Morality Without God: How Religion Hijacked Our Conscience

If morality comes from God, why do moral progress and religious doctrine so often collide? Mike Smithgall breaks down the myth that we need divine authority to be good.

This episode examines empathy’s evolutionary roots, the failures of fear-based morality, and the evidence that secular societies thrive without divine command. It’s a reasoned and candid look at what truly drives human ethics.

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Q: How do you explain moral instincts in people who’ve never been exposed to religious teachings? 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Thanks for tuning in. I'm Mike Smithgall, the unelected mayor of Atheistville, and this is today's Mic Drop. A while back, I got a comment that perfectly captures one of the most persistent myths about atheism. A member of the community that I will call hope and I had a lovely and friendly exchange, but during the discussion about morals, they said this the issue is still sin. How can you want a godless society and yet you still want to blame God for the issues? If God were eradicated from society tomorrow, do you genuinely believe that pure, innocent babies would be born into a safer world? Now I responded, but their question deserves a deeper dive because it touches on something fundamental, the relationship between morality and the concept of sin. Today I want to dismantle the idea that our moral compass and the very definition of good comes from God or scripture. The evidence from biology to anthropology to our own moral progress tells us a very different story. Religion didn't invent morality, it hijacked it. Now let's start our argument with what I call the scandal test. Let's start with Hope's core premise that without God, children wouldn't be safe. But here's the uncomfortable truth. Children haven't been particularly safe with God either. The Catholic Church has faced decades of abuse scandals, with thousands of priests accused of sexual abuse in the United States alone. I mean over 3,000. That's the scale of the crisis. The Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination, has its own crisis with hundreds of documented cases. What makes these scandals particularly damning isn't the abuse, it's the institutional response. These organizations claiming divine moral authority repeatedly move predators from post to post, prioritizing protecting the reputation over protecting children, and silence the victims. If the argument is that religion makes children safer, then I have to ask, how much worse could a godless society possibly be? And this isn't the indictment of all believers. Most religious people are horrified by these scandals, but it does reveal something crucial. Religious institutions don't have a monopoly on moral behavior. In fact, when they claim divine authority, they often become less accountable, not more. And in my response to that person, I made a point that always gets attention. I said, I commit all the atrocities I want to commit, and that number is zero. Now that isn't a boast. It's an observation about the nature of morality itself. When someone says the Bible is the only thing keeping them from harming others, they're revealing something troubling about their moral foundation. They're saying their restraint comes not from empathy or genuine care of others, but from fear of punishment, either earthly or eternal. By their own admission, they're one book away from being dangerous. This fear-based morality is fundamentally different from empathy-based morality. Fear asks, what will happen to me if I do this? Empathy asks, how will this affect others? One is self-interested calculation, and the other is genuine moral consideration. Now, most people, religious or not, operate primarily on empathy. They don't hurt others because they understand suffering, not because they're afraid of hell. They help strangers, not because scripture demands it, but because they recognize a shared humanity. The book isn't what makes them moral. They were already compassionate human beings. So if it doesn't come from fear, then where does morality come from? This is a crucial question. If morality doesn't come from God, then where does it come from? And the answer lies in our evolutionary history. And it's far more fascinating than any religious origin story. Cooperation and reciprocity appear throughout the animal kingdom. Primates share food and comfort distressed members of their group. Dolphins rescue injured companions. Even rats will free other rats from cages, choosing to help others claim extra food. These behaviors suggest that the foundations of morality, empathy, fairness, reciprocity, evolved as survival strategies long before humans developed language, let alone scripture. Human societies took these basic impulses and built complex moral systems around them. Archaeological evidence shows that hunter-gatherer groups enforced fairness and punished freeloaders and cared for the vulnerable thousands of years before organized religion appeared. These societies didn't need divine commands to understand that cooperation was essential for survival. The evolutionary perspective explains something that religious morality cannot, that we have moral intuitions that sometimes contradict what we're taught. Why do children as young as three show preference for fairness even when no one is watching? Why do people across cultures, regardless of religion, tend to help others in emergencies? Because those behaviors are just part of our cognitive inheritance. They evolved because they helped our ancestors survive and thrive in groups. And here's where the religious argument completely falls apart. Let's look at when scripture lags behind conscience. If morality truly came from unchanging divine command, we'd expect religious texts to represent the pinnacle of moral thinking. Instead, we find the opposite. Holy books often enshrine practices we now recognize as deeply immoral. Slavery, genocide, the subjugation of women, the execution of people for victimless crimes. The Bible explicitly endorses slavery, giving detailed instructions on how to treat different types of slaves. It commands the complete destruction of entire peoples, including children. It treats women as property, subject first to their fathers and then to their husbands. These aren't metaphors or cultural misunderstandings. They're clear moral prescriptions that most modern believers now reject. What's telling is how moral progress has worked in practice. It wasn't religious leaders reading scripture more carefully who ended slavery. It was abolitionists using reason and empathy to argue that human bondage was just wrong, often in direct opposition to religious authorities who defended slavery using biblical passages. It wasn't deeper theological study that gave women equal rights. It was secular philosophers and activists who argued for human dignity regardless of gender. These patterns repeat throughout history. Moral progress comes not from discovering new religious truths, but from humans using reason and empathy to expand our circle of moral consideration. All right, quick pause, just for a moment. If you haven't subscribed yet, I would love to have you join the community here at Atheistville and leave a comment. Your comments help shape the discussions and let us know what topics you enjoy. And I promise, even if we respectfully disagree, I will respond to you because I enjoy the opportunity to learn different perspectives. And one final thing, just reach back to your believer days and become an evangelist for the show. Tell someone else what we're doing. I'm trying to get the show out there to more people, and recommendations from people like you really help. All right, let's get back to it. Perhaps the strongest evidence against religious monopoly or morality comes from looking at the world itself. The vast majority of humans aren't Christians, yet they display the same basic moral behaviors. They care for children, they help strangers, they condemn unprovoked violence, they value fairness and honesty. Secular countries like Denmark and Sweden and Norway consistently rank highest on measures of social trust, happiness, and safety. These societies have largely moved beyond religious governance, yet they have lower crime rates, better treatment of minorities, and stronger social safety nets than most highly religious countries, including my own. For example, according to the World Happiness Report, the top five happiest countries are routinely secular or have very low church attendance. Conversely, highly religious countries often score low on quality of life metrics. Within the United States, studies consistently show that less religious states are often safer and healthier. That's going to fly in the face of what we hear constantly, but it's true. They have lower rates of violent crime, lower teen pregnancy, less divorce. The trend is clear. That doesn't mean religious people are bad. Far from it. Correlation is not causation. I say that all the time, but it's true, correlation is not causation. But it does mean that secular societies aren't collapsing into moral chaos, as critics would often predict. In fact, research by sociologist Phil Zuckerman shows that secular populations tend to be at least as altruistic, if not more, than highly religious populations. When looking at measures like charity giving to secular causes and rates of volunteerism. And the evidence is just overwhelming. Morality is not dependent on belief. So, what does secular morality offer that religious morality doesn't? Accountability, for one. When humans take responsibility for moral decisions rather than deferring to divine authority, we can examine the consequences of our choices and adjust accordingly. We can study what actually reduces harm, increases well-being, and promotes flourishing. Secular ethics can evolve with new knowledge. As we learn more about psychology, sociology, and human development, we can refine our approaches to justice, education, and social policy. Religious moral systems, anchored to ancient texts, struggle to adapt to new understandings. Most importantly, secular morality recognizes that humans are both the source of moral problems and the only available solution. We can't pray away child abuse or genocide. We have to build systems, change laws, and hold people accountable. That's harder than deference to divine authority, but it's also more honest and ultimately more effective. So let me return to Hope's original question about creating a safer world for children. The answer isn't more religion, it's better human institutions. It's evidence-based approaches to child protection, its transparent accountability systems, and a commitment to prioritizing victim welfare over institutional reputation. It's recognizing that moral progress is a human project, requiring human effort and human responsibility. It's understanding that empathy and reason, not fear and obedience, are the foundations of genuine ethical behavior. When believers tell me that faith makes them more moral, I want to remind them of something important. They were already good people before they opened that book, and they'd still be good people if they closed it tomorrow. Their compassion, their desire to help others, their protective instincts towards children, these aren't gifts from above. They're expressions of our shared humanity. Religion didn't invent morality. As I said before, it hijacked it. And then it spent centuries telling us we were too broken to fix ourselves. All right, that's my two cents, unblessed and unfiltered. Agree or disagree, that's what I got for you today. So here's the bottom line: morality is a human creation, not a divine gift. We don't need the fear of hell to be good. We only need empathy and reason. The work of creating a safer world for children and for all of us isn't about praying to a higher power. It's about building better human institutions and holding them accountable. All right, until next time, I'm Mike Smithgull, and I'll catch you on the next one. Hey, thanks for tuning in. I really hope you enjoyed that show. Make sure you like and subscribe to this podcast, it really helps us out. If you're interested in video, uh go to our YouTube channel. That's Atheistville over there as well. We have a lot of videos. That includes our Unholy Roundtable, our panel discussion. We talk to different atheists and take live questions. We also have more mic drops over there. And we do our Ask an Atheist series where we talk to individual atheists about their journey to get to atheism. In fact, if you would be interested in doing a show like that, I would love to sit down and talk with you. So let us know. You can also go to our website at atheistville.com. We have a lot of great content over there, including our blogs. So make sure you check us out. We're trying to be available anywhere you want us to be. So again, thanks for tuning in. And remember that reason and compassion go a very long way.