If it was a fundamental necessity, such a situation could not arise (or at least not persist for long).
Or we may have to conclude that we were incorrect in thinking it was a fundamental necessity.
Sure, but if you’re in Chattel Slavery South USA, or in Nazi Germany, you’d learn a neat trick to smooth all that over: just redefine who gets to be “people”.
My point is that they still believed in the sanctity of life (and other universal values) even if they disagreed on which groups it applied to.
Well, of course I value my life, as distinct from those in the group of People Who Are Not Me.
My point is that if a “universal” value can be stepped around so easily it isn’t universal at all.
I don’t believe that actual morality is inherited but we are wired in such a way as to get chemical rewards from responses to selfless acts and just getting along in general. Disagreeable people would likely have been exiled from tribes and family groups and not have the same reproductive opportunities.
You are right, altruism is selected for in humans. But it might not be selected for in intelligent creatures that evolved from solitary open ocean predators who go through a larval stage, to invent an example at random.
Intelligence alone would be able to recognize and remember the consequences of feedback from its own actions and might at some level appear to have some kind of morality.
It’s difficult not to think like a human, when you are a human, and easy to assume that everything else that thinks, must think like a human.
It is possible, I suppose, that along the way from chemistry to intelligent, sentient lifeforms, the various filters that exist as natural hurdles and selection criteria are universally and inevitably such that wherever intelligent, sentient life arises, it ends up being rather similar to humans in the way that it forms thoughts and how it interacts with other members of its own species and the world it inhabits, but it seems really unlikely that there is only one solution to this hugely complex puzzle.
Much more likely I believe, as Larry Niven (I know, SF again) wrote: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently.
We only have one example to work with: ourselves, so nobody can prove that other intelligent life would be different or the same, but insisting that it would be the same is, I think, similar to insisting that other intelligent life would look like bipedal, bilaterally-symmetric humanoids like us.
My first thought at the mention of killing off one’s offspring was the Gowachin from Frank Herbert’s The Dosadi Experiment,
Gowachin young are born into a graluz, or indoor pool into which the tadpoles are birthed and live until their father tests them by swimming through the graluz, eating those he can catch. This winnowing process is used to eliminate the slowest Gowachin who betray an insufficient desire for survival.
Realistically, the very old human ‘tradition’ of having double digit numbers of children because it’s a good way to insure that some of them live long enough to reproduce isn’t all that different.
God would not be God if He was fickle or had a fairweather mind.
You might be confusing when certain commands or laws God set in
the Bible changed from OT to NT, but that is not because no absolute
exists, but because God instructs and commands at particular times
for particular peoples/events to teach about obedience, trust, and faith.
When it appears like God is changing his mind in the Bible, it is not
because he is unsure or didn’t know. It’s because it was for us.
God is perfect, unchanging, all-knowing, and immutable. That is why
if you believe in God, then there are absolutes 100%. If you don’t
believe in God, then of course you’ll believe there are no such things
as moral absolutes or absolutes period. So you are right when you
say there aren’t because you don’t believe in God.
A few minor problems with this view. The first has already been covered - are god’s absolute moral laws whatever god wants them to be, or are they derived from some fundamental set of morals? If the former they aren’t absolute, they are just god’s whim, if the latter how can we find what they are and do we need god at all?
Then there is the problem of determining what they are. The laws as laid down in the Bible are either self-contradictory or make moral what we can determine ethically isn’t moral. (Like slavery.)
Then there is the question of whether god is bound by these absolute moral laws. If you believe in the Bible, clearly not, because that would mean genocide is not immoral if god does it, and I think we can all agree it is immoral if we do it.
Plus, how can we tell which morals are absolute and which are just whims? Keeping kosher was absolute for Jews, but in the NT it got thrown away to help recruitment. Keeping the Sabbath also.
Sorry, god-based absolute morality makes no sense. Which doesn’t prove there is no god - we can imagine capricious gods like the Greek ones.
God is. Moral laws are not outside of God.
They are what He is. That is why he is called I AM.
Absolutes are God’s attributes.
The greatest nemesis to humanity is his rebelliousness to God, meaning,
we don’t want to believe we are not the masters and creators of our own lives
and universe. That is the struggle that people can’t get over for those who don’t believe
in God. They don’t like the idea that “someone/something” is supreme over them.
Man wants to make himself God and believes only man can set the laws or absolutes
which is false and man’s pursuit of God-likeness will only lead to their demise.
The moment man realizes they are the created ones who exist to glorify the Creator,
is the moment we see with clarity and understanding of everything else. Without this,
all structures man builds will fail to stand because it is based on a false premise that
man is God and determines everything.
If only there was some, no, any evidence for this God thingy…
Please no, that’s no fun. Can we instead hear the most facile solution to the Epicurean Paradox?
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If God is omnipotent (having unlimited power or authority; all-powerful), then he has the ability to prevent evil.
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If God is omnibenevolent (being infinitely good or possessing perfect goodness), then he would want to prevent evil.
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If God is omniscient (having complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding; all-knowing), then he knows how to prevent evil.
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Despite these attributes, evil still exists in the world.
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Therefore, God either lacks one or more of these attributes or does not exist.
Ohh! I know that one! FREE WILL!
Careful - statistics show that priests who use that one are also more liable to die from cirrhosis