Transcript
0:00 it does seem like we need something yeah that hold to hold us together that points to a reason to be around I don't really understand the argument for equal dignity absent the soul and that's part of what anchors my faith you know I am Catholic I'm a practicing Catholic through an evolutionary lens we're just pure materialist we somehow there was this big bang thing don't get me started
0:30 where that came from but through a process that looks kind of like the math game the game of Life a couple initial conditions gave rise to an emergent complexity that ultimately accidentally ended up with these conscious creatures and we are having this conversation and maybe we have free will maybe we don't what does that mean I don't know um as an if you're going to be like an alien Observer we are not equal creatures there's like no world in which
0:57 we have equality other other than in like a kind of linguistic tautology like well you're both humans therefore you're equal in your humanness so how do you think about like the liberal principle of equality and can it survive the death of God God I I feel like my morals personally have always been about equality and and
1:30 I've never ever believed in any kind of deity so that came naturally from me um I had this debate with a guy called Conor Tomlinson who was on the show and he's he's Christian and he was saying it just seems that these morals we have are too perfect they've almost been sculpted for us to be the way we are and to have a functioning community so for example equality and those kinds of things he's suggesting so God must have imbued us
1:55 with them and that's what the Bible teaches us but I said but that's exactly the the argument of the evolutionary theorists which is this took 300,000 years and millions and millions of years before that before we were even human but the last 300,000 years of different tribe Dynamics and countless countless generations of tribes that went wrong because they didn't have the rights morals that makes for a good Society so this was the inevitability of 300,000 years which is such a long time that
2:21 it's impossible for people to even imagine how long that is those who had that desire to create fairly equal societies prospered so it makes sense that genetically that was passed down to us we have an innate sense of unfairness which you see in children you see children at a very young age before they even know what God is
Summary
- The need for a unifying principle or reason for existence is highlighted.
- The speaker identifies as a practicing Catholic and questions the concept of equality without a soul.
- There is skepticism about the idea of inherent equality among humans from a materialist viewpoint.
- The debate contrasts religious beliefs with evolutionary theories regarding the origins of morality.
- One speaker argues that moral values have evolved over time through social dynamics and survival of societies that embraced fairness.
- The innate sense of fairness in humans, observable in children, suggests a biological basis for moral understanding.
- The conversation raises questions about the sustainability of liberal principles of equality in a secular context.