The simple truth

[max-greece]

When atheists try to tell a Christian that he is doing something wrong or unloving my only response can be, from where do you get your morals and will there be any major repercussions if one doesn't follow your morals? And I'm not speaking of crimes, I'm talking about such things as hatred or pride. Can an atheist really argue that these things are wrong? I believe it is foolish for an atheist if he attempts to do so.

Of course you do.

But lets look at morality in context and see if we can't make some sense of it.

There are 3 basic systems that appear to be in use in nature to enable social structures to form with some overlap between them:

The first is for simpler creatures with complex social structures. These would include things like Bees, Ants, Termites, Wasps and Republicans.

Social control is chemical - and massively effective. Pheromones given off by the queen are sufficient to keep the workers, soldiers and drones (to a lesser extent) doing what they should be doing.

For ants, for example, a worker typically lives for about 120 days. It never sleeps and never stops working till the day it dies. Worker ants don't complain, they aren't unionised, they don't demand better working conditions and they don't take breaks.

The second system is for more complex creatures but generally in much simpler social structures. Example include things like Lions, wolves, various species of whales, chimps, bonobos and so on.

Commonly held wisdom is that their structures are based on instinct - they are born pre-programmed to cooperate and within their limited capacity for thought that is just about sufficient to keep the group together.

Note, however, that chemical control is also used. Male lions sniff the urine of females to determine whether or not they are in heat. Wolf social bonding is heavily reliant on smell - with each group having its own unique scent.

Further note that there is growing evidence of proto-morality within these social groups. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlif...wrong.html is an article published in 2009 that shows various obervations of strangely moral behaviours.
More recently observations amongst killer whales (just search for stumpy the killer whale on Google) strongly suggest astonishing moral behaviour bordering on full blown morality if not actual altruism.

At the end of the scale is us. We, uniquely blend complex individuals with complex social structures - more complex than any other.

Morality is the key glue that allows this to happen. We aren't born with moral values as such but with a tendency towards forming and adopting them within the culture we are born into. We are born with the tools that allow us to do this - empathy, a sense of reciprocation and a sense of right and wrong that we appear to have developed on from the examples above.

We are also born with some chemical control mechanisms, although these are much reduced in comparison to the insect colonies above. The smell of home is a good example. Smell appears to be a part of bonding us to our immediate environment and a foreign smell (or a different place or group) seems wrong to us, or not as acceptable.

Of course we also inherit instincts. Just look at a new born baby. When the mother picks it up the baby will automatically turn its head to her chest to feed, a baby knows to look you in the eye and so on.

Our morality isn't some magic resource bestowed on us by a benign creator. It is a product of evolution that, in conjunction with our brain size allows us to create complex sets of rules and regulations governing behaviour.

We, in common with other social creatures punish and ostracise those that fail to comply with social norms. Those social norms change with time. Each era judges the previous ones harshly. Within each time period extreme variations are similarly judged on the basis of our inherent sense of "right" and "wrong," which is really based on both our own social norms and the genetically inherited set.

In this way attitudes to murder, for example, are pretty uniform throughout history but to other aspects of society from slavery to homosexuality we lurch from one extreme to another.

The net result, one would hope, is of steadily improving morality culturally with the occasional setback. It is evolution in evidence, within a species.