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Comment by classicsnoot | Hacker News Reader

I haven't read the paper yet, but the headline/summary keeps getting bandied about reddit, imgur, facebook, and twitter.

The implication seems to be that because complex society formed without complex religion(s), said religions are superfluous and maybe even unnecessary or deleterious to said society. I may be reading the implication incorrectly.

If I am not, then I'm quite puzzled by this line of inference. If complex society formed prior to complex religion, and the only complex societies still around* today hold, or used to hold until very recently, a complex religion as a core element of societal identity, would the implication be that complex religion is an evolved trait of successful complex societies?

*Around of their own volition, not relegated to reservation regions or whose cultural pelt is being worn by its vanquisher.

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You're moving the argument too far. As complex societies developed without a moralizing god, religion is not necessary for morality. You can't use this to then say religion is unnecessary, as nobody has said morality is the only reason for religion.

Even today, many religious people will say that atheists are incapable of having morals. This is evidence showing that claim is ridiculous, not an attack on religion.

It could be that moralizing religion is not essential to the emergence of morality, but is essential to its long-term survival. For example, maybe morality and religion imply each other, and it just happens that most societies discover morality first (on practical grounds) and follow through with the other consequences in order to keep it.

Atheists can certainly act morally, and many do. But I would say that atheists don't have a basis for having morals.

dictionary.com says that morals have to do with "right conduct". But in atheism, there is nothing with the authority to give you a definition of "right". There's nothing absolute in the way that, say, the Christian God is absolute, except the universe, and the universe doesn't tell you what right conduct is. (I mean, there are the laws of physics, but that doesn't really help.)

So the atheist usually takes something non-absolute and makes it an absolute - society, or the human race, say. The choice is probably whatever corresponds most closely to the atheist's innate sense of moral right and wrong. And that gives that particular atheist a basis for morals within their own thinking. But "I chose this standard because it matches my sense of what's right, and then I think my conduct is right if it matches the standard" is, essentially, "I do what I decide is right". It's something weaker than what I think of as morals.

>But I would say that atheists don't have a basis for having morals.

>So the atheist usually takes something non-absolute and makes it an absolute

Okay, so that's a basis. The only issue here being that you don't consider a non-absolute basis to be valid. However, the deity of choice isn't absolute either - you have to deem it so in the same way that the atheist does. So either way there's no perfect ontological solution provided by either path.

> The only issue here being that you don't consider a non-absolute basis to be valid.

Well, it's not just me. A lot of people have, going back at least to Plato. Plato thought that you needed to have something absolute for there to be morals, but his problem was that his gods weren't big enough to proved that.

> However, the deity of choice isn't absolute either - you have to deem it so in the same way that the atheist does.

Yes and no. Yes, you have to deem the Christian God, say, to be absolute in order for Him to provide an absolute basis for your morals. (This is true whether or not that God exists.)

But the Christian is not in the same position as either Plato or the atheist. Within the Christian's position, God is absolute, and therefore can provide a rock-solid basis for a moral standard. In contrast, Plato's gods were inadequate as a moral basis, both in theory and in practice (that is, in practice they often behaved in ways that were not very moral).

The atheist has an absolute (at least, I think most atheists do) - the physical universe. Within (most flavors of) atheism, that's the only thing that can be really absolute, but it provides no moral standard whatsoever. (C. S. Lewis remarked that "what the universe is doing" is working toward the final and irreversible extinction of all life forms, and taking that as a moral standard would leave suicide and genocide as our only moral values. It seems better to just say "there's no moral standard there".) The atheist can pick a different basis for a moral standard and ascribe validity to it - say, the human race, or the atheist's society, or whatever. But the atheist has made a somewhat arbitrary choice - there's nothing within the atheist's position that compels that particular choice of moral basis. What's more, the atheist knows it. This is very different from the Christian's position, where there is one clear moral basis that can only be accepted or rejected.

It seems like you're making an implicit distinction between deciding to be a Christian and accepting God

> But the Christian is not in the same position as either Plato or the atheist. Within the Christian's position,

Yes, the position they just chose. It's like saying after you've made a choice, you can either take it or not

> It seems like you're making an implicit distinction between deciding to be a Christian and accepting God

I wasn't intending to, but perhaps I should have been. A Muslim has the same situation as a Christian - somewhat different morals, but the structure of the situation is the same. The distinction I was drawing was between polytheistic gods and a monotheistic, absolute God.

> Yes, the position they just chose. It's like saying after you've made a choice, you can either take it or not

I see the "choosing the Christian position" as parallel to "choosing the atheist position". But my point is that, when you choose the Christian position, that defines morals for you. When you chooses the atheist position, that does not define morals for you.

> see the "choosing the Christian position" as parallel to "choosing the atheist position". But my point is that, when you choose the Christian position, that defines morals for you. When you chooses the atheist position, that does not define morals for you

The parallel to "choosing the atheist position" would be "choosing the theist position," which would not define your morals either. From there, you can choose from a massive range of Christian positions which have different morals.

The presence of a god effectively changes nothing.

Suppose there is a god that has defined right and wrong, how has this knowledge been passed to mankind? If it is innate, then an atheist would have the same morals as everyone. If there is no knowledge given, then an atheist's innate sense of moral right is as likely to be correct than any others.

The third option is that they come from religious texts, in which case you are picking a standard as it matches your sense of what is right. Even if the morals are absolute, our inability to accurately find them makes them indistinguishable from an atheist standard.

Moralizing ≠ complex.

There are plenty of (complex! organized!) religions where all the gods just... do what they do, rather than being optimizing forces that seek to punish humans when they "step out of line" of the god's desires. The religion of the Ancient Greeks is kind of like this (in that only some of the pantheon have any moralizing character; others just "party" or "move the sun", etc.) The beliefs of some aboriginal American tribes are also this way. And Sumerian religion was definitely this, from what we know of it.

In such religions, "Gods" have two faces: one as heroic figures in a creation narrative (which has little relevance to day-to-day life), and the other as explanations for natural phenomena. Such religions don't usually distinguish between modern religious concepts of "god", "demigod/angel/demiurge/deva/djinn", and "heroic human": anyone from history could somehow be responsible for any random thing the world does now, no matter if they were just a regular human in their part of the creation narrative. (The reductio ad absurdam version of this belief system is the "caricature of native American religion" espoused in movies like Avatar, where everyone who dies becomes part of an amorphous entity of "the ancestors" who are collectively responsible for everything that happens. But they don't moralize at people; they just... make the tides and stuff.)

If something bad happens to you in a non-moralizing religion, it's not because a God decided you were disobeying their creed, but rather because a God was doing stuff and you just happened to get trampled underfoot without their notice.

A plausible theory of such non-moralizing religions (and their characters) is that they're the memetic byproduct of "mythology in the mode of Calvin's Dad"—i.e. parents giving off-the-cuff answers to children who keep asking why, when there is no real why as far as they know. (For example: "why does that star bob up and down around the horizon?" → "That star is a lady named Ishtar, changing her mood between loving the world and warring with it.")

The best of those explanations stick, and are remembered and passed along; and then, after the characters are created in the form of explanations for phenomena, then they get woven into the creation narrative, by the same sort of collective storytelling process that produced the Aurthurian mythos. Bam: a religion. We have enough examples of this happening even during recorded history (and even continuing to happen in the modern day) that it seems like a pretty solid explanation.

Moralizing gods have a different creation process that we don't understand nearly as well, though the cited study is a step in the right direction.

(My own personal hypothesis is that such religions are formed by elders who want to create evocative, memorable characters to use in parables to enculturate the youth (i.e. to get them to stop being such little assholes.) They start off as basically the equivalent of the "Donny Don't" storybook from The Simpsons—simplistic paragons of virtue or vice—and then elements are added to the narrative through repetitions of telling [i.e. practice], and mutation during retelling [i.e. children growing up, having their own kids, and realizing the usefulness of the parable-as-social-more-capsule], until the story is compelling enough to take off on its own without the need for goal-directed retelling. And one of the key elements to making such a narrative compelling is the addition of punishment of the paragon-of-vice by a character who isn't virtuous themselves, but rather is neutral and high-status, being able to serve as a "judge"; a character that can "stand above" the whole civilization, such that nobody can tell that character what to do, but where that character can tell everyone else what to do, whether by fear or respect. A paragon of authority. A God.)

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