Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Evolutionary morality...

As I've stated before, morality and naturalism don't mix. Now I don't really care if one feels the need to clarify whether it is methodological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism, atheistic naturalism, or whatever naturalism. The point is that any worldview which posits that nature alone is responsible for morality is being logically inconsistent. Touchstone Magazine's Mere Comments has a few posts in this regard that are worth checking out. In THE EVOLUTIONISTS’ FALSE HOPE:, David Mills references an interview with Michael Shermer in the Rocky Mountain News. The exchange with Shermer includes:
Seebach [the interviewer]: At one point you talk about morality as being a property of the species. Shermer: The reason I wrote that chapter was to answer the believers’ claim that without God, without an outside source, there’s no transcendence to morality. They ask, are you saying that it’s just purely a cultural thing? And my answer is no. There is a source of transcendence and it’s evolution; these deep-seated moral sentiments were given to us as members of the species by evolution.
Mills points out, as I have, that any form of transendence must appeal to an authority outside our realm. This is in complete contradiction to any mandate that all aspects of our being were derived from completely natural means. Mills follows up with a quote from C. S. Lewis:
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 that it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
Additional posts by Mills include, They Don't Get it, and The Evolutionist's Morality. Try as they might, evolutionists cannot give any convincing natural reasons that humans should act as moral creatures.

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