It seems to me to be an idea that would have gained traction as communities grew larger and systems of law and law enforcement were necessary yet primitive. How to get people to obey the law if the deterrence wasn't sufficient? Create a "cop" who could see what you did no matter how well you hid yourself, and whose punishments were inescapable, whether in this world or the next. Even the development of concepts like karma would have been a way of dealing with crime (or even just lack of cooperation) in such communities.
The idea that one needs a supernatural authority figure in order to know right from wrong seems absurd from the outside, and I think it works on the inside only because of our propensity for seeing the world from our own narrow perspective. Like many believers, I felt that people who abandoned god no longer had a system of moral restraint to rely on. And I suspect that I was like many believers in also being quite certain that *I* did not need such a system because I'd learned to be a good person. It's easier to believe that everyone else will falter under certain circumstances that would not be sufficient to trip ME up.
The idea that one needs a supernatural authority figure in order to know right from wrong seems absurd from the outside, and I think it works on the inside only because of our propensity for seeing the world from our own narrow perspective. Like many believers, I felt that people who abandoned god no longer had a system of moral restraint to rely on. And I suspect that I was like many believers in also being quite certain that *I* did not need such a system because I'd learned to be a good person. It's easier to believe that everyone else will falter under certain circumstances that would not be sufficient to trip ME up.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
