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The Forum > Article Comments > Morality and the 'new atheism' > Comments

Morality and the 'new atheism' : Comments

By Benjamin O'Donnell, published 1/2/2008

The problem of morality: good deeds, it seems, really are their own reward.

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gav_gjs wrote:
in genesis god instructs people to go forth and multiply and fill the earth and have dominion over the earth and all living things.

Well, if He hadn't said that perhaps you wouldn't be here, gav_gjs. And perhaps it wouldn't be you but dolphins sitting at their computers and engaging in discussions.

But seriously, what's your definition of morality?
Posted by apis, Friday, 1 February 2008 8:36:48 PM
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For O’Donnell to convince me that good exists without God, he needs to do more than convince me that evolution can explain the existence of a limited degree of altruism and a limited degree of empathy. He needs to explain why, in the absence of God, altruism and empathy are “good”.

Why are people worth being altruistic and empathic about? If we’re nothing other than the latest gorilla upgrade, I really don’t see what the fuss is all about, don’t see why one “should” be a altruistic/empathic towards other humans.

When I look at people, I see the divine spark in them, which survives the best and worst they have to offer. I respect this spark because I respect God. Further, this spark is an equaliser, giving me a reason to regard humans as equal, which in turn gets the idea of justice underway.

However, if I remove the spark, and just see the latest gorilla, which happens to be relatively hairless, I can't help but notice and be influenced by the differences, with nothing to level the field: different heights, colours, levels of beauty, degrees of strength and athleticism, differences in intelligence, differences in disposition, differences in behaviour (including degrees of altruism and empathy). And I’m talking about individuals, not groups. Some of them I like and admire, some I don’t. Why should I treat them the same, if they’re different? What important sameness do they possess?

Even if evolution explains why altruism and empathy actually happen, it doesn’t explain why they “should” happen, doesn’t explain why they’re good. I suppose it assumes the human species should survive – but, why should it? In the absence of the spark, I mean.

If I really thought evolution is all there is, I imagine I would value more "highly evolved" humans than less. Perhaps the more intelligent, if that happens to be the way we're evolving (I don't know). Or, if we can't predict the direction of evolution, then I wouldn't know which attributes to value. Evolution gives me facts, not moral guidance.

Pax,
Posted by goodthief, Friday, 1 February 2008 10:58:05 PM
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It is an interesting question whether humans could behave altruistically without the presence of 'God'?

I believe we can because it is vital to our own survival. It makes good evolutionary sense to show compassion and behave altruistically for the good of community. Without some sense of civilised order or sense of community morals and values we would be back to anarchy and chaos. Perhaps religion helped shape these values and perhaps religion was a necessary step in the evolutionary process until man evolved a sense of his own species to a higher understanding, or the next evolutionary plateau if you like.

Why is it impossible to believe that the desire to do good, act with fairness and kindness, to show respect and compassion could be genetically programmed in humans from an evolutionary sense?

Is this any more unbelievable than the idea of faith (which means in the absence of evidence) in an unproven deity.
Posted by pelican, Friday, 1 February 2008 11:37:53 PM
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Benjamin O'Donnell, brushing aside the wisdom of, amongst others, Dostoevsky who holds that "if there is no God, everything is permitted", and preferring instead the minimalism of private judgement, sums up his own position as follows: Good deeds, it seems to me, really are their own reward.

It seems to me that a person motivated entirely coherently and consistently by such a perception would have to be a person totally without imagination. He would have to be totally ignorant of the depth and power of human passions and totally unmindful of the vagaries of the human heart. In other words he would have to be a machine.

By way of contrast, history and observation of ourselves and those around us demonstrate that human beings very frequently act upon the perception that bad deeds are more "fun". M.D.Aeschliman calls it "the fierce energy of amoral human willfulness". He also observes that the "private judgment" of such charismatic moralists as Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler was to be carried to catastrophic heights. And the historian Leonard Schapiro writes that "the judgments on Stalin, if collected, would present such a catalogue of the folly of intellectuals as ought to prevent those of us who claim to belong to this category from ever raising our voices again."

For myself, I prefer to choose the wisdom of someone who, to quote Aeschliman, is the lineal descendant of a native British tradition of skepticism about skepticism, and thus the heir of Dryden, Swift, Johnson, and Burke, not to mention the more particular traditions of Patristic and Anglican theology, in a word: John Henry Cardinal Newman. Give me his words any day:
"Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another... Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles... Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man."
Posted by apis, Friday, 1 February 2008 11:50:11 PM
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No good deed goes unpunished. Sad eh.
Posted by trade215, Saturday, 2 February 2008 12:30:24 AM
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There is really nothing wrong with Hitler killing the six-million Jews because this was part of the evolutionary process of the superior Aryan race evolving to become a master race. This is consistent with Darwinism which argues that human racial competition and war are part of the evolutionary struggle for existence. Hence the Darwinian-inspired Nazis forcibly sterilised 400,000 Germans categorised as ‘unfit’, and 100,000 Germans labelled as "useless eaters" were killed.

Dawkinism took Darwinism to great heights that tyrants and homicidal governments can only dream about. They now have a ‘scientific’ excuse for ethic cleansing and genocide. The tyrants in Dafur have Dawkins to thank as they model their killings on Dawkins ‘selfish gene’ model of cultural evolution.

Darwinism and Dawkinism are the two greatest fraud in science today. They are not science to begin with. They are at best speculations where our ancestors came from.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001616 (Fraud in Science)
http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/t_sci_me.htm (Scientific Method)
Posted by Philip Tang, Saturday, 2 February 2008 8:25:44 AM
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