Secular Morality?

[Tassman]

If you pretend to be a far better at what you're doing than you are, then expect to be treated like that. If you were a bit more uncertain in your statements, none of which I think you can defend even half as well as you'd like to think, I'd respect you a whole lot more. Its not fallacious to treat you like this. But I'm not going to pursue this line, because I doubt you'd actually be able to tell the difference between what the fallacy of 'appeal to ridicule' is targeting, and legitimate ridicule, which is perfectly fine.

It depends on the argument, many premises can be established purely from ultra mundane perceptions. I presume you have a persistent awareness of self, you're also experiencing various sensations. You can consider concepts such as the number 1, and that there's a difference between something existing, and something not existing. These observations are either too trivial for science to deal with, is outside the field of the natural sciences. Yet all of these observations are still important, and imply profound things about the reality we live in, and many of the things that can be concluded from these observations are precursors for science to even begin as an enterprise.

Now lets get to this odd assertion of you. It begins with this quote that you've stated several times, in various forms.

Actually, ALL philosophical premises ultimately depend upon scientific facts. This has been the position ever since scientific methodology transformed natural philosophy into an empirical activity deriving from experiment.

You say natural selection, which means you're advocating an adaptionistic thesis on altruism and reciprocity. Yet you're not referring to any coherent model. Earlier you've admitted that all you mean is that from ethological studies of other primates, we see that they share similar behavioral patterns, so you conclude that there must be some natural selection going on. Yet you're supposed to account for the origin, and not why the trait persists.

Its quite conceivable that reciprocity and altruism leave absolutely no benefit on the survivability of genes, and that's if it can be selected for at all. I've asked you to show some evidence for this. Not unreasonable amounts either, but something that isn't evolutionary psychology hype.

It gets weirder though, because when I pointed out that you appeal to a scientific thesis in order to make your position seem better well defended, you say that what you're offering here isn't a scientific account?

http://www1.umn.edu/ships/evolutiono...tm#determinism

Simple observation is sufficient to reveal that the primates, including the human primate, have evolved as a social species and are instinctively equipped via Natural Selection to maintain cohesive communities. Such communities exist all over the planet. One doesn't need complex scientific argument or metaphysical reasoning to arrive at this conclusion.

So now you agree that this model you're proposing isn't well defended, but merely something that could be defended? In other words, a hypothesis (if it even is that, because I'm not sure you'd test it) not a theory.

But then you say this in response to my assertions that there's little to no scientific evidence for what you're proposing.

http://scu.edu/ethics/conscience/evolution.html

So which is it?

Second of all, along with a few other twebbers I've put Shunyadragon on ignore as he mostly pumps out noise and takes over threads. If he's posted some evidence not from a pop sci article, feel free to post it.

Yes.

Why do you think the "default position" is God? Provide substantive evidence please, not the standard casuistry one gets from metaphysicians like you.

Most naturalists limit themselves to something far more narrow than merely natural causes.

because all attempts to define causal relationships with non-materialistic arguments and/or supernaturalism result in scientific "dead ends" and god-of-the gaps-type arguments". Why did you omit the italicized part?

Evolutionary psychology is the field that tries to find evolutionary accounts for psychological features. Since morality is a huge and complex, made up of far more than merely reciprocal altruism (you scratch my fact -> you're happy you might reciprocate -> we both benefit), and you also covered other areas in your quote, its pretty clear that you've ended up in the field evolutionary psychology.

Even if you limit it to just the study of altruism, even there biologists I've found admit that its not really all that well defended. About all it consists of currently are a lot of mathematical toy models to account for behavior that increases the chances of survival of kin. As Haldane famously said "I'd lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins", the relatedness dies off exponentially. Whatever the behavior is, it must increase the survival cousins by a factory of eight, at no more than a cost of two to ones own survivability, in order for there to be a selection to take place at all.

About all the evidence I was ever able to find on it were ethological discussions about whether or not a particular animals behavior constituted an example of this, which is almost impossible to quantify. Which has left them merely to find instances of reciprocal altruism.

I offered "Intentionality, qualia, aboutness and morality and so forth" as conceptual problems to a naturalist. I'm not sure what you mean by god-did-it arguments. If you have any natural explanations for these problems, I'd love to hear them in another thread.



"[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect] is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.

Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others."

This being you, right?

[JimL]

The majority of arguments propsed by natural theologians aren't based on creationism. They're based on motion, causation, morality, orderedness, intelligibility, and other such aspects from which they infer God's existence (as well as some aspects of his being) deductively or abductively.

Leonard, i did not say that the argument for creation was based on creationism. That doesn't even make sense. I said the arguments are based on ignorance.

None of the arguments depend upon assertions of ignorance.

You do not know the answers to any of the above arguments, the conclusions arrived at are guesses, beliefs, based on our ignorance of the reality. To infer God and creation is to be ignorant of the fact, to infer an eternal universe is to be ignorant of the fact. But we have empirical evidence, there is no need for inference, obviously, that the universe exists, and none for an existence beyond or external to it, aka God. Theists argue that the universe itself is evidence of God, but in reality the universe is only evidence of the universe.

I agree that this can't be established from natural reasoning with certainty, unlike God's existence.

You just admitted that Gods existence was, by reasoning, infered, not established fact. By what reasoning do you now claim Gods existence to be established fact?

This is also the position of metaphysics in Christianity, the doctrine of Creatio ex Nihilo is known only through Revelation and not by natural reasoning.

That doesn't make sense. The very idea of God comes from the question of where did the universe come from. If it is through revelation and not by natural reasoning that the universe was created, then it must needs be through revelation and not through natural reasoning that God exists.

Agreed this is a completely certain statement, and I take it to be mostly equivalent with ex nihilo, nihil fit.

That is nothingness has no causal powers. So if anything came into existence, it must have a cause of its existence, located in another.

So therefore it doesn't follow that this principle excludes a beginning of everything, so long as it all has a cause in something else.

And there is no evidence that an effect can be caused by a substance distinct from its own nature. To do so would mean that the effect was created by the cause out of thin air, or to be more precise, created out of nothing!

You can't rationally believe two different principles, that contradict each other, because it implies that one or both of them are false.

Not sure what the point is here that you are trying to make.

[lilpixieofterror]

We'll see if he does accuse me of anything. I've already stated that I didn't come back to TWeb to get involved in these sorts of conversations. So if Tassman does do that then he goes onto the ignore list with Jaecp and Shunya. I simply don't have the time to get into big massive debates with those who don't want to have a serious discussion so it isn't happening.

I still laugh at Tazzy Wazzy's accusation that I have histrionic personality disorder. A strong introvert, like me, has a psychological illness that wants to be the center of attention? Before I was married, I could spend 2 or 3 days, by myself (by choice) and not be bothered by in the least and even enjoy the peace and quiet before I was off to work, so I found (and still find) that ridiculous claim really really funny and the best part is how he claims to be a psych major and yet... what serious psychological institution says you can 'diagnose' people's mental health online? None I'm aware of. He now 'ignores me' because just like Brave Sir Jaecp, when you disagree with him too much, he'll try to pretend you don't exist and hope all that nasty evidence stuff disappears into a puff of smoke.

Jaecp ended up kicking 3 people out of that thread in the end and even Irate Canadian thought they were going to be next. Like I mentioned I already put him on ignore so it was laughable for him to kick me out since I couldn't even read his messages and also I wouldn't be conversing with him anyway. I found this out by reading the messages of everybody else in that thread.

Brave Sir Jaecp's clueless behavior, is really really funny. I mean take a look at this 'response' to my post (where he 'responded' though shuny):

Mhmm,

Of the 3 people I banned from the thread each was doing some sort of negative thing. It had nothing to do with the nature of disagreement otherwise I'd have banned Maxvel, Leonhard, Bill the Cat, and Irate Canadian as well as the 3 people who weren't positive contributors.

Oh, and you too, Shuny, because you disagreed with a good chunk of my core hypothesis! If I ban everyone, who would I talk to, lol?

Notice how I said:

Be careful now DO, Brave Sir Jaecp has already banned you from his thread for daring to disagree with him, too much.

In other words, I said nothing about just disagreeing with Brave Sir Jaecp was enough to get him to boot you off his thread, but disagreeing with him too much, was grounds for him to bravely run away and declare victory. Making his entire rant, void and just showing (yet again) how he can't even read at a 3rd grade level. Yet, he wants us to believe he is this intellectual heavyweight when he can't even read at a grade school level. That is just too funny and the fact that he fails to spot his own insulting matter, in which he conducts himself, is even more amusing. Why don't I ignore Brave Sir Jaecp and his goon squad? They are entertaining and so darn funny in their antics (along with their attempts to sound 'smart') that it would be a loss of entertainment to ignore them.

Now what was this 'negative thing' I was doing? Oh, right... disagreeing with Brave Sir Jaecp!

[seer]

Is that a free choice or a determined choice?


This is a contradiction Tass. You say that they don't have an ethical system then you say they have values. This is nonsensical. They have behavior, period. Instinctive behavior.


Again Tass, how does Dr. de Waal know that the monkey is acting out of a sense of injustice rather than a sense of envy? Or how does he know that the monkey isn't merely acting from instinct rather than either fairness or envy? Sometimes even scientists see what they want to see. How are you not simply anthropomorphizing the monkey's behavior? How on earth can you know what the inner feeling of a monkey is? Please explain.

[Leonhard]

No it was an ‘appeal to ridicule’...a fairly standard practice around here among certain theists.

If you pretend to be a far better at what you're doing than you are, then expect to be treated like that. If you were a bit more uncertain in your statements, none of which I think you can defend even half as well as you'd like to think, I'd respect you a whole lot more. Its not fallacious to treat you like this. But I'm not going to pursue this line, because I doubt you'd actually be able to tell the difference between what the fallacy of 'appeal to ridicule' is targeting, and legitimate ridicule, which is perfectly fine.

A philosophical argument is dependent upon the science supporting its premise.

It depends on the argument, many premises can be established purely from ultra mundane perceptions. I presume you have a persistent awareness of self, you're also experiencing various sensations. You can consider concepts such as the number 1, and that there's a difference between something existing, and something not existing. These observations are either too trivial for science to deal with, is outside the field of the natural sciences. Yet all of these observations are still important, and imply profound things about the reality we live in, and many of the things that can be concluded from these observations are precursors for science to even begin as an enterprise.

Now lets get to this odd assertion of you. It begins with this quote that you've stated several times, in various forms.

Natural Selection predisposes social species like Homo Sapiens towards altruism, reciprocity, adherence to the rules of the group and other natural instincts which tend towards the social cohesion which is essential for survival of the group.

You say natural selection, which means you're advocating an adaptionistic thesis on altruism and reciprocity. Yet you're not referring to any coherent model. Earlier you've admitted that all you mean is that from ethological studies of other primates, we see that they share similar behavioral patterns, so you conclude that there must be some natural selection going on. Yet you're supposed to account for the origin, and not why the trait persists.

Its quite conceivable that reciprocity and altruism leave absolutely no benefit on the survivability of genes, and that's if it can be selected for at all. I've asked you to show some evidence for this. Not unreasonable amounts either, but something that isn't evolutionary psychology hype.

It gets weirder though, because when I pointed out that you appeal to a scientific thesis in order to make your position seem better well defended, you say that what you're offering here isn't a scientific account?

This quote implies that there's a scientific account, within the field of evolutionary biology for selecting for what we'd typically identify as the "good kind" of morality

No it doesn't! It implies that science has the potential for understanding such morality, how it arose and how it functions; and has indeed developed generally accepted hypotheses as to how it came about, as I’ve been outlining.

So now you agree that this model you're proposing isn't well defended, but merely something that could be defended? In other words, a hypothesis (if it even is that, because I'm not sure you'd test it) not a theory.

But then you say this in response to my assertions that there's little to no scientific evidence for what you're proposing.

Well there is considerable scientific evidence for what I’ve been saying as shunya has attested. To say there isn’t is a combination of denial and demanding unreasonably high standards of empirical verification.

So which is it?

Second of all, along with a few other twebbers I've put Shunyadragon on ignore as he mostly pumps out noise and takes over threads. If he's posted some evidence not from a pop sci article, feel free to post it.

Of course materialistic naturalism and methodological naturalism are the default positions; what do you think the default position is, God?

Yes.

By definition material naturalists limit their research to the study of natural causes,

Most naturalists limit themselves to something far more narrow than merely natural causes.

BTW: the argument is not based upon evolutionary psychology as you’ve been told several times before, but upon evolutionary biology.

Evolutionary psychology is the field that tries to find evolutionary accounts for psychological features. Since morality is a huge and complex, made up of far more than merely reciprocal altruism (you scratch my fact -> you're happy you might reciprocate -> we both benefit), and you also covered other areas in your quote, its pretty clear that you've ended up in the field evolutionary psychology.

Even if you limit it to just the study of altruism, even there biologists I've found admit that its not really all that well defended. About all it consists of currently are a lot of mathematical toy models to account for behavior that increases the chances of survival of kin. As Haldane famously said "I'd lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins", the relatedness dies off exponentially. Whatever the behavior is, it must increase the survival cousins by a factory of eight, at no more than a cost of two to ones own survivability, in order for there to be a selection to take place at all.

About all the evidence I was ever able to find on it were ethological discussions about whether or not a particular animals behavior constituted an example of this, which is almost impossible to quantify. Which has left them merely to find instances of reciprocal altruism.

I’ll leave it up to you to bloviate about “intentionality, qualia, aboutness and morality and so forth”. Anything, it seems for theists, to avoid natural explanations rather than tortuous god-did-it arguments.

I offered "Intentionality, qualia, aboutness and morality and so forth" as conceptual problems to a naturalist. I'm not sure what you mean by god-did-it arguments. If you have any natural explanations for these problems, I'd love to hear them in another thread.

The majority of arguments propsed by natural theologians aren't based on creationism. They're based on motion, causation, morality, orderedness, intelligibility,

...and all of them are Arguments from Ignorance and/or just plain wrong.

"[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect]The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others."

[Darth Ovious]

Be careful now DO, Brave Sir Jaecp has already banned you from his thread for daring to disagree with him, too much. Do you want Tazzy Wazzy to start accusing you of having a serious mental illness, that he can't show or prove that you have, in any way, as well?

We'll see if he does accuse me of anything. I've already stated that I didn't come back to TWeb to get involved in these sorts of conversations. So if Tassman does do that then he goes onto the ignore list with Jaecp and Shunya. I simply don't have the time to get into big massive debates with those who don't want to have a serious discussion so it isn't happening.

Jaecp ended up kicking 3 people out of that thread in the end and even Irate Canadian thought they were going to be next. Like I mentioned I already put him on ignore so it was laughable for him to kick me out since I couldn't even read his messages and also I wouldn't be conversing with him anyway. I found this out by reading the messages of everybody else in that thread.

[Tassman]

The natural evolution of morals and ethics has abundant scientific evidence for this hypothesis. I posted some of the research evidence in post #544, and no response. I can cite more if necessary.

The with the bogus, 'I think that were I to cite the universe itself as evidence of a Creator, . . .' is that it is impossible for any evidence to falsify this sort of hypothesis. Can you present a hypothesis that may be falsified?

http://www1.umn.edu/ships/evolutiono...ty/context.htm

[Jaecp]

I believe Jaecp's object was to silly irrelevant cute air ball videos that do not contribute to the dialogue of the thread.

Mhmm,

Of the 3 people I banned from the thread each was doing some sort of negative thing. It had nothing to do with the nature of disagreement otherwise I'd have banned Maxvel, Leonhard, Bill the Cat, and Irate Canadian as well as the 3 people who weren't positive contributors.

Oh, and you too, Shuny, because you disagreed with a good chunk of my core hypothesis! If I ban everyone, who would I talk to, lol?

[Tassman]

Oh, so now we do have freedom of the will! I'm glad you finally came on board.

You are doing it again - they don't have values!!!! They just act on instinct. To have actual values you have to think in ethical terms.

Then show me Tass, how does M.r de Waal know that the monkey is acting from a sense of unfairness rather than a sense of pure envy? Of course, the monkey has no sense of either - it is just acting on instinct. You are just anthropomorphizing the monkey's behaviour.

[Tassman]

No I wasn't. I was making a ridicule of you. You're already the butt of a joke here. But lets deal with this.

Yes I do, but you're not trying to do a philosophical argument, you're doing an appeal to a scientific result. Or rather you seem to make postulations about evolutionary biology that requires knowledge you don't have. And now that I think about it, I'm not sure you could get there even with your commitment to naturalism.

You're not appealing to materialistic naturalism, instead you're appealing to a scientific position, as if there was in fact a scientific account of the evolution of morality. Which you've done several times. Basically every time you say that natural selection has pushed us as a group towards social benevolence, altruism, etc... all for the group survival. Then you're either appealing to a scientific theory, or you're appealing to jargon. It sounds technically, and sciency, and sounds a bit like what they'd say on Discovery and that you can sometimes read about in issues of Scientific American, but does it actually represent modern science? I'd argue that it doesn't.

Yes but that's irrelevant.

Oh well then.

At the bottom of this post you'll find the quote you keep repeating over and over again. This quote implies that there's a scientific account, within the field of evolutionary biology for selecting for what we'd typically identify as the "good kind" of morality, as well as for rationality. While I have sympathy for the latter. At least it makes intuitive sense, I also have to admit that there's no scientific evidence in existence supporting this, period. As for morality, here its even worse, as humans have moral behaviour which could make it harder for your genes to enter the genepool.

I'd say this is wrong as well as materialistic naturalism is not the default position, but again, its irrelevant to the discussion.

Yes, but its irrelevant in as much as you're trying to push a scientific argument.

You can either drop the jargon, and stop talking as if evolutionary biology supports your general assertions or you could admit that you're making a philosophical argument, based on your commitment to materialistic naturalism based on some set of arguments you have. You're definitely doing the latter, namely philosophy (I respect that even if I think your arguments aren't that good).



And there you go.

I'm sorry Tassman, but there's no scientific evidence at all for anything you're saying. There's not a single successful paradigm in the field of evolutionary psychology. And what you're appealing to, whether you like it or not is not just evolutionary psychology (a field that's basically collapsed and is bordering on pseudo-science now), you're also making a just-so story: who cares if the group survives? Certainly not evolution, it "cares" mainly about whether one couple gets to have offspring and that's it. Whether they have nice cousins, or sweet aunts is completely irrelevant. You can make about as good an argument based on what we know, that a tribe where the children eat the parents once they have had their first offspring, would do about as well as one in which we're good to each other.

The origin of morality and rationality in Homo Sapiens is an unsolved problem in science, and may in fact end up having no conceivable solution in terms of natural selection.

Personally, I'm only here to criticise the way you're slanting your replies. As if you're replying to seer from a position of scientific aloofness. If you'd concede that they're philosophical arguments, then we can start to discuss the metaphysical problems with materialism and naturalism, and whether it can ever hope to deal with rationality, intentionality, qualia, aboutness, morality, and so forth.

Anything, it seems for theists, to avoid natural explanations rather than tortuous god-did-it arguments.

The majority of arguments propsed by natural theologians aren't based on creationism. They're based on motion, causation, morality, orderedness, intelligibility, and other such aspects from which they infer God's existence (as well as some aspects of his being) deductively or abductively.

...and all of them are Arguments from Ignorance and/or just plain wrong.

[shunyadragon]

Be careful now DO, Brave Sir Jaecp has already banned you from his thread for daring to disagree with him, too much. Do you want Tazzy Wazzy to start accusing you of having a serious mental illness, that he can't show or prove that you have, in any way, as well?

I believe Jaecp's object was to silly irrelevant cute air ball videos that do not contribute to the dialogue of the thread.

[shunyadragon]

Shuny, what is your definition of science? I would not be greatly surprised that you define science so that any hypothesis regarding God or his existence has to be declared "not scientific."

Correct and an unanswerable question in science.

The foundation of science is Methodological Naturalism which is neutral to any question outside the nature of the physical existence, which can be falsified by scientific methods. Still no response to my post, by Leonard nor you.

The challenge is, "Can you come up with a hypothesis for the existence of God that may be falsified?"Bottom line sort of thing.

You made a challenge to Tassman, "Tassman repeatedly make assertions based on the assumption that if he does not see any evidence for a scientific hypothesis, . . ."

I presented a scientific resource reference with extensive research, oooooh . . . silence no response. I can cite a lot more.

[lilpixieofterror]

Still Dizzy, once again for the dummy: What's your assessment on this predisposition? Because sometimes it's bad and sometimes it's good apparently and I don't know on what basis you make this distinction.

Be careful now DO, Brave Sir Jaecp has already banned you from his thread for daring to disagree with him, too much. Do you want Tazzy Wazzy to start accusing you of having a serious mental illness, that he can't show or prove that you have, in any way, as well?

[Truthseeker]

The challenge is, "Can you come up with a hypothesis for the existence of God that may be falsified?"Bottom line sort of thing.

You made a challenge to Tassman, "Tassman repeatedly make assertions based on the assumption that if he does not see any evidence for a scientific hypothesis, . . ."

I presented a scientific resource reference with extensive research, oooooh . . . silence no response. I can cite a lot more.

Shuny, what is your definition of science? I would not be greatly surprised that you define science so that any hypothesis regarding God or his existence has to be declared "not scientific."

[shunyadragon]

Bogus? How so? Can you show me?

The challenge is, "Can you come up with a hypothesis for the existence of God that may be falsified?"Bottom line sort of thing.

You made a challenge to Tassman, "Tassman repeatedly make assertions based on the assumption that if he does not see any evidence for a scientific hypothesis, . . ."

I presented a scientific resource reference with extensive research, oooooh . . . silence no response. I can cite a lot more.