Until recently, I hadn’t given much thought to promises per se or their critical importance to the evolution of conscience. Nietzsche, not surprisingly, understood its importance and addressed the issue in Genealogy of Morals (II:1): “To breed an animal with the right to make promises — is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set for itself in the case of man?” 

In Making Sense of Nietzsche, Richard Schacht highlights the importance of this question — and its answer:

What engages his attention here is the fundamental issue of what the possibility of promising (and keeping one’s promises) presupposes, and the ramifications in human life in the establishment of this possibility. Its establishment, Nietzsche contends, required the development of a kind of memory going beyond the (basically animal) capacity to absorb and retain things experienced.

This immediately calls to mind chimpanzees. Many have observed they are always “in the present,” trapped as it were by memories that can only be cued by external events or environments. The ability to self-cue memories without such prompts — to cease being creatures of the moment — was a fundamental cognitive shift or what I would call a phase change involving consciousness. By this view, which makes considerable transcend-sense, promissory ability is the prerequisite for “moral” ability.

What could be wrong with a large-scale movement that emphasizes meditation, morality, and mingling? Apparently quite a lot, if a recent “Photo Essay” over at Foreign Policy is any indication. The essay’s title contains all kinds of code words calculated to set off alarm bells: Close Encounters of the Buddhist Kind: An Exclusive Look Inside a Booming Multibillion-Dollar, Evangelical, Global Thai Cult.

It obviously took a bit of hard work to insert all the allusions, because this has just about everything. Far out and crazy, akin to UFO beliefs and Heaven’s Gate or Scientology (“Close Encounters”)? Check. Secretive and shadowy, but we have the Enquiring scoop (“An Exclusive Look Inside”)? Check. A dubious spiritual profiteering scheme (“Booming Multi-billion Dollar”)? Check. Enthusiastic, zealous, and irrational (“Evangelical”)? Check. Expansive, dangerous, and conspiratorial (“Global”)? Check. And the inevitable kicker, bringing to mind Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Reverend Moon: it’s a “cult.”

As if these clumsy connotations were not enough, the caption “essayist” (Ron Gluckman) absurdly trots out the Nazi analogies, complete with “scare quotes”:

Picture this: millions of followers gathering around a central shrine that looks like a giant UFO in elaborately choreographed Nuremberg-style rallies; missionary outposts in 31 countries from Germany to the Democratic Republic of the Congo; an evangelist vision that seeks to promote a “world morality restoration project”; and a V-Star program that encourages hundreds of thousands of children to improve “positive moral behavior.” Although the Bangkok-based Dhammakaya movement dons saffron robes, not brown shirts, its flamboyant ceremonies have become increasingly bold displays of power for this cult-like Buddhist group that was founded in the 1970s, ironically, as a reform movement opposed to the excesses of organized religion in Thailand.

Take cover! These mass-meditating Buddhists are poised for world domination! If Dhammakaya practitioners were carrying Mausers instead of flowers and clamoring for more meditation Lebensraum, the connection would be complete. Or not.

The photos in this feature are arresting and beautiful (excellent work by photographer Luke Duggleby), but caption “essayist” Gluckman tells us virtually nothing about Dhammakaya. It amounts to a hatchet job, which may or may not be deserved. One thing is for certain: Gluckman has not provided us with any information by which to judge the issue. His non-stop train of pejorative cliches and negative connotations speaks to an agenda. Instead of providing us with analysis, we are given only Gluckman’s judgments.

Whatever else it might be, Dhammakaya appears to be a dream come true for cultural anthropologists looking for a field site or subject. If anyone is aware of ethnographic work that situates this movement in a meaningful or informative way, please let us know. In the meantime, we can all channel our inner Leni Riefenstahl while contemplating scenes from the main temple complex:

As Nicholas Wade now reports, it appears that the case against Professor Hauser is not what it seemed and has encountered difficulties.  My sense of the situation, as an attorney, is there clearly was a rush to judgment and a shocking lack of process that has resulted in a Kafkaesque experience for Professor Hauser.  It obviously has taken a financial and emotional toll on him.  Harvard certainly has done him no favors.

The most disturbing aspect of the story is that Hauser’s defenders contend his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program.”  This sort of thing, if true, is completely unacceptable.  You can be opposed to someone’s research program without engaging in vicious attacks or making allegations that can ruin lives and careers.

This leaves me wondering who this critics are and what might be their motivations.  It would be one thing if such critics are opposed to Hauser’s research into morality and his argument that moral behavior is naturally evolved, no religion necessary.  This is of course a hot button issue that can crank up the temperature in any room.

But it is quite another thing if the criticism is aimed at Hauser’s primate cognition research — honestly, the stakes in such studies are not that high, and the findings — no matter which way they come out, are not going to unsettle anyone’s world view.  If Hauser’s critics are “virulently opposed” to this aspect of his research, the motivations are surely personal and petty.

The bottom line at this point is that it appears that none of Hauser’s research into morals has been touched by the investigation.  This is good news.

For decades, the intellectual descendants of Darwin have pored over ancient bones and bits of fossils, trying to piece together how fish evolved into man, theorizing about the evolutionary advantage conferred by each physical change. And over the past 10 years, a small group of academics have begun to look at religion in the same way: they’ve started to look at God and the supernatural through the lens of evolution.

In the history of the world, every culture in every location at every point in time has developed some supernatural belief system. And when a human behavior is so universal, scientists often argue that it must be an evolutionary adaptation along the lines of standing upright. That is, something so helpful that the people who had it thrived, and the people who didn’t slowly died out until we were all left with the trait. But what could be the evolutionary advantage of believing in God?

The giveaways are in the second paragraph — while it almost certainly is true that all humans over the last 75,000 years or so have believed in the supernatural, these beliefs have only recently (i.e., over the last 5,000 years) coalesced into something like “systems” grounded in “moral” behaviors.  It surely is no coincidence that such systems arose in conjunction with agriculture and larger scale societies.

This is an important point, given that Spiegel’s story revolves around Jesse Bering’s research into the effect that surveilling supernatural agents have on behavior and Dominic Johnson’s work on the relationship between religion and cooperation.  They are interested, in other words, on the connection between religiosity and morality, two concepts that were not linked during the exceedingly long period of human history during which shamanisms represent the primary forms of supernaturalism.

Although this history cannot be studied in a lab, it can be glimpsed through ethnohistory and ethnography.  Unfortunately, neither Spiegel nor his academic informants see this and the story ends on an unduly pessimistic note:

So the argument goes that as our human ancestors spread around the world in bands, keeping together for food and protection, groups with a religious belief system survived better because they worked better together.

We are their descendants. And Johnson says their belief in the supernatural is still very much with us.  “Everywhere you look around the world, you find examples of people altering their behavior because of concerns for supernatural consequences of their actions. They don’t do things that they consider bad because they think they’ll be punished for it.”

And then there are the people who say that cooperation doesn’t come from God — that cooperation evolved from our need to take care of family or show potential mates that we were a good choice. The theories are endless.

Unfortunately it’s not possible now to rewind the movie, so to speak, and see what actually happened. So these speculations will remain just that: speculations.

We can, in a sense, rewind the movie and when we do so — by, for instance, closely attending to the relatively well documented supernatural beliefs of the North American Plains Indians — we see that people were cooperating, punishing, and acting in certain ways (i.e., “morally”) not because they thought deities were watching them, but because this is what was required for continued membership within the extended kinship group.  One does not attend to this record in labs or receive grant money to study it, so we should not expect many cognitive scientists of religion to be evaluating their findings with history.

The philosopher and historian of science Michael Ruse has a nice piece titled “Darwinism and the Moral Argument for God,” in which he discusses the religion deflating research demonstrating that morality has no necessary linkage to God or religion.  This is of course true, as I explained in Religion Functions to Sustain the Moral Order — Starkly Wrong.  Aside from the considerable body of research showing that primates possess proto-morality (see Frans de Waal’s work) and that humans have evolved moral sensibilities (see Marc Hauser’s work), one should also consider that most or all hunting and gathering groups had distinct moral codes that were unwritten and unattached to notions of deity.  These codes became considerably more complex after the Neolithic Revolution, when writing first appeared and organized-systematic religions were formed. You can, in other words, have morals without religion.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche has posted an article asking: “Is Buddhism a Religion?”  Although Rinpoche’s version of Buddhism is non-religious, the fact remains that many practicing Buddhists around the world believe in a kind of Buddhism and engage in various Buddhist practices that are distinctly “religious.”  Rinpoche’s version of Buddhism is a recent incarnation that is highly westernized:

If you are interested in “meeting the Buddha” and following his example, then you should realize that the path the Buddha taught is primarily a study of your own mind and a system for training your mind. This path is spiritual, not religious. Its goal is self-knowledge, not salvation; freedom, not heaven. And it is deeply personal. Without your curiosity and questions and your open mind, there is no spiritual path, no journey to be taken, even if you adopt all the forms of the tradition.

This version of Buddhism is also tightly linked to the concept of the secular (see Talal Asad’s work) and concomitant privatization of belief.

Finally, Paul Wagler has posted on the early history of Christianity — “Ancient Empires: Reflections on the Spiritual Conquerers of the First Century.”  This story is interesting insofar as it goes, but a more complete history of Christianity and empire would discuss the marriage of Christianity to power that came with the Roman Emperor Constantine’s (272-337 CE) conversion and the subsequent adoption of Christianity as the official state religion.  This was perhaps the most fortuitous of all events in Christian history, and it resulted in Christianity becoming a “world religion.”  Without Constantine’s conversion, Christianity may have remained an esoteric Mediterranean religious sect.

I want to comment on the infamous email because there are other ways to approach the issue.  Like Myers, I will begin with this portion of the email, which contains an army of assumptions, none of them self-evident, and all of them used to advance a narrow theological perspective:

But the more significant problem has to do with the fact that the consent criterion is not related in any way to the NATURE of the act itself. This is where Natural Moral Law (NML) objects. NML says that Morality must be a response to REALITY. In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same. How do we know this? By looking at REALITY. Men and women are complementary in their anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Men and women are not interchangeable. So, a moral sexual act has to be between persons that are fitted for that act. Consent is important but there is more than consent needed.

Our moralizing professor has helpfully emphasized his key contentions using CAPITAL letters.  First, we have an appeal to “NATURE.”  Second, we have something called “Natural Moral Law” or “NML.”  Finally, we have “REALITY.”

Before analyzing these socially constructed, highly contested, and historically situated concepts, I want to refer my readers to one of my favorite bloggers and one of his recent posts.  Over at Missives from Marx, a religious studies professor recently defined some key concepts in critical thinking that we should keep in mind when considering the professor’s email:

Naturalization: the process that results in taking human products (whether cultural products, social products, social relations, etc.) as if they were natural.

Reification: the process that results in seeing fixity and permanence where there is none (sometimes called misplaced concreteness). Or, this could be the same as hypostatization: to project the real existence of a conceptual entity (like when people start talking about “religion” and “science” as things).

Mystification: the process that obscures social relations or the extent to which social relations [and history] constitute the world.

Applying these critical concepts to the professor’s contingent categories — NATURE, NATURAL MORAL LAW, and REALITY — we can immediately see he has naturalized them (presented Catholic constructs as if they were biological), reified them (discussed these thought categories as if they were real things having an independent existence), and mystified them (obscured the Catholic social and historical circumstances which produced these concepts).

With these things in mind, let’s look at another portion of the offending email:

Natural Moral Theory says that if we are to have healthy sexual lives, we must return to a connection between procreation and sex. Why? Because that is what is REAL. It is based on human sexual anatomy and physiology. Human sexuality is inherently unitive and procreative. If we encourage sexual relations that violate this basic meaning, we will end up denying something essential about our humanity, about our feminine and masculine nature.

I have it on good papal authority that the Catholic church’s position on homosexuality derives from the belief that the nuclear family is — and has always been — the fundamental social unit, and that the procreative bond between husband and wife is the anchor of this unit.  My authority contends that this is a universal feature of humanity (i.e., holds across cultures) and has always been this way (i.e., holds across history).  Anyone who holds these views is either profoundly ignorant of biology, history, and the ethnographic record, or simply dismisses these things as unimportant.

Why do I say this?  Let’s begin with biology.  It is abundantly evident that there are no clear sexual lines when it comes to the natural world.  The lines we create are largely artificial and are the product of Aristotleian essentialism; they ignore the immense sexual variation thrown up by nature.  These variations, in turn, create continuums of sexuality that manifest themselves in two distinct ways.

First, we have people who are born with ambiguous sexual organs (sometimes called hermaphroditic) — they are neither male nor female or are both male and female (I prefer the latter characterization because it is non-normative).  Second (and this is consistent with the first point), nature throws up variations in sexual preferences.  While homosexuality may, at first blush, appear to be an evolutionary enigma because homosexuals do not usually reproduce (which is a key aspect of evolutionary fitness), many studies have shown that selection may favor (or not select against) these phenotypes because homosexuals often play a critical role in the care of siblings and kin.  Ethnographic studies have shown this to be the case.  In addition most studies show that sexual orientation is genetically coded, as explained in this excellent survey over at Gene Expression.

That humans should sometimes be born with ambiguous sexual organs or alternative sexual preferences should come as no surprise, especially if one considers that all humans begin life as females and all humans are constructed on a female body plan.  Males, in other words, begin life as females and only through the later activation of certain regulatory genes and hormones do they begin developing male characteristics.  This explains why males have breast nipples, which are functionless artifacts of their female beginnings.  It stands to reason, therefore, that this differential development will generate physical and behavioral characteristics that exist along a sexual continuum.  Ontogeny is never uniform and certainly does not result in neat dichotomies.

Let us now turn to history and the ethnographic record.  Contrary to ahistorical Catholic beliefs and teachings, the nuclear family — with the procreating husband and wife at its center — has not always been and is not everywhere considered the foundational social unit.  In many (if not most) small-scale or tribal societies, the husband and wife were but a small part of the family unit and were not exclusively tasked with the raising of their biological children.

Small-scale societies are  most noted for fictive and extended kinship, which creates a basic social unit much larger than the nuclear family.  In many cases, mothers and fathers are not responsible for the primary caretaking and education of their biological children.  Biological and non-biological aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, and relatives are often given this responsibility.  In many such societies, a child can have several “mothers” and “fathers” and multiple sets of grandparents, not all of them biologically related to the children.  Recognition of these facts is often paraphrased by the saying “it takes a village to raise a child.”

The Catholic emphasis on marriage, procreation, and the nuclear family is therefore a recent development, limited in both time and space.  It generally coincides with the rise of city-states and the need for mobile labor units (i.e., the nuclear family) who could be deployed in ways most advantageous to economic needs.  Societies that are Christian and capitalist vigorously promoted this idea, to the point where it is now considered to be “natural” and timeless.

Also contrary Catholic beliefs and teachings, there have been many societies — past and present — in which homosexual relationships are not only accepted but also are approved.  This acceptance usually results from the perception that such preferences or activities are “natural.”  These relationships may occur at certain limited times in a person’s life (i.e., at certain ages) or under limited circumstances (i.e., as a rite of passage).  They may also be lifelong, depending on a person’s preferences.  This has been well documented in both small and large scale societies, including the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Maasai, Azande, Papuans, and Native Americans.

Native Americans in particular are notable for their acceptance of — and reverence for — persons having either ambiguous sexual characteristics or same-sex preferences.  In most Native American cultures, such persons were known as berdache or “Two Spirits.”  They often performed roles and assumed duties that are perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory which recognizes the adaptiveness of persons who may not reproduce, but play a critical role in the raising of children and tribal well-being.  While they may not reproduce, they help ensure the survival of their kin (and benefit the group) by performing a wide variety of useful tasks.

Ironically, Native American reverence for berdache stems from their close observation of nature (i.e., what is “NATURAL”).  They noticed, in other words, that some people were born with ambiguous sexual organs and different sexual preferences.  Rather than condemning these things as “unnatural” or “immoral,” they accepted it as perfectly natural.  And because berdache were unusual, Native Americans extended this acceptance into elevated status.  Berdache were often accorded special treatment and considered to have powerful medicine.

So here we have factual descriptions of NATURE and REALITY that contradict the Catholic construction of NATURE and REALITY.  From this, we may conclude that the NATURAL MORAL LAW referenced by the Catholic professor in his email to students is neither NATURAL nor LAW.  He should have been honest and called it CATHOLIC MORAL LAW.

Bell’s lecture (which I cannot believe he actually delivered; it would have taken hours) is a literary and intellectual tour de force, even if he gets many things wrong and his forecasts have missed the mark.  It is a perfect example of the kind of thing that happens when you combine an obviously brilliant mind with too much time in elite New York City intellectual circles and a long stint at Harvard.  This is an insular (and in some ways artificial) environment, where books and theory rule, and those immersed in it vastly overestimate the power of high culture and influence of the intellect.

Bell is clearly exorcised by an impressive host of thinkers, writers, poets, and philosophers, the majority of whom most people have never heard of let alone read.  Bell thinks he is diagnosing all of Western culture and civilization, when in fact he is diagnosing the concerns and preoccupations of a few, as if they somehow reflected the entirety of Western societies and cultures over the past 300 years.

Throughout the essay, Bell talks casually about “human universals” and “human nature,” though he seems to be ethnographically and evolutionarily illiterate.  He also seems to be infected with a sort of intellectual Janus disease, given his penchant for characterizing everything on his mind or which he discerns as “dual” and “double.”

Contrary to Bell’s guiding assumption, Western culture and history is not world culture and history.  Bell’s concept of traditional religion — which in typical (and wrong) Durkheimian fashion — holds society together, is a thinly veiled fantasy about how Christianity supposedly held the West together for thousands of years before the perilous and immoral onslaught of modernity and science.

In the end, I found myself agreeing with Bell only on a single point which he presents as a forecast — “the return of the sacred” and resurgence of religion:

If there are to new religions — and I think they will arise — they will, contrary to previous experience, return to the past, to seek for tradition . . . I do not know how these will arise, but I have some dim perception of the forms they may take.  The first [possible form] I would call moralizing religion.  Its roots and strength are in a Fundamentalist faith, evangelical and scourging, emphasizing sin and the turn away from the Whore of Babylon.

As is evident, Bell correctly predicted the resurgence of fundamentalism not only in United States, but elsewhere in the world — especially some Islamic parts of it.   This is what happens in the cultures of late capitalism, where mindless materialism and empty consumption rule, and when those cultures reach out to touch — and affect — other parts of the world, which must be integrated into the system.

But what of this “past” that Bell provincially speaks?  There is much more to history, culture, and humanity than the West.  History, thinking, and religion did not begin with the Greeks, as so many Western intellectuals mistakenly assume.

World cultures have a much deeper history and broader scope — as anthropology continuously attests.  A year or two of reading in ethnography, evolution, and archaeology would have done Bell much good (and resulted in a different lecture on religion, which is more than moralizing monotheism).  Isn’t it time to look beyond the parochial canon of classicism and shackles of sociological theory?

In the end, Bell seems to sense that he is operating in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere that may be — and in fact is — out of touch with “ordinary” people or what he calls “a large substratum of society” consisting traditionally of “farmers, lower-middle class, small town artisans, and the like.”

Yes, Daniel, there is life outside of New York, Harvard, Christianity, and the intelligentsia — all of which have far less influence, and importance, than you think.

I mention this because Sam Harris (the neuroscientist) is engaged in a debate with Sean Carroll (the physicist) and PZ Myers (the biologist) over whether there can be a science of morality.  This debate has been joined by Phillip Goldberg (the ecumenical minister), who asserts:

Sam Harris describes his plan to formulate a science-based morality. It is an intriguing enterprise, and I wish him well. A rigorous enquiry could shed light on questions such as what constitutes the common good and which behaviors ought to be encouraged or discouraged. It might give secularists something to hang their ethical hats on, providing an evidence-based critique of precepts that have come down to us from old religious codes.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if Harris’ enterprise derives moral maxims that sound like the dos and don’ts of religions? Obviously, many religion-based tenets — those related to sex, the draconian punishments, etc. — will not make the cut, but they’re pretty much dead already except among a fanatical minority. But other principles, not just from the West, but from Buddhist precepts and the Hindu yamas and niyamas — don’t steal, don’t lie, be kind, help others, etc. — are likely to stand up to scientific scrutiny.

Goldberg obviously is not an anthropologist or an historian, or he would know that moral-ethical precepts did not “come down to us from old religious codes.”  The basic tenets that Goldberg mentions (and which are common to most morally-based religions) — “don’t steal, don’t lie, be kind, help others, etc.” — have been around for a long, long time.  These precepts pre-date the rise of the first city-states (~4,500 BC), and are commonly found in hunter-gatherer societies.  In all likelihood, these precepts have been present in such societies for at least 50,000 years.

In historic times, one can find this idea among the Lakota or Sioux Indians.  In Land of the Spotted Eagle and My People the Sioux, Luther Standing Bear describes in detail what is known as “the Lakota way,” which encapsulates Lakota understandings of what constitutes moral or ethical behavior.  These understandings are little different from (and in several ways superior to) the basic moral injunctions contained in ethical world religions.  There is however one major difference, as Standing Bear states: “But this arrangement was not assigned to divine instruction nor given a religious hue; it was wholly and solely an adjustment with the social plans of the tribe.”

As for Goldberg’s contention that “which behaviors ought to be encouraged or discouraged” spring from the “do’s and don’ts of religion,” this completely ignores the fact that the earliest legal codes — which specifically described behaviors to be encouraged-discouraged in the form of do’s and don’ts, pre-date the rise of the oldest world religions.  While the Ten Commandments (Jewish) and the maxims of the Rig Veda (Hindu) are respectably old, both dating from around 1,500 BC, the Sumerians had a legal code (which addressed moral and ethical issues) more than a thousand years earlier.  The Sumerian code makes no reference to religion and is not based on religion.  By the same token, the Babylonian King Hammurabi formulated his famous law code (based on moral and ethical behavior) hundreds of years before the Ten Commandments or Rig Veda were conceived or written.  Hammurabi’s code was neither based on nor grounded in religion.

There is, therefore, no historical evidence to support the idea that moral and ethical precepts originate with — or are dependent on — religion.  The conflation of morality with religion is a relatively recent development in human history, and it is limited to certain peoples in certain places who practice certain religions.

All this aside, there already is a substantial body of scientific research which demonstrates that moral and prosocial behavior has a long evolutionary history and that such behavior is biologically rooted.  Some primates, untutored children, and adults in all cultures appear to possess basic concepts of altruism, cooperation, fairness, sharing, and tend to treat others in a manner that could easily be described as “the golden rule.” Primates and humans are intensely social, so these findings should come as no surprise.

There are of course exceptions to moral and proscial behavior, given that cultural patterning will significantly impact moral valuations, judgments, and actions.  Moreover,  individual pathologies — which may result from either brain defects or experiential trauma — can derail the basic moral-ethical tool-kit which all of us possess at birth.

As regular readers of the blog know, I have challenged this argument using several lines of evidence:

• Social primates, such as chimps, appear to understand and practice fairness, reciprocity and altruism, thus indicating that these “moral” behaviors have deep evolutionary roots;
• Children naturally develop a sense of fairness, reciprocity and altruism, thus suggesting that these traits have biological roots;
• Adults across the world and in different cultures tend to share basic and intuitive ideas about what is right and wrong (i.e., moral or immoral), which again indicates some degree of “moral” hard-wiring; and
• In many hunter-gatherer societies, the teaching and maintenance of right or “moral” behavior is completely divorced from ritualistic practices or spiritual beliefs; thus, the supposedly primordial “religion” of shamanism is not linked to morality.

Over the past week, I have been delving into the massive body of work on religion by the sociologist Rodney Stark.  In an article titled “Gods, Rituals, and the Moral Order,” Stark takes direct aim at the historically incorrect idea that religion and morality are necessarily linked:

“Religion functions to sustain the moral order.”  This classic proposition, handed down from the founders, is regarded by many as the closest thing to a “law” that the social scientific study of religion possesses.

The only problem with this “law,” notes Stark, is that “it’s wrong.”  Religion functions to sustain the moral order in certain societies, in certain places, and at certain times — usually within those societies that practice monotheism and whose gods are: (a) anthropomorphic; (b) concerned with morality; and (c) capable of punishing those who transgress morality.  Obviously, not all spiritual traditions or religions — past or present — possess these characteristics.

As Stark notes, many anthropologists have made this observation based on ethnographic reports, and it was well known to Edward Tylor, one of anthropology’s founders, who in 1871 stated:

To some the statement may seem startling, yet the evidence seems to justify it, that the relation of morality to religion is one that only belongs in its rudiments, or not at all, to [premodern societies].  The popular idea that the moral government of the universe is an essential tenet of natural religion simply falls to the ground.  [Shamanism and premodern religions are] almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainspring of practical religion.

This does not mean, Tylor comments, that premodern societies lack morals or moral teachings — they simply are not joined with spiritualism or religion:

Not, as I have said, that morality is absent from the life of of [premodern societies].  But these ethical laws stand on their own ground of tradition and public opinion, comparatively independent of the animistic beliefs and rites which exist beside them.  [Premodern religion] is not immoral; it is unmoral.

In the remainder of his article — which should be required reading for group level selectionists, evolutionary psychologists, and story-tellers who locate the origins of religion in prosocial and moral behaviors — Stark dismantles the idea that religion functions primarily to sustain the moral order.  While this may be true of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and also Hinduism, it is not true of all other spiritual traditions or religions.

Both studies are receiving a fair amount of attention.  This is unsurprising, given that the standard thinking about morality is that people are good or evil and that this is largely a matter of choice.  Another default assumption is that religious people are more moral than non-religious people.

In his article “Magnets Can Manipulate Morality,” Eric Bland reports:

Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists from MIT, Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it more difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have big implications for not only neuroscientists, but also for judges and juries.

“It’s one thing to ‘know’ that we’ll find morality in the brain,” said Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. “It’s another to ‘knock out’ that brain area and change people’s moral judgments.”

The area of the brain that was bombarded (and confused) by magnetism is the right tempo-parietal junction, a region that also allows us to attribute mental states to others (i.e., “theory of mind”).  Although Bland’s article emphasizes the impact these findings could have on notions of intent and guilt in the legal system, I think the findings have equal relevance to religion.  Most religionists assert that morality emanates from the divine.

Ever since the famous and gruesome case of Phineas Gage (who had a tamping rod blown upwards through his left cheek and out of his skull), we have known that damage to specific areas of the frontal lobes can dramatically alter behavior and impair moral judgment.  Andy Coghlan at New Scientist reports on a new study that confirms these findings:

To probe emotion’s role in moral decision-making, Liane Young and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology turned to nine people whose emotional responses were impaired due to damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Young presented these people with 24 moral dilemmas, each consisting of four different scenarios of varying acceptability. In one, for example, someone kills another by mistakenly adding poison to their coffee instead of sugar. In another scenario, a person tries but fails to kill another by deliberately poisoning their coffee. Participants ranked the moral acceptability of each scenario on a scale of 1 to 7.

The volunteers with brain damage gave failed attempts at intentional harm a 5, rating it twice as permissible as the other volunteers, who opted for 2.5. And the impaired group all rated accidental harm to someone as being less morally acceptable than failed attempts at deliberate harm.

In the end, these studies show that a substantial part of moral decision-making originates in the brain and that humans have evolved cognitive mechanisms for making moral judgments.  Although religious training can pattern these judgments, religion is not the source of the judgments.

These findings also contradict the idea that religion is an evolved adaptation which facilitated prosocial or “moral” behaviors and thus provided some groups with a selective advantage over others.