Morality and Biological Evolution?

Assertion:The short of it is that compassion, empathy, reciprocity, and other such 'moral' qualities are good for individuals and society as a whole and they are hard wired into our behavior.

Response:I agree! But that doesn’t explain why morality exists. If it is simply a matter of evolution (random mutations acted upon by natural selection over eons of time), then morals are, in reality, random firings in our brains. Lets take compassion, for example. If one organism somehow acquired a mutation that caused it to have compassion on another individual….? In order for it to act upon that, charity (in the general sense) must have also come about simultaneously. Compassion is an emotion. I can have compassion on someone, yet not act upon it. The action would be an act of charity. So, would the emotion be propagated through natural selection if it had no actual outworking? If it did have an outworking, how would that increase the individual’s fitness, unless the individual on which it extended charity had simultaneously evolved reciprocity? The charitable individual would, seemingly, increase the well-being of its immediate population, but according to BTE, wouldn’t it necessarily have to increase its OWN fitness, in order to increase its ability to propagate its genetic code? I think the general rule of charity is providing for a need at your OWN expense (exceptions would prove the rule). How would this increase its fitness?

Now, let’s examine morality from a Christian worldview.

1. God has created the universe with a number of laws that reflected His character: moral, physical, logical, etc.
2. Before the fall of Adam and Eve, and the subsequent curse on Creation, the moral law was known, period.
3. After the fall (when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God), all of Creation began to deteriorate (mutations, entropy, etc.).
4. The laws still exist and in the case of morality are written on the hearts of men. What we have are humans that choose to what extent they recognize and uphold the moral law. The consequences of their actions still demonstrate the fact that the law exists.
1. In my evolutionary indoctrination in college (I left buying BTE hook, line, and sinker), the evidence provided for the evolution of morality was that it can be observed in “lower” animals. However, there is nothing Biblical that explicitly or implicitly suggests that this cannot be. Rather, as all animals were vegetarians, it might be suggested that they, too, obeyed the moral law! (that is my own conclusion, and not a doctrine of the church, that I know of).