Without God, we will live like animals!
After listening to the debate between Bill O'Reilly and Richard Dawkins, it struck me again that the resistance to evolutionary theory largely stems from the illusion that without God there can be no morality. Some believers feel threatened by evolutionary theory not because the theory is right or wrong -- the evidence doesn't seem to matter much to them -- but because accepting it would mean accepting that we have been created by natural processes including our morality. The final part is what bothers them the most.
O'Reilly exclaimed that at least Jesus had "advanced the human condition in a moralistic way" and another believer, Reverend Al Sharpton, expressed the same sentiment in a 2007 debate in the New York Public Library:
"If there is no order to the universe, and therefore some being, some force that ordered it, then who determines what is right or wrong? There is nothing immoral if there's nothing in charge."
Perhaps it is just me, but I'd be wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for a livable society, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked rules of right and wrong before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal?
Human morality must be quite a bit older than religion and civilization. It may, in fact, be older than humanity itself. Other primates live in highly structured social groups in which rules and inhibitions apply and mutual aid is a daily occurrence. Acts of genuine kindness do occur in animals as they do in humans. Altruistic behavior serves a cooperative group life, which benefits the actors of such behavior, yet the behavior is fueled by its own autonomous motivations, which vary from self-serving to other-regarding.
The animal kingdom offers so many examples that I surely cannot summarize them here (see my new book, The Age of Empathy), but the interesting part is not so much whether animals have empathy and compassion, but how it works.
In one experiment, we placed two capuchin monkeys side by side: separate, but in full view. One of them needed to barter with us with small plastic tokens. The critical test came when we offered a choice between two differently colored tokens with different meaning: one token was "selfish," the other "prosocial." If the bartering monkey picked the selfish token, it received a small piece of apple for returning it, but its partner got nothing. The prosocial token, on the other hand, rewarded both monkeys equally at the same time. The monkeys gradually began to prefer the prosocial token. The procedures were repeated many times with different pairs of monkeys and different sets of tokens, and the monkeys kept picking the prosocial option showing how much they care about each other's welfare.
A flourishing new field of evolutionary ethics focuses on how humans solve moral dilemmas (usually not in a rational Kantian way), which parts of the brain are involved (often old "emotional" parts), why moral tendencies evolved in the human species (probably to promote cooperation), what kind of animal parallels can be found (from prosocial tendencies to obeying social rules), how empathy evolved out of mammalian maternal care (which explains why in human adults the hormone oxytocin stimulates trust and empathy), and how religion piggy-backs on moral sentiments to promote a cohesive society. The sequence of how various tendencies came into being is: first social instincts and empathy, then morality, and finally religion. This is of course quite the opposite from the origin story of Christian religion.
If human morality is part of the larger scheme of nature, there is neither a good reason to look at evolutionary theory as undermining morality nor to look at God as a requirement for it. Raping your neighbor is destructive to society whether you believe in God or not. Conversely, I have never seen convincing evidence that a belief in God keeps people from immoral behavior. Those who think that without God humanity would lack a moral compass totally underestimate the antiquity of our moral sense.
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There will always be people who for whatever reason have to feel superior than the rest of us and religion teaches them they are the righteous the chosen few .
I doubt that they could even entertain the thought that there might not be a god because then that would mean they weren't superior and we were equals . Imagine that .
What if there is no god but a universal spirit that favors nobody ?
I totally agree with what you said here ,,Perhaps it is just me, but I'd be wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-contr
As a person who has Native ancestry your arguement makes perfect sense.
Before the introducti
The native people didn't own anything everything was shared they didn't even feel they owned the land they lived on they saw the earth as a provider of life to show respect for and take care of and to pass down this tradition to their ancestors . It was the whites who decided that the earth was to be conquered and owned .
Even Columbus himself wrote in his logs of the Native peoples generous spirit .
Where was the empathy for all those woman and
Oh, you must mean like when when we atheists decided that shooting a guy in church is OK provided that he's a doctor who does abortions.
"A belief that God knows of and cares about one's moral choices would make those choices more consistent
Exactly. This is why Fred Phelps & Co are unlikely to stop picketing at funerals.
I am afraid their morals are still VERY so called FLUID as you put it ! If it serves my interest then its okay !
Let's do a murder tally
Russians with the Purge and collectivi
Mao's cultural revolution etc..10-20 million
North Vietnam and Cambodia another few million
Cuba = only a more political prisoners per capita than anywhere else
Oh well you've got to break a few eggs to make that utopian omelet
Yeah the absence of religion has done much to improve morality.
Maybe we should all become scientolog
2) The Vietnamese paid a much higher blood price when they were attacked by the U.S.A, a Christian Nation, in an unjustifie
3) The main reason for the initial success of communism in countries like Russia, China and Cuba was the terrible suffering that the overall population had to endpure for centuries before the advent of communism, enslaved, dehumanize
4) Atheist leaders/na
Scientific knowledge is derived solely by use of the scientific method. The method includes only verifiable
To have their concepts accepted as science, the creationis
http://www
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Have you read the Bible? If the scripture was actually adhered to from a moral standpoint
"noone's twisting your arm or if they are their clearly out of line."
Christians are twisting everyone's collective arm as elected officials continue to push their religious propaganda at the highest levels of government
Dawkins notes that a nascent "ethics' is present in the hominids, and it is likely correct that ethics has evolved. Noam Chomsky might say that ethics is in the deep structure of creation. But neither evolution nor ethics is a demonstrat
Organized religion can undergird ethics with the teaching that all humankind is within an interrelat
If Mr. Dawkins could turn from constructi
أَوَلَمْ يَرَ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا أَنَّ السَّمَاوَ
21.30 . Have not those who disbelieve known that the heavens and the earth were of one connected entity, then We separated them from each other, and We made every living thing out of water? Will they not then believe?
Among the traditiona
The Evolver, The Maker, The Creator who has the Power to turn the entities.
هُوَ ٱللَّهُ ٱلۡخَـٰلِق
وَالْاَرْض
He is Allah, the Creator, the Evolver, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is the Mighty, the Wise.
That should put the argument to rest. Somethings have been evolved while others are of special creation. Man, the children of Adam - homo sapiens- are of the special creation kind.
It is humbler and more reverent to feel awe at the powers of life to give rise to systems of increasing complexity - including emotion, social relationsh
we see evidence of different morphologi
theoretica
from fish to mammal it is theorized that mutations in genetic material would alter the morphology of succeeding generation
if one takes it for granted that we should question religion, then we should also question the scientific basis for evolution. it is part of the search for answers, whether one has faith or not.
Question: Do you believe that air planes, nuclear bombs and antibiotic
The evidence is mountainou
As to the morality issue: Why can't we be good merely for GOODNESS's sake, instead of out of fear of punishment