(March 13, 2014 at 1:33 am)orangebox21 Wrote: I'd say yes, we wouldn't be able to determine this is a less than desirable outcome without a God given morality. To illustrate: Why do we already assume that causing pain to someone else is inherently bad? After all it could benefit the individual inflicting the pain?If this occurs in a vacuum then yes, you could wind up with a viewpoint that hurting others for your own enjoyment is moral. The survival of larger communities and societies was almost certainly contingent on determining a code of conduct that strengthened the group.
"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
