Evolution of Morality

"If the truth can be told, so as to be understood, it will be believed" Terence McKenna. 

As an atheist I have often encountered the viewpoint that without belief in a god, there can surely be no morality. To someone of faith, their belief in their god is so woven through every aspect of their life, that it must be incredibly difficult to imagine a concept like morality as a separate thing. 

Often the response by atheists to this assertion is mockery, but I honestly don't think that helps either side. It is human nature to mock something which we see as foolish, but I think that for the most part what we perceive as foolish is simply a lack of knowledge. Not knowing something does not make a person foolish, it simply means that they have never had the opportunity to learn whatever it is that is being discussed. The fact that once I did not know that Earth revolves around the sun does not mean that I was a fool not to know, just that I had not yet encountered that knowledge. So I think the way to tackle this lack of knowledge is to enlighten, rather than mock. 

For my own part, I believe that everyone is capable of morality, and indeed that everyone has their own moral code. Where the disagreements arise, is from the fact that morality is entirely a personal thing, based on personal experience, based on things we are told by those who we look up to, based on the laws that we live under. So what is morally right or wrong varies from person to person, even within groups of like-minded individuals. 

One person will judge another as immoral for smoking cannabis, because it is against the law, but that same person will happily break the speed limit while driving, without a guilty conscience. If you've never had an accident while speeding, you can rationalise that the law is unnecessary, and your morality adjusts to allow for this concept. You can argue that the sale of controlled substances funds other crimes, but while that may be true, the actual act of smoking pot on your own at home, harms no one, yet the current view of our society is that it is morally wrong. At the same time, speeding can, and often does, cause harm to others, yet we have reached a point where it is seen as acceptable - at least to the point that myriad people do it every day. 

It was once considered morally correct to stone someone to death for adultery. We still hold the moral view that adultery is wrong. You choose a partner, you stay with them. We still feel that it should not simply be allowed to happen, and that when people commit it, it should not go unpunished. Nowadays we punish them by divorcing them. By them having to suffer the social exclusion of being labelled a cheater. But we don't (as a general rule) kill them for it. And the reason for that is that morality, like society, evolves. Some aspects of morality remain the same. I think we'd struggle to find anyone who thinks that killing or stealing are right. But that's part of why we stopped killing people for adultery. We learned that the punishment should fit the crime, so we adjusted our laws and stopped (in most cultures at least) killing people for adultery. Our morality evolved. Right and wrong didn't change, but our definitions of them did. 

Morality is a personal, individual thing. There are aspects of it that are pretty much universally agreed, but then there are other aspects that are more fluid. And we each decide what we believe to be morally correct, based on our own experiences. We learn that when someone dies, their loss causes great pain to those who loved them, and so we establish that to take a life is wrong. 

Gravity is indisputable. You can't choose whether to be affected by it. It can be explained and measured. It might be changed over time, by environmental changes, but we can't change it by simply ignoring it. And a personal experience won't change the extent to which it affects you. Morality though, is an abstract. You can't define it absolutely because it means different things to different people. In some cases we take the moral choice of "an eye for an eye". In others we choose to "forgive those who trespass against us". The important thing there is that it is a choice. Unlike gravity, we choose whether to be affected by the consensus opinion of what is right or wrong. Most of us believe that killing is wrong, and so we don't do it. But some people still do. If those people chose to disagree with the laws of gravity, they wouldn't simply float away. 

So what of the morality of faith? Having been raised with Christian values, that's what I'm most familiar with, so I'll use that as my example, though with the caveat that I don't pretend to be any kind of authority on it, and the knowledge that other faiths work in similar, but not identical ways to install their followers with a moral code. 

The bible has a lot of guidance and advice, for many things. A lot of the advice in there is perfectly sound, and as relevant today as it was when it was first written down. But a lot of it is contradicted by other passages, so we see people quoting only the passages that demonstrate their personal moral code, while ignoring those which contradict it. Conversely, much of it is not contradicted within the bible, but we find that people don't follow it because we now know more about the human condition than did the people of 2000 years ago. Our group morality has evolved. It has changed, and so we change our behaviour accordingly. 

Part of the problem with quoting any individual passage, is that a lot of it is about context, and much of it is open to interpretation. It's all translated, through several languages, and in some cases the translations are disputed. One individual passage is interpreted one way by some people, and a different way by others. It's not a set of rules, it's a collection of advice. And that advice is based on the personal experiences of those who wrote it down. 

But it's also anachronistic. It's often giving a viewpoint that few would share today, because it goes against what we now consider to be morally correct. Our morality has evolved. 

What you find in any faith-based text, or holy book, is not answers, but guidance. Advice. You might, as a result of that guidance and advice, *find* the answers you're looking for, but the answers themselves are not there. You find the answers in your interpretation. 

Some years ago I came to the conclusion that I am an atheist. I reviewed my own experiences and realised that the fundamental message of Christianity (the faith I was raised in), as with all religions, is essentially common sense. If you don't like being treated a certain way, other people probably don't like it either, so you should "do unto others...". Having a moral code, treating other people fairly doesn't require the existence of a creator. It just requires that you think sensibly and rationally about how you behave. 

I choose to follow a moral code not for the promise of reward in another life, but simply to improve the lives of those I share my life with right now. I don't do it to avoid going to hell, I do it to avoid other people feeling like they are in hell right now. Part of it is undeniably out of selfish motives - I want to be treated with kindness too. Though I don't think it's unfair to say that acting a certain way to ensure passage into heaven is also to some degree a self-serving viewpoint. 

The idea that *any* book could contain the answers to things which are subjective and personal, seems to me to be remarkably short-sighted. That the book is thousands of years old makes it seem unfair to expect that every part of it is still relevant and appropriate. In those thousands of years, we have learned so much, some through discovery, some through learning from mistakes. It's inconceivable to posit that all of that experience and learning is rendered irrelevant because of one book, written before the advent of scientific discovery. Yet this is the foundation for the morality of so many, who find it incomprehensible that without it, one can have any kind of morality. 

So how do we proceed? How do we reach a point where, rather than arguing about whose morality is superior, we instead work together, from the points where our moral codes overlap, to be a force for what we universally agree is good? 

Once you start down the path of being adversarial, there is little either side can say that the other would be able to truly take on board, we need to begin a discussion where each party respects the right of the other to have different views, even if they do not agree.