I can see why. And in frank honesty, existence does not have an intrinsic purpose or value. We create or assign it.

In a universe where personal existence has no significance ( it just happened to be/ just is) then you destroy the foundations of all morality. ‘Good’ becomes an utterly subjective, capricious thing.

You are completely correct. That’s why morals are so changeable, subjective, and capricious. We all have to make it up as we go along.

I object strongly to them if they then get on their high moral horse over certain issues.

I’m inclined to agree. When one admits that one is creating value (i.e., that value is not intrinsic) then one ought to remain on lower horses.

in an impersonal universe you cannot get ‘ought’ from ‘is’!!

I think you’re largely right on this. And I also understand the view that if you have a personal, creator deity, you could look to that deity for a purpose, for value, for “ought”. The idea that “the maker provides the meaning” makes sense and was a guiding ideology for me, and most of the de-converts here, for much of my life.

Here’s what I ran up against though. We don’t and can’t know what this maker is like or what morals he would have us adapt. Sure you can point to a holy book and say, “This is what the maker says.” But then which book do you point to? And having picked a book, which interpretation do you pick? And having picked that, how the dickens do you justify excluding all others?

You should be aware that through history and throughout the world today, you can find just about everything held up as “moral” and “god-ordained”. For you or I to sit in our current time and country and church, and insist that we have it all worked out and can say who was wrong and right in all places at all time…. well that’s a pretty high horse isn’t it?

of creation ex nihlo as ‘no basis n fact’ is a biased reading of the evidence.

Would you care to offer up the evidence of 7 day creation?

Evolution is just as much a FAITH assumption based on refusal to accept a personal God who speaks, communicates, instructs.

Not even close. And you must be super smart if you can divine the intentions of motivations of people you read exerpts from on a message board.

as a consequence you will rule out reading the ‘evidence’ in line with a Creator’s description.

Biases are natural and human, but what you write here is equally true of the Christians who treat evolutionary evidence this way. At least I can honestly say I am trying to minimize my biases in my analysis, can you say the same thing?

The alternative inevitably will need to read the evidence in an evolutionary way- unless you hold every single complex living thing just happened instantaneously into existence by chance!!

This is an odd ending for you post. Who holds this position?

Richard Dawkins argued in his famous book “The Selfish Gene” that human are merely a survival machine for our Genes.

Yes, Christians hate the idea that we’re merely the result of our genetic programming. But to some large extent, it is true.

“I’m not related to monkeys, it is up to you if you want to believe that you are” is the most common response I got from my devoutly Christians family members.

But I’d like to believe in what is true, not to believe in something that has no basic in fact (i.e. the world is created in 7 days), just to make me feel better.

Contrary to your statement, we are not programmed to be good. Yes, there are evolutionary benefits for society who acts kindly towards their kin – namely they tend to survive and pass on their genes to the next generation.

But for human being to do good, it takes our intelligence and free will to overcome our genetic programming that only cares about breeding and survival.

We are the only animal (yes, we’re part of the animal kingdom) that has the intelligence, and therefore the ability to refute our genetical programming.

To say we need God to act decently and do the right thing is an insult to any self respecting, educated intelligent being.

Meanwhile, does altruism make perfect sense in an evolutionary model? Maybe not, but since when was natural selection an ethical command? The reason to do good is because other people’s thoughts and feelings matter; occasionally, bridging that gap is a sort of defiance of our own genes — but that shouldn’t bring us down too much. We haven’t had to depend on evolution to correct for our deficiencies for several thousand years now. Instead, we have culture and society, aspects of life into which religion is certainly closely tied but not absolutely necessary.

Anyway, keep up the good work, people!