NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vrecknidj" data-source="post: 1659150" data-attributes="member: 7301">I agree so far, mostly.  There are a couple problems with the last sentence here.  The first is "Nature has attempted," this is claiming that nature has goals, that it's teleological--I dispute this claim.  The second is "ensures the survival of the species."  Look into the work of David Lack (the ornithologist) and a few dozen other naturalists since the 1980s.  What's being preserved is the survival of the genome--not the species.  No individual (at least among the non-human animals) works at the level of the group.  Sometimes, it's true, what they do looks like an advantage to the group (a bee dying to protect the hive, etc.), but when you look at the genomics involved, you see another story.  And, the end result is not the same as "survival of the species," otherwise I wouldn't have pointed this out.All of that said, this is still just one such example of the origins of a moral compass.  A reductionist/materialist might agree with it whole-heartedly, but, other than predictive value, there's no reason to select one set of axioms over another (say, when comparing a belief in electrons to a belief in Zeus).  Sellers pointed this out in his essay in the 50s, "The Myth of the Given."It's also entirely possible that the natural world has "given" us this compass because that's what God wanted it to do, which throws theology back into the mix.  The most savvy of theologians ignore entirely the simple dogmatism that so many seem to think constitutes a defensible position.That said, I don't happen to have an answer to the "what is evil" and "what is good" questions.  I could say what Kant thought, or what Hobbes thought, or what Bentham or Mill or Plato or Aristotle or Aquinas or Augustine thought.  But, since I don't know that I fully agree with them, it doesn't matter much.Dave</blockquote>

Verification