How is atheist morality not Social Darwinism?

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Morality doesn't require religion or law.

Generally, our upbringing combined with our neurotype defines what we see as good or bad.

Yes but it is a misnomer so therefore can't be compared to objectivity or subjectivity.

It is using a trick of Semitics to make an invalid argument.

It has nothing to do with objectivity or subjectivity, Full stop.

I was using this type of definition ...

Objective morality is the idea that a certain system of ethics or set of moral judgments is not just true according to a person's subjective opinion, but factually true.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Objective_morality

I think the Ten Commandments are reasonably interpreted as objective, because they supposedly came directly from GOD without human opinion. Even if one disagrees with the story, then at least fictionally they are objective.



This is debated in math.

Some would say that it is still not objectivity, because in your example of F=ma, underlying the formula are mathematical postulates that are human assumptions on how the world works.

A list of mathematical postulates ...
http://www.mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1912.2/ ... 65.ocr.pdf

Also, to note, many "scientific proofs" use the made up concept of infinity that does not exist in the real world.



Right , the Ten Commandments were recorded by Moses, and perhaps he did screw up. However, supposedly, he did not insert his opinion into what GOD told him. So that may be a contentious point.



Sure, but "moral code" can be selfishness; it does not have to be cooperative.



Sure, but I know someone who has spent about thirty years in and out of prison committing crimes, and thinks the people that are not grounded in reality are the ones who have made-up a morality in which they falsely belief other people give a crap about them.

I agree with this.

Anyway, the 10 commandments (ignoring all of the crazy laws that follow it) are a mixed bag. Only a couple have anything to do with modern crime and punishment. Several are dealing with the promotion of one religious faction over another. That this particular "deity" and his priests are jealous and have issues with the others in the Canaanite pantheon hardly seems to be a broader moral issue to me. It's one faction of priests looking for self-promotion. This was just another shot in a culture war that lasted for hundreds of years. We can't even know when it was first included or reached it's current form.

And of course there are multiple variants of the ten commandments. Which one are we talking about? I guess you'll have to subjectively pick one.




That's something believers believe, yes. But many scholars don't believe that. There is no historical evidence for a Moses, many problems with the Exodus and accounts of "Moses", and the bible is generally believed by critical scholars to have been written much later.

Okay ?



An experience which is unique to one person, which others cannot share, is subjective. That's not a pejorative, it's simply the word we have for such experiences. Suppose I had a wild dream last night. I can describe it to you, but you have no way to know if I'm speaking truthfully or making the whole thing up, because you can't experience my dream. It happened to me subjectively.

I can independently evaluate f=ma, or "It's starting to rain," or "Insufficient spark advance will cause backfires," or any of a million other claims that people might make concerning observable reality. I cannot evaluate the claims made by Moses, or Muhammed, or Joseph Smith, or anybody else who says he is in contact with a deity. I cannot experience those alleged visions or revelations or whatever, because whatever did happen, it happened subjectively to those individuals.

Decreeing that 'This particular incident involved my chosen deity, therefore it's objective' doesn't make it so.



Nope.



Newton's laws have been verified thousands if not millions of times. At the macro level, and under normal Earth conditions, they are objectively true. The engines in our cars, the houses we live in, the pipes that bring us water, are all constructed according to Newtonian principles. To suggest, at this point, that 'maybe engineers just feel that they are true' is frankly absurd.



What sort of moral code is suggested by observable reality is a topic for later discussion. Personally, though, I find that it's often in my own self-interest to cooperate with others. Don't you?



If his moral code has landed him in prison numerous times, he really needs to reevaluate it. And no ethical system can tell you if other people give a crap about you, any more than it can tell you the time of day. That would call for observation.

In the west, most atheists generally appeal to secular humanist philosophy for their moral principles which is totally opposed to social darwinism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism

However, it also really depends on what kind of atheist you're talking about since atheism in and of itself doesn't give an indication of any particular philosophy, it just means the absence of a belief in gods.

"Secular humanism does not prescribe a specific theory of morality or code of ethics".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism

So, secular humanism is no basis to argue against "Social Darwinism".

OK, I just added a whole bunch to your list.

Incidentally, Kantian ethics is certainly objective, and you can argue either way for utilitarianism (it is teleological, and the degree to which something is good or bad depends on subjective experiences, but I would argue it still presents an objective right and wrong in each situation...).

Morality being "made up" doesn't stop something from being immoral.

And you are wrong about Humanism, which does advocate for living morally - it just doesn't exclude any moral code that does not contain supernatural elements.

"Mathematical Fictionalism" is a debated topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy ... ctionalism

Quantum Mechanics applies to all matter, even macro-matter, so that alone should make you question the assumptions of Newtonian principals.

Here is a comedy about whether 'Math is real' (which apparently is what you are asserting).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbNymweHW4E[/youtube]

Last edited by LoveNotHate on 10 Aug 2014, 4:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There is a bit more to that snip from the wiki.





So really it's about finding moral principles without depending on religion to give them to you.




I don't quite go by the Golden Rule. Back when I was young there was a t-shirt slogan that said "Don't treat others as you would wish to be treated. They might not have the same taste." I took that to heart and instead go by the quasi-Hippocratic "first do no harm". Both of these are consistent with both secular humanism and arguing against social darwinism.

This snip is also relevent.




That is precisely the stand you have taken here- that God (or religion in general?) is the only possible source for morals. But that isn't true.

In the original post, I cited many philosophies that don't rely on a GOD, so I understand that morality can exist without a GOD.

"The Golden Rule" has been cited the most in responses.

"The Golden Rule" --> Give people welfare, because I expect welfare.
or
"The Golden Rule" --> Don't give people welfare, because I don't expect welfare.

This is an example of why I personally prefer the quasi Hippocratic "first do no harm" as a guiding moral principle rather than the Golden Rule. Using my own expectations or preferences for how to treat other people can create the sort of conundrum you use as an example. But "first do no harm" works better as a guide- although it doesn't answer the question. Instead, it requires you to to try to sort out help from harm. On the one hand, welfare can rescue people from homelessness. On the other hand, it can potentially foster learned helplessness. I don't have the answer. But at least "first do no harm" creates a goal- helping people without harming them with learned helplessness. The Democratic Party has been trying to sort this out for decades. It is not simple and there isn't a binary always welfare/never welfare answer.

Religion provides a set of rules to be obeyed based on diving knowledge through 'revelation' (holy literature, personal testimonies/encounters, etc). Theoretically, it is this 'diving knowledge' that determines what is of value and what is not and how to behave to reflect those values. The problem enters when you realize that those values are built on nothing else but hearsay. A lot of good has been done in the name of religious hearsay, such as the creation of hospitals, abolition of slavery (or the limited kind that we learn about in U.S textbooks), systematic requirements for charity, and taking care of the poor. However, a lot of bad has also been done in the name of religious hearsay, such as the perpetuation of slavery, the KKK, suicide bombers, etc.

The atheist problem is what to replace that 'diving knowledge' with once you find out that there is no such thing as 'divine' (or that it looks radically different than the anthropomorphic models that many religions display). If God(s) doesn't determine what's of value and what's not, who or what does? That's a good question, and like many here have already pointed out, one that is dealt with in the domain of ethics, where we look at what determines what is right and wrong.

At the end of the day, all human beings do good and all human beings do sh***y things. Atheism is less vested in an 'us and them' tribal mentality, which provides the rationale for not doing things that will badly influence others, as well as for not caring about how one influences others. I'm not sure if it makes much a difference one way or another in the short term. But it's relatively new to be safely (at least in some places in the world; there are still plenty being killed throughout the world for being atheist) out as an atheist, so it will be interesting to see how the discussion develops and changes in the absence of God.


Just like violence, social Darwinism is a position held (knowingly and not knowingly) as much (if not more) by religious folks as well as by the non-religious folk. Perhaps psychology and sociology could provide better lenses to understand why one group of people decide to behave/believe one way as opposed to another. The religious/non-religious distinction doesn't seem to make much difference, in my experience at least, in how one acts.

As is evolution, creationism, a flat earth, geocentrism, and global warming. And they are all found in Wikipedia as well.



I suggest you study quantum physics in depth before diving into those waters, because quantum mechanics do not invalidate Newtonian physics at all; quite the contrary. They do define the conditions at which Newtonian physics need additional calcualtion for further precision (approaching around 10% of the speed of lightand above, for example).



Math is most definitely real. It is observable and provable, and has been many times in the past. Using a comedy clip to argue otherwise is just plain silly.

The discussion was about F=ma, a mathematical equation. Thus, I appropriately cited a link to mathematical fictionalism (which is related to the question of mathematical objectivism), your wikipedia links have nothing to do with F=ma ?



Not correct.

I would suggest you watch this video of a Yale physics professor .. as he starts at 2:03 with "today we will shoot down Newtonian mechanics" ... meaning to understand QM you have to realize that the QM has probabilistic outcomes, and Newtonian physics has non-probabilistic outcomes. If you watch part II then can see his discussion in how QM applies to the macro-world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK2eFv7ne_Q

However, it should be self-evident that physics theory thinks QM probabilistic outcomes apply to the macro-world because physics people like Steven Hawking argue for the "multiverse" of multiple probabilistic universes.



This is debated among philosophy/math people so apparently you know something they don't? Did you watch the video ? Do you plan to claim your Nobel Prize soon as he says ? What do you know about math existing outside the human mind ?

The gist of my response was to indicate that just because it is documented that people argue about things does not mean that there is credible evidence on both sides.



If you want some serious discussion, I suggest you do some serious studying. You are over-simplifying things. QM only proves that there is a point at which Newtonian physics no longer apply, not that they are invalid or wrong. Have you even taken an intro to modern physics class? Newtonian and non-Newtonian physics are two different processes, one of which relies on a specific set of initial (primarily Earth-based) conditions while one does not.

Physics is my bread and butter. Without physics I would still be working retail and doing construction on the weekends.



Philosophy and math do not readily mix. One deals with the unprovable and one deals with the provable.

Your entire "argument" is akin to all of us living in the Matrix and nothing is real. Are you seriously suggesting that 1+1=2 is only valid because it exists in the imagination?