Moral Argument for God

I don't see your decisions as conscious decisions, I see them as behavioral instincts.Prove me wrong. While you're at it, prove that you and everyone around you isn't a zombie* on Tuesdays.* "zombie" being a term of art in cognitive science used to refer to the concept of a human being operating only from instincts so complex that they present a perfect simulacrum of consciousness. Right. For the good of the group, which turns out to be good for the individual. (Except when it's not, which is when you see almost all humans act selfishly.) But we don't have a standard of morality. We have individuals with individual moralities, and sometimes, a few of them can get together and agree to all have more or less the same morality. Sometimes.The very fact that so many individuals and societies have competing or even contradictory moralities is proof that there is no standard of morality.

A what?

Yeah, its exactly like that. Which is why it forms a pretty shitty basis for an argument. You say that the moral-like actions of animals are instinct and not consciousness and proceed from there, but why should anyone believe you when you can't possibly show any evidence that you're correct? Um, maybe you hadn't heard, but there's way more religions and societies than seven. And no, they don't all have the golden rule.There is no basic structure to morality that all societies share. Individual moralities come in all configurations, which is how we know that no "fundamental morality" exists. If it's so fundamental then why doesn't everybody share it?

My dictionary has a bazillion definitions, but none of them are "something God breathed into animal bodies that were decended from apes via evolution." So you're clearly operating under your own definition.At any rate I don't seem to have a soul that I can detect - just a mind and a body, as if those are even separate things - so I need you to, at some point at least, be a little more clear about what you mean when you say "soul."

Well, it was. It developed according to the design of a designer who evolved according to the partly-random processes of evolution. Who evolved. What's the point? Since the former, not the latter, constitutes the bulk of everyday mental activity for human beings I don't find the prospect you describe all that surprising. Computers just barely work. The human brain is a marvel of robustness. That quality is the hallmark of natural evolution, not intelligent design.

Yes, very much so. Far, far too complex to have been designed. The hyper-creative processes of selection and mutation are the only possible explanation for that level of intense complexity. Not only possible, the only rational conclusion. Since intelligence isn't up to the task then the best alternative is the only processes known to be more creative than intelligence - selection and mutation.

Yes. You forgot about selection, but yes, chance and selection are superior designers to intelligence, according to the evidence. That's why so many engineers are turning to genetic design models that employ chance and selection instead of designing things directly. I don't understand the question. Cause and effect?

What, just because he's there in the room? You're telling me that just the proximity of intelligence in the room somehow magically inflects the processes of natural selection and random mutation with intelligence?How the hell does that make any sense? Probably because you're not looking for it. How many biology journals do you read a week? I'm going to need some kind of context in regards to your search for hyper-creativity before I'm going to give credence to the claim that you haven't been able to find it. That's stupid. My guess, from interviews with autistic persons, is that while you and I have brains specialized for language and social interaction, they have brains specialized in other ways. Sometimes tey make it work, and sometimes they can't.

Maybe you've seen a few of them? They're called "living things."Seriously, if the creativity represented in the natural world isn't enough for you, if you believe the scope of human instrumentality even approaches the level of creativity that typefies even the most simple of organisms, there's absolutely no pleasing you. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that I actually, personally interviewed any autistic persons. The interviews I referred to were radio/tv interviews that I had viewed, not any personal experience I have on the subject. In fact, I have none. "Infusion of intelligence?" And what form, exactly, does this "infusion" take? IV drip? Selection is selection. In the natural world a potently lethal virus has to have a long incubation time or else it extinguishes infectees before they can carry it to new hosts, and it goes extinct. That's a selection pressure for long incubation times.Biowarfare programs can select for short incubation times, but that's still selection. The exact same process. It isn't even "artifical" selection because humans evolved in, and are part of, the natural world. Even when we do it on purpose its still selection, still mutation, still evolution; to assert that an "infusion" of intelligence is to assert something that has no relevant meaning.

Well, let me ask you this. People who live in cities generally do their best to keep them from being buried in the dirt. So if you find a buried city, one of two things is generally true:1) The city was buried so fast that nobody had time to do anything about it, for instance by vulcanism (Pompeii, etc);2) The city was buried slowly because everybody had already left. You find a lot of desert cities this way, and they get buried because wind is always blowing the sand around.Plenty of ancient cities that people abandoned, like Machu Pichu, were never buried at all, because they're in the tops of mountains or whatever where there is no dirt blowing around to bury them. They ask geologists. While it's true that the layers are not uniform all over the Earth, they are fairly uniform, or at least predictable (for instance the sediment bed of an ancient lake will be thicker in the middle than around the edges, like lakes are), on a regional basis. This is true for both thickness and composition.Any igneous layer gives a reliable radiometric date, and sedimentary layers have their own rules for deposition based on their composition and size, and so we can infer the dating pretty reliably. Moreover when referring to discoveries of human artifacts the artifacts themselves will suggest their time period.Finally another reason archeologists find so much buried stuff is because humans bury a lot of stuff (garbage, treasures, corpses) and stuff that isn't buried doesn't stick around for very long. As an experiment place two identical cans of Coke out front of your house, one on the sidewalk and one buried ten feet below the ground, and then see which is still there in 100 years.Archeologists find what's there for them to find. That tends to be buried stuff because stuff that isn't buried is lost much sooner. I guarantee you that, if we ever have spacefaring vessels in the vein of Star Trek, genetic algorythms employing the principles of mutation and selection will be responsible for much of their design. We're already employing those principles in the design of air- and spacecraft. I have absolutely no idea how to quantify complexity in a way relevant to this question, so I don't know how to answer.

No, that's still the first option: it is good because God commands it. Furthermore its nonsense to suggest that an objective standard can be internal to God; either its objective, or internal, but not both.

Thus, it is good because God commands it. Like I said, it's the first option. Because it can't be arbitrary and yet be objective. For instance - if God did not exist, would that standard of good and bad still exist? It didn't seem worthwhile, based on the nonsense that you quoted from it.

Why? Meaning and purpose are merely concepts that exist in our heads. They don't come from any external source. There's no requirement to "trace" them to a source, any more than we're required to trace daydreams to a source.If I see a cloud that looks like a rabbit, it has that meaning. But that meaning has no source other than myself, just like daydreams.

Right. It's an objective standard that exists outside of God. Second option. Right, and thus, we know the standard is external to him. If God can't change his mind about what is good and what is not, then the standard isn't something that's internal to him. So we're at the second option. Er, well, we don't know that to be true, in the least. Nonetheless you appear to have retreated to the second option, now.

You misunderstand. I know exactly what you're trying to say.Your problem is that your arguments logically neccessitate a completely different conclusion than the one you arrive at, which is what I'm trying to show you. Of course, if we're going to do this, then we need to first agree that words actually have meanings.Do you agree? But there is - his own nature, which apparently he cannot change. That nature is apparently a higher power over God.