(October 17, 2013 at 2:37 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:(October 17, 2013 at 2:27 am)genkaus Wrote: How about the thing called "conscience"?
As a by-product of evolution conscience would be no different than any other animal’s instinctual behavior, like bird migration. If conscience is an accidental feature of our species then it is not a reliable guide for ethical behavior.
To avoid the equivocation between conscience and instinct, you need not consider conscience an evolved instinct, per se, even if the means by which it appeared is evolutionary. You could say that it is a product of Man’s capacity to reason. This affords various solutions like enlightened self-interest, tit-for-tat, the “golden rule”, social contract theory, etc.
The problem is that you have started a regress that needs a termination point. By making reason the evolutionary by-product from which conscience gets its force, you must likewise explain how reason, itself being an accidental feature is reliable. First, you could say that the efficacy of reason is axiomatic. While I agree this presupposition is needed, the fact that you can reason at all is itself in need of an explanation. The required explanation forces the regress further back into the deeper prior causes.
The efficacy of reason presupposes that you live in a world with inherit rational order. This appears to be the case. Now either the rational order of the world is essential, a brute fact, or it is accidental, a contingent feature. In my estimation, the four fundamental forces and handful of known constants have all the characteristics of accidental attributes. First you can imagine a world with more or fewer forces and one in which the constants have different values, or even change within this universe. Second, even if the universe did indeed come “out of nothing” on its own, then so also must its physical laws come with it “out of nothing.” In this scenario, the secular response to “out of nothing, nothing comes” amounts to “out of absurdity, something comes.” Any morality that, at root, derives from absurdity is really no morality at all.
So the de-nihilists, atheists who deny that they are nihilists, must, if they are to be taken seriously, show that their favored ethical system is ultimately supported by something other than pure chance.
Kind of ambitious here aren't we?
It would appear that what you are looking for is a link from the formation of the universe to our morality. That's quite an ask with so many unknowns in the way isn't it?
Further, to take a pap phrase like "Out of nothing, comes nothing," and then attempt to apply that to such unintelligible fields as the Quantum Universe is simplistic to say the least.
Having established, therefore, that the request is ludicrous we come to the point of the piece:
"So the de-nihilists, atheists who deny that they are nihilists, must, if they are to be taken seriously, show that their favored ethical system is ultimately supported by something other than pure chance."
No. Here you are assuming that morality is absolute- the only logical conclusion from the formation of the universe, which is not what de-nihilists have to argue at all. Moral relativists merely have to show that there are, potentially biological benefits to their position - and even that would be tenuous.
If we look at the flipside - a theist view of the universe - morality is based upon the concept of a good God. The only evidence we have that God is good is what he tells us.
Therefore:
"So the theists who deny that they are nihilists, must, if they are to be taken seriously, prove that their favoured ethical system is ultimately supported by a good God.
