Original Sin - Scripture and Reason

I don't know, as I've explained. Nor do I need to, as I've also explained. What you are failing to do is to explain why it is necessary to know this information. Maybe I'll agree with your explanation, and I'll change my view - but I can't if you're not willing to bring it forward.

If you manage to work out an argument as to why I should need to know what you are asking, you'll let me know? That way we could, you know, have a discussion. As I stated in my last message, and which you did not quote:

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Nor do I need to, as I've also explained. What you are failing to do is to explain why it is necessary to know this information. Maybe I'll agree with your explanation, and I'll change my view - but I can't if you're not willing to bring it forward.

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Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

That seems agreeable, yes.

If jar has asserted that he 'could have' done it without things acting in their own self-interest we might have had a different argument. Instead he said that there was no such thing in play, and that his conscious self-reflection was sufficient to make that judgement.I do maintain however, that without a brain built for occasional cooperative behaviour it would simply have been unthinkable to jar to push those carts back. And that the brain is built by genes acting in their own self interest.

And, very importantly to the point I'm trying to make: GENES too. The term 'original sin' was used as far as I know to describe Paul's understanding of the reason why Jesus came and died. In Romans 5:

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Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned

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13 To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.

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15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

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18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

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I would argue that something that is part of human development does come natural to us. We are built to cooperate with our allies, a good deal of the Bible seems to be about defining who our allies are (fellow Israelites, 'neighbours' etc), but I think the drive to cooperate with allies pre-exists any commands to do so. But it's not just that we evolve culturally through memes to be selfless, its that we are built by our selfish genes to be at times, selfless. Being selfless is completely natural. As I said earlier, I'm happy to accept that there are 'divine memes' that are in some fashion important in moral decision making, my only point is that selfish genes can create selfless phenotypes. God might help, but it isn't necessary for cooperative behaviour.

No, he's really talking about genes, and genes specifically. I wouldn't say that 'animal instincts' is either closer or more general. Some selfish genes do go into constructing the brain structures that give us our instincts, but some selfish genes go into making toes.From The Selfish Gene:

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The gene is defined as a piece of chromosome which is sufficiently short for it to last, potentially, for long enough for it to function as a significant unit of natural selection...The largest practical unit of natural selection-the gene-will usually be found to lie somewhere on the scale between cistron and chromosome...Any gene that behaves in such a way as to increase its own survival chances in the gene pool at the expense of other alleles will, by definition...tend to survive. The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

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In terms of discussion specifically about behaviour, then I guess 'instincts' is as good a word to use regarding the unconscious 'motivators' going on - but those instincts, whether they selfish or selfless, are strongly influenced by our genes and the successful genes will be selfish genes.

Well, it's being less than selfish in the direction of total selflessness. Total selflessness is very rare, but not impossible to understand in terms of selfish genes. When I say 'cooperative behaviour' I mean any behaviour that costs the individual and benefits someone other than the individual (though there may be benefits to the individual as well). That section of the book is building the argument that it can be in our self-interest to behave as doves rather than hawks. But in other sections he talks about actions that come at a cost to the individual, that might have no benefit to the individual at all - but which can still evolve because it isn't the individual's interests that are importance - it's the interests of the gene that's key. Oftentimes the interests coincide, but sometimes they do not.This means it is possible to have pure selfless behaviours - situations where only one party really benefits (such as dying to save someone else), coming out of self-interested genes.

Yes, cooperative behaviour needs to 'pay for itself', so it needs to benefit something - either the individual or their genes or whatever.I wouldn't say that by definition, both parties need to benefit, but that's how it probably works out. Kind of difficult, its sort of a theme of the book, and I haven't memorised where the best places that show it off are. I might also be drawing off memories of the companion text, The Extended Phenotype.Try chapter 6, 'Genemanship'. A lot of that is about kin-based altruism I think, which is one of the effects I've brought up.

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Albino genes do not really 'want' to survive or help other albino genes. But if the albino gene just happened to cause its bodies to behave altruistically towards other albinos, then automatically, willy-nilly, it would tend to become more numerous in the gene pool as a result.

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And I agree with that - I'm just saying that selfish genes are responsible for building the brains that find altruistic acts worthy of replication for them to become memes. That is - our selfish genes are responsible for a lot of our kindness, selflessness and so on. Culture has redefined the limits of our sphere of kindness, and has given us a more thorough understanding of what it means to be kind etc.

I said:

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But in other sections he talks about actions that come at a cost to the individual, that might have no benefit to the individual at all - but which can still evolve because it isn't the individual's interests that are importance - it's the interests of the gene that's key.

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You asked for a reference for that claim, I provided Chapter 6. In Chapter 6 he talks about individuals performing acts that cost the individual but which exist because of the benefit to the genes causing that behaviour. From the chapter:

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The key point of this chapter is that a gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness

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So I'm baffled how you missed the parts of Chapter 6 that were or relevance to what I was saying. But its more than that! It isn't just reciprocal altruism (doing good to others so as to expect others to do good to you)! Sometimes acts that have no benefit at all to the actor (such as a 'suicidal' act of heroism), might have a benefit to the genes' chances of replication. That's the point of Chapter 6! Now granted, the genes might make 'mistakes'. That is, they may cause behaviours that in certain specific cases don't benefit them at all, but it should be the case that on average those genes that cause that kind of behaviour to those that possess it should benefit the gene. We are living in an almost entirely different environment than the genes we possess prospered in - so we should expect lots of these kinds of 'mistakes'. I've already explained in previous posts, this very thing. In short: Your genes are influencing you to behave in certain ways. Be nice to family, family are those that are closest to you, who you live with. Help out other allies. All that kind of stuff.And then you have memes/learned behaviour. We have learned that all humans are part of one big family. We have learned that all humans are fundamentally are potential allies. We have believed this idea, we have spread this idea.Therefore, since the genes are telling us to look after our own, and the hypothetical American considers the Sudanese one of their own, then they will take action to 'look out for them'. Donating money or food or whatever.We should see that same American will probably reserve more money for his own family, and will probably be more inclined to help out friends who are difficulty too. If they spend all the money on the Sudanese and don't give any for their family to eat or clothe themselves, we'd probably say they were mentally ill.As I quoted Dawkins saying in Message 23

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misfiring by-product of our Darwinian past when we lived in small villages...which meant we were surrounded by close kin...one good pre-requisite for the evolution of altruism...we would have been surrounded by people who we are likely to meet again and again throughout our life - which provides the basis for the other main Darwinian reason to be moral or altruistic...although we no longer live in small bands, the same rule(s) of thumb...are playing themselves out under the alien conditions of modern urban society...

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...it has become modified and refined through culture...

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As per the above, because they are operating in 'alien conditions' we should expect that we see a some genetically influenced behaviours 'misfiring'. But on the whole - we should still see the pattern of preference for friends and family. This can be examined by observing the history of the memes of the equality of all man.I mean, it wasn't too long ago that it would have been almost impossible to find a single average American giving any money to any Africans. They were basically considered subhuman savages by most individuals.The genes of people in the 19th Century and before, are not that different from the genes today. The same genetic influences of behaviour exist - but they are operating within an environment where the Sudanese can potentially be seen as being 'just as important as anybody else (except maybe family/friends).' Indeed. It's in the gene's interests to invest some costs into other people. The closer the stronger the influence. They don't have to be relatives for the genes to 'treat' them like relatives. If you learn that your brother of 25 years was adopted, you don't generally find yourself loving him any less. Likewise, if you consider your fellow churchgoers as 'brothers and sisters' you may find you treat them better than the genes would otherwise have caused.So yes - whether it is selfish memes exploiting certain brain structures built by selfish genes or whatever - 'selfishness' will almost certainly be an important part of any description of selflessness that is prevalent.

Dawkins rejects group selection effects outright and insists that selection primarily operates at the gene level. Group selection, he believes, does not explain what we see.As for the 99% of DNA line of thinking - this is actually similar to number 5 on Dawkins' Twelve Misconceptions of Kin Selection:

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Whether 99% is an exaggeration or not, Washburn is certainly right that any two random
members of a species share the great majority of their genes. What, then, are we talking
about when we speak of the coefficient of relatedness between, say, siblings as being
50%? We must answer this question first before getting down to the error itself.
The unqualified statement that parents and offspring share 50 % of their genes is, as
Washburn rightly says, false. It can be made true by means of a qualification....

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Why is it not the case that
natural selection will favour universal altruism, since most genes are universally shared
in a species? I think the simplest way to explain it is by using Maynard Smith’s (1974)
language of evolutionarily stable strategies...Let there be two strategies, Universal Altruist U, and Kin Altruist K. U individuals care
for any member of the species indiscriminately. K individuals care for close kin only. In
both cases, the caring behaviour costs the altruist something in terms of his personal
survival chances. Suppose we grant Washburn’s assumption that U behaviour ‘is based on
the shared 99 % of genes’. In other words virtually the entire population are universal
altruists, and a tiny minority of mutants or immigrants are kin altruists. Superficially, the
U gene appears to be caring for copies of itself, since the beneficiaries of its
indiscriminate altruism are almost bound to contain the same gene. But is it
evolutionarily stable against invasion by initially rare K genes?
No it is not.

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I'm not sure I'm spotting the difference. But there is such a thing as true altruism, and we have our genes to thank for their vital role in it. Just because the altruism has a cause, does not make it not true altruism. Indeed, I'm happy for the God effect to be brought in given the forum we're in.Really all that's left is to persuade you that an altruistic act, that was influenced by genetic factors, is a truly altruistic act.It is an act that comes at a cost to the individual without necessarily expecting reciprocation. If you want to discount 'reciprocal altruism' from being 'true altruism' I still contend that true altruism is entirely possible in a purely naturalistic account.If you want to say that God has refined or channelled our altruistic and selfish instincts or some such, I'm fine with that. Of course, my position is that inserting God here is unnecessary - but I'm not going to argue that here. THat's likely because I am drawing on other Dawkins related sources than The Selfish Gene. From his talks and other books. He elucidates his position on this subject quite well in The God Delusion:

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What gives us the powerful urge to send an anonymous gift of money ...to tsunami victims on the other side of the world whom we shall never meet, and who are unlikely to ever return the favour? ... Isn't goodness incompatible with theory of the 'selfish gene'? No.
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The most obvious way in which genes ensure their own 'selfish' survival relative to other genes is by programming individual organisms to be selfish...But different circumstances favour different tactics. There are circumstances - not particularly rare - in which genes ensure their own selfish survival by influencing organisms to behave altruistically. {eg., kin selection and reciprocal altrusim, reputation and advertisement}
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Through most of our prehistory, humans lived under conditions that would have strongly favoured the evolution of all four kinds of altruism. We lived in villages, or earlier in discrete roving bands like baboons...Most of your fellow band members would have been kin, more closely related to you than members of other bands...now that most of us live in big cities where we are no longer surrounded by kin...why are we still so good to each other...?
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What natural selection favours is rules of thumb, which work in practice to promote the genes that built them. Rules of thumb, by their nature, sometimes misfire....Could it be that our Good Samaritan urges are misfirings, analagous to the misfiring of a reed warbler's parental instincts when it works itself to the bone for a young cuckoo?

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It seems pretty consistent with what I've been saying I think. Its from Chapter 6 (again), The roots of morality: why are we good? I agree - those would be the misfirings. As Dawkins puts it in the God Delusion:

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Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes.

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Thanks. I think my main objection is to get you to appreciate what natural forces are capable of. You can go right ahead and believe that God is capable of awe-inspiring things too if you want. Might we agree on this, also from the God Delusion, as a existence-of-God-neutral position:

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Such rules of thumb influence us still, not in a Calvinisitically deterministic way but filtered through the civilizing influences of literature and custom, law and tradition - and, of course, religion.

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I'm not seeing why its grasping at straws, its a reasoned conclusion. What's so desperate about pointing out that genes that evolved in one environment may not function as 'planned' in another environment? The theory still holds: the cooperative behaviour was created by genes that act in a way that has ancestrally promoted their replication, in conjunction with the environment in which those genes were expressed and the learning of culture etc that follows.The selfish gene explains the cooperative behaviour.
The alien environment and culture et al explains why we are at least partially cooperative with people that can't reciprocate or aren't closely related, or part of a social alliance. But they can eventually be worked back to selfish causes. The genes that cause cooperative behaviour do so because ancestrally that has promoted their replication. That those genes may cause behaviour that isn't in the genes' self interest in novel environments sounds perfectly reasonable to me.Meet the Dodo. It never learned to avoid large mammals. This behavioural trait of not running away from large mammals, or of being generally friendly/tame worked fine for its ancestral genes. But it worked against them when mankind discovered how tasty and easy to catch they were.