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The Evolution of Morality
This discussion was created from comments split from: Biblical Inerrancy - Legacy thread.
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There are many answers to our moral dilemmas and failing, Boogie, hence my use of "somehow". I was watching a natural world programme about a wolf family today and pondered on the social cohesiveness and co-operation of the pack in protecting the youngest, accepting leadership from the experienced alpha male and alpha females, and their total ruthlessness in hunting down prey. All of the behaviour is I suppose to some extent instinctive yet there were remarkable signs of intelligent assessment going on. But I don't think the sentience of wolves demonstrates moral awareness.
How real is our sense of moral awareness? Is it unique to human beings, or is what we call moral awareness simply an extension of the kind of intelligent assessment we can see in social behaviour in the animal kingdom. And indeed is it possible to even talk about sin, missing the mark, without some kind of moral awareness? They are all good questions, I think, and Christians have come up with varying answers to them. Human behaviour is full of conundrums.
We vastly if not completely overstate human qualities, especially morality, which is a consequence of the emergence of rhetorical, three legged consciousness.
First, one needs to define morality. That it does, and always has, varied between cultures should be telling that much of it is culturally defined. So much of what a particular culture or sub-culture defines as MORAL is no more than prejudice. Stepping into the shared, such as murder, we go into predilection which evolved for our particular evolution and development. We are not the only species that regulates when killing of another of our own is OK and when it is not.
What we call moral is subjective to both how we evolved and how we live. The second shapes morality well more than some would like to admit. Including myself.
We should be kind because that's what we're partially wired - the better angels of our nature - to be and in our new emergent social structures (cyberspace) it's got to be in there. I don't see choice as meaningful in this or any other significant situation. Being kind, even sacrificially, rarely makes us feel worse. Where's the choice? Impulse control at best. Kindness is enlightened self interest - something I'm severely limited in as I demonstrate here; I tend (British understatement) to the adamant, the uncompromising, the compulsive as in the Purgatory exorcism threads. I can't leave that scab alone. I don't want to be unkind to non-rationalists but non/un-rationalism has (compulsion... irrational compulsion) to be challenged.
If by scrupulous behaviour one means Kant's categorical imperative and/or Bentham's utilitarianism, they can't possibly work as that assumes the rationalist delusion. i.e. that we are or should be rational creatures devoid of the need for emotional intelligence.
Quite. The notion of God creating a process that will slowly produce beings in his image is a far more impressive demonstration of the scope of his power and wisdom than any snap-of-the-fingers instantaneous creation. To build a universe of endless variety and absurd scale with the capacity (the objective?) of evolving first tiny, self-ordering molecules, then cells, then eukaryotes, then multi-cellular organisms and vertebrates and mammals and self-awareness and God-awareness. That is a demonstration of an almighty God; not to think of an outcome and merely call it into being, but to create a system consistent in time and space.
It's a good, separate, topic anyway. And there is a split thread function in the new software. So I'm going to tidy up.
Barnabas62
Dead Horses Host
Actually, yes it can. Kindness is the outworking of empathy, and empathy is a positive trait in a social species so would be selected for. I don't think it's any harder to account for than any other behaviour.
Sorry? I am not an image of God. I'm a piece of hard wired haunted meat. Imago Dei is a metaphor for our extremely constrained 'moral' capacity. As you yourself demonstrate justifying the murder of rape victims. Only evolution can explain such opportunity costs.
You probably can't demonstrate an evolutionary link yet as there are no moral fossils, but see Karl's post.
These behaviours are thought provoking and not easily explained away.
You get some of the flavour of that in the debate over the Hebrew word in the Genesis creation story which has been translated as 'subdue'. Subduing seems to imply innate tendencies to dominate by using power. I don't find in myself a desire to dominate and also find that I dislike dominant behaviour. The meme that might is not right seems to be deep within me. And yet I live in a world where the success of might is everywhere present in both human and animal societies.
The interpretation of the rat studies is not straightforward. Rat study discussion. In addition, there's really no lesson re humans being special or not out of it.
You link also talks about two possibilities: One is empathy, the other is the rat reliving its own stress caused by the alarm calls or pheromones of the trapped rat.
The cries of a baby are irritating to humans, regardless of that human's empathetic response to babies or a particular baby.
The lesson, IMO, is that other animals are mindless automatons and we are special flowers. We are more like them and they like us, though it isn't completely simple.
The lesson, IMO, is that other animals are not mindless automatons and we are special flowers. We are more like them and they like us, though it isn't completely simple.
I wonder, despite vast differences in religions and moral systems, what conceptions of religious sins and commandments are universal or near-universal among all cultures and whether or not this is because of a co-evolution of religion and moral codes.
This raises an interesting question about post-tribal religion, and how it helps organize social groups in a different way. Capitalist religion, I suppose.
There is a hint of that kind of utilitarian thinking in the Wiki argument I linked. So I guess seeing religion as a teacher and enforcer of cultural norms works as clue to its development.
Is it necessary? I think that is a less important question than is it true.
As to whether religion is required, probably not. It's quite aesthetic, I suppose, aesthetics being fairly important. But humans seem to create myths regularly, not all myths being religious of course.
That reminds me of Jung, who argued that heaven and hell exist in the human psyche, and are projected outwards. It even sounds banal today.
Maybe you were referring to this, but there are some controversial scientific claims that animals exhibit behavior that indicates spirituality. It seems pretty non-falsifiable to me, though, so I don't know if there is much value to such inquiry.
What do you mean by "an analogue" of religion? Do you mean spirituality in general, whether or not it involves a belief in the supernatural? Or do you specifically mean a belief in the supernatural?
Technologically-advanced societies with complex economies, effective courts and law enforcement, and efficient provision of social services may indeed not need religion as a way to record useful knowledge and encourage socially-beneficial conduct. So organized religion is not necessary in this sense.
However, what pre-modern societies have not had some structured form of spiritual beliefs and spiritual rituals? Even if these do not involve deities, dogma, scripture, etc., in the way that Western cultures conceive of religion, it's hard to say that any of these cultures lack religion defined in a broader sense. It's impossible to say if religion is necessary to any culture's survival, but the fact that it seems to be pretty universal seems to indicate that as humans evolved culture (and therefore a concept of morality), they also evolved spiritual rituals and beliefs.
It doesn't help that Wikipedia attempts to define religion by saying: "Religion may be defined as a cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. However, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion."
With such a definition, any philosophy of life or ethics shared by a culture or subculture, any set of transcendent or spiritual cultural rituals - no matter how shallow, faddish, or consumerist they may seem, and whether or not the subculture performing them even considers itself spiritual (it may in fact be a militantly anti-spiritual group) can be called religious. With such a definition it would seem that religion is indeed inseparable from being human and therefore could very well have been evolutionarily adaptive.
I think you can't have one of culture, religion, or ethics without having both of the others. But this is using a very broad anthropological-ish (I'm no anthropologist) definition of these things.
I honestly don't see why religion is necessary. Culture and ethics are the agreed upon rules by which we manage to survive in groups without murderifying each other. That religion has been intertwined does not them mean it must be.
I didn't mean that I thought you believe elephants have religion. I was saying that I wasn't sure if your comment that elephants do not likely have a religion meant that you had heard about the claims of elephant religious behavior and were skeptical about them. I didn't want to say "actually, there were these scientists that controversially said this" when that may have already been what you had been referring to and rejecting (perhaps rightfully so). I'm bad at this. I'm sorry.
What definition of religion are you using? Some scholars consider a non-spiritual "set of principles" to be a religion. (Basically, just about anything can be a religion.) But most people don't talk about religion using the terminology of religious studies scholars (pretty soon, the way university finances and trends in university courses are going, there won't be any religious studies scholars ).
I guess what I am trying to say is that being human means having some kind of philosophy of life, even if it is very informal and instinctual. It means having rituals, even if one does not consider them spiritual at all. And it means having feelings of awe and transcendence - even if one does not think that they have any spiritual element. I am calling these phenomena, when viewed at the cultural or societal level "religion." Maybe this definition is not very common among most people.
When you say religion is not "necessary" do you mean that it is not necessary for societies to survive (I'm not claiming this), that it is not an inherent part of humans and human interaction (I am claiming this), both, or something else?
Sorry about going off on a tangent when this thread is about the evolution of morality.
Humanity has this, I don't think all humans do.
Both. The only "proof" that religion is inherent is that it exists. It is at least as logical to view religion as an artefact of trying to understand the universe.
I think this is fair. It is undoubtedly true that we can identify human hands in the construction of religion as an artefact. The issue is whether the artefact is based on, and contains, divine revelation, or is purely a human construct.
The durability, variability and ubiquity of religious belief certainly shows that many human communities have found it useful. Much modern criticism has focused, often justifiably, on its more baleful aspects.
I try to avoid the "no true Scotsman" argument. So I'll put an analogous question. Is it possible that there is divine revelation at the core? Something worth preserving?
Personally I am very happy to look at possible baleful effects of religious belief and see whether the criticisms are justified. The human aspects of the artefacts benefit from criticism and consequential refinement. That is true whether or not there is divine revelation at the core. Stubborn dogmatic defence of the indefensible is not the right way to go. We can learn and adapt.
'But it's all right ma, it's life and life only."
Martin54, dragging conflicts in from other threads counts as getting unduly personal. Take it to Hell or stop it please.
Thanks
L
Dead Horses Host
hosting off