Has Evolution Baked Morality Into Us?

2 Comments

1. Well our current morality is based on both evolution and society… obviously we weren’t that different biologically from people a few years hundred years ago, and they were chill with slavery.

   But in terms of evolution, the reason we concluded this is that it makes sense that things like altruism would be evolutionary beneficial (caring for your young, etc.) and we see the building blocks of morality in other animals.

   Rats will help other distressed rats that have been soaked with water, and it will also choose to help a cage mate that is in distress before obtaining a food reward. Chimpanzees will help each other and share with each other, but only when they benefit from the sharing, as long as the costs are minimal and the needs of the other chimpanzees are clear. Chimpanzees also collaborate and form alliances in fights or when hunting. Capuchin monkeys have even been shown to react in a negative way when they see other monkeys being treated unfairly.

   We also find that babies of both animals and humans tend to have a primitive sense of morality in that they tend to like “nicer” things rather than meaner things.

   We don’t know exactly how it developed to how it did today, but it’s clear that being a social species and having a form of evolutionary morality is useful and most likely happened.

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2. The issue with this is that when people bring up the problem of evil, they do it given a creator who, according to the Bible, wants to make us prosper and not harm us.

   And so when people bring up the problem of suffering, it (seemingly) goes against the objective morality of God bring love (and love being defined as patient, kind, etc) described in the Bible. This is actually just an attempt at pointing out a self-refuting claim, like in your book “Tactics!”

   There is no problem of suffering if there is no all-loving all-powerful God. Suffering just exists as a fact of life.

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