AT writes:
I came across an article which suggests that morality and altruism might actually be hard-wired in our genes.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co … 01056.html
" …neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.
The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable…
Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results – many of them published just in recent months – are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species…
What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots – such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman’s experiment – that have been around for a very long time…
Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain activities. Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above our baser impulses. Greene said it is not “handed down” by philosophers and clergy, but “handed up,” an outgrowth of the brain’s basic propensities… [emphasis not mine]
Marc Hauser, another Harvard researcher, has used cleverly designed psychological experiments to study morality. He said his research has found that people all over the world process moral questions in the same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human brain, rather than a product of culture. It may be useful to think about morality much like language, in that its basic features are hard-wired, Hauser said. Different cultures and religions build on that framework in much the way children in different cultures learn different languages using the same neural machinery…"
AT writes - In other words, religion doesn’t create morality. If anything, it is the other way round. Religion can only exploit and modify to a degree what is already there.
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V writes:
Humans need moral guidance or a moral conscience since they have a ‘free will’ of sorts.
Actually it is like this.
We are free to do what we want – but are not free to want what we want.
All our actions have consequences, and many of our actions produce consequences that end up destroying peace. (both ours and other’s peace).
This is what separates us from the animals that run solely on instinct.
Humans run by instinct as well as moral guidance.
Whether this moral conscience in divinely inspired or from Nature I don’t know - that is why I am an agnostic.
But If I had to guess I would lean towards the atheistic view of Nature based, since I have not found any evidence of a God such as the monotheists claim.
…my discussion of this topic from an earlier post.
jesusneverexisted.org/jne/forum/ … opic=504.0
Take care,
V (Male)
Agnostic Freethinker
Practical Philosopher
AA#2