A Question for the Theists who Believe in Evolution

I'm not saying they are your value judgments. I'm saying the examples illustrate value judgments applied to an eye color, or applied to a given age group. My view doesn't.
You are also extrapolating that I expect society to operate on my view that value is not intrinsic. I have no such expectation.
Practically speaking, whether one believes all have intrinsic value or none do, the result is the same. You are left with no right to impose.

 

You are beating about the Bush. I should hope that society won’t operate on your views on intrinsic value any time soon and it seems you hope so to. Because practically speaking, whether one believes all have intrinsic value or none do, probably can lead to very different results. It was practical reason that made Kant declare the existence of absolute morals.
Personally I am not ashamed to declare that I do indeed think that it is absolutely wrong to torture children for fun and I am pretty sure that this “moral law within” isn’t alien to you either. Both you and I would probably not hesitate to stop a person who disagrees with us from torturing a child. If you haven’t got the honesty or bravery to admit that, feel free to call me a religious nutter for believing in the existence of absolute values - one of them being to regard you and any other human being as intrinsically valuable.

 

Settle down Juno.
I would reject the torture of children.
Why?
Because the torturer would be placing an intrinsically higher value on themselves over the children.
What your leaving out in your increasing hysteria is that you are simply moving where the value is placed. If it is removed from all parties the justification for torture disappears.
Thrilled you find me valuable, though I doubt if you had never met me or I disappeared from your life tomorrow it would make a farthings worth of difference to you. Not being mean. Just unemotionally honest about it.

 

No hysteria, just plain logic and some basics of moral philosophy. If nobody is intrinsically valuable anybody can be tortured. If you place no value on yourself you don't value a child less than yourself when torturing it. The command to love your neighbour like yourself only makes sense under the premise that you love yourself. And obviously the value I place on you is independent from the utilitarian use you have for me in my life. That's the whole point of declaring it intrinsic. Why do you give a flying (*)(*)(*)(*) about starving children in Africa (as I suppose you do) if their death would make as little difference to your day-to-day-life as a frog farting in China would?

 

The hysteria was noted when you accused me of dishonesty and cowardice and implied I thought you were a zealot. All unfair and uncharacteristic of you, and disappointing.
No one could be tortured because the torturer would be placing an intrinsically higher value on himself to assume the right to do so.

 

You were beating around the Bush and being evasive.

The point he's making isn't at all about you, it's about your belief - that people have no intrinsic worth. True, if people have no intrinsic worth, then there may be no reason for you to beat a child, but that misses the point. The point is that if a child has no intrinsic worth, then you have no inherent right or basis to object to child torture. Further, you have no reason for judging any law dealing with child torture - or any human affairs - as any better or worse. Didn't you say that if value is removed from all parties the justification for torture disappears (post 7? But if the value is removed from all parties, then there is no reason to stop torture.

 

When did we get our souls? IMO you're making a giant assumption that we have such a thing as a soul. Since there's no evidence for such a thing your question is hypothetical.

 

There are two reasons possible.
One, the torturer would be violating the concept, so to defend the concept the torturer would have to be stopped.
Two, the same reason we have laws that seem arbitrary now. It could simply be by societal agreement.

 

Troianii got it. Read again: neither did I accuse you of cowardice, nor did I accuse you of implying I’m a zealot. In fact I implied you’d probably try to follow the “Categorical Imperative” just as much as I would: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

What I then hinted at is the step that follows for many (including Kant) from the assumption of absolute morals: to assume the existence of God/the existence of a soul. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_argument

However, while I find that last step rather compelling, I recognize that one doesn’t need to follow it to subscribe to the idea of absolute morals and subsequently to the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml

Atheists and theists alike can subscribe to these universal human rights. IMHO their declaration is the greatest fruit of enlightenment and it’s deeply worrying to see how many people, who declare themselves ‘enlightened’, would happily throw inherent dignity and inalienable rights out of the window these days, just for the sake of promoting a radically materialist worldview. I never counted you as one of those.

In fact I strongly suspect you would subscribe to the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. So what would make you a very brave man in my eyes is to admit that you did not fully think your original post through and to revoke it. To talk oneself into a corner one doesn’t want to be in, can happen to the best of us. But the best of us don’t stay in there.

 

I am making the case that intrinsic worth or intrinsic irrelevance can lead to the same place.
Quoting Kant and the U.N. don't address the argument. They are appeals to authority without saying anything different from what has already been stated. I heard it the first time and responded.
I do agree with universal human rights. I get there on a different path. They are not mutually exclusive.

 

The assumption of intrinsic worth can hardly lead you to see no issue with destroying humankind. The assumption of intrinsic irrelevance can.

*sigh* if you agree with universal human rights, it follows that you agree that we have inherent dignity. Gee, I'm not even trying to make you say that it's self-evident that we were endowed with such inherent dignity by our creator. But without it there's nothing universal about universal human rights. Intrinsically irrelevant humans don't have any inalienable rights. Having inalienable rights makes you relevant.

 

That is the key. Your assumption of inherent dignity stems from your belief in a Creator. That makes that worth not inherent, but something provided from an external source. To argue inherent value, the idea of a god has to be eliminated from the discussion, because the origin of the worth is then external to the "creation".

 

The key to not having to admit that you were wrong? Nope. Again you just beat around the bush.
And you should really try to read my posts before answering them. While I find the “moral argument” rather compelling it is surely not my main reason for belief in God and while I believe in God, I explicitly recognized that one does not have to believe in a personal creator God in order to believe in absolute moral values/humans having inherent values. Most Buddhists, who signed the universal declaration of human rights, that declares the latter, certainly don’t. And if you have other ways to arrive at subscribing to these rights so be it. Try to make them logical though!

So is founding the idea that human beings have inherent dignity on a creator God self-contradictory and thus illogical? Certainly not! If you think it is, you should really get around reading basic old-school theology one day. God is not just external. May I point you again to the theological notion of Divine Immanence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanence?

It’s not at all uncommon for a Christian theist to talk of “the kingdom within”. Here’s - just for you - one of my favourite songs, incidentally quoting Kant:

[video=youtube;kL7q79kFWQQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL7q79kFWQQ[/video]

Peace, brother!

 

Of course it is to myself and others who know there is no evidence for it and have no need to believe in it but this question is for those who do.

 

Where does that inner kingdom originate from?
If you want to claim my argument is illogical, it won't be enough to just say so.
You may want to show it.
Somehow I have hit a nerve for you, and you are a lot less reasoned than I usually see you.

 

Remember “ipsum esse subsistens”? Philosophically speaking the point about God is that He doesn’t originate from anything, He just is. Same with absolute logical and moral laws that would exist independently of our mind but may find some resonance in them: they just are and - also by traditional theological definition - they are synonymous with God, who is pure “logos”/“the absolute”/ “summum bonum” … .

What’s to show? If you claim that thinking nobody has inherent worth will give people sufficient reason not to torture each other for fun, I fail to see the logic. If I think I’m a worthless bag of cells and you’re a worthless bag of cells why should I not torture you? What should be the issue with torturing people if everybody is worthless? If we’re inherently worthless why bother valuing each other and ourselves? We might as well all go and hang ourselves right now to spare us and the world some unnecessary hassle.

In post #76 you yourself say that you don’t “expect society to operate on (your) view that value is not intrinsic. “ Luckily society does indeed not operate on your view yet, because - as I put it to you - society would deteriorate if it did. So why do you hold this view, if you yourself more or less concede that it ought not to be held universally? That kind of defies the categorical imperative that is widely held as the reasonable basis for morals.

I’m basically just paraphrasing Kant, the ‘God-father’ of reason, here, who in so many words said that humanity ought to be “an end in itsef”. How much more ‘reasoned’ do you want me to get?

Actually it seems to me that you are the one who is less reasoned than usual.
In the hope of getting your original intention right, let me give you a helping hand to come to a reasonable resolution of our little dispute:
in the face of the magnitude of creation - of which we may well be just be an interim step/a short chapter rather than the crown - it’s a good thing to show a bit of modesty and to not to engage in human hybris. But modesty does not necessitate negating that humans have an inherent dignity and value. Don’t throw away the baby with the bath water!

 

Much to disagree with here, but I will just address your modest offer of a "helping hand" (hubris). I don't think that not applying an arbitrary universal worth to a given creature just because they "are" represents "hybris"[sic]. Quite the opposite is the case in my opinion. The hubris is in thinking that somehow we are so unique and special that we are each these precious little jewels deserving of some demi-worship. You have a personal god to attribute that to, but Kant found a way to get there,too, without him. So be it. Dust to dust.
That you don't like the conclusion is not my affair.

 

Nah, my “helping hand” is not a sign of hubris or “hybris” (the alternative spelling more common in Germany), it’s just an expression of cheekiness with a notch of playful arrogance.

And while with my personal background I’d find it indeed much simpler and straightforward to go for a Christian theological explanation as to why each of us is indeed endowed with the inherent dignity the universal declaration of human rights talks about, that declaration is not based on any theology as such.
Surely Judaeo-Christian religious thought inspired the first “humanists” and thinkers of enlightenment, but as I tried to point out to you: I would never claim that one necessarily needs to believe in God, personal or otherwise, to acknowledge human dignity. Here’s a Buddhist perspective for example: http://www.sgi.org/buddhism/buddhist-concepts/buddhism-and-human-dignity.html

Kant did not do entirely without God by the way, in fact he found that God (complete with immortal souls and an afterlife) is a necessary and not at all an arbitrary postulate, but never mind.

Your problem is that you don’t like the possible consequences of not regarding each and every person as inherently precious. If you prefer a worldview in which “the life of mortals is like grass” (Psalm 103:15) and nothing more, you ought to be prepared to live with the consequences such a worldview brings not only regarding the next life but very much regarding this one: Grass can be mown without guilt and remorse. And in your world what happened in Auschwitz was basically as neutral an event as mowing your lawn would be.

 

I'm not sure of any worldview that considers the life of conscious organisms to be equivalent to that of a blade of grass. There are people, including myself, that understand that we are all made out of the same stuff and that we are actually related genetically, but how you consider that to make Auschwitz equivalent to cutting grass is beyond me.

 

Please try to follow the conversation before making assumptions. Then you can try to explain to the Brucebeat why you think humans are in any way more important than grass. I'm trying to win him over to the idea of inherent human dignity. As of yet he seems to think you're nothing special just for being conscious.

 

Human Dignity?

Tough to find.

AboveAlpha

 

I have been watching the conversation. What do you mean by "inherent human dignity"? I've seen you claim that thebrucebeat thinks we are "inherently worthless" and "don’t have an intrinsic value", but what does this even mean in this context? What is this "worth" that you think we have? What is "intrinsic value"? Value to whom? Worth to whom?

 

We used to be worth about $2.50 in Chemicals but with inflation I think we are up to over $10.

AboveAlpha