Did God Guide the Evolution of Morality?

About a third of Americans believe “humans have developed over millions of years from less-advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” That sounds like a solution that will please everyone, doesn’t it? The scientist’s theory of evolution is accepted and the believer’s God has a central role. *

Few people on either side of the debate would find that position threatening. It’s a different story when we talk about the evolution of morality. Somehow a naturalistic explanation for our moral sense strikes closer to home than a naturalistic explanation for life itself. In some ways, our moral sense is a more important and cherished component of our identity than our physical bodies.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis pointed to our shared moral sense as evidence of God. We yearn for right rather than wrong; how could we long for something that does not exist? We thirst for water, which exists, rather than for an imaginary liquid. In the same way, our thirst for righteousness strongly suggests that there is such a thing.

Let us agree, then, that there is such as thing as right and wrong. Could evolution, rather than God, account for our sense of it?

I have heard it argued as recently as this morning that evolution could not have been the wellspring of morality. The competition-to-the-death that drives evolution could never result in anything like the moral sense we all have. Evolution could only produce creatures more and more efficient and ruthless. By now, we should all be Nazis. The atrocities of the Islamic State should be the norm.

Before responding, let’s be sure we understand the assertion. It is that no purely physical (i.e., godless) mechanism could possibly produce the moral sense we share. If we were to inspect the process without allowing God into the picture, it would not hold together.

That makes it unlike theistic biological evolution. The adherents of God-guided biological evolution say that he nudged mutations at key points so they were not random, although his work was subtle enough as not to be obvious. If I flip a coin five times and the outcome is heads every time, you might suspect that I cheated by “guiding” the process, but you would not say it’s impossible for a five-heads sequence to occur all by itself. C.S. Lewis and others who make the argument from morality are saying that it is impossible for the moral order we observe to occur as the result of a purely physical process.

Richard Dawkins more than refuted this almost 40 years ago in his book, The Selfish Gene. I posted a little series summarizing the book three winters ago. To boil it down even further, the argument goes like this. The unit of evolution is the gene, not the organism, for it is the genes that are doing the mutating. The genes (not the organisms) that produce the most copies of themselves are the evolutionarily successful ones. Copies of one’s genes exist most abundantly in one’s kin, and then in one’s tribe, race, species, and genus, in that order. Therefore, genes that manage to induce in their host bodies an instinct to aid the survival of one’s kin, tribe, race, etc., will promote more copies of themselves. Cooperation becomes a survival strategy, not necessarily for the organisms but for the genes. And indeed we see great cooperation and sacrifice for family members, a strong but somewhat lesser loyalty to tribe, and so on down the line — just as a gene-centered explanation of cooperation predicts.

What is the first rule of cooperation? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That also happens to be the basis for all morality, according to Jesus himself. Voila!

A purely physical, perfectly sensible explanation for morality has been found. Believers have declared this to be impossible. Indeed some, following C.S. Lewis, have made this the linchpin of their argument for God. Will they now recant? In the spirit of truth, will they admit their error from their pulpits and in conversations with the unconverted? Will they even read Dawkins’ short book before they decide not do to so?

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* – Young-earth creationists are unhappy with theistic evolution because, to them, it directly contradicts the gospel. They believe that Adam and Eve were real people and death — physical death — entered the world because of Adam’s sin. There was no death before Adam, so eons of “survival of the fittest” could not have happened. This is not a fringe view, by the way, according to the same Gallup poll cited above, just under half of Americans believe “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”