in evolution, when did the human conscience come into play? thinking critically, one can see that the law at its purest form came from morals. humans are capable of good and evil, without law, it would be pure evil causing extinction of the human race.

i say pure evil because today every good that is done there is an evil intent behind it. you are going to be appalled by now, but everyone lives to satisfy themselves ultimately, by that i mean our conscience. it is the core that causes us to do any good at all.

if you say the conscience/morality/sin does not exist, then you are giving yourself an excuse and you're in ignorance.

"atheists cannot explain the origin of human the conscience in a logical manner"

... therefore god did it.

makes sense.

oh wait

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

You must be joking.

I agree that the OP premise is flawed, but emergence has about as much scientific rigor as saying "God did it".

None of this makes any sense but even if it did your title should be changed from 'atheists cannot' to 'noone can'

something doesn't have to have the ultimate scientific rigor in order for it to be a better explanation than "God Did It". if something is a plausible and natural explanation, then it is automatically better than the supernatural one.

most of the newer branches of physics, such as string theory, don't yet have the kind of scientific rigor that one could expect, but wouldn't you gladly accept the standard model over "God Did It"?

Nonsense...swarm intelligence can be observed and is proven to work through simulations. You can even use it in applications. There is certainly no problem with rigor as it can be postulated, tested and has predictive power.

"God did it" is just a premise of minimal practical consequence.

Study linguistics.

I disagree. If it has no physically tested demonstration, it is not better. The standard model has been very successful and as far as it goes I think it is a great success. String theory, on the other hand, is undemonstrated and not a success to date.

Yeah, but it is silly to lump string theory in with biblical literalism and say they are the same because neither has made a clear and sucessful testable prediction.

I don't think that is quite what I said, and it is certainly not what I meant to say.

I will be more clear. And it really isn't string theory that I have a problem with. It tends more to the picture of multiple universes combined with the anthropic principle. The current situation is that the physical universe is such that life is possible although if any of a number of arbitrary parameters were different then life would not be possible. Some theists like that, because they argue that it demonstrates that the universe was selectively "tuned" to allow life. A counter proposition would be that there are a large number of universes and by chance some of them are such that life could exist. Of course we would find ourselves in one of those no matter how unlikely the configuration of parameters appears to be. Without a test that can demonstrate the existence of those other universes, the two explanations are equivalent.

What drew me to this thread was the use of emergence, which is a postulated phenomenon that is totally descriptive without rigor. It is more philosophy than it is science. To say that explains consciousness is completely unsupported by any rational scientific process and is pure speculation. As is "God did it".

It developed through social and cultural interaction. I have a pet dog, it knows not to pee on my carpet. If i had a wild dog in my house it would not know this so would pee on the carpet. At its most basic level even if the dog does not know why it should not do something it still knows that it is bad.

Similarly humans throughout history have acted in ways we today consider immoral. Like disfiguring the genitals of children, murdering your son on command from voices in your head, slavery, stoning people to death for working on the Shabbah and so on. Well, of course we still do one of those, but you get the point.

When relatively dumb animals can be trained to take a position akin to a conscience and morality and when morality and conscience is so dynamic that it has changed throughout a very short span of history then you need to go further than you do to fully understand what is happening but you have not gone nearly far enough in thinking about this to conclude "god did it" and with zero research im pretty sure social science has a pretty good idea of how morality and the conscience developed in human history.

Isn't emergent complexity an implied postulate of many scientific theories?....Like evolution?

If consciences comes form evolution i still dont know a possible creator/God didn't do it.

I can explain the origin of the human conscience in a logical manner and I am an atheist. Therefore you are wrong. Here's an example:

1. Humans tend to do actions which lead to them having better lives.
2. Acting morally tends to lead to a better life.
3. Therefore, humans tend to act morally.
QED

You seem to be equating consciousness with what we consider to be moral actions. I don't see how this is justified.

I don't think those are equivalent at all. The most advanced physical theories we have that try to go beyond the standard model, which we know is wrong, tell us that there are very likely vast parts of the universe that we cannot observe and string theory says there are on the order of 10^500 stable vacuums. Given that nobody has been able to find anything special or fundamental about our universe that indicates it is unique, it seems very much like we should take these ideas seriously. The designer argument is alot worse. No physics suggests anything like it is possible. Why wasn't the designer able to find a way to create the universe without fine tuning? Did he try to hide his existence but was too incompetent? If he wanted us to know about him why make the fine tuning so hard to detect? Have we not observed him because he doesn't care? You might as well say fine tuning is a glitch in the Matrix.

Again, not all speculation is equivalent. God did it is as bad as anything you can come up with like the Matrix or 5 dimensional science projects. Speculation that doesn't require things we have not observed is clearly better

conscience =/= consciousness

My thoughts on the OP - it is a mess - and in particular does not demonstrate the ability to judge if reasoning is "in a logical manner".

Yeah, all those people who are talking about consciousness and emergence didn't read OP closely. OP says conscience, not consciousness. So, no, I'm certainly not equating consciousness with what we consider moral actions. I'm not talking about consciousness at all.

No

Its not really fair to call string theory a scientific theory since it makes no testable predictions.

In my defense I didn't read the OP at all.

So you're saying evolution doesn't imply that new properties arise in systems as a result of interactions at an elemental level?

Thats what emergence is silly and evolution depends on it.

Hold a pencil at arms length. Let it go. Did it fall? If so you just confirmed a testable prediction of string theory.

Thats not a postulate of evolution. It is something that can be tested for and observed.