"Without God, everything is permitted" Voltaire
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Sound. I think you can use the idea to represent social accountability. With groups and fraternal networks, people all understand reputations of nondegenerate life and how it hurts others if anyone cheats. This social purpose motivates most of the moral derivations people use in religions.
I don't think evolution is a satisfactory explanation for morality.
I also don't think science has any legitimate explanation for the start of the universe
Well... the start of the universe is a very difficult thing to study.
Science has ideas for how the universe started, but they are simply our best ideas for how it might’ve happened given the evidence we can collect.
It really, REALLY helps that the farther away something is from us in the cosmos, the longer it takes its light to reach us. So if something is 5 light years away, the light we are receiving from it now (at the current moment) is a snapshot of how that object was 5 years ago.
This means we can look at the sky and look “back in history” by looking at things that are farther or closer to us.
The farthest we can look is at the “background” of the sky, which is called the cosmic microwave background, and which contains the faintest light from the longest time ago. The different aspects of this imprint—how the energy is distributed, whether it’s uniform or not, etc.—gives us lots of clues.
We also get clues from observations like the expansion of the universe, the formation of stars, fundamental physics, and so on.
The biggest limitation right now is that we do not have a good model of quantum gravity. All the other forces have been united at the quantum scale and we know how they interact at different energies. We just haven’t yet been able to figure out gravity.
A big discovery was finding evidence of gravitational waves. We now have to wonder whether there exists a particle that mediates the force of gravity much like the photon mediates the electromagnetic force (plus the other gauge bosons; the gluons for the strong force that “glues” nuclei together, and the W and Z bosons for the weak force... these are some stupid names for sure, but hell, it’s what we’ve got).
Our theories for fundamental physics work pretty well, so it’s a clue that we are on the right track. If your buddy had a model for how he thought quarterbacks could be rated, that would be all fine and dandy... but the moment he was able to start predicting the scores of entire football seasons in advance, you’d think, well maybe it isn’t PERFECTLY accurate but at least it’s pretty damned close!
It is undebatable that using theory alone, we have been able to predict with incredible accuracy the existence of new particles, like the Higgs boson. Technologies like GPS also depend on very complex topics like relativity, so we know that our models are at least “pretty good” if they are able to be predictive and not just descriptive.
This isn’t anything against religion at all. The two are not mutually exclusive, and are not in competition.
You are absolutely right in your last paragraph and, it is refreshing to see an atheist at least willing to concede this.
Do you believe evil exists?
I wouldn’t say I’m an atheist. That is an extremely dumb thing to be, because it assumes certainty that there is nothing like a higher power or god.
When it comes to moral things like evil, I think that there is no such thing as objective evil. The ability to decide whether something is right or wrong is a part of the moral construct that shapes every individual’s perception of the world around them. These constructs are heavily influenced by the experiences that we have and the societies to which we belong.
There is no such thing as “objective right” or “objective wrong.” That is simply our perception at work. Now this doesn’t mean that some things aren’t so appalling to us that any sensible human would agree that they’re wrong. Things like murder, killing children, and so on.
What I mean by no objective right and wrong (and evil vs good) is that if a rock falls on someone and kills them, you do not call the rock evil. It exists outside of our human world of right and wrong.
Maybe a different way to say it is this. I think there are human instincts that we have from birth which guide our morality. Very simply things. We smile when we are happy, and we become happy when we see others smile, even when we are babies too young to have any idea of what we are doing. This means that regardless of our society’s structure, we are almost inevitably going to value a world where people seek happiness and where we try to benefit one another. Same goes for other things. We have empathy, and we can experience by proxy how are actions would affect someone else. This means we hesitate to take blanket opportunities to hurt others because we know how it feels to be hurt. We also have an urge to procreate and we become psychologically very tightly bound to our children, especially women. So it isn’t hard to understand why societies all over the planet have developed societies where there are family structures that ensure our kids are nurtured.
All this to say. I think our sense of good and evil is rooted in our deep instincts, and we add nuance to it by reacting to the world around to develop a value system that changes as we experience life. The reason why humans are so united by a widely shared core of morals, nuances aside, is because we share these instincts. What with being the same species and all.
Does this make sense?
social accountability, in real time, not evolution. Everyone can see if someone cheats and would not do business with him after.
the second, yes, except it does not mean any specific personal moral god did it.