ean Piaget. He looked for a sense of morality when the children were allowed to play with marbles. He found several stages of development among the children, the first being standard behaviors of tasting them, burying them, piling them up, etc. Next, some of these behaviors became ritualized and repeated, as if associated with particular thoughts of the infants performing them. Within two years, small children old enough to speak were making some effort to imitate the rules of the game as practiced by their elders. They did not have the mental equipment yet to remember or understand all these rules. Paradoxically, they considered the rules sacred, yet each child played only against him even when with others, and there was no true competitive play under collective rules. Later, children mastered the rules of marbles in competition with one another. A keen sense of fairness arose that influenced the creation and use of the rules. Finally, though fairness remained paramount, older children came to regard the rules as their collective creation, a contract they form to be able to play with one another. Thus, the rules evolved to define the conditions for cooperation and the penalties for defection, and may be replaced by other formulations serving the same purpose. To my mind, this research proves conclusively that humans are rules-creating animals and that God is not required as the explanation either of marbles or of morality.The thought of that terrifies most theists, but it shouldn't. God wasn't much help to us in discovering how to cure or prevent smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid, whooping cough, polio, measles, and dozens of other diseases. We had to do it on our own. God wasn't much help to us in making the scientific discoveries that led to the technology that now makes life so comfortable for us. We had to do it on our own. So if we did all these things without God, surely we can make the moral discoveries that are necessary for societ...
