Earth. — TimeLine

Good! :D

Belief is for religious Forums, this is Philosophy.

Do you really believe that discussions of value have no place in philosophy? — T Clark

Obviously yes. But the claim that a thing has its own build in judgement is absurd.

I can't tell whether your objection is that "life is not good' or that 'life in itself is good' is poorly stated.

If you would, please clarify your view. — Bitter Crank

I've made the point more than once already.
Value judgements require a valuer. Nothing has inherent value.

Are you saying that just because you don't believe life is good it isn't? Or are you saying that you don't believe your life is good. — T Clark

Please refer to posts I have already made.
If you want to know if I think life is good or bad; it depends on what sort of criteria you want to bring to the table. Do you mean all life, my life, the lives of others? On earth, elsewhere?

Though, I agree with the sentiment that a two parent household, with loving parents is the optimal arrangement for raising children, there should be no children to raise in the first place. No one needs to be given the problems of life in order to carry out X reason (i.e. achievement, relationships, learning, etc. etc.). — schopenhauer1

There is no definitive proof considering the question of axiology as there is a balance between the benefits and the harms of procreation and no one can assess the benefits because the experience is personal. It may be assumed that it is for that reason 'harms' is the logical result, but given our capacity for autonomy and our ability to transcend the injunctions of others, we should be permitted by making that choice ourselves. You underestimate our cognitive capacity, our ability to become conscious of and reject blind conformity.

Most of my difficulties were a result of bad parenting; the problem is not that they had me (I am not the problem); the problem is them being bad parents. The risk could have been that I turned into a bad parent, and produced another, and another until you have a tumour of bad people growing in an otherwise healthy body. Cut out the bad parenting and you will have a good enough society and so it is bad parents that should not be allowed to have children, not that children should completely cease to exist.

It should be anti-bad-parentalism. Also, it is not your place to tell people what they may or may not be able to tolerate, our thresholds are different. I may have been through some pretty shitty circumstances, but I am inherently a happy person and embrace my vulnerabilities openly. I love people and I love being loving. Most people would not tolerate what I can rather easily.

The circular reasoning that without any individuals being born, there are no individuals experiencing growth breaks down in the broken logic of its own circularity. — schopenhauer1

How?

Life is an instrumental affair of survival, comfort and boredom regulation via the milieu of a linguistic-cultural setting, repeated unto death. We survive through economic/institutional means, we seek comfort via our institutional/encultured habits, we seek entertainment due to our restless, linguistically-based, culturally constructed, minds. — schopenhauer1

This is true, but again, you are not equating the fundamental aspect to our very existence; love. Again, love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence because we are able to identify external objects that enables feeling and makes experience intelligible. It is the human in humanity. Sure, we have all of what you say above, I can eat, drink, survive etc., but like the example of those children in the orphanage or even this, without love, our ability to correctly articulate and interpret the world around us makes us nothing but a species. Like aesthetics and art, our emotions and compassion define us and enable us to transcend those physiological states so that we experience.

There is no ending it except through death. As stated earlier- there is the non-existence before birth, there is death. Why the in between? — schopenhauer1

There is a 'we' here that you seem to miss. When one experiences love, compassion, empathy they transcend the ego, the 'I' and begin to feel and understand through moral consciousness the external world and the importance of others, of nature and animals. If I love my child and likewise my child loves me, if I die, does that love cease? The continuity is through one another and so it is during our time together that we improve, both in ourselves and through one another. The static fatalism that you offer is not resolving the problems you are articulating as justifications for your argument.

I find myself wanting to hug people and tell them things will be ok. — T Clark

I as well am late to the thread but it is moving fast for a day old. When I find myself wanting to do what you are suggesting you want to do, I do it. It may be dismissed or taken for granted OR it might just be what that person needed and it was within me to give. (L)

Historical evidence wont tell you how to interpret Nietzsche's philosopy. A reading of those philosophers and psychologists(Dennett, Adorno, Rorty, Freud, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze, etc) who say they have been deeply influenced by him will tell you whether they see the impilcations of his work in any way shape or form as fascist, rather than the polar opposite.
The key here is to understand Nietzsche's use of words like power and ubermensch not in the most obvious conventional sense, which is apparently how youre understanding them Not as weapons that individuals wield against others, but as self-overcoming. Power isn't a possession or attribute, its a vehicle of self-transformation and self-negation.
IT completely idssolvees the impetus behind fascistic movements.
Do you think Freudian psychoanalysis culminates in fascism? Because Freud said that Nietzsche's ideas were so uncannily close to his own that he had to stop reading him in order not to plagiarize him.
This Vox piece nicely summarizes my argument:
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/16140846/nietzsche-richard-spencer-alt-right-nazism

Do you think Freudian psychoanalysis culminates in fascism? — Joshs

No, but Freud too was a scientific materialist. I studied his essays as an undergraduate, they are of course brilliant and very profound in their own way, but there’s a reason that Jung abandoned Freud’s world-view, even while respecting his methodology.

Do you really believe that discussions of value have no place in philosophy?
— T Clark

Obviously yes. But the claim that a thing has its own build in judgement is absurd. — charleton

I thought belief was for religious Forums?

That is a major assignment in a University course on philosophy or intellectual history. Here's a summary by a philosophical theologian, David Bentley Hart: — Wayfarer

Hey Wayfarer, where is that David Bentley Hart quotation you gave from? I would be interested to read more. Thanks

Sorry, should have provided the attribution, it's from here.

The key here is to understand Nietzsche's use of words like power and ubermensch not in the most obvious conventional sense, which is apparently how youre understanding them Not as weapons that individuals wield against others, but as self-overcoming. Power isn't a possession or attribute, its a vehicle of self-transformation and self-negation. — Joshs

The problem with that is that Nietzsche denied the possibility of a reality beyond the self. I read his analysis of Buddhism, which he professed to admire, but completely misunderstood. He seized on the key Buddhist teachings of Nirvāṇa and śūnyatā to claim that the Buddha's teaching was aimed at annihilation, the cessation of all existence. He said that Buddhism was 'the cry of an exhausted civilization'. And yet he claimed to admire it, because he felt that its honest embrace of non-existence was an acknowledgement of the reality which the sentimental Christians couldn't bring themselves to face. But the problem is, that he was mistaken (if not alone in his mistake, as many Europeans of his day made the same interpretive errors, which is described in The The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, Roger-Pol Droit. It's true that some schools of Buddhism are fiercely anti-philosophical also. 'If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!', goes a Rinzai Zen aphorism. Zen doesn't put up with pious illusions and sacred cows. But the transcendental reality of the Buddha is emphatically not 'nothingness' or 'non-existence'. What it is, is something that can only be 'found by doing', by 'realising the Way', which is nothing like what Nietzsche understood.)

So - transformation into what? Negation, for what? There is nothing to be transformed into. It mimics some of the terminology of philosophy but turns it against itself. Nietzsche declared himself an 'anti-philosopher' and ought to be taken at his word.

They would be accepting that others, and even themselves, have mystical experiences. What they would deny is that those experiences yield knowledge. — Agustino

The mystic, on the other hand, will claim certainty and knowledge as a result of those experiences. — Agustino

I agree that mystical experiences do not yield knowledge in any 'ordinary' discursive sense; and that goes for works of revelation also. But I would argue that both mystical experiences and works of revelation may yield knowledge in the "Biblical' sense of familiarity. And I would say this kind of knowledge is affective; we are affected by it, and this affection is the motivator of faith. I mean who would have faith in something they felt nothing for?

I am not convinced that the great mystics believed that their writings presented knowledge in any ordinary discursive sense.

Is rather awkward. — TimeLine

I don't know what you're talking about. I interpreted your post one way, asked if my interpretation was correct, and it seemed it was, only now I guess it's not....

I could say that celibacy is dogmatic and assigns a negative value to perhaps the most common, basic, and accepted acts of human existence - sex — TimeLine

No it doesn't. You're describing anti-sex-having, let's call it, not celibacy. Celibacy doesn't declare that sex is immoral, it merely designates that a person has chosen to refrain from it. Catholic priests are celibate, for example, but they don't think sex is immoral.

Please don't use words like 'doubtless' when you are uncertain. You are surely better than that. — TimeLine

An overly pedantic and literalistic comment. My use of the word was quite appropriate.

People should not be having children for the wrong reasons. It does not mean that people should not be having children. So, what are the wrong reasons? And if they are wrong and if we can articulate why it is wrong, than our attempt should be to make it right. So, how can we make it right? If everyone stopped giving birth, that would not resolve the issue. Giving birth for the right reasons, which would be only when two loving people actively choose and decisively commit themselves to raising the child. — TimeLine

I agree. But you beg the question at the end. Why ought two loving people choose to have children?

Are you sure about that? — TimeLine

Yes.

Do you think that sexual intercourse' only objective is procreation and if so, would your complete abstinence therefore be anti-natalist? — TimeLine

It is from a biological perspective or from certain metaphysical perspectives I suppose. Abstinence from sex isn't antinatalism, unless one qualifies it as "practical antinatalism" perhaps. I have done so in the past but find the term mostly useless now. Antinatalism is a theoretical position.

But I would argue that both mystical experiences and works of revelation may yield knowledge in the "Biblical' sense of familiarity. — Janus

I don't follow exactly what you mean here.

And I would say this kind of knowledge is affective; we are affected by it, and this affection is the motivator of faith. I mean who would have faith in something they felt nothing for? — Janus

Yes, I agree that mystical experiences are affective, and sentiment grounds faith - a religious skeptic would agree to that. But I think they'd refuse to agree that this constitutes any kind of knowledge whatsoever, the same way they refuse philosophy's ability to arrive at metaphysical knowledge. So here, for example, Montaigne argues against philosophy and dialectical disputation:

And there was another man who rightly advised the Emperor Theodosius that debates never settled schisms in the Church but rather awakened heresies and put life into them; therefore he should flee all contentiousness and all dialectical disputations, committing himself to the bare prescriptions and formulas of the Faith established of old.

Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays (p. 360). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

(Philosophy, says St Chrysostom, has long been banished from the School of Divinity as a useless servant judged unworthy of glimpsing, even from the doorway when simply passing by, the sanctuary of the holy treasures of sacred doctrine);

Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays (p. 361). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Here are a few passages on right religion that I have underlined in my Kindle. I'd provide more comments but I'm short on time now. So I think that we're dealing with a gradation from mystic to religious skeptic, with people falling somewhere in-between generally.

Having looked through these, I see that at some points even Montaigne allows for some mystical insight (see the underlined and bolded bits at the end).

A bishop has testified in writing that there is, at the other end of the world, an island which the Ancients called Dioscorides, fertile and favoured with all sorts of fruits and trees and a healthy air; the inhabitants are Christian, having Churches and altars which are adorned with no other images but crosses; they scrupulously observe feast-days and fasts, pay their tithes meticulously and are so chaste that no man ever lies with more than one woman for the whole of his life; meanwhile, so happy with their lot that, in the middle of the ocean, they know nothing about ships, and so simple that they do not understand a single word of the religion which they so meticulously observe – something only unbelievable to those who do not know that pagans, devout worshippers of idols, know nothing about their gods apart from their statues and their names.

Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays (pp. 360-361). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[A] The real field and subject of deception are things unknown: firstly because their very strangeness lends them credence; second, because they cannot be exposed to our usual order of argument, so stripping us of the means of fighting them. [C]

Plato says that this explains why it is easier to satisfy people when talking of the nature of the gods than of the nature of men: the ignorance of the hearers provides such hidden matters with a firm broad course for them to canter along in freedom.

And so it turns out that nothing is so firmly believed as whatever we know least about, and that no persons are more sure of themselves than those who tell us tall stories, such as alchemists and those who make prognostications: judicial astrologers, chiromancers, doctors and ‘id genus omne’ [all that tribe].

To which I would add if I dared that crowd of everyday chroniclers and interpreters of God’s purposes who claim to discover the causes of everything that occurs and to read the unknowable purposes of God by scanning the secrets of His will; the continual changes and clash of events drive them from corner to corner and from East to West, but they still go on chasing the tennis-ball and sketching black and white with the same crayon.

In one Indian tribe they have a laudable custom: when they are worsted in a skirmish or battle they publicly beseech the Sun their god for pardon for having done wrong, attributing their success or failure to the divine mind, to which they submit their own judgement and discourse. [A] For a Christian it suffices to believe that all things come from God, to accept them with an acknowledgement of His holy unsearchable wisdom and so to take them in good part, under whatever guise they are sent to him.

What I consider wrong is our usual practice of trying to support and confirm our religion by the success or happy outcome of our undertakings. Our belief has enough other foundations without seeking sanction from events: people who have grown accustomed to such plausible arguments well-suited to their taste are in danger of having their faith shaken when the turn comes for events to prove hostile and unfavourable.

As in the religious wars which we are now fighting, after those who had prevailed at the battle of La Rochelabeille had had a great feast-day over the outcome, exploiting their good fortune as a sure sign of God’s approval for their faction, they then had to justify their misfortunes at Moncontour and Jarnac as being Fatherly scourges and chastisements: 3 they would soon have made the people realize (if they did not have them under their thumb) that that is getting two kinds of meal from the same bag and blowing hot and cold with the same breath. It would be better to explain to the people the real foundations of truth.

Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays (pp. 242-243). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

It may be plausibly asserted that [C] there is an infant-school ignorance which precedes knowledge and another doctoral ignorance which comes after it, an ignorance made and engendered by knowledge just as it unmade and slaughtered the first kind.

Good Christians are made from simple minds, incurious and unlearned, which out of reverence and obedience have simple faith and remain within prescribed doctrine. It is in minds of middling vigour and middling capacity that are born erroneous opinions, for they follow the apparent truth of their first impressions and do have a case for interpreting as simplicity and animal-stupidity the sight of people like us who stick to the old ways, fixing on us who are not instructed in such matters by study.

Great minds are more settled and see things more clearly: they form another category of good believers; by long and reverent research they penetrate through to a deeper, darker light of Scripture and know the sacred and mysterious secret of our ecclesiastical polity. That is why we can see some of them arrive at the highest level via the second, with wondrous fruit and comfort, reaching as it were the ultimate bounds of Christian understanding and rejoicing in their victory with alleviation of sorrow, acts of thanksgiving, reformed behaviour and great modesty.

I do not intend to place in that rank those other men who, to rid themselves of the suspicion of their past errors and to reassure us about themselves, become extremists, men lacking all discretion and unjust in the way they uphold our cause, besmirching it with innumerable reprehensible acts of violence.

Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays (pp. 349-350). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

The first charge made against the book is that Christians do themselves wrong by wishing to support their belief with human reasons: belief is grasped only by faith and by private inspiration from God’s grace. A pious zeal may be seen behind this objection; so any assay at satisfying those who put it forward must be made with gentleness and respect. It is really a task for a man versed in Theology rather than for me, who know nothing about it.

Nevertheless, this is my verdict: in a matter so holy, so sublime, so far surpassing Man’s intellect as is that Truth by which it has pleased God in his goodness9 to enlighten us, we can only grasp that Truth and lodge it within us if God favours us with the privilege of further help, beyond the natural order.

I do not believe, then, that purely human means have the capacity to do this; if they had, many choice and excellent souls in ancient times – souls abundantly furnished with natural faculties – would not have failed to reach such knowledge by discursive reasoning. Only faith can embrace, with a lively certainty, the high mysteries of our religion.

But that is not to imply that it is other than a most fair and praiseworthy undertaking to devote to the service of our faith those natural, human tools which God has granted us. It is not to be doubted that it is the most honourable use that we could ever put them to and that there is no task, no design, more worthy of a Christian than to aim, by assiduous reflection, at beautifying, developing and clarifying the truth of his beliefs. We are not content merely to serve God with our spirits and our souls: we owe him more than that, doing him reverence with our bodies; we honour him with our very members, our actions and with things external. In the same way we must accompany our faith with all the reason that lies within us – but always with the reservation that we never reckon that faith depends upon ourselves or that our efforts and our conjectures can ever themselves attain to a knowledge so supernatural, so divine.

Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays (pp. 491-492). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

I am not convinced that the great mystics believed that their writings presented knowledge in any ordinary discursive sense. — Janus

No, but many believed that the deliverances of mystical experiences were affective insights or intuitions that could be conveyed to others through means other than faith (like meditation, prayer, asceticism, etc.)

But the transcendental reality of the Buddha is emphatically not 'nothingness' or 'non-existence'. — Wayfarer

True. But we might say that it looks like nothingness from the perspective of someone still shackled to samsara, a "relative nothingness" that Kant and Schopenhauer speak about.

Very much so. Buddhism is fundamentally dialectical in its approach, meaning there are different perspectives depending on the state of development of the aspirant. That is expressed in the koan (which was made a song) ‘first, there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is’. That refers to stages of development - first, naive realism, the world simply is at appears; then the ‘realisation of emptiness’ - the insight nothing has intrinsic reality; and finally a new-found sense of the fact that mountains really are mountains, but seen from a viewpoint which understands emptiness.

That is one reason why Wittgenstein is sometimes compared with Zen - his saying that his words are like a ladder, which can be discarded after being climbed. Nihilism is discarding it, without climbing it. ;-)

I know that, I do not have to believe it.

Belief is for religious Forums, this is Philosophy. — charleton

Ha! As if it were you who gets to decide.

Believe what you will. But mention it and I'll unpack it.
Your choice.
Alternatively you could embrace rationalism and stop with the myth making.

Obviously yes. But the claim that a thing has its own build in judgement is absurd. — charleton

I'm not sure I understand. Is that what you think I said? Is it what I said? Let me think....I'll say it again differently - When you get to the bottom, all philosophy is about is what I like and what I don't. What I care about and what I don't.

Reminds me of the beginning of this video.

I as well am late to the thread but it is moving fast for a day old. When I find myself wanting to do what you are suggesting you want to do, I do it. It may be dismissed or taken for granted OR it might just be what that person needed and it was within me to give. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Yes. Your affinity for hugs is well established. Alas, I cannot hug the people on this forum. Also, I'm not sure any would appreciate it or take it in the spirit with which it would be given.

If you don't know what you are talking about then I suggest you look back and reacquaint yourself with the substance of the discussion.

I dont see any philosophical system as divorced from the rest of culture. In fact, I don't view any cultural product of any era, be it science, religion, political formations, literature, art or music, as understandable outside of its inseparable interrelatedness with respect to other aspects of culture.
So my view of Buddhism is that the insights of a historical period that contains the original writings of various Buddhist philosophers cannot be understood outside of their expression as the political, artistic and scientific structures of the period. Westerners for the past 200 years or so have taken bits of Buddhism and transformed them into an amalgam that really has much more to do with Western philosophical preoccupations than it does with how Buddhists thought a thousand years ago.
I don't see Westerners rushing to embrace other aspects of the historical cultures that produced Buddhist thought,such as their political organization, their social class systems , their systems of punishment and law, etc, their technologies and sciences. But these are reveal much about the significance of Buddhism on the self-understanding and functioning of those societies.
So Nietzsche may very well have misread Buddhist thought, but the only western interpreters of Buddhism I identify with are those who don't romanticize Buddhism by seeing it as something that somehow comes after western philosophy rather than as a variant of pre judeo -Christian-Muslim thinking that, via reinterpretation, can be creatively interwoven with recent western philosophies.

As far as Nietzsche not seeing anything beyond the self, keep in mind that the self he understood was one that was really a community of conflicting drives, or as Dennett would say, a collection of memes rather than a self-knowing ego. I don't like the meme concept , but it is an advance over older ideas of a self-knowing autonomous subject.
Darwin and Nietzsche ushered us into a way of looking at humans as adaptive creatures whose truths are not to be found in the clouds but in our messy evolving interactions in the world.

If the Buddhist strains you subscribe to speak of transcending the self, do they also believe one can transcend desire? Because that would be an incoherent notion. Desire is just another way to talk about situatedness, what Heidegger called being in the world,
Contrast, texture, qualitative meaning is the minimal condition of there being any kind of world at all.

Reminds me of the beginning of this video. — Thorongil

Spot on. The 'way of negation' is such an important thing to understand. 'He that knows it, knows it not'.

Darwin and Nietzsche ushered us into a way of looking at humans as adaptive creatures whose truths are not to be found in the clouds but in our messy evolving interactions in the world. — Joshs

But if we really aren’t simply and only ‘products of biology’ then it’s not a case of them ‘ushering’ us into anything other than - well, here. ‘Welcome to post-modernity! Nothing means anything, but you can make it mean anything you like, including “nothing”!' So that is what is being discussed here.

I think Darwin (like Nietzsche) is vastly over-rated in today's culture. His theory is a scientific one, accounting for the origin of species, but nowadays it occupies the vacuum left by the collapse of traditional culture. And then it becomes associated with all kinds of beliefs, or anti-beliefs, which mirror the very things that have been rejected. So where the Biblical tradition was traditionally the rationale for beliefs about the nature of the human, now evolutionary biology fills that space. But the problem is, something really crucial has been lost in translation, so to speak. H. sapiens is not simply another species, but a language-using, technology-building, meaning-seeking, rationally intelligent being - and to interpret that in purely Darwinian terms becomes inevitably reductionist. You mentioned Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos - that is exactly what it is about.

So my view of Buddhism is that the insights of a historical period that contains the original writings of various Buddhist philosophers cannot be understood outside of their expression as the political, artistic and scientific structures of the period. — Joshs

In other words, as the product of culture and society, culturally and socially conditioned. And that is quite in line with the attitude of cultural relativism, that religious philosophies (like anything) can only be the product of culture and society, but point to no inherent truth. But at the basis of Buddhism is the assertion of ‘an unconditioned, an unmade, an un-fabricated’. And only one of those two analyses can be right.

I agree that Buddhism is often romanticised and Anglicized in Western culture, and I will even acknowledge that I am probably the kind of person who is prone to that. But even so, I still believe it to be a (or even the) source of transcendent truth.

Transcendent truth would seem to be a wonderful thing. We think what we want is the solidity of a truth that won't turn out to be illusion. But is it eternal truth we really want, or is it a certain kind of truth? Heres what I mean. Let's take a hypothetical fundamentalist belief system that posits an elegant and transdendent order to things. In this order, Darwin is out and each species is created by a deity separately. There really is good and evil in the world, determined by specific universal moral truths that depict humans as being possessed by good or evil spirits.
Let's say for the sake of argument that this is a true belief system. How else can we characterize it besides the fact that it is true? Well, it is also arbitrary. As a guide for the living of our lives, and a guide for making sense of the intentions and behaviors of other people, this explanatory system will give us no choice but to see evil in myriad behaviors of those around us that doesn't fit into the correct one of the black and white boxes we must place them into.
I think there is real truth in all belief systems I have studied. They all offer explanatory systems for people, ways of making sense of each other that mean to improve on what went before.
But I see a progress in the successive belief systems ( science is one of these) that mark cultural history.
The progress I see isn't toward systems that are more
true, except in the sense that over time , we do a better and better job of seeing the relational processes within the world, and especially the relationships of human beings, as being more intimately understandable.
I dont care how transcendent a truth is supposed to be, I want a way to understand the other guy that is insightful enough that I don't need to resort to judging them as arbitrary , and doesn't force me to condemn their actions as evil, pathological, inappropriate.
Do Nietzsche and Darwin help us do this? Well, the psychologies they spawn don't force people into judgemenal conformist norms as did the priests, rabbis and ministers who used to be the source of professional advice for living.
But Darwin, Freud and Nietzsche( and Dennett and his ilk), fall well short of grasping the internal continuity of mental experience. Their forms of adaptationism are themselves somewhat arbitrary, positing forces of conditioning, of external and internal pushes and pulls driving us here and there.
There are more powerful ways of making sense of behavior than adaptationism, but one first has to pass through that era of thought in order to get there.
The notion of continuous innovation and creativity is a key element of what I see as the most enlightening directions today, and that's hard for me to reconcile with any idea of a transcsndent and eternal source of being. Even if that divine source is a Hegel-like source of evolutionary becoming, it's still a black box and as such is arbitrary. Enlightenment and purity just don't make good bedfellows.

Let's take a hypothetical fundamentalist belief system that posits an elegant and transdendent order to things. — Joshs

You would take it to be fundamentalist. I perfectly understand how the glaring shortcomings of Western religiosity have inoculated millions against anything spiritual. But it might turn out that transcendent truth is simply something which is truly good, which is not simply a matter of opinion or social consensus. You will find, if you scan popular Western culture, that this is considered an impossibility.

Science is not a belief system, it's a method. For that reason, the 'scientific world view' is an oxymoron, because it is precisely where science is treated a religion, albeit without the commitment to fundamental ethics which is part of religion. That's another aspect of the malaise of modern 'culture' (so called).

I think Darwin (like Nietzsche) is vastly over-rated in today's culture. His theory is a scientific one, accounting for the origin of species, but nowadays it occupies the vacuum left by the collapse of traditional culture.
...
So where the Biblical tradition was traditionally the rationale for beliefs about the nature of the human, now evolutionary biology fills that space. — Wayfarer

IF the collapse of traditional culture created a vacuum that sucked in evolution to fill the god-shaped empty space, questions should be asked about why traditional culture failed rather than blaming evolution for getting sucked in.

And evolution certainly accounts for a big hunk of what we can be and what we are. True enough, though, evolution does facilitate the manufacture of sometimes bogus theories. Someone will note that some disorders (or 'features') are inherited and they will explain it by claiming [whatever it was] gave people an evolutionary advantage. It might, or it might not. Genes get inherited all the time which have zero value in reproductive success, like genes that cause familial alzheimer disease or a high susceptibility to breast cancer. Claiming these had survival value is kind of stupid.

Darwin didn't know anything about genetics. Gregory Mendel's research into feature inheritance in plants wasn't available to Darwin (or hardly anyone else at the time), and many deeper discoveries about genetics were a century into the future.

Evolution should not lead us to think of ourselves as soulless creatures of deterministic processes. Our most human features were created and fielded in simpler form in other animals, from which we evolved, or with whom we evolved in tandem, over a long period of time. So we find in dogs, for example, a crude sense of justice. In laboratory situations (where several dogs can see each other during the experiments), it has been found that a dog will stop cooperating, if it sees that the other dogs have received a reward and it has not. INTOLERABLE. The dogs don't care about the quality of the reward, just that they receive something.

Primates, on the other hand, judge rewards by quality. Primates will stop cooperating with researchers if they see that other apes are receiving apple and orange pieces for rewards while it is receiving pieces of cucumber and turnip. NOT FAIR.

The capacity to make judgements of this sort was evolved before we came along. I think of this as expanding what makes us unique, rather than shrinking what makes us unique. Similarly, many animals bond with their offspring in exactly the same way we do. Hormones are released during labor that are calming and pain reducing, while at the same time oxytocin is released to help the bonding occur. When the mother finally pops out the newborn, she is physically ready to respond to the baby/babies.

That we employ animalistic mechanisms at various stages of life doesn't take anything away from our finer features, like debating philosophical questions on line.