This week we see Christopher Hitchens try to answer the question of where moral values come from in a Darwinian model. Don’t ever forget, God loves you!!
“There might be someone who says that’s so, but it would not be I think discernible by anyone here that I for example who do believe that we have evolved by random mutation combined with natural selection for success in certain genes, believes that someone who is born blind or deaf should simply be left by the way side. There is no such corrobory[sic]...” D'Souza, Dinesh; Hitchens, Christopher, 2008, Does God Exist, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ_WGb8X3L8, Christopher Hitchens vs Dinesh D'Souza | God on Trial Debate
“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.” – G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw In America, 1922
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated…We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man…. hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871
“Early embryos that have no nervous system most certainly do not suffer. And if late-aborted embryos with nervous systems suffer – though all suffering is deplorable – it is not because they are human that they suffer. There is no general reason to suppose that human embryos at any age suffer more than cow or sheep embryos at the same developmental stage…Suffering is hard to measure, and the details might be disputed…The evolutionary point is very simple. The humanness of an embryo’s cells cannot confer upon it any absolute discontinuous moral status. It cannot, because of our evolutionary continuity with chimpanzees and, more distantly, with every species on the planet.” Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006
