Again Tom you restate that since I believe in the possibility of evolution that no moral standards can be applied. Look at it this way! Life is all around us that is a fact! Scientific! The miracle of it is just as amazing as moral truth! Yet can we apply science to your or my reasoning? It is not that easy therefore in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson we must examine and reexamine! We must wrestle with and try our best to come to the best conclusions we can. Is the Bible adequate for this? The Bible gives laws that applied for a certain group of people at a certain time. It gives ideals for us to strive towards but the truth is we must face reality every moment of our lives. We must ask question and ask them again. Tom if life were as easy as many want to believe then we would all live together and our leaders would decide our lives for .....
1. Dave, you speak much of Thomas Jefferson. Yet you don't seem to understand what He actually thought. Remember this?
"When in the couirse of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..."
"...We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are CREATED equal, and are endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
So there it is Dave, Jefferson, a Deist, believed in a Creator God who had infused in His creation with "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God". That, Dave, is a far cry from someone who just keeps trying out whatever ideas that come up the road, as long as the liberal elitists approve of them.
If you want to follow Jefferson, you need to find out what those laws are and obey them.
2. Tielhard D'Chardin was sort of a panthiest, who, by the way, is one of the suspects in the Piltdown man hoax. He believed in a sort of directed cosmic evolution. (all the while collecting his paycheck from the RC Church. Now there's integrity for you!)
Now, Dave, how can you follow the ideas of a Deist, who belived that God created nature, AND a pantheist who believed nature was God???
This sort of thing is why I said you seem to be liberated from logic.
3. I never said that no moral standards can be applied. What I did say was that if there is no lawgiver then the only source of moral standards is ourselves. So, why are your moral standards better than anyone else's. (I know the answer Dave, the "Liberal" elitists are the only ones who understand the true, the good, and the beautiful, and you are trying to join the club)
You never seem to try to answer the question, "why is A better than B".
4. You say, "we must examine and re-examine, we must wrestle with and try our best to come to the best conclusions we can."
Says who??? Seems to me that if we get to make up the rules, and a whole lot of people choose to believe that the great truths of the universe are found on the back of a Budweiser Beer can, there would be no basis to say they are wrong.
5. The fact that "life is all around us" proves one thing. Life is all around us. That doesn't tell us anything about what to do with it.
You cannot derive an "ought" from an "is".
6. You say, "...can we apply science to your or my reasoning?"
What we can apply to reasoning is Logic, which is defined as the art of clear thinking. Its principles are cross cultural and cross generational.
7. As to the idea that values are in us as through evolution...since all life forms are competing for resources, according to Darwinist theory, genocide makes perfect sense. If we kill other people, they can't compete with us, so we and our offspring survive. Too bad for them, but that is the lot of the weak. Nature, red in tooth and claw.
Do you really believe this Dave?
I suggest that you stop telling everyone else that they need to think and start doing it yourself.
Thomas Maddux
