If Darwin is right and we are just animals what does that imply about morality?

We oversimplify.  We talk about nature.  We speak of evolution.  It is not nature its natures and not evolution but evolutions.  That aside let us go back to our figures of speech aware of how they can corrupt the true picture.

Another mistake is we regard something when left alone as natural.  When we interfere it is not natural.  This is not right as nature does "interfere" with itself.  Nature makes vaccines and we just extract them.  Thus it is natural to hurt others.  Thus it is natural to do anything that is possible. 

Nature never designs or gives.   It falls into something that happens to be useful.  It never gives.  It is always about taking.  Nature does not give you your life, your body, your food. It gives you nothing.  You are simply a part of nature that knows how to take.  You even take without your consent.  You took as a baby.  You make yourself by taking.

Survival of the fittest describes how in evolution, creatures changing over time, gets rid of creatures that are not adaptable enough.  It is about genes at the end of the day.  Darwinism says that the genes that survived by pure chance and by the luck of having a suitable environment made human beings not God.  The fittest means being the best at adapting to dangerous circumstances. 

Mothers in Darwinist thought only love their children to preserve their own genes. But that does not seem to fit our experience. But in fact it explains why child x is as precious as child y and mother will die for child y not x for y is her child. Genes by definition cannot have us acting like we think of them for it is too much like us caring only about things. Only science shows we have them. 

Evolution has "given" - led to is a better expression - us bigger brains which is why humans are so clever. Yet astoundingly Steven Pinker and co and many Christians with him say that the brain is about survival not truth or reason if evolution is true. There is more to our reasoning power than just knowing how to survive.  Good reasoning power is part of being adaptable.  It is what you would want survival of the fittest to accomplish.  However nobody gave us our designing powers and one day they will destroy us in a climate disaster or nuclear war.  So we are the fittest now but the fittest carries the seeds of our destruction.

Evolution is not about looking to the future.  It is not about planning the best way to get from point a to point b.  It may take a good step but this step is not likely to be good long-term.  Evolution is tiny changes happening in a current life-form.  The change may be lucky and spread or it may not.  The ones that help creatures survive usually in the short-term might be the lucky ones.

Evolution is a misleading term if it implies optimism or a force that knows what it is doing.  Religious evolution imagines that God is slowly making things better.  What they mean in their speciest way is that he is making things better for us most of all.  Some think it is only about us.  Religious evolution can imply either of those which is enough to make it questionable and off-putting.  Natural selection which says that the most adaptable will be the survivors or the best equipped to live is a better thing to concentrate on.  Maybe we should talk about natural selection not evolution.  It is clearer.  But natural selection warns that if we cease to be adaptable and we have ceased to be for we are destroying the planet then we will expire and maybe cockroaches will then be the dominant life form on earth.  Religious evolution is a dangerous irresponsible doctrine.  It is not evolution but almost it.  It is evolution with a religious twist.  Natural selection is a blind fact and something we have to put up with.  But this religious version of evolution makes it something to agree should be the case and it is just an action to be praised by God.  The religious evolutionist is more dog eat dog than the scientific evolutionist.

If morality is only about us trying to survive then it amounts to being only about what we feel is right and wrong. It follows that if we feel we want to rob the neighbours in famine time we should. If morality is intrinsically about survival whether fully or partly then it follows that peace is a myth: what we call peace is just a cold war. It would explain why religion is so dangerous as is anything that creates a “We are us and they are them” has to increase the potential for trouble.  Religion lies about the survival motive and that makes it so much more dangerous than any force that just that faces the truth.  Survival shows why violence is as natural as eating porridge.

Nature is about right in the sense of survival and wrong in the sense of danger.  That is why a sense of right and wrong exists in humans and animals.  It is based on an inborn and instinctive concern.  For all creatures this concern develops by education and experience.  A dog that gets burnt does not let it happen again.  In all that we have a feeling for what we ought to do.  Ought is a feeling.  Each creature has a sort of ought to written into the way it is. For example, worms drill into the ground and thus escape predators. An ought to does not have to be a choice to be an ought to. The hen ought to avoid being found by the fox. It has legs and eyes to detect the fox. Nature endows what we think of as morality.  It makes it natural for humans to think of morality and try to regulate it.

Religion blames the Darwinist belief that life developed without any obvious divine guidance or intervention for today's dubious morals and blatant immorality.  It says the morals of today are really in fact not morals at all.

We all have principles even if they are wrong so what we believe becomes what we do for our principles always shine through what we do and say and even what we do not do and do not say.  So if Darwinism gives us some scary morals and if they are detestable at times that does not disprove them.  Your morals depend on what is real.  If there is a war going on the morality you live will be agonising and seem cruel at times for it is necessary.  So Darwinism does not do away with morality but only does away with what some people such as Christians want morality to be.

It is argued that Darwinism has led to the destruction of human uniqueness and human identity.

What is your identity?  It is who you are.

But it is also what you do and do not do.  What you do not do is what you do in a sense for not acting is an action.  A person who never talks to anyone at all is in some sense not a person.  Whatever you self-identify as the core thing will be you identify as an agent.  So you cannot really say you hate somebody's immoral ways but love them.  In doing so you label them as something they are not and though it looks like you humanise them you in fact de-humanise them.

There are some questions about identity.  In general what is it to be human?  Who am I as a person or individual?

Some have made out that Jews are not fully human.  Catholicism underhandedly infers unbaptised babies are not human at all.  Such babies being excluded by God forever is worse than excluding them from anything else.

Then there is the problem of how some animals might be people in different bodies to ours.  Chimps could be people in their own way.  What if there are aliens flying about in spaceships on other planets?  Not all people need be human.

It is felt that actions can speak louder than words so that those who battle for unrestricted abortion or the right to die are in fact declaring others to be no longer human or perhaps they never were human.

What if you include your body in your identity or think your soul is the real you? 

Darwinists and Christians do believe that if there is a God then the body has developed on its own without his direct involvement so being Christian in itself does nothing to show that the body cannot go wrong so that for example a man's body should have been a woman's.  And if your body is not part of your identity then what if you imagine not that you are somehow biologically female though you have a male body but that your soul is meant for a female body when your body is male?  Faith in the soul as a separate thing running the body opens the door to more transgenderism not less.  Yet the belief that people are animals gets the blame for transgenderism from Christians!

Some argue that we are evolved animals.  Does that mean we are better animals than the rest?  Some say we are others say we are not.  Evolved makes you different not better

If we are just animals then should public nudity be legalised and allowed?  Interesting question to think about! 

Homosexuals and bisexuals and others argue that their homosexuality or whatever is a part of their identity that others must praise and accept and nurture.

If we are animals it becomes hard to explain how having sex with an animal if it does no harm to the animal could be wrong.  It is argued that such sex violates the right of the animal but this presumes that the animal is degraded or hurt.  But what about the hypothetical situation where it is not?  The animal rights argument is only as good as long as animals are hurt.  And even if they are is it is right to hurt a person who has sex with them for animals get over it and do not see abuse the same way as a human does.

As gender is a part of one's identity and a very big part it is believed it is a basic human right to justify a person born in a male or female body to transition bodily to the opposite gender.

Some believe in transracism where you could claim to be a white person in a black person's body for example.

Some believe in transageism where some feel they self-identify as a child in a grown up body.

Transable is a person who believes their body is meant to be impaired or a healthy limb should be removed.

As we have an animal nature, we cannot write off any of these as nonsense.  Darwinism or not it doesn't change the fact that I know I have an animal side even if we are not completely animals.  Attacking Darwinism because we don’t want to be animals is a sign that we hate what people are and we want something to blame.

Apply Darwinism to how pregnancy is full of errors and "design" flaws that harm the mother.  The hips are not wide enough and a woman needs too much assistance.  The vast majority of history's mothers were killed by pregnancy and childbirth. Motherhood will do permanent damage and can be called a necessary illness. With poor design the maker is either not perfectly powerful, not perfectly knowing or not perfectly good or any combination of these. Pregnancy is a health danger not an illness as such which is why abortion rights must be granted.  It is still very much linked to illness which is why saying it is not an illness doesn't carry much moral relevance.

Christians say that survival of the fittest in Darwinism only accounts for the fittest being here but not for how the fittest came about in the first place. They say that God can design things in seemingly roundabout and awkward ways if he wants as long as it is functional. Our backs are too weak for us but that does not matter as long as we are careful. So we are told. Nobody wants to argue that chance was at work which is why there are design flaws.

A bad design points to a flawed god at most and believers are flatterers and sycophants and hypocrites for glorying in him and pretending not to notice the blunders.  They exaggerate for their idol.

They are telling us to think about the origin of the system not the things that make its wisdom questionable!  Why should the origin of the system of survival of the fittest matter more than survival of the fittest? Believers have to admit that it is a cruel cutthroat system. They want to divert you from that to concentrate on the origin in the first place. That is cynical.  That x murdered matters for there is a dead body.  Don't divert to worrying only or mainly about why x murdered or what drove him!  Same principle for natural selection has nature "murdering" the weak or the people who are too mistaken about their ideas to survive.

Religion thinks, "Darwinism – if it is survival of the fittest then to evolve and help evolution you must scheme and use evil wisely."  It seems that if there is no God to answer to then you should be the sensible knave - you do good but in crafty ways that nobody realises that you are doing it for yourself perhaps just to feel good.

But that fails to notice that evolution works best when people in a group or who feel they are grouped in some way are nice to each other.  The sensible knave has a terrible price to pay for his success - failure.  It will come for he will feel nobody really knew him and only loved what they thought he was and will end up thinking probably everybody else is a sensible knave, a fake, too!  The error is in forgetting that we are communities not individuals at the end of the day. 

 Another error is that the brain rewards pro-social action so it is survival of the fittest as communities not so much as individuals.  The human race as a whole or unit does in fact try to outwit everything non-human. So all we can really hope for is people to be nice to those whom they meet.  A group always being nice to each other will not be nice to an outsider group.  You just have to hope that the big group has a lot of people in it to help with the niceness!

To see a human being as not being an animal but as sacred, has to ignore and contradict the fact that we do indeed do all the things that animals do. Disgust means we consider ourselves above animals. We are disgusted by people behaving the way we perceive animals to behave such as eating cake with their fingers when there is a knife there. This disgust, this speciesism is behind a lot of what passes for morality and drives it. Morality in most of its forms and for the most part ignores our evolutionary origins. It is based on acting as if we did not come from animals and indeed still are animals.

We all know that natural selection is true - it is not necessarily about evolution.  The strongest and most manipulative will survive.  We have to live with that victimising and threatening fact.  The more we blind ourselves to it the more we fear it.  We don't want to see it.  Belief in a higher power is another tactic of many that we use to blind ourselves with and try to protect ourselves with.  We want that power to give us an extra edge in the face of nature which is red in tooth and claw and know that a meteorite can wipe the planet of life anytime.  Religion does not need to command harm doing in order to get us to harm.  If the natural world is about a survival battle then surely the same happens in the spirit world?  If resources are limited in any world we will act Darwinian.  Does religion give us more Darwinism than Darwin did?

If Darwinism is a threat to morality then that is no reason for saying it is false though believers in God as the source of morality will still maintain that it is. You cannot say something is bad or wrong just because you don’t like its implications or what you think its results will be. Believers make a lie the foundation of their moral codes. Thus they have a counterfeit of morality not morality. It is a recipe for corruption. Hate for Darwinists will inevitably ensue. If Darwinism harms the credibility of morality, what the believers offer is worse.

People worry that animals being good to each other is only part of ruthless natural selection itself.  So instead of animals really being good we are only saying they behave in a certain way.  We are only describing how they behave.  We cannot call it morality.  Or ethics.  So when natural selection is so manipulative and dangerous this goodness is not moral goodness but only nature at work.  But what do people do?  They talk about morality while knowing that natural selection is true.  They don't truly believe in morality any more than the Darwinist atheist does.  They are insinuating that those who accept natural selection as true whether they are atheists or not, do not really believe in morality even if they say they do.  Such an accusation is itself immoral.  Morality demands not ideals but necessities.  So if all you can have is a bad morality - and that is what you get if ruthless nature is making you good to people - then it is what it is and it is immoral for anybody to say it is not morality at all or immoral or amoral to adopt it.

It is not evolution's fault or anyone's that its methods and processes are so cruel.  That does not affect fact that it could be better. Could implies should.  As part of evolution, we are best equipped to take care of the could and therefore the should.

If Darwinism is true then denying it is more harmful than accepting it. Ignoring truth does nothing to help but plenty to hinder for truth does not care what you want or need.  A religion denying that life is a battle for survival is just simply dangerous.