Hi John Clark Indeed the world contains much misery and injustice simply because it isn't Heaven. Leibniz said that without God, it could have been a lot worse.
Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-31, 13:17:47 Subject: Re: Is evolution moral ? On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:54 AM, Roger Clough <rclo...@verizon.net> wrote: > Is Evolution Moral?? I think Evolution is a hideously cruel process and if I were God I would have done things very differently, I would have made intense physical pain a physical impossibility, but unfortunately that Yahweh punk got the job and not me. The minimum requirement for calling oneself religious is a belief in God, and if there is anybody who calls himself religious who doesn't think that God is benevolent I have yet to meet him. And yet I maintain that a benevolent God is totally inconsistent with Evolution, which can produce grand and beautiful things but only after eons of monstrous cruelty. ?> the moral is that which enhances life I think that's true, and if so then morality is subject to Evolution just like anything else that enhances life. And if its made by something as messy as Evolution then you wouldn't expect a moral system to be entirely free of self contradictions. Consider the moral thought experiments devised by Judith Jarvis Thomson: 1) A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track saving the lives of the five. Unfortunately there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch and kill one man or do nothing and just watch five people die? 2) As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you, your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track killing him to save five people. Should you push the fat man over the edge or do nothing? Almost everybody feels in their gut that the second scenario is much more questionable morally than the first, I do too, and yet really it's the same thing and the outcome is identical. The feeling that the second scenario is more evil than the first seems to hold true across all cultures; they even made slight variations of it involving canoes and crocodiles for south American Indians in Amazonia and they felt that #2 was more evil too. So there must be some code of behavior built into our DNA and it really shouldn't be a surprise that it's not 100% consistent; Evolution would have gained little survival value perfecting it to that extent, it works good enough at producing group cohesion as it is. ? John K Clark ? ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.