I’ve seen many arguments over the years for our moral conscience being a good argument for God (most recently by a blogger called Bentham’s Bulldog in this article). Let me start by what I think is wrong with the proposition, then I’ll turn to where I think it has strength. First, naturalistic explanations of moral conscience are more robust than theists often concede, and the underplaying of the evolutionarily utility of our moral conscience doesn’t help the argument. Evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and social psychology offer plausible accounts of how humans developed moral faculties and the survival utility of such traits. Traits like empathy, fairness, and cooperation have clear survival value in social species. For example, groups that fostered trust and punished cheating or foul play would have had a better chance of survival, passing those behavioural tendencies down. At an evolutionary level, I think it’s possible to conceive how moral intuitions could have developed without needing to be designed by God. The fact that such traits are evolutionarily advantageous somewhat explains both the strength and the universality of many moral intuitions from a Darwinian perspective without obvious recourse to Divine intervention.
But on the positive side, it is stretching it a lot to say that moral truths are mere evolutionary products of human agreements, emotions, or rational deliberation. If moral truths are human constructions, then it's no mystery why we believe them - we created them. But if you look at all the things we have created and all the things we have discovered, moral truths look a lot more like discoveries than creations – and we certainly don’t behave as though we merely created them.
Unlike social conventions or human inventions, which we recognise as malleable and negotiable, moral convictions are often experienced and acted upon as if they are binding, external, and independent of personal preference or societal agreement - especially the most consensual ones (like “do not torture innocent people”, “do not rape”, “do not murder”, and so forth). Even if we argue intellectually that morality is constructed, we do not live as though that is true. Consider how we respond to paradigmatic moral wrongs like genocide, child abuse, or slavery. These aren’t viewed as merely "wrong" according to our societal preferences or cultural norms - they are condemned as wrong regardless of whether a society endorses or permits them. That response carries the character of discovery rather than invention. We act as though we have recognised a set of moral truths that stand apart from us, not truths we simply consented to or designed.
Compare this with how we treat actual human inventions. Take the rules of chess or metric measuring systems - both human-made systems. While we may care deeply about these systems functioning well, we generally accept that they could have been otherwise, and we don’t treat them as morally binding in the same way. Violating a chess rule may invalidate a game, whereas violating a moral rule is often seen as a violation of something sacred or deeply true. If moral rules were on par with our other creations, we should feel the same latitude toward them as we do with design choices in technology, art, or law. Yet, even across cultures, people are willing to stand up, protest, and even sacrifice their lives for moral principles - far more than they would for invented systems like etiquette or bureaucracy.
Moreover, when we create things - technologies, institutions, customs - we usually acknowledge our authorship and our ability to revise or discard them. But when it comes to the deepest moral truths, we act as though we are accountable to something larger than ourselves. We behave not like authors, but like subjects.
Even though evolution, social consensus, and emotion contribute to how we perceive morality, they seem insufficient to account for the weight and authority we assign to the deepest moral truths (see here for more on this). No, we act as though morality is grounded in something deeper than human minds - as though it has its provenance in God Himself, or for unbelievers, in a standard ultimately so high that it simulates God.
At the heart of the “our moral conscience being a good argument for God” argument is the epistemic problem that if our beliefs weren’t shaped by transcendent moral truths, as per the above, then it seems coincidental - and hence epistemically dubious - that our deepest moral beliefs turn out to be correct at every fundamental level. With my economist hat on, I can see how one could make that assumption as one of mistaken causality - that they evolve so consensually precisely because they work well enough to help us survive in a social species, rather like how scientific realism is justified because it is at least approximately true. On top of this is the oft-cited objection that if our moral conscience is designed by God to reliably tap in to transcendent truths, we might expect moral knowledge to be more consistent, stable and universal.
Here I’ll tackle both those errors in one hit. Under normal circumstances, experiences justify beliefs when the belief is explained by the fact that makes it true. If you know you’re not doing well enough in the capacity of serving as a volunteer in church, then your self-induced dismissal doesn’t justify believing you are doing well enough if you’re not serving on any team. Similarly, if our moral beliefs weren’t formed because of the truth of moral facts, we find it harder to justify those beliefs, in terms of explaining how we came to form those true moral beliefs, and explaining how we are justified in holding them.
Not only do we justify them because we believe they are true, we also don’t really believe their truth value lacks consistency by virtue that some people either fall so short of them or haven’t learned of their truth and absorbed it strongly into their culture. To illustrate, we don’t think that scientific facts are unjustified just because some people choose to reject them in favour of self-serving, counterfactual views. And we don’t really believe that about moral truths. In fact, to take an extreme case, even if 80% of the world’s next generation went on to believe that rape is no longer wrong, there’d be a better case that the 20% are still in the right than the 80%, who’ve been victim to a gross perversion of moral truth.
Moral discovery is, of course, part of our evolutionary story. But God guided the creation story so humans would acquire the faculties for correct moral beliefs - making those beliefs truth-discerning – and endowed humans with a bottom-up liberty of moral intuition that genuinely connects with His top-down moral truths (like He has done with mathematics, as I outlined in the articles in this tab). If a belief is only justified when the experience itself contributes directly to its justification, then it is stretching it to accept the naturalist assumption that all beliefs, justifications and truths just happen to have been converged upon over a lengthy evolutionary percentage game, and yet retain such powerful persuasion at the deepest level.
I don’t wholly endorse the sentiment that declares “naturalism is epistemically self-undermining because it cannot justify the very cognitive tools it relies on to claim knowledge”. Because justification only needs to be good enough, not absolute – and we have evolved plenty of traits that have been good enough to determine our survival. But I do believe it is the case that if our intuitions about moral truths aren’t caused by the truth of those moral propositions, then they can’t justify our evident certainty in the absolute nature of those moral beliefs. The only way out of that conundrum is to deny we have such certainty, but that would be to merely replace one untruth with another.
The weak theistic argument - such as that advanced by Bentham’s Bulldog - claims that if those deep moral truths do not originate with God, then the appearance of such truths is not more likely given their truth than given their falsity. But it’s a mistake to say that evolution makes it not much more likely that we believe moral truths if they are true than if they are false. Remember, evolution favours adaptive beliefs - but many moral truths (fairness, reciprocity, harm avoidance, and so forth) are adaptive, so there is a strong overlap between what’s deemed to be morally true and what’s evolutionarily helpful.
No, the stronger theistic argument would be to say that if the sets of moral truths are independent of God and happen to be right, then evolution through naturalism seems an unlikely route to such strong, certain conviction in their truth. The depth and certainty with which we hold these moral truths is more plausibly explained by theism than by naturalism. This is not a matter of statistical likelihood but of explanatory depth - a qualitative, not quantitative, argument.
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