Religion is a poor source of morality

[Neo-Scholastic]

I say this with all the respect I can muster: You appear to have completely missed the point of what I was saying.

I appreciate your goodwill. I like you. You raise good points and seem pretty thoughtful overall. If I misunderstood then the fault is all mine for not reading carefully enough. You’ve made a couple statements about me here and elsewhere that I truly believe were unwarranted. For quite some time, I’ve been very careful to qualify all my statements about atheism and atheists numerically with “a few” or “some” or many. I have also been very careful for well over a year to not equate atheism per se with ontological naturalism, physical monism, materialism, etc. And despite all this you seem to think I am making wide sweeping generalizations from “the hate in my heart.” As for this thread, I guess I could go point by point, but in this case I don’t believe it would be necessary or productive.

Put simply, your naturalistic position makes a circular argument. You cannot evaluate the efficacy with which moral reasoning makes correct value judgments without first assuming the efficacy of moral reasoning. That’s what I mean when I say that naturalist theories of morality unjustifiably ‘privilege’ some instincts (empathy, disgust, altruism, group cohesion, etc.) over others.

The research you cite insightfully identifies external influences (culture and experience) and innate processes that contribute to the process of moral reasoning. I do not dispute any of their conclusions. But, and it is a critical ‘but’, empirical data alone cannot show that the results of moral reasoning are in fact moral. For example, scientific research can show that sociopaths reason differently from regular folks. Scientific research apart from a pre-determined measurable moral standard cannot show that the value judgments of a sociopath are morally inferior, equal, or superior to those of regular folks. From a naturalistic perspective, the best anyone can do is say that the behavior of a sociopath deviates from the cultural norm.

Secondly, it is premature to say that specific social systems are more fit than others. As for now, scientific research is too incomplete to say if the moral framework of one culture is superior to another in terms of ‘fitness’. It’s all speculation. Human societies have been organized under tribal elders and warlords, dynasties, dictators, empires, communes, and nation states. Western constitutional republics and liberal democracies have only been around for a tiny sliver of human history. There is insufficient data to suppose that Western-style approaches to governance are any more likely to insure the long-term survival of humanity than Islamic Caliphates or stone-age tribalism.