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To: The Ghost of FReepers Past

Beginning with Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, the conservative intellectual tradition has been based on the claim that social order arises not from rational planning but from the spontaneous moral order of instincts and habits. Darwinian biology sustains that conservative claim by showing how the human capacity for spontaneous order arises from social instincts and a moral sense shaped by natural selection in human evolutionary history.

I don't see anything morally degrading in this. On the contrary, I see a science of human nature that supports spontaneous moral order as natural for human beings.

For example, when conservatives defend marriage and the family as natural because they are rooted in the natural human desires for sexual mating and parental care, doesn't this appeal to the biological nature of human beings?


10 posted on 09/17/2005 12:45:17 PM PDT by Arnhart
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To: Arnhart

If you aren't familiar with these threads, you will find that evidence, facts, reality, logic and science mean nothing when they run headlong into the darkness of willful ignorance.


14 posted on 09/17/2005 12:55:49 PM PDT by furball4paws (One of the last Evil Geniuses, or the first of their return.)
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To: Arnhart

What you have described is the foundation of Christian evolution.

That is, the forces of history have modified and molded and changed Christianity. This evolutionary process results in a greatly modified Roman church and myraids of Protestant sects.


180 posted on 10/08/2005 11:07:43 AM PDT by bert (K.E. ; N.P . I smell a dead rat in Baton Rouge!)
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