Can We Be Good Without God?

One word and one phrase need clarification in this question. "Good" and "without God".

I want to look at the phrase "without God". My first clarifying question would be "do you mean 'without God's existence' or 'without believing in God'?" The answer to this question will determine how my unasked question about the meaning of "good" will be answered.

If the atheist answers "without God's existence," then it is quite easy. The answer is "yes" and "no"- both meaning the same thing and being just as valid as the other. Since atheists must base their morals on sociocultural contract theory, "good" (which is a moral term) has no objective, intercultural definition. So, one person in one culture may answer the question "yes" (basing his answer on the "goodness" of general behavior), and another person in another culture may answer the question "no" (same basis). If God does not actually exist, this answer does not change even if someone believes that He exists.

Naturalism and Cultural Isms

This is going to build a bit more on my previous post "Naturalism and Human Equality". Naturalism demands that all living entities be ascribed equal value.

This includes bugs and plants. Why should we ascribe greater value to humans? Why not whales, because of their size, or certain trees, because of their long life-spans? If evolution is to be used as a guide, then we must conclude that survivability is the ultimate ascription for value. We could look at survivability of an individual or of an entire species, and we still would not conclude that humans are on top, though.

Useful or Useless Evolutionary Terms?

I want to look at a couple terms that have been added to the evolutionary vocabulary, but are hotly contested:

Microevolution- evolutionary changes that result in differences within a species or genus.

Macroevolution- series of microevolutionary changes that result in a new genus, family, order, etc...

The other day, a naturalist claimed that no such distinction is necessary. The argument is that there is a long string of microevolutionary changes from species to species, from genus to genus, family to family, etc...; macroevolutionary changes are a series of microevolutionary changes that result in a new species, genus, family, etc...; thus macroevolutionary changes are really the same as microevolutionary changes over time. Since they are ultimately the same, there is no need to distinguish between the two terms. This person further claimed that even if they allowed the distinction in terms, the fact that small changes over time is undisputed, means that many changes over time is proven; microevolution is undisputed, therefore a lot of microevolution (macroevolution) is proven.