JohnW
Posts: 3217
Joined: Aug. 2006
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| Quote (Glen Davidson @ April 14 2015,13:18) | The problem with this "discussion" is that the empiricists are looking at morality as something that clearly is not treated as absolute across societies and cultures (like it or not, morality differs substantially), and wanting to account for it. IDiots, on the other hand, insist that morality has to be absolute and unquestionable, because that's how they feel it is.
To bolster the universality they feel, they also note that morality is treated like morality (iow, rules by which society lives, generally enforced formally or informally) by most everybody--so they assume that everyone sees it as absolute like they do. Of course that's idiotic, since a society simply has to have at least some rules (no sanctions against stealing and murder would pretty much end society--the mafia might end up ruling, but then it has to have rules against murder of their own, at least), and while many atheists and other more "secular" sorts really do think that morality is basically absolute, many others don't, largely seeing morality as rules that have to be decided by vote or other legal means, as well as many being informally sanctioned.
That is to say, IDiots start with their a priori beliefs as if these were absolute truths, then demand that evolution or what-not account for these absolute truths. Sort of how they begin with Design as unassailable, then evolution can either explain the assumed goals of Design--libertarian free will, non-natural minds, targeted physiologies, etc.--or it must fail and be considered incapable of explaining humans.
Good and evil mean absolutes. What else could they mean? Never mind that they can't account for how God makes morality and good and evil, their claim is that clearly evolution/"materialism" won't give us absolute good and evil, then, as usual per them, God wins by default. "Materialists" can't rightly speak of good and evil, because they deny the "source" of such judgments.
Unless, of course, it turns out that good and evil simply arise from judgments against harm against one's self, one's relatives, and, in some cases, one's larger group. Then it's more or less inevitable when symbolic logic and language appear. And what does one think about an absolute harm done to one or to one's own? Generally, that it's absolutely evil. That isn't really hard to figure out, but they neither think that can be the cause, nor believe that one should think that could be the cause of moral thinking, hence they deny it not only as truth but even as possibility.
What a shock, they take the phenomenal appearance of "evil" and make it as absolute as traditional societies often do, and treat any questioning of their stance as being evil itself. How they experience "good and evil" to be is not to be doubted because it would be evil to doubt it, and the stance that neither denies morality's existence nor treats it as absolute (relativism, more or less) really doesn't exist. Or, even if it does, it shouldn't.
Obviously (to us), it's because they can't take the threat to their egos or groups. Except that it is completely non-obvious to those who hold the stance that dismisses such thinking as incoherent due to the sense that if it were coherent it would undermine their stance.
Glen Davidson |
We live in very privileged times, Glen.
God has been trying to communicate his universal laws of absolute morality for 6000 years, and every single version of them (and there have been, well, a few...) has been in error. But finally, he's managed to get the message through. Hail Barry, God's Anointed Arbiter Of Right And Wrong!
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Math is just a language of reality. Its a waste of time to know it. - Robert Byers
There isn't any probability that the letter d is in the word "mathematics"... The correct answer would be "not even 0" - JoeG
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