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The importance of these behavioural standards in preserving the cohesion of human communities can therefore be seen to occupy an essential position within the larger human evolutionary survival strategy. It is these core “evolutionarily-necessary behaviours” that I argue are what humans have come to intuitively understand as “morality” and which we have codified as doctrine within the multitudes of world religions throughout history. Of course, this was not a conscious process of codification, but rather an organic process whereby many of the social practices that humans have always intuitively recognized the importance of were retroactively established over time as divine moral law.

Let us imagine for a moment that there was a society that instituted and practiced a religion which preached the opposite of what was necessary for its own self-preservation. It is not hard to imagine that this society would not last very long, as its very own moral code and codified practices served to destroy it. Because its beliefs and practices did not conform to the self-preservation and survival interests of that human community, it inevitably went extinct along with the beliefs and practices that it normalized.

It is in this way that the “natural law” of evolutionary self-preservation, in effect occupies a position of moral authority over the beliefs and practices of any society, since, regardless of what that society wishes to believe, it is ultimately the ability of its religious doctrine and moral code to conform to the natural world and not the other way around that determines its worldly success. In other words, the beliefs of a society about morality and the good life are held hostage by nature’s inherent laws. The farther an established religious or moral code strays from this law, the less optimal it will be in facilitating the success of the community that practices it. This, in turn reduces the chances of that community’s survival in the face of natural threats or competitors whose behavioural standards are more closely synchronized with what our evolution has prescribed.

Thus it can be seen that, “morality” is best understood as a retroactive description of core “evolutionarily-necessary behaviour” that serves an essential function in ensuring the continued survival and self-preservation of human communities, thereby ensuring our species’ long-term evolutionary success. The functional role of nature as an “umpire” that polices religious and societal practices and forces their conformity to the evolutionary-necessary behaviour of self-preservation establishes it, not religion, as both the source of what we understand as morality, and the ultimate standard by which to judge what is and is not morally correct.

But even if one were to approach this question from a religious perspective, the validity of this argument is still demonstrated. If we are to operate under the assumption that “God”, however one wishes to interpret him, created the universe and everything in it, then it follows that the inherent truth of God’s laws should be reflected within the fabric of the universe that he has created and has dominion over.

Furthermore, it is not unreasonable to assume that, through the passage of time, incorrect translation of language, or simple human error, falsities may have inadvertently entered the transmission of God’s teachings from one generation to the next. If so, how are we to affirm whether and to what degree God’s teachings are being properly represented? To answer this, we can only turn to the natural world that God has crafted in order to rediscover and affirm, through observation, the universal truths that he has established.

If scriptural teachings are validated by our observations, then we can affirm their authenticity and their alignment with God’s will. Where they fail to conform, we can conclude that these differences are the consequence of human error, and that appropriate adjustments should be made to our human interpretation of God’s teachings in order to better reflect the inherent truths embedded in his nature. After all, who are we to favour our imperfect and error-prone human capacity to transmit God’s teachings over the natural laws that we discover through observing his universe, and which we are invariably subject to anyway?

In this way, it is possible to “unify” both religious and secular morality under a single standard that sees no practical distinction between a natural world which possesses certain inherent fundamental laws, and one which has been created by God and which should therefore reflect his universal will. The question of whether one embraces the existence of God therefore becomes a question of faith alone and has no material impact on how the moral quality of human behaviour should be judged in a practical sense, as both the secular and religious conclusions on this matter should ultimately be identical.