Just as Nietzsche had foretold, freethinkers who mock the very idea of a god as a dead thing, a sky fairy, an imaginary friend, still piously hold to taboos and morals that derive from Christianity. In 2002, in Amsterdam, the World Humanist Congress affirmed ‘the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others’. Yet this—despite humanists’ stated ambition to provide ‘an alternative to dogmatic religion’—was nothing if not itself a statement of belief.

Where do morals come from? Are they objective or subjective? Are their origins from God or are they somehow a result of evolution, a byproduct of Social Darwinism? Our answers to these questions largely determine how we live with and treat other humans and often even define which humans have human rights that should be protected.

About a decade ago, we watched an interesting series by the Dutch public broadcasting system, VPRO. The question of the origin of morality was put to Darwinian paleontologist, the late Steven Jay Gould, in part 6 of their 7-part series, “A Glorious Accident”:

Interviewer:  You said morality cannot be taught by nature – if you seek in nature for morality, or free will or rationality, you won’t find it.

Stephen Jay Gould: I said you won’t find morality which is a question of how we ought to behave… Moral questions are questions about oughts. Nature, as science understands it is a factual set of properties. There’s no way you can go from the facts of nature to the oughts of actions. They’re just different things.

Interviewer:  Nature is non-moral?

Stephen Jay Gould: Yes.

Interviewer:  Amoral?

Stephen Jay Gould: Non-moral. It’s just not, not a theme.1

When pressed as to why we should be “moral,” Gould could only appeal to pragmatism – we should be moral, so we won’t kill each other. But why not kill each other? Given the opportunity, those that are more able to survive will do so, and those less able will be eliminated and be less of a drain on natural resources. Recognizing these enormous global benefits, why not kill each other? Who is to say that would be wrong? Evolution is served very well by killing. Men in competition for mates and necessary goods would all try to kill their rivals, driven unconsciously by the all-important evolutionary drive to survive and reproduce. Since, in a Darwinian world, those are the only two important pursuits, how could that possibly be judged as wrong? And who has the right to place other people under such a burden? Killing others may not be right for you, but it may be completely right from another’s perspective. Evolutionarily speaking, it is just the way it is. Whoever survives will go on to reproduce, provided that some biological females also survive. And if the females should decide for whatever reason that they are not sexually attracted to the available males, evolution has already solved that dilemma by increasing the size and strength of the males while keeping the females smaller and weaker so that the survival of the species would not be hindered by something as silly as mere feelings and/or personal preferences. Evolution is inexorable and not hampered by niceties. The female would simply have no veto power in the matter. As we discover in the book A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion by evolutionists Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, rape is simply a part of the evolutionary process by which a less desirable male continues to propagate his gene pool. The authors helpfully point out that rape isn’t a question of morals:

The biologist George Williams, in his 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection, clarified what Darwin meant when he wrote of natural selection’s rejecting all that was “bad” and preserving all that was “good.” First, Williams noted, these words were not used in a moral sense; they referred only to the effects of traits on an individual’s ability to survive and reproduce. That is, “good” traits are those that promote an individual’s reproductive interests. We evolutionists use the term reproductive success to refer to these reproductive interests, by which we mean not the mere production of offspring but the production of offspring that survive to produce offspring (Palmer and Steadman 1997). A trait that increases this ability is “good” in terms of natural selection even though one might consider it undesirable in moral terms. There is no connection here between what is biological or naturally selected and what is morally right or wrong. To assume a connection is to commit what is called the naturalistic fallacy. In addition, Williams clarified that natural selection favors traits that are “good” in the sense of increasing an individual’s reproductive success, not necessarily traits that are “good” in the sense of increasing a group’s ability to survive.2

So, in a culture that has Christian morality woven into its fabric, rape may be viewed as “undesirable in moral terms,” but from a Darwinian perspective, it is not wrong – in fact, it is good. It is merely an essential tool of evolution. Perhaps women at least need to seriously consider the implications of evolutionary theory.

We are, as a culture, opposed to slavery, but is slavery intrinsically wrong? If morals are simply pragmatic social constructs, without reference to an all-powerful God, on what basis can anyone today claim that the former enslavement of Africans, for example, was immoral?  Why all the judgmentalism? After all, the scientific consensus of evolutionists at the time of the Civil War was that blacks were lesser evolved beings. The people just “followed the science,” and science said the evolutionary gap between blacks and whites was far greater than the evolutionary gap between blacks and apes.

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