Undeception

Since at least the time of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man up until quite recently in Francis Collins’s The Language of God, as well as among Vatican theologians, it has been argued that at some indeterminate time within our species’ evolution from primates, there was a special endowment from God upon our ancestors whereupon we knew right from wrong and morality was born. Further, it is argued that natural processes cannot explain humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong (regardless of the fact that it differs somewhat from culture to culture). This “Moral Law” argument seems to be the last God-of-the-gaps holdout for otherwise progressive theologians who accept common descent.

On the other side, atheists enjoy knocking this argument down. Despite Collins’s assertion that there is not likely to be any research that shows a naturalistic explanation of human conceptions of morality, there is indeed much promising research in that regard, much of which is highly suggestive of just such an explanation, even if the details are not all filled in yet (cf. the fossil record). This is how Steve Wiggins recently summarized the naturalistic explanation:

Apes plan ahead, recognize fairness, and can even see issues from the point of view of others… They are clearly inheritors of the moral sense that evolution has crafted among all cooperative animals over the eons. Religions like to lay claim to the origins of morality: we behave this way because our god told us to. In a sense that may be true, but only if the “god” is nature itself and the instruction it gives is the way for a species to thrive. Caring for one another, all religions aside, is the formula that evolution presents as the most successful choice of natural selection.

via “Ape Versus Primate”

Is it true that “only if the ‘god’ is nature itself” can it be maintained that the cultivation of morality and ethics systems are derivative from a god? In the sense that I don’t believe there was a *poof* moment of moral clarity among humanity from some divine spark nor that morality is only apprehendable through divine revelation, I agree with the gist of his comment, but there seems to be a bit of a non-theistic overreach in his reasoning. It is quite easy to understand how one can indeed “instruct” or proscribe things through proximate causes, and insofar as theistic evolutionists do not violate logic when they state that God ordained to create through naturalism, it is wholly within the realm of possibility that God intentioned that our species develop a moral compass to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others (broadly speaking) in more or less the same sense that He intended that we should have two arms and two legs.

What I wonder, though, is whether saying that He intended our ancestors to develop a moral sense is the same as saying that “we behave this way because our god told us to”. It’s a fine line perhaps, and quite open for discussion among philosophers and theologians. But it seems science, and still less scientism, has almost nothing to contribute there. Let scientists focus on closing the gaps in our understanding of the universe, and theologians focus on closing the gaps in our understanding of the meaning of God’s gapless universe.