Come one, Come all... Prove God doesn't exist, I'll prove you wrong.

[maurile]

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If evolution designs something, that implies intelligence.

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Evolution doesn't design things. It "designs" things. It works as if by conscious design -- sort of. (It is distinguishible from actual conscious design because it produces things like vestigial organs, junk DNA, and backwards mammalian retinal wiring that an actual conscious designer wouldn't produce unless he were very stupid.)

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If evolution is unintelligent, distinguish that from impersonal chance.

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I still have no idea what you're asking.

Maybe you can just make whatever point you want to make directly instead of asking me questions I can't make sense of?

[IronUnkind]

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I know it because I've thought about what our senses of morality are designed (by evolution) to accomplish; and thinking that molesting children is okay doesn't accomplish it.

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Am I to understand that you believe morality is circumscribed by nature. Even Huxley didn't believe that garbage. What are your thoughts on adultery? Is it okay for me to cheat on my wife simply because I am biologically programmed to do so? Pair-bonding, after all, is a cultural standard, not a biological one. Do you think homosexuals suffer from a sense "defect" because they think dirt tastes better than apples?

[maurile]

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Am I to understand that you believe morality is circumscribed by nature.

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Something must be wrong with my ability to comprehend English today. I have no idea what anybody's saying. "Circumscribed by nature"?

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What are your thoughts on adultery?

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It's wrong.

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Is it okay for me to cheat on my wife simply because I am biologically programmed to do so?

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No, that's not how morality works. The part of your brain that does morality, if it is functioning correctly, will judge adultery to be immoral. There may be other parts of your brain that will approve of your committing adultery, but it's only the morality part that matters when we're trying to figure out what's moral.

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Pair-bonding, after all, is a cultural standard, not a biological one.

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It is both, to some extent. Humans are somewhere between gorillas and chimps in terms of monagamy and pair-bonding. We definitely have some biological drive toward pair-bonding, which is why you feel pleasure when your girlfriend agrees to marry you. Physiologically, this probably has something to do with our oxytocin receptors being in the same regions as our dopamine receptors. (I was just reading about this last night, incidentally, in Steven Johnson's book, Mind Wide Open. It is a book that every poker player should read!)

But humans aren't completely monagamous in nature, you're right. (This is why, for example, male human gonads are relatively large as compared with those of, say, our more monagamous gorilla cousins; and why we produce various types of sperm that are more concerned with waging war against foreign sperm in the uterus than with getting to the egg themselves.)

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Do you think homosexuals suffer from a sense "defect" because they think dirt tastes better than apples?

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That's a complicated question. Possibly. Homosexuality might be explained genetically by heterozygous advantage -- in which case a person who is exclusively homosexual might be compared to a person with sickle-cell disease: disadvantaged in a Darwinian sense (even if the responsible genes themselves are not disadvantaged at equilibrium frequency in the population). Or there may be another genetic explanation for homosexuality, such as kin-selection, that doesn't imply any kind of Darwinian defect. Or the explanation might not be genetic at all, in which case I don't think the apples-dirt analogy applies.

Either way, I don't see any moral implications. (After all, it is not immoral to have sickle-cell disease. And please note that, by comparing homosexuality to sickle-cell, I am not suggesting that it is a physical or mental disease.)

[NotReady]

The point I'm making is you are arguing for unintelligent design, impersonal personality, personal impersonality.

Good luck with that.

[gasgod]

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I assert that I have every right to protect my children (and yours) from the child molester using any effective means at my disposal.

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Why?

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Are you suggesting that I ought not to protect my children? Or that I have no right to? Or that I have no reason to? You baffle me.

GG

[gasgod]

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A translation of this, from my point of view: "Since I cannot defend my beliefs with evidence, I will insult my opponents by asserting that they are similarly intellectually crippled."

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All the evidence points toward the existence of God.

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There is no evidence whatever. Only argument, conjecture and "faith". If there were actual evidence for any particular version of god, why are there so many religions?

GG

[NotReady]

It's a question, not a suggestion. You like to ask for proof of God's existence. So what's the proof of your moral values?

In other words, who determines right and wrong? Do you think it's self-evident? What if someone thinks they have the right to molest children? More likely, child molesters don't think there's any such thing as right and wrong. Many of the Nazi war criminals didn't think they were doing anything wrong.

[NotReady]

You require as much faith as any religious person. You can't know there is no God. You can't know there is any meaning or purpose to life. It isn't that there's no evidence, but a matter of interpreting the evidence. Atheistic evolution requires at least as much faith as any religion. The gaps in evolution by chance are monumental, the unexplained and contradictory abound, and the theory mutates much faster than any species ever did. To believe something came from nothing and life came from non-life is a belief principle of the first order.

[theweatherman]

evolution is uninteligent and impersonal. It only seems to have inteligence because (usually) only good mutations survive. Our seemingly "intelligently designed bodies" as you say are really just the product of infinite random chance. Not every advantageous mutation is passed along. The most evolutionarialy advanced chimp with an amazingly advantageous mutation could be struck down by lightning before it has a chance to pass its genes along. Evolution is at its core chance. However the sample size is enormous and its time frame is infinite so in the end (hopefully) only mutations with a +ev survive.

[theweatherman]

I think morals are more a product of society than anything else. Murder is wrong to most societies because a society could not function if its members were subject to random murder. Further more many child molesters do know they are wrong, as well as serial killers. A lot of times child molesters turn themselves into the police because they know they are sick but the system fails them and they are realeased without and mental help.

The nazi's were, in my opinion, without a doubt crazy, however the vilence against jews began with the call that they are detrimental to society. One could argue that it would be morally wrong for you to not defend your family friends, and society against threats. I in no way agree with the nazis or any of their opinions but I'm sure their arguements were very convincing to the people. If the citizens of Berlin really saw an internal threat its their duty to purge it, just as modern law eliminates murders, molesters and rapists from society today.