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Author Topic:   The moral implications of evolution, and their discontents.
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1496 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 82 of 124 (439482)
12-08-2007 10:13 PM
Reply to: Message 81 by Hyroglyphx
12-08-2007 9:57 PM


Re: The inescapable conclusion of strict naturalism
Yes, and likewise, believing in God will still give you these answers as well.
Well, except when it won't. If you maintain that God steers hurricanes according to His will, then determining where Atlantic hurricanes will land will have nothing to do (for you) with Coriolis force and high-pressure systems (because why would God care about those things) and everything to do with who was sinful, or who wasn't, or who was gay and who wasn't, or whatever you all think God cares so much about these days.
And so you'll make predictions that turn out to be wrong, because hurricanes as a rule don't home in on sin. Starting with "God steers hurricanes" you'll never arrive at an accurate predictive model of where hurricanes are going to go, because you can't reduce their behavior to anything God is purported to be concerned with.
For instance, if we were to ask why humans enjoy music, a simple, quick, and true answer would be, because we like it.
But we don't all like it.
And we have to like something, don't we? Why would we evolve a mechanism to "like" things, if the only things we liked were completely unobtainable? Obviously, organisms that need some things and are harmed by other things develop a feedback system where they prefer the things they need and avoid the things that harm them. SO obviously we're built to like certain things. And since music is a human creation, why would musicians make music if they didn't like it?
I dunno, I don't see music as a big problem.
At the heart of atheism is naturalism
At the heart of atheism is "you can use your senses and intelligence to arrive at conclusions about what things probably exist and what things don't." Is that naturalism? I don't know, I'm asking.
What he is left with is nature alone. And even saying that things like morals transmit through sociology is only begging the question. Sociology only makes sense, to a naturalist, in the realm of nature itself.
If you think you've said something meaningful that makes sense, allow me to correct your misapprehension.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 81 by Hyroglyphx, posted 12-08-2007 9:57 PM Hyroglyphx has not replied

  
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