" is to strip down the human experience to its materialist components - which is an impoverished worldview."

I don't see what's impoverished by this. Scientific processes of human activity and experience are fascinating. I don't see what is so magnificent about mystical (false) explanations for everything. It treats human beings like they're stupid and there are things we just shouldn't know.

As to the general complaint about reductionism, what could be more 'reductionist' than god is the source of all things?

I stand corrected, Greg. But I did burn the shit out of that strawman, didn't I?

Another point - religion has turned something magnificent like family and *reduced* it to nothing but biological function in order to argue for "traditional marriage". Marriage is nothing but a contract for procreation in the eyes of Abrahamic theists. And we're supposed to think that religion enables us to "know" aesthetics? Theism's view of human life is much more bestial than the most hardened materialist.

putin, your mistake is your framework (of course). you speak of producing beautiful things, as if it were hammering away at a factory, or a thousand monkeys, each at a typewriter, perhaps. in fact, to produce a beautiful thing is to know what it is. i'm sorry you cannot see that.

with respect to definitions, i really don't need to define what knowledge is, given that this too is one of the great debates in the human tradition. but i will say that knowledge is more than what can be "objectively demonstrated" (i take the kantian view that things cannot be objectively demonstrated - we cannot get at things in themselves).

if you want to debate at the level of, "religion has promoted sexual shame," then my response is easy. after all it was science which promoted eugenics. some people were objectively, scientifically inferior, you see. regardless, these kinds of points (and i respond only in kind to your point) are trite. in the same way, your point on the political debate over gay marriage as somehow representative of religion ignores two things - first, that this formulation of the family as a procreative unit is *primarily* a political formulation which exploits people's faith to get people into the voting booth, and second, that many people of faith are passionately in favor of civil rights for queer folks and use faith as a springboard for their activism.

yellowjacket - ha :P

It's really difficult to discuss anything with you. You mock my understanding of knowledge as supposed being too mechanical (your straw man), yet you refuse to clarify what on earth you are talking about. You are content with taunting me and others for not being a member of your exclusive club that knows all these secrets about life

And to produce something is not to know it. Many an artist's most famous and well loved works are loathed by the artist who makes them. Many artists have tended to be perfectionists who cannot even fully appreciate their own work. For example, the great AA Milne was rather miffed that he was most famous for Winnie the Pooh. Mozart hated the sound of the flute even though his compositions with it were extraordinary.

" then my response is easy. after all it was science which promoted eugenics. some people were objectively, scientifically inferior, you see"

That was/is not the point of eugenics. Some held that view, but eugenics was/is about preventing genetic disorders and debilitating illnesses. You bringing up eugenics has nothing to do with what we are talking about. It's just a cheapshot at science. The point is religion makes many beautiful things ugly, so I don't see how it informs us about aesthetics, instead it warps people's view of art, if anything.

"and second, that many people of faith are passionately in favor of civil rights for queer folks and use faith as a springboard for their activism. "

Unfortunately those people are few and far between compared to the well organized religious movements who actively work to attack people for who they love.

look, you obviously have a chip on your shoulder about religion. sorry that its been such a downer for you. for most people it has been a source of inspiration and guidance. religion safeguards and teaches great truths, though as with any human institution it is corruptible. regardless there are deep, and universal, moral lessons in religious teachings, and perhaps you should approach them with as metaphors and puzzles rather than dictates and superstitions.

"regardless there are deep, and universal, moral lessons in religious teachings" You'll forgive me I'm sure but the teachings in religion are no deeper than things you could learn from non-religious sources. And if religious moral teachings are so universal why do different religions provide different moral codes? Why are different people capable of reading different moral codes into the same religion? Why are religious teachings sometimes even internally inconsistent? Naturally you'll say because religious moral teachings are interpreted by humans who who are corruptible, but then, it isn't universal. The moral teachings of religion can't be both corruptible and universal, those two qualities are mutually incompatible.

"perhaps you should approach them with as metaphors and puzzles rather than dictates and superstitions" - Perhaps you should stop insisting that absolutely everyone must find value in religion and understand that they have a good reason to be leery or suspicious of it.

More to the point, I find that in religion the parts of the "moral code" that are universal aren't particularly deep, and the parts that can be construed as "deep" aren't especially universal.

the metaphor of the blind men desribing the elephant responds to your point about incongruence between and within faiths. and its also a good metaphor for the actual thread topic. no matter how effectively they describe the shape of the beast, they'll never really get the whole picture.

But if no one person is capable of perceiving all aspects of this supposed universal morality, then how is it universal? I mean, it might be universal ideally, but realistically, if we are not all capable of applying it in it's entirety than to all intents and purposes it isn't universal. Besides how do you back that claim up? If you can't perceive all of it, how do you even know it's all there?

Also that metaphor is kind of ableist. A blind person isn't incapable of understanding an elephant, they just relate to it using different senses than a sighted person.

Also, who's to say that the question of "what is an elephant?" or even "what does an elephant look like?" is universal. I mean, I realize you're using that metaphorically, but to a blind person, the description of what an elephant is, would be very different from how a sighted person would describe an elephant. Who's to say that one is more correct than the other? Is the blind person wrong when he describes the elephant in terms of the sound of it's breathing or trumpeting, and the smell of it, and the physical sensation of it's massive presence?

The point I was making earlier re:Massacres is that I think prevailing morality today says massacres are not moral.

And if one would say they are because God says so, then that would demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of their supposedly God given morality.

Historical Example: When Julius Caesar rolled into Gaul, he occasionally massacred his enemies. Prevailing historical opinion was that he was never needlessly cruel, but he didn't shy away from butchering the fuck out of people when it served his purpose.

Most people now would say that is immoral(and some of the passages from his writings on the Gallic Wars are rather chilling in their casual approach to slaughter). However, the Roman audience for which he was writing wouldn't have batted an eye. That was simply how things were done then.

Morality changes, thankfully. We actually ARE getting 'better' as a people. Things that would be common practice 150 years ago are simply no longer acceptable. Not to say they don't happen, but we as a global society are at least trying to reduce their numbers.

@ "after all it was science which promoted eugenics. some people were objectively, scientifically inferior, you see."

The way i see things, this would be better phrased thusly: 'people who saw other humans as inferior turned to science and found it supported their proposition'

Or to put it more bluntly, racists found scientific results which made it clear there were differences between races and used this to measure and rank these groups of humans.

It's like they came with a biased view to the data and took away the result they wanted.

Science is a tool, and a rather flexible one at that. It can be used like anything else for 'good' or 'evil' (where i of course think there is no such thing as absolute good/evil as discussed) That does not mean it isn't a 'good' tool, it merely means people who are not 'good' can use it.

Can the same be said of religion? in reference to sexual shame, and repression. I suppose it can be readily seen that people who wished to control the behaviour of others (for whatever reason) used the religion as a tool to suppress what the kinds of sexual behaviour of which they did not approve.

Is this the fault of the tool? I suppose i am putting words into Putin's mouth - and he can correct me if i'm wrong - but the 'chip on his shoulder' is about control/domination of other people. Putin is outspoken in his defence of communism as an egalitarian social system, whereas capitalism allows those who have accumulated wealth to repress those who have not - likewise religion, when used as a system for coercion and control, is repressive and objectionable.

Of course I take it that you, gregoire, see religion more as a guide to moral behaviour than a slave master. A shining beacon of good examples to follow rather than a system of power accumulation and control. Historically it has been both. (and perhaps even has been most successful at controlling when it has acted as a good sheppard)

How and Ever, i believe that if we agree that humans can't know what this 'absolute' moral good is, then it makes no difference. Both absolutest and relativists would/could/should attempt to act in the 'most' moral way they can, and in practice would be no different...

"look, you obviously have a chip on your shoulder about religion. sorry that its been such a downer for you"

I'd just prefer if you actually addressed the issues/questions raised here instead of psychoanalyzing me. I feel you'd get the same reaction anywhere you went if you went around claiming certain people didn't/couldn't truly know certain things and refused to tell them what you supposedly knew and how you supposedly knew them.

But yeah, I do think religion is nothing but an attempt to huckster fear in order for certain people to gain control over others. It's a big business. And religion has prevented America in particular from moving in a sane and rational direction on social policy, on education policy, and many other areas.

Whether people find 'inspiration' from it is irrelevant to the question as to whether it has produced knowledge of any sort or demonstrates that morality is universal.

"But yeah, I do think religion is nothing but an attempt to huckster fear in order for certain people to gain control over others. It's a big business. And religion has prevented America in particular from moving in a sane and rational direction on social policy, on education policy, and many other areas. "

I disagree, I doubt that was the original intent behind religion, but it's certainly the end result. As a christian, I take personal offence when about 60% of USA's population puts shame to my religion. They're seriously as bad as the crusaders and inquisitors, just a bunch of phonies pretending to do the work of god while burning the world to the ground in the sake of "righteousness".

@ Dexter, I am curious why you branded me a ''Creationist skeptic'' on evolution. Could you please point to what I have said in this thread which you disagree with and gave you cause to apply this label to me? I would appreciate it too if you gave any quotations from me in a fair, if not necessarily full, context.

@ jack_klein ''We actually ARE getting 'better' as a people''

Have you perchance got a take on the morality of nuclear weapons?

@ gregoire
I like you elephant metaphor. My favourite along these lines is that a group of teenagers stand around the bottom of the hill looking to get to the top. There are many paths to the top, some go part of the way together then diverge, while some join later, while still more find there way there independently. And yet they all eventually lead to the same destination.

I am STILL curious about two things
1) whether it is proposed that all/most/ human behaviour, in a moral context, is a result of the interaction between an individual's genetic make up and the environment; aka natural selection aka the survival of the fittest?

2) if there is any quantitative evidence for the hypothesis proposed by point 1)?

oh putin, it explains a lot that you are an america-hating commie. you may not like it but it bears insistence – as with the chip on your shoulder regarding religion, these kinds of pathological fixations undermine the validity of your argument. that you discount all contributions of religion to knowledge throughout history, is a reflection of the distortion that a pathological fixation can bring about, and how it results in manifestly ridiculous beliefs.

i have reiterated my position in the same terms since the outset of this discussion. there are limits to logic and evidence based methods (godel’s theorem shows us that these approaches are incomplete, or inconsistent, either of which is a strong indictment of the monopoly over knowledge that you would have for an evidence based system). further we know that universals are themselves are not accessible (kant’s critiques show us that we cannot know things in themselves, and thus cannot get to “the all” of a matter – a universal is definitionally “the all” of a matter).

again, at this point, your task is to say that despite these limitations we can absolutely discount (as you put it) “non-reason, non-evidence” based ways of knowing. since that hasn’t been done by anyone else effectively, i don’t see much of a chance of you handling it – again, because of the structural shortcomings which implicate how people can use our faculties of reason, and which limit our ability to rely on “objective” evidence (materialism) alone.

at this same point, i say that one must take a leap of faith to embrace the universal regardless of our ability to name it precisely (if it were named precisely, it would no longer be universal, it would be particular). that is *not* to say that one MUST do this – i am specifically saying that TO EMBRACE the universal, one must take that leap. if you don’t want to go there, it’s no skin off my back. my position is here is not “you are wrong, you must accept universal morality” – my position is “asked whether i believe morality is universal, i explain my perspective on why it is.”

in addition, i make two further claims. i say that there is a discursive benefit to this discussion, in that contention and debate itself heightens our ability to understand, even if we cannot arrive at a final destination.

finally, i speculate that this inability to arrive at the universal point may be itself a source of fuel for human endeavors – that our limitations keep us going, striving toward a goal that we know is there, but which we will always find a new perspective on (universal is “all” – *infinite* - there is always the possibility of further enumeration) and thus will not exhaust our ability to inquire, to ponder, to analyze, to explore.

there is no “demonstration” that morality is universal. a universal synthesizes parts and sublimates them into a higher whole – to demonstrate such a thing would reduce it to another part. in short, when you ask for proof, for evidence, you are precisely missing the point of what universalism means. and, far from trying to force you to accept such a thing (again, i could care less, as it is not my interest nor position to force others to agree with me) – i am trying to *explain* why your objections are, strictly speaking, not responsive to this debate.

with respect to these final two points (discursive benefit & the eternal onward march of the human experience) - the original universal moral which says all people are inherently morally equal, perfectly encapsulates my argument. the legacy of people discussing, debating and often disagreeing with the equality of all people, has resulted in the steady march of equality the discovery of greater and greater fields of equal rights - for religious minorities, racial minorities, women, for gays, for the disabled. and second, there is no shortage of work yet to be done, whether that is the condition of the impovershed masses of the third world or the various mechanisms of inequality which continue to persist even in the liberal capitalist world. our inability to resolve exactly how people are equal does not make fundamental human equality relative - it reflects how universals actually work (as opposed to the straw men repeated several times in this discussion, that moral universalism is really authoritarian absolutism). and to tie a few loose ends into this, it doesn't hurt that christianity is, in the western tradition, regularly attributed for it's contribution to equality - there are much discussed and direct links between christian theology of the equality of all under god, and formal equality under secular law.

@fulhamish,
I apologize. I read into your doubts about evolution... some of your comments were very similar to ones I've heard from Creationism/Intelligent-Design proponents... but I shouldn't have jumped to that conclusion. I take it then, based on your objection to me "branding" you that, that you are indeed *not* either a Creationist nor an Intelligent Design proponent? ...and that you believe some form of evolution accounts for the diversity of life on Earth? Would that be correct?

As to your questions:
"1) whether it is proposed that all/most/ human behaviour, in a moral context, is a result of the interaction between an individual's genetic make up and the environment; aka natural selection aka the survival of the fittest?"

I have heard it proposed. I'm admittedly not well read on evolutionary psychology... or whatever what you refer to might be called. Certainly many including myself discount spiritual influences or concepts of universal morality (having seen no convincing evidence)... and are left with: genetics, environment, development, and social influences to account for behaviors. The use of the phrase "survival of the fittest" makes me uncomfortable, however - because though it is technically valid, it is often misconstrued by laymen and Creationists and other skeptics as well as people who would misapply it, to mean "survival of the strongest and most ruthless" - i.e. an excuse for "social Darwinism". Fitness, of course, *includes* social interaction and strategies other than simply overpowering selfishness... and as we see, being socially aware and cooperative with other members of your species is a very successful strategy.

Given for the moment that natural selection operates in the social and psychological spheres in some sense... Like biological variation, one must be aware that presence of social and psychological variation does not attest to these variations necessarily all being adaptations. Further, since experience and habits of individuals are not passed down genetically (unlike say arm length or hair color), the selection must necessarily be indirect (and thus muted). Social behaviors are selected socially (in crowds vs. outcasts, for example) - which in turn affects livelihood and/or mating - which then affects selection.

"2) if there is any quantitative evidence for the hypothesis proposed by point 1)?"

I am even less clear about this. The stuff I've read is pretty qualitative and hypothetical. Thusly there is often controversy about such hypotheses. One imagines that the presence of numerous variables would make analysis of such phenomena difficult to pin down. One can certainly see behaviors that are consistent within a species (example: herding among grazing animals) and deduce what the survival advantages are of such a behavior... and I often find such arguments compelling. But how this has been tested in some more controlled manner, I don't know.

...but don't take my ignorance on the matter to infer that there has been insufficient study on the question - there may well be reams of supporting evidence - libraries full of supporting evidence... I simply, personally, am ignorant on the subject.

Regarding grazing animals... I *do* know that scientists have studied relative survival rates of outcast animals vs. those who stay in the herd... and found, unsurprisingly, that the outcasts tend to live shorter less healthy lives - not to mention their chances of securing a mate are drastically limited. Thus: evidence of how social behavior can be an adaptation and be naturally selected for. The more I think on this, the more I think that there is probably quite a bit of quantitative study on this. Of course. (since we're talking about scientists... and scientists are all about valuing data and evidence and controls)

" that you discount all contributions of religion to knowledge throughout history"

Name a single contribution of religion to knowledge, one that doesn't involve stretching the definitions of "contribution" and "knowledge" beyond recognition, and see if you can do it without nasty personal attacks. I doubt it. Until you operate with terminology in common usage, your polemics against me are irrelevant. Anybody can distort words and stack the deck to make it so their argument is unassailable, discussing anything serious with such people is a complete waste of time, as you exist in a self-congratulatory echo chamber.

" am curious why you branded me a ''Creationist skeptic'' on evolution"

Your never ending attacks on natural selection, your never ending attacks on evolutionary scientists in general, and your lauding of Discovery Institute hacks like Michael Behe's work which has been universally regarded as sloppy propaganda.

@ dexter, apology accepted. I guess you could find nothing in my posts to disagree with. I must try harder next time :-)

To answer your questions:

I am a creationist, but not a young Earth creationist. Therefore I must indeed believe in intelligent design, but not to the exclusion of a role for natural selection. Will that do?

On the phrase ''survival of the fittest'', as you raise it, I think that you will find that it was preferred by Darwin. He did not originate, it came from a man whose work he must have admired - the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. I will say nothing more about Natural Selection not applicable to the thread title here, but am ready and willing to discuss it in another thread if you like.

1) As a someone a little familiar with chemistry I am afraid that I look for the rate limiting step and I will therefore introduce a word that has so far been absent from this thread - mutation. Now all of the moral subjectivity which you tentatively, but somewhat wistfully, assign to Natural Selection must ultimately rest on this process. What is more in order for the new moral climate to become the status quo, sufficient individuals must undergo this mutation together, with suitable environmental interaction, at a more or less contemporaneously. In my opinion to believe that this is the mechanism which underlies what is considered to be a subjective morality requires a powerful belief system. One that is every bit as powerful as the theist who believes in objective morality. Now you might say that your view on subjective morality is based on some other concept. I do hope that you don't resort to the memetic ideas, which I alluded to earlier in the thread. So what exactly are you left with?

2) If the theory that natural selection dictates our current moral zeitgeist is not quantitative then how can it be falsified? As such it is surely not scientific. It seems to me that this can be extended to evolutionary psychology itself, but like you I know little of the subject.

Finally I continue to emphasise that, in my view, the extension of Natural Selection into morals, sociology, politics, linguistics, economics, eugenics etc. is a retrograde step which does much to harm, not only the interests of the disadvantaged, but also empirical science itself.

honestly, your question is on face stupid, and i am not going to validate it any further. you're an anti-religious crank, and that self-congratulatory echo chamber you see in me is a projection of your own atheistic hackery.