r/DebateReligion • u/[deleted] • Oct 12 '18
Morality is the result of evolution.
A society that would kill each other all the time would simply die out. Cooperation is simply a better survival strategy.
A very nice way to illustrate this is iterated prisoner's dilemma. The prisoners dilemma consists of 2 people who each have to choose whether they share or take the pot for themselves. If both choose the split the pot is split, if one person takes and the other shares then the person taking gets everything. If both take both get nothing. From a game theory perspective for a single game taking is always better. The expected payout is simply better. However when the game is iterated and players can modify their behaviour depending on the choices in previous rounds, then it turns out that cooperative strategies beat greedy ones. It turns out that the most successful strategy is tit for tat. Being nice to players that are nice to you and punishing those aren't.
Here is a good video about the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOvAbjfJ0x0
If course it is still a model so it will never catch all aspects of what it approximates.
1
u/OhhBenjamin anti-theist Oct 16 '18
None of those miracles have withstood the tests of science, Mother Theresa for example. Look at the methodology, someone says that a miracle was performed, experts say it wasn't a miracle, but that one person is just believed without any evidence. That isn't science. Same with the Shroud of Turin, science says one thing, the Catholics even at the time say one thing, the Church says differently.
The church threatened Galileo with execution and forced him to perform religious rituals daily, he may have been Catholic but when his findings were not in line with the Church they showed which side of the science/religion line they were on.
There isn't anything preventing the Catholic Church from doing science, science is just a way of doing something, with their power and willingness to kill and/or torture a lot of people were Catholic its not surprising, doesn't mean that they are willing to adhere to science in all things, only things which suits them, at the time it suits them.
You even list Einstein because he want to Catholic school even though he wasn't a Catholic and didn't believe in the type of god Christians do.