Do we need God to be good?

Posted by Chris Lyons on 24 August 2009 | 4 Comments

Tags: Religion, Philosophy

It’s often said that science deals only with facts, and that we need religion for our values; to tell us, in other words, how to live.

In this vein, David Hume famously claimed that you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, and G E Moore argued that to draw ethical conclusions from natural facts is commit the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Other philosophers, including Karl Popper, have said much the same thing.

I’d like to suggest that the idea of religion being the source of values is implausible, that values are in fact innate, and that science can tell us much about them. I’d also like to consider whether Hume’s fire-wall between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ is actually as robust as has been claimed.

The early gods didn’t concern themselves with morality. They had power over the elements, but were otherwise just as mundane and just as fickle as humans. Humans, for their part, tried to propitiate them so as to gain some power for themselves over weather, disease, famine etc, and they must have felt they had some success to have kept doing it for so long. It was only with the coming of the Abrahamic god,Yahweh, that morals came to be associated with deities. The Israelites had a covenant with Yahweh, such that, so long as they obeyed his law, he would back them up (though when he didn’t do so, they invariantly felt they had only themselves to blame). But Yahweh’s law was far from a universal ethic, and was, in fact, merely a tribal one. He may have told Moses ‘thou shalt not kill’, but he didn’t mean thou shalt not kill Philistines, Hittites or Canaanites. Indeed he often insisted that these be slaughtered without mercy – sometimes including the women, children, sheep, goats and chickens. “You must not let anything that breathes remain alive” he commanded Josiah, “you shall annihilate them”. Indeed, the God of the ancient Israelites was a pretty unpleasant character, and though some Christians still agonise over what he had to say (about homosexuality, for instance), there are great tracts of the Old Testament which are now just ignored as too ridiculous to be any guide to behaviour. Many religious folk, of course, still claim to regard the Bible to be the source of their moral values, even whilst reading it selectively. But to read the Bible selectively is to know more already than the Bible can teach.

Christians would claim that it’s the New Testament which guides this selectivity, and consider that the teachings of Jesus trump all that preceded them. But to know exactly what the historical Jesus said is problematical. The four gospels were written between thirty five and seventy years after his death, and the claims they make become increasingly extravagant with each successive account, starting with Mark and going through to John. Furthermore, it seems likely that the Christianity we’re familiar with is more the work of St Paul than Jesus himself, yet Paul never met Jesus, and said very little about him beyond the fact that he lived, died and was resurrected. It might be said, in fact, that Paul mythologised Jesus. But the epistles were written within twenty years of the Crucifixion, well before the gospels. It’s plausible therefore that the accounts of Jesus in the gospels were coloured amongst other things by the mythologizing of Paul.

Rather than rely only on the testimony of sceptical biblical scholars though, I would like to quote one who is himself a devout believer. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor is a Dominican priest and professor of New Testament Studies at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem (he is also cousin of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor). The quote below is an excerpt from an interview he gave to the BBC’s Roger Bolton.
JMO’C: I have always found it impossible to find anything in the teachings of Jesus that is original. What is original and distinctive is who Jesus was, not what he represented; not what he said, and not even what he did.
RB: So there’s nothing special in your view, Father, about the teaching of Jesus.
JMO’C: No, it’s the fact that he was the Messiah; that he was the Son of God, that he was the definitive agent of God in History that puts him apart from everyone else and makes him unique.

For Murphy-O’Connor then, Jesus was either God, or he was of no significance at all. Certainly, in his view, there was nothing new to be found in his teachings.

When we consider the values we hold today, many of them - human rights, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, for instance - we have acquired despite religion, and often in the teeth of its fierce opposition, rather than because of it. So if divine revelation isn’t their source, how do our values arise?

I would say they are innate, and have been etched into our brains by evolution. Had we been ants or bees, what we regard as right and wrong would have been quite different. The values we have are species specific, notwithstanding that we share some of them with our animal relatives - monkeys, for instance, have been shown to exhibit fairness. Evolution is often equated with selfishness, but ‘selfish genes’ (by means of the emotions) frequently bring about behaviour that’s entirely unselfish. Most basically, this is a mother’s love for her child, but the same mechanism (the drive to get genes into the next generation) leads through kin selection, reciprocal altruism and group selection to a very much wider circle of concern. With large groups, the problem of the free-rider arises, the cheat who takes without reciprocating, and this can lead to social breakdown. But groups can solve the problem by means of culture – gossip, reputation, laws etc – and those that do so gain a great advantage over the rest. In-group cooperation therefore tends to heighten between-group competition, and the question that then inevitably arises is whether in a globalised world a global ethic is realisable.

There are other factors besides natural selection at work, however, and, furthermore, to say that something is innate is not to say it’s unmalleable (only that there is organisation in advance of experience). Principal amongst these other factors is the prevalence of non-zero-sum games. When two people play tennis, one player’s gain is the other’s loss, and there is no net gain. In a great many situations though cooperation can lead to both parties gaining - a typical example is trade - and the secondary benefits of this kind of relationship tend to be increased regard, empathy and compassion. Of course there are limits to our sensitivity and concern for others, but the limits can themselves become part of our personal and collective concern.

A further mechanism that can drive this process is rationality itself – I can’t pretend that I occupy a privileged position in the world whereby my interests always trump yours – I can’t persuade you that the spot I’m standing on is special just because I happen to be standing on it. The result of this relativity of perspectives, of course, is the golden rule, discovered many times by different thinkers, and perhaps best stated in its negative form as ‘don’t do to others as you wouldn’t have them do unto you’.

So both evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology can throw light on how our moral sense arose as our brains were gradually shaped by natural selection, but neuro-science is now increasingly able to show what is actually happening at the neuronal level. To give just two examples, ‘mirror neurons’ are cells which are active when we perform a particular act and also observe it in another. They seem to denote a tendency to imitate or empathise. Indeed they are now regarded as bio-markers of sociability, and are, interestingly, abnormal in autistics. And certain neuro-transmitters, such as oxytocin and vasopressin, have been found to be intimately involved in mediating emotional bonding. These are all systems of social attachment; they represent the anchors of our morality; and we are all born possessing them.

So science can tell us something about how we’ve come to have values, and even how they’re manifested at the level of the brain, but will it ever be able to make normative statements – will we ever be able to say empirically what is right and wrong. I think the answer is ‘not in the near future’, but as the mind becomes more transparent to neuro-science this may change. Certainly, the is-ought dichotomy is already being tentatively questioned by some. Philosopher, Patricia Churchland, for instance points out that “what is desirable (an ought) is not independent of what humans actually desire (an is)”. And neuro-scientist, Sam Harris, thinks the same way, saying “claims about morality and human well being are claims about the architecture of our minds and the social architecture of our world. As such, they’re claims about facts”. To agree with this is to agree that, in principle, moral questions can have empirical answers.

In conclusion, I’ve briefly tried to show that moral values do not depend upon divine revelation, but are natural to us as social creatures living in the biosphere of the Earth, and science can therefore shed a lot of light upon them. Whether there will ever be such a thing as an empirical normative statement is a lot less certain, though perhaps not as impossible as previously thought.

Dr. Chris Lyons