An ad appeared recently on Bloomington buses that said, “You can be good without god.” It seemed like a fairly obvious statement to me, but it took some effort before Bloomington Transit would agree to run the ads. (Atheist ad campaigns like this one are making a modest sweep of the US; billboards with similar messages have appeared in various cities around the country.)
A recent article offers some evidence that morality and religious affiliation (or the lack thereof) are indeed two separate things. The article includes a meta-analysis of existing studies that have investigated the link between a person’s religious affiliation and the moral judgements he or she makes. The idea was to explore two divergent views on how religion evolved: Was it adaptive because it fostered cooperation between individuals who were not genetically related, or did it emerge as a side effect of other cognitive abilities that were themselves adaptations?
Current evidence shows that people make the same intuitive judgements about novel moral dilemmas regardless of their religious background, suggesting that morality and religion are not necessarily linked. It also suggests that the mental machinery underlying religious belief might be separate from that involved in making moral judgements, and that religion did not originate as an adaptation linked to cooperative behavior. One line of evidence involves studies based on responses to the online Moral Sense Test, and a study of a rural Mayan population provides further evidence.
Of course, morality and religion have become linked in the minds of many people, which is why getting those ads to run was not simple. The story of why and how that happened is yet to be fully explained.
You can read more in this article from Science Daily. The research was published as The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or by-product? by Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Marc Hauser. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14(3), 104–109, 2010.
The separation was pretty obvious to me as was the fact (or is it a belief?) that religion, and the link between religion and morals were both human made but it’s always good to have scientific proof back one’s view point. Thanks for sharing the article!–ag
An actual examination of religion would reveal that it cannot possibly be for the purpose of encouraging cooperation between unrelated individuals. It’s almost exclusively been a tool of nationalism, racism, classism. It is a tool to allow genetically similar individuals to organize themselves for the purpose of violence against the genetically dissimilar. I’m not even sure there’s anything wrong with that. I just get frustrated hearing people wondering if maybe religion had another purpose. There isn’t any evidence of any other purpose, in terms of the shape of history.
Now, intention is a different story. I think Christ was a Buddha.