I would say Dawkins with his “The Selfish Gene” has considerable investment in the connection between evolution and selfishness, and by his own reasoning he cannot be considered objective on the subject. It is a living example of his own thesis, where selfishness constrains him to see evolution as fundamentally selfish.
But I have never agreed with his basic thesis. On contrary, I see evolution founded on an absolutely essential two stage process each based on one of these two principles, competition and cooperation. Competition is the principle for individual evolution and cooperation is the principle for communal evolution. Frankly evolution without the latter is both lame and ineffectual to the extreme going nowhere.
As a result, I must reject the thesis that morality and altruism requires God and religion, and Dawkins’ challenge to atheists is one I easily accomplished myself as a youngster without any belief in God or religion (aside from psychology).
As for whether humanity is fundamentally competitive/amoral or cooperative/moral, that is a more complicated question and frankly the Christian viewpoint tends greatly more to the former than the latter. Not only is there the fall where we see murderous selfishness spreading in mankind, but after the flood I think we see even God endorsing competition in the story of Babel. This is one case where I see the presence of sin changing the rules because we are talking about human behavior rather than the natural world.
And I see it as just another example of the same kind self interested bias as Dawkins’. He has connected morality with Christianity and thus makes no effort to see any basis for morality without it.
Well what about me? I am a Christian so where is my bias. LOL Well for that I think you have to look at my reasons for belief which doesn’t include this absurd morality dependence argument. I have no pretense to objectivity only and I have plenty of bias on many topics – this just doesn’t happen to be one of them.
While my first inclination was to enthusiastically agree, I also had reasons to be skeptical. I saw these countries as used as support for many things like socialism. But even a little check on this reveals the hilarity of the argument. Church membership has indeed be falling in Scandanavia… why it has dropped to Church of Sweden (53.2% in 2021) and the Church of Norway (61.7% in 2024) and Denmark 70%. LOL LOL …well actual participation in services has been dropping with attendance in all of these only 10% of membership. But I cannot see that attendance is such a great measure of things like reasons for morality (I wasn’t attending for decades myself). Sorry… I just don’t see a great argument here.