In answer to both your questions, I’m an empiricist, in the sense I believe our conscious minds are blank slates until sensory experience writes on them—until something happens, we don’t have anything to think about. So every thought traces back to experience, not to any other source, other than our biological wiring. So things like God, crime, justice, practicality, etc, are concepts that arise in us when we reflect on our experience. Those kinds of concepts arise because among our experiences, we experience the biological drive to survive and thrive, and this drive in turn drives the imperative we associate with those concepts.

Per Occam’s razor, I think the sense of imperative is entirely internal, because we can completely explain it without invoking anything else. In short, we adopt religion and morality because we think it helps us survive and thrive. That’s not to diminish the value of such concepts. They are valuable concepts just like language, science, art and philosophy—all of which are ultimately human creations. The difference is that in order to survive and thrive, we have to enforce things like morality on society. This brings us to “social contracts,” which we propose, advocate for or against, and accept or reject, individually or collectively.