Is Dawkin's God Delusion wrong on moral foundations?

[GPLindsey]

I read the book and enjoyed it greatly, so go buy it!! However, I would like to raise the topic because there was one area that I found problematic. In discussing moral foundations, he discussed some interesting studies that showed how people from many different cultures, including non-Christians, adopt very similar ethical stances in different situations. He also pointed out how much of the "laws" and activities discussed in the Bible are morally outrageous (no argument there). He argued that these two observations strongly undercut Christian assertions that morality flows from the Bible and that only Christians can develop a true moral conscience.

However, I've argued with Christians on this topic and they often make the case that God gave everyone a moral conscience, so even those who have never read the Bible can be judged. The usual atheist response to this is to point out how different moral standards are among people around the world, to undercut the argument that God gave us each the same general moral conscience. However, Dawkins is making the case in his book that this generally uniform moral conscience does exist, athough it came into being through an evolutionary process.

For example, I once argued with a guy on-line about the Flood being immoral, because God drowned all the people for their wickedness centuries before he gave them a set of Laws to live by. How can you punish people for being bad if you never gave them the dos and don'ts for behaving? The Christian response was that all humans were given a moral conscience and that this was sufficient for God to judge the pre-Flood humans. I then asked what need was there, then, for a set of Laws, if our moral conscience was sufficient to guide our actions and allow us to be judged? The response was confused doubletalk as to how somehow both a moral conscience and the Law were needed.

So here is my dilemma. I don't think you can win arguments by taking two opposite positions and arguing both support your case. So if a Christian says everyone has the same general moral conscience, which is evidence for God, then the atheist should respond with:

1) Not true. Societies all over the world and even within Christian communities have developed different standards of morality, so evidence that there is some universal basic moral conscience is absent.

OR

2) True enough, but that universal basic moral conscience comes from evolutionary processes that favored things like cooperation, parent-child bonding, in-group cohesion, etc. It wasn't written into us by an all-Powerful God.

Is this a real contradiction or am I missing the boat?

[Wads4]

I read the book and enjoyed it greatly, so go buy it!! However, I would like to raise the topic because there was one area that I found problematic. In discussing moral foundations, he discussed some interesting studies that showed how people from many different cultures, including non-Christians, adopt very similar ethical stances in different situations. He also pointed out how much of the "laws" and activities discussed in the Bible are morally outrageous (no argument there). He argued that these two observations strongly undercut Christian assertions that morality flows from the Bible and that only Christians can develop a true moral conscience.

However, I've argued with Christians on this topic and they often make the case that God gave everyone a moral conscience, so even those who have never read the Bible can be judged. The usual atheist response to this is to point out how different moral standards are among people around the world, to undercut the argument that God gave us each the same general moral conscience. However, Dawkins is making the case in his book that this generally uniform moral conscience does exist, athough it came into being through an evolutionary process.

For example, I once argued with a guy on-line about the Flood being immoral, because God drowned all the people for their wickedness centuries before he gave them a set of Laws to live by. How can you punish people for being bad if you never gave them the dos and don'ts for behaving? The Christian response was that all humans were given a moral conscience and that this was sufficient for God to judge the pre-Flood humans. I then asked what need was there, then, for a set of Laws, if our moral conscience was sufficient to guide our actions and allow us to be judged? The response was confused doubletalk as to how somehow both a moral conscience and the Law were needed.

So here is my dilemma. I don't think you can win arguments by taking two opposite positions and arguing both support your case. So if a Christian says everyone has the same general moral conscience, which is evidence for God, then the atheist should respond with:

1) Not true. Societies all over the world and even within Christian communities have developed different standards of morality, so evidence that there is some universal basic moral conscience is absent.

OR

2) True enough, but that universal basic moral conscience comes from evolutionary processes that favored things like cooperation, parent-child bonding, in-group cohesion, etc. It wasn't written into us by an all-Powerful God.

Is this a real contradiction or am I missing the boat?


In my opinion, convergent ethical evolution has produced people with universally accepted norms of behaviour, in broad terms. Evolution demonstrates that the human race is all one closely related family. You would not expect close family members to have wildly divergent moral views.
On the other hand, Evolution also shows how human ethical memes as well as genes, have mutated and undergone adaptive radiation to fit in with different environmental conditions.
Similarly one would expect diverging groups of humans who have settled into "races" or sub-species to exhibit mutated forms of ethical behaviour, even, in some cases, until they directly oppose the ethical memes of other groups. This has produced polarised beliefs, eg Islam and Christianity (at least in some of their beliefs), Democracy/Fascism.
The present religious tensions stem from one group trying to impose its ethical system on another eg religious versus secular,-or enforce particular practices abortion versus anti-abortion. Both abortion and anti-abortion are "right" and "true", ( including even infanticide)--but only in their appropriate social contexts. All the social environments are now freely mixed up, thanks to modern communication and travel,--so likewise are all the different meme systems mixed up as well, producing endless conflict,-at least until one side emerges the stronger (at least for a while).
All the God-talk is just an attempt to rationalise these problems,-but it belongs to an obsolete pre-Evolutionary age.

[Johan]

Both Christians and atheists do seem to have a tendency to notice cross-cultural similarities or notice cross-cultural differences whenever it's convenient for whatever argument they happen to be making at the time.

The world outside of Christendom is an ocean of sin whenever the apologist is arguing that "people can't be moral without God", but then when cross-cultural similarities are pointed out, this is because "God gave them a universal moral conscience", not noticing that this refutes their earleir claim.

Of course, it's one thing for the theist or the atheist to say that, regardless of its provenance, we have an innate capacity to arrange our passions, our attitudes, and our behaviors along certain lines, and quite another thing to argue that we have an innate epistemic module (regardless of its provenance) for discerning independent moral truths, and still a third thing to say that we have an innate set of substantive beliefs (regardless of their provenance), and yet a fourth thing to say that we have an innate set of objectively true beliefs (regardless of their provenance). It is yet a fifth thing to say that any given universal or near-universal cross cultural capacity actually entails any of the nativisms beyond the first one.

So yes, you do have to keep a close eye on whether the apologist is noticing similarities or differences depending on whether it gets him out of the particular jam he's in at the time, and make sure you don't fall into the same trap of pointing them out whenever it's convenient for you to score a point. And you always have to ask the moral nativist, of either the secular or sacred persuasion, whether their pro- or con-stance to descriptive moral relativism has sufficient evidentiary weight to vindicate their pro- or con-stance to metaethical relativism.

[hinduwoman]

Some morals are obviously based on evolution itself --- like caring for one’s children. In every culture the mother who abandons her children is condemned, but that is not because God had ordained an universal moral conscience but because species survival demands we take care of our children.