Quote:
|
Sorry Tim, but you haven't argued anything. You state and seem to believe that morals only come from religion and unsupportable/unprovable supernatural being.
|
Not at all. I wrote - twice now, I think - that there could be no 'natural morality' without transcendence. Why not?
Among all the behaviour patterns that the natural world exhibits, there is no particular reason why the behaviour peculiar to one particular species should be more moral than another. Only a transcendent being can give that guarantee, choosing our species rather than, say, the mole-rat or the rotavirus.
Now you may argue against this that we are talking about a morality fit for our species. But this still runs into problems. Members of our species have - seemingly spontaneously - developed many different ways of behaving which to you, me, and (I assume) other people on this list would appear repugnant. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that there is not one single moral principle that you could point to that is not or has not been somewhere transgressed, for reasons that the transgressors themselves see as valid and, indeed, universal.
Sam Harris, and others like him, are quite desperately looking for an underlying moral standard that can be rooted in our species being and that does not need a transcendent god. I believe not that without god there is no morality, but that morality cannot be founded on either god or nature/science.
Ethical argument may take account of religious belief, and it may take account of science: clearly these are part of the environment in which such arguments occur. But neither the one nor the other has any casting vote.