THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY:
Recently while roaming through YouTube, looking for a good theist-atheist debate, I came across a 2-hour bit between Frank Turek and Christopher Hutchins and a 1½ hour bit between a multi-member theist-atheist panel, which was held somewhere in Mexico.
In both instances, I was sad to see the atheists 'running' away from the question of morality. Theists repeatedly and proudly pointed out that morality COULD NOT exist without a MORAL CODE GIVER (aka God). This is what I call the C. S. Lewis Argument which is expounded in the very 1st Chapter of his Christian apologetic volume, MERE CHRISTIANITY. But, I refuse to run away from this argument and would like to put forth my own theory for morality, which I like to call, "The Evolution of Morality".
For humans to be moral beings there is NO NEED for the existence of a celestial law-giver. Morality is an unspoken and an unwritten, but universally understood and agreed upon set of ideas of what is right and wrong, and is something which I posit has co-evolved with the human species along with such advances as walking upright, the opposable thumb, and sentience, and such discoveries as fire, tools, and the wheel.
Now, what is this morality? It's not transient state and federal laws like the speed-limit on a stretch of highway or that you need a fishing-license to fish in a particular lake or river. It covers more primal things like, feeding a starving member of our society, helping an elderly person to cross the street, protecting our children against physical and/or sexual abuse, lending a saving-hand to a drowning man or animal, being kind and accommodating to a pregnant lady, allowing an elderly person to take the only available seat on a bus, etc. See, we don't need a God to tell us these things are the right things to do. When presented with such situations, we just 'know' what to do...we just "feel it in our bones", so to speak. Why? Because over thousands of years of evolution, it has been hard-wired into our genetic code, just as salmon get restless and start swimming upstream to spawn or Artic Terns fly from pole to pole with the shifting of seasons.
Evolution helped us to codify these patterns of behavior as we slowly separated ourselves from our primate ancestors and gave up our hunter-gatherer ways for the ways of settled society and agriculture. Note our language when one of us breaks these norms of common decency! It is telling of our evolutionary past because we accuse our fellow human beings of "acting like animals"!! Ironically enough, over the millennia, these unsaid codes of behavior have been codified into religious and civil laws.
Of course, you may counter by saying that this unsaid code of behavior must not be that strong because we still have cold-blooded murderers, rapists, child-abusers, etc., in our societies. But I posit that the presence of these social 'aberrations' is not a nullification of our moral evolution, but instead proof of it! Just as whales and dolphins still have remnants of their ancestral 'legs' in their skeletal systems, we too have societal remnants of earlier forms of brutish behavior. We are violent and territorial primates - that remains largely unchanged - but a new evolutionary code has been quietly superimposing itself on the species, taking us to higher levels, without the help of God. In the distant past, for example, a male in his prime would not think twice about going to a neighboring cave, killing all the males and all the children there , and claiming the females for himself. It was not a crime. It was just survival and procreation! But, as we evolved, we have codified that kind of behavior out of our societies...sometimes unbeknownst even to us, at the genetic level...because suddenly it is no longer conducive to the advancement of our species!
Nowadays we attempt to consciously cull the herd of brutish or erratic behavior through rehabilitation, incarceration, or in extreme cases, through the termination of a life. While societal engineers may argue back and forth about the effectiveness of these methods, we are all still being carried forward by evolution towards a more altruistic and 'moral' society - not because it pleases a deity in the sky, but because life always choses the best path for its survival; and, this is the best path for our survival and progression, as a species.