And you are mostly ignoring the critical points in my arguments with this post.
I’m actually not. As I pointed out; your broad attacks fall down onto the 4 or 5 variations I outlined above. They still do - you’re just asking the same invalid question over and over, without addressing the key points - which I will show at the end.
Your view is similar to
this one.
You're then begging the question of why your definition of harm is the truth
“Does the majority make right? Is that your basis? If there is nothing the moral good is fixed to, then it is all relative.”
[strawman] imagine my surprise after explaining what morality is in detail, after repeatedly and explicitly stating that there is no objective moral standard, good and bad is subjective: that you come back and argue a second time that what I’m arguing does not work as an objective system.
Misrepresenting my position once can be an accident; doing so twice after explicitly being corrected suggests dishonesty.
Please review bullet #2 in the above post.
To be explicitly clear for a third time: I am not advocating any framework, I am not justifying moral decisions, I am not trying to provide a definition of “best” - I can’t, best is subjective, morality is subjective.
I am providing an objective imperative for why morality would necessarily exist as we currently experience in evolved organisms such as ourselves in order to be successful as a group.
I could make a similar argument for fear: harm to individuals from the environment or other organisms is an objective imperative that would necessitate the evolution of fear. It explains what we experience as fear, and why we are scared of certain things: but that argument is making no judgements about whether clowns or grass snakes are objectively scary.
As such, the overriding majority of your contention here is simply irrelevant as you’re attacking an argument I’m not making. I have clipped out all parts of your reply here that are predicated on this strawman.
“This paragraph begs many questions, one of which is the agency for acquiring the desire or ability to survive.”
Note: you mean “raises the question”. “Begging the question means the conclusion of an argument is being assumed in the premise” as none of the things you raise are part of my conclusion, there is no question to beg.
“natural selection has no ability and no personal traits, yet evolutionists give it all sorts, such as needs, as you did above.”
[Strawman]: evolution has no traits, no agency, no motivation: my argument neither depends, requires or argues it does. You’re taking the metaphors I use to convey the process, applying them literally, then attacking this literal interpretation.
Organisms reproduce with changes that effect the subsequent generations ability to reproduce in their current environment. As a result, while mutations are random, there is a non-random pruning of these changes that causes a statistical bias towards acquiring traits that improve reproductive success over multiple generations. This is often summarized as evolution “causing” things, because it’s simply easier to describe that way.
That you have attacked the way I have conveyed evolution, rather than what I am conveying; when you clearly have some understanding of how the process is supposed to work can only interpreted as disingenuous.
Again, things just happen, and why you think anything would be sustained by blind chance happenstance is beyond me.
[argument from incredulity] I have added a fairly succinct explanation above. Indeed, evolution itself is best described as a mechanism by which random chance with non random pruning can lead to non random outcomes. (But for some strange regions no one ever talks about the non-random aspects of evolution)
The part about exhibiting a conscience without first the existence of God is pure speculation in the evolutionary chain
How do you get morals from the way one biological bag of atoms reacts as opposed to another?
[Argument from incredulity] My first reply, and the post you are replying to explicitly explains how. Your incredulity is not a valid argument.
My conclusion is based on a variety of observed facts, which I have brought together using a logical argument, it’s self consistent, it has extraordinary explanatory power, is consistent with processes such as evolution that we can observe.
So it’s not really speculation as much as informed hypothesis, that is able to fully explain reality.
This is actually almost identical to what you’re doing: you’re using the facts and logic to try and extrapolate an explanation; so your position is literally no better.
Indeed, your position has no actual explanatory power (it’s mostly a tautology - god made morality because god needed to make morality), it isn’t predicated in any physical observable processes and, as I showed in my post above - isn’t even self consistent.
The idea that my explanation can’t be accepted because it’s speculative, and yet yours is fine whilst being no better, is [hypocritical].
Once again, I invite you to make sense of morality without an actual objective.
I’ve done that twice. That morality is a subjective evolved response that allows us to learn and respond to various anti-group behaviour; makes sense of what we experience as morality.
It allows us explain - objectively A why we have morals, it explains why we experience them the way we do, it explains the moral zeitgeist; it explains how Nazis can be done with the holocaust; why people’s moral judgements change dependent on their group, and whether the person being harmed is in or out of the group.
Indeed, a subjective evolved morality is the only way to make sense of what we experience; as all objective explanations end up being incoherent to some degree.
What you’re doing is [Begging the question] - presupposing that morality must be describable objectively is assuming your own conclusion.
You go on about this for many paragraphs. Bullet 2 in my above covers this in its entirety.
My thought about your speculation on the existence of God:
To deny God, you must first have a God (the irony: you can't deny God without first affirming Him).
[non sequitor] to deny god you must first have a description or concept of God. You don’t have to affirm it.
To deny Darth Vader exists you do not have to affirm him.
My whole take is that your philosophy of life, your worldview, is ultimately meaningless. Naturalism is nihilistic, yet you want things to matter.
Let’s ignore the wild [strawman] introduced by you putting several paragraphs worth of words in my mouth.
You’re making the same class of error I pointed out in #1 in my previous post: Confusing subjective with not existing.
Humanity could wink out of existence tomorrow. That can can both matter to me, and to us, but not matter at all in the universal scale of things. A dollar has no intrinsic and objective value; but it does to us.
[a] The [objective moral imperative] is from a naturalistic viewpoint. That is one way to examine existence but not morality.
[argument by assertion \ no true Scotsman] simply saying I’m wrong and that what I’m describing is not true morality, is fallacious.
"An objective morality would be [i] one everyone could agree on, anyone, regardless of culture or belief can validate is correct and true, and can be deduced independently without belief, preference; or assertion."
[i] Not quite. An objective morality would be one that existed whether or not we agree with it that IS true.
This is logically incoherent with everything you’ve said up to this point.
If Good and bad were objective, they would exist outside of our minds and our opinions, it would be a real thing - like trees or fusion. True simply means “in accordance with reality.”, so by definition of morality could be shown to be objective if would be shown to be true.
Now, to show it’s objective; you can’t rely on a your belief in a book, faith, trust: that causes that morality to anchor its truth in your opinion. We have to tether morality to something outside our human opinion or thought: IE: if morality were objective, we would be able to derive it without the use of books or faith, and it would be possible to independently validate it without using any of your opinions or assumptions. That’s what being objective entails.
If you can’t do that; then all you have is loud assertions that it’s is objective; but it’s really your brain that is making your morality real - and is thus is not objective.
So by definition all the things I said must be true of an objective morality: and given that to prove it exists would intrinsically be demonstrating it true - it’s not unreasonable that it would be like other incontrovertible facts - that are just absorbed in to general consciousness and assumed true - like the earth being spherical, atoms and Germs existing. Obviously not precluding crazies - but if proven real - there would not be any source of serious contention.
This is completely refuted by the utter sh*tshow of moral disagreement at every level by everyone - including in the same faith believing the same thing. This is covered in my previous posts.
How does a subjective, relative human being independently verify and deduce objective morality? It would have to be revealed by a necessary omniscient.....
[argument by assertion] What a load of asserted nonsense; no rationalization, no logic, no justification; just assertion.
Why could we not verify morality the same way we can validate electricity? Or mathematics? Or the existence of other planets? There is literally no rational justification for suggesting we need a deity to reveal objective morality should it exist.
Worse, ignoring my previous posts (that it would still be subjective), if a deity came and revealed morality to us - you may have a point.
You’re arguing that this happened, but in reality you simply have a book that purports it happened and for which you believe. This kinda sets up a [circular argument] that you use the existence of objective morality to support the existence of your deity, but at the same time you use your deity to justify the existence of objective morality.
[c] Not a shred of evidence for such wildly speculative assertions (as if they could deduce such things).
I actually explained why in the post you’re replying to.
The evolutionary imperative is objectively determinable - meaning any amoral analysis of human evolution would recognize that there is a selective pressure to generate some constraining influence: and the nature of that influence, how it would appear, and how it would work could largely be deduced from analysis objectively.
This is as opposed to your wild speculation above.
Despite all the fallacies above what is interesting is what you didn’t argue:
- You made no attempt to try and contrast reality with what I’m proposing. (Ie: show where my argument deviates from what we can both agree is real)
- you made no attempt to demonstrate why there must be an absolute Good, or a best.
- You made no attempt to assess or critique the evolutionary explanation in terms of known evolutionary mechanisms. (IE: show my argument is inconsistent)
Make no mistake. Your rebuttal is like arguing nuclear physics is false, without ever talking about atoms; without talking about what nuclear physics predicts or calculates; simply that it cannot explain an effect you can’t even show even exists.
