Albert Cipriani

Dear Doubting,
Obviously your: qualifies you as a bit of a poet yourself!

You say: That’s like saying the army tank ran over the automobile because it was so much heavier. It's really no explanation. Your “applying the functions of my complex brain” is a smoke screen, a patch of verbal incoherency masking the lacuna in your brain theory. It’s not good enough to say complex brain functions made you give to a beggar one day and ignore a beggar another day. You can do better than that.

There are principals of justice, feelings of empathy, and thoughts of cause and effect behind both of your opposite responses to the beggar. These abstractions are indeed processed in complex ways by your complex brain, but they and the way you process them -- not the organ doing the processing -- are ultimately the means whereby you do what you do. To doubt this, is to take the toiler for the tool. Your brain does its toiling via its abstract tools. The abstract tools are supernatural entities.

Reflex reactions require no abstracting. So if it were possible to hypnotize you into acting altruistically, then yes, that species of altruistic behavior would be without a supernatural explanation for you. But it would still have a supernatural explanation for the one who hypnotized you to do it.

To tell you the truth, Doubting, I don’t even believe in the supernatural. I only use the word as a convenience as a sort of shorthand to better increase my odds of being understood. Truth be told, there’s only one thing – Reality. Reality comes in two artificial flavors, objective and subjective. They are both just as real and the distinction between them is highly arbitrary. But on the scales of our value judgments, our age has erred by weighting the objective over the subjective.

Taking off my metaphysical mitts after remembering what forum I’m in, I'll now attempt to answer your question: altruistic behavior is subjective behavior. Subjective behavior is, logically enough, predicated upon subjective entities. Ergo, subjective entities (such as notions of justice, feelings of empathy, and thoughts regarding cause and effect) are responsible for altruistic behavior. Point is, if you simply substitute the word “subjective” for “supernatural” all will be well. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Doubting Didymus

A thousand pardons, I was being too simplistic in haste. I did not mean to give the impression that I thought the answer to the question: "wherefore morality" was: "da brain". My brain does not make me swerve to miss the ugly dog, any more than my stomach makes me consume brie and wine.

I could hardly agree more. I am a being with free will, and while my behavious might be influenced by this or that gene, at the end of the day my choices are mine alone. The choice to act in an altruistic or moral way is such a choice.

Why should I make that substitution? I see no theoretical barriers that would prevent an unguided natural universe from giving rise to beings capable of reasoning abstractly, perceiving justice, feeling empathy and plotting cause and effect. I see no reason why such beings would not be able to act in moral and altruistic ways. I see no evidence to suggest that any other explaination for the presence of thinking beings and their actions is a good one. Thus, I believe I shall leave the word 'subjective' just where it currently is.

Conchobar

I also do think that there are moral and immoral absolutes, species specific and molded by evolution. I am an Atheistic Evolutionist. I think that morality is genetically and neurobehaviourally programmed into our brains. It is more effectively programmed in some (good people) than others (bad people). Yet we all have an intuitive "knowledge" that murder apart from killing in self/family defence is wrong. We know that theft is wrong. We know that killing any baby is wrong now as it was in the time of Deuteronomy (when God ordered it.) We know that spousal abuse, rape, deprivation of freedom (slavery), lying, and robbery are wrong and always wrong.

Christian Bible believers think that killing babies was alright if God ordered it, alright if God killed the babies (Egypt and Noah's Flood), inflicting plagues on innocent people for what their Pharaoh did, killing men/women/children/babies for erecting a golden calf (changing religion.) All of those things were moral in the Old Testament but not in the New Testament. Now only the most dodgy or insane Fundamentalists would insist that it is still alright to kill the babies of infidels. Thus Judeo-Christian morality is very relative. It is not moral or immoral on any objective basis but purely the whim of God who can change his mind.

Christian moral relativeness is seen in the high Christian crime rate, and murder rates compared to Atheists. That is because they fail to see robbery or murder as wrong because of the harm done to fellow humans. It is only wrong by fiat from God if God is in the mood. And by saying a few magic words you can erase any responsibility for evil acts, as long as you believe and are born again. Some fundies have to be born again several times per year. That adds further to the proposition that Christian Morality is relative, what might be called "situational ethics."

Conchobar

Conchobar

Seriously, the most outrageous, repugnant, and disgusting immorality, debauchery, cruelty, and injustice ever put into print is in the Christian Bible. Mein Kampf seems like a Boy Scout Manual by comparison.

In both Mein Kampf and the Bible, attribution is made to God as approving the many atrocities. Even Hitler implied in saying he was doing God's work that God commanded him to destroy the Jews. Much the same occurs in the Bible's O.T. many passages in which God orders the Israelite Storm Troopers and Infantry Panzers to go into Canaanite towns to slaughter men, women, children, babies, infants, occasionally rip open pregnant women, and keep young virgin girls as sex slaves (for yourselves.)

No worse book has ever been written. I attack it sometimes with humour. The Author of God on Trial is quite serious. It will make you think of morality over dogma, of good over evil, of compassion over cruelty. I read the Bible to challenge my own views, only to have them reinforced 1000 fold. Try reading God on Trial.

Moral values are loudly attributed by Christians to their God and their Bible. Morality is a product of evolution itself. Early hominids lived in social groups. Certain behaviours proved to be detrimental (murder, rape, child molestation, theft, lying, and cheating.) And those hominids and humans who did this one or more times would be exiled, banished, or executed. This tended to eliminate those with tendencies for that behaviour from the genetic pool. Genes code for human anatomy, cognitive abilities, and moral behaviour. So in general the weak moral genes tended to be eliminated. Recessive ones would still pop up at predictable intervals.

History shows how the savagery of earlier man was improved by social and moral evolution. Religion adopted the commandments, the last 6 because we already have intuitive inhibition of such immoral behaviours as killing, rape, molestation, theft, and lying. The commandments did not come from a hypothetical god. It came from Moses himself and his “inner voice.” All religions tend to make bad behaviours sinful. It is good that it does. It reinforces the evolutionary intuitive morality already in our brain hard-wiring. We go one step further by making laws to further limit the commission of bad or harmful behaviours.

So, those of you who believe in God, I am granting you that religion may have some positive effects on morality. However, sometimes religion becomes perverted as noted in Deuteronomy, Exodus, I-II Samuel, I-II Chronicles, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joshua, and the immoral Noah’s Flood in Genesis 7-8. Yet studies show that the best behaviour occurs in two groups: Atheists and those who are devoutly religious. Most bad behaviour is in those who are weakly or moderately religious.

Conchobar

Albert Cipriani

Dear Doubting,
You say, The suburban mom living in the foothills who loses her toddler to a coyote thinks it unfair and unjust that her baby was turned into a mid-afternoon snack. So much human potential used only for its protein value seems wrong. But if the coyote pups starved to death cuz its mother did not snatch the toddler who’d invaded their territory, that too would seem unfair and unjust. Through empathy we are aware of the justice and the injustice of being both prey AND predator. That both killing and being killed is a conundrum for us even tho it is the only modus operandi for all of Nature, proves that our conundrum is not derived from Nature but from supernatural sensitivities.

Thus the cave dwellers of Lascaux, France painted the animals they killed. They took the lives of these now-extinct creatures, but in return, gave them immortality in the form of artfully applied pigments. This is eloquent testimony of our unique capacity to empathize with our victims and justify our “injustice.”

There is no precedent for such sensitivities in Nature. Wolves exalt in their kills. We, on the other hand, illogically feel for our victims as we enjoy the taste of our KFC chicken.

You say that such seemingly unnatural sentiments can be given rise to by Nature. Isn’t that like saying you believe in spontaneous generation? that deserts can give rise to water? or that oceans can give rise to dryness?

Can you not imagine a creature (perhaps an extraterrestrial) or a genetically altered ape more intelligent than us who has no notion of justice or capacity for empathy? You seem to think that intelligence, an objectively measurable definable trait, automatically induces a capacity for subjectively immeasurable indefinable sensibilities. But since when do opposites derive from each other. Opposites may attract, but in my universe no thing derives from its opposite

At the end of the day you are not alone. You are a complex of remembered actions that more or less express your complex of abstract judgments. You are neither your actions nor your judgments, but a holy or unholy matrimony of the two.

So who is this free being you call yourself whose choices are yours and yours alone? Everything we know of is derivative, even our notions of selfhood. The very concept of yourself is derived from your own notions of how well or poorly you stack up against your own notions of justice. If you were truly master of your ship, you could opt out of both, go catatonic and cease and desist from having any notions of justice. But no one can… a further proof that we are not a simple natural entity at peace with Nature but a complex supernatural and natural entity at war with ourselves and Nature.

None of us are alone. None of us is a single entity. We are a complexio absurdum of subjective and objective abstractions neither of which have we self-generated. Only Nature is alone. She is purely objective. utterly mechanistic, and logical. Human beings who try to be like that, merely natural, are like those flattened unrealistic medieval drawings prior to the discovery of three-dimensional perspective. Such people flattened their two-dimensional lives into a distorted version of a single dimension. But believers revel in their two-dimensional nature and do not disown their supernatural (subjective) nature such that their temporal lives become the two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional supernatural reality, complete with its vanishing point in God. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Wounded King

Dear Albert,

Could you please stop using supernatural and subjective as if they mean the same thing. This is patently dishonest. I doubt there is anyone who would deny the existence of subjectvity but many would deny the existence of the supernatural. There is absoloutely no evidence that subjectivity cannot arise through natural processes, if you feel you have some then please provide it.

Thanks,

Wounded

Albert Cipriani

Wow Wounded,
I’m rendered speechless by your request. But lucky for the truth, my fingers can still tickle the keyboard.

Yesterday, in the Existence of God forum I was told not to use the word “hypocrite.” Now I’m not to use the word “subjectivity.” What will it be next? Don’t use the three-letter “G” word?

That’s funny. I thought I just provided some proof in my prior post. What are you saying, that my evidence isn’t evidence cuz it’s only mine and not yours? That your subjectivity trumps my subjectivity? Seems to me that if that’s your point it only proves my point all the more, that subjectivity does not merely “arise through natural (objective) processes” but that its origins lie in the free will that is endemic to us being supernatural beings. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Tenspace

Where can I find information on those studies? I've been wondering about that for some time.

Thanks,

Tenspace

Wounded King

Dear Albert,

I don't think your 'evidence' is not valid because it is yours, I think it isn't valid because it isn't evidence. Your much vaunted subjectivity seems to have lead you into the strange belief that any ideas which can be formulated has equal weight to actual physical and scientific evidence.

All your evidence consists of is a series of bald assertions. As for not being 'allowed' to use the word subjective, all I ask is that you not treat it as equivalent to the word supernatural.

Just because appreciation fo art is subjective it does not follow, to most peoples minds, that it is therefore supernatural.

Your saying that nature is only objective does not make it so. As to nothing arising from its opposit, the old complexity arising from simplicity example comes irresistably to mind.

TTFN,

Wounded