Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”

[Esquilax]

Interesting turn, I think what you and Michael are disputing isn’t so much “a moral standard,” but “moral obligation.” I think it’s a tired analogy of God being the “law giver,” but it has its place; it “requires” of us, and we must “oblige.” Evolutionary morality is actually something I come back too often. I’m faced with the question of whether “moral law” is necessary if there were no way a society like ours were possible without our particular brand of morality. But, at other times I feel like evolutionary morality is simply a joke!

In some respects we have a moral obligation even under evolutionary morality, it's just that the obligation is to our fellow evolved animals, rather than to some distant supernatural force. Our survival, generally speaking, is contingent upon the health of the group, and certainly our current level of comfort and convenience is due to the society we have built together. We're obliged to keep it all running if we want to reap the benefits of it, and to propagate charitable memes as a method of causing it to run better.

Now, one might be tempted to argue that it's easy to shirk that obligation, to which my immediate response is that it's even easier to shirk a christian one; that's why we have so many different belief systems. At least under secular models the punishment is immediate- either social or legal consequences- and proportionate to the crime.

Allow me to just diffuse this situation?

I really don't mean to come across as combative, there. I mean, I appreciate the spirit in which Michael enters these conversations, I think he's a smart guy and a refreshing change from some of the other christians we deal with here (that goes for you too, come to think of it) but I couldn't think of a nicer way to phrase this, because it literally is a temporary suspension of rational thinking, formed into a bubble around religion. "It just makes sense to me," or "it explains a lot of things,"... sure it does. But that doesn't make it true, and that's certainly not sufficient justification to believe in that thing. There are plenty of other things, that explain the same amount of stuff, that he doesn't believe in- hell, practically anything, given that it's very easy to create magic things- which hints pretty prominently that the acceptance of this specific thing over any other is more emotionally driven than anything else.

Michael is expressing, perhaps a little poorly, his acceptance of God as being “properly basic.” Like the belief in the reality of the past, existence of other minds besides his own, or the continued regularity of nature, they cannot be empirically verified but they are nonetheless rational to believe.

This is presuppositionalism, and I find it to be the enemy of rational thought. It attempts to force a false dichotomy of solipsism or faith onto us all- either we ignore all our past experiences and don't assume anything will ever be the same as it was a moment before, or we all have faith in those things you listed. I recognize the utility of axioms, but listing god among them is attempting to slip in something that's not like the others. We all have some form of uniform idea of the past, we can measure the minds of others via technology, and nature has a long history of behaving as it behaves and not otherwise. In short, we do have evidence for those things that can be empirically tested, but more importantly, we have a lot to lose in terms of just being able to function if we don't adopt those axioms. Meanwhile, we have no kind of evidence for god that's anywhere near as clear as for the past, and we lose nothing by discarding it as an axiom.

It's not a very axiomatic belief, really.

I think the conflict is (and I don’t mean to assume this about you, correct me if I’m wrong) that you Esquilax are an empiricist, “all claims can be scientifically verified.”

I'm a little looser than that. My position, roughly speaking, is that without something I can test or sense for myself, I have no reference point through which the idea of the existence of a given thing could naturally enter my mind. If I can't in some way access or detect something, from whence comes the train of thought that would lead me to believe it exists?

And if I’m understanding you correctly, it is that altruistic behavior evolves into a “societal moral standard?” What I think Michael is driving at, as I mentioned above, is regardless of evolutionary moral standards, we are compelled to be moral; that there is a “requirement” placed upon us. So, really, I think this goes back to David Hume and when asked whether “ought” can be derived from “can.” I think you two fall into one of these two camps.

And my immediate response is, tell that to psychopaths. Or to any individual human placed within a situation where cheating without the possibility of repercussions arises. You can say we're compelled to be moral, but that's just not true, even as a general rule. Any person thinking of a compulsion to morality has clearly never spent a lot of time around young children, for example. The truth is, our society plays a much larger role in our better natures than you'd think.