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What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to disappear? Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion.
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What knowledge would we want to reclaim first?
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When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths, if they are indeed true? By reading the Bible? Our tour of the shelves will yield similar pearls from antiquity — like the "fact" that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive pair of cow horns.
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Whom shall we want to give priority in our resurrected world? Yaweh or Shiva? And when will we want to relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be stoned to death?
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The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
Imagine such a world. I venture that, in a great many respects, it would wind-up looking much like the present world.
It wouldn't take long, for example, for careful observers to notice that people die soon after eating a nice, rare, juicy pig steak. As among the early jews, the word would soon go out: Don't eat that stuff. They might even, knowing nothing yet of trichinosis parasites, suppose the subsequent death to be the punishment for eating an unknown God's favorite creature, and begin to pamper the filthy things as a device for currying His favor.
In time they would doubtless notice that sex causes problems — that sexual competition can be fierce, even downright murderous, and that something has to be done with all those kids. They would adopt commonsense conventions for regulating sexual activity, and those conventions would doubtless impose exclusivity in sexual relations and corresponding responsibility for the consequences of those relations.
They would do so as a self-interested matter of survival.
Nor does it require much imagination to understand that, knowing nothing of either biology or psychology, they might conclude that it's the way He wants things to be since those regulations conduce toward community stability.
Thus morality, stable in some respects throughout all of human history, and varying wildly according to local needs in other respects. Always, it is the codification, and usually the imputation to the wishes of an unseen God, of whatever is needed for self-preservation.
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