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J asked in Science & MathematicsBiology · 8 years ago

I also am wondering about subjects of morality and the universal laws of and how evolution can explain these.?

Thank you for answering the last question. I had recently heard someone talking about the veins and valves and was curious. My next question is about morality and the universal laws of logic. How does evolution explain the human conscience and sense of right and wrong. If humans are evolved essentially animals, how do we have morals and a conscience? Also, the laws of logic. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, logic is the same and every human in some way uses logic in almost ever decision. These "laws" of logic are the same everywhere and are the basis of science. The bible says that God created man in His own image. God's own image is moral and logical. He created logic and morality. And he never once contradicts Himself in His word. How evolution explain the creation or development of human the conscience or morals, and universal logic?

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  • ?
    Lv 6
    8 years ago

    The sense of right and wrong, to a major extent (in most people), is innate. It is an intuitive conception of morality. Why would this evolve? Because humans, like other primates, are social animals. This level of social interaction necessitates cooperative behaviour because the cost-benefit ratio of non-cooperative actions is not as beneficial (in terms of net relative [inclusive] fitness). Humans are not unique in having moral codes. All animals do. For example, read about Franz de Waal's work with captive chimpanzees, who have what we'd call a concept of fairness. Or in eusocial insect colonies, workers that attempt to breed are killed by their sisters, and the eggs they lay are destroyed. As humans, we mightn't think this was moral, but that's part of the moral code of a eusocial insect. So there is no absolute morality.

    As humans whose cultural evolution has surpassed (to some extent) our genetic evolution, we do not have to think of morality in terms of intuition. We can be consequentialists, and judge the morality of actions based on their consequences. Is that something unique to our species? It might well be. But that, like everything else, has come about through evolution by natural selection. Logic follows directly; the selective pressures for its evolution have shifted from being only on genes to being on memes as well.

    There is no evidence for any sort of supernatural deity, so what the bible says is entirely irrelevant.

  • ?
    Lv 4
    4 years ago

    you're staggering that Christians do think of authoritarian instructions are the source of morality, yet that is with the aid of no capacity constrained to Christians. human beings in all cultures all too definitely confuse authority with morality. yet i do no longer think of we could abandon the presumption of sturdy faith and invoke a projection of a loss of ethical attention to describe the confusion between a proof of ways issues are and a ethical attention approximately how they could be, because of the fact human beings everywhere in many cases confuse the two. think of to illustrate the confusion of the organic and powerful. each time somebody says "that is in common terms organic" he's making that confusion. final year I study a e book with the aid of the Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, "The sparkling Slate", wherein he argued that those confusions come from the evolutionary layout of the neural organs popular as ethical thoughts. human beings in all cultures are apt to confuse defensible ethical judgments and irrelevant fears, passions and prejudices. i will advise the e book.

  • 8 years ago

    My post wouldn't fit, so I've had to leave out a lot of things.

    How are the laws of logic a problem for naturalism?

    A very smart person for his time - Aristotle, a Greek - observed nature and noticed regularities and created laws of logic from them. "Hey, we've never seen an apple be both an apple and not an apple at the same time, nor have we seen anything else be itself and not itself at the same time ... gee, I guess something can't be itself and not itself simultaneously. I'll call this general idea the law of noncontradiction." Where's the need for an imaginary, magical being?

    And if logic came from god, why was it a Greek who came up with the laws of logic, and not a Jew? And why didn't god wait just three hundred more years and let Jesus bring logic into the world?

    As for morality, please. I'll tell you where people should NOT get the morals from. They shouldn't get them from a book of ancient mythology, written by scientifically ignorant, vastly superstitious, and horribly immoral men, that commands people to kill gays (Leviticus 20:13); has leading men who are polygamists (Genesis 16:1-4; Genesis 28:8-9, 1 Kings 11:1-3, Judges 8:28-32); has a man offer his virgin daughters to a crowd of men to be gang raped (Genesis 19:4-8), after which the two daughters get their father drunk, rape him, and become pregnant (Genesis 19:30-36); and whose leading character, god, gives Satan the thumbs up to kill all 10 of man’s children for no reason (Job 1:6-12, 1:18-19, 2:1-3); admits He creates disasters/evil (Isaiah 45:7) and makes men deaf, mute, and blind (Exodus 4:11); kills everyone (except one family) on the face of the Earth – including innocent newborns – in a worldwide flood (Genesis 7:17-23); commands people to kill women if their virginity is questioned on their wedding night and they are unable to prove they are a virgin (Deuteronomy 22:13-15, 20-21); commands that a child who merely strikes his mother or father is to be killed (Exodus 20:22, 21:15); condones slavery, including owning foreigners as personal property for their entire life (Leviticus 25:1-2, 44-46); says that if a slaveowner grabs a rod and beats a female slave so badly that she dies after a day or two that the slaveowner is not to be punished, because she was his property (Exodus 20:22, 21:20-21); and holds children who aren’t even born yet guilty for the sins their grandparents committed (Exodus 34:5-7; 1 Samuel 2:30-33).

    FOR MORALS FROM NATURE

    1) Non-zero-sum game theory, using the iterative prisoner’s dilemma, has shown how cooperation can increase naturally among interacting entities. Tit-for-tat (or a variation of it) proves to be the best (biggest payoff) overall strategy. Further, additional experiments that modeled evolution (higher scoring algorithms produce more progeny) have shown that cooperation can increase naturally in populations over generations, if the populations meet certain criteria (are social, have sufficiently complex brains to remember who did what to whom, etc.)

    2) Probably the primary basis of ethics is some form of the ethic of reciprocity (the Golden Rule). But it requires essentially nothing more than empathy. “Should I punch Bob in the mouth for no reason? Well, if I put myself in Bob’s shoes, I know that I would not like to be punched in the mouth for no reason, and, I would consider such an act by someone else to be bad. Therefore, no, I shouldn’t do it to Bob.” No religion needed to come up with, understand, or follow that at all.

    And note that empathy is not restricted to humans: chimps have a rudimentary form of empathy (as well as many other rudimentary forms of human emotions/feelings, such as recognizing when “I” have been cheated, and modulating ‘my’ response to being cheated based on how closely related/bonded ‘I ‘ am to the individual who came out to the good at ‘my’ expense).

    3) A simple ethic (not to be taken to extremes) is utilitarianism. This ethic is easy to come up with. Heck I came up with a form of it all on my own, when I was but a child! ...

    4) A simple “ethic” for society can be based on John Rawls’ theory of justice. In short, in his thought experiment, we are rational, self-interested individuals who have to determine the rules of the society we are about to create. We know a great deal about pleasure, pain, economics, social standing, and so on, but what we don’t know is what WE OURSELVES are: everyone trying to figure out the rules for the society make their decisions from behind this “veil of ignorance” as to what they themselves are. And this leads us to certain concepts of justice. ...

    5) Several books have been written about how evolution/nature can produce morals in humans. For example, there is “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong”, by Marc D. Hauser.

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