The moral route

The one question that pragmatists have never satisfactorily answered is why, if religious claims are false, are there so many people who continue to subscribe to them? For instance, before there was any practical science, people believed the Earth was flat. However, after careful observation has rubbished that notion there are no takers left except for a lunatic fringe.

Similarly, a naturalistic explanation for religion has been that it was a response to fear of the unknown, coupled with superstitious attempts to control or conciliate unseen powers. So why does religion persist, now that we understand natural causes and have had their “primitive” origins explained to us?

Probably, the most damning answer is morality. Where in the world do we get our sense of right and wrong or good and evil if the universe doesn’t possess a moral dimension? Sociobiologists today would pounce on this simplistic solution by saying that science has succeeded in explaining why we are moral by showing evolutionary altruism and kin-selection as the root cause of such behaviour.

But it seems like they would be wrong. The great American sociobiologist E O Wilson, who virtually founded and subsequently evangelised the cause of such nonreligious origins of morality 40 years ago, has recently done an about-face on it.

In a cover paper in Nature he has admitted he was totally wrong, as are all biologists who follow it. This means scientists are back trying to figure out where altruism which makes human beings the moral animals that they are, comes from.