical morality exists outside of the human species as mutual assistance and empathy. Natural selection explains morality as a behavioural adaptation that promotes survival, so science explains morality naturally.

Dawkins does not offer a definition of morality, instead giving examples by copying a modern list of ten commandments posted on a web page, the “sort of list any ordinary, decent person today would come up with” as desirable moral behaviour today. That is exactly what Giannetti does not like—it is a “herd mentality”. Presumably, then, Giannetti is an elitist, a Straussist, a fascist. He cannot be a democrat with an attitude like that, can he?

In Evolutionary Ethics: A Crack in the Foundation of Ethics?, John Mizzoni of Temple University, confronts Michael Ruse, another philosopher who cannot quite get rid of his obsession with God, on the issue of the evolutionary origin of morality. Morality, for Ruse, cannot be simply natural. Somehow, it has to have been imposed from “out there”—he must mean by divine command, Platonic forms or G E Moore’s non naturalism. As mutual assistance or cöoperation is a beneficial feature of human adaptation, some at least of Ruse’s argument supports a naturalistic moral realism rather than skepticism about it.

Ruse, apparently arguing from G E Moore, thinks evolutionary ethics reduces the objectivity of ethics. Nature states what is, whereas morals state what ought to be, and ought cannot derive from is, but only from some imperative. To think otherwise is to fall for the naturalistic fallacy, a fallacy which arises because attempts to reduce the moral term into a natural definition requires a definition of “good”, yet “good” cannot be defined other than as being good.

Moreover, Giannetti thinks that no one could possibly be civil in the absence of God and the police. Why should we be just, in the absence of any external punishment? Evidently Giannetti thinks we do have an external punishment, the boiling sulphur, no doubt, but how does he know? And how many, even religious people, believe it, these days? It is certain that many of the leaders of various churches in the past did not believe it, because they committed the gravest of injustices.

It is better to be just than not just because that way society is tolerable for everyone. As soon a someone starts getting some privilege, society gets unjust and many people begin to suffer. If the suffering gets intolerable for too many, revolution, or the collapse of society into chaos is inevitable. Morality is still a type of selfishness, but realized communally. It was that before the bible was written, and it is still that. It requires no God because it is a social matter, and social living is an evolutionary strategy for survival.

Darwin’s criterion of evolutionary success—survival of the fittest—was misinterpreted for a long time, especially by opponents of the theory of evolution, but also by many proponents of it, as equalling pure selfishness. “Fitness”, in the evolutionary sense, seemed to mean selfish enough to make sure you reproduced even if it meant your rival did not. Such a pure selfishness seems to exclude any type of altruism, helping others, but it ignores that reciprocal assistance within a group might make all of the members of it better able to reproduce than their purely selfish solitary rivals.

Moreover, fitness does not end at reproduction. Care and protection for juveniles helps them to get to the stage of reproducing themselves, so parental attention facilitates evolutionary “fitness”, and again the ability to cöoperate with others in a social group can give individuals brought up in the society an advantage in fitness. Conceivably parental care evolved first quite naturally, sociality and altruism evolved as extensions of it, and morality evolved as the sociality and altruism we recognize, as thinking animals, as being necessary to the preservation of the group.

Ruse accepts much of this, but thinks none of it is adequate because human behavior could have differed, according to the adaptations which happened. Humans adapted to behave cöoperatively but:

There was absolutely no guarantee that evolution would have led us to the point that it has. Perhaps, to make us cöoperators, evolution might have filled us with other sentiments entirely opposite from those about the worth of altruism and so on and so forth.

M Ruse

As we could have been something different, the foundations of our ethics are not objective. Well, we could have been something different, and then we would not have been human, or might not have survived at all. Since we have survived and succeeded so well on earth so far with the adaptations we have, including our morals, surely that strengthens their natural basis. They are our morals! There cannot be some sort of absolute moral that covers every animal species. The lion simply cannot lay down with the lamb, and still survive as a lion. Moreover Ruse says the fact that human evolution is purposeless means morals cannot be “out there”, notwithstanding that:

The traditional evolutionary ethicist argues that the process of evolution is not meaningless.

The goal of life is survival, and for social animals it implies survival of the species, not merely of any single animal. For a single animal, fitness to survive could exclude any efforts to reproduce as leaving it open to avoidable risk. The purely selfish animal would therefore eschew reproduction. Of, course, any such excessively selfish animal would die without passing on its genes, so the genes that conferred the excessive selfishness must die out, and the utterly selfish animal with it.

Evolution therefore applies to a line of animals with characteristics that produce offspring, a species. Morality and good parenting might be risky for the individual doing it, but it benefits the species as a whole by eliciting assistance from others, cöoperation. Our purpose in life is to preserve the species, and whether we do that by reproducing ourselves or spending a lifetime caring for our sisters kids, we are doing it. Ruse thinks human ethics, “here on earth” as he puts it, may not be relative, even though evolved, but other outcomes (relative ones!) might be the case elsewhere in the universe!?

Ruse seems to fail in wanting to keep non naturalism as a necessary part of his search for an evolutionary ethics. He admits an important and unarguable role for evolution but wants a gap to remain for God, and that must be a supernatural gap, a non natural gap. Yet by abandoning the need for a supernatural gap, and sticking to naturalism, yields up the morality that we actually find, moral realism. We have evolved to be moral creatures because we are social. Sociality demands a form of behaving that amounts to what we call morality. If we want to live together in society, then we have to behave in a way acceptable to others. When we do not, we are acting immorally.

No modern person, even among religious people, gets the bulk of their morals from the bible. They receive mainly what they experience in society, and little indeed from the bible. In any case, to believe Giannetti, we cannot know what the bible says without a host of angels to interpret it for us. Maybe that is why most Christians, who take their God to have appeared on earth in the form of a man called Jesus, ignore almost eveything he said, especially the egregious things like “blessed are the poor”. Christ, God, is utterly clear that no one is saved except by giving all they have to the poor, yet Christians ignore God and do what a rogue called Paul, for all the Christian knows, Satan in disguise, tells them to do.

My purpose has been to demonstrate that we—and that includes most religious people—as a matter of fact don’t get our morals from scripture.

R Dawkins, The God Delusion, 249

In the end, Giannetti agrees with Dawkins over all his criticisms of the enormity of religious atrocities. He also says that he is not a religious apologist:

Dawkins’s book is a clear, concise, and articulate formulation of the most common understanding of God and religion prevalent in educated, secular, economically privileged, Western society today… In this regard his work is very helpful in bringing these vulgar views into the realm of intellectual discussion and debate.

It was all hot air, then?

Further Reading

• More about morality, and justice as fairness, and more, the Principle of Humanity
• A lot more on religious origins—five linked webpages
• More on the death of God and secular Christianity

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History