Wealth makes people stupid, both in the pursuit of it and in the having of it. It does not turn them in drooling morons, per se, but it compromises their mental function significantly. This is problematic in a society that allows itself to be run primarily by the wealthy.
This is not about evolution in the sense of biological evolution. This is about cultural evolution. Cultural evolution is much faster. Again, look up the statistics. For the past century or so, the rate of growth of the population of the world has been slowing down. Around 2060 or so, it appears that the number of people in the world will actually be decreasing. The same thing is true of intelligence. We’re not talking about the amount of intelligence that people are born with. We’re talking about how well they do on I.Q. tests. Their scores on I.Q. tests have increasing in many places for decades. How well they do on I.Q. tests depends on both what they were born with and the culture that they grow up in. And, of course, how religious someone is isn’t determined by the minds they were born with, it seems. It depends on what they decide to do as they grow up. It appears that generally the culture around the world is becoming less religious.
As I pointed out, that problem goes also for the ones that want to keep an status quo based on faulty assumptions. You need to check Hegel, and why progress is messy, but it happens.
Sociologically speaking, that is likely, (as shown by how incentives do work in different job and class types). Now when physics are involved, that is less likely, (and less likely for models to be tuned just to get a result that annoys contrarians) it is almost 30 years since the point was made about climate models, they were useful and now real conditions have shown their worth, while the predictions of the ones telling us not to worry remain the pits.
Nope. No Christian anywhere says that.
I will admit, however, that some Christians know so little about theology that their muddled attempts at an explanation might sound similar to your statement. And it’s very likely indeed that some non-Christians might misunderstand even a fairly articulate attempt at an answer.
They don’t call it evil, of course. They liken it to, say, a doctor giving a painful injection to a child. The medicine will do much more good than the short-term pain. The child only objects because their comprehension is limited.
But since God is omnipotent, this argument falls apart. An omnipotent doctor wouldn’t need to inflict pain at all. It would be evil for a doctor to inflict pain when they have the ability not to.
Free will is an illusion caused by some manifestation of our brain’s circuitry. Humans actually have no real “control”, in the sense we typically mean, over our thoughts and actions. It is all either causally determined by previous inputs or random based on quantum fluctuations at the sub-atomic level.
This can be dangerous because it seems to get us “off the hook” for our behavior. It also dramatically alters how we view “success” in life and ideas regarding punishment and justice.
This is exactly how I think about “free will”, and besides the points you made this recognition has another drastic consequence: it practicably makes every religion pointless, which for many people (not me) is a dangerous thought.
I fear that it will happen in less than 30 years (when I’ll be 93); I really would prefer to go first.
Or we’ll squeak through and begin establishing a solar civilization that could survive anything that happens to the Earth.
Proposed as a problem in this story. Terrifyingly plausible.
It’s not really plausible. People want to think it is, but it isn’t.
Why not?
I see no reason why morality requires a soul.
Morality requires pragmatism. If it is not connected to real-world effects, it is not morality but just some arbitrary collection of thrown-together rules.
As for the “soul”, that is merely the internally observable manifestation of the natural survival instinct, which is itself just an observer: as the “soul” lacks any form of “agency”, it can play no part in morality.
Just something I have been thinking about awhile, haven’t really read or heard about elsewhere and is probably complete BS…
Sentience is not an on/off switch but more of a slider (0-1 and all in between)…and humans are not at 0…but probably not even close to .5. This means that in many things we think we are sentient but are actually driven by instinct/whatever. What makes this dangerous is that we will see some dangers ahead of us and there is nothing we can do Not will…but can.
Intelligence is a hinderance to the prosperity of the human race.
and/or versa vice
Caveat - I’m not sure I’m prepared to seriously defend this point, as I don’t believe it makes much difference operationally.
As alluded to by Eschereal, the application of morality requires choice, choice requires a free agent, soul, ghost in the machine, some entity which is not constrained by pre-existing conditions (internal and external) which it (the agent) did not create.
The existence of any given moral system is a separate question, but would still end up at the same stack of iterative turtles from my POV.
The movie Idiocracy has the same theme.
Ah, I think I see what you mean. Not necessarily a “soul” in the religious sense.
I’m uncertain what I think about the whole free will issue: I have trouble clearly describing what I think is true, and am not sure that what I think is correct. So will join you in not getting further into this here.
America’s unfettered freedom of speech is going to be its downfall, as it has been hijacked to spread effective propaganda when nearly half of the country is spoonfed literal lies (by Fox News et al).