Quote: "Evolution and the mechanism behind it (Natural Selection) is an observable fact. Gravity is understood less than Evolution in Scientific terms."
Agreed. Evolution is not a hypothesis which scientists are still arguing about: it is a well-documented process which pretty much the entire scientific community agrees upon. Of course, just because everyone agrees on it doesn't necessarily mean it's true - 100 years ago everyone thought aether existed, for instance - but it certainly indicates that it's an extremely strong theory.
If you do not accept evolution then you have to explain the natural camouflage on animals' fur, the reason why so many animals resemble each other and appear to have common roots (eg. zebras, giraffes, and horses; species of snakes; species of dogs; the famous finches from the Galapagos islands who are each uniquely adapted to their own island but clearly still finches); you also have to explain why there are observable similarities between the bone structures of numerous apparently unconnected animals, why vestigial body parts atrophy when the animals carrying them move to an environment where those body parts are no longer needed, and why medicines such as antibiotics become less effective over time because the disease becomes more resilient to them.
I'm not saying it's impossible to form a worldview which does not include evolution, but if you do not accept evolution then you do have to explain a lot of things.
Quote: "I was simply trying to make the point that a variety of opinions does not mean that there is no answer. The fact that there are many religions in the world is no reason to conclude that there is no true religion; it is actually a reason to conclude that there are in fact many different religions, and that is all!"
Good point; I'd just like to make the point that I disagree that there is an "answer" at all. In my view, large groups of people just tend to reach a consensus about what is or is not acceptable in their society, based on what is good for the majority of individuals in that society. N008's post has a number of excellent examples in this regard.
Quote: "Take this as an example showing why this is problematic. In your case, you would argue that both good morals and bad morals have evolved. For example, feelings of kindness evolved into what they are, and also feelings of hatred. But isn't there something outside of both of those morals that tells us one is preferred over the other? Why value kindness over hatred? There is no reason to if there is no absolute standard. Even if you say it preserves the species to be kind, we then must ask why that is a good thing? And in fact, a lot of morals have nothing to do with preserving the species."
Those morals which are innate and derived from evolution - such as the instinct to preserve oneself, and the instinct to protect one's young - are neither totally focused on preserving the species, nor on totally protecting the individual. They are all focused on
preserving the gene which causes them. This is Dawkins' theory of the "selfish gene". Let's take those two examples, kindness and hatred. Let's say a mother is kind to her child, to the point of being so protective of it that she is willing to die as long as it can survive. This will result in the death of the mother and the survival of the child, which means that the child's genes - which will probably contain the "kindness" gene - will be preserved and the cycle will continue. This will lead to the kindness gene becoming common. The kindness we feel towards strangers is probably a remnant of this gene, which originally only applied to close tribal and familial groups.
Now, let's take hatred. Imagine you are a member of a primitive tribe and you live alongside another primitive tribe. Because the other tribe hunts animals near your land, you hate them. Everybody in the tribe has a deep, seething, terrible hatred for every other member of the other tribe. So, your tribe goes over to the other tribe's land and you obliterate them. Their genes are removed from the gene pool; your genes (including the hatred gene) continue and become common.
In both cases, kindness (towards those like you) and hatred (towards those unlike you) result in the preservation of the genes which cause them, which is why we have them today.
To answer your question, isn't there something which makes us prefer the "good" morals over the "bad" morals? I don't think so, at least not innately. From nature's perspective, kindness is just as valid as hatred or even genocide: both are "good" from the gene's point of view because they lead to the preservation of that gene. There is simply no moral attitude to take: whether something in nature is nice or repulsive from our distant, civilised perspective doesn't effect whether something is "good" or "bad" in nature; better words than "good" or "bad" might be "useful" or "useless", since, in nature, function is all-important and comfort means very little.
And I think you can observe this in human culture. We like to think that kindness is better than hatred but human beings exhibit hatred as often as kindness, often with better results. The Roman empire, the slave trade, hate crimes - these are all things driven by hate, or at least by a tribal desire to protect people like you and to hate those unlike you, which led to a great deal of destruction and hardship for those who were the victims of that hatred. But they are also extremely powerful and result in the success of the hater's objective. Often, the only way to combat such acts is to stop them by force - that is, to hate back.
To be honest, if one of the two emotions "is preferred over the other", I think it's hatred. Throughout human history humans have fought each other, killed each other, and hated their neighbours; if they have ever *not* been at war with their neighbours this is usually because they are either too weak to go to war and are building up their resources, or they are allied with that nation in order to go to war with another. The history of Europe from the Dark Ages to, basically, the fall of the Berlin wall is an example of this.
Kindness, by contrast, has had very little effect on human history. The only reason I personally prefer kindness to hate is because I don't want to live in a world where we're always at war with other people. I don't think this because I believe war is morally wrong: I think this because I like security, I like living in a nation which will not be conquered in the foreseeable future, and I like stability. I don't like the possibility of being killed. I also enjoy the company of my friends and I like it when they are kind to me, so, to facilitate that, I am kind to them. In my view, I just can't see why anything else needs to enter into the question. I don't think there is anything particularly sacred about kindness: it's merely one way of doing things which is suitable for given situations, just as cunning or hatred or trickery would be suitable for other situations.
And I'm really, really sorry about this massive wall of text :S
Secretary of Unknowable Knowledge for the Rock/Dink administration '08
