In previous posts, I have shared findings from a book titled The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals by German psychologist Thomas Suddendorf, who teaches at the University of Queensland. His ninth chapter is on “Right and Wrong.” He begins with an epigraph from Charles Darwin: “Of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.”
Suddendorf, being a German, knows what moral atrocities a people are capable of committing against their fellow human beings. He writes: “Whatever our specific morals are, it is clear that we take pleasure in acting morally, and it pains us when we think we acted immorally” (187). He divides morality into broad areas encompassing: feelings of empathy, group pressure, and self-reflective reasoning.
From infancy, the author observes, humans have an innate “prosocial urge.” Children naturally share. They naturally want to assist others. They easily give up information (sometimes to the parents’ embarrassment). Suddendorf is absolutely correct that Darwinian evolution would argue that humans ought to be selfish (189). That being the case, Suddendorf, Darwin, and every other evolutionist has the obligation to reasonably and logically explain where selflessness originated.
Not only that, but evolutionists have the obligation to explain where morals as a whole originated and upon what basis ought humans to engage in morality. On what basis is something considered right or wrong? Because every time one tries to explain a basis of morality that is not grounded in the nature of God, he opens the moral door to ISIS, Boko Haram, and cop killers. Further, evolutionists have to explain how morality could originate in amoral beings or substances. That would be a hard thing to explain!
Relative to morality, just as sociologist (and apparently agnostic) Dr. Rodney Stark explains in his book America’s Blessings: How Religion Benefits Everyone, Including Atheists, Suddendorf agrees religion is good for our morals! “Religion reduces the need for policing because believers are to some extent policing themselves through their conscience – to avoid divine, rather than secular, punishment. …[T]he religious approach has proven immensely successful in keeping people in line” (193).
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Did morality originate in primates? Based on Suddendorf’s review of the evidence, it is impossible to see how. Chimpanzees, for example, do not even blush. “There is also little evidence to suggest that animals police others’ conformity to norms (if indeed they have them) and punish transgressions” (208). He continues: “there is little reason to believe that they have anything like human moral codes” (209). Animals do not do anything similar to self-reflective moral reasoning.
Among all “animals” (Suddendorf’s view), only humans have created government that creates laws. Only humans have police that enforce those laws. Only humans have created prisons to punish those who violate these laws.
The evidence is clear, from the pen of an atheist. Morality is not created through social relationships; it is innate. It did not, could not have, originated in the animal world. Morality did not originate in either plants, animals, or minerals. It therefore had to have originated beyond this world, that is, in the mind of God. That being the case, whatever God says is moral, is moral. Whatever God says is immoral, is immoral.
–Paul Holland
