Hummm…it sounds like you were attempting to respond to the first paragraph of my prior post.  That paragraph was a quote from Dr. Arv Edgeworth’s post to which I was responding so….

I was attemting to advace the position that morality does not require a belief in a higher power.   We all seem to reach the same basic conclusions about right and wrong regardless of our religious faith or  lack thereof. 

I don’t think you said anything I disagree with. 

Sorry for the delay.  I haven’t been eating lunch for 2 weeks; I just got busy and lost track of this.  I’ve tried to answer your questions below.

Murder is wrong because human life is beautiful and precious.

I believe that survival of the fittest happens.  To believe otherwise is to ignore mountains of evidence to the contrary.  Many things that are not good happen: babies suffer pain, cancer, war, genocide, starvation… strong evidence against an omnibenevolent omnipotent God. Just because I believe that something should not happen doesn’t mean that it never will.

The kind of world I want to live in does not supersede the type that my neighbor wants to live in.  I prefer to live in a society where we democratically compromise on the type of world we want.  Some seek, and sometimes even manage, to impose the type of world that they want to live in on others. In some cases they justify doing so politically (the Chinese communist party) and in others they justify it religiously (the Taliban).  Does the fact that one world view is based on a deity make it better? Once again, just because I believe that these societal structures are evil doesn’t mean that they will not exist.

I do believe that morality, cooperation, and altruism are all partly learned and partly genetic. Belief in a deity is also partly learned and partly genetic. There are a number of books on these subjects, and I can’t do it justice in a comment but here are a few thoughts. Societies whose members cooperate and have rules, outcompete those that don’t so a genetic predisposition to be “good” can be selected for at the level of society. 

How spiritual you are is highly heritable and doesn’t change if you are separated from your parents at birth but which God you believe in is not heritable and depends almost entirely on the environment in which you are raised.  If you are raised by Muslim’s in Mecca you’ll be a Muslim…

David

Have you never witnessed a very young baby experiencing compassion?  (by, for example, crying when his mother cries). It certainly appears that morality (if thats what you want to label it) is, at least to some extent, innate.   Or perhaps the baby is crying because and only because  he perceives that his own security is being threatened.  If that’s the case you might be correct,  maybe “morality” is perpetuated by nothing but pure selfishness.    We as human beings do quickly learn that life is much easier and more pleasant  if we cooperate with our fellow human beings and it is undeniably true that  the easiest way to avoid (the intentional infliction of) pain is to avoid hurting others.   Maybe what we commonly refer to as “morality” or “goodness”  is nothing more than making wise choices for survival. 

I applaud your efforts on broaching these topics, but I must disagree with your assessments on morality. Morality can be determined by reason, logic, and the facts. For instance: murder, no one has inherent authority over anyone else, therefore no one has the right to take another person’s life in cold blood. The same would apply to personal property, thus the immorality of socialism and communism. We have the inherent right to defend ourselves from those that would take our life, liberty or property (thus the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and yes there are many toy guns in my house:-)). Anyway, I can get carried away with examples, but to reiterate my main point, morality is derived from reason, logic, and the facts. Try reading some of the stuff by the Mises Institute (mises.org) or Ayn Rand’s “The Virtue of Selfishness” (a couple of the essays from the book can be found on aynrand.org). And no her use of the word “selfish” does not mean that you can lie, cheat, steal and murder your way to happiness. Those things do NOT serve one’s self-interest in any way.

As for your comments on evolution, I’m not much of an expert on that topic. But basing one’s opinions on a three thousand year old, pre-science book is absolutely ludicrous, so even if evolution is one day “proven” wrong, I know that the actual naturalistic explanation of our origins will be found. I also know the creationists will have a field day with that statement, but I’ll leave it as is.

Thanks for the article.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090519-missing-link-found.html

Sorry I left it out.

Let me throw in some other stuff on the Atheism side that historically finds little discussion. This is the area of Symbols and Symbolic Form. In this discussion, I clearly belong to the orientation that Homo Sapien Sapien follows an evolutionary path of adaptive differentiation over this past three million years or so. Prior to this ongoing Homo line of adaptive differentiation, adaptive differentiation involving bipedalism, binocular frontal vision, and color vision (to name a few key elements) – lay the foundation for the Homo way of life.

Several keys predominate. One is the three million year time-frame of primary hunter-gathering, with only the past ten thousand years finding focus within the agricultural revolution. Another is that of about three million years dedicated to using tools and Symbolic Form, with only the past fifty thousand years as a maximum for any evidence pointing to the presence of the written word/symbol/whatever. (This three million years of using tools and Symbolic Form quite literally brings about the increase in skull size within the Homo line by a factor of three). Another is that during the years of hunter-gathering (prior to the agricultural revolution) there is neither evidence of so-called accumulation of wealth nor evidence of defense of territorial boundaries. There is though evidence of Symbolic Form within pre-agricultural-revolution burial rituals indicating a highly differentiated sense of Self from Other, implying a sense of the Spiritual within the Homo line.

Therefore, there is something about Symbolic Form conjoined with the agricultural revolution that brings forth the evidence of the accumulation of wealth and the defense of territorial boundaries. At base, so-called morality begins with the conjugation of Symbolic Form with the agricultural revolution – and this roughly commences 10 thousand years ago. However, Symbolic Form, a sense of Self, a sense of Other, and a sense of the Spiritual ALL begin somewhere near the beginning of the Homo line some three million years ago – through the agricultural revolution – to the present.

I would like to see this discussion of Atheism and Evolution to include the issues above.

Oh, and by the way – in the tradition of David including the notion of Atheists loving their wives – and Sandra including the notion that Atheists love their husbands – I want to include the notion that I love my lover and friend – out of wedlock.

Bob Allen

Is my basing my morals on the kind of world I live in really different than you basing your morals on who you believe the creator is and which books you believe are divine revelation?

You ask “What if you decide some day that you want to live in a world that doesn’t include your next-door neighbor?”. I guess my answer is that one of the functions of governments is to keep us from anarchy. Even an amoral atheist can be deterred from immoral acts. A religious zealot, on the other hand, can believe that God wants him to fly airplanes into buildings, shoot a doctor as he attends church, or to torture and kill thousands who refuse to believe as he does and no threat of earthly punishment will deter him.

In fact, it is not “the creator” that sets the rules but the clergy. When you abdicate rule making to the creator you end up with the anarchy that you seek to avoid. I can find religious leaders that believe in polygamy, gay marriage, capital punishment, or killing infidels and religious leaders that believe those things are abominations and sins; often both views occur in clergy of the same religion.

Now, on to evolution:

You claim that I “admit that macro-evolution can’t be seen happening before our eyes because it takes too long” In fact, I specifically said that macro evolution can be seen but that turning a bacterium into a horse took too long to observe.

You go on to claim that “Both sides believe in micro-evolution and speciation” which is not true. The vast majority of creationists reject speciation because the bible says that God made each after its own kind. Once you allow for speciation and you allow descent from a common ancestor of animals as diverse as a Saint Bernard and a Chihuahua there isn’t much left to argue about.

In response to:
You claim that “missing evidence” is a myth. Then you state: “just because evidence is missing now doesn’t mean it will remain so..” I think you just made their point for them again.

Allow me to clarify. There is endless amounts of evidence for evolution – including almost all of modern biology. I see it in my everyday life – everything from the new varieties of apples I eat to the antibiotic resistant ear infections my kids get. Hence, missing evidence is a myth. However, a creationist can always find something missing from a very impressive record. “Where is the link between humans and lemurs?” for example. As a creationists however, it must be disheartening to see new links being found all the time.

Finally, in answer to your concern about not finding a transitional form today the question stems from a misunderstanding about how evolution works. Species evolve to be better adapted to their environment, but the environment changes over time. So, many species today are intermediate between what they’ve been and what they will become, but not knowing the future I can’t predict whether a change is an intermediate form or just random drift.

Sandra,

Hopefully my wife is one of them.