...If it did, humanity would have never made it past Neaderthal stage of evolution. You can not kill each other an expect to survive, morality has always been part of our human development. Other mammals have morality as well, other wise they would all be extinct.
http://www.atheists.org/Atheism/cohen.htmlMORALITY WITHOUT G-D:
Christianity is what is called a "revealed" religion. That is, God himself revealed that religion to man. In other religions man sought God -- some god -- and eventually found him, or thought he did. In the case of Christianity God sought man and revealed himself to him. The revelation, judging by after events, was not very well done, for although a book made its appearance that was said to have been dictated or inspired by God so that man might know his will, yet ever since mankind has been in some doubt as to what God meant when he said it. Evidently God's way of making himself known by a revelation is not above criticism. There seems a want of sense in giving man a revelation he could not understand. It is like lecturing in Greek to an audience that understands nothing but Dutch.
What was it God revealed to man? He did not reveal science. The whole structure of physical science was built up very gradually and tentatively by man. He did not teach man geology, or astronomy, or chemistry, or biology. He did not teach him how to overcome disease, or its nature and cure. He did not teach him agriculture, or how to develop a wild grass into a life-nourishing wheat. He did not teach man how to drain a marsh or how to dig a canal so that it might carry water where it was needed. He did not teach him arithmetic or mathematics. He taught him none of the arts and sciences. Man had no revelation that taught him how to build the steam engine, or the aeroplane, or the submarine, the telegraph or the wireless. All these and a thousand other things which we regard as indispensable, and without which civilization would be impossible, man had to discover for himself. There is not a Christian parson who would to-day say that God gave these things to man. That, perhaps, is not quite true. Some of the clergy will say that God gave everything to man inasmuch as he let him find them out. But at any rate none of these things I have named is said to have been revealed to man. He had to discover or invent the lot. And in inventing them or discovering them he behaved just as he might have behaved had he never heard of God at all.
What was there left for God to give man? Well, it is said, he gave him morality. He gave man the ten commandments. He told him he must not steal, he must not commit murder, he must not bear false witness; he told children they must honor their fathers and mothers, but somehow he forgot the very necessary lesson that parents ought also to honor their children. He mixed up with these things the command that people ought to honor him, and he was more insistent upon that than upon anything else. Not to honor him was the one unforgivable crime. But, and this is the important thing, while there is no need for an inspired arithmetic or an inspired geometry, while there is no inspired chemistry or geology, there had to be, apparently, and inspired morality, because without God moral laws would be without authority, and decency would disappear from human society.
Now that, put bluntly, lies behind the common statement that morality depends upon religious belief. It is not always put quite so plainly as I have put it -- very absurd things are seldom put plainly -- but it is put very plainly by the man in the street and by the professional evangelist. It is also put in another way by those people who delight in telling us what blackguards they were till Christ got hold of them, and it is put in expensive volumes in which Christian writers and preachers wrap up the statement in such a way that to the unwary it looks as though there must be something in it, and at least it is sufficiently unintelligible to look as though it were good sound theological philosophy.
Is the theory inherently credible? Consider what it means. Are we to believe that if we had never received a revelation from God, or even if there were no belief in God, a mother would never have learned to love her child, men and women would never have loved each other, men would never have placed any value upon honesty or truthfulness or loyalty? After all we have seen an animal mother caring for its young, even to the extent of risking its life for it. We have seen animals defend each other from a common enemy and join together in running down prey for a common meal. There is a courting time for animals, there is a mating time, and there is a time however brief when the animal family of male, female and young exist. All this happened to the animals without God. Why should man have to receive a revelation before he could reach the moral stage of the higher animal life?
Broadly, then, the assertion that morality would never have existed for human beings without belief in a God or without a revelation from God is equal to saying that man alone should have never discovered the value of being honest and truthful or loyal. He would not even have had such terms as good and bad in his vocabulary, for the use of those words implies moral judgement, and there would have been no such thing -- at least, so we are told.
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