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Author Topic:   Humans faults and evolutionary biology
Jumped Up Chimpanzee
Member (Idle past 4970 days)
Posts: 572
From: UK
Joined: 10-22-2009


(1)
Message 24 of 40 (572541)
08-06-2010 12:10 PM
Reply to: Message 19 by Kairyu
08-06-2010 8:46 AM


Hi WSW24
Some people have been trying to help me fit it in with christian thought, but I would like some neutral feedback on the subject.
I'm an atheist, so not sure if my opinion counts as "neutral" feedback, but here is my opinion which I hope may be of interest to you.
Your basic question seems to be:
Why did God make us in such a way that we do things that anger him?
That’s a very reasonable question. It certainly seems illogical. It’s a question often asked by atheists such as myself to challenge the whole idea of the Judeo-Christian god.
I think at the heart of the sin issue in Christianity is a universal difficulty all humans have in trying to make sense of apparent conflicts in their own behaviour, emotions and sense of morality.
From an atheist evolutionary perspective, I think it is easy to understand the conflicts.
Humans are a social species that benefit enormously from cooperating with each other. We have a much greater chance of survival (both as individuals and as a species) when we work together.
So, for our system of cooperation to work, we need to demonstrate selfless behaviour in order to be socially accepted and, (this is the critical bit) by demonstrating selfless behaviour, we stay in the social group and thereby achieve a selfish aim of increasing our individual chance of survival.
There is a sort of knife-edge balance we all walk in life between being selfless enough to be a valuable and trusted member of society, while still retaining an element of selfishness that guarantees our own welfare and survival. Obviously, you can’t be too selfless, like give all your food away, or you’d die. Not only would this obviously be bad for you, it would be bad for society to lose a valuable member. So we need selfish instincts to counter our selfless instincts (and vice versa).
We need emotions to drive us towards being good citizens, and we also need emotions to drive us towards looking after number one. This is where I think the root of the God v Sin comes from. God represents the selfless instincts we have to be good citizens, and Sin represents the selfish instincts we have to ensure we survive and reproduce.
So, in my opinion, the stories in the Bible were just metaphors that portrayed this dilemma of why we could be both selfless and selfish long before anyone knew about evolution.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 19 by Kairyu, posted 08-06-2010 8:46 AM Kairyu has not replied

  
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