It's rare (perhaps without precedent) for me to agree with one of your knocks on Darwinism, but there's a first time for everything. A lot of atheists mount an objection to theism on similar moral grounds (i.e. the problem of evil), without realizing that they are at the same time hoisting said moral grounds on their own petard. Not that this lets theists off the hook for the problem of evil in the first place...

Not so fast there.

Just because the Universe is indifferent, that does not mean that humans need to be.

The Universe does not think, we do. The Universe cannot be deliberately cruel. We can.

Or not.

Asserting, as the religionists do, that there can be no morality without god, or that there can be no free will without god does not make it so.

Harry - how do you know cruelty when you see it?

The only possible answer I can see is that good and evil, kindness and cruelty, meaning and non-meaning, are merely human constructs, and have no basis in the nature of the universe. That answer, though, raises the question: How could an indifferent universe could give rise to non-indifferent creatures such as ourselves? I'm not at all sure that an intellectually satisfying answer can be given to that question.

Harry:

You beat me to it - That was exactly my objection.

adarwinist:

Not all cruelty can be determined in this way, but a good rule of thumb would be, a) the act causes pain, whether physical, psychological, or financial, and b) the act is unwanted.

In the case of masochists, the inflicting sadist may or may not be cruel, depending on action and motivation.

Henry IX:

Good/evil, kind/cruel, or meaning/non-meaning, all require both conscienceness and consciousness.
Consciousness may be accidental, and is in any case a tool for survival. Conscienceness is also an asset for group and individual survival, raising the probability of cooperation, and lowering the probability of mutually destructive intra-tribe struggles.

Taking evolution at face value, and taking people as we know them to be, isn't it obvious that the lesson people will draw from evolution is that survival is the great goal?

Michael H. - you are expressing opinions, not rules. You are exactly right, though, in your round-about assertion that survival is the ultimate "good" in the materialist universe. Unfortuneatly, consciousness/conscienceness has little to do with it, as any cockroach could attest (if it were conscious/conscience)

adarwinist:

The beauty of it all, from Harry
's point of view, is that morality is whatever he says it is. In fact, he's stated here that he's never done evil because if something was evil he wouldn't do it--exquisite, no?

Michael:

"Want"? there's a moral standard for you.

oj: "want" is the basis of morality in the sense that morality is a description of those things we want to see in the world. Most humans who aren't thorough psychopaths want the world to be happy, not racked with pointless suffering. The tragedy of human history is that we are better at the simple desire than we are at agreeing on how to bring about its fulfillment. That is why devout monotheists in both Northern Ireland and Palestine can find themselves at each other's throats, and why Europe found itself nearly depopulated in the seventeenth century by its religious wars.

I find it charming to hear you all assert that a soulless universe couldn't have produced creatures with souls, but that strikes me more as wishful thinking than as hard fact. The universe itself is not a star and has no inherent quality of 'stellosity', but its physical processes nevertheless produced the stars we see in the sky.

"A lot of atheists mount an objection to theism on similar moral grounds (i.e. the problem of evil), without realizing that they are at the same time hoisting said moral grounds on their own petard."

I'm not exactly sure what this means, but the existence of evil argument is not that god cannot exist, but that if god exists, he cannot be both all powerful and all good.

As Harry mentioned, you cannot separate the existence of evil from the existence of conscious intent. It is the willful desire to inflict suffering or to willfully allow suffering to occur that makes an act evil, not the existence of suffering itself. Suffering and evil are not synonymous.

"Taking evolution at face value, and taking people as we know them to be, isn't it obvious that the lesson people will draw from evolution is that survival is the great goal?"

The great goal of whom? Evolution is not a conscious entity, it does not have goals.

"The only possible answer I can see is that good and evil, kindness and cruelty, meaning and non-meaning, are merely human constructs, and have no basis in the nature of the universe."

But humans are constructs of the universe, so good and evil are by extension constructs of the universe.

"How could an indifferent universe could give rise to non-indifferent creatures such as ourselves? "

The universe is indifferent to our non-indifference.

Robert:

He's not all powerful or all good.

Erich:

People want what other people have--happiness be damned. Morality is necessary to restrain those wants.

Robert:

Why elevate an indifferent Universe above non-indifferent Man? If morality is necessary, as we all agree, then aren't we the point of the Universe--creatures that are non-indifferent?

Maybe we are the point of the universe. Who knows? The universe will not tell you one way or another. We have to assert for ourselves that what is good matters, because the universe will not.

You make too much of the dichotomy between ourselves and the universe. We are the universe. The universe is not indifferent, because we exist.

"He's not all powerful or all good."

Then why do we need him?

Robert:

You make too little of the dichotomy. We must place ourselves at the center of the Universe, else we'll act indifferent.

Robert:

You only need Him if you wish a society that is not indifferent.

"We must place ourselves at the center of the Universe, else we'll act indifferent."

That is what Humanism is all about.

That's my point, Roger. As Harry says, we're pattern finding animals. If survival is the mechanism of our development, then survival is the highest value.

Well, David, if you don't survive, there isn't anything else of value, is there?

It's the old philosophical question -- the one all the moralists duck -- if the ends do not justify the means, what could?

You might try to reason backwards. Forget God a moment and observe his creation. (This is science.) Do we see humans (or any other animal, not to mention plants) spending all their efforts to kill off everybody else? Well, no, we don't see that.

Why not? Good question.

The answer cannot be Judeo-Christian morals, because the behavior predated those. So the answer must be something else.

I'm not going to tell you the answer, you'll have to look in the back of the book.

Robert:

But Humanism forgets that there's a Creator of the Universe, who put us at its center.

Harry:

But obviously your survival isn't the be all and end all, else why would anyone sacrifice themself for another?

And we do, of course, see humans killing each other off. What is abortion or genocide but the elevation of self over the moral obligation to others? From a materialist perspective there's nothing wrong with it, only from a God perspective is it wrong.

"But Humanism forgets that there's a Creator of the Universe, who put us at its center."

That's not what you said, you said "We must place ourselves at the center of the Universe, else we'll act indifferent."

All the appeal to the Creator does is give yourself permission to do something that you would do anyway. We put ourselves at the center of the universe by default - it is our nature to not be indifferent about our fate. How we got that way is irrelevant.

Morality to you is like a game of Simon Says. Actions are only moral if you do them at the behest of Simon (God), they have no intrinsic moral value in and of themselves.

God is all powerful and all good. The major theistic religions agree about these essential, defining attributes. The evil and suffering God allows or imposes are instructive, purgative, medicinal, provisional, temporary -- not ultimate. A three year old may not understand all the things his loving parents do to bring him up well, and a spilled ice cream cone or a tv show denied is the end of the world. He may hate his parents at times, and he may use kid logic to try to deny their power, their authority, their love for him. Later he understands, and is grateful. We'll all eventually have to undergo a radical adjustment in our sense of scale. As theodicies go, this may seem a bit facile -- doesn't mean it's not true.

"In fact, [Harry's] stated here that he's never done evil because if something was evil he wouldn't do it--exquisite, no?"

Harry in fact said that it had been a long time since he had intentionally done something knowing in advance it was morally wrong.

That is twice in the last several weeks you have gotten that completely wrong.

Robert D: Extremely well said.

OJ:
What is religious war but the elevation of one's own superstitions over the moral obligation to others?

Harry -- I'm not sure I qualify as a moralist, but I never duck that question. If the ends don't justify the means, nothing does.

Robert -- Bingo. Morality is a defined term. You don't get to redefine it. If it's any consolation, neither do I. I have no objection to you having your own code of conduct, I have my own. But don't kid yourself that it's universal or True.

Harry/Michael/Robert

Once again, you are using straw men. You assume because atheists don't self-immolate in a bachannalia of murder and mayhem, they must adhere to some moral code. Nobody is arguing they can't recognize self-interest or craft a civil order.

Materialists commonly define morality the way Michael did--not inflicting pain and respecting property. As they tend to extol physical life and choice as the sole purposes of existence, they pretty much have to to be consistent. That, however, flows not from believing in a mechanistic universe, but from being American. If you consider the US Constitution and Declaration to be historically "sacred" texts, then of course whatever makes classical liberal society work will seem right and therefore moral. A marxist would see executing oppressive classes and instituting state medical care in the same way, and feel equally moral about them. But, in both cases, the morality is faith-based, not natural or evolved.

Also, as David has pointed out before, this has nothing to do with evil, which is a noun and which you can't fit into your worldview. You guys dissemble clumsily about anything that doesn't involve physical pain or stealing. To take the thread of a previous post, if a twelve year old girl asks you why she shouldn't have sex with a pro athlete, you are caught. You know full well you would like to dissuade her and you may give all kinds of solid practical advice against it, but if she keeps on repeating: "Yes, I've thought of that. I can handle it.", you are bound to lose in the end because you can't say what she is doing is wrong even though every fibre in your being screams at you that it is. In the end, you are not talking about morality or evil, but about civil order and coercion.

That's also why so many atheists see nothing wrong with abortion, euthanasia, etc. No apparent pain. Ask yourselves this. Was the Holocaust wrong because so many Jews were killed or because they were killed so gruesomely and terrifyingly? Put another way, would the Nazis have been less appalling if they had found a way to kill painlessly and with no awareness of what was happening?

Robert:

That's it exactly. Morality has to have a Simon.

Mr. Finegan:

Then, at the very least, Christ's cries: "Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do" and "My Lord, my Lord, Why hast Thou forsaken me" are inexplicable. God can't be both all-powerful/all-knowing/etc. and be surprised at the true nature of mortality and doubt His own goodness.

David,

If there were a way to determine Universal, True morality, then none of us would be arguing about it. When was the last time anyone argued about the speed of light?

However, what does True morality mean outside of the human context? "Thou shall not kill" only has meaning to mortal, killable beings. There may be something called True Morality out there, some aethereal, Platonic essence, some image of the perfect morality. But the only morality that counts to humans is human morality.

This is something that every human can grasp, for we all know what it is like to suffer and to cause suffering. As Dennis Prager is fond of saying, empathy is the starting point of ethics. To know how you want to be treated and to realize that others deserve to be treated likewise is to know morality.

Whether this morality aligns with True morality is a question I don't need to answer, because it won't change my mind. If True morality tells me to burn my son on an altar, I will tell True morality to tale a walk.

Robert:

Why "deserve"?

"To take the thread of a previous post, if a twelve year old girl asks you why she shouldn't have sex with a pro athlete, you are caught. You know full well you would like to dissuade her and you may give all kinds of solid practical advice against it, but if she keeps on repeating: "Yes, I've thought of that. I can handle it.", you are bound to lose in the end because you can't say what she is doing is wrong even though every fibre in your being screams at you that it is."

Peter, how will you handle it? Why is she going to be swayed by "because God says so" if she won't be swayed otherwise?

I believe that a lot of the sexual revolution can be attributed to teenagers who only got the "because God says it is wrong" admonition from their parents. Just resorting to taboos is an abdication of parental responsibility, you have a duty for passing on wisdom to your children, which involves explaining why things are wrong. Almost all children will reach the age when they will blow off the admonitions of their parents. If you haven't filled with them with any wisdom, then they will just repeat all of your mistakes and learn the hard way.

I'll be out of here until next Monday, Happy New Year all!

Happy New Year, Robert.

OJ,

I didn't say Jesus was God; he gives mixed messages about his own divinity and seems to doubt it himself sometimes. So I don't ascribe omniscience and omnipotence and complete, divine goodness to Jesus but to the one he referred to as Father, the one he spoke of when he said "Why do you call me good? Only God is good." The doctrines of Jesus' divinity and of the Trinity seem to me to paint over the Gospels' ambiguity regarding the precise relationship between Jesus and the Father.

Jesus's plea for forgiveness for his killers and his anguished sense of being forsaken by God are only inexplicable if you grant him full divinity, full identity with God. Incredible anguish can shake even the strongest faith.

That God needed to send Christ among us to comprehend us suggests a lack of omniscience. That He is surprised He Created such a flawed creature suggests a lack of omnipotence.

God sent Christ to teach us, not to teach Himself about us. I'm not sure what you mean by God being surprised he created a flawed creature, unless you're referring to the anthropomorphized portrait of God in Genesis (and anyway, our flaws are ephemeral, not constitutional). But what suggests he's surprised by our rebellion? I don't take the limitations ascribed to God in the OT so literally, and my theological conclusions are not based on Christianity alone. If you want more theological clarity about God's omnipotence, omniscience and goodness, try the Bhagavad Gita. If you want to stay within Christianity, St. Augustine does the best job of explaining the issues of free will and the fall, sin, evil, etc., without speculating that these might somehow be the result of divine incompetence.

God even enters into a series of covenants with Man, thereby limiting whatever power he does have. And at least one of these, that with Noah, seems to be based on some regret on His part.

Well, if His plans are no more likely to work than mine, I prefer mine.

Peter, I did not participate in that thread about the 14yearold girls (not 12, I think) and the jocks, for a couple of reasons.

1. When I grew up, marrying off 13-year-old girls was regarded as legal, moral and appropriate by the rockribbed Christians of east Tennessee. As I've noted before, some of my playmates were married by age 13.

So I don't see that as a moral issue, just social.

2. In my youth, I was a sports writer. I watched women begging for sex with athletes. So when they start young, well, that's their call, isn't it?

Suppose the girls had been 16? 6?

Harry:

That's an admirably succint and honest way of putting it--all atheism really amounts to is the elevation of oneself.

adarwinist:

Surely you aren't claiming that consciousness/conscienceness aren't helpful for survival ?
Coming from a member of the most successful species on Earth, that would be odd.

Peter B.:

I said nothing whatsoever about morality, merely proposed a rule of thumb for defining cruelty.

While there is a thread of truth in your statements, it's deeply ironic that in the very next sentence after accusing me, et al., of using straw figures, you begin constructing an effigy worthy of Burning Man.

Do you find that many people respond favorably to being told what they think, believe, know, and want ?

You make many assumptions, and then expand and build upon them.
In my case, you end up so wide of the mark that you might as well be Paul Krugman.

The Holocaust was wrong because the Jews, Gypsies, mentally defective, etc., were killed without their consent.
It was particularly appalling due to the systematic, organized inhumanity of the process, as opposed to, say, the Rwandan slaughter.
However, the Holocaust is hardly unique in that regard: I place Stalin's Ukrainian famine, Pol Pot's labor camps, and the Italian gov't/military's treatment of their own troops during WW I in the same category, although the last example is also the least.

As to your last sentence: Yes, of course.
However, they'd be no less wrong, although they'd be less evil.

Harry:

So, what is, is, right?

Michael:

It's obvious why you think you should have to consenbt to things, but why should I care whether you consent?

oj:

Because God does.

You maintain that God is necessary for morality. To cast aside God's decision and example regarding humanity's leeway to choose would be both inconsistent, and a folly.

Peter, if by "what is right" you mean "what is moral," well, I don't find sex, in itself, immoral. That's how you tell me apart from the Christians.

As for the correctness or likely outcome of the incident in Canada, I don't know enough to form an opinion.

Will young girls survive early sexual encounters with older men. You'd better hope so.

Orrin, mutual agreement is important because you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Your view of how the world would work without a godly morality is contradicted by history. It hasn't worked that way in the past.

And it is contradicted by darwinsim, which explains, even if Christians can't, why it is advantageous to be social and suicidal to be antisocial.

That's so whatever moral system is in operation. Even in Stalinist Russia, people found it to their advantage to work the system.

Harry:

If the point of morality is that Man is sinful by nature and needs to have his basest impulses restrained it's self-defeating to ask folks what they think they should be allowed to do. The answers are obvious--kill the inconvenient and bothersome and transfer other peoples' stuff to themselves.

Michael:

God doesn't say anything about consent--He tells us how we must behave ourselves.

OJ:
Have you ever heard of self organizing systems? There are plenty of them around. Capitalism is a self-organizing system. So is morality.

We could all be potentially inconvienient and bothersome to someone else. We all have stuff we don't want to lose. Deciding it is OK for us to kill and steal means it is OK for us to be killed and plundered. Being social animals, people, in general, recognize that implicit payback.

Of course, there are exceptions. Replacing "us" with "them," as in societies where power is concentrated in one group, leads to the results you predict. E.g., the -isms, Sunnis where they predominate, Shiites where they predominate, Hindus in India, and the Spanish Inquisition, where the opportunity for theft was as good a reason as any for an accusation of heresy.

Humans, in general, restrain their worst impulses. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. We were social animals--with all the self-organizing restraints on conduct that requires--long before we could conceive of religion.

You make a similar point above, Jeff, to which I was inexcusably sarcastic. I'll try to be less sarcastic here.

As I understand your argument, it is that humans are social animals, that sociability is a plus factor for survival and that inherent in sociability are certain rules of behavior, which implicitly accept the competing claims of others within the group to be treated as each member itself wishes to be treated, that we can call "morality." The mechanisms of evolution have resulted in these rules being hardwired within us, except for certain members of the group who are born without (or with a weaker than normal) version of these rules. We call these people "psychopaths" and, within the bounds set by sociability, psychopathology makes one less apt to successfully reproduce.

I have no problem with that at all, excepting only the caveat that it makes crystal clear that evolution is your god. Go forth, brother, and worship as you will.

Michael/Jeff/Harry

"Do you find that many people respond favorably to being told what they think, believe, know, and want?"

Not particularly, but so what? You (and Robert) seem to be worried about the efficacy of parental technique, which is a different question. You may think religious strictures cause people to rebel, but Midge Dector made the opposing case years ago in "Liberal Parents, Radical Children" that moral relativity feeds on itself and becomes more extreme in succeeding generations. Tom Wolfe made the same point about the sixties' rebels. If you look at what liberals predicted would happen when porn, abortion, pre-marital sex, etc. were first cautiously tolerated and what actually did happen, their case seems pretty strong.

True, a religious person who believes transmitting the rules in the Bible is all a kid needs is indeed in for a few unpleasant surprises, but that is tangenital to what we are arguing about. Are you going to define right and wrong in a way that makes sure your kids are on the right side whatever they do?

And where does your logic lead you? Gee, I think sex is wrong for my young teenage daughter. The very idea appalls, sickens and terrifies me, but I won't say so because that will lead her to rebel by having sex, so I'll pretend it is up to her and then hold my breath hoping (praying?)she will make the right decision? Kids are pretty contemptuous of that confused hypocrisy.

We have a teenage mental health crisis, especially among girls. As Dr. Laura said, if you're not going to raise them, don't have them. If it doesn't work, that means heartache and trouble, but you don't make the problem disappear by saying "Whatever you decide is best for you."

Jeff, to assert that humans restrain their worst impulses naturally is more a prayer than a fact and a strange argument from one who objects to the idea of a deity because there is so much evil in the world. Even if we have a natural capacity for empathy, feelings are not sources of morality, which is about actions. We have an equal capacity for jealousy, so why are you so confident the good feelings will always triumph in the end? Especially as you say evolution is incredibly stupid at times and leads nowhere in particular.

Harry, I assure you I am under no illusions that a universal belief that teenage sex is wrong would eradicate teenage sex. Christianity is not one big ethical cleansing programme.

Jeff:

No, there are, by definition, no "self-organizing systems". Systems represent decision making and organizing by sentient being.

Peter:

Actually, most everyone responds well to it. Even Harry/Jeff/Robert have adopted JC morality for the most part, they just think they can arrive at it themselves. In reality, they conform almost totally to the religious ethos they claim to have freed themselves of.

Orrin:

I know. Isn't it fun, though, to watch the nervous indignation when you compliment them by telling them how righteous they are?

OJ,

The covenants God establishes with Noah and the Israelites do not limit his actual powers; if he chooses, he can break such covenants. Omnipotence, of course, would include the power to voluntarily enter into agreements, along with the ability to break them. That he didn't break them is no proof that he lacked the ability to do so. Doing so would be what Kierkegaard calls a "teleological suspension of the ethical." As source and definer of the categories of good and evil, God is above the morality that applies to us. And though God was sad that such an extreme measure as the flood was warranted by man's evil, there's no indication in scripture that He thought He made a mistake in taking such a measure. It's instructive for us to know that He brought the flood, and to know why.

If you truly want to know whether God is all good and all powerful, you need to be provisionally open to these ideas, and then, most importantly, pray that He'll reveal His power and goodness to you. Those who ask, receive.

Dawkins and other atheists/materialists refuse to acknowledge their own epistemological biases, their dogmatic anti-empiricism. The world's theistic traditions make the same offer to all of us: Do you want to know whether God really exists? Do you want to know why you're here, who you are, how you're supposed to live, what lies beyond death, and what your relationship is to the Absolute Truth? Then, just as in any other discpline, there's a prescribed method of investigation by which you can ascertain answers. First, you need to have an open mind and at least a scintilla (or, uh, mustard seed) of provisional faith that this method might actually lead to knowledge (again, this is true with every discipline). You need to study, you need to follow certain rules of conduct, and above all you need to pray to God for understanding, even if doing so seems, as it will at the beginning, the height of absurdity. If you follow this method, God will reveal Himself to you. But if you refuse to employ the prescribed method (including sincere, patient, assiduous prayer) and then claim you know that God doesn't exist, you're like someone who says he wants to learn about microorganisms but refuses to use a microscope, and ends by claiming that microorganisms don't exist, all because prejudicially he rejects the methods of inquiry that would lead him to knowledge.

Maybe someone used to beat you with a microscope. Maybe a lot of biologists are hypocrites who mistreated you. Maybe you think you'd be happier not knowing about forms of organic life invisible to the naked eye. You'd still be wrong to conclude that paramecia don't exist.

Well, Bob, you made the point I was going to make about god being all-powerful. Signing non-enforceable contracts does not diminish one's power. You'd think all the lawyers here would have jumped on that.

But I know god is supposed to be all-powerful because that's what I was taught in the Baltimore Catechism.

As I've said before, to a Hindu, Orrin would be almost as much an atheist as I am. He believes in a mere one god, and not a very godly god at that.

He's practically a Unitarian. In fact, I think he is, although he does seem to reject the doctrine of "neighborhood of Boston."

Of all the avowed deists here, only you, Bob, would have been accepted as a Christian in East Tennessee. The Catholics have to believe in Virgin Birth or they're out; and the Baptists have to accept Jesus as a personal (and deified) Saviour, or they're out.

Welcome to the wilderness, the rest of you. All the most interesting people wander here!

Harry:

With all due respect to the good burghers of East Tennessee, why do you take what you find offensive about their piety as an indictment of faith in general? I've lost count of the number of times you have condemned this or that evolutionary scientist, some very respectable, as knowing nothing about Darwinism, yet you seem to hold to it with a passion that would impress the saints. If I understand you, Bible-belt intolerance and your beloved Inquisition prove billions wrong ab initio, but the fruit flies of Hawaii redeem all the errors and evil committed by Darwin's apostles.

Bob:

A compelling argument, eloquently put. Thanks.

OJ:
Bacteria and slime mold colonies form self organizing systems. Some chemical solutions do the same thing. Capitalism is a self organizing system, because it operates without plan, direction, or central decision maker. Morality is a self organizing system. That a host of sentient beings are involved doesn't change that.

Peter:
I'm not sure what you mean by "And where does your logic lead you?" Nothing in "my logic" prevents me being very directive in making decisions based on my concept of my daughter's best interests. So, regarding sex, I can tell her what the best decision is, and why, then be as dictatorial as need be in its enforcement.

Humans, in general, have to restrain their worst impulses, or we would never have advanced far enough to have religion to argue over. Good actions don't always prevail over evil ones; rather, they do so just often enough. Kind of what you would expect from evolution. Invocations of a Supreme Being don't change that underlying fact, as history amply shows.

Bob:
I spent many years provisionally open to those ideas. Unfortunately, the other end of the line was dead.

Putting aside "teleological suspension of the ethical" for a moment, there is plenty of utterly pointless suffering in the world that has nothing to do with free will. A compassionate God could certainly design a way around cleft palate, for instance. There are a host of other examples; I'm sure you can think of plenty. God can be good, and all powerful. Both, in the face of cleft palate, is a stretch.

Peter:
The problem East Tennessee burghers pose is that it is impossible to discern which kind and degree of piety is correct. But it makes a difference, because those pieties make mutually exclusive claims--otherwise, they wouldn't exist as separable faiths.

Take a trivial example: dancing. To those burghers, dancing is the work of the devil. Well, is it? If you like to dance, are you willing to give it up on their say-so? You better, because their God-given morality is very clear on the subject.

"... the fruit flies of Hawaii redeem all the errors and evil committed by Darwin's apostles." You must have concluded Nazism and Communism would not have occurred absent evolutionary theory. I doubt that very much.

David:
Posing evolution as the backdrop for morality means a couple things. First, it explains how morality can exist independent of religion, as it must. If people do not already have some innate sense of right and wrong, moralistic appeals to those concepts would be utterly meaningless. Secondly, it explains why our moral sense is so prone to failure--just barely good enough comes with the evolutionary territory.

Invoking evolution as the source of our morality does not make evolution my God, because it has nothing whatsoever to say about God. It does however, suggest that religion is really nothing more than icing on the cake, and that religions are correct only to the extent they materially succeed. That religion is materially based may be an uncomfortable conclusion, but lack of comfort is not probitive.

As I was writing this, my 9-yr old son came down, and read this over my shoulder. His asking what this is all about led to a discussion on morality (when I asked him why he thought stealing a Game Boy cartridge from his friend would be wrong, he replied, without a moment's hesitation, "Instinct. My brain says so."). Whereupon my 10-yr old daughter joined the conversation, which turned towards discussing the movie "Edward Scissorhands" which we had seen the night before, and had upset her quite a bit. It is an excellent morality tale, which, among other things demonstrates that being good doesn't ensure good things will happen.

Anyway, your post led to an excellent half-hour discussion of morality; thanks for getting it started.

Were capitalism self-organizing it would not be so rare in human history nor require a philosophy and legal system to function.

Jeff:

Your children have grown up in a Judeo-Christian morality soaked culture--your kid's instinct would be to cave in another kid's head and steal the game. Luckily, religion quells most of our instincts.

Jeff:

A) "when I asked him why he thought stealing a Game Boy cartridge from his friend would be wrong, he replied, without a moment's hesitation, "Instinct. My brain says so.")."

Just thought of that all by himself, did he? Astounding. I have to admit he sounds more convincing than his old man.

B)"So, regarding sex, I can tell her what the best decision is, and why, then be as dictatorial as need be in its enforcement."

Boy, you atheists on this site should get the party line straight. Michael and Robert are worried kids will do exactly the opposite of what they are told while you are rediscovering the joys of 17th century patriarchy. Until what age do you believe your reign of terror will be effective? Talk about the Big Spook!

C)"You must have concluded Nazism and Communism would not have occurred absent evolutionary theory. I doubt that very much."

Of course you doubt that because it doesn't fit into your worldview and evolutionists are well-known for ignoring inconvenient facts and disdaining humility. Why would a materialist, secular doctrine like evolution have anything to do with secular materialism?

Happy New Year and all the best to you and your great family.

Michael:

Sorry about that. Can't always keep the faces straight around here.

Jeff,

Of course I don't know the specifics of your investigation, but as I indicated in my post, mere provisional openness, while necessary, is not sufficient in this, the most important of all inquiries. Your abandonment of the search renders your conclusions premature. Knowledge of God is not cheap, and "many years" is often not enough to gain this knowledge. Do you drop out of high school because the teachers won't award you a PhD?

Your allusion to "pointless suffering" begs a huge question: why do you assume you have sufficient data to determine whether such suffering is pointless or purposeful? In Vedic theology, the world in which we live is a sort of purgative prison in which we can entertain the illusion that we are independent from God. We're trying to be something we're not, and suffering is a prominent result. But even the worst suffering here is instructive and medicinal, as I indicated above. The problem with your argument, as with many atheist arguments, is that it's based on mere assumptions, on uninformed speculation about what an all good and all powerful God would do. Likewise, a surgeon's son who sneaks into an operating theater and sees his father cutting someone's chest open might decide his father is an evil killer.

Bob:
First of all, I am not an atheist.

Secondly, your line of reasoning is inherently self justifying, in that it could never admit the possibility that the other end of the line is, in fact, irrevocably dead. The requirements to get a PhD are pretty clear. If I were to fulfill the requirements, but still not get the PhD, then what?

Religionists continually make assumptions about all manner of spiritual considerations. Eschatology springs immediately to mind as a particular case of extensive assumptions minus even a jot of data. So if religionists base their arguments on uninformed speculation about what God does, why can't anyone else?

Why do you assume I don't have sufficient data to conclude there is such a thing as pointless, random suffering? You pose the inscrutability argument. In contrast, I think it is entirely scrutable: random, pointless, suffering exists precisely because the Universe is utterly indifferent to our existence.

I certainly can't say you are wrong. How can you say I am wrong?

OJ:
Are there any cultures that encourage stealing from friends? Or might it be that our instincts limit our desire to steal?

Peter:
A). Heck, I was surprised, also. So far I have relied on leadership by example, without putting much reasoning behind it. So when he said that so quickly, it was a Mr. Jaw meet Mr. Floor kind of event.

B) The only party line I need to get straight is with my wife. I have no idea how long I can be effective, but abdication in the face of difficulty is nothing to admire.

C) Thanks to M. Ali Choudhury, I am reading "The Triumph of Western Civilization." Among other things, it emphasizes the role of Christianity in the development of the West. It also calls Communism and Nazism major religions, and notes the roots of Communism go back to early Christian teachings. Why would a spiritual, sectarian doctrine have anything to do with Communism?

BTW, thanks for the holiday wishes; I could scarcely have asked for better. I hope yours have turned out as well.

Jeff:

Yes, other cultures do encourage stealing. But, more broadly, most cultures teach that it is wrong precisely in order to overcome instinct.

Jeff,

I didn't say you were an atheist. But your argument, in refuting the theistic hypothesis of an all powerful, benevolent God, is atheistic.

You're right, I won't admit the possibility that the other end of the line is dead. Why? Because I dialed that number myself. I had to keep dialing for a long time, I had to clean a lot of wax out of my ears and resistance out of my heart, but eventually I heard an answer (it was the surprise of my life!). I continue to hear that answer, not without some ambivalence. There are ways in which it makes life much more challenging. But that line is not only alive, that line is Life itself.

You say that "random, pointless, suffering exists precisely because the Universe is utterly indifferent to our existence." This is circular reasoning. You assume you have sufficient data to pronounce the Universe indifferent. How can I say you're wrong? Because I've come across data that gives powerful indications of an opposite conclusion. The truth is that God loves you and wants to reveal himself to you, all your ostensible experience to the contrary notwithstanding. Keep dialing that number. What have you got to lose?

Time and self-respect. Besides, I was raised Catholic, and we were taught that Faith is a gift, that you cannot demand it, and that to demand it is Pride, the greatest sin.

Or as that great theologian, Jim Morrison, put it: "Petition the Lord with prayer? Petition the Lord with prayer? You CANNOT petition the Lord with prayer!"

However, I find you approach more coherent, and certainly closer to what I was taught as a lad, than what Orrin et al. push.

You have done what I did. Made up your own mind. Maybe God helped you, maybe not. But you did it, you did not follow instruction from some -- possibly bogus -- Teacher.

Contra, Peter, I have no problem with the piety of the people of East Tennessee. It's what they do to people who have a different opinion that I find reprehensible.

There are two possibilities for personal conduct. Make your own way, or follow someone else's. Let's say I was growing up in East Tennessee. My parents paid good money for bad education in morality, but there were hundreds of people -- all reputedly moral -- telling me that not only were my parents all wrong, but that if I didn't switch over to their opinion, I would burn in Hell forever.

On what basis do I choose?

Harry:

You honour your parents, as the Commandments told you.

Yes, Harry, that's the atheist conceit, that you've forged your own path, but in reality you conform rather closely to JC morality. If feeling that you invented it yourself is important to you for psychological reasons that's not such a big problem.

oj:

Rather, Lucifer wanted humans to be told what to do, and instead, we got free will, and the necessity to learn to make the right choices.

Peter B.:

Think nothing of it.

OJ:
What precisely is unique to J-C morality, as opposed to others extant, that Harry is indebted to?

I don't think Harry is saying he invented his morality; rather, he has been saying that among the variations of morality available, he has made specific choices about what constitutes right and wrong, rather than acquiescing to one specific religious authority to decide for him.

What's more, his assertion is that all of you, to the extent you didn't blindly swallow your parent's religion, have done precisely the same thing.

From the sounds of it, OJ has done a lot of this himself, because his belief system doesn't particularly adhere to any one Christian orthodoxy I am aware of. Unless God talked directly to OJ--he may well have, I don't know--than what OJ has done is precisely what Harry has done. That Harry has declined to put a theological cloak on his decision making process does not make it an atheistic conceit.

Peter:
What if one's parents are Hindu? According to OJ, Hinduism is plain wrong, so adhering to the commandment to honor one's parents will lead to perpetual spiritual error. And according to the Catholics, there is only one true church.

Bob:
Time, and self respect.

If the evidence available appears to contradict a particular human presumption that God is both benevolent and omnipotent, then one possible conclusion is that presumption is mistaken.

Suffering that appears random and pointless may in fact be precisely that, and your imposition of an inscrutability argument is itself circular, because the more inscrutable the cause of the suffering, the more correct the conclusion.

Any God that allows what happened to Bam, is, like any other mass murderer, not worthy of my worship. Any God that couldn't do anything about it doesn't seem worth the effort.

Jeff:

The Commandment is not to agree with your parents or even love them, but to honour them. Think about it.

Sorry G-d lets you down so much. Maybe if we put Dawkins in charge everything will be much better.

Peter:
I did think about it--your answer to Harry seemed perplexing on that very account. Does honoring them include acceding to their direction in spiritual matters?

Is God a mass murderer?

OJ:
Which cultures encouraged stealing within the "us" group?

Plenty have advocated stealing from "them".

Harry:

Yes, I made up my own mind, but only after persistently conducting an experiment whose results are ultimately reproducible by anyone with a strong enough longing for the truth to subordinate attachment to their current self-image (i.e., self respect) to persistence in this quest. Actually, my question to Jeff about what he had to lose is a very important one. I didn't mean to imply that there isn't a cost to this knowledge; it's very costly, this pearl of great price. But it tells you who you really are, so the soi-disant "self respect" that keeps you from the search for God, and for discovery of your constitutional identity as servant of God, is paradoxically debasing, incarcerating you as it does in labyrinthine illusion. Jim Morrison is an instructive example; he was a brilliant guy, but his narcissistic iconoclasm and uncontrolled appetites kept him mired in illusion that ultimately killed him. Listen to "The End" -- he never even got out of his Oedipal phase. And you take him for some kind of authority?

Jeff:

Actually I wasn't advancing the inscrutability argument; not the classical Job sort anyway. For a long time I was dissatisfied with Judaeo-Christian theodicy arguments. Eventually I found in the Vedic scriptures a theodicy unrivaled among the world's wisdom traditions in comprehensiveness and coherence. As I mentioned above, all of us in this world are here because we chose to leave our spiritual home with God in order to enjoy the illusion of independence. At our own risk, we chose to come here and engage in projects that would make us feel like we were autonomous gods. The result is a mixture of suffering and enjoyment. But even the worst suffering, such as that happening in Bam, is temporary, and it's designed to show us how we've erred and point us back toward our home of unending bliss and knowledge. The suffering is thus combined of aversive conditioning and healing pain of the sort caused by surgery. There is no eternal hell; God gives us endless opportunities to return to Him.

These are the broad outlines; many of the details may be inscrutable, but God gives us the knowledge necessary to find out who we really are.

Bob, what makes you think I diddn't expend as much effort as I'm capable of in considering the question of god?

I just came to an opposite conclusion from yours.

As for self-respect, it's like means and ends. If you don't respect yourself, who else would?

Orrin, I accept, at most, 7 of the 10 commandments. I don't think that makes me a Judeo-Christian or even seven-tenths of one.

Harry,

You said yourself that your unwillingness to sacrifice time and self-respect is what keeps you from further exploration of the question of God. This implies that you have not exhausted your capability to continue the search; you've simply decided that you have other priorities.

Consider the possibility that the self you're so intent on retaining respect for is not your true self. Humility is a sine qua non for this experiment.

Bob:
How about I quit for the same reason I don't buy lottery tickets: it isn't worth the candle.

Is it your opinion the Vedic scriptures are superior, or divine revelation? If the former, then you are suggesting that others use material justification--your word--as sufficient reason to believe your assertion. Come to think of it, that is true of the latter, too.

Fundemantally, though, you do resort to an inscrutability argument. The reason we are here in the first place is inscrutable: unless there is no communication in our spiritual home, one would think the word would get out how futile it is to come here. Secondly, did the suffering in Bam point out the error of the people who died, or survived; the horribly injured or the barely touched?

Never mind the inscrutability of victimizing a group of people whose religious creed is subservience to the God the Vedic scriptures assert they are trying to be independent of.

The alternative of course, is short and brutally simple: the Universe is wholly, completely, indifferent. It fits the evidence completely, but does rather have the shortcoming of being unpleasant to behold.

That doesn't make it wrong, though.

Jeff,

In terms of theological clarity and comprehensiveness, especially regarding theodicy, yes, the Vedic scriptures are superior to those of the Abrahamic religions. All theistic scriptures are divine revelation, but the fullest and most profound revelation I've come across is in the Vedas. And I'm not asking anyone to simply take what I say on faith -- you can check this out for yourself.

Yes, the ultimate futility of coming here is known in our spiritual home. That's why the great majority of spirit souls elect never to come here. But the prospect of enjoying some minute, illusory sense of independence from God was something that we fallen souls found hard to resist. Futility is not exactly a strong or universal disincentive for people full of desires; witness the success of drug dealers, casinos, pornographers, etc. And notice I said ultimate futility. The enterprise is doomed, but in the meantime we can also have a lot of fun with our personal God projects here.

Again, all the adversity we experience here is either aversive conditioning or healing pain. God does not victimize; he instructs and heals. Religious people are not immune to the effects of this sort of karma; many of the karmic reactions we experience are from previous lives (for the scientific case for reincarnation, see books by researcher Ian Stevenson). I admitted that the details are inscrutable. But God has revealed the broad outlines of His plan to bring us back home. I cannot prove this to you, but you can prove it to yourself if you want.

The hypothesis of an indifferent universe is an unpleasant one, but I certainly don't reject it for that reason. I'm not sure it's more unpleasant than what I believe -- that I and all my fellow denizens of this suffering world are here through our own fault, that we're accountable to a Perfect Being against whom we've sinned, and it's a long, hard road back home, even though He helps us. When I was investigating these questions, I was hoping to find out something much less disturbing, something that would let me off the hook.

If you ever decide to begin your investigations anew, I'd suggest reading "The Forgotten Truth" by Huston Smith. He makes a better case for the theistic worldview than I ever could.

I hope you don't mind, but I'd like to weigh in as well.

Personally I ascribe to a more Agnostic worldview. I don't believe that there is much of anything that we can know, and I think that it is rather irresponsible of people to present themselves as having finally deciphered the secrets of the universe.

Of course, they may be right. One would hope, however, that if one was able to crack wide open the nature of the universe, they would be wise enough to realize how hard it would be to convince others of its Truth-and moreover, given the nature of consciousness, doubt that what they had received was truly unmitigated Truth.

What I mean to say is, to know something is an absolute, and there are very few things that we can be absolutely certain of.

We can be certain that we exist and that the world exists, in some fashion, for to disbelieve in yourself and the things that you have experienced is a definitional impossibility. You may doubt what you and they are or made of, but even if they are simply ideas in your head they still exist.

Hmm...so anyway. What does this have to do with theism and atheism?

Some theists claim they know that god exists, and some atheists claim they know he does not. I expect, in reality, they really mean that they believe it. To say you know means not only that you have no doubt that something is true, but that you could not possibly doubt it- and I suspect that most of the faithful (meaning those that do not doubt despite evidence against or a lack of evidence for), upon close examination, would come to the realization that it would be possible to doubt what they believe.

That which we can be absolutely certain of is boring. The things people have faith in are the important things anyway. I just think it’s important not to fool ourselves into thinking what we believe in is what we know.

Has it occurred to any of you that "free will" is an incoherent concept and something it is logically impossible for anyone to posses? Which in turn removes most meaning from the words choose, should, ought, etc. No one could ever have consciously chosen to do, think, or believe anything other than what they did, thought, or believed. And this conclusion remains the same whether the universe is completely deterministic or subject to some measure of true randomness (as opposed to a mere lack of knowledge about all the factors that led to some observed event(s)).