Posted on 03/19/2010 1:04:09 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to give you six (or six billion, billion, billion) of the best if you are bad. Morality is flimflam.
Does this mean that you can just go out and rape and pillage, behave like an ancient Roman grabbing Sabine women? Not at all. I said that there are no grounds for being good. It doesn't follow that you should be bad. Indeed, there are those – and I am one – who argue that only by recognising the death of God can we possibly do that which we should, and behave properly to our fellow humans and perhaps save the planet that we all share. We can give up all of that nonsense about women and gay people being inferior, about fertilised ova being human beings, and about the earth being ours to exploit and destroy.
Start with the fact that humans are naturally moral beings. We want to get along with our fellows. We care about our families. And we feel that we should put our hands in our pockets for the widows and orphans. This is not a matter of chance or even of culture primarily. Humans as animals have gone the route of sociality. We succeed, each of us individually, because we are part of a greater whole and that whole is a lot better at surviving and reproducing that most other animals.
On the one hand, we have suppressed all sorts of common mammalian features that disrupt harmonious living. Imagine trying to run a philosophy class if two or three of the members were in heat.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
It is not an accident that these type of truly evil men are worshipped on Democrat Underground and the Daily Kos.
As a foundational starting point, they all hate American traditional values, God and the Bible, thus their sick philosophies are just that.
if this “comentator” is correct then aynn rand is vidicated and the looters like Obama are in BIG trouble.
Nietzsche said, correctly, "The end of Christianity means the advent of nihilism. This, the most gruesome of guests, is standing already at the door. Our whole European culture is moving for some time now, with a tortured tension tht is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe; restless, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afrai to reflect." Nietzsche was correct in his declaration of Europe, and I fear Sunday last, we turn that same corner. The extermination has already begun again. This time they began with exterminating words with political correction. Then they exterminate thought, declaring they read hate into an evangelical preacher doing his job. They exterminate the right to life. They exterminate the right to the liberty to make choices of how you spend your own money. Make no mistake, extermination is their goal and the "God is dead" declaration justifies any action they wish. Truely, Dosoyevsky was right when he said, "All Things are now permitted."
Am I now giving the game away? Now you know that morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator, what's to stop you behaving like an ancient Roman?
I suppose he realizes that the line about the depraved Romans totally destroyed his argument, but it didn't slow him down. If natural selection inclines toward cooperation, then what happened with the Romans....the Nazi crematoriums, the Stalinist Gulags? Answer: forget natural selection, they were acting out their own choices. Totally depraved choices.
It doesn't matter how much philosophical reflection can show that your beliefs and behaviour have no rational foundation, your psychology will make sure you go on living in a normal, happy manner.
He truly doesn't slow down. He says you'll go on acting as if there's a happy, moral world in which you live, even though the truth is that they have no rational foundation.
Then he admits in closing:
Morality has no foundation
So, then, the argument is this. Natural selection favors cooperation. It leads to a morality that really doesn't make sense, and there really is no foundation for morality.
In short, this guy has not solved atheism's denial of a real morality.
Well said.
Excellent analysis.
His line above makes it sound like he's found a way to explain a real morality with zero God.
Then he actually demonstrates the opposite. I suppose natural selection taught him deception. :>)
Thank you for your kind words.
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Heh. :)
Of course not. His "argument" is just a bunch of empty jabber.
IMHO, at bottom, "atheist" is just the polite word for "nihilist." There can be no morality for a nihilist. Isn't that pretty much what this guy readily acknowledges, when he flat-out avers: "morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator"? Evidently he is saying we humans are just naturally, systematically duped.... If this is so, how can we say we know anything? How can Ruse say he knows anything?
There is no reason either: "your beliefs and behaviour have no rational foundation, your psychology will make sure you go on living in a normal, happy manner." Reason is just another illusion. Our "psychology" is on some kind of automatic pilot, and it knows how to keep us "happy." How our "psychology" knows this he does not bother to explain.
Jeepers, this entire screed is a misrepresentation of the reality which we experience, in which we actually live; and ultimately is a total denial of it.
Just what one would expect from a nihilist.
The breakdown of society does not come from the failure of genes; it comes from the failure to acknowledge a common moral code. Which the nihilists have been trying (very successfully) to undermine over the past two centuries.
Thank you so very much, xzins, for your excellent observations!
Good points.
Thx for the ping.
Are we to conclude, since he asserts that morality has no foundation and that natural selection (thus evolution) is the foundation, he is saying, that the foundation, Evolution is nothing?
Great observation, BB.
My genes give me illusions? I wonder how exactly that works. My genetic code knows what's will be best for the future of humans? What has been best?
I suppose it has a little genetic future-history book approved by the Texas Textbook Commission with appropriate illusory interpretations of human situations that I might encounter???
This makes my head hurt. :>)
It's a catchy phrase. But the people who use it cannot explain how genes give us illusions. But the simple assertion is enough for them. If you disagree with it, you are what Dawkins/Dennett call a "dim." (They consider themselves shining examples of the "bright.") Maybe there's even something evil about you for not thinking as they tell you to think.
This article, and the type of thinking it exemplifies, is nothing but a great big con job....
Sorry, but the term is already taken.
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That sounds a lot like what liberals think of conservatives.
How is that different from Bible tales? It seems to me that people just have a "need" to make up things as they go along instead of just accepting what they don't know and leave it as what it is, a mystery free from qualifications or "explanations" based on fancy.
Every society has a concept of the right and wrong; their own brand of morality. In all societies, restrictions to conduct, and punishment based on misconduct, serve to protects the community. There is nothing "holy" about the moral code except that adding "holiness" to it gives it more "umf." Whether the "lord" who pontificates it is the one imagined in the sky or on the ground, it's the way a community survives.
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What are "Bible tales"?
Evidently kosta defines them as just stuff that people made up while stumbling aimlessly along in a pointless word, just to cheer themselves up, dontcha know? Because the tales are (according to him) "self-interested," they are unreliable; thus we should not believe them.
But maybe I should have let kosta answer your question first. :^)
Anyhoot, it is my understanding that Bible "tales" are based in actual human experiences. In this sense, they cannot be just "made-up stuff." The experiences themselves prompt the telling of the "tale."
In Plato, there's a "tale" like this — the "'saving tale' that will save us if we save it." To me, this insight prefigures the Christian message, delivered some 500 years later.
Thanks so much for writing, trisham!
I must have missed his response. :)
For evos who like to try to divorce themselves from philosophy, they sure don’t have much trouble engaging in it when it suits their purposes.
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