Three questions:

1. At what point in this alleged evolutionary process did altruistic acts become praiseworthy?

2. At what point in this alleged evolutionary process did selfish acts become worthy of condemnation?

3. Is it possible that as this alleged evolutionary process continues, that selfish acts will become praiseworthy at some point in the future while altrustic acts will be condemned?

Thanks, OP.

Says the spokesman for the god who killed every child and fetus on earth and who, as a faithful spokesman, accepts that moral anathema as holy, loving, righteous, perfectly moral ... and refuses to extricate himself from this abomination of a doctrine. Who instead supports it, apologizes for it, and tricks out consciousness to defend and rationalize it ... because sometimes, indoctrination is just an all-in thing. We call this having faith, while in science they call it having a closed mind oblivious and resistant to honest argument. And that's why apologetics is religious, but not spiritual ... and very unlike the Jesus character. It - apologetics - is all about resistance. Resistance to the realization that life and consciousness moves on from the legends of thousands of years ago. And no, it is not moral to dig in your heels and resist the evolution of consciousness by miming wives tales and superstitions from ancient times while exempting them from reality testing.

They've been praiseworthy at all points, even before the Big Bang.

Selfishness is not necessarily worthy of condemnation now, but when it is, at all points, even before the Big Bang.

No.

Yes, this is a textbook example of the naturalistic fallacy. You derive on the basis of a descriptive theory of how species evolve the prescriptive conclusion of moral nihilism. Evolution is not a moral theory, so the fact that we can't derive a moral theory from it does not mean that there are no moral truths. We also can't derive moral conclusions from the Laws of Motion, but that doesn't mean that accepting them means that we should become moral nihilists.

Nope. You've made this mistake before. What you're describing is AJ Ayer's emotivist moral theory, which was based on the logical positivist view of language plus the assumption that there are no moral facts, not natural selection. Given that few people today accept this view of language, you are arguing against a strawman.

As a Bible Believer, I agree with you.

As a Bible Believer, I agree with you, except for the slight modification that acting in one's self-interest isn't necessarily condemnable, but acting selfishly is worthy of condemnation.


As a Bible Believer, I agree with you here, too.


Regarding the Big Bang: Every bang needs a banger!

Have a good day!

I disagree that I am committing the Naturalistic Fallacy(NF) here. The conclusion, "Evolution entails nihilism", while it may be false, does not commit the NF, given that that conclusion itself is descriptive, not prescriptive. For the NF to occur, the conclusion must be prescriptive.

I agree that Evolution is not a moral theory. But some accounts of Evolution would seem to preclude the possibility of any any absolute standard of righteousness.


As an undergraduate Philosophy major, my favorite book was Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic. It was I believe Antony Flew's Dictionary of Philosophy which amusingly called the Emotive Theory the Boo-Hooray Theory. If it wasn't Flew's dictionary, it was the dictionary edited by Peter Angeles (sic?).

I don't know why you respond by saying you agree with the conclusion as a Christian. That isn't relevant to the argument. Our disagreement is about the moral implications of evolution.

You often assert that if evolution is true, then prescriptive statements to act morally are false. That is an example of the naturalistic fallacy.

I do not believe that the Naturalistic Fallacy is being committed on my part in your example. The conclusion "prescriptive statements to act morally are false", is not a prescriptive claim, in my opinion. A prescriptive claim entails than one ought or ought not to do something. I would argue that the conclusion is a descriptive claim about putative moral claims. It isn't saying what one ought to do.

I was highlighting that we have drawn the same conclusions on those things, but for different reasons.

I need to know if a certain medicine is the right one for an illness. So what I'm going to do is run it past what the people thousands of years ago in Palestine thought about it. You know caused by demons, a curse on your house, maybe some bloodletting, etc.

And I need to know how far it is from Vega to Betelgeuse, so I'm going to run that past the astronomy theories of, you guessed it, the brilliant Biblical backdrop.

Then I need to know where homosexuality comes from and if it's cool or not, and I'm gonna check the writings of the Ancient Sages of Galilee on that.

Lastly for now, concerning my recent conversion, I want to know what the origin of universe, energy, matter, consciousness, etc. is ... and I'm just going to go with faith on that one. Why not?

These are my ethics, my metaphysics, my epistemology, my logic. Though it's no longer punishable by death to not operate like this, I'm all-in on Pascal's Wager regardless of what anybody says.

I know exactly who and what god is, I know he never changes, and I know I never change in that belief. How do you think I rate on the openness scale? On the flexibility scale? What are the odds I actually know the answer to these great mysteries of life and the universe, as compared to the odds of being self-deluded in so believing?

I don't think that 'evil' is an inappropriate word to use to describe Trump who meets the definition of "profoundly immoral and wicked" with ease. His entire life is a series of immoral acts, culminating, thus far, in an attempt to overthrow US democracy, an effort that he continues still. I would call that 'profound'.

He's a totally self-serving and very ill individual, displaying extreme traits of sociopathy, pathological narcissism, paranoia, a lack total of remorse, an inability to empathize, and a simply incredible level of dishonesty (30,000+ lies in only 4 years? And that's only the ones he told in public).

He's a conman, it's that simple and if you want to frame it in religious terms, I think it's far more likely that he was sent by the devil, than by God.

The most incredible thing for me is that there's anyone who believes anything he says when so much of what he says is so easily provable to be lies and/or contradictory. He 'hires the best people', but then has the highest staff turnover of any president ever because those hires were 'morons' or 'stupid'... He was 'so close to finshing the wall' but the southern border is currently 'totally open'... He's a self proclaimed genius who sued all his schools to prevent them releasing his academic records... He's the 'most transparent president in history' who fought tooth and nail to prevent his tax returns being released, who had meetings completely alone with traditional enemies of the USA, who reduced the number of peope listening to his calls etc etc...

And we can talk about his lies about the economy, about voting, about Covid... in fact, give me a Trump claim, any Trump claim and the odds are massively in my favour that it was an outright lie or at best deliberately misleading.

So, go ahead LG, try to defend him.

A number of popular late-1960's and early '70's slogans included the word baby. Here are a couple:

You've come a long way baby (Advertising slogan for Virginia Slims cigarettes)

Burn, baby, burn (A reference to burning draft cards)

Given the bolded above, I take it that you haven't read much, if any, of this thread. I don't think I've posted hardly anything about Trump on 2+2 for about two years. I have no interest in the topic at all.

That's a shame, few things are more simple than proving that Trump is a pathological liar, the only interest I had was in seeing which deflection method you would engage in to avoid having to accept it, but perhaps you already do.

Did you see that at his rally last week he actually told his supporters how he deceives them?

“There's a word: disinformation. If you say it enough and keep saying it — just keep saying it — and they'll start to believe you,”

And then this weekend at CPAC he told them how he deceives them about polls:

“If it's bad, I say it's fake. If it's good, I say that's the most accurate poll ever.”

This is a man so pathologically narcissistic and self-absorbed, he literally brags to the very people he's deceiving about how he's deceiving them, and they still keep believing and trusting him. The cognitive dissonances are just off the charts.

Given this astonishingly easy way to demonstrate just how easily humans deceive themselves and hold beliefs that are blatantly untrue, wouldn't you agree that this has some bearing also on god beliefs? Do you accept that you might be guilty of this behaviour, and if you accept that, what do you do to try to verify that your beliefs might actually be true? (I've described some of the things I do, in the other thread)

There are good reasons to believe in God and bad reasons to believe in God.

Dr. William Lane Craig makes a useful distinction between knowing that something is true and showing that something is true.

A simple real-life example:

About fifteen hours ago I drank a bottle of Gatorade. I know that I drank a bottle of Gatorade at about noontime yesterday. However, if later this morning I am asked to prove that I drank a bottle of Gatorade at about noontime yesterday, it would be virtually impossible for me to do so. So, knowing something to be true and showing that something is true, are distinct enterprises (so to speak).

I know that Christianity is true by virtue of my entire life being turned upside-down (actually, my upside-down life was turned rightside-up) the moment I received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and was in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit. (It wasn't until much later that I learned that the cause of my regeneration was wrought by the Holy Spirit; at the time I only experienced the effect of that indwelling.)


(more to come....)

But what we've established beyond doubt is the human ability to hold false and even contradictory beliefs. Trump supporters are a gift in that regard.

I would argue that you don't actually 'know' that. The classic criteria for knowing something are that it must be true, you must believe it yourself, and that you must have good reasons for believing it. Since you can't prove that god is real, you can't know that it's true, and so you can't 'know' that god is real, you can only 'believe' that thing.

So at best, you can only claim a belief here, you can't claim knowledge.

And now we get to whether or not you can trust your beliefs to be true, and you can't, because they're based on your perceptions. Interestingly, in the other thread where I talk about not trusting our perceptions, you've used that to argue that I can't trust my own conclusion about that since it's based on my perceptions, but you mustn't believe that yourself otherwise it would also apply to you and you wouldn't be able to be so certain.

Presumably then, you think we can trust our perceptions?

I covered a lot of the above just now in the other thread.

Yes, I think we can generally trust our perceptions, with varying degrees depending on circumstances.

That's a wrap for tonite (it's 4:17 am ).

Have a good day.

I'm enjoying our discussion. We can continue it later.

Sure. If I see a car drive down the road, a car probably just drove down the road and I didn't imagine it, I'm not taking this to a ridiculous epistemological ideal of 'you can't trust your perceptions at all', even though that's technically true.

But on the issue of a universe creating deity that no one can prove exists, in a context where there could be multiple other much more plausible explanations from something that I think I just experienced, and where the thing I experienced happens to take the form of something that's prevalent in my own culture and happens to match what I've been educated on, etc etc... None of which proves that god doesn't exist, but are very good explanations for why a particular perception might take a particular form over something else.

Then no, I would not trust that perception at all and unless I could verify it in some way using an external source, I would be rightly skeptical about what I think I experienced. What I would never be is certain.

Have a nice day!

Why did you not respond to that post?

I'll slightly re-cast the bolded above:

"You can't trust your perceptions at all" is a ridiculous epistemological ideal.

"You can't trust your perceptions at all" is true (technically).

Think about it.

Don't need to think about it, there's no conflict in what I'm saying. I'm aware that that's the ideal, I don't take my thinking that those lengths for reasons I've given before. Empiricism has similar flaws when taken to the ideal version of itself, but that doesn't stop me, or anyone else, from using science.

You've also skipped over that I agreed with your "I think we can generally trust our perceptions," but I'm pointing out that it's not one or the other, there are going to be times we can rely on them, and times when we shouldn't, and drug-induced visions of gods are not a time to rely on our perceptions...

I am an ardent believer in the Scientific Method. I am an equally ardent opponent of Empiricism. It is important to distinguish between empirical methodology (i.e. the Scientific Method) and Empiricism (i.e. the belief that only the Scientific Method can give us knowledge).

I agree with all the above. Well said.