Being Good Without God

"Religion usurps for itself a product of human development that has occurred without any need of divine intervention, it is the ultimate confidence trick, selling us what we already own."


There is a widely held conviction that being good is linked to religious belief. So is it possible to be good without God? To be good requires first having a moral blueprint by which actions can be judged to be good or bad and for the believer this blueprint is derived from God.

Most people would agree with the following assertion; that you should treat others the same way you want them to treat you, this notion relies on reciprocity and is intuitive when your own self interest is evenly balanced with that of another. However there are many circumstances when you cannot rely on a matched response so why should someone behave in an altruistic or generous way when there is no guarantee that their behaviour will be reciprocated?

For many species, like most fish for example, after fertilisation of the eggs the parents take no further part in the development of their offspring. Other species like most birds have a different method. As neither the skeletal wings or the feathers necessary for flight can develop fully within the confines of a shell, the hatchling bird requires weeks of nurture and protection to enable this development and therefore cannot fend for itself for a considerable time.

Both these methods of reproduction have been highly successful as the ubiquity of fish and birds species testify. For the bird however reproduction has an additional responsibility, namely parenting. For the hatchling, survival is a race against time; the longer that it stays in the nest the more vulnerable it is to predators. Rapid growth requires a constant supply of food. For a typical brood of five or six chicks the demands on the parent birds are enormous. During this period adult birds may be near to starvation themselves as they devote all their energy to feeding their offspring. And in addition they will invariably put themselves at risk to defend their brood when it is threatened by a predator.

The bird’s behaviour is obviously altruistic as no reciprocation is likely but does this mean that it is good? It is obviously good for their offspring as their survival is dependent upon it, but can it be good in the general sense without having a moral dimension? If a bird is compelled by instinct to behave in an altruistic manner then can we regard this behaviour as morally good?

Even though their lifespan if usually greater, most mammals devote a proportionally much longer period to parenting, than birds do. And amongst the most devoted are we humans, spending around twenty percent of our lifespan rearing our own children. In common with all other species who are involved in parenting, we really have no choice as our species would not survive if we did not expend a huge amount of our resources in rearing our offspring.

Even in our changing society the majority of us are still reared by loving parents or at least parent. Almost every mother establishes a bond with her child soon after birth as do the majority of fathers. The human family is the crucible where altruistic behaviour is forged, not out of a desire to please a distant god but out of biological necessity. The human family is the base unit of human society; its structure is echoed in almost all human organisations, whether social, legal, political, sporting or religious. Within the family is the archetype of all human relationships.

Whilst parental altruism is inevitable this cannot be said of our offspring. As soon as it is able an infant will take what it wants at the expense of anyone else. Usually this behaviour is challenged by parents, particularly if other siblings are involved, bad behaviour is chastised whilst good is rewarded. It is within this transfer of the biologically motivated behaviour of parents to the culturally acquired behaviour of their offspring that the notion of morality can be said to emerge. Good that is inevitable becomes good that is preferable.

The notion of good (and therefore of bad) has become a cultural meme, it has evolved and spread into all human activity. It has resulted in the concept of fairness and justness and a system of law based on the concept of natural justice, natural because we know it to be true.

So do you need God to be good?

Religion, in most of its theistic invocations, usurps for itself a product of human development that has occurred without any need of divine intervention, it is the ultimate confidence trick, selling us what we already own. Yes we would have been good without god! So how has it got away with this fraud for so long?

Religion offers its adherents a simple deal. It trades the promise of a life after death for obedience and deference in life before death. In order to buttress this compliance religion has sticks as well as carrots, and foremost of those sticks is the prospect of hell for miscreants or at the very least the absence of heaven.

In common with other tyrannies religion has policies to maintain its grip, it embroils the young before they a capable of independent thought, it requires tithes and regular worship of its particular God but foremost it has a set of rules that must be obeyed. Many of these rules are hostile to competing religions and some require punishment and even the abuse of infants as in the practice of circumcision; but smuggled in amongst these abhorrent “laws” are many that anyone will intuitively accept, you should not steal, you should not kill, you shall not bear false witness etc. This seduces the believer into accepting the entire package and convinces them that they cannot be good without it. It is no surprise that the notion that you should treat others the same way you want them to treat you is a precept of nearly all religions as well as secular, naturalistic doctrines, reciprocal altruism is simply common sense.

In many countries, like the USA and Iran for example, morality based on religious belief has been conjoined with political dogma in order to undermine or drive out the secular alternative, to the extent that many ordinary people genuinely think that, in the absence of their religion, they would behave like savages. The usurpation of humanist notion of good and the claim that it emanates from god is a disgraceful sham. The truth is that we humans are programmed to be good.