Evolution, care of the young, and sex versus reproduction

It's no surprise that we seek out sex and enjoy it. It's no surprise that women as female mammals are strongly motivated to care for their offspring. Unlike most mammals, humans have evolved so that adult males provide resources (originally this was mostly food) for the children they have fathered, so they also care about the welfare of those children and invest a great deal in them. That is exactly what evolution by natural selection would predict.

Our desire for our children to thrive, and our willingness to invest heavily in them is so commonplace that we may lose track of how it's not obvious. Even selfish people who treat those outside their families very poorly most often leave all their assets to their children. We don't say, "Oh, he wasn't selfish -- he left money to his children!" In our minds, leaving money to our children *is* a form of selfishness. Given that we are all mortal, this is exactly what evolution would predict. Even selfish people with considerable money rarely spend all they have on hedonistic pursuits in their later years, but instead think it is right to leave something to their kids. They will typically do this even when their children are estranged, or hate them, or have adopted values very different from the parents' own.

At the heart of evolution by natural selection is leaving many descendants, and where this starts is being the father or mother to many children. The advent of reliable contraception in the past 70-odd years has created a major divergence between current selection pressure and that operating at any time in the past. Evolution did not require us to actively want to have children. All it required was the desire to have sex. Sex naturally caused pregnancy and in turn babies were born. Evolution has shaped us so that once they are born, it is a very high priority to care for them. But evolution never made us say, "I would like to have children." I think all human societies understand that sex causes pregnancies, and people in earlier times may have had the idea that they had enough children already. But this competed with the immediate urgent desire to have sex, and also a male's insistence on having sex with his mate even if she didn't want to. These factors are still in play in the large parts of the world that do not have access to reliable contraception.

But where contraception (and as a fallback, abortion) is freely available, birth rates have plummeted. We can fulfill our urges to have sex without having children. Of course many people do want children, but they typically want just one or two. Evolution's goal is to have many children. While medical advances have cut child mortality dramatically, three is still a minimum for a population to replace itself where a significant number of people choose to have no children at all. Why do people not want lots of children? For those of us who are fairly well off, there are opportunity costs -- lots of fun things we could do with our time instead of raising children. Also, we care about the welfare of our children, and realize that our existing one or two children will thrive better if they do not have to share our limited resources with further children.

The resulting dynamic seems to be that people in rich countries do not replace their numbers, but their place is taken by immigrants from regions where reliable contraception is not available. When those immigrants take on the values of the rich societies and have access to contraception, then they do not replace themselves either. But there are always more immigrants to come in, creating perhaps a dynamic equilibrium.

If this state of affairs persisted for thousands of years, evolution would strongly favor genes that tend to make people want to have a lot of children, not just a lot of sex.

Evolution would favor genes predisposing men and women to be willing to pay large sums to be sperm donors and egg donors. The fact that no such donors today pay for the privilege, and that egg donors in particular need to be paid for their services shows that evolution has made us want sex, but did not make us want to have offspring.

How to make sense of it all? The theory of evolution

I've joked sometimes that if I needed to come up with an epitaph for my gravestone, it might be, "I don't know." Yet of course, "not knowing" isn't a very satisfying answer. I'm reminded of the line from Paul Simon's song, disapproving of a person constantly saying "I have no opinion about that" by reframing it as, "I have no opinion about me."

There's a great deal that we don't know.  "How did wings develop on animals?" or "Why are there so many galaxies and stars?" Science is working on those, but most of us don't lose sleep over them. The questions that we all seem to care about a lot more are, "Why are we here? What gives life meaning? What should I do with my life?"

I've argued that there is <no objective morality>.  I've argued that <there is no God>. I'm not sure I need to argue that there is no objective "meaning of life" in the absence of objective morality or God, as I can't see what candidates there would be.

The best answer to, "What should I do with my life?" is to pick something, decide that it's what's important, make it your own, and work for it. In the absence of objective morality, there is no argument to be made as to why any choice you make would be fundamentally, profoundly right or wrong.

Yet when we look at what humans pick and what guides their choices, there is a great deal they have in common. So I offer answers to questions that are slightly less profound than "What is the meaning of life?", namely: "Why are our minds the way they are? Why do we want some things and want to avoid others? Why do we think some things are important or moral or 'right living' and others are not?"

This will take a while. I've divided it up into seven separate posts.

The best framework I know of for making sense of our lives and the world is evolution by natural selection. This is the foundation of all of modern biology, and one of the best-supported scientific theories there is.

You can look up <Evolution> so I won't go over the basics. But one critical concept I want to raise is the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA). We humans (and our hominid ancestors) evolved over the course of millions of years in hunter-gatherer bands. Only in the past few thousand years have we lived in larger units of political and economic organization, initially triggered by agriculture. That is not very much time for natural selection to change our minds. We may sometimes have traits that were adaptive in the EEA but are not adaptive today.

Our bodies evolved countless unconscious processes -- regulating temperature, water content, eliminating waste through kidneys, healing wounds with scabs, on and on. All the "lower" life forms have their own versions of solutions to such problems, and often our solution is the same as organisms quite different from us. These are the focus of the field of biology, but I focus below on our conscious experiences, since those are what concern us.

We are mammals, and we share with other mammals a great many things. We mammals feel pain when our bodies are damaged, and this unpleasant sensation motivates us to avoid such situations. We avoid being too hot or too cold. We enjoy food, and it's no surprise that we are motivated to find enough. Even people who have been hungry for a long time never really adapt to that circumstance -- they always want enough to eat. That is of course entirely consistent with surviving.

The exact relationship between conscious experience and the physical world is an unanswered puzzle and one which many thinkers (and I) see absolutely no prospect of answering. But whatever the relationship, it makes sense that our conscious experience shares the same goals of survival with our physical bodies. We know conscious experience depends on a physical body, and if your consciousness is in control of your actions and has no interest in eating, the body will die and with it the consciousness.

Given climate change catastrophe, build monuments?

I made an <earlier post on climate change>. It centered on an essay by Jonathan Franzen. The main message was that climate change is already here, and we need to think about how to live with it as best we can rather than pretending that if we all band together we can keep it from happening.

Not long after, I received the <latest issue>  of MIT's "Technology Review", with the cover title "Welcome to Climate Change". A mainstream publication was taking the same view Franzen had.

Some of the articles looked at details rather than the big picture, such as a push in areas of Australia where wildfires are becoming increasingly common to build fireproof houses (mostly underground).

We learn that while India is investing in solar power, it's still going to use more and more coal. Nuclear power, one possible source of energy without a carbon cost, is on the wane in Korea and China.

But the most interesting, big-picture article was by Roy Scranton, titled "Learning to live in an apocalypse". He notes that all previous crises we have faced or imagined begin with an event -- pandemic, earthquake, meteor strike, nuclear war -- and then they end. But there is no event marking the beginning of the climate crisis. It's already here and getting worse. There's also no end in sight. This is not a crisis you get over and resolve and recover from. It goes on for hundreds of years at least. The best guess is a 12-degree-Celsius rise in temperature in less than 100 years. Scranton suggests it's entirely possible that this is inconsistent with large numbers of human beings surviving. I'm afraid that sounds entirely plausible. Yet my intuition is there will be at the very least little corners of the earth that will still be habitable. A thousand-fold decrease in the population would still leave 7 million people, enough to be the seed of a new more vibrant civilization in hundreds of years as the climate improves or we find ways to adapt. Perhaps that will come across as emphasizing that the glass is 1% full instead of 99% empty, but human extinction feels far more serious than an enormous population decline followed by a resurgence.

So, if you can get your mind around the reality of climate change, how should you think about the future?

Scranton writes, "Our apocalypse is happening day by day, and our greatest challenge is learning to live with this truth while remaining committed to some as-yet-unimaginable form of future human flourishing -- to live with radical hope." Even if it came to look like there was a 90% chance we would go extinct, that 10% chance of a future flourishing should be enough to motivate us to go on.

And to emphasize the continuing great uncertainty, in this same Tech Review issue a real climate scientist, Tapio Schneider, writes, "The single biggest contributor [to uncertainty in climate predictions] is uncertainty about clouds, and specifically about low clouds in the tropics. Low clouds over tropical oceans reflect sunlight because they are white, and this cools the earth. We don't know if we'll get more or fewer of them as it warms."

Then we can ask what political actions we can take. In my previous post, I relayed Franzen's belief that if climate change is already here, it's much harder to motivate reducing carbon emissions. When you could say, "If we all pull together we can keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees and avoid catastrophe", that had a certain appeal. If you say, "If we all pull together, we can take one degree off the expected rise in temperature, though we don't know if that means 6 degrees instead of 7 or 10 degrees instead of 11, but it will probably help make things not quite so bad as they would otherwise be." The old message was not motivating any sort of major change, and it seems likely the new one will motivate far less. It's great to limit carbon emissions when opportunities arise, but it's time to give up on that as a central political strategy.

I hope scientists think hard about novel approaches to head off the worst calamities or minimize their destructive effects. Having abandoned the push to reduce carbon emissions, climate activists' new focus should be on massive funding for research and pilot projects of mitigation. Tech Review describes scientists working on genetically engineering new strains of food crops that can thrive in hotter and more extreme conditions -- the mitigation potential is obvious.

As sea levels rise, there will be enormous political pressure to find a way to save coastal cities. We should oppose large expenditures to protect against a 5-foot rise in sea levels if we can look just a little further into the future and see a 20-foot rise. We should oppose shortsighted, short-term solutions.

But the fundamental problem is that it looks like our civilization is in for a major decline no matter what we do, when taking account of the enormity of the problem and the political realities. Mitigation is an attempt to slow our decline, but it seems likely that it cannot prevent a decline that could better be termed a collapse.

If we take this view seriously, it suggests a major change of perspective -- perhaps a shocking change.

I suggest we look back to the Roman empire -- more than a thousand years ago. Today we figure the empire was going to fall no matter what they did. But when ordinary people think of the Romans, we don't condemn them for not doing everything in their power to keep the empire from falling, and we don't condemn them for extreme income equality and the many practices we now consider barbaric. We get joy and inspiration thinking about their luxuries and achievements at the height of their power.

If the future turns out to be as bleak as it appears, posterity may view us all as living in a golden age, the pinnacle of human achievement and comfort that will be followed by a thousand years of hard times. This suggests two different things we might do.

First, the people a thousand years from now will be far more interested in how far we expand the horizon of progress than what we did (and mostly did not do) to stave off catastrophe, so let's keep on pushing those limits, just as we have been. Let's keep extending the human lifespan and curing rare diseases. For us liberals, goals include reducing income inequality and working to improve the lot of oppressed minorities. Let's keep those scientific discoveries coming so we know more and more about the nature of the universe.

At a personal level, we can choose to enjoy what our forebears created for us, even if we can see that it will likely end before long. There's no need to stay at home, eating locally grown potatoes, freezing in winter and baking in summer -- though few of us do that anyway.  Let's go right on using air conditioning, driving wherever and whenever we want, eating produce flown in from far away, and flying on jets to vacation or visit distant friends. Heck, we can do more of it.

This doesn't require much effort, since that is what ordinary people are doing right now. But it suggests that climate activists could relax and feel less guilty about mostly living a life of ease and going right on as if nothing is going to change.

The second thing we might do would be to put more effort today into pushing the limits of what we can accomplish. Build a pyramid to make Cheops look like an anthill. I've mostly thought the idea of a manned mission to Mars was a ridiculously expensive boondoggle. But if we think of our legacy as the far limits of human achievement in this golden age, why not?

A <Star Trek episode> explores what a civilization does when it realizes all life on its planet is going to end. They created a probe to go off into the stars and transmit to someone (Captain Pickard, naturally) the experience of one lifetime on their planet -- for some remnant of their civilization to survive. That technology is pure science fiction, but if our audience is humans on Earth emerging from primitive circumstances, it is more feasible: Let's engrave a summary of human knowledge and history in rock.

In search of analogies, a strong sports team vying for a championship may trade away future prospects for proven stars who can help them win right now. Someone in hospice can eat whatever they want, or use whatever addictive drugs they want, knowing their own time is almost finished. The future rests not with them but with their children.

It's premature to fully adopt this perspective. We can still all hope for more low clouds in the tropics rather than fewer. But it's time to realize that developments of the next 20 years might make this an approach to seriously consider. In 40 years it might clearly be the right thing to do. It's time to start thinking about it now.

The vast majority of people today will not accept the idea of coming catastrophe, perhaps by consciously denying it or more often by just figuring that the world won't change much and there are always doomsayers. Perhaps their attitudes will change if we do have to abandon coastal cities and significant portions of the world population start dying. Perhaps they will then be receptive to this plan of expensive space missions and monumental achievements if circumstances become dire enough.

Yet even an ordinary billionaire could finance inscriptions in rock.

I eat meat, but my choice makes me uncomfortable

There are many arguments against eating meat that don't move me. The possible downsides for my physical health don't concern me much, as I don't put much effort into my health. The increased carbon footprint involved in animal products is real, but it coexists with many other lifestyle choices that would have greater carbon impact.

So then it comes to the animals themselves. What's the baseline for a good animal life? I suggest that the relevant baseline for animal suffering is not humans, but wild animals. Animals in the wild routinely starve to death and suffer parasites and injuries. Just because we are responsible for farm animals coming into the world, that does not mean we have to choose our modern goal of minimal human suffering as the relevant comparison.

"Don't kill the poor animals" doesn't move me. All animals die, and the dying is often unpleasant. Animals do not fear death as people do (eternity of nothingness, etc.).

"They're meant to live free" doesn't move me. "Life of Pi" was a work of fiction, but I thought one point was correct in reality as well. Pi's family owned a zoo. His belief was that animals in a zoo that have enough to eat and are safe from harm are happy. (Sufficient living space is probably also required.) They wouldn't choose to be wild, doing the hard work of getting meals and avoiding becoming someone else's meal. The desire for them to live free and wild comes from us, not them.

So I would have no problem with eating meat from animals who lived reasonably happy lives. But almost all of our meat comes from factory farms, and arguably all of the animals in factory farms live a life of misery, even measured against the yardstick of wild animals. Confinement that distresses the animal is worrisome and seems to apply to many types of factory animal. There are allegations that chickens are bred to grow fast at the expense of their structural integrity, and so their short lives are spent in pain.

With the concern being the misery of animal lives, being a vegetarian who eats dairy and eggs doesn't get you off the hook. Dairy and egg production also involve animals in stressful, miserable circumstances.

So why am I not a vegan? Why do I not even seek out rare and expensive meat from happy animals? First, I cannot look you straight in the eye and give an answer that makes me feel confident. It is an uneasy choice for me. But below are some rationalizations and reasons.

I read a book several years ago which concerned food and human culture, but sadly I cannot remember the author or title. It started with the observation that all human societies have a "meat hunger", likely due to the concentrated calories and protein in animal-derived food. The author asserted that only half a percent of world population is vegan by choice, though many more are due to poverty. But numbers don't determine right and wrong. I could of course join that half a percent.

So, what would veganism accomplish? If I don't eat animal products, then I am not supporting the meat industry. With lower sales volume, meat producers will produce less meat. Fairly often a chicken that would have been raised in miserable conditions will not be born, and far less often a cow, steer or pig.

The fact that the scale of the industry is so large makes it easier to avoid thinking about consequences. If I was getting my meat from a local butcher, the relationship would be clearer -- if I don't buy this chicken, then a chicken that would be killed tomorrow in the back of the shop will not be. And the butcher will order one less chicken.

A reason for my refusing veganism that I am more comfortable with is that factory farming is integral to our entire society. The best way to fight against something integral to a society is political activism. A person could organize to end factory farming and not eat a vegan diet, and of course not all vegans are activists. If a ballot initiative improving the lot of animals in factory farms showed up, I'd vote for it (and I think there was one in Massachusetts in recent years).

But as a political issue, it is going nowhere. Nothing much has changed in recent decades in terms of the suffering of animals or people's attitude towards it. It seems that a large majority of my fellow humans know that animals suffer so they can eat meat, but they are not inspired to support even mandatory incremental improvements in animal living conditions that would raise the price of meat slightly.

I live in a society where meat and dairy are everywhere. They taste awfully good. They do have concentrated calories and protein. I could set myself apart from my fellows and become vegan, and ignore the tempting aromas and sight of tasty meat and cheese all around me But I don't.

Why does the average person not care about the suffering of animals in factory farming?

I wonder if the problem lies in expanding circles of "we". Our hunter-gatherer ancestors thought it was just fine to kill all the people in a neighboring band if they could get away with it. In the ancient world (say including 2000 BCE to 500 CE), slaughtering the entire population of a conquered city was routine. Surely they knew that the others were humans just like them and suffered just as much, but the golden rule didn't affect behavior. Up through World War II nations routinely cast the enemy as subhuman and troubled themselves little about slaughtering enemy civilians. Since then we have seen fair numbers of people considering themselves as citizens of the world as their first allegiance. Europeans stopped fighting and made a union. It sort of looks like rich countries don't wage all-out war on each other any more (though I am far from confident that this will continue indefinitely). The right-wing positions that horrify us liberals so much have to do not with killing disfavored minorities but with limiting immigration, which shows how far we've come since 1945.

But still, at least through 1945, lots of people knew that enemy civilians suffered just like they would suffer, but made it a low priority to avoid enemy civilian casualties. The US and Britain might have committed fewer "hands-on" atrocities in World War II than Japan or Germany, but the strategic bombing campaigns slaughtered a great many innocent civilians, and we knew it.

So now we are perhaps in sight of the point where we might follow the golden rule as it applies to all other humans, even those from very different societies and races -- at least the innocent ones.

But not animals. We know animals suffer, but somehow they're not part of "we". And of course even though they suffer, animals are dramatically different from humans, who are all exactly like us in the ways that count. Pet animals are part of "we" because we invite them into our lives with affection, and humans will put great effort into their health care.

Maybe in a hundred years our descendants will look back at us meat-eaters with the same disbelief we might have for a society of the ancient world that captured a city and slaughtered every last man, woman and child. I'm not taking the lead in bringing about that society, but I'm not proud of it.

I like most kinds of meat and dairy. Perhaps some animal foods involve less animal suffering. For instance, if veal calves are confined but ordinary beef cattle are not, that would be a reason to eat beef instead of veal. Perhaps with some research I could find reasons to choose among, say, chicken, pork, beef or dairy.

As someone who often just doesn't want to think about meals, I have become a fan of Soylent -- a mildly sweet liquid meal in a plastic bottle that goes down easy. Three bucks for a healthy meal. And Soylent is vegan. Maybe I'll start having more of it.

God does not exist

At this point in my life the nonexistence of God feels so obvious that I'm not inclined to give a detailed argument.

The paradigmatic "God" is an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being, though polytheistic religions have believed in a much wider variety of gods. Humans have a powerful urge to make sense of things, which has been adaptive for us in finding generalizations, outfoxing foes and prey, and ultimately leading to our impressive store of scientific knowledge. However, on many big questions there's not enough data to really make sense of things, so we make things up. That includes belief in spirits, gods, and ultimately, God. But science has explained a great many things that were before explainable only by God. Evolution by natural selection was an especially profound discovery. Our need to make sense of the big questions and long historical tradition leave many people still believing in God. But if we take the scientific perspective of hypotheses, predictions, and repeatable observations, no hint of an actual God is to be found.

I don't claim science understands everything. The most profound thing we know of that it does not understand is conscious experience -- why things have a "seemingness". There is no limit to what else might exist that we have no knowledge of. The Christian God might conceivably exist, but we have no evidence for it. Pascal's wager is useless, and here's why: for any imaginable God who will reward you for doing X and punish you for doing Y, there is an anti-God with the exact opposite preferences -- he will punish you for doing X and reward you for doing Y. If there is some God, we know absolutely nothing about him, which for practical purposes means he does not exist.

In a world with no inherent, objective meaning, we choose our framework for how to live a good life (often simply accepting what our family, friends and society believe). Choosing to believe in God is no worse a choice than any other. Studies suggest people who believe in God are happier and have improved measures of well-being. I suppose such a choice could be called faith. But the scientific method has given us tools for discovering a great many regularities in the world and dismissing ideas that are not supported by fact. Those who believe in God, if they are honest, should realize it is an arbitrary choice without support from the extremely impressive edifice of science.

And while believers may not want to focus on the arbitrariness of their choice, they should at least have humility, recognizing others have chosen different frameworks with no less support than theirs. In a pluralistic society, we have rules about tolerance for a wide variety of personal choices as long as they don't encroach on others' freedom. So what I ask of believers is that when they do affect the lives of others with different beliefs, via laws or their private behavior, they should have a secular justification. This obviously prohibits burning heretics or chopping off the heads of infidels, but it also argues against a state religion or discrimination against any group based on their private beliefs.

God does not actually exist. Choose to believe in him if you wish, just also have humility to understand that other good and reasonable people have made other choices, whether believing in some other conception of God or no God at all, which need to be respected.

Inner experience is a poor reason to believe in God

I have no doubt that in cultures with strong religious traditions, many people believe in God without the benefit of any inner mystical experience. They believe what people close to them who they trust believe.

Another reason to believe is an inner experience. Suddenly a person feels God's presence. Or they feel a connection to the entire universe. It seems to be a very common feature of the stories of saints. These people are moved by the inner experience to go beyond what those around them believe.

Today, in more liberal circles, many people are atheists and if we follow the lead of trusted people it is definitely a live option. Among UUs, I sense that very few people believe because they have read the Bible (or the holy book of some other religion) and agreed with it intellectually. The more common reason to believe in God is some inner experience. This could occur while daydreaming or on the margins of sleep. It could occur during meditation. It could occur while reading a holy book.

In a sense, everything we experience or think we know is a perception. But some perceptions are more reliable than others. One criterion of clear perceptions is that everyone in the same situation perceives the same thing. This is the foundation of science. This liquid is a certain color. Looking at a life form, a given person sees the same body shape and characteristics. People can sketch it or photograph it, and everyone else who looks at it sees the same thing. You look at the gauge of an instrument and if it reads 97.3, everyone else who looks also sees 97.3. In more recent times, what you observe is often the output of a computer program. Other people can independently write a program designed to do the same thing, give it the same input, and see the same output.

Mystical experiences do not have this uniformity. People experience different things. Some have vivid experiences of being abducted by aliens. Society recognizes an entire class of such inner experiences under the heading of hallucinations, most often associated with schizophrenia or dementia.

There are also perceptions where almost everyone experiences the same thing but independent measurements of the scientific sort reveal them to be incorrect. Optical illusions are a classic case. In the 1970s I knew of the Necker cube illusion, the Muller-Lyer illusion, and a few others. Searching today, I found this large collection on the web, composed mostly of illusions I had never seen before.

Beyond perceptions, there are also inferences and beliefs. If I have a bible, it is "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. In it he lays out in detail the various ways that most people will think things that simply aren't true, with everyone tending to make the same mistakes. Mathematics, logic, and other observations of the repeatable, scientific kind give us in contrast the right answer. Wikipedia has an impressive (or depressing, perhaps) list of cognitive biases.

So even if everyone had the same mystical experiences, it would not be good evidence of the existence of God.

Inner experiences are very interesting in their own right. We live our lives in our own heads, and the part that reads scientific gauges, changes diapers, buys low and sells high, and generally gets things done is only one part. Various schools of meditation do achieve interesting inner experience that those who have not trained in their technique don't have. It's just that it all goes on within a single head. Or when information travels between heads it does so by through the mundane modalities of speech and writing.

An omnipotent God surely could give us experiences of the sort that scientific observation is based on. He could inscribe some particular message on prominent surfaces throughout the world. He could make us all hear the same message in our heads. We would independently write it down and discover that we all heard the same thing at the same time. We are so used to the fact that God never does this that we can lose track of how he surely could. One explanation for why he doesn't do this is that it doesn't suit his purposes. The simpler explanation is that he doesn't exist.

Some theists have argued that there is a God-shaped hole in each of us. To the extent this is true, the simpler explanation is that it is a "belief-in-God shaped hole". It could join the list of cognitive biases.

Mystical experiences are far from universal. They have a great deal of variability. It is hard to draw any clear distinction between them and hallucinations or alien-abduction experiences. Our inner experience is unreliable in a great many ways documented by science, typically in ways that are the same across people. Inner mystical experience is a poor reason to believe in God.

There is no objective morality

This post was never posted to the FUUSN list. Unless otherwise specified, from now on all posts to this blog are appearing here for the first time.

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That's right, there is no objective morality. People have strong feelings and convictions that some things are moral and some are immoral. Such feelings tend to run in the same direction within a given society. Some such feelings may be universal to members of the human species. Scientists and philosophers can study such beliefs and find patterns. But to be objective, a morality isn't just a description of people's moral beliefs. It is a firm belief on a firm foundation that certain actions really are right and some are wrong, independent of social customs and human nature.

In March of 2007, I wrote in my blog, "But I do have a faith, and a hope. My faith is that a basic belief like "killing is wrong" is true and that killing really is wrong and not just some convention or fluke of my human nature. Like many who have a more ambitious faith, mine sometimes wavers." But by 2012 my faith had vanished. When I read this article by Joel Marks, it felt exactly right to me:

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/confessions-of-an-ex-moralist

This was someone else who had reached the same conclusions I had but could express them far more eloquently. He was also arguably a master of the field he was rejecting -- a professor of moral philosophy. I have no such credentials.

In the debate between theists and atheists, theists will commonly argue that without God there can be no morality -- no right or wrong, and anything is permissible. Atheists disagree strongly, and Joel Marks refers us to the book Louise Antony edited, "Philosophers Without Gods" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/970578.Philosophers_Without_Gods). She asserts that "Every writer in this volume adamantly affirms the objectivity of right and wrong." I read the book but their arguments in favor of objective morality aren't there and must be somewhere else.

Perhaps one factor is that in an attempt to convince theists that morality can exist without religion, atheists can quietly maintain faith in "ought", since theists' belief in God is also based on faith. In arguing with the amoralist, atheists who believe in objective morality need to defend their faith in something different from everything else that exists. I have heard this described as the "argument from queerness". Objective morality would be a queer thing.

I agree with Marks that there really is no need to panic:

"One interesting discovery has been that there are fewer practical differences between moralism and amoralism than might have been expected. It seems to me that what could broadly be called desire has been the moving force of humanity, no matter how we might have window-dressed it with moral talk. By desire I do not mean sexual craving, or even only selfish wanting. I use the term generally to refer to whatever motivates us, which ranges from selfishness to altruism and everything in between and at right angles. Mother Theresa was acting as much from desire as was the Marquis de Sade. But the sort of desire that now concerns me most is what we would want if we were absolutely convinced that there is no such thing as moral right and wrong. I think the most likely answer is: pretty much the same as what we want now. "

We can go on teaching our children about right and wrong. We can continue to refer to morality in talking with other people. It's just that it's not an objective morality.

Marks also refers to Richard Garner's book "Beyond Morality", where he sets forth the amoralist position in detail. Garner notes that philosophers have been earnestly debating moral questions for millenia, but nothing is ever resolved. On practical questions such as abortion, capital punishment, or animal suffering, it really looks as if people already have their conclusion in mind and marshal moral arguments to support it, rather than the other way around. Garner suggests we would do better if we simply describe what we like and don't like about the different options, appealing to others who we hope will be persuaded to the extent they like and dislike the same things we do.

If you dig deep, seeking to find the ultimate truth of right and wrong -- as I think some intelligent young people commonly do -- you will find nothing. You will find no objective basis of morality. But if you give up that search, life goes on as before. We all have our goals, desires, and sense of right and wrong, and we will keep arguing with each other about them, striving to do what is right as we see it because that is what we desire.