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Originally Posted by Repugnant Abomination
Where does our authority to claim something is right or something is wrong come from? From God? Evidence? Reason?
Explain yourselves.
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I'm just now beginning to delve into morality myself. I don't consider myself a relativist, but I'm not sure why. I'm obviously interested in the evolutionary basis of morality; in regard to the basics (stealing, murder, etc.), I would like to think our basic morality has evolutionary foundations (with obvious genetic exceptions such as psychopaths and those with brain tumors affecting their judgment, etc.)
Sam Harris wrote a book a few of you are probably familiar with,
The Moral Landscape - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
and Daniel Dennett has addressed a bit of the cultural roots of morality in
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I haven't read The Moral Landscape yet and there seems to be a bit of decent criticism of science determining human values, but I'm going to read it anyways.
Repug will probably accuse me of
Scientism, because that's the hip new thing among apologists now, but science is clearly the best tool we have for discovering things about the world. As he hasn't further explained
(despite me asking him to) his view that certain things can be determined as "absolutely true" using pure Rationalism, I'd like to hear that now. I would be interested in hearing how he can find such truth without evidence, which would put it in the realm of science.
As an aside, while probably nobody here is arguing for religion being a basis for morality, I really hate it when they do. This is part of a reply to someone's Facebook post I wrote the other day, and it's relevant to our discussion:
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Christianity really pulled it's "morality" out of thin air though, didn't it? I always find it amusing when Christians point that out; what new morality was introduced to humanity by Christianity when it arrived on the scene?
Most, if not all of the big moral issues (don't kill, don't steal, be good to others, etc.) were already evolutionarily rooted in and practiced by human cultures before Christianity even existed. (Although it's interesting that Christianity felt no need to add things like "don't rape", "don't keep slaves" and "don't abuse children" to it's top 10 list).
The extra things (like homosexuality, not to mention all the other nonsense in Leviticus) are now being seen as non-issues of morality as we progress. So what, specifically, about Jesus can we not find in myriad other moral teachers and religions throughout history, other than the promise of eternal punishment if we don't follow him (and even that may have been borrowed from a prior religion)?
Most of the teachings of Jesus, the person, were agreeable and good. But you can follow moral teachings of a fellow human just fine without surrendering your reason to religion. The claim religion has on morality reminds me of the land settlers just "took" when they got to America. It was already there...they just forcefully took ownership.
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