RE: Can Darwinism account for morality?
June 18, 2015 at 12:59 pm
(This post was last modified: June 18, 2015 at 1:10 pm by Aaran.)
(June 18, 2015 at 12:46 pm)FatAndFaithless Wrote:(June 18, 2015 at 12:42 pm)Aaran Wrote: That's an excellent post, thank you.
I hope I didn't infer that everything constituting the moral system of any given society is derived from natural selection. The human intellect is quite liberated from the confines of instinct, and this is what furnishes people with the ability to conjecture on the morality/immorality of things like making lewd remarks, which can't really be addressed from the perspective of evolution.
The most annoying thing is when creationists ask a fascile question like "If evolution and survival of the fittest is true, why should we help the needy/why shouldn't we kill people with disabilities/etc etc." They view Darwinism as some sort of proscriptive code, instead of simply the biological mechanisms through which we arrived at our current state of genetic diversity. You might not hear that line of argument much in the UK, but I can't tell you the number of times I've been asked "why be good, if we're all just animals and only the fittest should survive?", along with the attendent comparisons to nazi eugenics and the like.
I've heard it on occasion, from individual nutjobs rather than collectives of nutjobs. I try to explain that simply describing a scientific process like survival of the fittest isn't the same as endorsing the 'kill or be killed' worldview.
(June 18, 2015 at 12:55 pm)Thackerie Wrote: What the hell is "Darwinism"???? A 19th century religious movement that worshipped Charles Darwin?
Or just a phrase uttered by utterly ignorant fundigelicals in an ignorant attempt to ridicule evolution?
I didn't think a respectable atheist would ever use that term.
I wasn't aware that atheists were in the business of declaring people 'good atheists' or 'respectable atheists', or, by the same token, 'bad atheists' or 'disrespectable atheists'. I thought that sort of thing was monopolized by the religious.
Forgive me, but I don't see how my use of the term Darwinism has attracted such criticism. ISM's aren't the province of religion alone - Minimalism, Aestheticism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, SOCIAL DARWINISM. Has nobody questioning my deployment of the word Darwinism ever heard of Social-Darwinism, an ideology wholly divorced from all religious connotation? If that phrase can be used without qualms, why can't its second constituent part?
