All of Bruce Anderson's Comments + Replies

With God, 9/11 was permitted for Mohammed Atta, Inquisition for medieval Catholics, and so on. With it was permitted the brutal massacres of the Crusaders in the Middle East (against Muslims) and in France against heretics. With Him was permitted the pogroms against Jews in medieval Europe.  You see the evils of WW2, but what caused the evils of the Thirty Year War, as a part of the European Wars of Religion? What caused evils during the brutal Arab-Islamic conquests?

What about that thing where you can't derive an "ought" from an "is"? Just from the standpoint of pure logic, we can't derive anything about morality from axioms that don't mention morality. If you want to derive your morality from the existence of God, you still need to add an axiom: "that which God says is moral is moral". On the other end of things, an atheist could still agree with a theist on all moral statements, despite not believing in God. Suppose that God says "A, B, C are moral, and X, Y, Z are immoral". Then an atheist working from the axioms "A, B, C are moral, and X, Y, Z are immoral" would believe the same things as a theist about what is moral, despite not believing in God. Similarly, Darwin's theory of evolution is just a claim about how the various kinds of living things we see today arose on Earth. Forget about God and religion, it would be really weird if believing in this funny idea about how complexity and seeming goal-directness can arise from a competition between imperfect copies somehow made you into an evil person. Indeed, claiming that atheism or evolution is what led to Nazi atrocities almost feels to me like giving too much slack to the Nazis and their collaborators. Millions of people are atheists, or believe in evolution, or both, and they don't end up committing murder, let alone genocide. Maybe we should just hold people responsible for their actions, and not treat them as automatons being piloted by memes? As another example, imagine we're trying to prevent a similar genocide from happening in the future (which we are, in fact). Which strategy would be more effective? 1. Encourage belief in religion and discourage belief in evolution. Pass a law making church attendance mandatory, teach religion in schools. Hide the fossil record, and lock biology papers behind a firewall so that only medical doctors and biologists can see them. Prevent evolution from being taught in science classes, in favour of creationism. 2. Teach the hi

What kind of theism though? A god that deliberately and knowingly created a world like this is evil by normal moral standards. So good would have to come from a different god unsullied by the act of material creation. It sounds like Gnosticism. 

While I disagree with the other parts of this (The Nazis were religious, though they were pagan instead of Christianity), I do think that there's a significant probability that morality is just a social construct, and thus evil and good can only ever be from points of view. This is called moral anti-realism. Controversial take: The only reason we agree on moral behavior and immoral behavior so much is not because there's a moral reality waiting to be discovered, but instead the fact that humans are so similar. I don't assign significant probability mass to this remaining the case, and thus vast disagreements on moral and immoral behavior will arise.