But is it really true that there are no antecedents or parallels of a moral sense in other animals, or is that really just a straw man created by creationists and theologians to rationalize their beliefs? Well, whenever someone makes claims that can be easily verified empirically, we can simply turn to the evidence and see how such claims stand up to experimental scrutiny, and as world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal shows in the following TEDTalk presentation, there are all kinds of examples of moral behavior in the animal world, often including two crucial components of morality: fairness and empathy.
And yes, since de Waal is a primatologist, you can expect to see plenty of examples of monkey moral behavior, and since we're dealing with monkeys, of course there will be some hilarity :)
Very interesting! However, I think the argument here is very one sided. First of all, the important thing to point out is that Evolution Theory is that, a theory: idea, notion hypothesis, postulate, aka something that is not proven, a mere guess. However, if you come from the perspective of Evolution being a fact, you end up taking several/numerous instances that might or might not point to your theory (guess) being true for the sake of proving something that cannot be as of yet in a concise scientific manner. Or in other words, you find and retain examples that prove what you already believe in (evolution) and disregard and discard those that don't. Seems to me like voodoo science, you already have determined your outcome and you look for things that will prove it. Case in point, if there is conclusive evidence that there is a moral behavior among primates (which on an evolutionary scale, developed by evolutionists) are below humans, then how do you explain all the f*cked up, messed up, immoral people? Does that mean that they only physically evolved but psychologically are somehow below (once again on an evolutionary scale) monkeys? Seems to me like this evidence is not further proof of evolution by any means. It just states that there exists some sort of moral "code" among monkeys, nothing more. Furthermore, that's a very well known common sense thing, there is a "moral code" among other animals, why it's there is a different question.
ReplyDeleteAll right, looks like we're going to have to get together one of these days and hammer this out :)
ReplyDeleteHaha... well, to be honest with you, there is nothing to really hammer out. One of the points I was trying to make, and maybe a central point in a sense, is that the knowledge of science is extremely limited, in relative terms of the Universe. As an example, not too long ago (also in relative terms) we used to think that the earth was flat, and anyone who thought or suggested otherwise, was not only ridiculed but also persecuted. Same seems to be the case now. If science hasn't proven something YET, it doesn't exist, while the truth is that it has always existed and still does, we just don't know about it or don't know how it all fits in together. The important thing to keep in mind is that everything we have "discovered" in science are just pieces to a puzzle and they might not fit where we think they do sometimes, because they are just individual pieces. But.. if we start shoving them into places we want, we get a distorted larger picture. And I think that's what many scientists are doing, instead of having an open mind, they find something and shove it to where they THINK it should fit, not where it really ought to be and a lot of the time it actually will be some time before we know where it actually fits. And maybe it's not scientists themselves per se, but people take scientific knowledge and manipulate it to prove a theory they've arrived at as being true (and by people I mean, media, government, corporations, etc).
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