“Philosophical arguments, explanations that the world is not moral, better definitions of morality, they’re all nice but in the end, you won’t convince me that a monkey birthed a human. If I am making a mistake in believing that you believe that the monkey birthed a human, I want to know what that mistake is in order to learn about evolution.”
Based on this I have to conclude that @gilch was right about the importance of starting with epistemic rationality, and going from there. Practice on the easier problems before you tackle the hard ones, for the same reason that catechism and Sunday school generally teach children and recent converts the nice parables and ignore Job and other complex and harsh passages until much later.
Whether or not you believe it actually happened that way, if you don’t understand how humans and apes could have arisen from a common ancestor over the past 5 million years or so, if you don’t understand how all life on Earth could have originated from some of the first strands of self-replicating RNA billions of years ago, if it isn’t clear how human moral instincts could have arisen via biological evolution for millions of years living in hunter-gatherer bands or how our ideas about those instincts could have been honed into modern forms by millennia of cultural evolution living in agricultural and pastoral communities, then you haven’t understood the concept of evolution and aren’t ready to explore the question of morality in a godless world.
There are many good places to start. Mine was the Sequences, before they became this book. There are lots of other options that will appeal more or less to different people and be easier or harder for you to enjoy reading and stick with. Learn as much as you can about everything that interests you, and as much as is useful about everything that does not. Go forth and study.
When you are ready, maybe don’t start with your own faith. Read about Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, and how law relates to different religious and metaphysical and social systems. Read about what meaning is, isn’t, can be, and can’t be, from a metarational perspective. Then think about the questions you asked here. We’ll all be here to talk then or answer questions you have along the way.
Oups, my wording was misleading. I know about evolution, and I know how the human species came to be according to evolution.
Since evolution argues that monkeys birth humans about as much as catholicism argues that Amalekites should die, I meant that I believed I was potentially making a huge mistake about morality, the same way I would make a huge mistake by thinking evolution claims monkeys birth humans. If I had made such a blatant mistake, I hoped someone could point it out for me.
(Please don’t argue whether monkeys birth humans. I am aware that in some sense they did and in some sense they don’t. That’s really not the point.)
“Philosophical arguments, explanations that the world is not moral, better definitions of morality, they’re all nice but in the end, you won’t convince me that a monkey birthed a human.
If I am making a mistake in believing that you believe that the monkey birthed a human, I want to know what that mistake is in order to learn about evolution.”
Based on this I have to conclude that @gilch was right about the importance of starting with epistemic rationality, and going from there. Practice on the easier problems before you tackle the hard ones, for the same reason that catechism and Sunday school generally teach children and recent converts the nice parables and ignore Job and other complex and harsh passages until much later.
Whether or not you believe it actually happened that way, if you don’t understand how humans and apes could have arisen from a common ancestor over the past 5 million years or so, if you don’t understand how all life on Earth could have originated from some of the first strands of self-replicating RNA billions of years ago, if it isn’t clear how human moral instincts could have arisen via biological evolution for millions of years living in hunter-gatherer bands or how our ideas about those instincts could have been honed into modern forms by millennia of cultural evolution living in agricultural and pastoral communities, then you haven’t understood the concept of evolution and aren’t ready to explore the question of morality in a godless world.
There are many good places to start. Mine was the Sequences, before they became this book. There are lots of other options that will appeal more or less to different people and be easier or harder for you to enjoy reading and stick with. Learn as much as you can about everything that interests you, and as much as is useful about everything that does not. Go forth and study.
When you are ready, maybe don’t start with your own faith. Read about Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, and how law relates to different religious and metaphysical and social systems. Read about what meaning is, isn’t, can be, and can’t be, from a metarational perspective. Then think about the questions you asked here. We’ll all be here to talk then or answer questions you have along the way.
Oups, my wording was misleading.
I know about evolution, and I know how the human species came to be according to evolution.
Since evolution argues that monkeys birth humans about as much as catholicism argues that Amalekites should die, I meant that I believed I was potentially making a huge mistake about morality, the same way I would make a huge mistake by thinking evolution claims monkeys birth humans.
If I had made such a blatant mistake, I hoped someone could point it out for me.
(Please don’t argue whether monkeys birth humans. I am aware that in some sense they did and in some sense they don’t. That’s really not the point.)
I’m not going to argue with you. I still stand by the rest of my comment.