Tico wrote:Ok, I'll take the plunge.
I believe that most humans inherently know good from evil.
I'll go even further. I believe that most humans prefer to do good rather than evil. Good is natural. We know, without being told by any deity, that it is wrong to kill another human, to steal, to slander, to covet, to disrespect, etc. That way lies chaos and ultimately destruction of our kind. It is against natural instinct to destroy your own species. We do not need religion or priests to teach this. It is inherent, instinctive.
Good is also easy, and like a river finding the path of least resistance through a canyon, easy is natural. It is easier to do the right thing (not to kill, not to steal, not to lie) than the wrong thing. The wrong action takes planning and effort because it goes against our natural goodness. Again, we do not need religious leaders to teach us this -- we need only to listen to our own consciences.
First of all, I don't think that what you are describing is an awareness of good and evil - or not the sort of good and evil that religious people talk about. And secondly, I don't think you have accurately described our natural instincts, because I think that what many people would describe as "selfishness" is more of a natural human inclination than what you have called "natural goodness".
My first point is that, without God, surely it isn't actually
wrong to kill your own children, for example. From an evolutionary perspective, we can definitely say that killing your own children is a really bad idea
if you want to propogate your own genes. Or from what you have said, we can say it is a bad idea to kill people
if you want the human race to survive(though I don't quite agree with this, but I'll come to that later). But don't Christians believes something more than this? Isn't something lost if we reject religious ethics? Namely, actions actually being
wrong, rather than just
a bad idea if it happens to go against your desires.
My second point is just that I don't agree with the details of what you have described as human instincts. The unit of survival is not the human race, it is the individual, or possibly even the individual gene. We do not instinctively want the human race to survive, we just want our genes to survive. Why do you think there is so much racism in the world? If we all instinctively wanted the human race to survive, then according to you it would be easier to be tolerant of other races. But on the contrary, I think that it is easy to be prejudiced against people who look different, and much harder to learn to be tolerant and peaceful towards such people, and aware that they are only superficially different.
This is because the unit of survival is the individual, or the gene. We are naturally inclined to be hostile towards someone who looks very different to us (and therefore has very different genes), because we do not naturally care about humans in general. We care (unconsciously/instinctively) only about our own genes. If it is wrong to kill humans, then we do not instinctively know this; killing people who are genetically different from us is perfectly consistent with our natural instincts. You seem to suggest that what is natural is good. According to your account it would be good for me to kill a black man.
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