Absolute morality from God doesn't exist

[rug]

By James Kirk Wall, Tuesday at 7:31 pm

Charles Darwin never said that evolution was good. He was never an advocate of the survival of the fittest constituting a virtuous moral code. Evolution was simply the result of an unbiased quest for truth. Why are there species and breeds of animals that exist on the Galapagos Islands that don’t exist anywhere else on earth? The result of answering this question was not an argument of morality, but rather an argument of reality.

Evolution only cares about survival and offspring. An immoral and cruel family with many children is advantageous to a moral and loving family with few children in the survival of the fittest. Compassion and generosity have helped our ancestors survive, but so has greed and hate. In order to ascend the purely survivalist morality of evolution, mankind must establish an ethical social order and rules of society. Advancements in morality cannot come from nature; they must come from a collaboration of mankind’s’ greatest moral reasoning.

Many argue that morality must come from a greater source than humans in order to have any legitimacy. If societal human rights only come from people, they can be taken away by people. The only way to be good is to have this dictated by the highest source. An omnipotent being of which there is no higher power must dictate what is right and what is wrong. Anything else is arbitrary and suspect.

The problem with this ideology is that we cannot determine what divine morality is. Millions of men throughout history have claimed to speak for god. Which one truly had the authority to do so? If you decide that the words of the Bible are the true words of god, you are making a personal choice or one that was made for you when you were young. You are deciding on one source of morality out of thousands and declaring that one to be divine. Do humans have the divine authority necessary to dictate what the divine source of authority is?

http://www.chicagonow.com/an-atheist-in-illinois/2016/12/absolute-morality-from-god-doesnt-exist/

[safeinOhio]

1. Polar opposites

arise together. At least one philosophy (religion) understands this.

[guillaumeb]

2. Interersting article, but....

this part troubles me:

Evolution only cares about survival and offspring. An immoral and cruel family with many children is advantageous to a moral and loving family with few children in the survival of the fittest.

Any family that does not have certain rules will not survive. What is described here, the immoral and cruel family, sounds to me like early hominid Libertarians. Humans are social creatures and cannot survive without a support structure. The family is the microcosm and society is the macrocosm of support structures.

Morality, like ideas of good or evil, is a societal construct. What is considered moral, or good, or evil, can vary from society to society.

[nil desperandum]

3. Humans

are social indeed, but the dominant families of human history haven't been particularly moral if we are honestly considering what has worked in creating dominant families versus non-dominant families.

Nobility has never been truly kind in sharing power or concern over how many lives they destroy in the effort to maintain their dominance...humans have used other humans as slaves throughout our history, treating those slaves horribly and without morality even though some were supposedly god-fearing believers...they show no more remorse for having done so than the lion who kills the children of the lionesses he intends to impregnate.

As nobility and family grew to encompass larger territories the need to accommodate the lesser members of the group in order to maintain growth resulted in the need to incorporate a larger morality, but even then it was a sliding scale of morality.

Morality might indeed be a societal construct, but not one that is universally held or employed equally even by members of the group who believe it is applied equally. Some nations have obliterated other nations and while not enslaving entire populaces have destroyed the ability of those nations conquered to advance beyond the point they were destroyed.

Morality is not applied equally, it never has been and it never will be. You can see examples of people excusing immoral behavior of some while denigrating others for the very same behavior at work every day often in places that claim to be devoid of such things.

[guillaumeb]

4. Agreed. Greed and a lust for power are motivators for a tiny fraction of humans. eom