Hi jaywill,
It's always good to read your posts -- thanks. Your clear descriptions of your state of mind ("My thoughts are still developing...") are especially refreshing. A couple points stood out for me:
1.
jaywill writes:
... we have TIME to learn how to live in oneness with Him in ever deepening degrees of union. We can abide in Him as an indwelling Presence. And He can abide in us as a realm and sphere to express His perfect life from within us, regulating our reactions, manifesting Himself in our personalities. This union expresses the highest level of morality on the earth, if we allow Him access to all of our soul.
This describes what I think is an entirely
subjective basis for morality.
As you say, holy scripture is not (cannot be) a fully-detailed instruction manual that provides a specific "moral" answer for every possible situation. For many situations where people must choose a course of action, there is no external, explicit specification that says which choice is the "moral" one.
But then, when you say that a particular state of mind, involving a particular faith or belief, is the (sensible? best? only?) basis for moral behavior, you are actually dodging the question of how to
validate that a particular choice is the "right" one. I expect there will be a fair degree of consistency among Christians when you present them with a given scenario and ask "What would Christ do?", but I also expect there are many scenarios that will elicit different answers, even among Christians of a single denomination, because each individual with this religious belief is likely to have a slightly different relationship with (a different understanding of) his/her God.
It is an intrinsic and unavoidable fact of human existence that we must act in spite of uncertainty. The spiritual sense of certainty that you describe is an ideal that I assume is quite rare (and people who assert -- or even believe -- that they have such certainty are still liable to do things that really turn out to be wrong {ABE: of course, the same could happen to people who express or believe their own "certainty" on the basis of evidence, but perhaps less often}). Attributing one's choices solely to religious belief, based solely on some personal sense of righteousness, actually makes the justification of one's actions more problematic, because the religious belief is subjective.
2.
I think that to fit morality into a purely evolutionary paradigm you have to stress the materialism of morality. That is as life forms do what they do to replicate themselves some mutations pass on material substance which is equvalent to moral values. The benefitial mutations are then made to survive through natural selection.
Does love have a weight? Is there an atom for honesty? I think that is where we are if morality comes about from your evolutionary process.
I think you are attributing too much materialism to ToE as it applies to behavior.
Consider the vast range of "innate" behaviors observed in virtually all animal species (including man): things that creatures do, abilities that they acquire, without needing to be "taught" deliberately by others. Then consider how some innate behaviors will yield different outcomes when the members of a given species face different conditions.
My favorite example is comparing houseflies and moths: trap the insects in a clear wine bottle, and lay the bottle on its side with the bottom facing a light, and the open end facing darkness. The moths will remain trapped in the bottle (and eventually die unless you change things around for them), because their behavior is to always fly towards a light source. Meanwhile, many (possibly all) of the houseflies will escape because their flight behavior is not constrained in that way. (If you try to alter the experiment to favor the moths and disfavor the flies, a few of the flies are still likely to succeed in escaping.)
For all the species that seem to us to lack symbolic language, self-awareness and abstract thought, the linkage between behavior and physical inheritance/mutation can be studied and understood as a mechanism that consists in a binding of neural and muscle structures, and that interacts with events in the environment as perceived by the creature's given senses.
As a general rule, when the senses, neural reactions and muscle capabilities combine in ways that work well in a given environment, the whole package tends to get passed on to subsequent generations. Over time, as mutations continue (both physical and behavioral), the ones that work better in the given environment will lead to a "honing" or "fine tuning" of both physical and behavioral patterns. When environmental conditions change (either because of moving to new territory, or because of things like climate change), the direction of favored mutations will change accordingly, but flexibility of behavior will tend to be the more important factor for survival.
For humans, the matter is obviously more complicated: so much more goes into the determination for each choice of action; the acquisition of our behavioral repetoire is a much more prolonged and complex process; our dependence on elaborate social structures for survival tends to turn every behavioral trait into an equally elaborate mixture of individual and social motivations.
The power of our behavioral flexibility, as proven by mankind's ability to survive and propagate in virtually every land-based ecosystem on the planet, seems to overshadow -- and indeed to override -- the influences of physical mutation. An infant born of Chinese parents and adopted by Arabic parents would have no difficulty learning Arabic as a native language, as well as the entire system of social behaviors of the Arabic community where the child grows up. The debilitating effects of many crippling genetic conditions are overcome by societal norms that allow the affected individuals to receive special treatment so they can live the fullest life possible.
Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, the basis -- the basic rule -- for deciding what constitutes moral behavior can be stated quite simply: whenever you can, choose the course of action that will yield the most benefit to the widest range of life. I think we could look at history (and pre-history, and variations across communities and populations living today) and see an evolutionary vector for morality in terms of what the individual considers to be "the widest range of life" that should benefit from one's choice of action: pure self-interest would be the most primitive state; preservation of offspring and immediate family members is more advanced; then preservation of the clan, then of the multi-clan village or neighborhood, then of the larger town, the city-state, the nation.
Very few have reached a stage where "the widest range of life" has global scope, and includes all species. But the results the of choices mankind has been making over the last couple millennia are reaching a point where a much larger proportion of us must reach that stage, or die for lack of this greater degree of flexibility.
The point I want to stress about this perspective on morality is that the bases for making choices, and the rules for assessing the actual value and correctness of the choices we make, are fundamentally objective: the proof will be in the results. We will still be acting with varying degrees of uncertainty, but the goal, and the realistic expectation, should be a gradual reduction of uncertainty as we get better at doing what we need to do.
This is too important to be consigned to vague and ephemeral notions of religious beliefs.
Edited by Otto Tellick, : minor addition in part 1, as marked.
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
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