Comments on "Evolution and Morality"

[misterme987 (Andrew P.)]

@ho_idiotes
I think you’ve answered their reasoning pretty well. It shocks me that their reasoning is essentially “if there is no God, there is no objective morality, and therefore it’s good to kill Jews.” The step from no God to no morality may be plausible, but how do you get from no morality to “we should kill Jews”? How do you even determine if something is “good” if there’s no objective morality? Even more concerning, why was this person’s first thought that Jews should be killed if objective morality doesn’t exist?

[WalterKloover]

Evolution is a thing that happens in nature. It does not provide moral guidance. Does the natural occurrence of rain mean humans should occasionally dump water on each other?

It seems some people who (1) don’t accept evolution and (2) believe in God as a source of moral rules, think that support for evolution must be an effort to replace God’s moral rules.

They seem not able to grasp that someone might accept evolution based on the evidence without the (conscious or unconscious) motive to get rid of God. No matter how often the existence of theists who accept evolution is pointed out to them.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Tim

The Holocaust would appear to be an act of Artificial Selection, not Natural Selection (and therefore not evolution). Artificial Selection can select for any arbitrary trait, even ones that reduce fitness – as is quite frequently seen in dog breeding. Therefore the fact that they were subjected to the Holocaust cannot be taken as evidence that the Jewish people were weaker.

A related point: “Artificial selection” is nothing more that part of selective breeding that has been practiced by humans as part of horticulture and animal husbandry since pre-history. So the Nazi’s would have been able to use it as a justification for their atrocities even if evolution had not been discovered.

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@Faizal_Ali

@Tim

The Holocaust would appear to be an act of Artificial Selection, not Natural Selection (and therefore not evolution).

A related point: “Artificial selection” is nothing more that part of selective breeding that has been practiced by humans as part of horticulture and animal husbandry since pre-history. So the Nazi’s would have been able to use it as a justification for their atrocities even if evolution had not been discovered.

Another related point - the Nazis weren’t selecting who would breed and who wouldn’t, they were selecting what to exterminate. Their aim wasn’t artificial or natural selection, it was disinfection.

[ho_idiotes (Matt)]

@misterme987

Even more concerning, why was this person’s first thought that Jews should be killed if objective morality doesn’t exist?

I suspect because it was the most shocking thing he had heard/read somewhere. I very much don’t think the individual involved is racist, but anything that sounds good against atheism seems fair game to them. I pretty much abandoned further conversation with them about religion because of our inability to agree that this view is nonsense.

@WalterKloover

Evolution is a thing that happens in nature. It does not provide moral guidance. Does the natural occurrence of rain mean humans should occasionally dump water on each other?

It seems some people who (1) don’t accept evolution and (2) believe in God as a source of moral rules, think that support for evolution must be an effort to replace God’s moral rules.

Yup, or undermining the cliffs to implement coastal erosion and the subsequent development of the shape of the continents and islands.

[Paul_King]

If the world is such that killing all the Jews would be good, why would a God be against it?

Even without considering that God would presumably have been the one to make the world that way, and thus approved of killing all the Jews.

It really seems as if no thought whatsoever has gone into those assertions - they can’t even be considered arguments.

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@ho_idiotes

I suspect because it was the most shocking thing he had heard/read somewhere. I very much don’t think the individual involved is racist, but anything that sounds good against atheism seems fair game to them.

They’re repeating Nazi propaganda about Jews being inferior. While that pedantically may not be racist, it’s close enough.

[ho_idiotes (Matt)]

That is actually a very good point, something I hadn’t considered and will need to take seriously

[Tim]

On further reflection I think that, putting aside the fraughtness of attempting an argument based upon the Holocaust (an argument which arguably is itself a “comparison to Nazis” and thus falls afoul of Godwin’s Law before any further discussion of it can even proceed), the argument is such a dumpster fire of fallacies, that it begs comparison to Ray Comfort’s infamous Banana and Crocoduck arguments.

This combination of fraught subject matter and abysmally bad argumentation would perhaps have made the topic (assuming it needed airing at all) better suited to a ‘Lounge’ conversation, than a heavy-handedly “moderated topic”.