Resolved: All but the nihilist shares an operative form of faith.

Pro says, "I contend that all but the nihilist shares faith. Faith in the value of individual human life and dignity flows from philosophy or is accepted as self-evident. Humanities' common faith ..." and "... the type of faith I am describing guides the way we live. Faith in a higher power (i.e. God) or faith in a higher principle ("we hold these truths to be self-evident…") are operative. Indeed, these types of higher faith, if you will, guide much of our lives." Pro thus began by contending that personal morality derives from a leap of faith. Pro claimed that no matter how derived, everyone ends at he same place, putting paramount value on human life. Pro's claim that everyone leaps to the same morality is false. People do not uniformly place the highest value on human life. They will sacrifice themselves for personal or group causes, and they will take great risks to protect their societies. To what degree they value life and for what ends varies greatly. What we observe is not a leap to a common morality, but a gradual evolution towards it. Human sacrifice is gone; slavery has been well purged; and authoritarian rule is at least in decline. It has all happened by increments, not leaps. A leap of faith can go in any direction, but theists are generally moving towards the consensus of social evolution. The direction is determined by human instincts, not revelation. We see different types of moral behavior in other species. By "moral behavior" in that context, I mean "rules that describe the way they live," which is what Pro sought. Animal behavior parallels human behavior for a number of social species, and we may assume it was instinct, not leaps of faith, that got them their rules. For humans as well, the basic patterns of behavior are determined by instinct. The details of the moral rules evolve with society. Pro supposes that social evolution did not occur in pre-history, and that its not occurring in prehistory undermines the case that it occurs at all. Because we only know things in prehistory that are deduced from bones and artefacts, we cannot say much about how social evolution occurred. Pro's claim it did not occur is there for unsupported by hard evidence. We do know that a great deal of social evolution has occurred in historical times, because we have observed it. I cited a number of examples, like Christianity reversing its position on slavery from slavery being immoral to its being moral. The fact that social evolution has occurred defeats any argument that it could not have occurred. The physiology of creatures only evolves in response to environmental pressure. Horseshoe crabs have not evolved in 300 million years because nothing in their limited environment changed enough to change them. If humans lived in small tribes in pre-history, then there would be no need for their morality to change. Whatever rules they developed would continue to operate adequately to cope with their static social environment. We can image that moral rules might be challenged by environmental change, particularly as humans migrated to different terrain and climates. However, social evolution in prehistory is speculative. The rise of civilizations around 10,000 years ago certainly put stress on the rules for living that sufficed for wandering independent small tribes. No society made a leap to new set of rules, rather many things were tried, and slowly some rules emerged as sound and enduring. Others have continued to evolve to cope with new possibilities and new social challenges posed by the size of the population and the technologically-developed tools for coping. Pro objects, "In light of Milgram, I cannot believe there is some hidden, slowly revealing pure core of 'human nature' which will lead us to the Promised Land." I did not claim that thee was a pure core of human nature hat would lead us to a moral ideal. I said that instincts favoring preservation of the self, family, and society are often in conflict in the situations posed by modern society. Moreover, human reasoning ability allows consideration values relative to the short term and the long term. Therefore we have moral issues that are not easily resolved, and the best we can do is craft consensus compromises. Advances in technology change the issues and introduce new ones. For example, there were no moral issues related to cloning or maintaining a person on life support before cloning or life support existed. The lack of a leap of faith explains why moral problems exist and often have no clear resolution. If Pro's claim of a common leap of faith were true, we would have common resolutions of moral issues. Pro argues, "I certainly did not intend to argue self-evident truths can be derived. If they could be derived, they would not need to be self-evident." The laws of nature, for example, are self-evident, but nonetheless derived. Newton derived "force equals mass times acceleration" by observing nature and deducing the principle from observation. The formula F = m*a was not found carved on a cliff; that's not what self-evident means. Similarly, the Founders derived the moral principles in the founding documents from observing mankind. All of the key founders, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin were Deists. They "sold" the concepts using religion. The basic argument was "All religious revelations must agree with the nature of man as observed, therefore these principles cannot be in conflict with your particular religion." That reflects the Deist belief that God made the world, but left it to man to discover moral principles. Refer to the book by Gaustaud http://www.amazon.com... for the primary sources. Atheist may similarly derive morality as self-evident, without making the assumption of a Creator. If something requires a leap of faith, it is certainly not self-evident. Pro references a discussion of free will that points out that computers, unlike humans, are not self-referential. That discussion is irrelevant to the current debate. I posed thought experiments relative to the topic. I asked what morality would be developed for hypothetical intelligent creatures with the basic instincts of, say, a praying mantis, a cod fish, or a bear. I asked what morality a computer that mimicked human intelligence could develop if it lacked any inbred or programmed instinctual drives. A subjectively conscious computer may or may not be possible, but that is irrelevant to the point I'm making: morality is only defined relative to genetic coding. Pro argues "Note that Con provides no reasoned argument as to why mattering to ourselves bootstraps us into mattering at all." For x "to matter" with respect to an outcome y means that changing x produces a change in y. Thus a self-preservation instinct matters for human morality. It makes self-defense morally permissible, for example. There is no "bootstrapping" required for instinctive motivation to matter to humans. Instincts matter directly because of human nature. Pro says, "whether humanity proves ultimately to be self-preserving is very much in doubt in this coming century." This irrelevant. People try not to get into car wrecks because they are concerned with their well-being. The nonetheless get into car wrecks through errors. With advanced technology maybe errors of a few humans will wipe out the species. Pro wants some transcendental basis of human morality that would be compelling to space aliens and other species. That doesn't exist. He will never find explanations adequate because they do not meet his preconception. No faith is required to affirm morality derived from and consistent with human nature. Modern society challenges conflicting instincts, but resolutions are found as a product of social evolution, not by leaps of faith.