Posted on 11/06/2002 9:25:58 PM PST by general_re
of evil can best be explained as the antithesis of commonly accepted and proverbial rules on how to live life.
I raise the issue of what constitutes "evil", not to split hairs, but to point out that without a Creator, there is no reason that any of the eloquent rules that you posted are binding upon anyone, or even why they should be "commonly accepted." Your rejection of the first and greatest commandment (one of the "commonly accepted and proverbial rules on how to live life") is an illustration of the problem in a nutshell. There are a host of difficulties in giving an adequate accounting of moral incumbency from an evolutionary perspective. Everything we intuitively know about morality defies naturalistic explanation.
From an evolutionary perspective, how can ANY physical force (which in the materialist evolutionary view is responsible for everything, including your very thoughts, and which is all that exists) be seen as "evil"?
As you can see from the rules that you listed, and as we all know intuitively and immediately, moral propositions are COMMANDS that emanate from some personal source, and not just from some personal source, but some personal source with authority. I can go out in the street and start directing traffic, but unless I am wearing a uniform with a duly issued badge, and I have the authority to direct traffic, no one is obligated to obey me.
These commandments you have put before us imply that we ought to live in some particular way. Yet in a purely evolutionary, impersonal universe that is entirely the product of non-teleological physical forces, there is no logical way to derive these "oughts" merely from what "is". What sense does it make to morally condemn a physical force, when all physical forces are just a part of the great, accidental, impersonal evolutionary process? Whether the physical force is just a chemical reaction in the brain of a theist with whom you disagree, or a whole bunch of highly coordinated physical forces amalgamated as human beings that fly passenger jets into buildings, all are just part of the evolutionary process, are they not? The evolutionary process, which by definition is nothing but undirected, impersonal physical forces, remains mute on the "morality" of either one. The best 'ethic' you can come up with under such a premise is bare, arbitrary utilitarianism, and even then, perhaps the individuals who break the commandments you listed are just successful evolutionary predators. In such a universe, there really isn't any "good" or "evil", there is just individual preference.
Moral obligation is based on the assumption of free will, an assumption you seem to share. But the first hurdle you have to overcome is that volition infused with ethical content is completely unexplainable if everything about us is determined by our prior physical states.
And even then, if moral propositions are just impersonal, abstract principles, then why should anyone feel obligated to obey an impersonal principle? Is there some impersonal, transcendent standard outside evolution that at the same time is the product of evolution? How can that be?
Cordially,
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