RE: How to easily defeat any argument for God
August 27, 2019 at 8:28 am
(This post was last modified: August 27, 2019 at 9:34 am by Acrobat.)
(August 27, 2019 at 7:37 am)Grandizer Wrote: Human beings evolved to be, well, human (prone to be selfish in some contexts and altruistic in others and human in all contexts). They weren't designed specifically to be Good (this is such a bizarre way of using the English language, btw).
Clearly we didn't evolve to be good. Evolution selects for features favorable to survival and reproduction, in conjunction with environmental pressures at the time. Yet we recognize that we ought to be good, even if we fail to do so. We recognize some sort on intrinsic purpose, in which we ought to serve, rather than one we evolved to serve. We recognize a morality, that's distinct from recognition of survival and reproduction, distinct even from a recognition of wellbeing. We don't need to have formed much of conception of any of these things, to recognize good and bad, like the case of babies few months old, recognizing goodness in the helping puppet, and badness of hindering one.
Quote:And often times, when a human individual has been referred to as broken, it is because they were considered to be behaving in ways that are not socially acceptable (this is not necessarily the same as moral).
When we recognize something broken, something inhumane, the absence of humanity, humanlessness, of the holocaust, it's not a recognition of the Nazis not behaving in socially acceptable ways, like we could easily say of someone with bad table manners, but in behaving in ways contrary to the essence of how we ought to be, not as defined by society or people, but by some profound truth.
Quote: You telling me about the various feels you have, but there's no indicator that any of this has brought you close to the truth on this matter.
I'm not telling you how I feel, no more than I'm telling you what I feel when I point out the sun outside my window. I'm telling you what I see, what we see. The objectiveness of goodness and badness. As out there rather in here. I'm describing the reality of this objective truth, that underlies our moral perceptions. In contrast to your attempts to explain the same thing. I'm compensating for your failures, your blindness, incoherencies, and contradictions when trying to express your recognition here. From the base line of first person experience and observation, to express it simply, rather than in the convoluted language often used by others here when expressing their moral views.
Quote:Very young children have clearly wrong conceptions of how the world works. They think rocks were made so we could scratch our backs on them. Do you really want to appeal to young kids as a support for your position?
I'm using young children as support, of how readily we perceive teleology, as a default perception. I'm pointing out that this perception is perfused in our moral perceptions, built into its very language etc.. So much so that none of us, including yourself have shook it off, hence why you can't deny, or shake off the objectiveness of morality, and resort to a variety of mental gymnastics to preserve it, rather than reject it all together, because trying to do so would required a level of dishonesty, than even you refuse to partake of. There is a good book on this subject Alastair Macintyre After Virtue, about the incoherency in secular moral philosophies, of our moral language, as a result of trying to articulate it in absent of its teleological assumptions.
I'm pointing out that the nature of good both the young child and you and I see, hasn't changed. Young children may not be able to articulate it, while adults like yourself fail to properly articulate it, in fact articulate it in ways inconsistent with the perception.
I'm pointing out the failure of your introspection, that if you just looked a little closer within you'd recognize this failure as well. Trying to express more clearly, what you perceive so vaguely, through a glass darkly.