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Author | Topic: Atheism Cannot Rationally Explain Morals. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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Such a simple idea so miserably twisted. The idea is that evolution as a theory and a worldview doesn't give any grounds for assessing a human being as any more important than a bug in the large scheme of things. It is obviously not a worldview. As a theory, what you say of it is true but irrelevant. Yes, it gives us no grounds for assessing the relative importance of bugs and humans --- just like the theory of gravity doesn't, and the theory of thermodynamics, and the theory of quantum electrodynamics. This doesn't mean that these branches of science say that humans and bugs are of equal importance, it means that they don't say anything about the subject at all. Which means that --- good news, Faith! --- you can believe in gravity and still believe that you're better than a bug. As you do, Faith. When you understand why you can cheerfully and consistently do that, you will understand why I can too.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
And again, you can put humans above bugs, but it can only be a subjective valuation since evolution gives you no grounds for it. Come now, Faith, you don't really believe that things are only objective if they are grounded in the theory of evolution.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
The only way chaos can become ordered is by an input of intelligence. Can you prove this? It seems on the face of it to be flagrantly untrue.
Morality involves choice. Selective pressures remove choice, don't they? I can make nothing of this. Would you like to try again but make it a little less gnomic?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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The thing about the ToE is that it defines a human being. No. We already knew what human beings were. Do you suppose that before the ToE people were going about looking at each other thinking "I wonder what that is? Could it be an aardvark? A tree?" No, people knew what humans were. But now we also know how they came to be.
If we're animals that descended from animals why should we have any obligation to ...anything in particular? How is our descent relevant to our obligations? If I shouldn't kill people, I shouldn't do it whether my ancestors were australopithecines, or made by God out of dirt, or hatched out of an egg laid by a giant space chicken.
It's clear we have some kind of built in morality but it's all over the map ... Boy, God really dropped the ball there, eh?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
The theory of gravity does not define human beings, nor does the science of astronomy nor the science of any other physical phenomenon, but in contrast to those other sciences, yes indeed evolution does define human beings. It says we descended from something apelike. It says we are animals, that our ancestors are animals. But these are mere facts about us, they are not definitions. If God made a man by magic, he would still be a man, wouldn't he? (And the fact that we are animals follows from the definition of animals, it has nothing to do with the theory of evolution as such.)
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Am I the only one here who spent years among people who liked to talk in terms of our animal nature and how we evolved this or that function and so on? I am one of those people. I have said plainly and distinctly, and as recently as my last post, the one which you just read, that we are animals, descended from animals. But this does not lead me to conclude that humans have no value, because why would it?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
You're still ssying it in a way that suggests you aren't thinking of what I'm saying. Humans "having no value" is not really what I'm saying. It's more about how humanity's place in the universe was demoted. Well, that's a weaker position than you and your creationist cohorts seemed to be taking. The argument appeared to be that atheists could not justify treating humans morally because an evolved human would have no value, or at least no more than any other collection of atoms. If all you now wish to say is that the evolutionary account of origins is less flattering to your vanity than the creationist account, then yes, maybe; that's up to you. (Personally I have never seen anything that paints a more wretched picture of humanity than Calvinism, but maybe that's a matter of taste.) However, so long as the "devaluation" you speak of does not reduce our value right down to nothing, then we still have grounds to treat an evolved man morally.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
No, the point remains that there are no grounds BASED ON EVOLUTION for the morality we ascribe to ourselves. Everyone has agreed with that absolutely and without a moment's hesitation. But it is not in fact the only point that you guys have been making.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
On the other hand, atheists believe in evolution, and evolution implies that all life is meaningless and dispensable and that humans are worth no more than bugs. Are you going to try to argue for this bizarre assertion, or are you just going to recite it over and over?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Why shouldn't you kill people? 'Cos they don't want me to kill them.
How did you arrive at this morality? I ignored the fatuous and wicked nonsense in the Bible and consulted my conscience instead. Your turn. Please answer the same questions.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Remember us all saying that morality was not objective? I didn't say that. It's debatable.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
First I need Faith to define her terms. What is an objective and what is a subjective morality?
In the meantime, I would invite you to consider the word "plant". Once it included fungi, now it does not. And if it is convenient to distinguish between them, we could perfectly well have decided to distinguish between "green plants" and "fungal plants". Does that mean that whether something is a plant is subjective? That would be an odd thing to say. (Note that the qualities of plants and fungi have remained the same all this time.)
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
But there is an underlying reality which is unaffected by what we choose to call things. We could have used "dog" to mean cat and "cat" to mean dog, but that doesn't mean that the nature of dogs is subjective, it means that the connection between collections of phonemes and their referents is arbitrary. This is still objectively a dog ...
... it just isn't objectively called "a dog": we cannot say that the French are wrong to call it un chien, or the Chinese to call it gŏu. But it's still a dog.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
What we include within the category "dog" is subject to the list of criteria we decide to include. You are illustrating my point. Again, that's a fact about language and not about the animal. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
But what we are discussing is the language and the categories humans create. But there is an underlying reality that is more important then these. It makes no sense to say "It is a merely subjective opinion that the sun is hot, because we could just as well have decided that the word 'hot' should mean octagonal."
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