Did Religion Give Birth to Morals?

I'm still waiting for the evidence that they do.Act morally, I mean. If you consider the fact that the optimum solution to the reiterative Prisoner's Dilemma is basically "do unto others as they did unto you" - retributive justice, in other words - it's not hard to see how a system of enforcement of locally-detrimental but globally-beneficial behaviors begins to emerge.Honestly I don't find anything so magical about so-called "moral" behavior that can't be explained by a little game theory. But the burden on your side, OM, is explain why, if humans have morals that come from divine providence instead of contingency, human beings act so immorally? Actually, in most species where there's this sort of competition, the encounters are deliberately not fatal. Think it through - a fight to the death between equally-armed combatants is usually a Pyhrric victory. Usually your opponent can get enough good hits in before he succumbs to leave you seriously debilitated, even mortally wounded yourself, by the end of it.As a result, in the animal kingdom, competition between males is typically subdued and deliberately restrained, rather than being an all-out melee. For instance, rams charging each other, or hissing cockroaches grappling. It's a lot safer, for everyone, to lock horns or snap off some extraneous limbs than fight to the death. These restrained battles leave the victor in a much better condition to protect his progeny, so you can see the evolutionary advantage to this behavior.

A lot of people do exactly that. How is that possible if human beings have morals, which you claim they do? He was certainly a religious person. If religion is the source of morals, as you claim, how is that possible?

I don't see that in your link, which you fail to note is a from a publication from 1926 - long before the majority of the current research on emerging moral/ethical systems.I wonder, perhaps, if you could reply to the arguments I offered in message 5. In particular, how can you doubt that morality emerges out of practical necessity in the face of the reiterative Prisoner's Dilemma?

Er, I guess I don't know what you mean. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, of course, you don't know what your partner is going to choose; but to say that it's a solitary game is very inaccurate.I'm not sure what the rest of your post actually means. I don't sense that you're motivated to produce clear writing. This is inaccurate on many levels. Self-sacrifice can equal survival, because it's known that your relatives carry many of your genes. Thus, to give one's life for two brothers is survival-positive: statistically, between the two of them, they carry all of your genes. So there's no loss.Moreover - morality, ethics, and laws are the formalized cultural structures we use to make sure that the other side is cooperating.The beauty of the evolutionary explanation is that, not only does it explain where morals come from, but it explains why people so often act outside of their morals. These are two problems that religion has never been able to successfully grapple with.

Well, no, you lose. You're simply making up a non-existent reward to change the comparison. You may propose that you go to heaven, or whatever, but you don't. Just like for everybody else there's no such thing.You don't get to dismiss the outcome of the game and substitute feel-good make-believe. That's disingenuous.Honestly I don't see how anything you've written here constitutes a reply. At best you're simply using sophistry to cloud the issue. Well, indeed, the issue does become a lot less clear when you introduce made-up conditions and non-existent rewards. I suspect that obfuscation is a deliberate strategy on your part. If it did, it won't. Continue, I mean. That kind of bottleneck is unrecoverable. There's no way a species continues for any length of time from only two individuals. I don't know what you mean by "respect", unless by "respect" you mean "not raping a woman"; in either case I'm dismayed that you so quickly leapt to a completely off-topic justification for a brutal crime. Indeed I don't know what kind of moral calculus you're operating under where a doomed, futile effort to "save the species" constitutes a justification for raping an innocent woman, and I'm shocked and disgusted that you would call that a "win" for her.

Not so. I've already explain how altruism on an individual level is explained by a general, social benefit for altruism. Obviously, society can't be altruistic, because society isn't a thing. Individuals are altruistic because they're the only ones who can be. Sure, you can. And the reiterative Prisoner's Dilemma explains why people, in general, don't turn the other cheek - the reiterative outcome is worse than retributive justice.Your religious arguments don't explain that. Evolutionary arguments are so powerful because, at once, they explain both our ideals and our failings. Religion has always struggled to reconcile the two. But so much of that is not a path to truth. Much of it, like your arguments, are simply sophistry for its own sake. You called it a "win-win" situation, though. Now you've completely reversed yourself. There's no loss, as I explained. Rape or not, the species ends. Two individuals isn't enough to save a species. It's no loss to fail to get what you weren't going to get anyway.

No, what you've proven is that God is not useful for understanding morality.

Well, most people in the same situation do steal, and then tell themselves it isn't stealing.What does that tell you?

lol! You're absolutely right, Jar. God only knows what you did to merit such intense scrutiny of what you believe. I don't know what it is about creationists that make them so perversely fascinated by your personal faith.