Offshoot discussion of "what religion are you" thread

[Rían]

Originally posted by Eärniel
There isn't necesarily a connection between our abilty to go around hurting people and a being outside of the universe, or the chance that we are all accidents.

I'm sorry, Eärniel, I did a lot of typing today and I got lazy and used the term "accident", thinking that people would know what I meant. They didn't, and now I have to type MORE and clear it up!

Basically, I see a logical problem with the worldview of atheism in dealing with the very observable fact of the existence of morality in humans.

The Christian worldview is that God has placed in every person a moral code - the sense that certain actions are either RIGHT or WRONG. And what do we observe? That this is indeed the case! (much to our chagrin when we go against what we think is right - that darn uncomfy feeling in our conscience....)

The athiestic worldview, and the worldview of the most commonly accepted version of evolution, is that there is no God, and that there is no intelligent, moral guiding force behind the universe. And if you think thru the implications, this means that there is NO basis for people having moral values. IOW, we happened to evolve the way we did, but there is no right or wrong about it. How can there be right or wrong about random chance and natural selection? The mechanism of natural selection does not allow only the "nice" organisms thru, does it? The mech. of NS does not make moral judgements; it does not make ANY judgements - it is just a name given to the idea that those species that just happen to have beneficial mutations will naturally survive. So we have a very stubbornly-observable fact that humankind has moral values, and yet have no basis in that worldview for saying that ANY decision we make is either right or wrong. And this is a SERIOUS logical defect in atheism/atheistic evolution. Do you see, or do I need to explain it more, or do you see but disagree (and in that case, please present your case )

If you were nothing more than instincts, I probably can't judge whether you hurting people is right or wrong from your perspective. Right or wrong are IMHO elements belonging to reason, not instinct. But I don't see why I can't object to it.

First sentence - I agree. Second sentence - but what is your reasoned choice based on? Morals.

Instincts aren't all about hurting others either.

I believe that the only way that instincts are pertinent to this discussion is the very odd way that humans will fight to overcome instincts when their MORAL sense says the right thing to do is the thing that goes against their instincts.

Why would we end up as slime again? Just because we might have started like it quite a while ago doesn't mean we'll end up like it again.

Oh, I just meant when we died, we decompose (just like that joke about Beethoven's grave ... do you know it?)

It could be just me but these deductions look slightly illogical to me. Here and there, there are some very big leaps taken to arrive at the next point.

Are they more logical now that I've un-lazied myself (see, my moral sense triumphed over my instinct to be lazy! ) and tried to explain better?