Wilson
In response [to the question about the source of morality], you now tell us that we have an innate predisposition to both good and wicked behavior. But we are still stuck. What I want to know (still) is what warrant you have for calling some behaviors "good" and others "wicked." If both are innate, what distinguishes them? What could be wrong with just flipping a coin? With regard to your retort that my "talent for needless complexity" has simply gotten me "God's coexistence with evil," I reply that I would rather have my God and the problem of evil than your no God and "Evil? No problem!"Hitchens
My answer is the same as it was all along: Our morality evolved. Just as we have. Natural selection and trial-and-error have given us the vague yet grand conception of human rights and some but not yet all of the means of making these rights coherent and consistent. There is simply no need for the introduction of the extraneous or the supernatural....
[Hitchens goes on to say that he does not steal or do other harm to others, except sometimes he may take a cheap shot at someone.]
But I am always aware of doing so, or if you like, of the temptation to do so, and I strive (not always with success) to resist the tactic, and rather dislike myself when I give in to it. Why do I do this? Socrates called this restraint the daemon: an inner voice that helps us toward self-criticism. I am content to regard it as indefinable, which is where we part company. My own inclination is to regard it as a human faculty without which we could not have - I shan't say "evolved" yet again - made the smallest progress as homo sapiens. You believe that I owe this inner prompting to the divine....[but] Ask yourself this question. Can you name one moral action, or moral utterance, performed or spoken by a believer that could not have been performed or spoken by an atheist?
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