My reply to mike wittmer and tom felten at Our Daily Journey with God.

My reply to mike wittmer and tom felten at Our Daily Journey with God.

Mr. tom felten sir, you quote-mined Darwin which means you chose only one paragraph which supports your idea that evolution is not a fact. If you read the rest of that chapter you would have noticed Darwin explained why the evolution of eyes is NOT absurd. Also, in the past 150 years there's been a tremendous amount of scientific progress in evolutionary biology. To depend on just a 19th century scientist is ignoring the discoveries of the 20th and 21st centuries. It wouldn't kill Christians to study evolution, preferably from books written by real 21st century scientists (who don't invoke magic to solve scientific problems). I recommend Why Evolution is True by the University of Chicago biology professor Jerry Coyne, published in 2009 instead of 1859.

mike wittmer wrote "How does natural selection ground morality and thought?"

Your question is a lot like asking "How does gravity ground morality and thought?"

Natural selection is just one of the mechanisms of evolution. It works and biologists know it works. Natural selection doesn't say anything about morality or anything else. It's just a description of a natural process which works a lot like the artificial selection of cows. But instead of the farmer selecting which cow is allowed to reproduce because it has qualities the farmer likes, natural selection means nature does the selecting. That means if a human ancestor can run fast enough or has the brain size required to successfully capture a meal, that ancestor lived long and had more children. His favorable advantages were more likely to spread throughout the population. That's how our ancestors went from ancient hairy ape to modern hairless ape (also known as people).

This all may seem impossible and/or repulsive to you Christians but the DNA evidence doesn't lie. Christians accept the results of paternity testing in humans. They should know the exact same method is used to accurately determine evolutionary relationships. That's why biologists are 100% certain we evolved from the same ancient apes that modern chimps evolved from. Biologists can't deny what they can see with their own eyes and that's why the Christian biologist Francis Collins completely accepts our evolutionary relationship with chimps. He can't say he denies what he's certain is true.

Christian biologists are rare, but they exist. And virtually all of them love evolution. I will never understand why they ignore the religious implications, but at least they don't deny reality.

To get back to your question, natural processes say nothing about morality. However biologists have noticed that even our closest non-human relatives, the chimps, are altruistic. Perhaps this means it's in the best interest of a species to cooperate with each other, so there may or may not be evolutionary reasons for being civilized. In any case, modern humans have the brains to figure out what's right and what's wrong without depending on ancient holy books (which I noticed are full of violence and genocide so thank goodness I don't get my moral values from the Bible.)