New Guy briefly made the point over on the China board, but it belongs here. It deserves a real Manifesto. Later. All I have time for is a mini-manifesto.
Bemused beleives that Good and Evil are mere products of evolution.
New Guy believes otherwise.
I have read plenty of work by evolutionary scientists- in fact, in todays world, any real biologist is an evolutionary scientist. Evolution is the prevailing theory of how biology works, and its a good one, just as Einstein's equations are a good theory of how matter and energy in the universe. I am a beleiver, but I find the claims that evolution is somehow inconsistent with God to be silly- after all, believers generally don't have a problem with Einstein's theories, even though there are biblical references crediting God with controlling the motion of the stars and planets.
There was that little flap over Gallileo, but we're feeling much better now, we're over that.
Back to the Mini-festo. Good adn Evil are qualities. They are descriptions. They are solely moral in nature. They did not "evolve". This should be obvious. The strict "there is a scientific explanation for everyrthing" type (which I deeply respect, I am quite the Dawkins fan) will give plenty of theories on why a certain Good behaviour evolved, and why a certain Evil behaviour evolved. But... here it is, and after however many million years of evolution, we have BOTH behaviors. Humans can do things that are Good, and things that are Evil. We certainly recognize which is which. Make no mistake, even the Palestinian cheering for a suicide bomber KNOWS it is Evil. He will call it "resistance", but he knows it is Evil, and to protect his own feelings of pride and racial superiority he is forced into deeper and deeper fantasies.
So the question is, if two sets of behaviours evolved, one universally recognized as good and one as evil, (there is no culture on earth, not even in France, where risking death to save a stranger's baby would be regarded as Evil)why do we recognize the difference?
Evolution allows only for Selected traits and behaviour to be passed on. Reproductive success is the ONLY criteria allowed in Evolution, as bemused points out. So how do we get Good and Evil? Why is it that we can Universally label two actions, when the only plausible categories under Evolution would be "aids to reproductive success" or "hinders reproductive success"? Certainly, there are recognized good actions that fall under both. There are recognized evil actions that fall under both.
From a strict evolutionary sense, we should see any action that hinders reproductive success as wrong, and any action that favors reproductive success as right. We don't.
It is a mistake in religous belief to ascribe to God anything we can't explain satisfactorily by science. Yet, Morality, more than anything else, WANTS to be in the realm of God. It begs it.
Going a bit further- Evolution takes time. We have instincts that have been with us from before the dawn of sentience. Human babies will instinctively react to predators they have never seen, and will never see except in zoos! It follows, then, that if evolution has created all that we call morality, it should be a morality fit for the human condition as per the millions of years we spent evolving. That is, small, competing, hunter-gatherer bands.
To a hunter gatherer band, every stranger is an enemy, unless it is of the opposite gender, in which case it is an enemy and possible mate.
Morality today is not like that. Heck, it wasn't like that 5,000 years ago. There may be people who behave like that, but moral people reject that behaviour and as far back as philosophical writings go, ALWAYS HAVE.
So how can it be that we have intuitively, instinctively, rejected the code of evolved hunter gatherer bands in favor of a far kinder, gentler, and universal system of ethics? How is it possible that a planet full of diverse members of a far flung species are ALL aware, in their gut, in their conscience, of a morality that supercedes making babies or not?
I beleive it is because we have a spark of the divine. I mentioned Genesis in Manifesto 1. I don't beleive it is literal. But it is very old. It goes back before the recorded existence of the Jewish people- parts are lifted from ancient Sumerian epics. The part about the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" is very, very old. Isn't it interesting that to ancient philosophers, trying to understand the soul of mankind, wrote a story that clearly shows that the START of the real journey of mankind was learning good from evil?
This was the point were evolution was finished with us. It had taught all it could teach, and here we became something more than animals. Evolution taught us to value friends and family over strangers, and to squash bugs. Real Morality, which is all about UNREQUITTED acts of good, something utterly alien to evol |