Morality without god

How would you explain things like the soldier that throws himself on top of a grenade to save complete strangers or the guy that runs into a burning building to save a child he has no personal connection to? How do these fit into the "maximum personal benefit always" paradigm you are advocating?I'm not saying that there aren't evolutionary explanations for these behaviours but I think your "maximum personal benefit always" stance is too simplistic.

Best thing for who? How can it be the best thing for the person whose existence has ended? Selfish genes. If, on balance in our ancestral environment, a selfless or even personally damaging (e.g. dying) act results in greater propagation of ones genes then an instinct to behave in ways that are detrimental to the self will evolve.Selfless individuals are ultimately motivated by selfish genes. But selfish genes don't always result in actions which are beneficial to the individual "actor" in the way that you are insisting is necessarily the case.Giving one's life for the good of the "tribe" is not personally beneficial to the dead individual. No matter how you look at it.

This is where you are going fundamentally wrong. By any coherent definition of 'personhood' our genes result in us sometimes doing things which are personally detrimental at times. Whose goal is propagation? The childless man who dives on top of a grenade to save the lives of complete strangers? How exactly? In most cases the selfish gene and the selfish individual are in accordance. But not always. Which is why I originally posted to point out that your "maximum personal benefit always" stance is too simplistic.If now you are saying that it isn't always the case we have no real argument.

Well for example I am not the same person as my son. I may well do things that are ultimately detrimental to me as a person because my selfish genes cause me to act in ways that benefit my son as a person at the expense of me as a person.That which benefits my gene carrier may well not benefit me. I don't really see how you can dispute that except by insisting that my gene carrier (i.e. my son in this case) is the same person as me. Which obviously he isn't. I would agree that life does indeed have that unconscious "goal". And it is this goal that ultimately underlies all evolved human behaviour. But individual persons may not have that goal at all. Which is why I think your conflation of selfish genes and the idea that everything we do is for personal benefit rather than genetic benefit is just wrong. If a childless man who could make a run for it decides instead to leap on that grenade to save the lives of unrelated strangers he isn't doing himself or even his genes any good at all. This is a genuinely selfless act. So how do you explain this with your personal benefit argument?I'll tell you how I explain it in selfish genes terms. We start by asking in genetic terms what is happening here? What is happening is the misfiring of our ancestral instincts. We evolved in close knit tribes where all those around us were pretty closely related and thus acts of such bravery for the survival of the "tribe" may well have had a positive result for the propagation of certain genes within the tribe. Now of course in a world of international travel and a population of billions it is ridiculously unlikely that any significant genetic advantage will be gained by the childless soldier far from home giving his life for the greater good in our example. But the instinct is still there. Still there in the same way that the instinct to seek out high fat and high sugar foods is still there despite most of the Western world being more at risk from overeating than under-eating.The reason we desire Big Macs is the same reason we are capable of acts of complete selflessness such as the grenade covering soldier in our example.The reason is - Selfish genes taken out of the environment in which they evolved to propagate most effectively.

Do you think that if I was perfectly genetically cloned the resulting clone and me would be the same person? The flaw in your argument here is the assumption that our genes and our personhood are one and the same thing. They are not. I think I have illustrated that our selfish genes are quite capable of making us act in ways that are not good for us as individual persons at all. It is the misfiring of behaviour that would be genetically (but not necessarily personally) beneficial in our ancestral environment that results in acts that can legitimately be described as selfless.Selfish genes result in (at times) selfless persons.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

How is It an assumption to invoke evidenced naturalistic causes for morality and intelligence?Do you think that selfishness, our warring instinct and the ability to lie evolved naturalistically or do you also hold some creator responsible for those things as well? Does your position require the assumption that non-intelligent non-aggressive non-selfish particles can somehow combine without any intelligent interference to produce intelligent selfish creatures capable of making aggressive and selfish decisions?Is God responsible for all aspects of human psychology in your view or just some of them?

Then why hold up morality as some sort of indicator of God's existence any more than (for example) hatred? [qs]Firstly if we weren’t free to choose selfishness we would not be free to choose unselfishness and we could no longer be moral creatures.

Then why hold up morality as some sort of indicator of God's existence any more than (for example) hatred? God could have made only good and indifference. Moral and amoral. You don't have to have evil in order to have free will do you?You seem intent on highlighting the things you think are good and holding them us as some sort of evidence of god's existence when there is no more reason to invoke morality than evil in your arguments.

So hatred and selfishness and evil are just as much god's work as morality?We could have a thread called 'Nastiness without god' and you could make all the same arguments you are doing in this thread except we could replace 'morality' with 'evil' - Right? Is there anything God isn't responsible for?Is God responsible for stupidity and evil?Is God responsible for selfishness and indifference?Is God responsible for ignorance and hatred?Could we have a thread entitled 'X without God' and expect all the same arguments from you as the ones you are presenting in this thread?Despite your protestations you still seem to be special pleading morality (and intelligence) to a large extent.

God has apparently chosen to calibrate the morality-scale such that evil exists. Presumably he could have created a scale which includes far worse than evil (lets call it evil++). The scale of man's ability to do wickedness could have been even greater than it is if God had wanted us to have an even greater level of freewill. I mean presumably no man can be as evil as Satan himself (whether Satan is real or just a concept of ultimate evil is irrelevant to this).So it would seem God has felt it necessary to restrict our freewill in terms of our ability to commit possible evilness. He chose to limit our freedom to just evil.My point is this - If there is going to be a limit imposed, which there must be, why not stop at indifference rather than evil? Rather than create good and evil why not narrow the scale so that the only possibilities are indifference and escalating degrees of good? You still get freewill but you don't get evil. The worst someone can be is indifferent.I put it to you that God should have calibrated his scale so as to make evil unnecessary for freewill. We can only conclude that God actually wants us to be able to be evil.Evil isn't logically necessary, any more than evil++ is logically necessary, for freewill in the way you are asserting.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

In which case it is God's will that there be evil.

Does Satan exemplify evil?If not then I think we are talking about different concepts of the thing commonly referred to as "Satan"

Just as God is simply a human construction...

How can whether or not it is God's will that evil exist be irrelevant to the question of whether there can be morality without God?

How about you learn to read my posts?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.