Richard Carrier has the time, and somehow has remained independent, to make these long-form blogs on things I normally wouldn’t bother with, because I can see they are bunk on the surface. But he makes the exercise valuable by presenting complete analyses of everything these fraudsters leave out. In this case, it’s what we know about how morality developed through human history.
The recent blog starts with a mocking of a theologian’s thesis, that Americans are pagans. By pagan, Johnson means anyone who replaces something with God as their focus in life. This is opposed to the actual definition which is pre-Christian polytheism.
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/28853
I usually don’t finish these, as I said, they are long. It’s usually the links to his earlier work, where he expands on an important detail, where I find the value. In this case, it’s another debunk of a poorly formed argument, but he provides more on the counter argument. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day. Darwin gave us the beginning of the science that has been built upon, showing us how it was “naturally selected” for moral behavior. Lincoln translated our Christian culture into this new idea with the phrase “better angels of our nature”. That is, it’s our nature, not angels like you see in the Bible stories.
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/19737
From the blog:
[A]theism predicts that moral rules will only come from human beings, and thus will begin deeply flawed, and will be improved by experiment over a really long time (each improvement coming after empirically observing the social discomfort and dissatisfaction and waste that comes from flawed moral systems) … [and] only slowly over thousands of years, because humans are imperfect reasoners. And that is exactly what we observe. Just look at the examples of slavery and the subordination of women in the Bible [Old Testament and New].
By contrast, theism predicts a universe directly governed by justice-laws, or a kind and just stewardship, or the enacting and teaching of divine justice and mercy, everywhere, from the start. But we observe no such laws built into the universe, and no stewards or law-enforcers but us, and no perfect moral code has existed anywhere throughout history. The best moralities have always just slowly evolved from human trial and error (see Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature and Shermer’s The Moral Arc). Thus, the evidence of human morality (its starting abysmal and being slowly improved by humans over thousands of years in the direction that would make their societies better for them) is evidence against God, not evidence for God.
One of my critiques of atheist discussions is too much time is spent addressing contradictions in the Bible, and not enough on how ethics naturally developed. We can spot the unsound logic of the theologians, but we’re not so hot at laying out the data, or even the overview of how the work of humans built the basis of a moral world. If it were just some dusty history I could see why we wouldn’t do it, but it’s the map forward too. It starts with three metrics:
So what’s left? All we can do is try to empirically ascertain what’s best, from observing how societies go well or poorly, how human lives go well or poorly, how human individuals’ inner quest for satisfaction goes well or poorly, to build up evidence for which values actually statistically perform better on all three metrics. In other words, all we have left is Ethical Naturalism.
The Klingons killed all their gods. Star Trek baby! Like a religion, as my husband says. Of course, the Bajorans aren’t doing very well and might do well to rid themselves of the prophets.