That's a tough question, I'm still grappling with it.
Evolution is the source of ultimate truth - which means for me that truth can be defined as whatever survived the process of evolution and the oldest something is the more truth it conveys.
Thus I treat evolution as a mechanism of discovering the truth. Morality manifests itself via evolution but is not the end-product of it.
We could say that morality is the set of rules that allowed those who followed them to survive. But this does not imply that evolution created those rules. Instead we could say that evolution revealed the rules we now call morality.
Actually I was thinking about an answer against the "evolution created those rules" argument but couldn't find any. It seems logical that nature had those rules already and by time it just revealed them to us, because we were getting smarter to discover them. So morality does come from something outside. But why do you think there is another reality outside of this one?
Because I don't know of anything that does not have some sort of reality outside of itself. Both mathematically and physically there is no such entity.
But just because you don't know anything like that, doesn't mean that it exist. Basically we are on the atheist stage of a universe out of ours =D
Yeah, but this also means that atheists believe in something that nobody has ever encountered: a self-contained entity without any external reality. That's a nice paradox: atheists are the most irrational creatures one can imagine - they believe in things that even mathematically don't exist.
There is no paradox - the "containment" has to end at some point, you may imagine an external reality, but what is that reality contained in?
You'll just end up with an unfalsifiable, Russian doll type universe. It's not "scientific" to hypothesise anything you wish without any good reason for it.
And no, we don't believe anything that is mathematically not possible
There are two options: it's either infinite (Russian doll type universe) or there is a finite numer of realities and they mutually create each other.
Personally I like the latter option: I like the concept that we humans have something which the external reality (we can call it "divine" or whatever) cannot ever have. Thus we complement the divine, or in other words the divine needs us to be complete (just as we need the divine to be complete). Our mode of existence is beyond comprehension of the divine, and it can only realize this form of existence through us, humans.
I agree, it's not scientific and for a good reason: it's beyond science. Things like religion and morality are external to science: they contain science but science does not contain them. Thus science can be discussed in religious terms but the opposite is not true.
In mathematics you can define a self-contained entities (e.g. the set of all sets) but you end up with a paradox or reliance on external axioms. For me this is precisely what defines the term "non-existent" or "impossible".
Yep, a Matroshka fashioned universe goes against "naturalness" assumptions and Occam's razor..
Agree that you have to study these things separately, then in the last point, you said
but the purpose of science is to make theoretical models of the universe using mathematics that accurately describe phenomena , i.e, explains the empirical data collected and also make fairly accurate predictions. I'm not sure how applying religion to this process is practical/useful
And the purpose of religion , morality or ethics are to teach man how to live a meaningful and happy life, again, science is going to be useless (not absolutely, but you get the idea) here.
This problem leads to godel's incompleteness, (as you may have seen in my other post) which sets a limitation on human knowledge : no matter how advanced we get, as a civilization, there will always be some truth that will escape us, and we will, not even in principle, be able to prove some results that "appear" to be always true.
This is precisely a consequence of what you said, but bear in mind that there is no paradox or contradiction within the laws nature themselves, truth exists independently of any human or any sentient being.
Only paradox lies in the humans ability of acquiring knowledge, which will always be a smaller subset of the total knowledge that exists