Why construct it from scratch? We have a pretty good idea of what morality leads to a healthy society. The fact that it takes supernatural threats to make people follow it is irrelevant.
If you abandon religious ideas, you are constructing from scratch.
Everything that leads to a healthy society, right down to not murdering, is based in religious doctrine. The very idea of making the judgement that "healthy" is desireable, even before agreeing what "healthy" is, is based on the religious idea that we should pursue things that are "good". There is no difference, in a purely mechanical universe, between good and evil and, really, they don't exist in that framework.
Further, religion isn't supernatural, it's subnatural; it's is the idea that the mechanical reality we interact with was created (and likely maintained) by a concious being that exists outside of it, and the universe is therefore "good".
This is actually supported by our current understanding of quantum mechanics and string theory. In the book The Cosmic Landscape, Leonard Susskind discusses the idea that all potential realities can be represented by an n-th dimentional topography (think a plane with hills and valleys) where n represents the cosmological constants we are aware of (speed of light, Planks length, etc). I can't recall the exact number, and there may be some we haven't discovered yet, but I believe there are at least ten.
The universes that can exist are represented by n-th dimentional "valleys" in the Landscape, where all constants are at local minimums. The vast majority of the Landscape is "inhospitable" to reality itself.
Of the valleys that can exist, almost all of them are unstable; they either immediately expand until entropy, or they collapse.
The precise combination of constants that allow our universe to exist, to have actual time is vanishingly rare. Changing any of them, by even a tiny amount, would result in our universe not existing. Further, AFAIK, we don't have any other combinations that would work, either.
The odds that our universe exists make a trillion to one shot look like a sure thing. And I don't mean "there are trillions of potential valleys and ours is one of them", I mean the odds that any single valley, across the entire Cosmic Landscape, is as stable as a universe would need to be to support anything like life, is something like 1x10^100:1. And that's before you consider the odds of life existing within our stable universe.
It is actually more plausible, statistically, that God exists and created our universe, than our universe coming into existance spontaneously.
Why construct it from scratch? We have a pretty good idea of what morality leads to a healthy society. The fact that it takes supernatural threats to make people follow it is irrelevant.
If you abandon religious ideas, you are constructing from scratch.
Everything that leads to a healthy society, right down to not murdering, is based in religious doctrine. The very idea of making the judgement that "healthy" is desireable, even before agreeing what "healthy" is, is based on the religious idea that we should pursue things that are "good". There is no difference, in a purely mechanical universe, between good and evil and, really, they don't exist in that framework.
Further, religion isn't supernatural, it's subnatural; it's is the idea that the mechanical reality we interact with was created (and likely maintained) by a concious being that exists outside of it, and the universe is therefore "good".
This is actually supported by our current understanding of quantum mechanics and string theory. In the book The Cosmic Landscape, Leonard Susskind discusses the idea that all potential realities can be represented by an n-th dimentional topography (think a plane with hills and valleys) where n represents the cosmological constants we are aware of (speed of light, Planks length, etc). I can't recall the exact number, and there may be some we haven't discovered yet, but I believe there are at least ten.
The universes that can exist are represented by n-th dimentional "valleys" in the Landscape, where all constants are at local minimums. The vast majority of the Landscape is "inhospitable" to reality itself.
Of the valleys that can exist, almost all of them are unstable; they either immediately expand until entropy, or they collapse.
The precise combination of constants that allow our universe to exist, to have actual time is vanishingly rare. Changing any of them, by even a tiny amount, would result in our universe not existing. Further, AFAIK, we don't have any other combinations that would work, either.
The odds that our universe exists make a trillion to one shot look like a sure thing. And I don't mean "there are trillions of potential valleys and ours is one of them", I mean the odds that any single valley, across the entire Cosmic Landscape, is as stable as a universe would need to be to support anything like life, is something like 1x10^100:1. And that's before you consider the odds of life existing within our stable universe.
It is actually more plausible, statistically, that God exists and created our universe, than our universe coming into existance spontaneously.