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social rules of the group. As a social primate species we evolved the capacity for positive moral values because they enhance the survival of both family and community. Evolution created these values in us, and religion identified them as important in order to accentuate them. “The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable,” Darwin theorized in The Descent of Man, “namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” The evolution of the moral sense was a stepwise process, “a highly complex sentiment, having its first origin in the social instinct, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, confirmed by instruction and habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense and conscience.”6

Evolution also explains evil, original sin, and the Christian model of human nature. We may have evolved to be moral angels, but we are also immoral beasts. Whether you call it evil or original sin, humans have a dark side. Individuals in our evolutionary ancestral environment needed to be both cooperative and competitive, for example, depending on the context. Cooperation leads to more successful hunts, food sharing, and group protection from predators and enemies. Competition leads to more resources for oneself and family, and protection from other competitive individuals who are less inclined to cooperate, especially those from other groups. Thus we are by nature both cooperative and competitive, altruistic and selfish, greedy and generous, peaceful and bellicose; in short, good and evil. Moral codes, and a society based on the rule of law, are necessary not just to accentuate the positive, but especially to attenuate the negative side of our evolved nature. Christians would find little to disagree with in the observation of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s chief defender in the nineteenth century: “Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical process of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”7

Thus, by explaining the origins of our positive and negative behaviors and characteristics, evolution explains the origin of morality and religions designed moral codes based on our evolved natures. For the first ninety thousand years of our existence as fully modern humans, our ancestors lived in small bands of tens to hundreds of individuals. In the last ten thousand years, these bands evolved into tribes of thousands; tribes developed into chiefdoms of tens of thousands; chiefdoms coalesced into states of hundreds of thousands; and states conjoined into empires of millions. How and why did this happen? By ten thousand years ago, our species had spread to nearly every region of the globe and people everywhere lived where they could hunt and gather. This system tended to contain populations, but the invention of agriculture around that time allowed these populations to explode. With those increased populations came new social technologies for governance and conflict resolution: politics—and religion.

The moral emotions, such as guilt and shame, pride and altruism, evolved in those tiny bands of one hundred to two hundred people as a form of social control and group cohesion. One means of accomplishing this was through reciprocal altruism—“I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine.” But as Lincoln noted, men are not angels. People defect from informal agreements and social contracts. In the long run, reciprocal altruism works only when you know who will cooperate and who will defect. This information is gathered in various ways, including through stories about other people—more commonly known as gossip. Most gossip is about relatives, close friends, those in our immediate sphere of influence, and members of the community or society who have