Then it must be arrogant to have human rights, free will, notions of moral law, ideas of progress too?
All products of our biological and social evolution, can you explain how that's relevant?
Well I don't really understand this idea of social evolution, because whilst we've definitely progressed in terms of technology and scientific discovery, the human race has progressed very little...in only takes one to look back at the previous century to realise that...it's the most barbaric and bloody in the recorded history of the human race...there are more slaves now (between 21-27 million) than there have ever been in history...if that's social progress, I'm worried
Sure, we're more comfortable, live longer lives, but we're still irrational, callous animals who are destined to constantly repeat the same mistakes again and again and again
Human rights didn't really exist in pre-Christian antiquity, in Rome (where slavery was axiomatic and viewed as necessary for social order, same goes for the Greek social order), at best one was simply recognised as a 'persona' or a 'face', however, if one was say, a slave, a criminal or a leper even, there were absolutely no human rights...it is true that under Augustus, certain legal protections extended to slaves, but they had still no real rights in front of the law and couldn't appeal against their masters, and more than that, their word held no value...in other words, unless one was a citizen, one was devoid of any semblance of personal dignity - 'non habens personam' [quite literally not having a face]. That is not to say that Christianity hasn't been guilty of exploiting slavery but Christianity has also always been pivotal in emancipation (one only has to think of Tolstoy's profound effect on Gandhi and Luther King Jr. as examples)
Nowadays we can hardly say to be free of bigotry or racial prejudice but such ideas offend us deeply in a moral sense and this only thanks to ideals slowly bestowed to us from Christianity. Unlike pagan antiquity, which looked on in horror as the bizarre Christians granted full humanity to everyone they came across, nowadays we accept the value of every person because every Western conscience is indeed informed, whether one likes it or not, by a specifically Christian idea of the person.
Free will, again, as an idea, does not exist any cultures except for ones that were or are Christian. In Eastern philosophy, as Schopenhauer discovered, history is cyclical; endlessly things come and go, and any conception of one being in charge of one's destiny is laughed at. Darwin said we're animals, but yet one never hears of animals of having 'free will', and we are the same, caught in an endless maelstrom of cause and effect, with no real choices in life...as John Gray has noted, free will only works as a concept when God endows us with the ability to choose between good and evil...and it is totally irrational and non-logical to believe in free will outside of a Christian system of thought...because what evidence do we have for it otherwise? Humanism is deluded in thinking free will can exist without God...Nietzsche thought so too
The idea of progress is also one inherited from Christianities teleological system of thinking. In Christianity, a utopian mode of thinking, humanity is moving towards judgement, or the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth (depending on who you read)...and history is a straight line barreling towards this end point. Again, in no other cultures is history ever thought of teleological, but in the post Christian West, we still cling on to the utopian idea that we're progressing as a society. I find it strange that secularism always discusses nature as cyclical but history as linear...surely one must recognise, as Hegel did, the logical problem here. As J69 said, we're only one species in the endless cycle of nature, so how can we sustain any notion of progression when it has no logical basis? I don't think religion necessarily encourages progress but the idea of progress, of society constantly moving forwards, is inherently religious...and there is nothing today which makes me think, 'oh look society is progressing' when we're willing to create weapons that can potentially wipe out humanity...or tut tutting at the Crusades when 'progressive' Western nations support malevolent dictatorships in overseas countries...
Of course moral law is a total fallacy if we're animals too...there is no subject more widely disagreed upon in secular (and may I add religious) philosophy than morality, and that's because without absolute moral values (upheld by an omnipresent, all seeing judge, such as God), the world can only be amoral, like the animal kingdom. Of course that is not to say altruism has no basis, because as Dawkins wrote about in the Selfish Gene, altruism is a valid act, but at it's basis it's still inherently selfish..
anyway enough of my essay
those goals at the San Siro always make me feel a bit ill... those were the days