The Red Herring of Religious Morality

Human morality, despite being a subjective and nebulous abstraction, is approached by both atheists and theists as a zero-sum game. You often hear it contested amongst the polemicists and charlatans that debate the subject ad nauseum that either a person of faith acts ethically only in the face of divine inducements, or morality is an absolute that is meaningless in the absence of God. Typically, religio-ethical debates centre on this issue as one of the last boltholes of scientific un-clarity, where a person of faith can feel they might be on more solid ground than the literal interpretation of scripture that only makes them look foolish. Since scriptural literacy is irreconcilable with everything we know about the workings of reality, it is chiefly in this moral domain that the real contention still lies (at least amongst the reasonable). The absolutes postulated by both sides are both, I believe, in error.
In the red corner, we have the atheist, secure in his iron tower of reason. He sees the claims of the religious as at best inconsistent, at worst immoral – the immorality of vicarious redemption, the abdication of personal responsibility etc. He thus accuses the theist of morality under duress, a continual cowering beneath the gaze of a divinity which guides the theist and without which, in the view of the atheist, the theist would have no conception of morality and would spend his time casually murdering passing strangers. Thus, the theist is, by definition, immoral.
In the blue corner, we have the theist. He feels that morality is an absolute that has been ingrained in to his ‘soul’ at the moment of his creation by God, perhaps as a gift to separate him from the ‘lower’ animals. By a willing rejection of this heavenly absolute, the atheist is left with only his subjectivity, leading axiomatically to ethical corruption, and (they never quite say this, but it is inferred) possible genocide (leaving aside the historical inaccuracies of this claim). Thus the atheist is, by definition, immoral.
Here we have a problem. Imagine that the atheist and theist are both decent people; helping out at the local school, giving to charity and recycling their kitchen waste. They do what they can to minimise their carbon footprint. They save for the future, call their mothers regularly and help their kids with that tricky maths homework. An unbiased observer might be forgiven for thinking that the two are morally identical. Can it therefore be said that both get their morality from different sources?
The problem with the theistic view of morality, and we must be abundantly clear about this, is that it bears no correlation with reality. I intend to prove this by dabbling in the scientific method.
Image you believe in an all loving, all powerful and all merciful God. You believe that this God created everything, and built the universe as a suitable home for his beloved humans. Unfortunately for you, it seems He built the world in such a manner as to be blighted by regular natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis and the like) that each take a devastating death toll of the humans He apparently loves so much. As a Theist, the occurrence of such natural disasters makes no sense, and thus must be ascribed to His mysterious ways, or, in a rather more sinister way, to the wilful rejection of His will by those that died, warranting their punishment. However, if you are an Atheist, particularly an Atheist with a scientific interest who has some understanding of the origins and formation of the Earth, you know that Plate Tectonics causes the build up of pressure along a plate boundary that eventually causes that boundary to fail, releasing large amounts of energy in the form of an earthquake. From this point of view, the earthquake, tragic as it is, makes perfect sense as simply a feature of the planet we happen to live on.
The natural disaster therefore makes no sense if you are a Theist, but perfect sense if you are an Atheist. And so it is with morality.
If all humans were imbued at their conception with an unalterable sense of the immutable moral laws, one could make predictions about the behaviour of those humans. If these humans had free will (a contradictory and inconsistent claim that I will leave aside for now), they could either choose to abide by, or rebel against, those laws. Further, if those laws were divinely revealed, then any human who accepted the law of God would necessarily be a moral person. For the sake of this argument, let us assume that the same moral law is available to all branches of the three great desert dogmas. Now, using the hypothesis that morality is an absolute that has been imbued in humans by God and that was revealed by His word, the prediction should be that all people of faith are, and have always been, paragons of morality. Now, let’s check this against the evidence. One piece of evidence alone is enough to disprove this hypothesis. For three hundred years, the maritime powers of Europe engaged in that great stain on the history of our species, the transatlantic slave trade. The participants in this moral abhorrence were extremely pious, religious societies, for example, Catholic Spain. Thus the hypothesis is disproved, or, if it is true that all men of faith act on their divinely inspired morals, then we can conclude that the average Human Being living almost anywhere on Earth at the start of the 21st Century has superior morals to God.
Now, another hypothesis. Human beings are an emergent phenomena, the result of thousands of centuries of Evolution by Natural Selection. It was to our survival advantage to live in groups, and thus we would display altruistic behaviour and feel empathy towards members of our own tribes, and react aggressively to intrusion or perceived threat from other tribes. As the race grew larger, the tribes became more complex, eventually becoming nation states and religious groupings. Now, using this hypothesis, I make the prediction that large complex conglomerations of humans in modern society display inconsistent morality based on who they identify as a member of their tribe. Some behave savagely, especially under duress. Others do not, and, in the pursuit of wealth, some even begin to see the race in its entirety as their “tribe”, enabling good relations and charity to cross previously impervious ethnic boundaries. And this indeed, is what we see.
So, just as earthquakes make no sense from a theistic point of view, neither does morality. The next time a theist says to you that the Holocaust was as a result of an atheistic rejection of God, say to them that the Holocaust, in all its epic savagery, is precisely what we would expect to happen at some point in human history if the theory that we are an evolved tribal animal, with no creator god, is true. The Holocaust happened precisely because there is no God. Not that they’ll listen, of course. They never do.