(December 8, 2010 at 3:30 am)Micah Wrote: 1.) If someone is an Atheist and believes in materialism, how do they account for thought? Is human thought just a chemical reaction?All the evidence currently suggests it is.
Quote:2.) If someone is an Atheist how do they define morality? Christianity's moral system is irrelevant to an Atheist, so how do they define what is right and wrong? Is there even a difference between right and wrong to an Atheist? If there is no creator of the universe, then there is no truth, so there can be no right and wrong for an Atheist, which means that an Atheist believes that cold blooded murder is just fine.Atheists define morality in numerous ways; some believe in relative morality; some, like me, believe in moral nihilism (i.e. that morality is ultimately meaningless).
It is not true that the lack of a creator means there is no truth; truth is simply the outcome of any event at a specific point in time. There is no need for a God in order for that to exist.
What I would personally argue is that there is no higher meaning, and thus any claim to morality is not absolute, even if it is based on a known truth. This doesn't mean I believe that cold blooded murder is "just fine"; it means I don't have a belief that it is "good" or "bad" in any ultimate way. I may feel bad when I hear about a cold blooded murder, but that isn't morality at work, that is my personal form of ethics.
So there is a difference between what I perceive to be right and wrong according to my own beliefs about ethics, but there isn't a difference between right and wrong according to my views on morality, since I do not believe that "right" and "wrong" are even meaningful descriptors of anything to do with morality.
