Curt, Juan – Truth is bigger than science. One cannot demonstrate their own birth — it’s not “repeatable, demonstrable, testable”. If the difference between good and evil and the incredible design in the natural world (and the origin of it) aren’t proof, then what could possibly satisfy?

Juan – the assertion that moral philosophy and physical reality are separate may be a false assumption — after all knowledge is intrinsically tied with morality, as no conscious observation can take place without morality playing a part. Man ascribes meaning to events, and “meaning” immediately has an interplay with morality. That fact is something that I think Mises philosophical base was very weak in, and Rothbard was stronger (Rothbard was very honest in the implications of his philosophy).

Gene – Depends what you mean. Observation without cognition isn’t a moral question, but as soon as one is “thinking about one’s thinking” it becomes necessary to fit one’s observations into a worldview for any abstract thought or knowledge accumulation to take place.

Then observation becomes moral because man decides on a worldview in which to place the knowledge he receives. The framework itself is a moral question, because the more facts are integrated, the more implications for man’s life and his relationships to other men arise.

The opposite attitude is to downscale the cognitive framework which destroys the ability for comprehensive understanding … a moral choice in itself.

Good and evil aren’t defined by society, Curt, just as the law of gravity or economics isn’t. “Morality is a subjective judgement about what someone does with that knowledge.” Exactly. Since to think and function you must fit knowledge into a mental framework, Curt, morality has EVERYTHING to do with what you consider evidence and what you accept and integrate into consciousness. As an extreme example: what Hitler and Mother Theresa accepted as truth were profoundly different!

And you can’t function with the idea that “society defines evil”. You know there are better and worse societies: some societies live in utter darkness, to believe any other way is to accept any “socially approved” actions as equally valid – which is a complete win for the propagation of evil.

Many scientists stand amazed at the result: a LOSS of respect for truth and science. But that is the natural result. If there’s no real good and evil (thus no God), there’s no reason to hold fast difficult truth over pleasurable falsity, and the race to the bottom, started by “redefining” evil contrary to God’s laws, is on.

That fact was a major failing (and a strength in some ways) of Mises “wertfrei” … his analysis is not value free, it chooses apriori logic over other methods of truth … note it contains an assumption that contradicts the “purely” empirical scientific worldview: that our minds are structured to understand and observe using logic. But Mises position was consistent. A position a lot of scientists hold is not: science relies on apriori presuppositional thinking. Mises was honest in admitting it. Many scientists are not honest in admitting they are making metaphysical claims about the nature of knowledge.

Jim, good and evil are redefined constantly, entirely dependent on the society and culture. Of course I can function with that idea, I am doing so right now. Always have, and so have you. The fact that you are so myopic as to think that your idea of good and evil are the only right ones for everyone else is merely the sin of pride.

Do you remember what you wrote to me when I wrote that I treated the people around me well because I wanted to be treated well? Your contemp for someone living by the “Golden Rule” was astounding.

I could not care less about your book. The more you talk about your book being right when all other books are wrong, the further you get from any basis for me to listen to you at all.

I asked you for a test for what you say is right in front of me. You give me platitudes and bald assertions, like the gods planted the dinosaur bones 6,000 years ago and then changed the rate of radioactive decay to “test our faith”. It is you who are telling me that I must believe the incredible. There is nothing “incredible” about nature, it’s all very mundane and natural. By definition. Pi always was 3.141592654…, even when people thought the gods ordained that it be 3.

The source of all this argument is very likely the vast scales of time involved, scales that elude human context. The idea of natural selection enabling big changes is simply foreign to minds locked into mere human terms of “years”.

Especially minds deadend by dogma, chained by hypocrisy, and so wrapped up in their own illusions of superiority to the rest of nature that they cannot contemplate their own irrelevance. “There has to be an afterlife, I’m too wonderful for death to be actual death!” Again, the sin of pride.

It would give me great pleasure if I actually believe you when you said, “one last thing”. The sin of pride won’t let you walk away, unless this very challenge goads you into doing so. Interesting experiment on my part, ne?

Having done so in a previous comment (regarding “A Constitution of Contradictory Rights”), let me again quote from E. O. Wilson’s “The Biological Basis of Morality” (The Atlantic Monthly, April 1998):

“In the empiricist view, ethics is conduct favored consistently enough throughout a society to be expressed as a code of principles. It reaches its precise form in each culture according to historical circumstance. The codes, whether adjudged good or evil by outsiders, play an important role in determining which cultures flourish and which decline. … The empiricist argument holds that if we explore the biological roots of moral behavior, and explain their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wise and enduring ethical consensus. The current expansion of scientific inquiry into the deeper processes of human thought makes this venture feasible.”

“[E]thical precepts…are more likely to be products of the brain and the culture. From the consilient perspective of the natural sciences, they are no more than principles of the social contract hardened into rules and dictates — behavioral codes that members of a society fervently wish others to follow and are themselves willing to accept for the common good. Precepts are the extreme on a scale of agreements that range from casual assent, to public sentiment, to law, to that part of the cannon considered sacred and unalterable. … What have been thought of as moral sentiments are now taken to mean moral instincts (as defined by the modern behavioral sciences), subject to judgment according to their consequences.”

“Now suppose that human propensities to cooperate or defect are heritable: some people are innately more cooperative, others less so. In this respect moral aptitude would simply be like almost all other mental traits studied to date. … To the heritability of moral aptitude add the abundant evidence of history that cooperative individuals generally survive longer and leave more offspring. Following that reasoning, in the course of evolutionary history genes predisposing people toward cooperative behavior would have come to predominate in the human population as a whole. Such a process repeated through thousands of generations inevitably gave rise to moral sentiments.”

The bottom line for me, Jim, is that I have faith in reason, empircal or otherwise, hoping that the free use thereof will eventually triumph over the evils that beset us, including and especially the greatest of all evils, the State, which continues to this day to subvert both religion and science to its antisocial and inhumane purposes.