Quote:
If, as many people believe, there is a God, and that God made us in his own image, then of course we are distinct from nature, just as He is. But talk of God's image is a metaphor for the very fact that we need to explain, namely that we treat the human being as a thing apart, a thing protected by a sacred aura in short, not a thing at all, but a person.
This sounds like the God of the gap argument, meaning that if there is something out there and we don't know what it is, we call it God. It seems that according to the author, because we need to explain that a person has value we use the metaphor (or make things up in our head) 'created in God's image'.
These would be my questions to the author.
If there is no God or 'image of God' then why don't we treat people according to their true identity which is a cosmic accident? If humanity is only matter and energy and reactions why would we trust those reactions to tell us about reality? How does matter and energy produce explanations? Why does humanity have value?
Quote:
The astonishing moral equipment of the human being including rights and duties, personal obligations, justice, resentment, judgment, forgiveness is the deposit left by millenniums of conflict. Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.
How can one know if morality is evolving or decaying unless their is a moral standard?