Someone on another forum, a Christian, wrote the following, which I gather is a rather common reaction when confronted with non-god-based morality:
Quote:
I can't begin to comprehend morality in abstraction, I must always equate it to the intrinsic moral value of someone. Evolutionary ethics is trying to tell me that it can explain the intrinsic morality written into my being, without a personal lawgiver. I find that concept completely untenable. Naturalism demands that we are the products of matter and time, springing forth from a totally physical, blind, amoral framework. As another Priest of atheism has put it:
DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.
Apparently Pol Pot danced to its music, as did Stalin, Mao and others. The real rub comes when the naturalist wants to say that what those monsters did was "wrong". Their actions can't be deemed immoral or wrong, their actions - from an atheistic perspective - must simply be seen as amoral happenings. Evil itself must be denied in order to adhere to the New Atheism.
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To which I replied:
Think of it this way, what evolutionary power would morality have if it was easy to disdain? The sense of morality as absolute is itself evolutionarily inculcated because group dynamics must operate within a certain limited sphere in order to be of advantage to the species in question.
In other words, the sensation of moral absolutes, the very sense of righteousness itself, is an evolutionary by-product.
A good example of this is "the sanctity of life." From the perspective of the selfish gene, the sense that life is sacred is a great trick, an illusion, for the maintenance of the genetic line. When Catholics (or anyone else) say No Condoms, No Abortion, No Capital Punihsment, they are playing the Darwinian game to a T and are in fact being ruled by the very thing they think they're battling against: nature, red in tooth and fang.
Why does this go unnoticed by most? Because it's "culture." Culture has been called everything that people do when they're not paying attention. A good example of this is regional accents. When you stay in your own region and consequently come in contact almost exclusively with people in your own region, you think you have no accent and think the same of the people around you. When you go somewhere else, you naturally think the people there have an accent, from which is inferred that you are the one speaking properly.
This is identical to your sense that you have access to the one proper morality. What you should say to yourself, even more so the more minor a moral infraction is in terms of real effect (i.e. blasphemy), "My reaction is a result of my moral accent, which comes from too much clubbing with my own kind."
This kind of statement is often taken to mean that morality is somehow "subjective" in that it is whatever you or I say it is. This is wrong on every level. Collective morality is a result of evolutionary effects on group dynamics, with group dynamics itself having been selected as evolutionarily advantageous. Morality is independent of us individually and thus capable of being dispassionately observed, which is what "objective" means.