Don't Put The Cart of Religion Before The Horse of Morality

On the BBC's The Big Questions last week, human rights activist Peter Tatchell proclaimed that while religion has done some good in human history its overall contribution to society has been negative. Even if that is true, which I doubt, that's not the question I want to address here (I did once write something roughly to do with that issue here in this article). No, what I wanted to address was what a religious commentator (I forget her name) blurted out by way of response: she reproved Peter Tatchell by insisting that humans depended on the Judeo-Christian religion for the processes of moral codifications to be created at all, and that all of contemporary humankind has religion to thank for the fact that our morality evolved in such a developed way.

It's a common view posited by many people of faith, but it just isn't true - and such claims give a bad impression of theists' ability to understand the evolution of morality. It is impossible for religious codifications to be the basis of morality because, as anyone who understands the problem of the criterion would know, it is not possible to construct any kind of moral codification without an already existent evolved moral awareness by which to judge those constructs. Or to put it another way: you can't assess the rights and wrongs of ethical codes without first having an understanding of rights and wrongs.

Even as a person of faith I repeatedly find myself reminding fellow believers that morality is a humanly constructed phenomenon that evolved to aid us in survival and reproduction. It's true that religion did get in first in our historical attempts to codify that evolved morality into a set of ethical laws and practices, but it's rather misjudged to suggest that without it we wouldn’t have evolved all the refined notions of rights and wrongs. Of course we would - as humans continued to culturally evolve we would always further enhance our moral philosophies and ethical sensibilities - it's part of our natural assent towards bit-by-bit improvement. It's through understanding that morality is a human construct that we have the best chance of understanding why Christianity is something altogether superior to mere morality.