Morality without God is impossible

GDR writes: I find that a little ambiguous.

Not sure what you find ambiguous about him rejecting the “Christian notion of a moral soul” but the believer's ability to ignore inconvenient evidence is bottomless.

Actually we know that isn’t true. We have people brought up Christian converting to Islam and vice versa. People change their religious beliefs all the time. I have even heard accounts of people being brought up Christian and converting to atheism.

I said “ And btw, the god is almost always the one they were brought up with. Never one you'd never heard of.” If you can provide evidence of people converting to religions they'd never heard of before its god spoke to them, I'd love to hear it.

The Anglican church has since the time of Richard Hooker held to the belief that our theology is based on reason, tradition and scripture. In the past 2000 years we have had considerable time to reason as well as build up tradition. Christian theology is evolving and IMHO will continue to evolve. I would add that because of improved understanding of the early Greek language, partly because of the finding of the “Dead Sea Scrolls’ that we have a lot better understanding of the original texts, which is resulting in a lot better understanding of Jesus’ culture, Jesus was a 1st century Jew speaking primarily to 1st century Jews. He wasn’t a 21st century white westerner.

I'm going to repeat this because you obviously do not get it. Of course 'traditions' have built up and Christianity has split into 38,000 sects with all manner of bizarre beliefs and practices but you've got nothing to go on but a single book. Nowt.

I have no problem with any of that. It also doesn’t preclude external influences.

It also doesn't rule out electrical interference from overhead power cables either. Or friggin' goblins. Or anything anyone wants to dream up. It just makes those dumb assertions totally irrelevant and redundant. We now *know*.

There is no empirical evidence for the fact that I believe that within that there is God’s small still voice or His spirit that nudges us to do the loving thing.

What you believe is irrelevant, the facts tell their own story. You're just ignoring facts because they don't reconcile with your beliefs. You're just a different flavour of Faith.

These are a couple of chunks of text from the introduction and the conclusion of quite a decent paper about current neuroscience and morality.

It has a very large number of references to the actual research if you've any interest in following it up. I draw your attention to the second paragraph in particular - though the whole paper is interesting.

quote:

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Decades of research across multiple disciplines, including behavioral economics, developmental psychology, and social neuroscience, indicate that moral reasoning arises from complex social decision-making and involves both unconscious and deliberate processes which rely on several partially distinct dimensions, including intention understanding, harm aversion, reward and value coding, executive functioning, and rule learning (Decety & Cowell, 2017; Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012; Krueger & Hoffman, 2016; Ruff & Fehr, 2014). Human moral decisions are governed by both statistical expectations (based on observed frequencies) about what others will do and normative beliefs about what others should do. These vary across different cultures and historical contexts, forming a continuum from social conventions to moral norms which typically concern harm to others.

[…]

Decades of research demonstrate that neurocognitive systems for stimulus valuation, mental state attribution, saliency processing, and goal-related response selection provide the necessary mechanisms for moral reasoning.

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...372234/pdf/nihms-1500620.pdf

ie no god whispering necessary

GDR writes: I quoted the part I found ambiguous and that wasn’t it.

But you ignored the important point which was that the neuroscientist you quoted as being a Christian and therefore on your side, turned out to reject the Christian version of morality. But hey ho.

I found it interesting, and I see it as being correct

I'll be sure to let the guys that have spent their lives trying to understand the workings of tiny portions of the brain know that you and CS bleeding Lewis agree with them...

when they say that, “It is important to note that while empathy is a powerful motivation for prosocial behavior, it should not be equated with morality.” ... I think that we,{at least I), have been seeing them as being essentially the same.

Right, that's probably my fault, not really understanding that you're coming at this stuff for the first time.

Morality is the *behaviour* that results from a complex set of interactions in the brain - one of which is the emotion of empathy. Empathy makes us cry when we see someone else cry and makes us want to help; it's a physical reaction, unless we're psychopaths we can't stop the feeling. But reflex reactions aren't what we'd normally call moral behaviours. Moral behaviour is what we do after we've felt the emotion. That's moderated by our calculating brain. Amongst other things.

People watching starving babies in Africa will feel empathy for them. Some - a very few - will get on a plane and try to do something to help, others will send $10 to a charity, some - probably most - will think 'how sad' and get on with their day.
Psychopaths will wonder what all the fuss is about because they don't feel anything. But they will intellectually understand that others feel it's a bad thing.

We would both agree that our relationships with parents and others have an impact on our response to our empathetic feelings.

That's not in any doubt at all and never has been. Although we're born with the evolved tools that allow us to work together and feel compassion with each other and require fair dealings, our environment tunes our sense of morality too. That's why basic moral behaviour is universal - don't kill, don't steal - but also why it differs between cultures and over times. It's developmental in both uses of the term.

The question is whether or not “the still small voice of God’ is one of the others.

That's not in doubt either. There's no necessity for it; it's totally explicable naturally. It's like still insisting that Thor is behind lightening - yet we have a natural explanation.

This does indicate that we start off in this life with a basic sense of right and wrong which would agree with C S Lewis, as well as your quote, as I mentioned earlier. Why this exists as part of our conscious nature is of course the question. To say that it simply evolved does not answer the question of why it evolved or whether there was an intelligent agent responsible or whether it evolved simply as a result of other non-intelligent processes.

Where would we be without Lewis? Science is eternally grateful. He is the wind beneath the neurologists' wings.

If you could start distinguishing between a god that intervened at creation then stood by and watched and a god that's intervening with all of us in real time it would be helpful. The first is quite, quite different to the second.

Once again it does demonstrate that a psychopath has knowledge that what he/she is doing is wrong and is responsible for their actions.

Of course! Don't confuse empathy with morality. Psychopaths also are usually of higher than average intelligence, that's why so many of them end up running big companies. The intellect moderates our behaviour. Psychopaths can learn what moral behaviour is, just like they can learn algebra, but they don't *feel* it. It's not a compulsion. Not a drive.

With this in mind I’ll amend my thinking to agree that morality is something that has socially evolved naturally

Finally...

but I would still subjectively maintain that the God meme still nudges us in the direction of empathy.

Of course you do. Nevertheless, god is not a necessary component of the process.

Right off subject, but one of my musical heroes lives in Sussex. (Ditchling) That would be Vera Lynn who turned 103 on Mar 20.

Ditchling is pretty, and about 10 miles away. Has a great pub too.

Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

GDR writes: I would agree that it can be explained naturally, but that doesn't explain "why" it can be explained naturally.

The 'why' is the same as it is for all other naturally evolved traits - it has a survival advantage. We evolved emotions like empathy and calculating brains because they helped us to become the most successful critter on the planet.

This is a different 'why' to why is there something rather than nothing.

But it seems that you have shifted your position from your god being an interventionist one whispering in our ears moment to moment, to one that created a process that achieved the same effect without his direct involvement. That is very welcome and very rare and you're to be congratulated on it.

The articles that you linked earlier do suggest that a sense of morality is universal.

We don't need scientific articles to tell us that do we? Even CS bleedin' Lewis could tell you that. Even my old mum could tell you that!

Is there a universal morality built into the evolutionary process that is there as the result of intelligence? The answer is subjective and flows from belief. Just because you don't deem it as necessary does not mean that it isn't there.

All that can be said is that evolution is a natural process and supernatural intervention in it is neither evidenced nor necessary.

Your (new) belief that it is, or was, directed to produce the effect it has is not an answer, it's a belief.

We will never have an answer to whether a god exists because it's evidentially impossible if he prefers to hide and all his 'effects' are made to look totally natural. Rationally we are left with shrugging our shoulders and saying that if it looks like a duck etc, it is a duck. Or more formally, “ Entities should not be multiplied without necessity."

GDR writes: I find those two sentences contradictory. We have evolved natural traits that have given us a survival advantage and one of them is that we survive better as individuals when we work cooperatively in groups than we do on our own.

That's the entire basis of society (and group selection in biology) - individuals do better as part of a group acting together than individually. Surely you understand that basic idea?

Incidentally even the Bible tells us that.

And CS bleedin' Lewis too no doubt. So as we're all in agreement that individuals can thrive better in groups let's move on.

However, when we make personal sacrifices which will also weaken the group I contend that we are going against natural evolution.

Contend away; you're just failing to understand how it works. If all of us made suicidal acts, we would not survive. But we rarely do, we have a balanced set of emotions that allows us to do compassionate acts but prevents us risking everything all the time.

You can see this at work just in watching Phat here. He desperately wants to follow Jesus's requirement to give everything away to the poor and follow him, but in reality he knows that would be stupid.

example our church raises a fair bit of money to send to non-related groups including to having it go to the third world, and then we struggle to raise the money for the new furnaces we had to put in recently.

But you didn't give it all did you? Nor did you sell your church and donate the proceeds. You also worked as a group, not as individuals.

IMHO opinion this is evidence that there is more going on than simply the evolutionary process which would lead us to work collectively in a group.

I keep having to remind you that we are more than an evolutionary end point. Darwinism only gets you so far. H. Sapiens is no longer dependent totally on evolutionary pressures, we create our own environment - we have an executive mind. We plan and organise. There is indeed much more going on and it's all natural. We have yet to find anything that isn't or even looks like it might be.

I think what I have changed is that I separated morality from empathy. I see that designed in the evolutionary process a sense of morality involved in how we work collectively in our groups. However, I do contend that we have a "God meme" that nudges us to empathy and then act upon that empathy when we are able to do so.

Do'h. You have to jemmy this god of yours in somewhere don't you? So is this now a generalised idea and no longer a still small voice whispering in our ear? What is this meme?

OK we agree that there is a universal sense of morality. Would you agree that is represented by "The Golden Rule"?

Everybody - including neuroscience and atheists - accept that a sense of morality is universal in people (with the exceptions of psychopathy etc). It varies between races and over time but some parts seem to be truly universal - theft and murder for example, but other facets seem quite flexible - eg sexual morality.

You know I actually agree with that. In accessing the ducks this sure looks to me like a world designed by intelligence, and that being the case then it looks to me like a world designed with a purpose. Hopefully I have all my ducks in a row.

I wish you'd stop doing this. We're discussing our sense of morality, not life the universe and everything. Just as I think we’ve agreed something you move the bloody goal posts again.

I would contend that "processes" should not be multiplied without necessity.

That is also true, have you identified any? (Please stick to morality).

GDR writes: I'm going to just focus on this as I think it is the basis of where we disagree […] So, if I were to reject my theism and accept atheism I would agree with everything that you have said. […] However, if you were to reject atheism and accept theism you still might disagree.

This indicates a fundamental misunderstanding and a common error that non-scientific/non-critical thinking believers routinely make. And it seems almost impossible to dislodge.

I happen to be an atheist. That has absolutely nothing to do with what science is saying about what it knows about morality and neuroscience.

If neuroscience was saying that there's an area of the brain that's made of stuff never seen before on this planet and is observed to be interacting with our consciousness in an impossible way to make only positive influences on human behaviour and that it works regardless of physical brain state, that's what I'd be saying too. I'd be fascinated.

To put it in more personal perspective, years ago I heard about what I thought was a new scientific discovery called Intelligent Design. I was excited. Something had been discovered that pointed to a god of creation. I read everything I could about it and found that it was a pile of bollox. Not science at all; another religious scam. I was disappointed for two reasons, firstly because it wasn't true and secondly because the religious community had created another scam. If it had been good science it would have been great.

As a believer you attempt - not just you, every believer I've ever met - to make an equivalence between belief and atheism. You want them to be equal and opposite and you consistently refuse to accept that atheism in not in itself a belief.

You think/believe that an atheist will force everything they learn into an atheistic world view just as you feel forced to jemmy everything I point you at into your belief. That's simply not the case. Science is objective - or as much as it possibly can be. Its findings are independent of belief. That's why believers can be, and usually are, good scientists. And so can atheists.

It's only when science's findings conflict with a belief that there's a problem. You can accept science's findings without question when science tells you the genetic make up of Corvid 19 but if it suggests that the earth orbits the sun it's immediately dismissed as a conflict.

You say it yourself “ So, if I were to reject my theism and accept atheism I would agree with everything that you have said.” Like I said before, you're a version of Faith. A nice liberal one but you're fighting facts to save your belief and that's ultimately disastrous for your faith. Someone capable of real critical thinking would not allow a belief to overcome a fact. A real fact will last while belief will change.

That's the history of both magisterial, your faith will adapt to encompass the new knowledge science produces or it will die. You'll call it an increasing understanding of god and you'll argue increasingly for a kind of cosmic background sort of god if you're sensible.

Try to get beyond this atheism problem you have, it's colouring your thinking. If I was a Muslim neuroscientist the facts would be the same. There is no evidence for a god or anything else intervening with how moral problems are dealt with in the brain.

I doubt you can find 2 theists anywhere that will agree on everything.

Why doesn't that force you to think that maybe the beliefs are all wrong? Or at best, only one is right and it might as well be a buddhist in Nepal as you.

Faith writes: Of course I deny this flatly, and I ask that you please supply ONE example of a fact that I'm fighting in order to save my belief.

You're not kidding are you? You are the living, breathing example of religious delusion. There's a list a mile long of the facts you deny to preserve a crazed belief.

You actually admit that you're doing it and are proud of it; you say that where science tells us something that is in conflict with the bible, then science is wrong.

Your single belief that the world is only 6,000 years old forces you to deny facts from every scientific discipline from astronomy, radiophysics, biology, palaeontology, molecular biology and geology to name but a handful.

You're EVC's poster child of anti-fact, anti-science.

GDR writes: However, looking at brain scans is science. Observing that moral traits are transmitted within a culture is simply an observation and not science.

Let's get back to this and facts and science.

As far as I can tell you've now accepted that empathy is an emotion like our other emotions such as anger, love, happiness, fear etc and that it's origin and mechanisms are natural. Ok?

You've also discovered that empathy is not morality but that it can become cause a moral response to a situation. I suppose it's a bit like anger is a cause of whacking someone on the nose.

Just like science can study what causes the feeling of anger to arise, it can study what causes the feelings of empathy, compassion etc.

You are dead wrong about science not being able to study observations. The study of observations is all science is. It observes how the stars move around the sky and creates theories of planetary motions, it studies observations of how virus's spread and creates germ theory, it studies fossils and living organisms and develops a theory of how species evolve etc etc. Science IS the understanding of observations. Without the systematic gathering of observations there would be no science.

So what's different about studying how a particular observation that some higher-order mammal exhibit moral behaviours and that humans are extreme examples of this? To a scientist it's simply another area of study but to a believer is exempt from study as god given and inexplicable by normal means. It's a silly exceptionalism that science just shrugs at and goes on to explain.

What is it that you think is so special, so different about morality to excludes it from scientific study? What is it that's missing from explanations you've seen so far? As far as I can understand it's something to do with the cultural transmission of moral norms - what you keep calling memes. I don't see any problem there at all.

Faith writes: What you think are facts I don't think are facts.

That's not it at all.

What science knows are facts, you are not able to allow yourself to accept because they contradict something you think is in your 2,000+ book. You tell us this in exactly those words. It has nothing to do with whether they are facts or not. There's your problem.

Faith writes: I make use of plenty of actual facts I learn from science, they fit just fine into my biblical model.

delusion
/dɪˈluːʒ(ə)n/

noun
noun: delusion; plural noun: delusions
an idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by reality or rational argument, typically as a symptom of mental disorder.

GDR writes: However I don't see how the study of the fact that morality is culturally spread is science.

Uh? Why on earth not?

You can do studies that show that children from loving moral home are more likely to be loving and moral. I don't see that as scientific.

But that IS scientific! That's a perfect example of a scientific finding. What do you think science is? I can tell you that modern criminologists are doing an awful lot of work trying to understand why that is and - at least as important - why it often isn't true. And what specific factors can predict it.

It is sorta like saying that as we have storm clouds to the west we're likely to get rain today.

That's what science is. It takes a simple anecdotal observation and tests it. Does it always rain? How often? Does it work for every season in every continent? Can we predict it? Can we build it into other observations and begin to build a general weather model?

certainly am not saying it should be exempt from study.

Phew, science will be really relieved!

I don't question that morality is spread naturally. We, I think, have agreed that there is a universal sense of morality. The question is then, did that sense of morality exist prior to there being sentient life and is external to it.

That's two questions :-)

We know that simple moral behaviour exists in many animals that are not what we'd normally call sentient, so sure, we know it existed in a form before modern humans came along. It certainly had to exist in pre-humans otherwise we wouldn't be here now.

We also know that moral behaviour is intrinsic to an organism because we see it working as a brain function, there's no strings attached nor any need for them.

My theistic, subjective belief is that their is a moral agency that is responsible for our sense of morality. I also subjectively believe that that moral agency influences us to respond positively to that sense of morality but has allowed us the free will to totally reject it.

Yeh well, if that's what you need to get you through your day, there's not much else I can say other than it's just plain silly.

I'm not questioning the science but I do add subjective, non-scientific beliefs to it.

Why guild the lily? Kids don't actually need Father Christmas to get the presents but I suppose it's a nice story.

Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

GDR writes: I'm not really sure why you feel the need to be so patronizing, but if that is what you need to get through your day then so be it.

Fair enough, I apologise.

That is my belief which is also held by millions which of course does not make it true, but maybe not silly.

It's the fact that millions of people believe similar things to you and even more millions believe what I consider to be equally silly or even sillier but different things that makes me so irritable.

Even here in the UK where religion is a minority and dying pastime the bloody stuff is everywhere. Every village has a church - often more - we have non-elected bishops in our Parliament, the BBC broadcasts a mass every day and we have JWs banging on our doors and hanging around town proclaiming the 'good news'. The propaganda is everywhere and it annoys the hell out of me.

Every time I'm forced to go to a religious wedding, funeral or, even worse, a christening, I'm outraged that so many people are taken in by this nonsense and I'm embarrassed for them. The thoughtless chanting, the rituals, the repetitive bleating, grovelling and reinforcing of unfounded assertions, the utter gibberish spouted by the priest in his ludicrous clothes really makes me mad. It's just indoctrination and one day it'll be mostly gone, changed beyond recognition into some nice fluffy stuff, but that day is a long way off sadly. At the very best, it's a waste of people's time, effort and resource.

So please just ignore me when I lose it a bit here.

I agree, telling people that the earth is only 6,000 years old when there is a mountain of evidence that proves it beyond any doubt at all is both delusional and deceitful.

But I have to put up with that crap too, plus I get the religious crap!

What makes you think atheists aren't offended by that all stuff too?

GDR writes: The point is though that the crap I was talking about is ubiquitous and in your face. The fact that there is a church in every town and you feel obliged to go to the occasional baptism just doesn't seem like much in comparison.

“The point is though” that I have to put up with the same in-your-face crap as you do PLUS all this religious bollox.

Or do you think that us atheists are immune to it because we're sociopathic, heretical, immoral, pop star adoring trivial-minded beasts? Or something like that?