Atheists would like to see the origin of morals in animals. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Joel Kontinen
The origin of morality is a hard nut to crack for Darwinists. Their evolution-based worldview has no shortage of insurmountable problems, such as the origin of life, the development of life and the origin of consciousness and language.
Frans de Waal, known for his research on chimpanzees and bonobos, discusses the origin of morality in his new book. He thinks that great apes have a rudimentary understanding of right and wrong, but he does not claim that they are moral beings.
As all readers of Mickey Mouse would remember, we tend to interpret the behaviour of animals from our human perspective. Attributing human traits to non-humans, a phenomenon known as anthropomorphism, can easily result in wrong interpretations. Thus, we might think that a dog (or a bonobo) feels shame, although there is an unbridgeable gap between humans and animals.
Only humans are morally accountable beings. In practice, this means that we should try to be accountable to our Creator instead of attempting to find excuses for not doing so, for instance by pretending that we are the results of blind Darwinian processes.
Source:
Dye, Lee. 2013. Do We Need God to be Moral? ABC News (7 April).
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