There is a lot of discussion on this site and elsewhere about Good and Evil, whether or not morality is absolute and could only be determined by an all-powerful creator. I hope to make a logical argument that morality (i.e. our understanding of good v bad / right v wrong) is a logical product of Evolution and not Creation.
One thing that is often not considered in these discussions is: what do we actually mean when we talk about right and wrong, or good and bad? (I’ll leave the term evil aside for the moment.) Generally speaking, something described as right/good is considered to be beneficial; whereas something described as wrong/bad is considered to be harmful. To whom or what it is beneficial or harmful will of course vary from situation to situation, and may be disputed. But what cannot be disputed is that there is an emotional response to our consideration as to whether something is right or wrong, good or bad. Morality is not a dispassionate issue. We instinctively apply a different set of emotions towards good things than we do towards bad things.
Beneficial things that make us feel happy, safe, healthy, etc we label as right/good, and harmful things that make us feel unhappy, frightened, ill etc we label to be wrong/bad. There is an obvious reason for this.
The emotions that we feel towards good and bad things are an entirely logical consequence of evolution. In the same way as we fear a lion, or recoil from heat, our emotional reaction is a control of our behaviour that aids our survival. If we did not feel negative emotions such as anger or fear towards certain types of behaviour that are harmful to us, we would never have survived as a species. Our emotions drive us away from bad (harmful) behaviour and towards good (beneficial) behaviour.
As humans are a social species that benefits from cooperation between individuals, when we consider whether something is good or bad, we are more often than not considering whether it is beneficial or harmful to a group or society as a whole, rather than simply to the immediate selfish concerns of an individual.
This means that it is meaningless to say that a god (or anyone for that matter) has defined x as right/good and y is wrong/bad without any reason. If there is no reason why x is good and y is bad, then the words good and bad have no meaning. x and y would be totally interchangeable and there would be no emotional attachment to the consequences of something being good or bad.
There is no such thing as absolute evil or an entity called evil. Like good and bad, the word evil invokes an emotional response. Simply put, evil means very bad. We all have the understanding that something that is evil is very harmful. But, again, something can only be considered very harmful if there is a reason for considering it is in some way very harmful. The word evil is meaningless otherwise.
Morality is not something that any entity could cook up and then inject into us. Even if we consider that it is good or right to do something because it is God’s will, we are still considering the consequences of what that means. Is it beneficial to follow God’s will or is it harmful? That’s why people get so worked up about it. If it is neither beneficial nor harmful to follow God’s will, then what does it matter? Good or bad would both be viewed with equally cool indifference.
So, even if there were a creator, he couldn’t have invented the concept of good and bad. He may well use the concept to his own ends (e.g. by convincing us that we should do this or that because it is beneficial to do so). But then you have to consider why a creator would want to convince us that it is beneficial to behave in a certain way — and why he created us in the first place. The only reasonable conclusion is because it is beneficial in some way! That would seem to imply that there could be no such thing as a perfect, all-powerful creator; for why would it need to manipulate things to its advantage?
"Bring on the wall!" - Dale Winton
™ Version 4.2