Thanks to commenter -R at NewsHounds, I think I've found the key to their motivation: anxiety, specifically anxiety about human freedom. -R supplied to following passage from an ID nut, Phillip E. Johnson, the patriarch of the "Intelligent Design" movement:
"If there is no Creator who has a purpose for your life, then thereSo, without a Creator, there are no rules. This reminded of a saying attributed to Dostoyevsky, "If there is no God, everything is permitted." It turns out that this wasn't written by Doestoyevsky but it does come close to the idea mentioned in The Brothers Karamazov (Garnett translation):
is no such thing as sin," he said. "Sin would mean that you are in a wrong
relationship to your Creator. Well, you can't be in the wrong relationship
with the particles. They don't care. So you don't need a Savior, to save you
from the consequences of your wrong relationship with the particles. ...
"When you give away creation, you have given away everything." LINK
"I ask your permission to drop this subject altogether," Miusov repeated. "I will tell you instead, gentlemen, another interesting and rather characteristic anecdote of Ivan Fyodorovitch himself. Only five days ago, in a gathering here, principally of ladies, he solemnly declared in argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbours. That there was no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That's not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position. From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical friend Ivan Fyodorovitch's theories."For Johnson, the existence of the biblical God ensures the validity of the morality expressed by not only the 10 Commandments but also by the many ancillary rules in Leviticus and elsewhere in the Bible. Like Ivan, Johnson feels the alternative to the Creator is untrammeled egoism and crime, certainly an anxiety-provoking outcome.
"Is that really your conviction as to the consequences of the disappearance of the faith in immortality?" the elder asked Ivan suddenly. "Yes. That was my contention. There is no virtue if there is no immortality." LINK
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Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal have shown in a series of studies with brown capuchin monkeys and Pan troglodytes chimps that primates share with us a ‘sense of fairness’ and ‘inequity aversion’. We could also expect more of our ‘moral’ notions to be innate and not merely cultural formulations. Sapolsky and Share (2004, PLOS) have shown that female baboons will reinforce a ‘pacific culture’ in baboon troops when aggressive males have been removed and that this culture can be perpetuated, against the common observation that baboons have a ‘violent’ nature. Science will tell us what we already know, that humans have an innate sense of fairness or that human tendencies can be pushed into a variety of directions. All animal societies regulate behavior. We are not a blank slate but we are plastic. For moralists this is not satisfactory. Our modern world religions were born out of a crisis of civilization in the so-called Axial Age when local religions, gods and customs were no longer useful in lives of imperial subjects. All these religions were universalist transcendent religions. We live in an age when the sacred assumptions of these axial religions are questioned by empiricism and science. There is also the painful recognition that other codes of behavior may be valid. Modern moralists want Hammurabi's Code of Laws to be reflected in Nature- universally written in the hearts of men. For them only Homo paturnus can survive.
The Straussians for their part have said- ok there is no universal moral code or soul or natural hierarchy but we can’t tell the People that. These myths are necessary to maintain order and to instill a mythic but necessary sense of virtue. Enlightenment is only for philosopher-kings.
I've kind of thought that being mammals and having language would be enough to show that we have some tendency to cooperation without the need for a Sky God of some sort.
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