Why do you believe in God

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Evolution is my bet. Humans with an innate sense that murder is morally permissible, good, or mandated would die off. The other humans would kill them pretty fast. Societies that accepted murder, or theft, or other such things as morally permissible, good, or mandated would have collapsed quite quickly.

We either (or perhaps both) innately feel our moral code or have learned our moral code because individuals and societies that did not hold this code would have died off.

Ancestral worship is not theism. The worship of gods is fairly rare in Japan.

I don't find this to be true at all. I don't have a need to believe in anything. I'm not quite sure I know exactly what you mean by belonging to something greater than ourselves.

OK, so is genocide morally permissible? As long as it's against a different group than you belong to, genocidal tendencies could actually be evolutionarily favoured.

I don't think I can explain it to you, then.

Clearly I don't believe genocide to be morally permissible.

Genocide hasn't worked out wonderfully in the past. It has a tendency to go both ways, and annihilate practically everyone. Although, this nasty and persistent us versus them mentality remains with us today. There is enough ethnic hatred out there today to last humanity until the end of time, so I guess you could argue that genocide has been selected for.

I'm willing to contemplate it. I have a few ideas as to what you mean.

1. Belonging to a great and noble cause. I can understand that, I want to do good things and make a difference in the world.

2. Belonging to a great and noble group. I sort of understand that. People want to belong to a group of people, a community they can be proud of and be accepted in.

3. Belonging to a wondrous and magical mythology. I don't mean this insultingly, I just could not think of other words for it. I understand this one too though. It seems that a religion can be a very beautiful picture of the world. Let's take Christianity. All loving god, paradise for all eternity. Doesn't everyone wish they were infinitely loved and happy? It sounds so very nice that people want it to be true, even if they have no good reason to believe it is. But to me, this seems like wishing one's favorite novel were secretly true, even though there's not a scrap of evidence.

Your contemplations are bang-on, but what I think you've realized is that it's a movement of the heart, not just a movement of the mind. To understand it conceptually, using just your intellect, is not enough.

But on what basis do you declare it immoral? Frankly, if you're going to argue for evolutionary morality, then whatever is "natural" and works for the individual is moral, and I don't see how that's much different from egoism. Groups who promoted genocide against other groups were just acting on their natural, evolutionarily determined impulses, and thus the Holocaust was moral. Correct?


It works great if you're the one administering it, rather than the one receiving it.


Let's bring some basic game theory in. Genocide is a dominant strategy: if there are two groups, A and B, and each group could be either genocidal or non-genocidal, we can construct a pay-off matrix to determine the outcome of various scenarios. If one group is genocidal and the other is not, then the non-genocidal group is wiped out by their aggressive neighbors. If they are both genocidal, then the stronger group wins and survives (let's say that under this scenario they each are taking a 50/50 shot at survival). If neither is genocidal, then both live in peace (ignoring population-density concerns). This is clearly a prisoner's dilemma situation. If A is genocidal, then B's only chance at survival is to also be genocidal and hope they're strong enough to be better at genocide than A. If A is non-genocidal, then B can be genocidal and wipe them out, thus enabling them to take resources that would otherwise be used by A and otherwise dominate and be more successful than if they were sharing space with A. Therefore genocide, while not being in everyone's best interest, is the dominant strategy and should be selected for. So this, by your theory, makes it moral.


So if genocide has been selected for, it is moral, yes? That is one thing that has been selected for by evolution. If morality is the actions evolution drives us to take, it includes the good and the bad, not just the particular bits of human nature you personally approve of.

I eagerly await the next attempt at establishing non-theistic morality.

But wanting something to be true won't make it so. Isn't reality important? There's loads of fiction that I would love to be true, but wanting it will never make the Doctor materialize, it will never make the Pernese dragons exist, it will not give me a time machine or magic, or anything else wonderful, yet so tragically fictional.

I think what slowmutant meant (correct me if I'm wrong, sm) was that religion can't always be understood on a purely intellectual basis. That doesn't make it inherently false, it just means it falls outside of the bounds of human reason and a level of emotional involvement is needed to understand it fully.

I think I have previously referred to some tenets of religion as being a-rational. They can't be confirmed or denied through reason alone.

Orwell, you're misunderstanding me. I was only trying to explain where traditional morals come from. I do not believe that because a certain set of morals exists/evolved that it is correct. I have my own set of morals that I arrived at through years of thought.

Also, let's look at history. Let's look at Nazis. Basically, really simplistically, everyone who was not a blonde, blue-eyed German was on Hitler's exterminate list. This didn't go over well with the Allies. I would guess that the very basic, primitive, underlying reason why people stand up to genocide like that is the desire to not be massacred. Strength lies in numbers, so if a bunch of people who do not want to be eliminated band together against the genocide, then the threat is defeated.

Clearly, there is an emotion as well as rational component to morality. I would argue that much of the emotion associated with morality is societal. Although really basic things like murder has a genetic undercurrent, because of what I said earlier. All I'm saying is that evolution is the root of morality. Clearly it's become quite complex.

So how exactly do you intend to defend Divine Command Theory? Could I just see your version of this argument?

This is starting to look like Non-Overlapping Magisteria.

How can you know an emotional fact? Something like the existence of God is either true or not true. You can't just feel your way to it.

And what makes your set of morals the correct ones? On what are they based? And if they are not the only correct ones, then there are no objective morals and we're back to nihilism.


If morals are societally based, then anything society condones is moral. If my society condones genocide against your society, then it is moral. If evolution is the basis of morality, then everything resulting from it must be. If only the evolved morals you like are actually moral, then it's not evolutionary morality you're upholding but your own subjective morality, which is not morality at all.


Does it need to be defended? The premises are that an omnipotent and good God exists, and that He gets to define what is and is not moral. Thus, whatever God tells us to do, we do, and it is moral. It's a pretty simple theory. The only way to really undermine it is to attack the premise of God existing, but at least it is consistent as long as its premises are accepted (the conclusions follow from the premises). Subjective morality has internal contradictions that make it a load of crap no matter how you cut it.

To consider that without God humanity would ba A-moral just seems ridiculous to me, there are plenty of primitive cultures that did not have a Abramic understanding of God yet have morals, religion had such a hold upon our culture that of course the doctrines of the church were used to form our basic set of morals, although I would argue that the various churches and religions have always had some very questionable morals.

I think what Malsane refers to as Evolutionary Morals is a form of learned understanding and respect, to ascertain that we could not learn ethics and morality without the assistance of God is daft

well, I believe that it could be argued, from a secular point of view, that it didn't work that well with Nero, the Inquisition, and Hitler. From history, at least, we could see that when any power have had imposed things like that at a given time, they have been eventually taken down, with insurrection and revolution as reactions towards it, wether that was considered morally correct, that view would be changed due to said reactions and the intense violent confrontations in responses to that, I mean, for a reason concepts that are defended today have been formed out of necessity due to several conflicts in history, that's my view on this.

I would think that with the advent of the enlightment, that may have play a big role into the birth of current principles such as human rights and the concept of Genocide, and not by purely religious principles, but I don't think it should be ruled out either.

Besides, Genocide is a 20th century concept, in historical context, we can't really say wether Theism can support more the concept than the secular point of view, not to mention that what we consider to be genocide today, that may have been justificable under religious grounds in history.

Last edited by greenblue on 19 Jan 2009, 2:25 am, edited 2 times in total.