(June 20, 2015 at 2:15 am)Nestor Wrote:(June 15, 2015 at 7:03 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: This is kind of a spinoff of the WHY BE GOOD thread.
The question I have for atheists, isn't "why by good." I think it's simplistic and deeply flawed to think that the only reason to "be good" is to avoid Hell. And of course, I believe that anyone can be a good person regardless of beliefs.
The question I have for atheists is how do we know what IS good?
Religious or not, we all somehow know that certain things are intrinsically, universally immoral. Let's use murder as an obvious example. So if murder is wrong, where did this law come from? If this is a universal truth, where did this truth come from and who/what determined it to be what it is?
You can say things are good because God made them that way, and that anything God does is instrinsically good because God is by nature good.
But this is just circular reasoning. Why not just say that things are, by nature, good, without bringing up the issue of God at all?
Of course, it's difficult to understand how this could be established, and it seems more likely, given that we just happen to think we know what things are instrinsically good, that things aren't instrinsically good but rather good because that is the value we have assigned to things that give us feelings of pleasure.
Another atheist posed this question here.
