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Religion, ethics, and genetics
01/02/2006 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Mark looks at the standard Sunday school view of history and the belief that nobody would be virtuous without a fear of God. But might any ideology - and a belief in morality is an ideology - have a genetic basis instead? In the 07/23/04 issue of the MT VOID (Mark's own excellent e-zine: Ed), I made a rather flip and whimsically-intended comment: "When we see the world enflamed in fighting in the name of religion, it is easy to forget that religion's original intent was to save the world from the moral evil of atheism." It is an irony that has more recently and expressed by other people is currently the centre of some controversy.
The standard Sunday school view of history is that the natural state of humanity is evil and degradation, or at the very least naughtiness. Frequently the concept of Original Sin is involved. People have a view that religion came into the world to redeem humanity and bring them to God's Will and His Grace. Humans without God are programmed for evil. Some define virtue as doing God's Will even if the actions otherwise seem immoral.
There also is the belief that nobody would be virtuous without a fear of God's post-mortem judgement, that this is the only motive we have for morality. The belief is that atheists must be immoral because they do not believe in God's judgement, so have no reason to be virtuous. Dostoyevsky said, "If God does not exist than everything is permissible." Some believe that just not believing in God is in itself immoral.
In any case we have a very Cecil B. DeMille-like image of people without the enlightenment of religion falling, sometimes almost immediately, into bestial orgies of sin, perversion, and other pagan depravity. The moment people abandon the true religion, as the Israelites in DeMille's THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, they degenerate, and it is only the word of God that brings them back to decency and right. And that really seems to be the prevalent belief of how it was, particularly when cultures clashed in Biblical times. We have the view of all the sinning that was being done in the time Noah or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra. Much of the American population believes that most of ethical belief has its root in religious rules.
Today most religious people feel that the Israelites had a moral superiority over the believers of pagan religions. The Sunday school viewpoint is that the Israelites brought a wave of morality sweeping into the ancient Near East. We like to think that believers in Dagon and Baal were terrible and degraded people. It is easy to believe that. None of them are around to defend their creed, so we do not really know. When Christianity spread to places like Hawaii in better documented times, the morality of that action is easier to question. It is not as easy to say that the pre-Christian Polynesian religions were morally or ethically inferior to the religions brought to them by missionaries.
Some philosophers, notably Rousseau, believed instead that humans were born virtuous. I would like to consider the possibility that ethics do not necessarily come from religion. In my opinion there actually may be a genetic basis for ethics and morality. It may well be that humans have some instinct for morality and ethics without having to be given these concepts by religions. It may well be that our ethics are programmed into us genetically, not necessarily taught to us by religions.
The question one might ask is whether any ideology - and a belief in morality is an ideology - can have a genetic basis. Do genes have the possibility to inspire thought patterns along a certain line? I think that they could, and what convinced me they could is what I have heard of canine behaviour.
So do I believe dogs have an ideology? In a way they do. They decide that certain behaviours are a good idea. Somehow retriever puppies all get the same idea that it is a really great game to have someone throw them a stick, to find it, and to bring it back. It is a behaviour that seems very natural to retriever puppies and they all get the same idea. This does not seem to be passed to them culturally from other dogs. They get the idea on their own. Terriers somehow similarly get the idea that it is great fun to dig in the ground. Husky puppies will on their own decide that it is fun to pull things. These are not what we consider full-blown ideologies, but they are ideas. The concept of instinct, I think, comes and goes from favour in the scientific community, but a much of animal behaviour is hard to explain if behaviour and belief is not part of their genetic programming.
Over the last few years there has been discussion as to whether spirituality might be part of some people's genetic make-up. Dean H. Hamer published a book, THE GOD GENE: HOW FAITH IS HARDWIRED INTO OUR GENES. People have been talking about this thing called "the God Gene." This gene would make people more susceptible to feelings of having mystical experiences and make people more willing to believe that these feelings are divinely inspired. In a sense these people with this hypothetical gene may be programmed for religious faith. It is not too much more of a stretch to believe people could be hardwired for ethical behaviour.
Certainly many aspects of even human behaviour are hard to explain if one entirely rejects the ideas of genetic hardwiring and instinct. There seems to be a sort of genetically programmed ideology even in humans. There is even a mechanism for explaining why some ideas may be in the gene. Richard Dawkins suggests in THE SELFISH GENE that much of human behaviour can be explained as subconscious (or deeper) and implicit survival strategies for preserving not oneself necessarily but copies of one's genes. Why are people attracted to the opposite sex? It also happens to be a good strategy for getting genes into the next generation. Nobody thinks explicitly that preserving his genes is important, but if some set of genes do pre-dispose their owner to pass on his genes, those genes are more likely to get into the next generation.
Ethical behaviour might be quite likely to have a genetic basis. People who are highly unethical create conflicts that they can easily lose. There would be positive survival value to having genetic programming that makes people greedy enough to fight for their own survival, yet not so greedy that they endanger others' survival. There could be genetic programming to co-exist and to even to team up to help others in society keeps the gene pool large enough so that it does not lead to in-breeding. This could well be a genetic survival strategy. Nature may actually select for programming that leads to ethical behaviour. Humans may well have an instinct for morality. And the answer to the religious question of what motive is there for morality if not rewarded by God is that morality may increase the probability for survival.
Some religions would like very much to be associated with ethics. They would like to be seen as the only path to an ethical and moral life. A co-worker who was known for his religious fundamentalist viewpoint debated me on the subject of religion at one point, trying to convert me to his viewpoint. He asked me if the reason I resisted was that I was afraid of the high moral requirements of his religion. He made what is a standard assumption that other fundamentalists have made that he was on what we both assumed was a higher moral plane than I was because he was his religion and I was not. And from his point of view and in the view of his religion that was true.
Earlier in the argument we had discussed the ethical treatment of animals. I considered it very important and he just dismissed it with the statement that the Bible says that man was given dominion over animals. He assumed there was no ethical reason for better treatment for animals because he knew from his book that it was not required. His religion had high moral standards because he did not accept the validity of any moral standard not espoused by his religion.
I have always been sceptical of the association of religions and ethics. I have frequently wondered if certain religions were not over-stressing belief and faith and even music, but were not strongly acting as moral compasses for their members. At least if they were they were not moral compasses that agreed with my own.
I think religions would want to take credit for a strong ethical basis that frequently is imaginary. Religions frequently take credit for things that may have nothing to do with them. If a church member gets sick, it is bad luck. If the member gets well, it is God who gets the credit. It is just good business for the church to give God credit for ethical impulses.
The best way to see if ethics are really possible without religion would be to look at atheist societies and see if they devolve into immorality. Certainly in the 20th century some atheistic governments were highly immoral. Dictators like Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Pol Pot have been responsible for mass murder and even genocide. It would be a mistake to ignore them. But there are several largely-atheist societies today that are much more ethical (e.g., Scandinavia). I would say that if a dictator has control of a country and is bent on very unethical acts, those societies frequently become extremely evil. It is the powerful dictator, not the people, who lack the moral resolve to know right.
Certainly if one reads the headlines of a newspaper, a great deal of the violence in the world today has a religious basis. And wherever it happens it seems it is people who have no doubt that what they are doing is God's will. They may delegate their consciences to a book or a religious leader. Ironically some societies in which religions play less of a role seem to be functioning considerably better. I recently read the article, "My Heroes Are Driven By God, But I'm Glad My Society Isn't" by George Monbiot that appeared in "The Guardian" (http://tinyurl.com/cdrjn). In this article Monbiot presents the idea that secular democracies seem to function better than religious ones. He quotes the following by Gregory Paul writing in the Journal of Religion and Society:
"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion… None of the strongly secularised, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction." Within the United States, "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the north-east where . . . secularisation, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms".
The original article with the formidable title "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies" by Gregory Paul, can be found at http://moses.creighton.edu
Now a correlation does not show cause and effect, but the correlation certainly does not seem out of line based on experience. It certainly does show that religion is not doing a very good job in limiting crime and extending morality. People with a strong faith that their actions can always be squared with God are very likely to associate that with license.
I suspect that humans are born with conflicting urges, both having their origins in their genetics. One urge is for the social order that will provide their genes with a stable gene pool. The other is aggression, which protects genes more directly. I think that humans, as thinking beings, generally can balance these two urges and that the urge for social order does a reasonable, though not perfect, job of holding the aggression in check. The young learn early to check their aggressive tendencies. Some of the social democracies of Europe are examples of this.
Religion is one of the ideologies that can come along and override the genetic urge for social order. It frequently says that the intuitive morality is a false one and that the true morality comes from only God. As soon as it offers a substitute morality, the conflict between aggression and morality finds an entirely new balance. Morality can come to mean aggressively enforcing some human's interpretation of God's rules. It offers those who would want it what is de facto a licensed exemption from common morality in the name of God. It can bear a message that what is claimed to be the "real" morality allows and may even require aggression against non-believers. Historically the result has been burning at the stake, stoning, and religious wars at the extreme end, but can also include intolerance for non- conformity and rigorous enforcement of tradition. The religion offers some a licensed exemption from common decency and even a moral compass that points in the direction of aggression.
If one looks at the greatest man-made ills of the 20th Century, perhaps all history, they mainly come from ideologies - religious or secular - that offer a higher cause than intuitive morality. They offer a supposed superior morality that allows aggression to be done in a cause superior to common decency. That cause can be nationalism, socialism, racial superiority, or frequently religion. In short, religions are extremely unreliable authorities on morality.
Mark R. Leeper
© Mark R Leeper 2006
For science fiction treatments of the "God gene" and similar ideas, see Robert J. Sawyer's HYBRIDS and Greg Egan's "Oceanic". [-ecl] 
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