Here is an interesting perspective from one Clive Staples Lewis on the supposed evolutionary aspects of Morality....
some people wrote to me saying, 'Isn't what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn't it been developed just like all our other instincts?' Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct--by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires--one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. If' two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature's mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of' the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same. And surely it often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is? I mean, we often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up our imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough steam for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is. The thing that says to you, 'Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up,' cannot itself be the herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note.
Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call ' good,' always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses--say mother love or patriotism--are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kind of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
Here's another interesting point he makes on the subject, by stressing the issue he had as an atheist, prior to his conversion to Christianity.....
For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world--that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.And, of course, that raises a very big question If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling 'whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?' But then that threw me back into another difficulty.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless -I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.
Originally posted by willRules
Here's another interesting point he makes on the subject, by stressing the issue he had as an atheist, prior to his conversion to Christianity.....
Justness and unjustness are contrapositives, i.e. the concept of one can be logically inferred from the concept of the other.
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Originally posted by willRules
Moral Law attempts to establish objective truth, when he himself contradicts this by identifying (correctly) that nothing is either just or unjust except what is based by our own perceptions and biases.
And the conversion point is more than a little suspect. He's able to identify that all experience is subjective, and therefore what he sees as an unjust universe is really just his interpretation of it, not an objective truth. But he he claims that "his sense of what is just makes perfect sense" as though this validates his earlier theory of an extrinsic Moral Law. By what standard does he judge its "rightness?" How is this revelation equivalent to a belief in a deity? Both require large leaps of logic, and one has to wonder if his atheism was really more of an agnostic sense of a creator but not a particular religion....because if this nearly a priori philosophical argument for a deity is enough to sway him all the way to a prescribed earthly religion, his convictions could not have been terribly strong.
His musings on duality are more Eastern than Christian, so he almost doesn't even sound like an atheist turning Christian. In any case, I've heard better defenses of objective moral truth here on the forums, though none have convinced me.
Originally posted by DigiMark007
Moral Law attempts to establish objective truth, when he himself contradicts this by identifying (correctly) that nothing is either just or unjust except what is based by our own perceptions and biases.And the conversion point is more than a little suspect. He's able to identify that all experience is subjective, and therefore what he sees as an unjust universe is really just his interpretation of it, not an objective truth. But he he claims that "his sense of what is just makes perfect sense" as though this validates his earlier theory of an extrinsic Moral Law. By what standard does he judge its "rightness?" How is this revelation equivalent to a belief in a deity? Both require large leaps of logic, and one has to wonder if his atheism was really more of an agnostic sense of a creator but not a particular religion....because if this nearly a priori philosophical argument for a deity is enough to sway him all the way to a prescribed earthly religion, his convictions could not have been terribly strong.
His musings on duality are more Eastern than Christian, so he almost doesn't even sound like an atheist turning Christian. In any case, I've heard better defenses of objective moral truth here on the forums, though none have convinced me.
They all seem to ignore faith. They have faith that "truth" is absolute, but then try to prove that truth is absolute by pointing to things can can only be proved by faith.
The other thing I notice, all the time, is when they sum a problem into two answers, and ignore the obvious third answer.
For example: The people who saw Jesus after he was dead were ether lying or telling the truth. There is a third option that is always missed; they could have been wrong (mistaken).
Originally posted by Shakyamunison
For example: The people who saw Jesus after he was dead were ether lying or telling the truth. There is a third option that is always missed; they could have been wrong (mistaken).
Wrong? Define their wrongness. I am confused at what you mean by the third option in this specific example. (I could venture to guess...and then be wrong on what I assume you mean...)
Originally posted by dadudemon
Wrong? Define their wrongness. I am confused at what you mean by the third option in this specific example. (I could venture to guess...and then be wrong on what I assume you mean...)
Ok. I will give you another example.
A person says they saw a UFO.
A. They are lying.
B. They saw a flying saucer from outer space.
There is also the possibility that they saw something they could not understand.