Of late, my friend Chris has been blogging about the moral argument for the existence of God. Atheists typically respond to the moral argument by saying that morals evolved. While some very good refutations of that view are available, I wish to add my own comments regarding the atheist position. I'll tackle that position from the angle of genetics and not philosophy et al.
First off, is it morally acceptable for a member of the species homo sapiens to kill another homo sapiens without cause? Not at all, and most people, including atheists, will agree with me. So, here's another question: is it morally acceptable for humans to kill chimpanzees, for no reason other than, say for the chimpanzee's fur? If the answer is "no," then is it morally acceptable to kill (without cause other than profit) a gorilla? A lemur? To get to the meat of my argument, at what percent of DNA similarity to our DNA does it become morally acceptable to kill an animal for no real cause? Are we allowed to kill an animal whose DNA is say, 99.99% similar to our own DNA? Is it okay to kill an animal whose DNA is 98% similar to our own? 97%? You see, if morals evolved without any guiding intelligence, at what percentage of DNA similarity are we supposed to draw the line that separates those creatures that we may kill and those we may not kill? Something to ponder over. After all, we share 97.5% similarity to mice [Mural et al. 2002], and yet, intriguingly, tonight I am setting up some mice traps to catch those nasty pests. So, I would love to hear an atheist response to this.
References:
R. J. Mural et al. A Comparison of Whole-Genome Shotgun-Derived Mouse. Science 296: 1661 (2002).
