The April 4th edition of The New York Review of Books contains a fairly long excerpt from the first chapter of Ronald Dworkin's final book, Religion Without God - he died on February 14th. I believe the article is available without a subscription. I read Dworkin's previous book, Justice for Hedgehogs, and, while I disagreed with him on many points, the thoroughness with which he covered the subject was impressive. Based on the excerpt, it looks like this book will be just as thorough.

The excerpt begins with a discussion of the conflicts between religion and atheism. Dworkin quotes a number of atheists who express a type of religious attitude toward the beauty of nature and life. He then goes on to define what he considers a religious attitude, essentially the acceptance of a full, independent reality of value; and 2 central judgements about value: human life has objective meaning or importance, and the universe as a whole and all its parts are something of intrinsic value and wonder. Religion itself generally consists of 2 parts: a scientific part and a value part. The scientific part covers such things as the origins and nature of the universe, the attributes of the deity, etc, and the value part covers how a person should live. He believes that religious atheists and theists share the value part.

Dworkin agrees that our values don't come from God. He differs with de Waal in that he doesn't accept that our morals come from evolution. In his opinion, if they did, then they wouldn't represent an independent morality, but would be dependent upon biology.

An excerpt:

My personal opinion is that morality/ethics in no way are dependent on religion, but that religion can be used to reinforce or refine them. Religion can be used both by those that believe and those that don't when one is developing or exploring their own moral base.

I suspect animal social behavior is somewhat evolutionary, and the social animals within a species have significant advantages over the anarchic ones.

At some point our wiser ancestors also realized working together and having social rules was a good thing, and having them ordered by a powerful deity would add credence and get most people in line. Eventually, this religious ethic can, and probably will, become the norm for society simply because it works.

Deities and afterlives are also handy for dealing with injustices and pain in this life, too, so I can't imagine a species with as much imagination as ours not having them.

Whether they exist or not, and I truly do not know, deities are highly useful things.

I think religious groups and organizations can be highly useful as well, but recognize that they also can be highly destructive.

anything intrinsic in religion.

Some alien race, or our own descendants if we last long enough, may wonder at our capacity for greatness and destruction and ask if one is dependent upon the other.

In our own image.

Humans always seem to base their gods on a human form, even if they endow them with other things, like animal parts.

But I wonder how many actually believe that?

"Is conduct right because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is right?"

and only applicable to those who believe in gods.

were by no one's standards beacons of admirable moral behavior, either towards each other or towards humans. Greek religion was not rife with "Thou shalts" and "Thou shalt nots", and to the extent that the Greek gods commanded humans to do things, those commands were not particularly intended to instill "right" behavior, nor were the gods examples you would look to for such guidance.

with a certain potential for "good behavior" built in. It follows, unfortunately, that we also carry the genes for rather appalling "bad behavior." Bonobos may give us the warm fuzzies, but it's the Pan troglodytes' nasty habits of territorial war, murder and infanticide that we've inherited right alongside empathy. Not only is parenting an activity that does not fade unnoticed into the background, much of it consists in deterring an infant human from scaled-down versions of chimp mayhem. No, Johnny, don't hit little Frank with the alphabet blocks. No, Mary, that's Janie's tricycle; give it back to her. No, don't lie to me; I saw you break the window, so don't try to blame it on your brother. Etc., etc.. It's fine to say we've inherited a measure of morality in the process of evolution. What isn't fine (and de Waal apparently, to his credit does not do this) is to blame all of human immorality on social constructs--politics, religion, capitalism, socialism, whatever "ism" one doesn't happen to subscribe to.

Babies are more likely to experience sympathy or empathy for those they see as most like themselves.

They did this by identifying a food preference, then introducing puppets with the same and different preferences.

The babies were more drawn to those with the same preference.

But the most intriguing part was that they got upset if the ones like them were being hurt and didn't appear bothered at all if the ones who were different were being hurt.

So, my takeaway is that they are born with some kind of moral construct but it may be limited in terms of some kind of tribal identification.

that showed that the subjects tended to inflict increasingl levels of pain on victims they couldn't see. Translate linvisibility from the physical realm to the psychological, and you get all sorts of nasty bigotries.

Figured you'd recognize it.

and am going to pass it on to the biologists in my family especially.

I don't know why he would jump to the conclusion that just because Apes are social and exhibit behavior we would interpret as
empathetic etc etc -- this means that religion is bunk and atheism is the logical conclusion. I have nothing against atheists, but he's going to have to convince me of that argument.

It is fascinating to realize how close we are to monkeys.

It's a good book about chimpanzee social structures and how they resemble human societies.

maybe I will read that after the Bonobo/atheists book. Whatever you think of the conclusion, it is a fascinating look at animal behavior by an ethologist. (Ethologist=animal behavior scientist, for those not familiar)

Most people don't realize that ninety six percent of the chimpanzee's genome is identical to human. This is an interesting article from 2012 comparing the two:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120823142735.htm

Reminds me of a funny story. I had a friend who's mother was not very educated, a fundamentalist Catholic, hard worker, many children, not much time for pondering philosophy. My friend was highly educated, and was trying to persuade his mother away from creationism. One day he went too far. She got very angry and said, "So. First you tell me my ancestors are monkies. And so NOW you tell me my ancestors are fish?!?!"