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.
Excellent analysis.
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!
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?
Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear brother in Christ!