Atheist

Morality Without GodSaying that without God, not everything is permitted, is not the same as saying that our complex ethical systems are possible without God. Such systems exist. Are they evidence of God? Or did they come about in some other way?

Darwin began by viewing God as the first cause, the force that set in motion all that he saw. Later, he came to understand that God was not required as part of the explanation.

Similarly, God is not required to explain moral systems. Yet the compassionate or just treatment of humans by their fellows who don't have to is one of the most compelling arguments ever offered for the existence of a just, compassionate God. To disagree with this, it is necessary to advance some alternative explanations.

The following is a brief survey of some other theories of the origin of morality, followed by one of my own. Just as biological, psychological and sociological influences conspire to influence any other human behavior, the following theories don't seem to be mutually exclusive; they may all hold true simultaneously.

Psychological Explanations. Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion that religion was nothing more than a self-deception in which man engages to deny his own loneliness and fear. God is nothing morer than a projection of the infant's loved, feared, all-potent father.

In Civilization and its Discontents, he went further, to trace the interesting relationship between the infant's inability to distinguish its body from the universe and the religious feeling of oneness with existence. Just as we must renounce infantile impulses, no matter how gratifying, to avoid living our lives soiled, helpless and ineffective, humans collectively renounce chaotic impulses so that they may co-exist in a stable society. Morality, then, is a reflection of the superego, while religion itself, the "oceanic feeling", is an echo of the infantile id.

Freud's two essays were the mature expression of decades of work with adults. He had not looked for morality or God; it merely occurred to him that what he had found might explain both.

An excellent way to study a thing is to look for it on the margins: you might study a country by examining its borders; an object by its boundaries; a thing by placing it in circumstances it wasn't intended to endure.

Jean Piaget engaged in such an exercise when he looked for morality in very young children, who had not had much time to be exposed to a complex moral system in their secular or religious education. Nor did they have the mental equipment yet to understand a complex, taught morality.

Just to make sure that what he found could have no overt relationship to serious moral teaching, he looked for morality in the game of marbles. The rules of marbles, after all, are exclusively the province of children, and are not a topic in which the state or the church have much interest.

He found several stages of development among small children. In the first phase, marbles were simply an object of motor skills, and infants engaged in standard behaviors of tasting them, burying them, piling them up, etc. Next, some of these behaviors became ritualized and repeated, as if associated with particular thoughts of the infants performing them.

Within two years, small children old enough to speak were making some effort to imitate the rules of the game as practiced by their elders. They did not have the mental equipment yet to remember or understand all these rules. Paradoxically, they considered the rules sacred, yet each child played only against himself even when with others, and there was no true competitive play under collective rules.

Later, children mastered the rules of marbles in competition with one another. A keen sense of fairness arose that influenced the creation and use of the rules. Finally, though fairness remained paramount, older children came to regard the rules as their collective creation, a contract they form to be able to play with one another.

Thus, the rules evolved to define the conditions for cooperation and the penalties for defection, and may be amended or replaced by other formulations serving the same purpose. To my mind, this research proves conclusively that humans are rules-creating animals and that God is not required as the explanation either of marbles or of morality.

The Prisoner's Dilemma. The importance of cooperation as a motivation for morality returns us the the world, which we dealt with in last month's issue, of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Cooperation evolves when people are involved in a series of contacts and transactions with one another, come to have some knowledge of one another, and therefore trust one another. A usual, if not necessary, condition is that there must be some negative consequences of defection; the other "player" must have the ability to punish a breach of trust. In other words, morality evolves as a set of conventions regulating our mutually beneficial dealings with trustworthy neighbors.

The Prisoner's Dilemma had not been defined yet when Piaget wrote, but in discussing the consensual basis of rules, he clearly understands them to be a means of promoting cooperation; the rules grow in importance as cooperation becomes more important to the child.

A Biological Explanation. Along come the evolutionary biologists and sociobiologists and argue that morality (along with everything else in life) has a biological and evolutionary basis.

Although not all scientists in the field are in apparent agreement as to the basic unit of evolutionary competition--the group, the individual or the gene--Richard Dawkins has persuasively argued that it is the gene. Any genetically induced behavior that propagates

the gene causing it will succeed in the evolutionary arms race. We all learned at school, and most of us accept, that a gene which causes a leaf-eating species to have a longer neck, or a prey species to run faster, will make its "owner" live longer and have more offspring, eventually becoming general in the population. Dawkins, sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson and others argue that the root of morality also lies in the gene.

Dawkins gives the odd but enjoyable example of a gene that causes both green beards and altruism to green-bearded people. If the result is that green-bearded people intervene more often to rescue one another from danger, greenbeards will have more offspring than others who are not rescued and there will be more of them. Dawkins argues for a moral calculus that justifies risk: individuals rescue others who represent a significant enough investment in the same genes to justify the risk, much more often than they rescue strangers (we rescue our offspring from danger most of all, as they represent our greatest investment in the future