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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tunica Albuginea who wrote (1033)	10/1/1999 8:25:00 PM
From: Akula	Respond to of 69300

I believe that you are flawed in your assertion that morality is founded in religion. I am personally a Christian, but I do not believe that good and evil are rooted in religion. There is a very simple metaphysical argument for this. First, one must ask what makes a thing good. You have apparently argued that God must decide such a question. Next, ask why God gets to choose. To simply say that God chooses as good whatever He wants makes morality too arbitrary to have any meaningful definition. Suppose, however, that you say God chooses what is good because He is good. What then makes God good? God cannot make Himself good if he was not good to begin with. Thus, good, evil, and morality must have objective definitions independent of religion. There is such a thing as a moral atheist. Furthermore, in response to your second point, an evolutionary selected behavior is a behavior that tends to make the genes "for" that behavior survive. To put it another way, if the genes for loving ones offspring make those offspring more likely to survive, then love is an ESB. I am simply saying that the above behavior is moral and that it is also mandated by evolution. Religion is not necessary to explain it.