The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #108205   Message #2261057
Posted By: Amos
12-Feb-08 - 10:52 PM
Thread Name: God still with me 2008
Subject: RE: God still with me 2008
No. We have to differentiate between "goodness" and survival. In the real world, the broadest measure of success is survival because that is what all organisms organize around -- bringing themselves in to the future as individuals, families, colonies, sub-species, species, and en masse.

However, on closer inspection, we survive, for example, at the expense of cows and fish and pigs, carrots and rhubarb. So there is a complex interacting matrix of collisisons of survival and not-survival going on.

Most organisms seem to strive for their own survival, and for reproduction and protection of their own offspring, and for their own herd, tribe, etc. They therefore have more affection for actions which aid those efforts, and deem them (if they have language with which to do so) "good".

But "good" in the abstract sense is a judgement value, and there is nothing inherently "good" about survival of one or another species, or all of them, or none of them. Except to the degree that life forms such opinions. The extreme example of this is the German army's slogan in WW II -- "Gott Mitt Uns", or "God is With Us". A judgement about what is good that most of the civilized world disagreed with. But it was a judgement of good from the perspective of those whose survival depended on that Army doing well.

Abstractly, good and bad are opinions which have no other basis.

A