Wow... full of logical errors... Among the countless counterexamples one could cite against any claim to an “innate conscience” is the fact that the 9/11 hijac

Wow... full of logical errors... Among the countless counterexamples one could cite against any claim to an “innate conscience” is the fact that the 9/11 hijackers regarded their murderous actions not as abhorrent, but as sublime. Poor logic here. Hitchens would claim that it was their religion that perverted their innate sense of right and wrong. To search for such a sense, I can only imagine you would need to look at very young children and even then it would be hard to discount the cultural/upbringing factor. The claim to “innate knowledge,” like the claim to knowledge through faith, is a form of mysticism, the claim to a non-rational, non-sensory means of knowledge. Not if its been observed enough. You don't need to be able to explain something down to the quantum mechanical level to assert it exists. How can religious belief be wrong if the “innate consciences” of billions of people tell them that it is right? What? Historically, most religions were spread by a small number of individuals. How is this innate? (Someone correct me if I'm wrong on the history). If man’s ethical ideas were innate, if his biology predisposed him to irrationality, if he had no choice about whether to commit evil, then the entire field of morality—which presupposes that man does choose his actions—would not only be pointless No one is claiming there is no choice, merely that our moral decision making procedure is imperfect and/or very flawed. Why does an “ethical realist,” who claims to believe that ethical truths are waiting in reality to be discovered, insist that ethics must be grounded “intuitively,” via “irreducible leaps,” rather than rationally In part, this might be because introspection is, in some ways, inherently self limiting. There is nothing logically incoherent about saying that "this is far as I can break things down." The whole discussion of how senses are needed to even write a book is silly. You can't take someone's argument to an extreme and then point out how silly it is. The claim isn't (or shouldn't be) that "senses are useless" but that "our senses are not perfect receptors of the outside world." Overall, the large problem is that the author is looking for a perfect answer to questions when the thought process behind it is still in its infancy.