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But the entire point here is that he made a claim from authority, fifteen years of study, but can't seem to elucidate what it was he studied. I suspect that it was a decade and a half of watching anti-evolution youtube videos.
No, it's based on the survival instinct which is an objectively correct instinct to have because it is the result of the objective process of evolution and natural selection. Nothing to do with preference or opinion.
Incomplete data presented incorrectly does not impress.
The results of the Christians vs atheists
I try.
See below.
Evolution doesn’t have a moral component in itself, but it does apparently produce beings that care about morality. It produces beings (us) who care about the well being of ourselves and of others. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about morality at all. That’s what morality is – a system by which we evaluate the consequences of actions to determine whether or not we should consider them good or bad or right or wrong. If morality is about well-being, as I think it is, then there can be at least some moral truths to be found. It’s not arbitrary. The fact that we have any morality to begin with means we are concerned about such things. What’s arbitrary is following the whims of some deity that simply dictates morality to us.
I’m referring to your claim that without god we’re stuck with subjective morality and personal opinion, etc. When I say that we are bound by the laws of nature in determining moral codes what I mean is that we are all physical beings existing in a physical universe where the consequences of our actions are dictated by the physical laws that exist in that universe. If I stab someone in the chest with a knife, the physical consequence is that the person is harmed or killed. That is an objective reality that we cannot get around. There should be some objective truths to be found. It’s in our best interest as a group, to discover these truths.
Our own, based on the evaluation of the consequences of our actions that occur in the physical universe we find ourselves in.
We evolved a survival instinct.
I never said anything that even hinted that all of moderns science (not even evolutionary science) was wrong. I did not say it, I do no believe it, and I have never believed that.
Your right but for the exact wrong reasons. I do not want to have a discussion wit you because you appear to be redundant, arrogant, and condescending. Every single paragraph I read said the same thing. I am too ignorant to realize just ho brilliant you are. No one would want to hold a discussion with a person who repeatedly said that over and over.
This appears to be just more of the same thing that led my to conclude your just taking out your general dissatisfaction with reality on me because I represent something you do not like. Evidence and reasoning is to no avail against preference and emotion. What you said here is perfectly wrong and my 10,000 plus posts contain over 9000 examples that prove just how wrong you are.
It is all opinion even if it is grounded in evolution. It is not even a preference we obey.
Yes, you do try.
Your tap dancing in a mine field here. To say it does not contain a moral component is deduced from the fact that nature cannot ever tell us what we should do. 2 + 2 does not equal though shall not murder. Yet in the next line you say it produces creatures who care about it. So now you have smuggled in a transcendent morality that we care about but that nature cannot produce. You have in fact made an argument for my point. If you look at nature of our own history then evolution has created every form of behavior imaginable and validates them al because it allows for no objective standard to judge which are right. It has produced examples of creatures caring for each other, and examples of creatures torturing, killing, oppressing, enslaving, and eating each other. It is both justification for benevolence and the worst malevolence possible. It also does not contain nor does it produce any way of determining which is which. Even most of it's benevolent behaviors includes components that come at the expense of other creatures which have just as much inherent value as we do. So again choosing to base morality on parental care instead of over predation is simply a matter of arbitrary preference. It is not moral to for instance think that human well being is the prime directive because it comes at the expense of the rest of nature. Human well being leaves chickens, cows, sheep, and pigs to be the subject of our whims and eventually killed for our gain. What you call morality is actually unjustifiable speciesm which is less justifiable than even racism and far more immoral. Thanks God humanity has never thought evolution was a good enough basis for morality to actually use it.
That is not what we do. We arbitrarily decide without any justification that maximizing humanity justifies virtually minimizing the rest of nature. It is a might makes right justification or it has no justification. It is most certainly not objectively true that we should even maximize our own existence. We do not even attempt to do this. When we treat al life equally then you can point to that as an example of acting constant with your world view. We never have, we do not currently even try, and I imagine we never will.
You might have missed by definitions so let me supply them. There are two forms of morality. One which is purely preference and one which is actually true.
In chess humanity has created the rules and admits they are not moral and only suffice for a game. Evolution would be better compared to gravity. It simply says what is. You can invent rules concerning gravity (like don't jump off a cliff) but they are merely preferences and non-moral. Evolution is the exact same as the rest of nature. It only can tell us what is (providing we can accurately conclude what it is doing) and can never tell us what should be.
I would not use Harris, he was forced to admit that he has no basis for objective morality but instead assumed it into existence, and he did so in public and on tape. I will make a request below that will allow you to put what you said here into practice.
Ok, our own. In 5000 years we have had 300 free from major warfare. So war is an inherent good or right if our own evolutionary past is the foundation for morality. So is slavery, so is oppression, so is genocide, so is rape, etc.......... You have but two choices. Grant them all
I do not remember who did it but it was used in just that way by several others.
Just this one sentence tells us you haven't actually understood one word of what we have been trying to explain to you so there's no point for me even trying to explain what the problems are with the rest of your points. Perhaps it would have been possible to explain things to you if you had taken one sentence or point at a time and we could have addressed them one by one but the way you pile up one misunderstanding after another it's impossible.
So now you want to establish the logical fallacy of an appeal to authority based on what? On the number of posts you've made? Give us all a break. I attempt to stress quality rather than sheer quantity, but you do seem to slide into the Gish Gallop given half an oportunity,
What are you talking about? It is the simplest deduction that in 10,000 posts anyone who is coherent would have given reasons for many of his claims which defeats your claims, but this is not an appeal to authority in any way. It was an appeal to proof. My posts contain the proof that you are completely wrong in your statement mine was in response to. Even just in this thread most of my posts contain more explanation for their claims that those they responded to. I don't know what your doing, I don't know what kind of bizarre motivation makes you show up with the first post full of personal, uncivil, arrogant, commentaries which are untrue. What I do not is I don't want to get tangled up with it. Think what you want, I have no interest. It is too bad to because minus this garbage. you could probably hold up half of a interesting discussion.
It shows that despite what you have been saying I know what is ontologically true of moral values and duties. You nor anyone else could be right even if (provided you are like you wish to think all on the same page) you all said the same thing because what your saying is impossible. Not that more than a handful of scholars would agree with you (most of them agree to the second point I have made, not yours), nor has even all the non-theist laymen agreed with you in this thread. I have seen several of them agree with me. There are entire maximums of science that bear out what I have said and defy what you have in the attempt to contend with it. This is not a matter of opinion, it is an objective fact. Nature can never ever tell anyone what they should do, and even if it could it constrains completely contradictory behaviors with no way to select which one is actually right. Everything is true of evolution but even then it is merely true of it and not truly good or evil. It just is and has no moral component what so ever. So if you have tired of trying to get morality from something which does not contain it then let this end here. I want logical arguments not arrogant claims to how stupid you believe your opponent is. Scholarship is on my side, not yours. I am content, why can't you be if we left this futile discussion right here? If you think a mere guess is true of what evolution (which contains both murder and altruism) justifies is a reasonable basis for morality then apparently neither the fact no society has ever done so nor the fact it is irrational will have any effect on you. So let's drop it, deal?
It's a deal. If you ever decide to stop those Gish Gallops of yours and allow us to explain how things actually work sentence by sentence point by point we can resume the dialog.
How many people did your god supposedly kill in the flood?
