If Evolution is true, why help the poor?
I’ve seen my share of ridiculous church signs but we have to create a new dumbass award for whoever came up with this one I found on reddit. The person who posted the picture says the area code is 716, in case you’d like to call in and answer their question. I wonder if there are any prizes to be won!
If Evolution is true, why help the poor?
Tags: dumb church signs, evolution, why help the poor?
u dont need to do anything how poor are evolving into credible biengs ,just take away ur capitalism ,or mullaism.
why is this sign so stupid? just because you don’t agree with the folks who put it up doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid question. essentially, it is asking where we get our morality. it has to come from somewhere, right? survival of the fittest and natural selection can seem to speak against a moral right and wrong. if there is no supernatural being to bring about justice after death, then why be concerned with anyone but ourselves in life? why should we help the poor? because it is right? why is it right? where does “right” come from?
i think it is important that we look for the answers to these questions. you can’t defend what you believe if you can’t answer questions like this.
@wanderer
You pose some very interesting questions. Here are some thoughts on the origin of morality and ethics for you to ponder:
@dog
Thanks for posting that video. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Dawkins has an answer for that question, either. He says that our sense of being nice to our neighbor probably stemmed from our ancestors living in small tribes and dealing mostly with a small number of people, mainly family. I feel like that is a shallow answer. How does that explain why people aren’t at war with the neighboring cultures that they do not interact with? Or at least the ones that we do not exchange goods with? If life evolved to this point on a principle of survival, why do we attempt to live peacefully with everyone? Being nice doesn’t always help you stay alive.
He goes on to say that the question of where our general morality comes from is very hard to answer, and he leaves it at that. He does say that he is grateful we are nice, but I still feel unsatisfied from his response.
Again, thanks for the video.
@wanderer
The origins of morality are indeed hard to discern. However, in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins says the Kuna of Central America (a small tribe that has had no contact with Westerners or formal religion) share practically the same morality as the rest of us (as judged by their responses to objective questions about how they would tackle specific moral dilemmas). It’s a very interesting argument points to morality predating religion. You can read some parts of it here on Google Books.
As regards why we don’t wantonly attack our neighbors, we do – when think we can get away with it. Look back at history, for the largest part of civilization people have constantly been at war with neighboring cultures that they did not trade with. Whenever explorers discovered a new culture, it was always either trade, or pillage if you could.
I’d like to say that today the situation is different, but it is not. Countries are allied and in contact around the globe, and international law and powerful friends prevent the wholesale colonization and pillaging that used to go on. Today countries think twice before invading their neighbor.
And yet there are not only plenty of wars around the globe, but also a wholesale exploitation of weaker countries (or their people) by the strong – from the War in Iraq that was started on false pretexts that got the whole world to not only allow, but assist the US to have its way, to the diamond mines in Africa and the sweatshops in Asia and Latin America. If you look at the governments we elect and how they behave on an international level, you’ll see that they are totally driven by ‘national interest’, which means selfishness trumps morality.
I don’t mean to be so cynical, but that’s the way it is.
I can’t argue that morality precedes religion. In fact, I know that Christianity doesn’t claim that morality came from religion. They believe it was instilled in man when God created him. It does make sense that mankind’s moral right and wrong would come from something other. It seems odd that cultures, large and small, have developed similar moralities.
You make a good point. We are selfish, and things are screwed up. I personally believe that things would be more screwed up if we actually existed and evolved through a process of natural selection. If we can’t prove that the evolutionary process gave us our morality, the very thing keeping most of us from stealing, raping, etc., then I can’t accept it as a valid answer. If I have to go on faith that things just turned out the way they are, then I’d rather place my faith in something else.
wanderer has said:
“if there is no supernatural being to bring about justice after death, then why be concerned with anyone but ourselves in life?”
I am not surprised he has no difficulty explaining where his morality comes from. He has absolutely none! To be good for fear of punishment is the opposite of morality.
Oh god, if this is the 716, I’m ashamed to live here. :/
Know the truth and the truth shall set you free. One in ten Americans are atheists. Less than 1 percent of the American prison population are atheists. This number suggests that atheists are more moral than their Protestant (28%), Islamic (21%), Jewish (19%) and Catholic (27%) counterparts.
The lowest level of emotional intelligence is where a human follows the social contract only if threatened with a negative consequence. Most religions cater to this crowd. (ex. General rabble, if you don’t _______ (fill in the blank) God/Allah/Yaweh/Krishna tells will punish you.) If theists don’t get caught, they believe they are somehow cleverer than their god’s system, and make a habit of socially destructive behavior.
Evolution demands that beings display species beneficial behavior.
Atheists understand morality is entirely a choice. I personally choose to follow the social contract because I understand that my social activism creates a better world for myself and my offspring. It is only logical to be moral, as I am connected to my world by my actions. My existence is little more than a cosmic blip in an infinite stretch of reality therefore I treasure and nurture my existence and it’s connections.
Social responsibility/ morality is a form of species evolution.
@Ricardo
Morals are simply principles of right and wrong. While I believe that morals are instilled in man by God, I do not see how this translates to me being “immoral.” Also, I do believe that God will hold us accountable in some way, but that is not to say that I only attempt to be moral for my own benefit.
@Clark
Those statistics (as far as I can tell) are recorded responses of prisoners who are already in prison. A better, but more difficult to produce, study would determine a persons beliefs before and after they were incarcerated. Turning to some kind of faith in a period of suffering is common in all humans. That does not prove atheists to be more moral.
There is so much more to Christianity than avoiding punishment. It is not meant to be a religion where you follow certain rules and do certain things to appease an angry God. It is about a relationship between the divine and mortal, Creator and creation.
I also believe that morality is a choice. There are many who claim to be Christians who choose to cheat on their taxes, cut you off in traffic, rob convenience stores, launder money, etc. Still, there are others, both non-Christian and Christian, who let you merge when your lane is ending, pick up a shift for you at work, give money to charities, start charities, etc. Believing that God created the world and loves us does not automatically make us more moral than anyone else. It’s still a choice.
To do good in God’s eyes.
From what I know about God I find arguing about God’s existence to be pointless.
What makes a person believe in God is set by the individual.
It is interesting how Christians “knew” there religion was right throughout time and decided to kill anyone who didn’t agree with them. Where was their sense of morality? Well, like every other religious conflict in life, those specific person’s sense of morality came from their specific up-bringing. Therefore they believed they were doing this for their false deity because he willed it (when they never got a message from him to do it, they just assumed). Morality is an opinion of the individual, nothing more, nothing less. Morality changes over time for a specific person over time. That is how it works. Any higher meaning or deeper conflict is simply naive people over-thinking the sense of morality and not willing to accept the fact that it is their choice that they feel that way. Nothing else.
Is killing morality or immorality? Why do US government implement death penalty. Isn’t that killing? One needs to understand why there is killing? Throughout the world history, people have been killed for various reasons. They may have their own reasons however, one must need to understand the reason behind it. The bible records the history of man in terms with his relationship with God and his society. When they needed to maintain the law and order, they were commanded to carry out the capital punishment. Even the Israelite s are being punished by other nations. People have always misused their power which is descriptive than prescriptive in record. In order to understand the killing command in the Bible, one needs to understand why they were commanded to kill? After the September 11, America has been pursuing after the terrorists and killing them? Is it moral or immoral?
A question that is pushing me up is can a non-living thing produces living things? Is a man consequence of evolution of matters? Is there any empirical evidence that evolution of matter produced male and female beings? Can we test that in our laboratories? Is evolution theory in itself a complete solution to the question of origin of life? Many people claim that water is a source of life. I don’t think so. I think it only helps to sustain lives of living things and beings but it does not produce life. Has it been proved in our science lab water producing life? Water is only a fertile ground for life. The life cycle of Amoeba shows that one cellular animal remains one cellular. Though one can observe the progression of life in nature nothing is evolved out of another. Every living thing has its own kinds. That is to say that a fish never give birth to a frog. A fish give birth to a fish. It has not yet been proved in our finest laboratories that a mother-monkey giving birth to a man.
Then, a question arises, how come there are similarities between the anatomy of human body and animal body? Is it not a progressive development? The simple common sense is that both need to survive on the earth. The atmosphere of nature demands the similarity in bodily system to exist on the earth.
Is there existence of morality among animal kingdom? Their morality is the survival of the fittest. Where did man get his morality? Did our first human being (man and woman) inherit the morality from a monkey as he was in the process of evolving from it? Why there are a plenty of differences between man and animal in the area of mind and reasoning? How come a man is creative by nature whereas animals live as they are?
Is an animal a rational being? Obviously not. What about a man? No doubt. At least man can look back to his history and analyze what is right and wrong.
Where did man get his ability to rationalize his situation from? From his intuition? Does a stone has an intuition? No. Did an intuition in man first originated in his primitive stage(while he was still a monkey) while he was still struggling to become a man? Not likely. Does a presence of evil in the world prove that there is the absence of God’s presence which is called atheism?
Is it possible to negate theism by atheism out of intellectual faculty?
Is man a creator of himself? If he is, how did he create himself? Where was man before he created himself? Who created a theory of life or concept of life in a seed? Can non-living things produce living things? If something is happened by itself, it is likely that it recurs. Why do not we see another self created man now? Instead, human being is born out of marital union. Who created the concept of sexual union and birth?
If nature is all there is, how did nature come to exist? Why not we see earthly natural ecosystem in other planet such as moon? Naturalist claim that man is the consequence of purposeless mechanical mechanism. If so, how can a man strive to be purposeful and goal oriented? If human beings had not made goals in their lives, our human history would not have seen scientific discoveries.
Is faith irrational? What is faith? The author of Hebrew writes, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Heb. 11:1). Every hypothesis is a kind of faith which motivates a student to make research on given hypothetical topic. In fact, the evolution theory is also a hypothesis. A hypothesis is not a fact. It is an imagination. Darwin studied on only what was created, the geographical and ecological relationship with earth’s creatures. He never saw how it was created. He could only imagine it and come to the influence of his imagination.
Does an agnostic have faith? Yes he does. He has a faith in agnosticism, that is to say that God cannot be known; we do not see him, so we cannot prove him that he exists, therefore, he is not, he does not exist. If he does not exist, who created the idea of God? Is God simply a whim of religious fanatics, weak, and frail human beings? Just because you can’t see God does not mean he does not exist. There are many things man cannot see with his physical eyes and yet they are existing. Man cannot see his mind, he only sees his brain as substance, and man cannot see his soul and spirit, he only sees his heart. Yet, these unseen substances in man operate to show his difference from other.
If human being is the product of the evolution theory which is also a belief and not proved by means of test tube process, how come there is so much difference between the power and ability of human brain and animal brain? Why do human brains are very productive in creative thinking whereas animals are not able to progress? Why does not an animal’s brain evolve to become a scientist, an engineer, an astronomer or a doctor? What made man to be so creative whereas every other living beings are in the stage of where they are? The ability of a human being is so vast that he can go to outer space as well as to the depth of the sea which is impossible for animals.
Scientists have discovered various laws in nature, such as, laws of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and so on but they do not know how these laws came into existence. Agnostic’s conclusion is that the universe runs by its own laws. Because the laws are not God, there is no God. Agnostics cannot describe who established the laws in the universe.
Let us observe the incident of America’s dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan. How many natural laws were created by the blasting of atomic bomb? It destroyed hundreds of thousands of people and ecological system but it did not create anything useful, permanent laws of nature as the law of gravitation or law of motion?
How did matter come into existence? Our physical world is made up of matter. What was there before nothing was there? Man is composed of matter and life but he is not just a living being like an animal as some agnostic claim, he is an intellectual being who can study and observe his history, anatomy, philosophy and so on. Where is his mind come from?
Apart from physical laws, there are moral and ethical laws which try to harmonize human society. How come human being alone think of morality to balance social order because of which there is a concept of law and justice? There is a question asked by an atheist, how could God in Old Testament ask the Israelites to kill the inhabitants of Palestine? The misunderstanding of an atheist is that there was a time when the levels of sin of Amorites were not reached in full measure (Gen.15:16), God did not ask Abraham to kill them, but during the time of Joshua, their sins were reached in full measure and they were destroyed (Lev.18:28; Deut.18:12).
Many a time, the problem with scholars is that they try to understand the biblical literature from their present context which is unfair. Everything should be understood within its context. One needs to understand that when Israelites committed sins against God, they were destroyed by Assyrians and Babylonians.
God of the Bible is not afraid of reasoning with human being. Isaiah records, “Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord (1:18). It shows that God is not a dumb or a crank. He is willing to discuss in the line of human immorality. Without the morality of law and justice, no human being can function in a society. Science deals with matter, but one must know that man is not only matter, he has mind, he is in need of moral codes to which people called religion.
Agnostics are afraid of moral code because it demands to practice the law of ethics in all aspect of human lives, the violation of which can produce guilt in a man. In order to produce guiltless society, Agnostics propose to destroy moral codes, religions, concept of God and establish human supremacy over God. They declare that man is law to himself and Supreme Being. This has been experimented by Russia, North Korea and many other communist countries. But people in those countries rather looked for some other Supreme Being and because of which millions of people put their faith in God. Today, Communist China has more than 23 million people believing in God.
It is true that American materialism, freedom of speech and human rights and separation of church and state has caused the people to drift away from the fear of God and search for sensual gratification. Agnostics are taking advantage of this. It is also true that many of American Christians are not faithful to the stipulations recorded in the Bible because of which they are indifferent to the physical and spiritual needs of their neighbors. It is clear that present America is advocating freedom of human rights to lose the sexual restriction in the land. This has caused another problem, millions of unwanted pregnancies for which they needed further freedom to practice abortion.
People in the world normally commit another sin to cover up previous sin, but in USA people are demanding freedom to kill unborn babies to keep up the sexual freedom. This is a concept or theory of back to the nature. In the animal kingdom, there is no ethics of marriage and sex. They can do according to their bodily appetite, gratify the physical needs as Epicureans philosophy says, “eat, drink and enjoy for tomorrow we will die.”
Is there any evidence that God is interacting in the world?
Any inquisitive human mind cannot accept that nature is all that there is as naturalists claim. There must be a cause for nature’s existence and its laws whereby nature operates. William Dembski argues that “the world and its laws are not self-explanatory and therefore point to a transcendent source.” It is also true that theology and philosophy are not meant to do an empirical research on interactions of God with the world. For this, one must look to science. Science can investigate intelligent causes that are happening in the world by which one can observe interaction of God with the world. Psalmist says, “Nature declares the glory of God.” What Psalmist is trying to say is that there is an intelligent cause behind the nature. Naturalist’s claims of undirected natural causes are preposterous because the feature of nature exhibits an intelligent design.
Science cannot reject the concept of intelligent design because recent study on biology has come to the conclusion that without the application of intelligent causes, one cannot explain the complex structures of biology and with the help of intelligent design, one can detect these causes empirically, for example, forensic science, archaeology etc. Dembski states that “intelligent design properly formulated is a theory of information.” It collects the information left by intelligent causes which is not able to do by naturalism. Therefore, the theory of intelligent design is superior and reliable to explain the origin of creation and species. This is to say that the cause behind the creation is no other than creator whom theists call God who is intelligent and purposeful in his action.
One need to note that by giving few models of small-scale variation in nature does not sufficiently prove evolution. If the argument of evolution theory is restricted to study of natural changes in certain places, it cannot explain entire life history. It would be superficial to claim the existence of creation out of random incident with impersonal natural laws to which Jacques Monod calls “chance and necessity.”
What is the possible answer?
Theistic Naturalism
The concept of natural selection cannot fully explain the existence of conscious minds which has the ability to solve equation and to write poetry. Scientists have discovered useful knowledge; however, they have also produced number of myth and fantasy. Dawkins states that “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” It is likely that they are designed for a purpose; otherwise, they would not appear that way. I would like to challenge the naturalist to tell the truth that if the study of biology proves the intelligent designs behind every creation, they should say so. They just cannot delete the idea of supernatural elements for the sake of getting rid of God from the creation. If they do not want to believe in supernatural forces, that is their problem. If supernatural forces exist, they should not be afraid to admit so.
Johnson’s argument seems to be contradictory when he says, “evolution that involves no intervention or guidance by a creator outside the world of nature” because if creation shows the systematic function, there must be a purposeful creator. When a naturalist sees a natural law, he must be able to concede that a law does not formed by itself; there must be a lawmaker. Scientist must acknowledge that it is the human mind that makes scientific study possible. There must be another mind who made human mind. Medical science has proved that there are many cases when doctors are not able to understand the miraculous healing of sicknesses. It also shows that there is the existence of supernatural power. There is a fear among the naturalist scientist that if everything is credited to God, there is no point of research and discoveries. It is not so. One can go to the depths of the research and yet he can find that there is a reason for every reason. If a biologist is ready to accept that genetic information is the result of preexisting intelligence, it will be easier for them to understand the existence of life on matter.
It is true that naturalist cannot give satisfactory explanation of the origin of life. At some point, they must consult with the theologians. Naturalist should understand that theology does not supersede the place of science on interpretation of reality rather it just seeks its place within the concept of reality. Atheist must understand that science has nothing to do with atheism. It is simply an unwanted culture evolved out of intimidation. Science is nothing but the study of re-observable fact whereas atheism is also a religion because it talks about God negatively. If it talks about God, then it is a religion.
Scientists have acknowledged that there is a limit in scientific explanation of creation. If so, there must be another branch of study which can contribute in the study of science. Science could never describe the preexistence stage of anything such as what took place prior to the big bang. It is interesting to note that the gospel of John talks about what took place prior to the big bang; John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” (John 1:1-3 NIV). This passage clearly talks that creation came to existence because of God whereas naturalistic evolutionary theory talks about the existence of creation by means of forces that are impersonal and unintelligent.
It is a universal truth that unintelligent matter cannot create life but one can observe God’s power in them. For Paul writes, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities– his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made,” (Rom.1:20)
Dawkin’s acceptance of living things giving the appearance of having been designed for a purpose is that they are exactly what they are designed for but the sad thing is they do not want to concede. Paul clearly writes, “so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal god for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.” (Rom.1:20-23).
Whether an atheist likes it or not, there is a reality of God. Philip E. Johnson writes in his book called Reason in the Balance, “If ultimate reality consists of elementary particles, and if everything that has happened is in some sense determined by some great law that governed events at the beginning of the big bang, then the search for the final theory is not just a game that particle physicist play but a quest of immense importance to humanity. In that case we might say that “physics” and “metaphysics” are at bottom the same thing. But if God is real and constitutes the true basis of all knowledge, then we call the governing discipline theology.”
If one accepts God’s existence and his active role in human affairs, then metaphysical reality is valid. Man is to realize that he is not all powerful nor all knowing. He must accept the existence of all powerful and omniscient Being. If God is omniscient, he is also a God of order. If he is a God of order, he would not act in random and wasteful way. He is not a guy who is not sure of the outcome of what he does. The Bible is clear that God’s action of creation was good from the beginning. Henry M. Morris states that “the wastefulness and randomness and cruelty which is now so evident in the world (both in the groaning creation of the present and in the fossilized world of the past) must represent an intrusion into His creation, not a mechanism for its accomplishment. God would never do a thing like that, except in judgment of sin!” John D. Morris explains that “The Fossil Record doesn’t just show how a full understanding of the fossils contradicts evolution; it specifically supports creation and the Flood. It documents the sudden appearance of basic types, not a slow development of one type from some other type through transitional fossils. Fossils exhibit stasis, not the change that evolution requires. The animals represented in the fossil record typically died in catastrophic conditions of rapid water movement, not in uniform conditions. Fossilization occurred through rapid burial.”
William Lane Craig writes that “if God exists, then obviously he isn’t bound by the finite velocity of light signals and so could know what events were occurring absolutely simultaneously with one another throughout the universe. Nor is his knowledge of the subatomic realm mediated by physical measurement processes, so that it is not problem at all for him to know what position and momentum is possessed by every elementary particle in the whole of his creation.”
The study of human body has revealed that man is composed of 100 trillion cells. These cells are so active that the biochemical processes take place every moment. Frank Sherwin quotes B.L. Feringa, “if you could build a motor one millionth of a millimeter across, you could fit a billion billion of them on a teaspoon. It seems incredible, but biological systems already use molecular motors on this scale.” Frank Sherwin further writes that “Indeed, “it seems incredible” to suggest that such sophistication is the result of chance, time, and genetic mistakes!” If it did not happen by chance, it must be created by the creator.
Brian Thomas states that the recent invention of “synthetic life” was no more than “an exact copy of pre-existing DNA from a living strain of bacteria.” It is clear that scientists were not able to create a living bacterial cell. It is simply a proof that there is a brilliant originator of living human cell who is no other than God.
read a book called God and the New Physics
@thundersouthern : if He then created us , why would he let us debate these things? why would he let man’s mind to thingk negatively about Him?
why do atheists exist? what is his reason then?
You need to know that God did not create us like a robot. He created man with a freedom of choice. A choice can be both negative and positive. But you decided to think negatively about Him. This is the greatness of God. God is not afraid of how you think about him? You can choose to reject him. But, just because you chose to reject Him does not mean God does not exist. Atheism is simply a denial of God. Why do you deny God? Because God exists.
He can joke about a bad reason to be moral, Bad reason? There can be bad reasons to be moral in atheism?
Hey I can do it too: If giraffes have long necks, why pay your taxes?
Some people think they can just string phrases together as if there is a relation between them and that automatically makes an argument.
Evolution is a hard concept to fully grasp.”
If evolution is true,
why help the poor?
The evolutionist might answer: “Why? Because you feel like it. If you don’t feel like it, then don’t help. Evolution will pick the correct action. If helping is good for humanity, then the helpers will have a stronger community; if not, then the non-helpers will hold the competitive edge. Eventually, one will outnumber and assimilate/annihilate the other.”
Evolution is not an answer, it’s a process; and far too complex a process to easily predict the outcome.
The beauty is that evolution is a leaderless process, and it functions perfectly without anybody understanding it. Religion on the other hand has to be steered, and is always at the whim of our bumbling, adolescent race.
The ability and power of human brain is so vast that it can imagine anything. Therefore, the concept of evolution is nothing but a byproduct of human reasoning. Well, same can be said about the concept of God. However, there is a leader in religion, that is God. I am afraid that a leaderless process may lead to nowhere whereas a leader has his set destination. A leader guarantees our future.
Morality isnt that difficult to decifer.
We are social animals, we require morality to function as a society, we have evolved this function to survive.
Morality is also, a bit selfish, i’ll try to explain:
Your a pre-historic Cro-magnon, you live in a tribe.
Someone in your tribe is running around killing other tribesmen with rocks.
Now out of fear that anyone could be next, the tribe comes together and the offender is dealt with (exhile or death etc).
Now your not going to start killing people with rocks are you? because you dont want to be exhiled or put to death yourself!
Thus – Murder is wrong, the tribe flurishes.
As a social animal we have also evolved to help eachother, if the tribe is stronger, the individual is stronger.
So it is in the best interests of the tribe to help the old/frail/poor because if they are stronger, the tribe is stronger, so you are stronger.
We have actually evolved this way, so the fact that we help the poor, is yet more evidence of evolution, so the makers of this sign have really shot themselves in the foot.
Not that they would be intelligent enough to ever realise that…
Note: Other animals have basic morals and help eachother, Dolphins have saved Humans, Dogs have saved their owners (both social animals) and im pretty sure they never read the bible.
“Thundersouthern Says:
December 2nd, 2010 at 2:48 am
You need to know that God did not create us like a robot. He created man with a freedom of choice. A choice can be both negative and positive. But you decided to think negatively about Him. This is the greatness of God. God is not afraid of how you think about him? You can choose to reject him. But, just because you chose to reject Him does not mean God does not exist. Atheism is simply a denial of God. Why do you deny God? Because God exists.”
- However if you “choose” to reject God you will be tortured horribly for eternity, in a Hell that he created.
Not really a choice in my eyes, like the robber who puts a gun to your back and states “You have a choice, you can choose to give me your wallet, but if you dont, i’ll shoot you” and the robber is not only your Father, but the inventor of firearms.
How loving and moral your God is.
Note: I do not “reject” God, I do not “choose” to deny him, I simply CANNOT believe in such a ludicrus idea, with absoloutly no evidence to support it.
I DO NOT, AND CANNOT MAKE MYSELF BELIEVE IN GOD….this is different to rejection or denial, do you honestly think I would not love the idea of an almighty loving being to be true?
Why do the faithful have such a hard time grasping the concept on non-belief?
Its as if they’re so brainwashed they simply cant understand that I just can’t bring myself to believe in an omnipitent, omniscient, omnipresent being .
I certainly don’t think its’ a stupid question, and I think it’s important to ask these things.
There are personal reasons, of course, and cultural reasons. I think it is well argued and a failry stable theorem (not fact, or proof) that Morals and mores involve within a culture, as well as individual members of that culture for a variety of reasons (enviromental, religious, practicalism), and vary midly from member to member of a culture. So in general (grossly general, and not proven but a guess with good numbers) Morality for people comes from the culture or society at large (present and historical), derived from a variety of sources.
If you want to look at it from an evolutionary stand point, I have to ideas…
But to be clear, I don’t think any evolutionary scientist takes Darwin for science or fact, he was a savant who stumbled on very rudimentary piecves and estimated a sum whole of a concept, but really didn’t a firm grip on things or any functional detaisl, we’re still working them out. Saying evolution is “survival of the fittest” is like saying cake is made of Flour, eggs, sugar, levening, a liquid and heat… Right, but not really all there. Even Darwin acknowledge that evolution was more about speces survival and change than individual members of a race.
1. Improvement, protection and support for disadvantaged members of the speces (particularly of fruitful breeders) could be an evolutionary advantage to our speces over those that don’t. Mamals in general have a tendancy to care or rear their own kind, for example the raising and protection of offspring to a self-sufficient age has proven to be a very successful survival technique for many species.
2. Who says that it’s not for the betterment of the speces to help the poor? The “poor” members of our species (generally disadvantaged in many ways) are somehow way more successful biologically than the so called sucessful or wealthy. The breed at a much higher rate than the wealthy and educated, and their children generally suffer the same disadvantages, and with more children the disadvantages should increase, and become worse as more struggle with less and less resources.
While this happens the “successful & Wealthy” are not breeding to maintain their numbers and they have access to resources to provide for better, healthier, more educated offspring. And lets face it… they were successful, so they should be producing more offspring, and the unsuccessful less, this would improve the species’ chances for survival… But that’s not happening, so our measure of sucess is apparently not correct by an evolutionary measure at present. The poor seem to be leading the direction of the species at present, and education and the access to an abundance of resources is apparently not what our species needs.
BUT, if you’re like me and you think being a member of a speces that can hardly feed itself, breeds beyond the level of resources that can support it, and can’t think it’s way out of a paper bag is a bad thing, and Not the best bet for us in the long run, then improving the lot of the poor is generally a good idea. If you don’t agree, then… Let “Idiocracy” come to pass.
But that’s only a few reasons for helping the poor, and those are the just “cold” reasons.
If atheism is true- why help the poor?
If atheism is true- the answer is, that there is no reason to help the poor.
There is no reason to do anything.
If atheism is true then were are a cosmic accident. Just chemicals sparking in the darkness.
You might as well do whatever you like as there is no right and wrong. No morality.
It’s all just an illusion created by our own arrogance- that we somehow matter.
Let the poor starve- or feed them. At the end of the day it’s irrelevant.
As are you.
Now if Evolution is true why help the poor?
Well- because Evolution being true does not cause a problem for Christians who don’t take allegorical stories literally.
I’m not entirely convinced by evolution- not because I believe in a literal Adam and E Eve, but because I can’t see how it is the one answer for all of life’s complexity.
How for example does it explain butterflies. The caterpillar turns itself into a goop which then reforms as a butterfly. How could that happen in small incremental changes?
I think something much more complex than simple survival of the fittest and gene mutation is occurring. Perhaps something we have yet to fully grasp.
When we do understand it, it wont affect my belief in God or my faith in Jesus, because my faith isn’t based on a magical supernatural God making everything work.
That may be hard to understand but I believe that reason and faith are not mutually exclusive.
Is it justifiable to call man as a social animal as Aaron claimed? Aren’t there differences between human realm and animal realm? The idea of man being considered as an animal (whether you add any adjective, it doesn’t matter) is crude understanding of human behavior and animal behavior. Just because some dictators in the human history behaved like less than animal does not mean a man is on par level with an animal. I would argue that man is not a social animal; man is above animal in every aspect of life, such as, in knowledge, wisdom, progressive thinking, scientific development, inventions, mass communications, and etc. etc. It is perhaps not unfair to say that man can bring his dreams into reality but animal cannot; for instance, man dreamed to fly, invented balloons and airplanes, desired to go to the depth of the sea, developed submarine and other instruments which are impossible for the animals.
It is true that both man and animals have similarities in the organs and their systems of the bodies, but man is unique in terms of his ability to explore his past and present history as well as ability to set the goals for the future which is incomprehensible. The reason that both animal and man have similar organ system structure is that both are made to live on earth, depending on food and drink to survive. If one study the life cycle of both flora and fauna, they are the part of ecosystem to continue to run the life on the earth. Although, my friend has tried to show human beginning in pre-historic Cro-magnon, I would doubt if they were evolved from atoms.
Concerning, morality, it is not hte later development out of need while living in community; morality is passed on from one person to another. Moral consciousness was commanded on man according to the Bible– “do not…..if you do, you will suffer consequences.” Just because few Dolphins saved human beings and Dogs served his master does not mean that they are equal with man. They are part of creation and man is to associate with them so that they can serve man. Similarly, horses, elephant, oxen also serve men does not mean that they are social men. Man is unique in creation, not an social animal.
Concerning God, because he is the creator of the universe and all lives, he is the owner and judge of the earth. Just as US govt. not suppose to tolerate evil in society, they will prosecute criminals, in the same way God will judge those who behave against the moral standard set by him. Yes, man’s sins are judged on the cross of Jesus Christ, so that if man accept Jesus’ death and resurrection, he will be redeemed for eternity. Time will come for every man to believe in his creator.
First off, I’m an irreligious spiritual man who believes in the concept of a Supreme Diety, but one who is way more complex than the one Christians pray to, and one who is disgusted with how we as humans have been behaving in its name.
That said, after studying both sides of the atheism/theism issue and evolution/creation, I have come to the following conclusion:
Atheists know there is a god, but choose not to look towards it for guidance.
Agnostics don’t know if there is a god or not.
Theists know there is a god, and choose to look towards it for guidance.
That being said, atheists who are evolutionists are missing an important piece of the puzzle; evolution creates other entities out of existing entities, otherwise, why would we have a DNA chain in our cellular nuclei? Therefore, I submit the following notion as a logical conclusion based on analysis of the above three observations, and the empirically proven theory of evolution: all life on this Earth, including us and maybe even other beings across the universe, EVOLVED from seeds of life CREATED by some supreme deity / force / being of order and chaos.
It is a scientifically proven fact that our universe is governed by immutable laws of physics and chemistry. Those laws are abstract notions that cannot be seen, but have observable effects. Our universe has been tuned precisely in the manner it needs to be to support human life, and possibly life elsewhere. I think someone or something had to design those laws and put them into motion in order for their evolutionary plan to unfold. As a rationalist, I find it easier to believe that we evolved from lesser life forms than that we were instantaneously spawned from nothing. Our natural world doesn’t work that way.
I have personally renounced Christianity once and for all years ago. There’s some good in Christianity, to be sure, but I can’t seriously consider myself as one of them after all of the horrible things they do around the world in the name of their god. This includes fundamentalists of every religion who choose to piss all over everything their saner, non-fundamentalist counterparts tried to build up over centuries. I still believe in a Supreme Deity or Eternal Entity who may or may not bring us into eternal existence after death, however. I don’t believe that the entity is concerned with how we live our lives, since whatever path we choose we will reap the rewards or curses resulting from our positive or negative actions, respectively.
In my last post, I mistakenly stated that athests know that god exists, but in reality they don’t believe any god exists. Sorry about that misstatement!
I have no problem with that stance on the existence of god. Everyone reaches their spiritual awakening in their own way, if they choose to at all. A god is not necessary for spirituality and is certainly not necessary for human emotion and morality. A god / gods may influence human morality and emotions, but ultimately they are our responsibility.