Silly Evolutionists, Morality that isn’t temporal and subject to convenience comes from our Creator.
This is joke post, right?
Please tell me how one might argue with Marquis DeSade, “Whatever is, is right”?
>> Start with the fact that humans are naturally moral beings.
That’s just ridiculous.
If we were naturally moral beings, one would not have to ask the question “God is dead, so why should I be good?” ... we’d as the question, “why do we need a God if humanity is already so moral?”.
If humanity were naturally moral, people would not struggle day-in-and-day-out with maintaining morality ... and people would not fail so spectacularly quite so often. Even people who are genuinely trying to be good struggle daily with suppressing instincts toward immorality ... which says nothing about those who couldn’t care less whether they were good or not.
Just stupid.
SnakeDoc
Ignorant at best. We all have a quiet still voice inside of us. Every honest person I have ever debated admits to this. It comes from God. It is instilled into us when we are conceived.
I might ask the author: Why do Christians advocate help for "the least of these," regardless of their genetic relationship to us, far more than people of any other faith?
The only way liberals can make a good argument is by, first, misrepresenting the positions of the other side. Worthless to read further.
There is no morality without God.
Maybe I missed it, did he establish the purpose of human life?
Again, pure nonsense. He just needs to apply his own
rationales to his OWN arguments....as in the following:
If thoughts about “morality” are just illusions..
couldn’t thoughts about “facts” be illusions. Or do
the same illusions by others validate your own “illusions”
and make them correct?
So the torturer among torturers is correct. right?
How about the murderer of biological professors(See recent
story about bio professor killing her colleagues in Alabama)
in the presence of other murderers of biological
professors? Is that person morally correct?
Eventually you HAVE to believe if some type of final
nonrefutable fact on which all others get their
validity. He just happens to believe his
“illusions” are the right ones. But he tries to act
as if he is “non-religious” He just traded historical
Judaism, Christianity for his own epochs religion.
A completely parochial, and provincial position. And by
the way, by an organism(human,maybe) destined to be eaten by
those immoral bacteria, bugs, sea-creatures, and
eventually maybe by other beings. Maybe his illusion is
that his opinions will last forever, or that they can
influence humans.
Interesting ... let’s see.
Should we assume Turkey Morality and die in a rainstorm out of amazement? Or perhaps Polar Bear Morality and kill whatever we feel like, hungry or not.
Hyena Morality, so that we can “eat on the run” and “off the hoof”?
Or perhaps this is a dictate to wipe out all species who have not “evolved” our higher sense of what is right.
Temujin, Hitler and Stalin were great fans of natural selection, and they thought that it was only natural they should select who would be allowed to breed and survive.
Deep down in their heart of hearts, the socio/liberal/Communists in charge of our country know that we’re not evolved enough to make these choices, so they are busily setting up mechanisms to decide for us, optimizing our race.
They all have degrees awarded to them by idiots like this.
Except that in all history, humans have believed in God or in gods.
The "natural morality" he points to developed in human societies dominated by a belief in God or in gods.
He does not have any evidence to support his contention that morality developed in a Darwinian natural selection process.
Indeed, there is no evidence that some sort of "natural morality" would prevail in a society in which there was no belief in God, and in which the legacy of a belief in a God was gone.
People talk about the UK and Europe being a "post-Christian" society, but the key unacknowledged assumptions on which the society operates were bequeathed from a theistic belief system.
For example, the idea that all human life is of value and that all humans are of "one blood" as the Bible speaks. This underpins laws against murder and against discrimination against different races of humans.
The idea that Darwinian natural selection would evolve a morality against, say, slavery, to pick an example, is against everything historical about the abolition movement, which was first and foremost a Christian movement.
Natural selection and survival of the fittest (i.e., the continued development of those whose characteristics are most fitting to their environment) has given us...
...people the great majority of which believe in a Creator.
Think about it.
(Still alive, J & S! ;-) Looking to FR again this weekend, which is a good sign.)
Total garbage. Man is inherently cruel and selfish, the herd instinct controls that to a certain extent, but the herd instinct is not morality, its just behaving in a manner for the common good of the society. The common good of one society may be to completely obliterate or enslave another society, and this has happened countless times in human history.
Morality is about absolute good and evil regardless of the well being of any individual or society, and that CANNOT exist unless it exists in the foundation of the universe, in other words, in a Creator.
Man Will Die. - God
A good argument can be made on the religious side that God and heaven do not, for the most part, interfere with what we do on Earth, and that, instead of the immediate gratification of reward and punishment, when we are immoral, or break religious laws, or not, we are punishing or rewarding ourselves.
That is, when a mother tells her child to not touch a hot oven, and the child disobeys and does so, burning their finger, their mother has not punished them for disobedience. The mother just gave the warning—the punishment was automatic.
But a hot oven is obvious. What about punishment for breaking a spiritual idea? The religious person could argue that even if the punishment seems subtle, it is just as certain.
For instance, to “Take the Name of the Lord in Vain”, is incorrectly thought of as not cursing, or using God’s name to curse. But this is not accurate. It is not using the Lord’s name in *vanity*. In idle whims and petty reasons. Things that don’t matter. Diminishing God by invoking Him constantly.
How could that possibly hurt a person? Perhaps by diminishing God in their sight. Perhaps something far more obvious.
Isn’t that...irrational? If I can cheat and steal and get away with it, why wouldn’t I do so?
During the 20th Century, according Rummel, in Death By Government, 165-170 million people were murdered by their own governments. And in every case, the government was led by atheists...where is the standard to say whether that is good or evil?
This eponymously named professor of philosophy and zoology from Florida State is simply addled-brained: There is no murder rate among lions. Lions do not commit murder; that would mean they are killing other lions. Lions kill for food; and lions generally do not consider other lions to be a food source. The murder rate in Detroit has nothing to do with acquiring suitable nutrition: Men kill other men for other reasons. Ruse’s is an utterly mindless analogy.
All his argument reduces to simple assertions; i.e., statements that are completely unfounded on the basis of logic or evidence which he does not intend for you to challenge. Indeed, you are forbidden to do so. If any one of them were successfully challenged, Ruse’s entire argument would collapse like a house of cards.
Here is Ruse’s “argument”:
1. God is dead — an assertion not proven, because unprovable. You can’t “prove” the non-existence of God; you can’t “prove” a negative.
He does acknowledge this: “God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good.” At least Ruse gets that right: Without God, there is no standard of good; thus nothing can be either good or evil.
Dostoyevsky makes this point brilliantly through his character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. As Marc Slonim says:
Ivan lacks simplicity and warmth; he has neither faith nor love. His schemes are cerebral, and his conduct is founded on purely intellectual premises. If there is no immortality of the soul, if man is abandoned to his own devices and there is no reconciliation between heaven and earth, then everything is permissible — including crime. ... Ivan rejects the common moral code and places himself beyond good and evil. “What is conscience?” he asks. “I myself made it. Then why do I torment myself? Through sheer habit, through a universal habit which is seven thousand years old. But let us get out of this habit and become gods.” In his vision of a godless society and of an unlimited freedom for man Ivan makes a step toward the concept of Superman: the highest ideal of Nietzsche, who acknowledged Dostovevsky as one of his masters.(2) It is only by “recognising the death of God” that we can “possibly do that which we should.” But the problem is, with God gone, where would that “should” come from? “Should” and “ought” pertain to the moral realm — but Ruse contradicts himself here, relative to his earlier statement; i.e., “God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good” [if God is dead].
(3) Ruse says that humans “are naturally moral beings.” How so? He seems to be saying that it is the nature of man to be a moral being. But how can we reconcile this with the expectation that, with God “dead,” man becomes unlimited? (Indeed, that’s the whole point of bumping Him off in the first place.) How can something “unlimited” simultaneously have a specific “nature?” He further argues that morality only “looks” objective; it is in reality relentlessly subjective. It is actually only an emotion. But let him speak for himself here: “morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers.”
So morality has to be made into something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective. “Why should I be good? Why should you be good? Because that is what morality demands of us. It is bigger than the both of us. It is laid on us and we must accept it, just like we must accept that 2 + 2 = 4. I am not saying that we always are moral, but that we always know that we should be moral.”How do we know that?
Note the passive construction, “it is laid on us and we must accept it.” Whatever is laying morality on us must be the same as what constitutes the “should” in (2) above. Note also the suggestion that nature has to fool us in order to make us moral (“So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective.” And as we all know, subjective things — to the post-modernist mind — are always “bad things.”
And yet he does admits this:
It has to pretend that it is not that at all! If we thought that morality was no more than liking or not liking spinach, then pretty quickly it would break down. Before long, we would find ourselves saying something like: “Well, morality is a jolly good thing from a personal point of view. When I am hungry or sick, I can rely on my fellow humans to help me. But really it is all bullshit, so when they need help I can and should avoid putting myself out. There is nothing there for me.” The trouble is that everyone would start saying this, and so very quickly there would be no morality and society would collapse and each and every one of us would suffer.Here Ruse seems to acknowledge the problem that man cannot be the source of the moral code, not himself the definer of right and wrong, of good and evil. So Ruse puts the source in blind natural processes. But the laws of nature tell us only what happens, not what’s supposed to, or ought to, or should happen. The natural world is about what exists, not what OUGHT to be.
Ruse concedes we need morality after all. Yet he says that the domain of “ought” and “should” is an evolutionary development. Yep. I guess it’s an evolutionary construction. Just like 2 + 2 = 4 is an evolutionary construction — NOT!!!
And then, the pièce de résistance, the summary clarification given in Ruse’s concluding remarks:
God is dead. The new atheists think that that is a significant finding. In this, as in just about everything else, they are completely mistaken. God is dead. Morality has no foundation. Long live morality. Thank goodness!Well, that clears up everything, now doesn’t it?
Don’t people ever get sick and tired of intellectual swindlers like this?