Evolution and Ethics

Our Moral Inheritance

“How often, when smarting under some unforeseen misfortune or disappointment, does a person call to mind some proverb or common saying familiar to him all his life, the meaning of which, if he had ever before felt it as he does now, would have saved him from the calamity. There are indeed reasons for this, other than the absence of discussion: there are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized, until personal experience has brought it home. But much more of the meaning even of these would have been understood, and what was understood would have been far more deeply impressed on the mind, if the man had been accustomed to hear it argued pro and con by people who did understand it. The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.” J.S. Mill, “On Liberty”

Secular Humanists want to pretend that science is on their side. They also are impatient with traditional moral and ethical systems and believe that discrediting their sources removes pernicious superstitions. This is formally referred to in logic as the genetic fallacy.

The argument goes something like this, evolution proves that the Bible is wrong about human origins, therefore the Bible is wrong about human ethics and morals and we can just ignore all that superstition.

This makes an unfounded leap to conclusions. The Bibles teachings about origins satisfies a human desire to know. The Bibles teachings about morals and ethics provide a guidance to people on how to live. Believing in the Garden of Eden does not effect how people live their lives on a daily basis. Believing in the Ten Commandments does. If you do stupid things every day, it will hurt you. If you believe that arsenic is good for you, you will be poisoned. If you follow a moral or ethical rule set that is inferior to others it will injure you or society. The Bible is sort of like the human genotype or any genotype for that matter. Certain elements of its contribute to societies ability to function. These provide a blueprint for human behaviors. Other parts serve little functional purpose. Those parts which are functional are subject to evolutionary pressures just as genes are.

If we apply evolution to the usefulness of the Bible as a source for moral and ethical guidance, instead of using it as propaganda to attack the Bible, we would say that the Bible evolved as a moral handbook. As the selected product of thousands of years of social evolution, and one which has survived for more thousands of years, its teachings must be respected. The Bible and similar works have turned out to be fit to survive as a guide to moral and ethical conduct.

Evolution would tell us that traditional moral values evolved, as the evolved product of a very complex system perfected over millennia by societies competing with one another, they must be respected. We may not understand exactly how or why they work, but evolution tells us that they do work and changing them without understanding them is dangerous.

The Secular Humanists are a lot like the Greek Astronomers. The Greeks held that the circle was the most perfect form so planetary orbits are circular. Modern astronomy now knows that the imperfect ellipse is the actual form of planetary orbits. Secular Humanists believe in a lot of things about human nature and society derived from a similar emotional bias. It would just be so much nicer if humans were blank slates, if all humans were reasonable, if self-interest could be ignored in designing the new utopia. Communism and Socialism are classic Secular Humanist utopian systems. They failed because human nature is no more perfect in a simple human sense than ellipses are perfect in a simple human sense. Human nature is the product of evolution, it has a very dark and nasty side, but it is perfect in the sense that a birds wings are perfect or elliptical orbits are perfect. Except that human nature evolved when we were all hunter/gatherers. Human society evolves and changes at a rate faster than genetic evolution can occur. We are adapted by evolution to life in a different environment than that which we have created for ourselves. Our artificial environment gives us great gifts but also creates problems we are not adapted to handle instinctively. We must address those problems through education in the standards of a culture which has adapted to meet them. The moral and ethical standards of the Bible provide such an evolved template of behavior.

What evolutionary theory should tell a reasonable person about the Bible is that while we have no need to accept it as literally true, we should be very careful about abandoning its social and moral standards for some adolescent utopian standards created largely on the basis of wishful thinking. In the end, when we reduce human nature to scientific fact and can describe a scientific guide for human behavior as clearly as we describe elliptical orbits, it is going to end up being pretty close to the traditional values which social evolution has given us in documents like the Bible. Evolution is a very efficient mechanism.

Again all the arguments in this area have been so twisted out of contact with reality by the emotional baggage the two sides bring to the issues that nothing said in public makes any real sense at all. A sensible approach based on evolution is to assume a certain value in traditional moral systems, to support organizations like churches which promote these values while not insisting on the literal truth of associated beliefs about unanswered questions.