Dawkins claims that evolution gives a much better explanation for morality than does the God Hypothesis.
Before we consider his argument we might pause for a moment to note something he says which I find intriguing. He argues that acts of altruism in animals are demonstrations of one individual's superiority over another:
The dominant bird is saying the equivalent of, "Look how superior I am to you, I can afford to give you food." Or "Look how superior I am, I can afford to make myself vulnerable to hawks by sitting on a high branch, acting as a sentinel to warn the rest of the flock feeding on the ground." ....And when a subordinate [bird] attempts to offer food to a dominant individual, the apparent generosity is violently rebuffed.This makes sense to me. I've long thought it an interesting quirk of human nature that many people actually resent favors done them by others. Rather than see the favor as a kindness, people sometimes react to it as though it were a personal affront.
Perhaps the ingratitude is due to the fact that at some subliminal level the beneficiary of the favor realizes that he is being implicitly put in a position of inferiority relative to the benefactor, and no one likes that.
Anyway, Dawkins' point in chapter 6 is that we don't need God to be moral. The urge to be kind, for instance, is a product of our evolutionary history, and we'd have that inclination whether God told us to be kind or not. There's much in his reasoning on this matter of which we can be critical.
The problem is not how to explain "moral" behavior. People can certainly do "good" things whether God exists or not. The problem is trying to account for moral obligation.
How are we obligated to do something just because evolution has inclined us to do it? Why should we be kind if there's no advantage in it for us or if cruelty will benefit us in some way? Why is it wrong to be cruel? What does it mean to say that something is "wrong" anyway? How do we justify the belief that moral good and bad have any non-arbitrary meaning apart from an objective transcendent moral authority?
Evolution has bestowed upon us other tendencies besides an inclination to kindness (which, by the way, not all humans appear to possess) which we do not consider good. How do we decide which of these tendencies are good and which are bad? Evolution has given us a tendency to be aggressive and violent, to be racially biased, to be selfish toward non-kin, to be sexually promiscuous, etc.
Is yielding to these inclinations morally wrong? If so, why? Dawkins comes very close here to committing the genetic fallacy, the error that says that because humans have evolved to be a certain way that therefore we should be that way. Indeed, that we have a moral duty to be that way.
He also informs us that he is himself a moral consequentialist - i.e. one who bases moral rightness on the results of the act - but who do those results have to benefit in order to be right? Other people? Himself? How does he decide which it is to be, and why would it be wrong to just care about the benefits of one's actions for oneself?
Dawkins cites studies which show that there's little difference in the way atheists and believers make moral judgments and concludes from this that "we do not need God in order to be good."
This is quite an unusual conclusion to draw from these studies. All they show, if they show anything at all, is that atheists have moral convictions that are completely unsupported by their deepest beliefs. Their atheism gives them no basis for thinking anything is right or wrong, but they believe there is right and wrong anyway.
What the studies Dawkins cites suggest is that most atheists are inconsistent, since every atheist who makes a moral judgment of others is acting as if her atheism were not true.
Dawkins goes on to allege that the Christian tries to be good only to seek God's favor. He concurs with Michael Shermer that "If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder,' you reveal yourself to be an immoral person."
Well, no. In the absence of God there just is no morality or immorality, only amorality, but set that aside. Dawkins misunderstands the Christian motivation for the moral life. It's not fear of punishment and hope of reward that motivates Christians to do good deeds, when they do them, but rather love and gratitude to the God who has done so much for them.
Believers do not seek to win God's love by being good. They try to live the way God wishes them to live, to the extent they do, because God loves them and they love Him.
To say that anyone who rapes or murders is immoral, as Shermer and Dawkins do, begs the question. It assumes that the word "immorality" actually can mean something significant even though there's no ground for any objective moral value.
For Dawkins an immoral act is nothing more than an act which he doesn't like. If there is no God it simply can't be any more than this. To say that something is immoral is to say no more than that he wishes people wouldn't do it. Notwithstanding his wishes, the person who does do such things is, assuming the truth of atheism, no more "wrong" than a cat is wrong to torment a mouse.
In a classic illustration of the fallacy called Division* Dawkins makes the ridiculous claim that rioters in Montreal during a police strike in the 1960s were mostly religious people because most Canadians are religious people. Perhaps we can forgive Dawkins this bit of logical asininity if it weren't that he comes right back on the next page and makes the same sophomoric argument again, this time by quoting a section from a book by fellow atheist Sam Harris.
In that book Harris seeks to disprove the belief that religion leads to better behavior by observing that most of the crime in the U.S. occurs in our cities and most of the cities with the highest crime rates are in states which tend to vote Republican and are therefore most likely to be populated by Christian conservatives. I am not making this up. This is Harris' argument, and Dawkins signs on to it.
Overlook the fact that most of the cities with the highest crime rates (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore) are actually in Blue states, what Harris and Dawkins are apparently unaware of is that even in cities in Republican states the populations of these municipalities are overwhelmingly Democratic and secular.
Instead of employing such a juvenile argument perhaps Harris should have just visited a prison and taken a poll of the inmates and asked them how many were devout, church-going believers who prayed daily up to the time they committed their crimes. I think there'd be little wonder as to what the results would show.
It's hard to believe that otherwise intelligent people would make such embarrassing arguments, but when your task is to try to give a defense of morality without God there just aren't any compelling polemical resources laying about. Thus, Dawkins and Harris find themselves taking a chance on an argument that would be laughed at by middle-schoolers.
The fundamental moral problem for the atheist, a problem which Dawkins never really addresses, is this: What is there which obligates us to behave in one way rather than another? What makes kindness better than cruelty? Why should I not just live for myself? Why should I care about others? What's wrong with selfishness?
It's really no surprise that Dawkins doesn't address these questions. Indeed, the surprise would have been if he had, because for the atheist there just is no good answer to them.
It's perhaps fitting to close with a quote from Dawkins' hero, Charles Darwin. Darwin writes in his Autobiography these words:
One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life...only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best.In the absence of God, all we have to guide us are our "impulses and instincts," and no one's impulses and instincts are any more morally authoritative than anyone else's.
Ironically, the fact that for the atheist one's own subjective feelings are no more morally superior than anyone else's doesn't prevent Mr. Dawkins from repeatedly making moral judgments of religious believers throughout his book and especially in the next chapter.
* The fallacy of division occurs when someone concludes that because a thing possesses a particular trait or property that every part of the thing must possess that same trait or property. For example, it would be the fallacy of division to conclude that because the United States has a large population that therefore every state in the U.S. has a large population.
