(March 19, 2014 at 10:57 am)tor Wrote: So everybody has an opinion. How do we settle it? With tanks and helicopters?That's how humanity has done it, for the most part. Even today, different nations have different laws. Each society or community is going to tailor its laws (whether legal, ethical, or moral) so that these promote the survival of the group. I think that if there was a true objective morality, at least some components of it would be evident throughout recorded history, but most of recorded history seems to follow the us/them or protect-the-pack pattern. Burning someone alive? Moral, if the person is a witch. Ripping out the still-beating heart of a young man? Moral, if it makes the rains come.
"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
