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 ...
Buddhism is an atheist belief structure and yet it seems to be the one that actually walks the walk. It has a strict adherence to science and is no as the religion of compassion. It believes we’re in this struggle of existence together and to love each other as we love ourselves. I was once your mother so I love you as you were once my child mentality. There is no “me” and “you”: There is only “one”
They do not believe in ANY gods
Just putting that out there
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.
Already did! Do NOT make me wait in line! :-D
Well, professor Dawkins. . .we're waiting. . .where's the ethical system to teach us biological beings how to be altruistic? If indeed we are only biological. . .then survival of the fittest is all we have. However, if we are more than biological and posses an eternal soul. .then. . and only then is there a justification for morality which largely entails the postponing of immediate gratification for a GREATER fulfillment at a later time.
Postponing immediate gratification never makes natural sense and thus, biology alone will never be able to justify such behavior. But it is only when humans can defer the desires of now for a later and higher good, can a civil society emerge. Therefore, God, eternity, the soul and transcendent values are essential. In fact, it is the basis of America's founding documents.
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?
Terminal idiots, indeed.
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?
Ruse's last paragraph is a boiling mess of self-contradictions. I can't make any sense of it at all. Can you???
But an image comes to mind: of Professor Ruse mooning us; and he has a "happy face" painted on each cheek....
Your image is close, but rather than smiley faces I see Screwtape on one cheek and Wormwood on the other.
You really want to try and make sense of it?
I’ll go hunt the Jabberwock instead.
(That sound you hear is my vorpal sword going “snicker-snack!”)
(Evolutionist says Morality is fashioned by natural selection)
Friedrich Hayak said the same, long ago.
Imagine trying to run a philosophy class if two or three of the members were in heat.
The author doesn't remember high school, I think.
What the good Professor is actually proposing is that there is some sort of selection pressure to be found in moral behavior; that is, moral individuals out-breed immoral ones and societies - collectives - within which moral behaviors predominate will proliferate faster than those which do not. Unfortunately for his argument it is impossible to isolate moral behavior in this context from religious belief. One might as easily claim that religious belief provides that very same selection pressure.
Nor is human history particularly sympathetic to the claim that societies based on strictly secular morality tend to out-breed, out-compete, and survive over ones based on religious morality. Quite the opposite, as a glance at relentlessly secular Europe of the moment will reveal. There the demographic crisis very much follows the distribution of secular morality. In my own view the Professor would do well to reconsider.
Incorrect. The first thing that a male African lion does when he takes over a pride is to kill all the cubs of his predecessor, thus maximizing his own reproductive success.
hosepipe sometimes points out that this means the atheists are under-evolved.
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