to wonder how people can not believe in Evolution .......

[cookielove]

After a discussion at work which actually started about a childs' dress (day nursery) leading onto the duggars and then religion, it came clear to me that several of my work colleagues do not believe in evolution and not only that but also dinosaurs not existing

Now i can understand the more religious people not believing as Evolution and adam and eve clash, but for those who were not religious how can you not believe in Evolution. Its proven.

I mean really how can people not believe in Evolution or dinosaurs.

I quote one of my work colleagues 'well there's lots of dinosaur toys so they must have been real' .... WTAF?

Please tell MN that you believe in Evolution, and dinosaurs ......

Far from being a non-science, eugenics is a classic example of the interdependence of science and cultural beliefs. It was an offshoot of early genetic science. In the 1920s in the US the only critics of eugenics were non-scientists like Clarence Darrow. The scientific community embraced it warts and all. One exception from the science community was Thomas Morgan of Columbia University, a very lonely voice lost in an avalanche. Once it was revealed how the science had been carried to its logical conclusion during WW2, it was disowned like a red headed stepchild and given the name political ideology (more akin to religion).

How would we set limits?

We would avoid killing people. One of the nice things about having a religion that has rules such as 'thou shalt not kill' is that you don't have to go to all the bother of working out all that stuff about limits, bad qualities, good qualities, or try to anticipate scientific discoveries of the future. Moses was ahead of his time?

Why is killing and stealing wrong? Because you wouldn't like it if someone did it to you so you shouldn't do it to other people. The golden rule seems reasonable. As people don't like it being done to them, allowing people to do it willy-nilly within your society also provokes discord and possible breakdown of the society therefore it should be prohibited.

"Reason is not always triumphant. Hence warfare."
That's incorrect, if you think of warfare in terms of evolutionary stable strategies. Individuals and societies may have concluded that killing is always wrong and be living in peaceful co-existence (as 'doves'). This strategy is only stable without the presence of 'hawks' - societies which see killing members of other societies for the advancement of their society as acceptable. A hawk could easily wipe out pacifist dove societies and hence they don't endure. So better strategies emerge such as 'tit for tat' or 'tit for two tats' and so it can be reasoned that there are situations in which killing is acceptable, such as for self-defence, including defence of the society. You can't assume that every society has the same ethics as you do and therefore it is best to plan for that situation in your ethical framework to ensure your survival.

"And how would we know that a "bad quality" might not have some advantage at some point?"

Indeed one just needs to look at sickle cell trait. This is a recessive allele that in pairs causes sickle cell anaemia, which is bad, but on its own, sickle cell trait provides protection against malaria, which is good. Hence sickle cell trait (and thus sickle cell anaemia) is much more prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa than in the UK.

The golden rule, as in 'do unto others as you would unto you'? (or whatever it says)

First paragraph:
How do you know people don't like being killed?
What does it matter if they don't like it since they end up dead?
Surely if enough people are killed who might care, you can avoid discord?

Second paragraph:
Is warfare right therefore, or wrong?
What if people are killed during warfare?
What if they don't like it

Your suggestion of living like a dove and planning for the attack of the hawk is a curious reversal of what is usually taken as the message of the Golden Rule...

"Moses was ahead of his time?"

For a group of people who apparently endorsed the rule 'Thou shalt not kill', the Israelites (and indeed Yahweh) were particularly blood-thirsty.

I found this interesting and thought-provoking.

"In a laboratory setting, macaques were fed if they were willing to pull a chain and electrically shock an unrelated macaque whose agony was in plain view through a one-way mirror. Otherwise they starved. After learning the ropes, the monkeys frequently refused to pull the chain; in one experiment, only 13 percent would do so - 87 percent preferred to go hungry. One macaque went without food for nearly two weeks rather than hurt its fellow. Macaques who had themselves been shocked in previous experiments were even less willing to pull the chain. The relative social status or gender of the macaques had little bearing on their reluctance to hurt others.

If asked to choose between the human experimenters offering the macaques this Faustian bargain and the macaques themselves - suffering from real hunger rather than causing pain to others - our own moral sympathies do not lie with the scientists. But their experiments permit us to glimpse in non-humans a saintly willingness to make sacrifices in order to save others - even those who are not close kin. By conventional human standards, these macaques - who have never gone to Sunday school and never squirmed through a junior high school civics lesson - seem exemplary in their moral grounding and their courageous resistance to evil. Among the macaques, at least in this case, heroism is the norm. If the circumstances were reversed, and captive humans were offered the same deal by macaque scientists, would we do as well? In human history, there are a precious few whose memory we revere because they knowingly sacrificed themselves for others. For each of them, there are multitudes who did nothing."

This is an extract from the book

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan

but I c&p from this article

What makes us different?

"How do you know people don't like being killed? "

Empathy. It is not only the people being killed that are affected is it? It is their families and friends too.

"Is warfare right therefore, or wrong? "
'Justifiable in certain situations' could certainly be reasoned. If you want to argue that notions of good and evil are helpful in deciding laws then perhaps you could explain why members of the even the same religion are getting themselves in such a muddle over issues such as abortion and gay marriage?

Thanks for that moving experiment, Juules. First time I'd seen it. Compared with similar experiments using humans, the macaques seem to have quite a bit more compassion than humans ... does this mean they have more 'soul' I wonder?

Math, the ectoplasm was a little joke. I have actually been inside churches, read ye bible, and so on

My answer to your big ethical questions is slightly different from "Do unto others" (perhaps I should learn from the macaques.) We are a co-operative ape which struggles to thrive alone. If you go round killing your neighbours, you'll find yourself out on your ear. Banishment is one of the oldest and most awful punishments for a reason: we can barely stand it.

Warfare is undesirable but appears necessary on occasions when one community seems set on overtaking another. Religions may denounce it, with good reason, but few seem to have much of a problem cheering their own army. There are RC chaplains out in the battlefields, are there not? And let's not even start with the tremendous massacres carried out in god's name (or names.)

My "bible" for the past year, btw, has been Paul Gilbert's The Compassionate Mind - and will be for some time to come. You might like it :)

But empathy is entirely unscientific when it comes to how people being killed may feel. There is no reason attached to it surely? It is based on the notion that one person may understand how another person feels, both in the physical and emotional senses. How can you really feel what someone else does? The best you can do is imagine, and perhaps feel a prick of conscience. How much of empathy is conscience? Where does conscience come from?

'Justifiable in certain situations' can be and has been reasoned. The basis of western theories of just war/bellum iustum is found in the writings of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, who owed some of their method and some of their ideas to Cicero, but a lot to Christian ideas. There is a whole body of law on starting, engaging in and now finishing a war arising from the deliberations of those two theologians.

I thought so Garlic...

Compared with similar experiments using humans, the macaques seem to have quite a bit more compassion than humans ...

Yeah. Have you read about the prisoner/jailer experiment? :(

But it's all to do with peer pressure.

And games theory. Love it.

Juule, there have been experiments where humans were told to do the same as the macaques and they did it - the Milgram experiment. There have also been the blue eyed/brown eyed experiments.

"But empathy is entirely unscientific"
What do you mean by unscientific?

"There is a whole body of law on starting, engaging in and now finishing a war arising from the deliberations of those two theologians."

Yes, I know. I went to Catholic school and we learned all about it. I don't think the crusades met the criteria for a Just War btw, yet religious people back in the day were all for them. It is interesting how religious notions of good and evil have evolved to keep roughly in step with the ethical frameworks of the times. Christians were quite happy with slavery at one point - as was the God of the OT who is apparently the same god.

Hello PopcornBiscuit
No I wasn't talking about you when I mentioned fake scientists.
And I didn't look at your pint either.

I was referring to asiatic who has told us that s/he is a christian scientist and that s/he doesn't believe in evolution (to paraphrase).
A few people have asked he/r what her speciality and qualification are but no answers were forthcoming.
So I am a bit - my first ever!

I guess a religious person might look at the different outcomes in the macaque experiment and the Milgram experiments, and point to the latter as evidence of original sin in humans, which does not exist in the rest of creation.

I would see it as evidence of human ability to think about and consider abstract ideas as equivalent in value to the evidence of their senses. I don't think this is original sin, but evolution.

The people who pushed blimming hard for the abolition of slavery were very fervent Christians, Noble.

Really interesting to read this - I was wondering the other day if any serious scientific thinker has challenged Darwin in the last 150-odd years - it seems not! As for Genesis not being v. scientific - well, given that one creation story was probably written several centuries after the other one, it's hardly surprising they're different - y'know, what with evolution of ideas and all....

And people who owned slaves and anti-abolitionists were also Christians, Holoferneses. Some Christians argued that since the slaves weren't Christians they didn't deserve liberty! So it wasn't fixed religious notions of good and evil, rather society being at a particular point in its philosophical and ethical development that allowed for the abolition of the slave trade.

"point to the latter as evidence of original sin in humans"

I would love to see whether Catholics behave differently on Milgram-type experiments in order to test that hypothesis. Because of course Catholic baptism rids one of original sin.

Well, yes, servitude & abuse have long been justified by the belief the 'inferiors' have no souls. Blacks, Asians, the British working class ... can't feel; no souls, y'know. Still, if we make 'em learn their catechism and give them a good whipping we can do 'em a favour and send 'em to heaven. Luvly jubbly

Gosh, does it, giraffe? You mean Math is sin-free?! Wow

Noblegiraffe, empathy is not the same as reason, it is not rational; it has as its base the idea that you can experience what someone else feels. Therefore not something based in science or the scientific method but in emotion. It is subjective.

As for your claim that you went to a Catholic school - proof that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing? You sweeping statements about a lot of matters here are not based on fact but highly subjective impression imo.

A religious person might think of the fallen nature of humans (which is not nullified by Catholic baptism) as a result of those experiments, but might also look at the higher thinking processes involved. The people who pulled the levers or pushed the buttons or ostracised their brown eyed classmates might have been thinking of a reward, or feeling some negative pressure (like being ejected from the group) -- maybe our rationality on its own is bound to lead us in some circumstances to do things that fall on the side of bad and not good? Maybe there are limits to empathy? Maybe we need more than reason alone in order to conduct our affairs? Banishment and the ability to enforce it has its limits as has been seen in the case of perpetrators of some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. Many criminals die peacefully in their sleep surrounded by their loved ones. Clearly there were some people who did as the macaques did and defied the expectation that they would blink in the face of punishment. What was their thinking process?

If the grasp of science here is as shaky as the grasp of history seems to be, then I despair for the future of science. People who appreciate the scientific method when it comes to matters of biology seem able to spout a lot of really silly half-baked ideas plucked from the swirling zeitgeist and swallowed whole when it comes to history and culture and law, and seem subject to a lot of very kneejerk irrationality when it comes to religion. It's like a red rag to a bull.

In the interests of clarity would like to assure you all that I am definitely a sinner.

The people who pushed blimming hard for the abolition of slavery were very fervent Christians, Noble.

Thomas Paine, the writer of "The African Slave in America" and "The Age of Reason" was a fervent Christian? Wow, who knew?

Thank goodness for that, Math, your halo was hurting my eyes