Can There Be Morality Without the Abrahamic God? (Hint: Yes)

by David Sims

“IF THERE IS no God, where does our morality and the ability to know right from wrong come from?”

Theologians and religious leaders often attempt to make God a prerequisite for morality, but this is contrived to make the belief system that they are selling seem more valuable than it really is.

Morality is survival behavior above the individual level. Moral systems evolved among humans for the same reason that animals evolved fangs, claws, and the ability to run fast.

The highest value in any proper moral system, which is any moral system that does what a moral system should do, is survival.

Why survival? Because, as I’ve said many times, nothing matters to the dead. Because neither truth, nor justice, nor freedom — nor anything else — has any value at all to extinct peoples. Because only to something alive may anything else be good. A rock doesn’t care whether you hit it with a hammer, but a mouse does.

When I name survival as the highest value of a proper moral system, I mean the survival of the moral system’s practitioner group — not the survival of any individual and not the survival of any other group. Nobody needs a moral system to tell him to run from danger, or to fight for his life if he cannot run. Morality is survival behavior above the individual level; it evolved to preserve the group that makes the existence of the individual possible. This group might be distinguished by culture, but, most of the time, it is distinguished by race.

There is one further requirement, namely, the manner in which the practitioner group guards its own survival must be such that the group’s prospects for continued survival do not diminish over time. As the members of the group die from old age or from mischance, they must be replaced by at least as many new members of equal or greater quality. For races, this requirement is mostly satisfied by the way in which biological inheritance works — though it could benefit from some application of passive eugenics; e.g., the culture might be formed such that the best and most able members of the race were encouraged to have many children, while the least able members were discouraged from breeding.

Again, why is survival always the highest value in any proper moral system? Because, I say as I have said before, and it bears repeating: If a group places supreme moral value on something else, then sooner or later they would encounter circumstances in which their survival is in conflict with whatever that other thing is. When that happens, either the group will abandon their improper moral system and take up a proper one, or they will die off into extinction — and their improper moral system will vanish along with them.

What does not exist has no value. What cannot exist for long — especially if it is configured such that it causes its own demise — probably isn’t worth much.

And here, once more, is why the emphasis isn’t on the individual, but on the group that makes possible the creation of a particular type of individual. Individuals are ephemeral. They cannot by any means endure forever. But the race that made the individual can endure, if it behaves in accordance with a proper moral system. That’s why a warrior who fights for his race is a moral being. He fights, until he dies or the war is concluded, so that the people most like himself will be able to remain in existence.

Just as a normal person values his own children more than he values the children of others, so does a normal person value other members of his own race more than he values members of other races. People who don’t do that are not normal. They are sick. How did they become sick? By absorbing the propaganda of clever enemies to the point of moral confusion and, thence, into mental illness.

* * *

Source: Author