1. Aren’t you saying people who believe in a higher power are idiots because science can explain why we’re here? Hypocritic[sic].

I’ve met and read about any number of highly intelligent people who profess a belief in some flavor of “higher power”, ergo I’d be an idiot myself to say that “people who believe in a higher power are idiots”.

The belief itself may be “foolish” (for some appropriate definition of the term), but certainly that doesn’t make the people who believe it necessarily “idiots”.

And as stated, I don’t think “why [are we] here” in the metaphysical moral sense is the proper province of Science. As you indicate, “how did we get here” certainly is.

Secondly science doesn’t have to explain why we are here. Its a ridiculous question to start with. What science can do is show through hard physical evidence and proven theories how we got here. If you put the discussion in the realm of why rather than how you might as well be discussing the existence of faeries.

For example, I was pondering he optimistic idea of everything turning out all right, the bad guy getting punished and the good guy winning in the end. It underlies our conception of justice, which is more than simply human legal antics. But in order to develop a sense of this absolute construct which is completely unprovable, intangible and fictional, at some point did we have to believe in ages past in some force of being that was supposed to make things turn out all right? After all, when we get to human cases, away from the imaginary vague absolute, we quickly realize justice is a very subjective idea. Yet the “everything will be all right in the end” idea pervades our fiction, our self-help genres and our aphorisms.

I don’t hold with agnostics who don’t believe in belief, because pretending that there is no bias or human tendency to act on the basis of an assumption is hypocritical. But leaving an unanswered question open is not only agnosticism, it’s good science.

I find that when Dawkins addresses the issue of morality in chapter 6 and 7 (I think) of the god delusion, he makes a good statement about the idea of moral absolutes. You touch on it in here, but it’s not quite clear enough, I think. Moral absolutes are kind of silly because there is no real way other than god to justify it, and when a moral dilemma arises, they are immediately invalid because you’re dealing with moral gray zones. then you’ve got at the most basic level two ways to deal with it: Kant’s categorical imperative or a more utilitarian/consequential approach. Fine examples of such gray zones are the infamous ‘runaway train’ scenarios.

The choice is yours in the end on how you chose to act in any given situation. Doing the morally ‘right’ thing is favorable because you earn your place at the top of a hierarchy through trust. People want to be trusted (for obvious Darwinian reasons: trusty individuals are socially accepted and are then more likely to pass on their genes), so they will likely do what is moral.

That is why it is evolutionarily favorable to be moral, and why absolute morals as those given by a god, are illogical to abide. the given answers are good, but I think these are better.