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Great argument man. I agree with your points, I do have a small quibble if you don't mind.
Just want to make a distinction between morality stemming from evolution/consciousness and morality stemming from social norms, though one could say it is still evolving.
It is not a false dichotomy, it is not one or the other, I believe these play into each other. This doesn't necessarily mean that morality is objective by any means. It can still be subjective while still having a basis. Morality is dynamic. Just as a peddle on a plant (evolving morals) is different than the stem (morals from our consciousness). While still attached to the stem, it is its own entity with connections to the stem. Bad analogy?
Well, I think so, what do you think? and if I am wrong please show me. I like to learn.
This is somewhat true. The basis for morality can be tracked to consciousness. So in sense moral was kind of always there.
While I am aware we, humanity, develop and change our morals over time, but let us not forget that the basis of empathy, compassion, love etc. can be traced back to not only other members of the animal kingdom but our consciousness.
That is not to say we cannot change from the bare minimum low-level moral codes our early humans had just as we may consider acts and behavior amongst animals would be immoral.
Info on why I think this is so:
Humans are social, and in order for a social species to survive and thrive, there must be naturally evolved tendencies towards the bare minimum of social cooperation. Notice how, for much of history and still today in many instances morality applies much more to behavior toward in groups, like family, clan, nation, often in that order.
We do not need religion and some outdated prehistoric man-made rules to tell us right from wrong. We are born in a sense with human decency towards each other.
Morality ultimately stems from the brain and it requires emotions and consciousness.
The science of human behavior suggests that innate morality comes to us from birth, perhaps similar to the language instinct where humans have an innate capacity for language even though any particular language comes from cultural development(see Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky on this).
In fact, when dealing with a social species like humans, "morality traits" would be expected to confer a strong survival advantage, particularly when you zoom out from individual survival and consider the survival of family members sharing common genes. It would be helpful if you realized there are bodies of scholarship researching and addressing these questions. Peter Singer basically proved how morality evolved. Peter Singer is one of the contributors of the foremost best and most current full publication on the evolution of morality and ethics.
"We have no need to postulate gods who hand down commandments to us because we understand ethics as a natural phenomenon."-Peter Singer
*"Evolution has produced the requisites for morality: a tendency to develop social norms and enforce them, the capacities of empathy and sympathy, mutual aid and a sense of fairness, the mechanisms of conflict resolution, and so on. Evolution has also produced the unalterable needs and desires of our species: the need of the young for care, a desire for high status, the need to belong to a group, and so forth."<.em> * - Arnhar
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We as a society collectively determine our morals based on the values held by the people who make up our ranks. That is why we today understand that slavery and marital rape are immoral, despite the fact that Christian morality says that both of those are okay. It is our innate solidarity, and not some security camera in the the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.
Instead of relying on innate feelings or belief, I can spend more time thinking and evaluating my feelings and the feelings of others around me and to try to establish the consequences of my actions (ethics). One could construct an ethical system that remains flexible, based on human nature and science, all without owning a single moral belief. One does not need to use belief statements to do this. Instead one need only use desire statements. For example, I want people to live together peacefully because everyone will feel better as a result. And then I might describe a way to achieve this want by using a theory to establish it. At no time do I require beliefs to establish statements about morality.
We derive our own morals and ethics. These also evolve and are not static. As humans emerge from hunter/gatherers to agricultural societies. As our abilities to communicate and learn grow, we must have morals and ethics that can evolve to meet our needs. By communicating with each other we work these out.
The morals and ethics of over 2000 years ago, by and large, are not appropriate for today. How could they be? Religion has been the largest stumbling block in the evolution of societal morals and ethics. Religion needs to reflect the needs of humanity or it shall perish. Taking a note from Hitchens, if it's to be argued that our morality or ethics can be derived from the supernatural, then name me an action, a moral action, taken by a believer or a moral statement uttered by one, that could not have been made or uttered by an infidel, a non-believer. And may I say, It often turns immoral when one gets their moral judgement from an outdated book from a time when we as a species were not as civil and secular as today. i.e no laws are now put in place for rape, murder, barbarism etc. things that are at least condoned and at most can argued for using the bible.
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Mind you, even if we consider this to be true, it doesn't make the OP's argument any more or less true. It is just a brute fact. The OP just added an extra unsubstantiated claim that it was a supernatural being that put this morality into our consciousness.
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I hope I articulated my point well :)
@furyian
Completely agree. However, I did not want to make the post any longer than it had already grown.
Thanks for the additional teaching...
rmfr
Yes, well of course all these cultures were barbaric with nothing to give to humanity.
It begs the question, "what have the bloody romans done for us?"
It is not as if Christianity has ever done anything wrong if we go by the past, is it?!
- Crusades
- The murder of Pagens who came before them
- Making pagen services punishable by death
- Numerous wars in the name of Christianity eg. 1456 battle of Belgrad
- Murdering for Heresy which was common place
- Burning of 'witches' and heretics eg. Thomas moore under the reign of Henry 8th
- Inquisitions
- The slaughter of Jews from 4AD up Until 1648 and the Chmielnitzki massacres, one could even say The Holocaust depending on your views of the religion on the majority of Nazi's, specifically the SS.
- The taking over of native lands and enslavements of vast arrays of peoples
- And to more present times with the child sex abuse cases and the Rwanda massacres
I would happily have made this far more vast, but I am very tired.
Anyway, that's a phenomenal organisation of love, tolerance and compassion.
Nice list TBW, I'd also add...(as they like bringing up Nazism/Nazis) the Reichskonkordat!
This was the concordat between the Vatican and the Hitlers German Reich.
Wonderfully moral of them.
I mentioned that before but did not know its name. I am sure our OP will not look it up. "The treaty guarantees the rights of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany. When bishops take office Article 16 states they are required to take an oath of loyalty to the Governor or President of the German Reich established according to the constitution. "
I used the 25th Article of the Nazi Manifesto to say the same thing as this:
"Article 1 The German Reich guarantees freedom of profession and public practice of the Catholic religion. It recognizes the right of the Catholic Church to regulate and manage her own affairs independently within the limits of the law applicable to all and to issue – within the framework of her own competence – laws and ordinances binding on her members."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat
Rasster:
"Following from what I said, where would the world be without Gods law, the 10 commandments?"
As both "god's law" and the 10 commandments are man-made, I expect we'd be pretty much where we are now.
Here's a question for you:
If the individual and combined effort spent on indoctrinating little kiddies with some sky-god fantasy or other was directed instead towards promoting a secular, humanitarian understanding of reality, what do you think the state of the world would be today?
and yet some people here think it may be better. That is a contradiction between you guys.
Rasster
See my question to you in the post you just quoted from.
Raster:
Hope I don't pre-empt any reply you might make by posting out of turn but your "without god's law" question raises another:
Where would the world be if all of god's laws found in the bible were enforced in their entirety, without exception?
@Bill Re: "Where would the world be if all of god's laws found in the bible were enforced in their entirety, without exception?"
My guess is that we would still be in the Dark Ages. And fun times were had by all....
Since all “god’s laws” are man made, what’s your point. I never needed religion or commandments to know right from wrong. Society taught me what is right and wrong. The commandments didn’t stop me from doing wrong.
The problem with society is poor family structure. Children are not guided and cared for properly. They just learn from the internet.
@Rasster original post.
Oh another "atheist are evil lawless people with no morals." And anyone not christian are barbarians.
Yawn.
I am late to the party looks like you guys all already covered the basis of this tired, beaten to death argument by theist that have already been powerfully refuted in many different ways.
I assume it was already mentioned that roman gladiatorial combat increased near the end of the decline of the roman empire when it already mostly switched over to christianity.
I also assume it was already mentioned as large as christianity is, it still only represents less than 5% of everyone who lived. So 95+ % of all people ever lived were barbarians eh. Even if one were to swallow this completely unsupported christianity religious nonsense, it seems like the devil has most certainly been kicking the christians god's ass up and down the street for the last 100,000 years. Seems like god is pretty damn ineffective at controlling his own "creation"
Answer to your question at bottom:
Where would the world be without god's law and the 10 commandments?
Easy answer: in a better place. Especially these days when we have scientific findings to fill in most all of the blanks and unknowns we had 2000 years ago. Have you even read the 10 commandments as they were originally written?
1. I am the LORD thy God. <== bow down to ONLY me! Do not question it!
2. No other gods before me. <== bow down to ONLY me! Do not question it!
3. No graven images or likenesses. <== bow down to ONLY me! Do not question it!
4. Not take the LORD's name in vain. Umm what? Why? This is stupid. How does this make the 10 commandments? Out of all possible suggestions why this one? Why not, thou shall wash thy hands and save a few billion lives from an early death?
5. Remember the sabbath day. <== bow down to ONLY me! Do not question it! Waste an entire day every 7 days on ME!
6. Honour thy father and thy mother. <== duh
7.Thou shalt not kill. <== duh (Lots of real laws already in place for this.) Unless of course my representative religious leader tells you to kill people.
8.Thou shalt not commit adultery. <== why? It is not even defined exactly what it is. Basically it is do not steal women, or at least pay for them if you do. Also back then men had no way of knowing if a baby is theirs unless they lock down the woman as property.
9.Thou shalt not steal <== duh (Lots of real laws already in place for this.)
10. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor <== aka do not lie. (duh!)
11! Thou shalt not covet <== wait, what? How did we get to 11 it is supposed to be 10? Oh yeah all the various christian religions cant agree! People covet all the time anyways. Must be the most ignored "rule from on high" I ever seen.
The "duh" ones everyone already knows. Already laws everywhere forbidding the practice, dont need a "god" commandment. Everyone knows w/o some special magical tablet from god, don't kill humans, don't steal, and don't lie especially in a slanderous way. And respect your parents that raised you and made you possible, (unless they do not deserve it.)
Laws against murder, theft, adultery, lying, and dishonoring parents and gods etc. existed a long time before the Ten Commandments, e.g. with the Code of Hammurabi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
Still can't get used to the way this site loses posts in the middle of threads, so I'm moving this to the end.
"Yea well you guys do the exact same thing with the atheistic communists like the Soviet Union."
Bullshit, like most theists who come here you make up lies and don't even pretend yo evidence them. The SS was exclusively christian as is the Ku Klux Klan, does that mean you're a Nazi and a member of the Ku Klux klan?
"How many millions of people have massacred in atheistic communists societies were there was a ban on religion, old Soviet Union for one example. You atheists will go something like: Well they are not true atheists"
Another moronic lie, I'd say no such thing. I'd say what I always say, what the fuck has their atheism got to do with their crimes? All totalitarian dictators commit crimes, and that includes all theist dictators as well, like Hitler, or Saddam Hussein, or how about the Russian Tsars whose barbaric rule led directly to the Russian revolution and Stalinism. The Pope has absolute authority over the RCC, and the RCC is one of the most heinous criminal organisations on the planet.
"Well look, you guys just made that Scotsman fallacy too didn't you?"
Of course not, because no one made that claim, you just lied and made up a straw man argument. I'm happy to accept Stalin was an atheist, he claimed he was so why would I doubt him, but I see no evidence his crimes had anything to do with atheism, and it's beyond facile to claim he would not have behaved as he did is he had believed in a deity.
Now why don't you show comparable integrity and admit Hitler was a christian, and so were the SS. Or are you going to use the No True Scotsman fallacy, and add hypocrisy to your brazen lies?
I'm guessing you'll never give an honest answer, but will slither away like all the other theists who have burst into this forum with their sententious preaching, and then run and hide when their vapid superstitious claims are challenged.
Me thinks Rasster has left the building. Me thinks he has had enough spanking.
Excepting this one, my last post answered his post about why no one has argued against his Main Argument in the OP.
Thus, I went back, copied and pasted his Main Argument into HTML-Kit, tore it apart and addressed it. I ain't seen a new post by Rasster since.
I think everybody else had spanked him so hard, he never saw me actually tear apart his Main Argument in the OP.
What do y'all think? Think he had enough of y'all's spankings?
rmfr
@Arakish Re: "What do y'all think? Think he had enough of y'all's spankings?"
Impossible. NOBODY ever gets enough of MY spankings.....*pinky finger to lips Dr. Evil style*....
arakish: Think he had enough of y'all's spankings?
Nah. Christianity's the cult of hair shirts and self-flagellation. They thrive on guilt and humiliation.
After Christians took over western Europe, there were even more atrocities: Purges, Crusades, Inquisitions. Christianity did not make Europe more moral; it made it commit its immoralities for a singular god instead of multiple gods. Big Deal. If I am oppressed by one instead of many gods, what is the gain?
Quote by OP:
I shall fix this for the OP:
Morals were always there in the sense we evolved with a conscience, a sense we belong to each other how we act and live shapes our conscience and morals, yes, and it is also subject to evolve and change more. Morality is an instinct, an evolutionary mechanism humans developed as a result of early herding behaviors in vertebrates. Moral specifics, their expressions, are cultural artifacts arising from social mores.
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Let us break this sentence down, and please anybody who knows about logical thought and fallacies please correct me if I use them wrong or change what I say to make it more succinct.
This a non sequitur. It does not follow that if we have a conscience that developed a basis for morality that is must have been created. Just because we have morals tells us nothing about a creator is needed for them. We have an understanding of how consciousness can develop the basis for morality without needing to appeal to a supernatural deity. Taking Occam's razor, no more assumptions should be taken than necessary.
What makes the OP think that consciousness was created? Yes it is indeed very complex, probably the most advanced thing on this earth, and yes we don't know that much about it but simply saying "this is complex, therefore, a creator" is appealing to complexity, ignorance, and incredulity.
Just because you have a million examples of an intelligent being creating a complex object doesn't mean that all complex objects must be created by intelligent beings. HUGE unsound illogical reason there. Furthermore, we have many examples of that not happening. Crystals are perfect examples of this or kaleidoscopes. Very beautiful complex patterns are created in both of these, but we know from studying and manipulating them that the patterns arise simply from mathematics and the laws of physics (http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=2520).
This reasoning is circular. It assumes that the universe, black holes, stars, planets, snowflakes, life etc are created. Actually, physics, chaos theory and evolutionary theory tell us how most complex things in the world could have evolved on their own, without any help from any "creator" .
So complexity need not arise from intelligence. Now, does this mean it couldn't have been God? No, and I concede that. It just makes it very unlikely. But thinking logically, and taking no more assumptions than necessary, we have to decide whether complexity is more probably explained by an all-powerful creator who can do anything, or by mathematics and physics. Bearing in mind that postulating something that is itself unfalsified (supernatural deity) to explain another thing is a step back isn't it? One doesn't solve a mystery by injecting a deeper mystery. This is an increasingly common canard that is really just another 'god of the gaps' claim... essentially because neuroscience hasn't completely resolved how brain begets mind, there 'must be something more' .
And even worse logically, it uses a HUGE anecdotal evidence fallacy. In summary, the OP’s point is this:
Does the OP not see how this argument relies entirely on his own perception of what is and isn't possible in the universe? If he accepts this that is fine, that means he has faith but with that comes no evidence.
This again is a non sequitur. If I get what he is saying here, just because we feel like we belong to or were put here by a higher power says absolutely nothing about if there is one or that our consciousness was created for this reason.
The reason why we humans feel like we are part of a divine supernatural design can all be explained by more credible sources.
Theism is here because we are primates looking out into the cosmos on a rock and are afraid to die, we want a path set out for us to walk to make life easier, we want a person looking out for us. It's all based on wishful thinking.
"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. [...] If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."
– Sigmund Freud
“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
– Sigmund Freud
A result of our naturally evolved neurology made hypersensitive to the purpose (an ‘unseen actor’). because of the large social group's humans have and the way the brain associates pattern with intent.
Humans have evolved a variety of cognitive shortcuts to deal with the mass of information provided by our senses. In particular, we tend to filter sensory input according to a set of expectations built on prior beliefs and past experiences, impart meaning to ambiguous input even when there is no real meaning behind it and infer causal relationships where none exist.
Morality and ethics compel us to act this way.
Humans are social, and in order for a social species to survive and thrive, there must be naturally evolved tendencies towards the bare minimum of social cooperation. Notice how, for much of history and still today in many instances morality applies much more to behavior toward in groups, like family, clan, nation, often in that order.
We get our empathy and moralistic outlooks from inherent traits that have been selective over hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. As well as the evolution of morality and egalitarianism in society: Primate groups that do not work as a socially cohesive unit with fairness and some semblance of "rules" or "laws" would not have lasted long. Thus leaving groups more predisposed to caring for everyone in the unit to reproduce and pass on these "micro-societal values", keep this up for many millennia and you do get a genetic predisposition for at least a foundation of social order. Sure societies of the past are on the lower end of the curve when it comes to individual well-being and social justice and order, but as society advances, we learn more and more the benefits of working together in a society that values structure and "the golden rule". It is actually quite interesting as the increase in individual well being and law and order are inversely correlated with the decline of religious control and the rise of human secularism.
Everything works without the need to posit a supernatural deity to it. Occam's razor stands. It is not reasonable to have a predetermined answer before any evidence not deduced. Any more assumptions on this can be disregarded. No more assumptions should be made than necessary. Since there is no reason nor evidence to suggest a supernatural entity let alone realm exists, it is futile to attempt to argue morality is needed outside of a place not known.
Rasster,
I'm not impressed by your historical and social "analysis" which are heavily biased, full of serious omissions, and often outrageously contrary to known facts as has been pointed out by a number of people on this forum. A junior high school report comes to mind. Is this how you expect to convince us?
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