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Sounds like the guy (Michael Foust) that wrote that article took something Dawkins said and WAY WAY overgeneralized it to be saying what he WANTED Dawkins to have said.

From Dawkins simply saying that some ppl, who sincerely believe God is watching them, might behave better than they would otherwise, this Foust really went to town putting his own interpretation of what that meant Dawkins was “actually” saying.

The referenced “experiment” with the paying for coffee and the picture of eyes, only suggests to me that the picture of eyes led to ppl paying more.  A picture of eyes is not God.  But of course a religious nut would make that fantastic leap of illogic that it supports the idea that people were reminded by the picture of eyes were (what?) reminded that God is watching? Maybe they were just reminded that other people would not think as well of them if they didn’t pay their fair share.  Who knows? It was not a very rigorous experiment.

I believe that there are VERY probably a subset of people who are more likely to behave morally because of their religious beliefs.  That is probably about the extent of what Dawkins meant to say.

We know that morals do not come from an actual God, because “God” is just a human concept.

So did  “Atheist Richard Dawkins (really) Say God Informs Morality…” (or is that what Foust wanted him to have said)?”

But yeah, maybe some people need their religion to keep them in line.  OR maybe since they have been brought up believing that they need God to keep them in line, then those people ARE dependent on their belief in God to keep them in line.  And those people, IF they suddenly lost their religion, might act in immoral ways, because the underlying foundation of their personal system of morals was gone.

And those people might have learned a system of morals based on respect and empathy for other humans if they had been taught that from the get-go instead of a system of morals based on an imagined super entity.

I think that we inherit the basic parts to develop a system of morals.  But whether we do and how well we develop a system of morals depends an awful lot on our social conditioning for such.  But we humans genetically inherit the capacity for empathy and that could be what is sometimes referenced as “God having written his law on every heart” (gag me).