God is not intelligent, or, why I am a pantheist

Cypress said:
Thanks for the debate.
I cannot prove conclusively that moral relativism is wrong, just that I don't think it's the whole story.

People who visit the Aushwitz memorial can be brought to tears, even though the people who suffered and died there were not family, friends, neighbors, or even fellow countrymen. They were nameless and faceless complete strangers.

To me, the best explanation of that is that buried deep in human conscience is a belief in an objective moral truth, a sense of absolute right and wrong that goes beyond utility, reciprocity, mutual advantage, social convention, popular opinion, or legislative fiat.
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Is that a case of "objective moral truth" or of self identification.
 
martin said:
Is that a case of "objective moral truth" or of self identification.
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I don't think they are mutually contradictory. Empathy can be a universal morality and also be based on putting yourself in the other person's shoes.

To me, the fact we can feel empathy for faceless and nameless strangers, and even for rivals or enemies is a signpost indicating a moral conscience that believes in absolute right and wrong - completely independent of utility, mutual advantage, reciprocity, or the laws of biology, evolution, survival, and natural selection

There was no utility, evolutionary advantage, or reciprocity for what Oskar Schindler did.

My entire thesis is that utility, mutual advantage, and reciprocity definitely exist in our social value systems -- but that's not the whole story by a longshot.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Agreed on development, but well socialized, moral people don't develop in a vacuum. Separating Nature and Nurture is a major area of research in psych studies. One of the best is Twin studies where twins who were separated at birth are tracked and studied through adulthood. An infamous (because it was unethical) was the forced separation of triplets placing them in three different economic groups of parents. Ethical studies do not include forced separations for psych experiments.

Agreed on Abu Ghraib, but, again, that's learned behavior. Someone in another culture could easily say "Yeah. That makes sense. Torture is justified."



FWIW, the movie "Three Identical Strangers" is available on Hulu: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7664504/

www.medicalnewstoday.com

Nature vs. nurture: Do genes influence our morals?

Does education shape our moral values, or are our genetic profiles also responsible? New research suggests that DNA may play an important role.
www.medicalnewstoday.com www.medicalnewstoday.com
The well-known “nature versus nurture” debate goes back hundreds of years, and it is still of interest today.

It asks whether certain behaviors are rooted in our natural inclinations, or whether our social environment shapes them.
Recently, the release of the documentary Three Identical Strangers reignited some discussions into the importance of environmental factors and education versus that of heritable traits.

The documentary presents the case of a contentious “twin study” (or in this case “triplet study”) conducted in the 1960s. It involved separating identical triplets during infancy and adopting them out to different families as “only children” to assess how the siblings would evolve throughout their lives.

www.psychologytoday.com

Decoding Nature and Nurture: Insights From Twin Studies

Genetics may play a greater role in distinguishing between disgust and fear than previously known, according to new research.
www.psychologytoday.com www.psychologytoday.com

Decoding Nature and Nurture: Insights From Twin Studies​

Research finds genetics may help us distinguish between disgust and fear.​

The nature versus nurture conundrum is an eternal debate. A recent study of 175 identical and 88 fraternal adult twins explores some of the questions of how genes and the environment determine the fundamental aspects of the emotional and rational life of humans....

...One notable finding is that the results suggest genetics play, a role in distinguishing between disgust and fear more so than positive emotions. The researchers state that this may be due to an evolutionary adaptation, as identifying threats is key to survival. In general, however, they speculate that environmental factors have a greater influence on the perception of emotional expressions since “the intentional (conscious) and accurate perception of others’ emotional expressions within a particular environmental context is a paramount skill for successful social interactions.” Because social expectations vary so widely across cultures, it follows that the environment and external influences play a greater role in shaping social and emotional interactions compared to genetics.
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Your right, humans are not biomechanical machines that develop in a vacuum.

A moral conscience has to be discovered, cultivated, and exercised by the actions of free will.

Humanity wouldn't have needed prophets, teachers, and sages if we were born perfect and sinless

I believe that there is still something in our moral conscience that is predisposed to potentially discovering an ultimate moral truth. Self-knowledge of this type was supposed to make you free, according to Jesus, Siddhartha Buddha, the authors of the Baghavad Gita

The fact that human history in general has been one long arc bending towards ever more justice, benevolence, egalitarianism - and over the long term does not arc back the opposite direction - is a clear indicator to me that humans are predisposed with the psychological potential to recognize absolute right and wrong.
 
Cypress said:
I don't think they are mutually contradictory. Empathy can be a universal morality and also be based on putting yourself in the other person's shoes.

To me, the fact we can feel empathy for faceless and nameless strangers, and even for rivals or enemies is a signpost indicating a moral conscience that believes in absolute right and wrong - completely independent of utility, mutual advantage, reciprocity, or the laws of biology, evolution, survival, and natural selection

There was no utility, evolutionary advantage, or reciprocity for what Oskar Schindler did.

My entire thesis is that utility, mutual advantage, and reciprocity definitely exist in our social value systems -- but that's not the whole story by a longshot.
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How do you know what moved Schindler? It certainly seems from the outside it was identification with other people, therefore a kind of moral reciprocity. Not suggesting a "contradiction", only the absence of a non-subjective morality.
 
Publius said:
God is not intelligent.

Or rather, God is not an intelligence. The distinction is significant. God is an abstraction, and a mystery.

What I mean is that, in my brand of pantheism, there is a spiritual basis to life, that there is spirituality permeating all things and this divine source is not an intelligence. It is just source, a spiritual source sans intelligence. So, to say it is intelligent or stupid presumes intelligence, and given that it is not, these descriptors are not applicable.

The simplest definition of Pantheism is that it is the belief that God is not a separate, personal being, but rather that God and the universe are the same. In this view, everything in the natural world is a part of God, and God is present in all things. I have taken this idea and put my own stamp on it, and for lack of a better term, pantheism is much closer to how I see the world, on a spiritual plane, than anything else. Always remember, to a pantheist, his 'God' is not a personal God, or a God in any sense of it's traditional and historical definition, mono or poly. It is more of a non falsifiable force that permeates all things, more or less.

Now, I cannot be so arrogant to presume these things as fact, so preface all that I write on the subject with 'in my opinion...it is my belief that.....'., noting that to assert this preface on everything I express about it would be cumbersome, so just assume it henceforth.

My God is not theistic nor deistic, it is more on the Einsteinian pantheistic model. It does not intervene or answer prayers, and without undermining prayer, because, in my view, true prayer is meditation and meditation is the fastest path to God. This God is our native state, it is our destiny, our natural heritage and all souls, like bubbles in in the ocean, are bubbling upward and will eventually reach the sky, it is inevitable. The only 'hell' is the misery we create for ourselves but it is not permanent. Through this 'hell' we are forged like one forges steel through a furnace. Trouble, difficulty, pain and misery and the like, are the means by which we grow. There are higher states where misery fades and earth's density hasn't reached it, though it has on other planets. Each of us will eventually evolve to higher densities and reincarnate on planets where there are highers densities, (no Martha, Humans are not the brightest bulb on the food chain) where life exists without pain and misery and each of us has this to look forward to. That is the extent of my 'faith'.

This divine source is welling up everywhere. For me, this is the only thing that makes sense and the nice thing about it it does not conflict with science and where it does agree with religion insofar as that it is taken on faith as it is not falsifiable.

This divine source is not a personal god, and there is no such thing as a personal god. This divine source permeates all things, is the source of all things, and resides at the center of the human soul, whereupon all living things are but tentacles on the octopus of god. But, where that metaphor breaks down is that an octopus is has intelligence, and God does not, as God is beyond intelligence and incomprehensible. This divine source does not exist in time and space, it is behind it, the source of it, beyond it, but reachable, nevertheless. Once achieved, once one returns to native state, life, as you have known it, becomes a moot point -- life becomes moot.

The only way to find God is to find oneself. It has been said, 'Know thyself, and the truth shall set you free'. Now, that quote can be attributed to someone or some thing, but I believe it is older than our planet and has been around for billions of years. No, it's just a hunch, sure, I could be wrong, probably am wrong.

Much of my philosophy is borrowed from ancient eastern philosophy and a few modern mystics, sages.

All of them teach reincarnation, and I take reincarnation on faith, as well, not to mention there is some evidence for it. It is also logical to me.

When we die, our essential selves, our souls, noting that "I' and the 'soul' are the same thing, we do not perish. Death is an illusion and we are eternal.

The basic premise of eastern philosophy is that you keep coming back, you grow spiritually a little bit with each life, and this continues for however long it takes for the individual, the soul, to reach the Godhead, AKA 'self-realization', 'samadhi', 'nirvana' or 'heaven' or whatever term endears one the most. It has been said by most of these mystics that one can accelerate the process via meditation, or the modern term now is 'mindfulness' techniques. I also believe that during the first century or first few centuries when Christianity was coagulating and forming into various factions and struggling to achieve something, the Gnostic Christians believed that Christ had a secret, esoteric teaching and that teaching was more in tune with eastern philosophical concepts, accepted reincarnation, and it was Orthodoxy which deviated from Christ, whereupon they cherry picked his teachings to conform to that which would empower the political power of the church.

This is my faith, this is what I believe. I just thought I would share these ideas with anyone who cares to read them, and/or dispute or be amused by them.

As a side, but related, note; In in the context of non-zero probability, assuming infinity, abstract or real, all that is possible, is inevitable. (See if you can falsify that one). Life is possible, this much we know, and infinity, in terms of non-zero probability, if it is possible, it will occur, eventually, though not assured at any point. Thus we have life. So, in a sense, it is infinity that is the mother of all that is possible. Now, some things are impossible. Anyway, compared to infinity, all that is finite is infinitesimal. That is why all arguments that go 'there are too many gazillions of factors to be aligned in space for anything to happen by chance (the argument for 'intelligent design'), are specious logic'.

Thanks for reading.
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All of this blather necessitates the condition that the writer isn't seething with evil behaviours and regards.

I say that as an atheist.
 
martin said:
How do you know what moved Schindler? It certainly seems from the outside it was identification with other people, therefore a kind of moral reciprocity. Not suggesting a "contradiction", only the absence of a non-subjective morality.
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Reciprocity is based on an expectation of repayment or mutual advantage

The only thing Oskar Schindler brought upon himself for helping thousands of strangers was risk, danger, and financial ruin.
 
Cypress said:
Reciprocity is based on an expectation of repayment or mutual advantage

The only thing Oskar Schindler brought upon himself for helping thousands of strangers was risk, danger, and financial ruin.
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I'm not suggesting otherwise. By "moral reciprocity" I meant doing for others what he would have wanted done for himself and those who mattered to him. I think maybe this is not a disagreement just a different take on words. I would have defined "objective" more broadly.
 
martin said:
How do you know what moved Schindler? It certainly seems from the outside it was identification with other people, therefore a kind of moral reciprocity. Not suggesting a "contradiction", only the absence of a non-subjective morality.
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IMO, it was Western Civilization morality.

One of the toughest things to teach soldiers is how to kill other humans after 18+ years of social conditioning that killing humans = murder. Obviously a few take less training than others, but as the suicide and PTSD numbers prove, it takes a toll on the majority of service personnel.

Schindler was 32 years old in 1940. While he has some problems earlier in life, he matured and had a foundation of Western Civ morality which ran counter to what passed for Nazi morality.

The biggest difference I see in people like Schindler and the Dutch who hid Jews in their attics and basements versus other common citizens is the spine to take the risks involved in acting upon their morality. Lots of people are moral. Lots of Germans recognized that what the Nazis were doing was wrong, but only a few acted upon it.
 
Daylight63 said:
The reason I asked was because if the moral teachers were necessary for us to have the basic morality of do not murder, do not steal, etc. then there must have been some societies in which those things were never taught.
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A good house needs a strong foundation. Without it the house will eventually collapse.

The foundation of human societies is the willingness to stick together for mutual benefits such as food, safety, employment and other factors mentioned under Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs under Physiological and Safety. If that foundation doesn't exist then, like the house, the society will cease to exist.


Maslows-hierarchy-of-needs.jpg
 
martin said:
I'm not suggesting otherwise. By "moral reciprocity" I meant doing for others what he would have wanted done for himself and those who mattered to him. I think maybe this is not a disagreement just a different take on words. I would have defined "objective" more broadly.
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I don't think that feeling of putting yourself in someone else's shoes invalidates my opinion that empathy is a universal objective moral truth, excepting sociopaths and the mentally deranged. I don't see a case of mutual exclusiveness.

The interesting thing to me in how this thread developed is that the strict physical materialist might start out saying humans are just another animal in the evolutionary scheme and of no special significance, and now we are carving out special exceptions for humans that do not depend on natural selection, utility, mutual advantage. We are recognizing that empathy and mercy for faceless strangers, even rivals and enemies seems to be uniquely human.
 
Cypress said:
Your right, humans are not biomechanical machines that develop in a vacuum.

A moral conscience has to be discovered, cultivated, and exercised by the actions of free will.

Humanity wouldn't have needed prophets, teachers, and sages if we were born perfect and sinless

I believe that there is still something in our moral conscience that is predisposed to potentially discovering an ultimate moral truth. Self-knowledge of this type was supposed to make you free, according to Jesus, Siddhartha Buddha, the authors of the Baghavad Gita

The fact that human history in general has been one long arc bending towards ever more justice, benevolence, egalitarianism - and over the long term does not arc back the opposite direction - is a clear indicator to me that humans are predisposed with the psychological potential to recognize absolute right and wrong.
Click to expand...
Agreed such things have to be developed and cultivated. The subject of Free Will is a good one since I do believe that rational human beings do have choices beyond their genetics and upbringing. Most of those choices will involve self-interest AKA survival. We all benefit from living in a civilized society where we can be safe, employed and have a future for ourselves and our families.
 
Daylight63 said:
The reason I asked was because if the moral teachers were necessary for us to have the basic morality of do not murder, do not steal, etc. then there must have been some societies in which those things were never taught.
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I can't speculate about the psychology of humans prior to about 3000 BCE because there are no written sources. We only start to get some data about human ethical values starting with the Babylonians, the Zoroastrians, the Hebrew prophets, the Vedic Canon, the Greeks
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Agreed such things have to be developed and cultivated. The subject of Free Will is a good one since I do believe that rational human beings do have choices beyond their genetics and upbringing. Most of those choices will involve self-interest AKA survival. We all benefit from living in a civilized society where we can be safe, employed and have a future for ourselves and our families.
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A lot of truth in your statement. Thanks

When we talk about living in civilized societies, I think we are biased by the experience of living in 20th and 21st century communities, with police and fire services, public schools, museums, utilities, hospitals.

Unless you were wealthy, living in an ancient or Medival city would be dangerous and most likely short.

There is a lot of utility and mutual advantage living in modern communities. The ancient sages believed in absolute right and wrong. There was no utility in helping lepers, treating strangers with infectious disease, or rendering aid to rivals. But an absolute moral truth requires that one not consider utility or advantage in their value system. In hindsight we might say it seems like common sense but that's because we inherited two thousand years of a moral truth taught by Near Eastern and Asian sages
 
Cypress said:
I believe there is a moral law imprinted on the human conscience that supersedes human opinion or human fiat.

That's how I can say what the Nazis did to Jews was absolutely and objectively wrong.

Otherwise, disbelief in a universal objective moral law means the Nazis just had a different opinion than you; you cannot say they were objectively wrong.
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Who cares if Nazis were wrong or we just have the opinion they were wrong. No difference.
 
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