[Big Papa Goat]

Originally Posted by Preechr

My direct interest in the debate comes from the point of view that those that treat science as a religion (not all science fans do this, but it is my contention that many folks do) use the admittedly flawed anti-religion aspect of the evolution debate in addition to similar functions of ecological science, some parts of cosmology, psychology and politics (as well as many other parts of modern culture) to create a dysfunctional alternate reality, a religion, for themselves that let's them live entirely free of any sort of moral ties to any of the rest of us.

As long as the topic of motives for supporting different positions is there, I think it's worthwhile to point out that most, certainly many of the most important political theorists that work from an evolutionary or biological perspective are conservatives. The big book of biopolitics was actually written by a student of Strauss. James Wilson wrote a fairly prominent book The Moral Sense that was at least in part about the biological basis of moral sentiments, and it was explicitly about refuting amoral philosophy on the basis of evidence for natural human moral senses.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it would seem the last time evolution was ever seriously used to undermine morality was with social darwinism, and that was something like a hundred years ago, and is explicitly rejected by modern theorists.

A society which will endure, a formal example of this does not yet exist, will be based on the characteristics of the sort of morality and ethical considerations found in the life of a happy individual

Well, I guess we'll just have to get the philosopher kings in power to see that happen.

Didn't Plato conclude that such a government would never actually happen? Wasn't it pretty much entirely allegorical anyway? In any case, I guess the Republic would be too off tangent.

My purpose for life is to be happy. That's a remarkably difficult thing to do, though, obviously, self-preservation is a big part of that.

Without getting too much into what happiness is, a more pressing question regarding such a position in the context of this debate is how does the your own purpose of happiness explain the purpose of the entire biosphere, which is really what an intelligent design theory would have to state.