Proofs of God

This entire thread has inspired me to take Logic 101 when I have time. I have nothing much to add except a comment from personal experience. Small children do not understand fairness. They are egocentric and anything that doesn't go their way is declared to be "unfair". It is very hard to convince them otherwise, believe me!They learn fairness because they experience the consequences of acting unfairly - their friends desert them, their parents punish them, etc. There's nothing metaphysical about it.On another matter: discussing the morality of homosexuality seems as relevant as any other example (murder and rape have been mentioned previously). The fact is that societies do not agree on what is and is not moral, and the same society may change its prevailing morality in the space of a generation.Incidentally, rape most certainly is or has been "moral" in some societies; same with child abuse. And what we might call murder has been called many other things in other times and places (eg. "human sacrifice", which was not considered immoral). I see no evidence of universal innate unchanging God-given morals among human societies.

I don't think morality is something you "believe in" like a god or the healing power of crystals, so there's nothing startling about atheists having morals. Morals can be logically formulated (eg. "for the good of society") - although people are not going to agree on the result because they'll likely start from different premises.------------------
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I don't think it's helping to consider morality as an entity in and of itself. What we call morality is simply a set of ideas developed over generations that came about for various reasons such as enabling humans to live together in societies. It's not an absolute thing that popped into existence.------------------
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These are silly questions. Of course you need other people to further your own interests, unless your own interests are literally being a hermit who wants no manufactured clothes, no farmed foods, no roads or books or sex.I think a better question is: "What stops you pushing a stranger under a train?" What if no one knew your crime - say, what stops you pushing a stranger off a deserted cliff top just for the hell of it?Given a stranger and a cliff top, the idea would never even occur to most humans. Or if they did consider it they would feel constrained and not act out. Constrained by what? By their god-given morality, or by their socio-biology?------------------
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I don't think this was necessarily a statistical oddity. I don't know how many people would have acted as you did, but I expect the percentage would not be insignificant.The fact is that most human beings have sympathy and compassion in certain situations, even when the person in danger is a stranger. It might *feel* like instinct, but there are underlying reasons and I think they stem from the fact that humans are social beings. We can automatically put ourselves in someone else's position (eg. child in burning car) and act accordingly.Humans act in many, many ways that are not advantageous from an evolutionary perspective. It's not very useful to try and fit our more complex behaviour patterns into an evolution framework. Evolution only controls organisms that cannot control their own environment.------------------
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By "automatically" I meant, as in the situation described, the person doesn't stop to think about it. However, there are still reasons why the person acted that way, and why perhaps other people would not act that way. It doesn't mean one is more moral than the other. There are all sorts of factors at play.The word "instinct" means something different to me. It means specifically something that is innate - you're born with it because it confers a survival advantage. I don't think this has much to do with morality.------------------
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