CiCi takes the view that there is no "ultimate" or "universal" meaning in the world, but that the creation of meaning in homo sapiens is part of our conscious existence and therefore nonetheless valid. Prof. Gleiser argues that rarity and morality provide us with a sense of purpose. Peter Blair argues that meaning, for a Christian, flows from God. How do these different views of meaning work themselves out in your lives and communities? How do you find purpose?

If you have a different source of meaning than the ones listed above, what is it, and how does it affect your life?

I think that the points made thus far are all very interesting, but most are inherently flawed in one respect. They seem assume that morality must come from an outside source and that it is only a fact of our self awareness that we even have morality.

Would a biological explanation of morality change this view?

Example: The Golden Rule: When a bat is sick, other bats provide food for the sick and that bat provides food for other sick bats when it is healthy. Bats that have never been sick, care for other bats. Pack animals such wolves protect each other and have social bonds which reinforce their living together. The fact that they take care of each other which is a very adaptive trait. Other solitary animals do not display these behaviors, because it does not help them and their species or they simply never adapted it.

Would we say that animals who avoid confrontation are more moral than those who do not? This seems doubtful because we have this idea that we have more volition in our decisions than other animals due to our large prefrontal cortices (or is it cortexes?). I think that intuition would be shared by most. The fact that we have this ability greatly increases our reproductive fitness as a species. Most of the decisions that are considered to be moral by most such as not murdering, not molesting, protecting your friends, etc have obvious biological implications in terms of our physical health, psychological health, and survival. Our ability to chose morality is just as adaptive such as an extreme situation like war where one might have kill someone else in order for you to survive.

Just because religions may have been the first to canonize morality, does not mean that they (or the deity they believe in) came up with morality. It may just be an inherent characteristic of our species more so than it appears in others.

Nas- I agree with you that morality may be innate or internal to the human species. A lot of Christian thinkers would share that view, arguing that God placed into mankind a moral instinct through evolution or some other process. But the purely biological explanation doesn't get you anywhere because it commits the naturalistic fallacy, confusing "is" and "ought." That is to say, we may get an explanation of the origin of morality and a description of why people tend to behave morally from evolution, but we don't get any normative principles from it. Just because we have evolved to behave in certain ways, doesn't mean we ought to behave in those ways. Evolution can only tell us how it is that we are moral creatures, it can never tell us why we should behave morally, something any solid account of morality must do.

CiCi- Of course you can be "nice" if there are no absolute truths. I just don't see why you bother to. If you believe in nihilism it is a species of irrationality to behave morally, because your behavior is in logical contradiction with your beliefs. I think you have to admit that it is extremely odd that a throughly amoral and arational process would finish by producing moral and rational beings. It would be like putting in all the materials to bake a cake but when you removed it from the oven it was a steak. The process and its conclusion are totally incongruous, which to me hints that there might be some moral or intellectual mind behind it.

As for meaning, either it exists or it doesn't- this idea of creating our own meaning to me makes no sense. Meaning is necessarily ultimate or else it is no longer meaning. My point simply was that if the universe was truly objectively devoid of meaning we would not know that. If you have lived in a dark room your whole life and never seen light, you would not know you room was dark. If we live in a meaningless universe, we would never know it was meaningless. We know by contrast. When everything is always one way, we do not even to reflect upon or identity that norm.

Peter-

Firstly, you have no idea how intriguing it is to me to see Christians actually admit that evolution does not conflict with an idea of God. I had never seen that until I saw Ian H. speak at the presentation a few weeks ago. Even though I question the assertion of that existence myself, I find your views and general non-combative attitude to be a much more credible outlook.

However, I have to disagree at a fundamental basis. It seems to me that you are attempting to impose some sort of abstract order on this concept of morality. I suppose I would answer your penetrating questions with one more... Why? Why must we have normative principles? Why do you need a reason that people must act in any certain way if it is an inborn biological imperative? It seems to me that that would be the logical base case. Also, the evolutionary perspective does give a compelling reason why we should, it is the same reason for why it developed in the first place. The continuation of our species.

Perhaps our confusion is some difference in the basic definition of morality.