Oh, it’s here, you just have no intention of debating, so I’m not gonna look for it.
Your brain. People who have brain trauma sometimes experience changes to morality. But you’ve already been told this several times and will dismiss it because you have no intention of actually debating.
Firstly you cannot point to evidence that a neurological response to stimuli is repsonsible for a moral decision, so stop posturing.
Secondly, what stimuli? What stimuli tells us not to murder our brother.
Some specifics please.
It triggers ‘in’ your brain, but that isn’t the trigger. There must be a mechainsm that is the catalyst or trigger for the response. What is that mechanism?
A number of links have already been provided showing the evidence for this. To continue to deny it at this point is simpy dishonest.
It’s not the stimuli that stops us, Sparky, it’s the negative emotional response to the stimuli. We don’t eat rotten meat because ut stinks. We don’t kill our brother because it "stinks: emotionally.
You can read any of the links that were provided by Kimera. You know they were provided. Your continued requests for cites and details that have already been multiply provided are exceedingly disingenuous.
I’ll ignore your continued evasion to stay with the current point, but do stay with the issue.
What is the source of the stimuli that tells us not to kill our brother? It;s a simple question, particularly given your claim to a purely naturalistic explanation.
You must somehow posit a physical, neurological reaction that stops us in our tracks. What is it’s source? What makes it kick in?
Look I’ll make it easier for you.
Are you suggesting that we instinctively and unconsciously know not to kill our brother because it will deplete our gene pool in some remote manner? Is that part of the trigger?
[quote=“aigonz, post:685, topic:551952”]
I have looked through most (not all) of the sites quoted by Kimera. I suggest you should do the same before claiming these as ‘evidence’. The sites conatin postulations, opinion, suggestions and possibilities, all with an assumption to evolution. Here is a typical example:
"Group Competition, Reproductive Leveling, and the Evolution of Human Altruism
Samuel Bowles
Humans behave altruistically in natural settings and experiments. A possible explanation—that groups with more altruists survive when groups compete—has long been judged untenable on empirical grounds for most species. But there have been no empirical tests of this explanation for humans. My empirical estimates show that genetic differences between early human groups are likely to have been great enough so that lethal intergroup competition could account for the evolution of altruism. Crucial to this process were distinctive human practices such as sharing food beyond the immediate family, monogamy, and other forms of reproductive leveling. These culturally transmitted practices presuppose advanced cognitive and linguistic capacities, possibly accounting for the distinctive forms of altruism found in our species.
Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA, and Universitá di Siena, 17 Piazza San Francesco, Siena, Italy."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314/5805/1569
Note the following words:
‘estimates’
‘likely to have been’
‘could’
Is this really all you have?
We have a natural aversion to murder, which developed from premoral sentiments in earlier primates that created better, more successful societies. It is a hardwired emotional response. It’s not because we know it will “deplete the gene pool”, it’s just an emotional response that evolved out of necessity for us as a social animal. If it did not exist, obvious problems would arise.
You just answered your own question. God is such a violation of everything we know about physics that you have to claim that he is “not governed by the natural universe”.
No, it’s pointing out the obvious fact that the existence of our universe demonstrates that universes are possible. Support that, again, the “god hypothesis” lacks.
No, it’s pointing out the obvious. There’s zero evidence that it’s true, zero evidence that it’s possible, it’s part of an ideology (religion) that has always proven false in the past, explains nothing, and makes no sense upon examination. It is a blatantly silly idea, and no amount of insistence that is must be taken seriously will make it any less obviously silly.
1> God cannot be a violation of something He is not subject to. Your proposition is simply illogical.
2> Other universes are ‘possible’. The existence of God is ‘possible’. Both can be assumed as ‘possible’ from the existence of one universe.
3> The existence of a god is demonstrated as possible by the evidenece of morality and design, nether of which currently enjoy a satisfactory naturalistic explanation.
Let’s clarify something here.
Is the naturalistic position that an aversion to murder is:
a> a hard wired emotional response, unrelated to ‘survival’ as such,
or is it
b> a neurological response to a subconscious desire for survival?
More silliness. Your claiming that he isn’t subject to natural law IS claiming that he’s a violation of those laws.
Even more nonsense. No, the existence of the universe doesn’t “imply god”, nothing does. You are attempting to equate two very different things; we have a universe, right here. We are in it. Claiming that there may be another is just claiming that might be more of something that we already know exists. You can’t point to a god and claim that’s evidence that your god exists; there are none to be found.
Again nonsense as has been pointed out over and over. Nature explains morality just fine, and there isn’t any “design” to explain. Nor would a god have anything to do with something being moral even if there were such things as gods.
What about those sections of DNA that are errors? A prominent example is chunks of retrovirus DNA that got inserted into one of our ancestor’s germ cells, and then gets copied to all its descendants. That chunk of DNA can’t do anything, it’s just a chunk of a virus wedged into our DNA, clearly and unambiguously. And guess what? Animals that share a common ancestor, share the same retrovirus DNA chunks, with possibly some new ones added since the latest common ancestor. We share many of those errors with chimps and the other great apes. This fact is incompatible with the idea of a common designer, unless that designer does so much wholesale copying from one species to another that he copies the mistakes as well.
Francis Collins’ idea of theistic evolution includes common descent. What about yours?
If Haeckel’s drawings were presented improperly, then shame on those textbook publishers. However, as with most creationist claims, I don’t think that the picture is what they make it out to be. Patrick Frank dug into a set of 15 prominent biology texts from the last 75 years and found this:
You might want to re-read what I wrote, and what you appear to disagree with – specifically I was agreeing with you re. the simple existence of a common building block, the key point was regarding molecular evolution.
Philosopher of science Karl Popper claimed in the 1970s that darwinism was not a testable scientific theory – his point being that in order for a theory to be good science it must make testable predictions, it must be inherently capable of being falsified, and Popper felt that Darwinian evolution did not make these predictions. Popper subsequently revised his criticism, but the point remains that testable predictions must be possible.
A good example of this sort of testable experiment comes from three NZ researchers, and was reported in Nature in 1982. Their argument ran something like this:
The sequences of amino acids in proteins conveys evolutionary information, and using this information it is possible to construct a family tree which shows when different species split from ancestral lines. From the information of a single protein it is possible to construct only one family tree that involves the minimum number of mutations. This one tree doesn’t prove evolution either, it just provides a possible explanation of the observed protein differences.
But then, the testable prediction: the minimal tree constructed for say cytochrome c from two species should be the same minimal tree for a different protein but the same two species.
When the researchers looked at 5 proteins and 11 species (and 34,459,425 possible trees), they found all the trees they did get to be very similar, with statistical analysis showing less than 1 chance in 100,000 that the results were co-incidence.
(All based on information from chapter 10 of John Gribbin’s book In Search of the Double Helix – an excellent and very readable science writer).
Collins seems to think so – and he is not a proponent of ID, so I’m guessing he’s in the “all the rules set up at the beginning” camp rather than, for example, Behe’s irreducible complexity and the implication of a handyman god who has to tinker as he goes along.
Perhaps not, although your arguments have been ranging all over the place, and when object morality enters the conversation we’re making quite a leap from a first cause creator.
It may be a bit of both, specifically “a” with regards to my family / gene-line / tribe, and “b” with regards to everyone else.
Humans in pre-state societies show precious little aversion to the murder of anyone outside of their immediate clan – despite the silliness of the Noble Savage sentimentalism. Studies of the Yanomamo people for example suggest that 1 in 3 adult males died from inter-village warfare, and more importantly – for the naturalist explanations – men who participated in killings had more wives and children than those who did not. That is a pretty strong form of natural selection in favour of bopping the neighbours on the head.
No. We don’t have “knowledge” of anything. We are instinctively repulsed by the idea because we are biologically hardwired to feel distress when we see injury inflicted on those close to us (i.e. the empathic response). There isn’t any “knwledge” involved. It’s an innate emotional reaction, and we had it before we were even humans. You can still see it in other animals. It isn’t magic, and it isn’t objective. You should be familiar with this response yourself, unless you have had your empathic response damaged in some way.
What the fuck is a “tooth and claw society?”
What is this “no longer” shit. It IS wired into many animals. If you’d bothered to check any of the links you’d been provided with, you’d know that.
It is a. It has nothing to do with a subconscious deisre for survival, anymore than the sex drive really has anything to do with wanting to reproduce. The fact that the empathic response results in more stable communities and more successful reproductive efforts is an incidental result of the emotional responses. None of it has a damn thing to do with the subconscious. Evolution doesn’t work that way. It just so happens that populations with those genes had a better chance of survival than those who did not. The notion that unconscious desires can affect genetics is ridiculous.
1> Not being subject to natural laws doesn’t mean God violates them. I’m not subject to the laws of Iceland, but I don’t violate them by not living in Iceland.
2> The universe exists. Nothing that exists has EVER come into existence without cause. Eiither the universe has always existed, or it had a first cause. That first cause is either an intelligence beyond the universe, or it is a natural event that deifies all current eplanation and observation.
3> Re morality…we’ll get to that…