Science and religion both represent a search for truth. Both provide answers to our search for truth.
When I am presented with a truth claim from the Bible I test it for a> interpretation (from the original languages) and b> application (was this within a cultural setting 3,000 years ago or does it still apply today).
When we are presented with a truth claim from science, we should likewise submit it to similar testing.
Please understand, I am not anti science. There is a long list of notable scientists over the ages who were/are theists or deists. However I have tested the bible and found it to be reliable. I expect us to do the same for science, and not just rely on the scientific method as if it is omnipotent. It is not.
The Hittites were a people group mentioned in the Bible. For many years historian doubted the historicity of this people, until the late 19th century when archaeologists found evidence.
As to the flat earth issue, there is a good explanation of the Biblical position on the shape of the earth at http://www.tektonics.org/af/earthshape.html, and of the history of the falt earth thinking at Who invented the idea of a flat Earth? - ChristianAnswers.Net. The latter piece includes material on Christinas such as Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes who promoted the idea of a flat earth and were roundly rebutted by Church leaders.
The “good” is that genes very similar to your own get passed on. Your kin don’t have your exact genes, but they are similar enough to make it a good strategy to help your kin survive even if it is dangerous for you to do so. What we would expect would be for animals to have a desire to promote the survivability of their own kin. The way it seems to have happened in social animals is that adults have a desire to be nurturing to “cute-looking” little ones. That strategy works most of the time, although there are notable exceptions like the lioness and baby oryx you mentioned.
So now that we’ve explained it from the POV of someone who accepts evolution, how do you explain the lioness-oryx thing? I thought theists typically viewed morality as something God bestowed on mankind, but not on the other animals. What’s your view?
1> I understand your point about genes being passed on. My point is that the impulse to preserve ones own would mitigate against such a motivation.
2> I will answer you second question assuming we have a common understanding of the terms. We see in the animal kingdom examples of what we might call moral behaviour, eg empathy, compassion. This, however does not mean animals have a systematic moral code or ‘ethics’. The difference is simply this: reason. In the context of morals, this has been described as “conscious reflection, deliberation, imagination and weighing of various facts and moral beliefs against each other.” In some ways there is a pararallel with language. Some say animals have developed languages, however they lack one vital aspect that we humans have, recursion. The differences between human morality and animal altruism is vast and unbreachable.
And from the same erroneous post that produced the “Hittite” claim:
Piffle. Name one “scientist” who disagreed with the notion that the Earth is spherical. You cannot.
The Earth has been known to be roughly spherical since before Aristotle and was demonstrated to be roughly spherical–including a fairly accurate measure of its size–by Eratosthenes around 240 B.C.E.
On the other hand, the rare references to the shape of the Earth found in the bible refer to a circle or disk shape, not a sphere.
Well, let’s see if we’re on the same page. The way I figure it,
Option 2 is better than Option 1.
Option 3 is worse than Option 1.
Option 4 sometimes manifests as Option 2, sometimes as Option 3.
It’s therefore an open question whether Option 4 nets any ‘good’ compared to Option 1; if it manifests as Option 2 five or ten or twenty times as often as Option 3, then it probably does.
We agree that it’s not as good as Option 2. I’m asking whether it’s better than Option 1. Is it?
(That said, there are other formulations that get to roughly the same result. Let’s drop the bit about options this time, in a somewhat different context, to consider whether it makes evolutionary sense to live by a variations-on-a-theme policy called, um, Imitate While Experimenting With Slight Changes.
So figure you’re a baby lioness whose earliest memories involve being nurtured by your mother, from suckling on up. And as you grow older, you notice that other young lion cubs are getting raised by their mothers. And there comes a time when your sister is raising her cubs, same way you’ve seen it done plenty of times before. Let’s figure you now know this behavior and can replicate it faithfully. Maybe you do so when your first litter arrives.
But maybe you introduce a slight change every once in a while; you experiment a little, trying out variations you haven’t actually seen before; sometimes they works, sometimes they don’t. Behaviors that tend to work keep getting performed in front of your fellow imitators, who can then replicate 'em faithfully easy as experiment with further variations. Behaviors that tend to fail get performed less often and replicated less often and experimented with less often, since the results of yet other experiments are constantly vying for attention.
So, in this scenario, maybe figure you’re the first lioness who ever adopted an orphaned family member: your sister died, her cubs were just sitting there in abject helplessness, and you took the unprecedented step of applying your do-this-for-your-offspring behavior to a lion cub who’d never been in your womb. And figure it worked out great: lionesses who share your Imitate-And-Experiment genes would’ve died off but instead reach adulthood, whereupon they have cubs who likewise grow up and have cubs who do likewise, and so on, and so on, and lionesses who can play around a bit with established concepts and behaviors spread o’er the land.
Oh, and your great-niece adopts an oryx at some point.
Why? Same reason. Oh, sure, the experiment doesn’t pan out nearly so well that time, but that’s not the point; the point is being an Imitate While Experimenting With Slight Changes type, which nets good enough results often enough – and to the extent that it’s in effect, it can make ideas and practices do the evolving for us.)
I think you miss the point of the circularity.
I was answering your question about why one would perform a benevolent act; I figure doing so makes them feel good. I believe this in part because I feel pleased when my sympathies are evoked and I can help someone in need. This seems to strike you as unusual, which is why I’m trying to emphasize that synonyms for altruism often suggest the “feel good” aspect: it looks less like disinterested action when you swap in a word like “sympathy” or “compassion”, which often function like “hunger” or “lust” when describing someone’s motivations and impulses.
And, likewise, answering questions about why animals seem to act “hungry” or “lustful” by postulating the pleasurable satisfaction of an impulse while implying a “hungry” or “lustful” attitude – well, yeah, that gets pretty circular pretty fast, too. So what?
1> The Bible states the earth is round. It does not say it is flat. When we discuss the earth today in common usage, we call it ‘round’, not ‘spherical’.
2> The Bible speaks of two simultaneous events, one at night, one in daytime, showing the understanding of the earths rotation.
3> Leukippos and Demokritos both procliamed the flat earth long after the writing of the Old Testament passages used to support your erroneous claims.
Indeed I would concede that scientific acceptance during themiddle ages has been exagerated, just have the beliefs of the church during this period. A very good case is put for this at http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/russell/FlatEarth.html
Your point doesn’t make sense - you just agreed that the rough behavioral guideline which directs a mother to adopt cute-looking critters can help pass on genes. It’s quite often the best strategy to get a mother’s genes into the next generation (the mother’s sister’s genes are a close substitute). The impulse not to waste your resources on another set of genes is not the best strategy, if these helpless youngsters are usually closely related. It’s standard evolutionary ideas.
Did you know that reason doesn’t play that large of a part in moral judgments? What happens (and this has been demonstrated by lots of psychology experiments, notably the “trolley problem” which you should look up), is that you have an instinctual, gut-level guide to morality, which the reasoning part of your brain then rationalizes. Just like with the lioness, your instinct usually guides you, and the difference is that you use your reason after-the-fact to rationalize it to yourself.
1> Now explain the adoption of an oryx by a lioness (which is counter evolutionary), and then explain the mechanism by which this unreasoned benevolnece became a systematic set of ethics in humans.
2> Reason plays every part in the development of ethics and a systematic morality that operates at a higher level than the individual.
1> OK, so your sugggestion is that the oryx will somehow be swept up in a wave of family adoptions. But again I counter that with two simple facts. The adoption delivers no tangible benefits, genetic or otherwise. Second, the adoption actually carries risk of sacrfice to family memebers. The evolutionary impulse to fight for ones own will outweigh any altruistic impulse.
2> The circularity comes in two ways. a> Accepting a conclusion as evidence for the argument. Your explanations are unobserved and speculative, and they assume evolution to justify an evolutionary explanation. b> You argue a benevolence to justify benevolence. For example the feel good factor you describe has a source. The source is a feeling of benevolence. But it is benevolence we are seeking to explain.
There is no verse in the bible that says the earth is “round.” Isaiah mentions the “circle” of the earth and circles are two-dimensionsional flat figures.
Totally irrelevant. The sun moving around (above and below) a circular plane provides the same effect without requiring a spherical earth.
Neither of those two philosophers were scientists and neither lived anywhere near the sixteenth century of the Current Era, so you are just blowing smoke, as usual. I noted that the spherical earth was recognized by the time of Aristotle and they both preceded him by a few years.
So what? I have never claimed any connection between the church and a flat earth. By the time that Christianity arose, the spherical earth was common knowledge. Most of the accusations of a “flat earth” aimed at the Christian Church originated with anti-Catholic rhetoric in the nineteenth century.
You claimed, falsely, that “scientists” as late as the sixteenth century argued against a “round” earth, but you are misusing the word “round” to mean spherical when the bible has no passage that makes that claim and the best you can come up with are a couple of philosophers–not scientists–from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., so now you have posted errors twice and the bible is still stuck with its error.
1> Circles are round. Circles do not have ‘four corners’.
2> I have posted material that clearly shows the Bible writers spoke of a round planet.
3> Ancient languages have limitations, Hebrew was no exception. There was no hebrew word for ‘sphere’. There was for round. That’s what the writers used.
You might also want to explain Job 38:14, which indicates the rotation of the Earth on its axis by an illustration of a clay pot turning on a wheel to receive the impression of the seal.
No, wait, that’s not quite right. You’re thinking correctly; the lionesses are under-thinking it. I’m saying the occasional oryx gets swept up in the wave of family adoptions because the lionesses are adopting somewhat indiscriminately: they’re adopting somewhat indiscriminately when they adopt orphaned kin, and they’re still adopting somewhat indiscriminately when – maybe one time out of a hundred – a lioness adopts an orphaned oryx.
The benefit of adopting indiscriminately is that you often wind up adopting orphaned kin. The drawback of adopting indiscriminately is that you occasionally wind up adopting an oryx. It’s a package deal: adopting indiscriminately carries benefits and drawbacks.
They could devise a better strategy if they reasoned about this, but,.
No, it won’t; it doesn’t, in fact. Man, for someone who’s uncomfortable about assuming stuff feels good when the only evidence is that animals keep doing it and I feel good when I’m doing likewise, you’re quick to flatly claim that Impulse A (which also can’t actually be observed) will outweigh Impulse B regardless of which behavior observably keeps winning out.
Look, imagine I’m debating the very possibility of sex feeling good while asking you why Dog A is enthusiastically humping Table Leg B. And imagine you tell me it feels good. And imagine I start to scoff at your circular reasoning, saying your explanation is unobserved and speculative, seeking to explain the behavior with a postulated “feel good” factor – and, I add, how dare you suggest that animals who quite enjoy humping and therefore do so quite indiscriminately often enough wind up screwing the opposite sex in between humping table legs, thereby making lots of little baby animals who grow up to do likewise! Why, it’s all merely conclusions masquerading as evidence, say I; you argue the assumption to justify the attempted explanation!
We’re not the only ones who exhibit it. We’ve just got a lot more of it.