To highlight the transcendental nature of God, of course.
I’ll disagree with a different premise of the OP - one that is unstated. Even if someone disproved god, many religious types wouldn’t listen. We’ve disproved the inerrant Bible plenty, and has it helped?
And if pigs could fly, when is the next one arriving at Denver, and will the FAA ground them for improperly bundled tails?
One of the stranger things I learned from the other thread, was that many atheists seem to have this idea that goodness is an inherent state. One is either good or they are not, and this seems to derive from genetics, at least the way it was outlined. Others were cultural relativists who saw morality as a result of culture, something that makes more sense to me.
The idea that there is such a thing as intrinsic goodness that can tell us whether a species ‘deserves’ to live or not seems like a rather religious concept. Personally, I think morality is inculcated more than it is a natural consequence of people being good. They have to learn morality.
So in your scenario, I would say yes, we should invent a God. If that is how it happened on Earth, I find the idea of a secret society of mystics who formulated and executed such a plan, equally as incredible as the idea of a God.
Now, I have seen arguments that morality exists amongst animals. I have also seen arguments that some tribes of the same species are more moral than others, or have widely different standards of morality. Some more vicious and cruel and some more docile and harmonious.
In Modern society the State fulfills this role, and has inculcated a common moral paradigm within a large enough group of people that lack of homogenous belief is not as important as homogenous behavior.
Cite, please?
ETA: with the caveat that “not sociopathic” =/= “inherently good”
I think considering morality like language is a middle ground. As if it would arise without training, but not as nuanced as if conditioned from the start with all the grammar in place.
Do you think tallness is an inherent state also? Characteristics that evolve, especially complex ones like morality, have inherent variation. Some characteristics that wouldn’t cut it in suburbia might have worked fine for a Viking. Goodness in this sense is only understandable in the context of a given society. It doesn’t have all that much to do with morality, but more with selective advantage. Pacifist tigers don’t last long.
I don’t know that it would arise without training. A feral person is just as likely to kill their own species over competition regarding a needed resource as any animal. I simply think that for the feral the notion of morality is irrelevant.
I don’t think morality is an inherent state. I am arguing against the notion that it’s an inherent state. Tallness of course is relative to the size of others around you. Selective advantage only goes so far in a complex civilization. I reject the notion that atheists developed a system of morality hermetically sealed from the ambient religious culture that they were born into. I think it’s ludicrous to say that the religious person receiving authoritarian religious education is less moral than the atheist who came to it by reason, because no one makes up the moral arguments on their own. Regardless of what sort of situation they lived in before developing a moral code, they heard moral arguments, whether they watched a few episodes of ‘Law and Order’, or heard a conversation about what people just shouldn’t do to each other from the barstool a couple down from you. Those same morals that people profess were debated and refined in religious institutions throughout history. Civilization’s custodians were largely religious for the past few thousand years of history. You can deny the existance of God, but to deny the influence of religion on moral culture is just plain ignorance. Even if you point to the enlightenment philosophers or the ancient greek philosophers they were not working in a vacuum separate from their culture religions.
I certainly agree that an atheist’s moral code is influenced by the culture (as well as genetics) but a religious person’s moral code is influenced in the same way. Certainly what is morally permissible dress for most religious people is far different today than it was even 50 years ago, without a change in what religion says. The disagreements about the dietary laws that the early Christians had seem to be a function of what culture they were in. Those in the Roman culture saw no problem eating shellfish.
But plenty of serial killers had religious education and plenty of those without religious education aren’t serial killers. Both sets got exposed to the same social environment. I doubt either of us, or most people, could open fire at people in a school, yet some seem to be able to. How to explain that besides some internal, no doubt genetic, moral variation?
So, religion influences culture but culture also influences religion, or else God’s commands wouldn’t have changed over the centuries.
Why would you want me to answer?
You wouldn’t hear me arguing to the contrary.
The problem with this is that serial killers are outliers. My point is that religious moral education is steeped in the culture, and has little to do with the likelihood of whether or not outliers will adhere to the codes of conduct established by the culture.
Yes absolutely, it’s a communication. Religion is an attempt to regulate culture. With secularism we have found ways that separate culture and religion, and cause its own host of problems, that prior generations who did not see them as separate did not have to contend with. Religion is not separate from culture, it’s intrinsic to it, and will always be intrinsic to culture at least in terms of history. However, there will always be managers of culture, and the nature of managing culture is religious whether we choose to abandon the term or not, there will always be cadres of intellectuals attempting to define what the culture is, the process is a combination of description and proscription whether it is Liberal Social Scientists or Catholic Theologians. SOMETHING will always fill the place of God, whether we call it God or not.
Agreed. For whatever reason, the evidence seems to strongly support that people want to believe in a power greater than themselves. While getting rid of the idea of God is hypotheticaly possible, I am sure that people will still be superstitious at the very least. After all, lucky tokens are comforting!
-Eben
The issue I see here is that there is a sort of obsessive need to reduce the idea of God to some little marginal token barely worth taking notice of. However, the power of God in people’s lives, be God a real entity or not, is immense. Generally it is filled by grandiose ideas like Communism. It’s not just a lucky token but a driving impulse within a culture. Whatever the cause celebre of a culture is, that’s their God.
I’m not understanding your use of the term, cause celebre. You seem to be implying that OJ is, or was, God.
I used it incorrectly. I mean ‘driving impulse’. Kind of like Liberty in America.
Such as ? As far as I can tell, seperating religion into it’s seperate sphere where it contaminates everything else as little as possible has been immensely beneficial, with no cost I can see. Unless you count the lessened ability of the religious to oppress a “cost”.
Nonsense. People can and do have culture without religion.
Ah, the old religious assertion that atheists are all liars, or deluded.
:rolleyes: So now you’re redefining “God” into something that almost no one would consider God, just so you can say God will always be believed in ?
No, you just don’t understand what I’m getting at, as usual. I’ll continue to debate with others, and you can see if you can follow along.
I understand exactly what you are getting at. I just don’t think it’s anything other than a desperate attempt to claim that most or all people will always believe in God. You are obviously one of those people who just can’t accept the idea that people can live perfectly happy, moral, satisfying lives without believing in some sort of God.
Outliers in their moral education or their genetic moral sense? I think clearly the latter. Stalin went to seminary, after all, and it didn’t seem to make him think about what he was doing.
On the other hand, most people would be reasonably moral without any formal moral education at all, at least not more than is automatically provided by parents.
I agree that religion is part of culture, but so is secularism. I don’t think you can distinguish them that easily. But I disagree that something will always replace God, unless you consider social pressure a form of god. We have lots of social pressures, like etiquette, that have nothing to do with god and yet are followed as strongly as religious commands, if not more so.
Religion, outside of theocracies, isn’t so monolithic either. Unitarians and Baptists are pretty far apart. Is the culture of a region dominated by one or the other a function of the tenets of the church, or are the tenets a function of the society. Since hardly anyone follows the Bible strictly any more, and God has not seen fit to pronounce his opinion on our morals lately, and because religious leaders are as much a prisoner of their culture as anyone else, I think there is a feedback loop between religion and culture. Two examples - the Mormon church changed its view on polygamy based on the culture, and many Southern churches changed their views on slavery based on the outcome of the Civil War.