Evidence · Case 09 · Atheism
Evolutionary accounts of morality
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Our moral sense can be explained as an adaptation: cooperation, empathy, and fairness helped our ancestors survive in groups, so natural selection wired in moral feelings, with no God required, or so the objection goes. This can explain why we have moral feelings, but not whether anything is really wrong. If moral sentiments are only survival wiring, then “torturing children is evil” reduces to “our species happens to have evolved to dislike it,” and a differently evolved species could feel the reverse with equal warrant. Explaining where a belief came from does not show whether the belief is true.
Sources
Objections & responses
- “Explaining where a belief came from doesn’t show whether it’s true” cuts against the theist too. And debunking isn’t the only naturalist option; tracking accounts hold that selection favored beliefs that track real moral facts.
Both points are fair. The genetic fallacy warning applies symmetrically, so evolution explains moral feelings is not treated here as a refutation of realism; it is a challenge the naturalist realist must answer, which is Sharon Street’s debunking argument turned against naturalism itself. Tracking accounts are the naturalist’s reply to Street. The theist’s response to tracking accounts is that they require independent moral facts for the tracking to track, which reopens the grounding question. That three-step exchange is the state of the debate.