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Originally Posted by peter12
That wasn't what was under discussion.
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It sure seemed like it to me, and I was reading pretty carefully.
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I could easily satirize the other side and say that the answers given were "because technology." Doesn't work like that either.
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You could, if anyone had suggested that.
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I was trying to discover his premise so that I could reasonably respond. Do we behave morally as a result of 4 billion years of evolution?
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This question has already failed from the outset because it assumes we behave "morally". You can't start from there. We do not necessarily behave morally. In many cases, behaviours that seem intuitively "moral" to you may be diametrically opposed to those of another culture, and either or neither of those behaviours may in truth be "moral".
Again, two separate questions:
1. why do we behave as we do, and
2. is the way we behave moral (and if not, what is)
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If so, why is there so much diversity in human moral systems, and if we think that reason is important, to what degree, and in what form?
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I would have thought this was obvious - evolution is a selective process that will encourage different traits in different groups of people. There is, in other words, more than one potential societal setup that will lead to that setup surviving over a few thousand years (or even less), which is all the time that's needed to establish a moral tradition.
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My only answer is that Christianity must be considered as the primary source of morality within the modern context.
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Well, there have been many responses to this from others in this thread that demonstrate why this answer is a massive oversimplification.