Atheism and morality

[pineapplebunnybounce]

I forgot to add something to my earlier post.

Not only are everything you've used in support of your argument vague (your sensations and dreams), they're also not observable to anyone else. Therefore this is a purely internal argument, and since there's no way for any of us to verify your "evidence", I submit that only you can resolve it, within your own head.

[Inigo]

I forgot to add something to my earlier post.

Not only are everything you've used in support of your argument vague (your sensations and dreams), they're also not observable to anyone else. Therefore this is a purely internal argument, and since there's no way for any of us to verify your "evidence", I submit that only you can resolve it, within your own head.

With which premise do you disagree and why?

[Whateverist]

You can't refute an argument by calling it a turd ball.

And neither can you turn a turd ball into a reasonable argument.

You then accuse me of lacking originality. That's untrue and irrelevant. To my knowledge nobody has defended quite the view I am defending. For the view I am defending is not that morality is composed of the commands/favourings/instructions of the Judaeo Christian god, but that morality is the composed of the commands of a vengeful god who is not perfectly morally good. My arguments, if anything, only underscore the non-existence of the Christian god. But anyway, the originality of an argument has nothing to do with its soundness or validity. So I'm unsure why you mentioned it unless you're just a horrible person.

I'll grant you that at least one of us is a horrible person, insincere and guilty of misrepresentation. It just isn't me.

What is not original is to pass your self off as something other than the apologist missionary you are so that you can voice the concerns you feel we should all have as atheists. As usual you resent that we won't just accept your definition of atheism. Terribly inconvenient for you no doubt.

No one here wants or needs your snake oil.

[max-greece]

My confidence in the truth of atheism has been shaken by my reflections on the nature of morality. Perhaps my reflections are poor and I am making some very great mistake. But I think that morality may require a god. That doesn't show a god to exist, of course, for perhaps morality is an illusion. But it reduces its credibility to some extent.

Here is why I think morality requires a god. first, however, I want to distinguish between moral phenomena and morality itself. I use the term 'moral phenomena' to refer to moral sensations (so, the deliverances of our moral sense) and moral beliefs. I take it as beyond question that moral phenomena exist. But it does not follow that morality itself exists, for morality is not a sensation or a belief. it is the thing sensed, the thing believed. To believe an act to be wrong is to believe the act has the attribute of wrongness. One has the belief, but whether the act really has that feature - indeed, whether such a feature exists at all - remains an open question.

Anyway, here was the though that first set me off doubting atheism. Morality is normative: it instructs, favours, commands. It is not enough for it to appear to do these things. A morality that does not instruct or favour or command is no morality at all. Morality actually does these things. This seems to be a conceptual truth about morality. Yet, for the life of me I find it hard to conceive of how anything other than an agent could do such things.

I won't ramble on further - I'll just see if I've made a mistake at this early stage! (for it gets worse!)

I am really struggling with what you mean by the question of the existence of morality.

There seems to be no evidence of its existence outside the human brain. We see no evidence of morality in nature.

What we do see in nature are a variety of mechanisms that allow social creatures to interact successfully.

Ants, for example, do not rise up and kill the queen in general. They are controlled by pheromones. This suffices for creatures with rather small brains. The same thing for bees and wasps.

As we move higher up the evolutionary ladder to creatures with larger brains we see instincts replacing chemical controls. Lions work together in a pack to hunt gazelles. A lion on the hunt will not suddenly attack one of its fellow pride members even though it has a perfect opportunity to do so.

When we get to creatures with developed higher centres of the brain, aka - us, instincts alone do not suffice. As social creatures we have therefore developed morality.

This has allowed for a much more complex set of rules to deal with a variety of situations that probably started with the hunter gatherer societies and has continued to develop as our cultures have become more complex.

The arguments that this is a development of a pre-programmed tendency through evolution include:

1. Morality changes all the time. Just look at the last 50 years to see how our attitudes have adjusted to race, sex, sexual orientation and so on.
2. Morality gets suspended as the need arises. Thou shalt not kill - unless you are at war of course.
3. Mental illness can serve to create amoral individuals. Psychopaths and sociopaths appear to lack the basic understanding of morality and therefore have to be removed from society.

None of the above undermines our deepest moral senses which are so ingrained as to make it appear to us that morality is somehow real and beyond us - as in from an outside force.

In fact it is highly likely, as far as I can see, that it was, in part, the societal desire to instil morality that religion and the idea of god(s) was borne.

I would therefore conclude that morality is entirely a facet of our evolution that we have taken and adapted for living in the modern world. Its changes and adjustments over time have given us a moral history of the world which, in conjunction with our present morality, allows us to make judgements not only in terms of the morality of our own actions but also those of others, both in the present and in the past.

[pineapplebunnybounce]

I forgot to add something to my earlier post.

Not only are everything you've used in support of your argument vague (your sensations and dreams), they're also not observable to anyone else. Therefore this is a purely internal argument, and since there's no way for any of us to verify your "evidence", I submit that only you can resolve it, within your own head.

With which premise do you disagree and why?

You ignored the points I made in both posts and proceeded to make unfounded assumptions on what i think. This isn't going anywhere.

Which premise do i disagree with and why?

Yours. Because it sucks.

[FallentoReason]

A similar account can be given of the development of a sense of god and belief in god - such dispositions have (or may well have) conferred some evolutionary advantage on those who have it. But you wouldn't for one moment accept that in this way one can show how evolution gives rise to a god. It shows only how evolutionary processes may give rise to creatures who have the impression there is a god. So too for morality.

Firstly, I understand what you mean when you say morality and the notion of a theistic god are similar. What I find bizarre is that for one of those you're perfectly fine with saying that it's 100% fabricated with no basis in reality, but for the other, you're wanting to plant it on something solid in such a way that atheism is no longer a viable foundation. That's called special pleading, since from your own point of view you rationally have a defeater for believing either god or morality to be real (if I've correctly understood the above).

Secondly, I think something needs to be clarified before this thread can go any further. What is it for morality to "exist"? Let me explain. A similar example of morality would be money; it deals with physical objects made from trees and splatters of ink which we then call "money". But does it exist? Is currency actually a thing? No, I'd say that it's a concept which we've all agreed on. We have collectively decided to value these bits of paper and ink in such a way that it makes people give us things in return for this colourful paper. Likewise with morality, it deals with physical things (us) but the "value" which we assign actions with doesn't "exist" per se. Punching someone is nothing more than the molecules forming my fist coming into contact with the molecules forming someone's jaw. But we see this "transaction" as "morally bad", and just like the concept of money was something we realised would be integral for the functionality of society, so too did we realise that hurting your fellow human would be inversely integral for the functionality of society.

If my reasoning above is sound, then I'd say that your search for this place where morality "exists" is a lost cause. Furthermore, if morals were to exist independently of us, it would make them an objective truth which surely means we could a priori derive a list of do's and don't's. In the history of humanity, such a mythical set of morals has never been found which strongly suggests morality began with us i.e. evolution.

[paulpablo]

Moral instructions. That's just what a moral instruction is. It is an instruction that automatically confers a reason to comply. In this way moral instructions differ from, say, your instructions or the instructions of a club or the instructions of etiquette.

Which moral instructions are the ones that everyone has a good reason to follow?[/quote]

[fr0d0]

Welcome new guy/ Rhythm's new sock puppet (inside joke, apologies )
Oops, wrong thread. I think

1. Theists are trinitarian Christians? Cool! it was way too crowded with all of those Muslims, Jews, non trinitarian Christians, Hindus... you see what I mean!
2. I've seen your argument (broadly) argued before by trinitarian Christians. They (and I would concur) suggest that presupposing God is the only coherent explanation for reality.
That always remains a result of assumption however.
They're assuming a morally good God just like you, but understand that god to be the Christian God, where you do not.

Perhaps me agreeing you will be the push you need back to atheism.

[Inigo]

Which moral instructions are the ones that everyone has a good reason to follow?

Normative moral philosophy is that part of ethics concerned with figuring out just what it is that morality instructs us to do and be. And the truthful answer is that I do not know exactly what morality instructs us to do. My method of figuring this out is going to be exactly the same as yours (I assume). I will consult my moral sense and that of others and try to systemise its deliverances.

Metaethical inquiry is investigation into what morality actually is. Strictly speaking every normative moral theory is compatible with every metaethical one. And what I am doing here is arguing that the metaethical view that morality is composed of the commands/favourings of a god is very plausible. In fact, I think it by far the most plausible metaethical theory, for the reasons I have given.

---

1. Theists are trinitarian Christians? Cool! it was way too crowded with all of those Muslims, Jews, non trinitarian Christians, Hindus... you see what I mean!
2. I've seen your argument (broadly) argued before by trinitarian Christians. They (and I would concur) suggest that presupposing God is the only coherent explanation for reality.
That always remains a result of assumption however.
They're assuming a morally good God just like you, but understand that god to be the Christian God, where you do not.

THank you for your welcome. However, I should clarify my position as it is not as you have assumed. (I am in the uncomfortable position of holding a view that virtually everyone is going to have a problem with - this makes me suspicious that there is something wrong with it, yet to date no-one has been able to tell me). Anyway, to continue alienating people : I do not think morality presupposes a morally good god. In fact I think morality presupposes a vengeful god and I think vengefulness is not praiseworthy. I think it is a bad character trait. Perhaps it isn't, but my moral sense and that of an awful lot of people concur that it is, and so I assume that it is. So, I do not think morality presupposes the Christian god. In fact, my argument - which I think challenges atheism - also challenges Christianity and a whole host of other religions. I think the evidence for the existence of a Christian god just isn't there. My arguments actually bolster the case against Christianity, I would say. Morality becomes evidence against the existence of the Christian god, not for it.

I should also note that to account for morality's features I have not had to posit a god who has created us, or the universe or anything lik that. What I have had to posit is a god who has power over our welfare in an afterlife, that is all. The god in question, therefore, bears more resemblance to a Norse or Greek god than any more traditional one.

But at the end of the day, I am not a man of faith. I am not trying to find arguments for a god that I already believe in. I am just trying to understand what morality is, and my best attempt to do this has led me to posit a god. I'm not happy about this and the worldview that starts to emerge is really rather horrible.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

This seems to be a conceptual truth about morality. Yet, for the life of me I find it hard to conceive of how anything other than an agent could do such things.

...like sentient human beings?