RE: Conscience and the Moral Argument as Evidence for the Goodness of God.
June 16, 2023 at 7:14 pm
(June 16, 2023 at 5:52 pm)Simon Moon Wrote: Humans are social animals, that evolved in small groups of 50-150 members. Things like: cooperation, empathy, reciprocity, etc were necessary for survival.
If individuals of those groups behaved like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky claimed they would (without the belief in gods), they would be ejected from the group, to almost certain death.
Those 100's of thousand of years of evolved traits, are still with us.
Just exactly which god do Bonobo chimps believe in, that causes them to: protect weaker members of their group even if it puts their own lives at stake, share food with other group members even when food is short supply, adopt orphans of dead group members, punish violent members of their group?
Do you really believe that if you stopped believing in a god, you'd instantly become a thieving, murdering, raping maniac?
I actually rape and murder exactly as much as I want to. Which is zero.
It sort of looks to me as if evolution hasn't made us all that peaceful.
Like maybe it's true that we want to be nice and friendly with the other 50-150 in our immediate group. But then history shows that we have no trouble going over and massacring the 50-150 people in the next valley over, if we happen to want their resources.
Then if we're saying that humans are like other primates, don't some of those guys decide their leader through combat? Like the alpha male becomes alpha by beating up the old alpha? And then the new alpha has sex rights over the girls?
So there are a couple of things I think we'd want to resolve before adopting your view of things.
First, just because we evolved with a trait doesn't make it moral or ethical. Maybe our reason and ethical sense says we should overcome traits we evolved with. We wouldn't want to slip into a naturalistic fallacy.
Second, I see no reason to believe that evolution has made us peaceful. Or cooperative beyond a very limited scope.
It's admirable that you don't want to rape or murder anyone. But there sure has been a lot of rape and murder in history, which leads me to think that it remains a natural trait.
