(May 26, 2015 at 7:29 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: If God does not exist, why be good?It seems like the best option by a pretty good margin. Most creatures seek out some kind of optimal life, and humans have become pretty sophisticated at it. If all food is nourishing, why bother spending time finding and preparing the best foods? If all clothing provides utility, why care about how it looks? If all homes provide shelter, why care about how big the kitchen is?
Without a god or old book to tell us, what is the basis for wanting to present an attractive appearance? Or wanting to prepare and eat the best foods? Or wanting to live in a nice home? Or wanting more than just to stumble through life without caring whether we're enjoying it or not? Easy: we seek an optimal life. An orderly and civilized society that follows certain rules that have stood the test of time and experimentation seems like a good starting point, so it's something we pursue without having to be ordered to by a divine being.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
