Do we get our morality from evolution?
This was a question Ron asked in comments, and I think we should break it into its own thread, for ease of discussion.
Someone anonymous wrote:
"Great answer, I do think that science has it's own moral code though that still puzzles me. I havn't seen a cat that would not hunt the mouse but what I did see on one of the animal shows was a crocodile that attacked a small deer like animal and a near-by hipo attacked the croc, gently placed the deer in his mouth and carried him to safety and tried to nudge him back to life. Even the people on the show said that they did not have an explaination for this.
Another show showed two male cobras in a turf battle and said that they will intentionally not bite each other because they have a built in understanding of the fatality in the bite. When one of the cobras is penned he must leave. I realize that my understanding could be skewed but to me that sounds like morals."
I think both of those are great things to discuss.
As I see it, there are two questions here:
Did humans get their morality from evolution?
Do animals exhibit behavior that we might call morality?
Let me try to answer the first one.
Did humans get their morality from evolution?
Here's where we get into an area where religion and religious belief has something to say. Religion says that at least SOME of our morality came from the sky in the form of some pretty famous stone tablets. Evolution has nothing to say on whether or not those stone tablets are the word of God. Religion also says that a famous carpenter brought us some really great moral guidelines. Evolution is silent on that question as well.
I'm not going to wade into those possibilities here.
If you ask if morality came from evolution, I'm going to say, well, our brains came from evolution. Our bodies came from evolution. Our hearts came from evolution.
Did God use evolution to create morality? Good question. It's a religious question which science cannot answer.
But we did evolve morality. Chimps have their own form of what you'd call "chimp morality," that is, a set of social rules by which the family group gets along, settles disputes, looks out for one another, protects the weak and ensures the continued survival of the family.
All social animals have social rules they follow. Dogs in packs have a pecking order, an alpha dog, etc. Dogs imprint on people and treat their owners as the alpha dog in the pack.
Geese will imprint on a human owner, as if it's a parent, and will follow them in a gaggle.
Sometimes animals will adopt an animal of a different species, even when normally that animal is food. We've seen that in cute stories in the news where a pet cat has a parakeet. Sometimes the mothering instinct is so strong in an animal that it will adopt the young of a different animal. I remember a story about a wild lioness that adopted different baby gazelles for short periods of time (before the other lionesses in the pride killed them for food).
All of these instances are examples of social instincts in animals. There is no evidence to suggest that our social behavior isn't, at least in part, instinct-based.
posted by Siamang @ 10:22 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Siamang,
You've said before that evolution didn't disprove God. I am curious to here more on this. Of course growing up I have always been taught to believe that it is either one or the other.
Ron
Hey, Ron. Great question!
I've always thought that a DEVO lyric provided the most succinct reply to that one: "God made man, but he used a monkey to do it, God made man, but a monkey was the glue"
Of course, there are millions of Christians who nevertheless accept the historical, fossil, geological, genetic, taxonomic, morphological, and all the countless other areas of evidence for the underlying process by which the great, wonderous diversity of life flows.
I like this article online, which has a quote by the director of the Vatican Observatory, a Jesuit named the Rev. George Coyne
"If they respect the results of modern science, and indeed the best of modern biblical research, religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly."
Rather, he argued, God should be seen more as an encouraging parent.
"God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity," he wrote. "He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves."
If you accept the idea of God, you must realize the science in every aspect of God's creation. When a bird flies, you may rightly judge it a miracle, but you don't say "miraculously God holds each sparrow aloft." You, as a modern person, must allow for the science of aerodynamics.
In 1623 Gallileo wrote:
"Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something."
There isn't magic holding the sparrow aloft. God is too clever to make a world where He is constantly required to lift each sparrow. Behind all of God's actions in the natural world, there is a process.
God doesn't move the planets by His Hand. He is too clever for that. He has gravity and inertia do it. And in so doing, holds the entire universe together with a simple unifying bond. You and me, our very atoms, the world, the planets, the stars, everything is united by gravity.
Similarly, a creator God is cleverer than someone who merely makes a world with life that needs constant re-balancing to meet whatever the current needs are of any population of animals. What if He could create a world where the animals, and plants and all life are in a constant form of growth, rebirth, renewal... Always fixing any need, always growing to fill new ecological niches. It's a more wonderous creation, to me.
Science doesn't ask the question "did God create the rich diversity of life we see?" That's the realm of faith.
It asks the question "by which process does nature grow and develop?" Just as it asked the questions "by which process do birds fly" and "by which process do planets move?"
Oops, here's the link to the article about Rev. Coyne.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10101394/
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