God and Darwin: On the Same Page

Is there good without God? Can people be good without God? How can people be good, in the moral and ethical sense, without being grounded in some sort of belief in a being which is greater than they are? Where do concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, come from if not from religion? From where do you get your sense of good and evil, right and wrong?

The “good without God” movement is one small step for humans and one giant step for humankind. So much violence and evil has been done in the name of God, and the humanist movement seeks to reclaim the human capacity for good that has been hijacked and distorted by religious traditions over the centuries.

I agree that humans have the potential for great good and for great evil, and this has nothing to do with belief in a higher being. The Nazis were Christians, and the evils they committed during the Holocaust will forever represent the lowest point of man’s inhumanity to man. At the same time, most of those whom they victimized were Jews, whose helping and caring for each other showed the depth of human kindness possible even in the midst of unspeakable horror.

Darwin would say that living beings are on an evolutionary journey to higher levels, and that the cruelty and violence they inflict upon each other are merely the consequence of evolution. And so may belief in God be part of evolution: religious beliefs may have helped our ancestors survive great hardship. Certainly faith in God helps millions today cope with life’s challenges and suffering.

But religion also has been and can be a crutch, preventing people from taking a stand against great evil or allowing them to explain it away as “God’s will.” Where is the human responsibility and accountability in doing good or refraining from evil only because a higher being desires it? Human values and ethics—and the will and agency to choose the good—must come from within each of us rather than from conformity to a set of rules.

As life on this planet evolves toward greater and greater complexity—from particles to atoms to molecules to living beings to human populations and, finally, to the community of all created life—we will only survive through activities that are life-giving rather than life-taking: cooperation, empathy, caring, peace-making. And belief in God itself—if it is to be life-giving and if it is to further the evolutionary process—must evolve as we do, moving us toward greater human accountability and responsibility.

I believe in a God who is the author of everything—life and death, creation and destruction, good and evil. My sense of right and wrong comes from my belief that not only are humans created in God’s image, but also are imbued with God’s wisdom, passion, and creativity. As a practicing Christian, I also believe that the purpose of Christ’s humanity was to show us our origins in God and to give us a glimpse of who we are becoming, who we already, in some ways, are. To show us that the light of God is found not only in Christ, but in each and every human soul. With these gifts come a profound freedom and an enormous responsibility.