The Origin of Morality

Recently I have been watching some theology/atheism debates. I was especially impressed with some of the arguments delivered by Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens even though they mainly deal with Catholicism rather than religion as a whole. In two debates featuring Hitchens (one with Douglas Wilson; the other with Frank Turek), however, he fails to answer specific questions in what I would call a satisfactory manner.

One was on the difference between having faith in a religion, and holding faith in reason. That's something I could come back to later; suffice to say for the minute that I don't think that religion and reason can be compared as things you place faith in. It would also suggest that those who have faith in a religion are unreasonable.

The other was the origin of morality. Turek's question to Hitchens was along the lines of "If there is no god, if we are just matter in motion, where does morality come from? The carbon atom? The benzine molecule? Where does morality come from?"; reasoning that without a deity or supreme being to set a moral code within us, morality could not exist.

I went away thinking about this one, but I have to say that it was easier to answer than Wislon's question about having faith in religion vs. having faith in reason (although what caught me about Wilson's question was its wording, not so much an answer). I came up with an autodidactic response, which I was going to detail here.

Just before writing this entry, I thought I'd make sure I had the definitions of morality and ethics clear. What do I find? I find that the evolution of morality is already a theory in evolutionary biology and sociobiology (here's the wikipedia entry). Well thank goodness! Now I don't have to write the whole thing out.

However, it does show that Hitchens was either skirting around a subject he hadn't ventured into before, preferring to go on the attack rather than come up with a plausible response; or he simply wasn't listening to the question. Although I've gone through about four or five debates featuring Hitchens now, you could just copy and paste Hitchens' arguments from one into all the others because he seems to repeat himself quite a bit between discussions.

Does this make me question my own secularity? Of course not. It reminds me that even though we might give up mysticism and superstition, our journey to enlightenment does not end there. There are many forms of ignorance to address and overcome.