New here, figure I might as well get something going right away.
An unending topic for non-believers (though I looked through the last seven pages and couldn't find it listed as a topic or I would have posted there) is how to answer believers who think that morality can only come from God. I enjoy reading brainier (I hesitate to say "brighter," because I scoff at that word when it is used as the self-description adopted by some atheists) folk than I (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, et al) explaining and answering the anti-scientific assertions of believers. But so far, everyone I have read comes up with unnecessarily long and involved answers to the question of the origin of morality. Yet this appears to me to be one of the easiest problems to explain, hardly a problem at all (though the believers will never accept it, naturally).
I see morals and morality to be an obvious product of the evolution of gregarious species. Every gregarious species which depends on the cooperation of member individuals for group survival (and thus, individual reproduction) from ants and bees, to herd and pack animals both prey and predator, to ape and to humans, every such species has evolved a code of conduct. Whether it is an almost entirely instinctual division of labor among the simplest critters, a pecking order, a hierarchy of dominance, and finally, our own morals and manners, these behaviors developed and evolved to aid our cooperative effort to survive, prosper, reproduce. In short, morality is profoundly a product of evolution.
Simple as that, or so it seems to a dumb blue-collar guy like me. Why don't I see the book authors and magazine (the skeptic and humanist mags) columnists giving this answer? Or am I wrong?
An unending topic for non-believers (though I looked through the last seven pages and couldn't find it listed as a topic or I would have posted there) is how to answer believers who think that morality can only come from God. I enjoy reading brainier (I hesitate to say "brighter," because I scoff at that word when it is used as the self-description adopted by some atheists) folk than I (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, et al) explaining and answering the anti-scientific assertions of believers. But so far, everyone I have read comes up with unnecessarily long and involved answers to the question of the origin of morality. Yet this appears to me to be one of the easiest problems to explain, hardly a problem at all (though the believers will never accept it, naturally).
I see morals and morality to be an obvious product of the evolution of gregarious species. Every gregarious species which depends on the cooperation of member individuals for group survival (and thus, individual reproduction) from ants and bees, to herd and pack animals both prey and predator, to ape and to humans, every such species has evolved a code of conduct. Whether it is an almost entirely instinctual division of labor among the simplest critters, a pecking order, a hierarchy of dominance, and finally, our own morals and manners, these behaviors developed and evolved to aid our cooperative effort to survive, prosper, reproduce. In short, morality is profoundly a product of evolution.
Simple as that, or so it seems to a dumb blue-collar guy like me. Why don't I see the book authors and magazine (the skeptic and humanist mags) columnists giving this answer? Or am I wrong?
