Paley's moral compass

As a follow-up to the Ecclesiastes book review post, it seems the construct for morality for Christians (or other religions) falls into Paley's watchmaker analogy. This is heard in Christianity as "But for the grace of God, there too go I". Christianity is rife with demeaning humanity as amoral and evil with the single exception of accepting Jesus as one's savior to both forgive transgressions and begin to live a more moral life as Jesus lives through him or her.

If this is true, then the Christian who believes in evolution has drawn a dangerous line. Obviously, behavior as well as physiology is under evolutionary pressures, but the religious moralist presumes high levels of morality can only be attained via divine providence. This is a dangerous line because behavior has a natural basis. As behavioral studies begin to show more genetic, cultural, and environmental forces at play, moral codes will also start to be teased out, and the Christian evolutionist will have to continually adjust his or her concept of the natural/supernatural boundary. (Check out this site for examples of biological altruism). The young earth creationist does not have this problem. They simply consider evolution bogus.

In short, this is another form of Intelligent Design, accepting the physiological components of evolution, but disregarding the behavioral as too complex to be completely natural.

I see two alternatives. 1) God is not necessary for morality or 2) God still uses evolution as His primary tool for mucking with the natural world.

Option 1 is easily accepted by atheists, but hard to swallow for the theist because it starts to beg the question "What good is God?"

Option 2 is something that I will be addressing in future posts as I read and become more familiar with proponents of this theory, including Richard Colling's Random Designer.