Try this experiment on a religious friend: Tell him you think you might believe in God. Then ask him to list the qualities that define God.
Before reading on, I thought “Creator of everything, understands everything, is in perfect harmony with morality, has revealed himself to the Jews and as Jesus, is triune.”
People seldom start religions by saying they’re God. They say they’re God’s messenger, or maybe God’s son. But not God. Then God would be this guy you saw stub his toe, and he’d end up like that guy in “The Man Who Would Be King.”
That’s what’s so special about Christianity—Jesus is God, not just his messenger or Son. The stubbed toe problem isn’t original, it comes up in the Gospels, where people say “How can this be God? We know his parents and brothers!”
PPE: I see you added a footnote about this; still, even in the OT God lets himself be argued with—that’s what the books of Job and Habakkuk are all about. Paul also makes lots of arguments and has a back and forth style in many books.
A belief in the God that is an empty category is wrong, but it’s misrepresenting religion (Judeo-Christian ones in particular) to say that all or even most or even a substantial minority of its adherents have that sort of belief.
But if for some reason you want to know what “human terminal values” are, and collect them into a set of non-contradictory values, ethics gets untenable, because your terminal values benefit alleles, not humans, and play zero-sum games, not games with benefits to trade or compromise.
Evolution isn’t perfect—the values we have aren’t the best strategies possible for an allele to reproduce itself, they’re only the best strategies that have appeared. This leaves room for a difference between the good of a person and the good of their genes. Thou art Godshatter is relevant here. Again, just because our human values serve the “values” of genes doesn’t mean that they are subject to them and are somehow turned “instrumental” because evolution was the reason why they developed.
G K Chesterton