Young Earth: The Evidence

[crispybits]

OK then I can safely ignore all that waffle about thorium, as you admit "your standards are not theirs" then their moral/immoral actions and the (flawed, seemingly by either your standard or mine) justifications they might make have no relevance to my moral position. I shall look forward to you actually addressing my position should you ever actually choose to.

[_sabotage_]

Your position is that atheists seek to cause the least harm as a moral principle. That is subjective.

I addressed how it can be subjective and cause harm.

[crispybits]

Not at all. You presented a scenario where a group of people is aware of a less harmful alternative and yet chooses a more harmful alternative. That group is not following the "minimise harm" principle.

[_sabotage_]

And in this, you have no standard to hold them to.

You can't hold them to an atheist standard. You can't hold them to a legal standard. All you can hold them to is:

They can do it, therefore they are fit to do it and therefore they should do it or a fitter person will.

[crispybits]

You are confusing the ability to judge the action with the ability to enforce a more correct action.

I can hold them to any standard I like, even a completely arbitrary one, and declare that they have either met or failed to meet that standard. For example I could make a standard right now that all posts on this forum should contain a word of more than three syllables such as undergarment. Your last post (unless you edit it after I just read it) does not meet this standard and I would be completely correct in saying so.

What I can't do is force them to adhere to my standards unless I can somehow get my standards into legislation and bring successful prosecution against them. But this has nothing to do with morality at that point, it has to do with legality. I am certain you know the difference between something being legal/illegal and something being moral/immoral from your previous posts (not just in this thread but across multiple subjects).

Whether an action is moral or not has nothing to do with whether we can prevent or prohibit it if someone is determined to do it.

[_sabotage_]

Sure.

But whether we expect to be met with moral responses will dictate our own.

For example, if I believe that someone adheres to survival of the fittest as a governing principle, I will expect them to be dishonest, conniving, ambitious. I would just rather not have anything to do with them. I intend them no harm, I'm just not interested in that game.

Unfortunately, morality influences law, and as morality falls more in line with survival of the fittest, then I would expect the "strongest" to seek and receive more advantages through the law. I can't avoid the law and therefore can't follow a moral existence without being made to suffer.

Since I believe that the suffering we do to others will follow us throughout time, I can only seek to limit the harm they cause me and others for their own sake.

In this I'm being as you suggest, but I'm not openly and arbitrarily being as you suggest. I'm confined within the terms of my religion, or not truly following it. If not truly following it, I'm condemned by my own words and beliefs. If I am truly following it, I should be limiting the harm I cause to others or allow others to cause to themselves in dealing with me.

[Metsfanmax]

Your position is that atheists seek to cause the least harm as a moral principle.

I am an atheist, and the basis of my moral position is essentially the golden rule. I believe preference utilitarianism (the moral system I discussed in the thread where we talked about animals) is a natural consequence of that. Where crispy and I disagree with you is not on the golden rule, but whether the golden rule implies absolutely inviolable rights/responsibilities.

[_sabotage_]

Mets we have been through this before.

I don't object to anyone's religion or lack there of. Certainly religion doesn't guarantee the expectations of that religion will be met. But it provides a standard to judge by.

I feel we don't have that standard, but I'm pretty much the definition of insane (knowing this is what keeps me pretty much rather than full blown), so what do I know.

Wouldn't it be nice if our politicians and leaders tried to adhere to some of their pledges?

[crispybits]

You keep bringing social darwinism into this. I have never said I agree with that philosophy (you can search every one of my posts on this or any other forum if you like, you won't find it) and I definitely have said at least once or twice in response to the accusation that I do believe it that I categorically do not agree with it. Atheist morality (or, more accurately, non-theist moral philosophies, since there is no single orthodox dogmatic athiest moral view, though there are some principles shared by most non-theistic moral philosophies) does not equal social darwinism. Atheists can't even agree on whether morality is subjective or objective. Personally I think it is probably objective and context-dependant, though I remain uncertain and open to further debate on the matter.

You also keep bringing the law into this. This is another false connection as I've already mentioned.

Just to be clear, the arbitrariness of religious morality is not what I am criticisng. I am criticising the fossilisation of morality that happens through religion. Once you write something down and call it the word of a god then (assuming you have the balance of power in a society) you are preventing a future potential better understanding of how the universe works and how our societies work from being put into place later on. You are also opening yourself up to complete absurdities, such as a death penalty for working on one particular day out of every seven. Nobody should be able to claim any sort of perfect infallibility on any topic, and with such a complex topic as morality that has such an influence on everybody's lives it's even more harmful.

That said as long as you are not harming anyone then you should be free to follow whatever religious morality you wish to in your own life. Just don't go telling those of us that follow different religions or none that we also have to follow your moral system, and definitely don't try to legislate it unless you can prove in a rational way why the moral principle you are attempting to force upon everyone would be a good thing and back that up with valid reasoning and evidence (the same standard we ask of all moral propositions btw, secular or religious).

[Metsfanmax]

Mets we have been through this before.

I don't object to anyone's religion or lack there of. Certainly religion doesn't guarantee the expectations of that religion will be met. But it provides a standard to judge by.

The problem is that no one exists who actually gets to figure out what the standard is. Like, you have the Pope who is the ultimate leader of the rules of one particular sect of Christianity, but people who don't like how the Pope interprets the Bible will just ascribe to a different sect of Christianity. So ultimately you still have people obeying the moral guidelines they want to believe, instead of ones they think came down from on high.

This situation would only be resolved if there were only one possible way to interpret the meaning of the New Testament (and that's leaving out the Jews and the Old Testament entirely).

[waauw]

absurdity, sure, fair point. But really, it's just a symbol. Symbols are not supposed to be taken literally as having some kind of magic power or being a real thing. What about what it symbolizes rebirth in all kinds of ways is 'absurd'? Is that symbol really comparable to what some humans think about the life and earth's creation granted not a single one of us was there to know nor is there any written history to rely on?

I'm not certain what you mean by 'symbol'. What object or person are you referring to with this symbol? Please elaborate.
As for your last sentence, which gravely needs some more punctuation if I might add, you don't need a witness to trace back history. So again, please elaborate. It might be I'm missinterpreting something here.

[_sabotage_]

You keep bringing social darwinism into this. I have never said I agree with that philosophy (you can search every one of my posts on this or any other forum if you like, you won't find it) and I definitely have said at least once or twice in response to the accusation that I do believe it that I categorically do not agree with it. Atheist morality (or, more accurately, non-theist moral philosophies, since there is no single orthodox dogmatic athiest moral view, though there are some principles shared by most non-theistic moral philosophies) does not equal social darwinism. Atheists can't even agree on whether morality is subjective or objective. Personally I think it is probably objective and context-dependant, though I remain uncertain and open to further debate on the matter.

You also keep bringing the law into this. This is another false connection as I've already mentioned.

Just to be clear, the arbitrariness of religious morality is not what I am criticisng. I am criticising the fossilisation of morality that happens through religion. Once you write something down and call it the word of a god then (assuming you have the balance of power in a society) you are preventing a future potential better understanding of how the universe works and how our societies work from being put into place later on. You are also opening yourself up to complete absurdities, such as a death penalty for working on one particular day out of every seven. Nobody should be able to claim any sort of perfect infallibility on any topic, and with such a complex topic as morality that has such an influence on everybody's lives it's even more harmful.

That said as long as you are not harming anyone then you should be free to follow whatever religious morality you wish to in your own life. Just don't go telling those of us that follow different religions or none that we also have to follow your moral system, and definitely don't try to legislate it unless you can prove in a rational way why the moral principle you are attempting to force upon everyone would be a good thing and back that up with valid reasoning and evidence (the same standard we ask of all moral propositions btw, secular or religious).

Social Darwinism happens anyway. We are social, hierarchical creatures. Lack of human touch can cause depression. We keep up with the Kardashians and try to keep ahead of the Smith's. Although a fallacy, we constantly demand authority in our debates, in our sources. We heed the consensus. And it's much easier to do by laying claim to a historical figure.

The governed can only be lead by moral authority. Take it away and you lose the people. Unfortunately, it's been found that it's easier to lead through fear than love. We have The Prince, we have experiments supporting it. And since, our leaders have tread a fine line between causing and directing fear and maintaining as pristine an image as possible.

Sometimes they lay claim to the historical figure and sometimes they try to replace it. Jesus was replaced over and over again with a new Jesus. The church defined him as they wanted, the king defined him as it wanted and until today there hasn't been a president that hasn't laid claim to him.

Throughout history we can observe this, observe the changing claims, observe the purposes of them. It provides a sign post to measure apples to apples as well as apples to oranges. It provides a stake from which we can measure if moral authority has gone too far.

What I'm asking is not for you to follow Jesus, but for you to agree to a stake, a signpost that we can all agree on. To recognize that social Darwinism is real and to provide a safeguard for yourself and those around you to protect against its excesses, to call them back, to reign them in.

We need something to agree on, because in not agreeing we leave the hens to the fox while deciding how to share the eggs.

[warmonger1981]

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Aleister Crowley

[crispybits]

Social Darwinism happens anyway. We are social, hierarchical creatures. Lack of human touch can cause depression. We keep up with the Kardashians and try to keep ahead of the Smith's. Although a fallacy, we constantly demand authority in our debates, in our sources. We heed the consensus. And it's much easier to do by laying claim to a historical figure.

I admit it happens, I have said I don't think we should use it as a moral principle to guide the ongoing moral conversation. Murders happen, that doesn't mean we should use murder as a principle to build a moral framework around. Precisely because the appeal to authority is a fallacy is why so many reject it, and why we eliminate it from areas of our lives. We haven't yet got rid of it from the morality discussion, but that doesn't mean we can't. The authority fallacy used to be used in science, it used to be used in legal philosophy, it used to be used all over. It's slowly been or is being rejected in each and every area and that's a good thing, because it means we can constantly be striving for our best without being diverted by fallacious means of reasoning.

The governed can only be lead by moral authority. Take it away and you lose the people. Unfortunately, it's been found that it's easier to lead through fear than love. We have The Prince, we have experiments supporting it. And since, our leaders have tread a fine line between causing and directing fear and maintaining as pristine an image as possible.

Sometimes they lay claim to the historical figure and sometimes they try to replace it. Jesus was replaced over and over again with a new Jesus. The church defined him as they wanted, the king defined him as it wanted and until today there hasn't been a president that hasn't laid claim to him.

Throughout history we can observe this, observe the changing claims, observe the purposes of them. It provides a sign post to measure apples to apples as well as apples to oranges. It provides a stake from which we can measure if moral authority has gone too far.

I'd say that current western governments lost their moral authority a fair while back. They rule because the institutions themselves cause a kind of self-protective social inertia. We don't follow governments now through either fear or admiration, and it's a matter of time before that institutional self-protection is eroded to a critical point, much as has happened with every major institutional government system in history (think of all the empires that have risen and fallen over the centuries of recorded history). Political figures using religion as a tool to self-identify with the masses is only effective whilst the population identifies as religious, and that is another plus point for atheism (or at least keeping your religious/spiritual beliefs private and personal) being moral, because once you remove that you are one step closer to politicians being forced to sell themselves on policy, integrity and principle. There would still be other problems for sure (cult of personality to name but one) but not every action has to solve every ill of the world for the action to be moral.

What I'm asking is not for you to follow Jesus, but for you to agree to a stake, a signpost that we can all agree on. To recognize that social Darwinism is real and to provide a safeguard for yourself and those around you to protect against its excesses, to call them back, to reign them in.

We need something to agree on, because in not agreeing we leave the hens to the fox while deciding how to share the eggs.

I tend to agree with Sam Harris in that there is an objective moral landscape. We may not yet have fully mapped it but it is an objective thing that follows the laws of nature much like if you froze a choppy ocean in an instant the shapes of the waves would be caused by complex hydrodynamic laws. For example causing someone innocent and unwilling extreme pain solely for your amusement is always going to be a worse moral act than not doing so. Through study, through openness and honest dialogue we may be able to really start mapping this moral landscape in more and more detail. Viewed in this context I don't see the necessity for us to agree on anything, though I think in actual fact we do already agree on many things. We can agree for example that killing another person is wrong unless the action falls into certain limited special circumstances like self-defence.

If I have foundational principles A, B and C, and you have foundational principles X, Y and Z that's fine. We can work out all the places where those two sets of principles agree and use that as a starting point. Then that moral discussion I keep mentioning kicks in, and both of us are expected to show good, valid reasoning and evidence to back up which set of foundational principles creates better outcomes in various contexts. We may even think of ways in which to refine these foundational principles, or add to them, in order to improve our own moral understanding. And all the while what we are doing is mapping that moral landscape. If just the two of us do it then we're not really mapping very much or very precisely, but get everyone doing that and we start mapping more and more of the landscape in more and more detail, and without the fallacious appeals to authority (or other fallacious reasoning).

[_sabotage_]

If morals are objective, then they could be rooted out and formalized. According to scientists, the human brain has had the same mental capacity for 100,000 years. While tools for understanding scientific principles didn't exist, tools for understanding morals did.

Why is it not possible, if morals are objective, humans had the same mental capacity and experienced the same harms, and had a long line of traditional work to base their unique talent on that they hadn't rooted out the objective measures?

Sun Tzu wrote the principles of war 2500 years ago and is still mandatory reading for all officers in most countries. We have fleshed out his ideas, we have added guerrilla tactics, but all the principles have remained valid.

Logical fallacies were written about more than two thousand years ago and remain largely the same.

The same rigid bodies which help stagnate the state are the ones teaching children at school. You don't seem to recognize the ability to propagate ideas to alter morality and therefore maintain moral authority. Since the tools are stronger than the individual, the individual needs strong tools to protect themselves against this much enhanced power of the state. I didn't ask for guidelines to live by, but safeguards to protect the individual against a lopsided power struggle.

If the abuses of the state have been long known, why have we failed to maintain the long known safeguards? Fear. What moral framework can be developed based on the realities that have been present for the ages that could prevent this fear enabling the directing of abusive policy?

[crispybits]

Why do you assume we had the tools to properly explore this landcap before now? I don't even assume we have the tools even now, I suspect that more advances in neuroscience will be needed before we can really address several moral questions with any sort of objectivity. At least in the way I talk about it moral objectivity is a set of objective truths about the universe as measured against the constantly evolving (and hopefully improving) standards of morality that we as societies put into place. Given that knowledge of the workings of the universe would be required to properly build functional models of this and test hypotheses and drill down into many of the details it's no surprise to me that morality is something that we are only really beginning to address in a scientific way in the last few centuries, precisely because we did lack the tools beforehand.

You don't need fear to have us not maintaining existing safeguards, you only need apathy. Sure in some cases it may be fear, but in the west especially, with the exception of the extreme gun nuts who whip themselves into a frenzy at the thought of tyrannical governments, people don't especially fear their government. They distrust them a lot of the time, but as long as the government is doing a reasonably competent job in maintaining a certain level of standard of living they don't really care and it's too much bother to go trying to change such a huge tangle of bureaucracy.

[_sabotage_]

Unfortunately you seem utterly unaware of the two most common tools the government uses against the population:

1. Divide and conquer,
2. The Hegelian dialect.

Assuming that we can't make objective determinations is the same as saying they aren't real and therefore can't protect against them.

The government will use a crisis to implement legislation that couldn't otherwise be implemented.

Do they do this? The anthrax from the attacks following 9/11 came from a government lab. The government started taking cispro before any attacks happened. We have never convicted anyone for this. It just so happens that the media and the main opposition of the patriot act were targeted. The patriot act was written prior to 9/11. While the population was in shock, the opposition was under attack, we lose our freedoms.

We have no safeguards against these situations.

If you look at another example, the abortion synthesis. Why is this ongoing? It's quite simply a divide and conquer. And it's extremely effective. By placing two parties debating non-essential issues, we ignore the fact that the parties are in agreement with essential issues. The public keeps getting distracted and pitted against each other over nonsense, while the true issues are furthered by a united front.

When people get upset about it, we are thrown a third minor party bone that addresses the issues with strawmen. We feel that there is choice, but we feel the choice is stupid and therefore are forced back to a paradigm that is non competitive in any real sense.

Government gains further powers, less accountability and no route to change is foreseeable. They have used us against ourselves and used their ability to organize in preparation for crisis against our lack of preparation.

We don't need preparation, we need principles that we can maintain in a time of fear. We need principles that keep us from being distracted by nonsense.

[AndyDufresne]

We don't need preparation, we need principles that we can maintain in a time of fear. We need principles that keep us from being distracted by nonsense.

--Andy

[blackdragon1661]

I love young earth debates! Let's start with simple questions:

Q: Is it possible for something to be created from nothing?
A: No. The First Law of Thermodynamics clearly states otherwise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_thermodynamics

[blackdragon1661]

Thus: If something cannot be created from nothing, and we have something, then there must have always been something.

[blackdragon1661]

Q: If there has always been something, then wouldn't that thing be eternal?
A: Yes.

Q: So what is eternal? (has been, is, and always will be)
A: Well, there are many theories going around. Some say that a Divine Being or God is the eternal thing, and that He created the earth. Some say that the Universe is eternal, and that evolution has occured inside of it and created what we have today. Others proclaim that there was just a tiny speck of matter, and that matter blew up in what is known as the Big Bang, and that created our world. We will explore each of these more in depth later.

Do you agree with me so far?

[crispybits]

Assuming that we can't make objective determinations is the same as saying they aren't real and therefore can't protect against them.

No. We can't currently make an objective measurement of the number of stars currently in the andromeda galaxy because we see it as it was 2.5 million years ago. That doesn't mean that the number of stars is somehow not real or that we can never do this measurement.

I'm struggling to see how any of the other stuff about bad things governments do has anything to do with morality (beyond being stuff we could assess for it's moral character). I agree by the way that there is a manipulation of the public through bringing certain issues to the fore when much more important things are concealed from us, either actively or just through misdirection from things that exist in plain sight. But this has nothing to do with exploring a moral landscape any more than it has to do with seeking advances in rocket science, subatomic physics or biochemistry.

[crispybits]

Q: If there has always been something, then wouldn't that thing be eternal?
A: Yes.

Q: So what is eternal? (has been, is, and always will be)
A: Well, there are many theories going around. Some say that a Divine Being or God is the eternal thing, and that He created the earth. Some say that the Universe is eternal, and that evolution has occured inside of it and created what we have today. Others proclaim that there was just a tiny speck of matter, and that matter blew up in what is known as the Big Bang, and that created our world. We will explore each of these more in depth later.

Do you agree with me so far?

No need to explore all of them because the multiverse and God and all other extra-universal explanations are all just guesses without empirical support (we can't look outside the universe) and until such time as we can look outside the universe none of them should be accepted as reality. It's sure fun guessing though.

Also, eternal is a function of time (existing for all time) and time is a property of the universe, but not necessarily of whatever happens outside the universe. Until it can be proven that time exists outside of the universe then the word eternal is meaningless when used in that context.

[_sabotage_]

Government isn't kept in check by law, it's kept in check by the morality of the population.

If the population says killing is immoral and sticks to it regardless, then the government couldn't create excuses to go to war. If the population says, all people are equal, then the government couldn't convince us to target a group.

Morals are based on human interactions. Human interactions have billions of examples to choose from right here. They are limited. We don't need to discover them out of the depths of infinity. Harm is harm. If the moral is that no harm shall be caused, then the population will hold them to that. There won't be excuses. If the moral is that harm should be limited and we leave that undefined, then we have nothing to hold the government to.

You are saying after thousands of years, and billions of people, and multiple billions of interactions, we are still unable to define harm. As such, we have nothing to hold each other to. We can be divided, we can be abused and we can't even call it abuse.

[crispybits]

You're assuming both that the population is kept reliably informed and that we have the means by which to control our governments in the ways that would change their behaviours sufficiently to remove the harmful actions. Only a tiny part of government is elected, and like it or not the elected ones don't have complete control over the non-elected ones. There are high ranking government employees, unelected, who wield a great deal of influence. Imagine a newly elected member of the government saying "we should do X" and being told by the unelected and hugely experienced guy "we tried that, didn't work, we're doing this now and it seems to be working much better to do what you want to achieve" (and remember that whole thing could be a fabrication).

You're saying that after millions of hours looking through telescopes we still can't tell what kind of planets orbit the hundred nearest stars to us? Well that must mean that the stars are not real or it's not possible to know right? The number of data points means nothing until someone can come up with a hypothesis that explains whatever it is properly, it's not like we get to a magic 1,342,823 data points and go "aha! we have the answer now!"

Edit - also definitional puzzles are always trickier than physical or conceptual puzzles precisely because the definition provides a unique specificity to a puzzle. Try doing the most simple maths puzzle if I write the numerals in an unkown language and don't give you the definitions (translations) for this new language...