So…I was discussing religion and morality with a friend of mine the other day and the conversation came down to this question:
Which came first: religion or morality?
The original conversation was about whether morality would exist without religion. And that is actually the real question, so feel free to speak on that. Determining which came first doesn’t answer that question (unless morality evolved first), but this chicken-egg sort of debate caused us to carefully examine our positions, which was the most interesting part of the convo. Here are our basic premises:
My friend believes that morality wouldn’t exist without religion. People are inherently selfish and need a higher power to rise above that. Religion “controls the people”.
I think “morality” is basically the set of behaviors necessary for cooperative functioning within any group. Those who lie, cheat, steal from, or murder others in the group are likely to be outcast. This POV would suggest that morality evolves from self-interest.
Thoughts?
Morality. So say I all.
Our ethics evolved right along with the rest of our parts. If you folks haven’t read “The Origins or Virtue” by Matt Ridley, scamper off quicklikeabunny and do it. Or, if you live in Atlanta, you can borrow mine.
Shit. “The Origins OF Virtue”.
Sorry, it’s the booze.
Morality. I agree with the whole “we evolved our sense of right and wrong thing.” It’s a no brainer, even monkeys have morals. And I do live in Atlanta, so if you’d like to bring “Origins of Virtue” to the next SITP, that’d be great!
It’s pretty clear that our sense of morality is evolved, both genetically and socially, and I think it’s safe to assume that at least the precursors to morality existed before any kind of religion.
There is also current empirical evidence for this: more and more animals are shown to display moral behaviors, and it’s pretty clear that humans are the only ones to have religion.
What I think religion does is attempt to consolidate certain moral dicta into a code of ethics.
So… morality came first, and then the social engine of religion augmented (or distorted) this innate and socially-constructed sense of morality.
Morality. I think religion was just a fancy way to write it down and force people to listen before we had police and laws to do that. Sure, people can be dicks, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know the difference between right and wrong — it just means they don’t care that much. Religious people are equally capable of that attitude.
I don’t know if we can ever be sure. Certainly the earliest humans that were able to communicate ideas would have come up with a system of mythologies to explain the world around them. Whether they would have applied that mythology to their own behavioral system we can only speculate.
I will say that there is a lot of evidence suggesting we evolved our big brains in part due to our social nature. And as such, it seems unlikely that we could have ever existed as groups without some system of morality. It might not be the same as what we have in place today, but certainly it was something. Perhaps it was something closer to the social codes of modern apes.
On the other hand, we can’t deny that religion has influenced morality like nothing else in history.
Clearly morality came first. And in exactly the way you describe. Your conversation with your friend is making one major assumption, though: that religion is the source of law.
I know your friend is saying that religion gives a reason to be moral, as in a supernatural motivation to behave ethically, but when you break down that belief it becomes clear that it’s an issue of reward and punishment, dictated by an authority. Basically, “be moral, or else” – so, morality comes from laws, and those laws come from religion.
The problem with that assumption is that prior to any system of religious laws that we know of, there were secular laws. Laws passed down by kings without any supernatural overtones. Laws such as the Code of Ur-Nammu, which included prohibitions of theft, rape, vandalism, murder, and other immoral acts. The Code of Ur-Nammu was written 1500 years before the Pentateuch – well before any religious system of laws that we have yet discovered.
The second problem with your friend’s assertion is the very nature of morality and religion. Religion is about one’s relationship with their gods. It’s very much a vertical relationship. God is on top, you are on bottom, and the entire relationship is built on that fact. Morality, on the other hand, is a horizontal issue. It pertains to how people treat other people. A person’s relationships with gods is not even on the same plane as their relationships with other people.
I think this question also requires a definition of “religion” – obviously, as early humans banded together for better survival, they must have created some basic community standards that could be construed as “religion”, but wouldn’t be like a modern equivalent (i.e., the catholic church, mormonism, paganism, whatever).
I think it highly likely that the two things developed in tandem, rather than one before the other. Human beings seem pretty hardwired for social interaction.
The only way to even suggest that morailty comes only from religion is if people were to follow every moral put forth by said religion. For christianity, that would be over 613 things one must do or avoid in order to please their god. As it stands I know very few christians (if any) that honestly think that wearing fabric woven of 2 different cloths is an abomination and should be avoided as a matter of morality.
People still pick and chose their morals, even within a religious context. This is indicative that humans follow the same idea of morals regardless of their religious affiliation (or lack thereof).
Thanks to FMRIs, we are getting better at determining exactly where activity occurs when making moral decisions. This can only lead to a better knowledge of where our morals come from.
I am betting they are hardwired into our brains (for the most part) as a matter of a very social animal survival.
@JSug I’m pretty sure we can never be sure. :)
But as for the main question I think the terms are a bit ambiguous. Are we talking about a formalized concept of morality or a particular set of behaviors? And are we speaking of formal religious doctrine or the earliest attempts to explain the unknowns in the world around us through magical thinking?
I’m no sociologist or social biologist or evolutionist or any of those other -ists, so my opinion probably holds as much water as a fork. I view morality as a form of altruism, or at least what I understand to be altruism. People help people for the sake of the species’ continued survival. It’s only with our big brains that we’ve categorized altruistic acts as “right” and non-altruistic acts as “wrong.” Religion later pushed these concepts to the extreme and defined “good” and “evil,” claiming these terms to define morality.
And altruism isn’t reserved to highly evolved beings such as humans. Even E.coli in our guts have shown signs of altruism: When two colonies of bacteria are close together, competing for nutrients, certain members of one will develop a toxin, to which other members of their colony are immune, and burst, showering the competitors in a sort of microbiological warfare.
So not only did morality evolve with us long before religion, weapons of mass destruction evolved with bacteria long before either of them!
Sethmanipo — It’ll be there. I want to stay on D*C security’s good side :) Treat it well, since I think I promised to eventually send it to Tina in Destin, since her dad has a boat and they scuba.
Definitely morality came first.
In answer to your friend’s comment, people are inherently selfish. We are also inherently empathic and altruistic and loving and hungry and intelligent and …
I figure that we want explanations for things. Philosophy, in its earliest form, probably grew up to explain why we behave the way we do, and why we like some types of action and dislike others. When put together with our first guesses at why the world works the way it works, we had religion.
To the extent that religion is universal (historically as well as currently), it is simply a philosophical hypothesis of the human condition. In that sense (and only that sense), humanism/atheism is a “religion”. We all need some such a hypothesis to help us navigate the adult world of social interactions and decisions.
Of course, that’s not what most people mean by “religion”, and religion in its common sense is neither universal nor necessary.
And possibly not all that old either. (As far as I know, the ancient Greeks and Norse don’t seem to have considered their gods to be moral lawgivers. Enforcers at best. They were instead simply explanations for the puzzling aspects of the natural world.)
Chicken and egg.
I mean, a child has morality before he/she has religion. And heterochrony often (but not always) mimics phylogeny. So I suppose there is (circumstantial) evidence that morality came first.
But I would suggest that morality intuitively stems from external influence. In a child: their guardians. In a teen, their peers. In an adult, their gods.
So I believe–in the absence of objective evidence–that the two are tightly inter-twined, all chicken-y and egg-y.
From the original question:
It was the egg. The egg came first.
I am a Hedge
I agree that we can never be sure. However, to me it does seem clear that religion has influenced morality but is not necessarily the cause of it.
I think that’s more evident now than ever since several religions live in societies together and more or less agree upon what is and is not moral (there are obviously still many disagreements).
I also think the biggest differences between ideas of morality exist because of cultural disconnetions, not necessarily religious.
Do chimps have religion? I think there’s some decent evidence that have morality. That is, they behave in ways that indicate they have some sense of right and wrong and some sense of fairness. So if chimps don’t have religion, it seems likely that morality came first. (this is not an airtight case, as morality may have developed independently in chimp and human lineages, and not been present in the most recent common ancestor).
I am a Hedge
Not only did morality come first there really isn’t a connection between the two. Religion has often been, and still is, used to justify very immoral acts. Murder, rape, salvery, misogny, bigotry, theft are all justified through religion. I don’t think that these would be justified through morality.
Oops. My apologies to NeuroTrumpet @4, who scooped me on the chimp thing.
Nevertheless,
I am a Hedge
Religious types try to stake a claim on morality but they’re stealing. Morality is a product of our tribal roots and necessary to our survival as a species.
Remove religion and morality would still exist even without the promise of some mythical “heaven” or multiple virgins.
Definitely morality. Like everyone has said so far, it’s necessary for survival.
(ps: new here, hello!)
+1 I Am A Hedge (No, he is the hedge. Or she. Can’t say.)
The meteorite is indifferent.
@Gabrielbrawley:
Sure. It’s easy. We just have to not see the other side as ‘people’ and thus deserving of moral behaviors on our part.
To be honest, I can’t imagine a religion in a preliterate society. I know there were (and are) such things, but I would think that the experience of religion in a shamanistic oral tradition and canonical textual tradition would be so completely different as to be non-comparable. The question is not really “Did morality exist before religion?” but did the earliest morality exist before the earliest religion.
Morality is a form of metacognition. You have to be able to think about your thoughts before you could think about whether they are moral or not. At the same time, you have to be able to think about your thoughts before you could be capable of magical thinking.
Thus, I think that morality and magical thinking (which is religion) existed in the human mind together pretty much from the beginning because they are both symptomatic of the same mental capacity (metacognition), just different ways of relating to it.
“Religion has not civilized man — man has civilized religion. God improves as man advances” – Robert Green Ingersoll, an early ‘new’ atheist. The Ghosts 1877
The general consensus here has some empirical meat that he lacked, but basically Ingersoll said it all over a hundred years ago.
I would also use this as a response to Taypro’s comment (#16) suggesting that religion has influenced morality. You may be right, but for any sensibly naturalistic definition of morality, all of the evidence points the other way: morality influences religion.
And I disagree – it is not the case that we can “never be sure”. Perhaps we can’t be sure yet, but the evidence continues to pour in. Reasonable certainty may not be far off.