Re: [asa] prisoner's dilemma

I see the danger of this despair too, Wayne. One can't simultaneously not
believe in something and yet try to gain the benefits of such a belief by
attempted pretense. Either God is real and so is our hope. Or he is not and
our hope will perish. Having faith that the former is true, may he grant us the
grace to believe it and live by it to our very core.

One of the problems that I think still arises with attempts to explain
evolutionary origins for morals at a cultural level is the fact that our known
history would not seem to bear it out -- at least not in any kind of Christian
perspective. Maybe at the smaller community level cooperation could be
significant for natural selection purposes. But at the international level, to
postulate that Western Europeans had a superior set of moral standards (that
they actually lived by) than, say native American peoples stretches credibility
quite a bit unless one still subscribes to manifest destiny. Or that most
conquering empire builders through history somehow had higher morals than their
victims is now recognized by most of us as a perverted "might makes right"
philosophy straight from Nietzsche.

In contrast, it is easier to imagine that a basically peaceful and trusting
civilization would not actually last very long when surrounded by war-mongering
neighbors. So the fact that any of us have any inclinations (or a faith that
causes us to admire & aspire to such) still does remain problematic to would-be
evolutionary moralists. Still -- I don't want to lean too heavily on this
"gap" argument.

--merv

Quoting Dawsonzhu@aol.com:

> Merv wrote (in part):
>
> > That is why attempts like 'prisoner's dilemma' are important to understand
>
> > I
> > think. In order to show how 'selfish, mindless genes' can occassionally
> > forgo
> > the immediate payoff for the sake of community, they are postulating (and
> > not
> > altogether unconvincingly) that natural selection could operate at the
> level
> > of
> > community or even culture, to benefit cultures that have morals and
> > self-imposed
> > restrictions may "out-survive" cultures with none -- or different ones.
> >
> >
>
> I can basically agree. At any rate, it is something that
> we need to examine, because it can do a lot to dig into who
> we are as individuals. I _can_ see that there are games at
> all levels and that we play them.
>
> You might even reduce it down to thermodynamic-like ensembles
> where the dominant state becomes that long term "payoff".
>
> But taken too far, we can reach the conclusion that other
> even "beneficial" aspects of our psychology such as
> our a desire for meaning and our need for hope are all just
> illusion. These would be simply things that helped us survive;
> nothing more. It strikes me as almost paradoxical that
> to believe in God has helped the human race survive, yet
> there is no such thing: just a blind pitiless universe
> and selfish games to optimize the perpetuation of our genes.
>
> It seems like one of the things that is missing is why these things
> should even matter at all.
>
> by Grace we proceed,
> Wayne
>

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Received on Wed Aug 16 12:29:02 2006