My views on objective morality

[Catholic_Lady]

Sorry I did not respond to this post. The reason I didn't is because I feel like parts of the issues you bring up have already been addressed and I'll just be annoyingly repeating myself. Nonetheless, I appreciate your respectful tone, so here are my responses:

How do I know what I don't know? If someone asks me a question, like "why doesn't God do ______", and I don't know why, then I know that I don't know. 

As for how do I know that what I believe is true, again, this is basically a "why are you Catholic" question. Not something that can ever be summed up in a forum post. The short answer is, given everything I have experienced/seen/learned in my life, the faith makes sense to me.

But how do you know that what you do believe is true, given the fact that you don't have a metric for it?

How do you know that what you think is free will is free will? How do you know that what you regard as moral behavior stems from your god? The short answer is that you don't know. You believe, you have faith, that it is; but you can't say that things like genocide aren't you god's will -- after all, he's ordered such things, if we're to believe the Bible.

I feel very confident that it is. Of course, there is always the chance that I could be wrong. But let me put it this way, I feel as confident in my beliefs as I am confident that my husband loves me. Could I be wrong about my husband loving me? I mean, sure... anything is possible. but I feel confident enough that he loves me to the point where I am ok with saying "I know my husband loves me." Same thing applies to my religious beliefs. I feel confident enough to say "I know God is real, I know He gave us free will, I know He is love and goodness, and that anything outside of that is immoral." How do I know? How am I so confident? Again, it is not something that can ever be summed up in a forum post. The short answer is, given everything I have experienced/seen/learned in my life, has led me to believe what I do. 

If all you have to go on is faith, well then you're essentially saying that morality is subjective. Because at that point you've defined what you regard as moral, and then are saying "my god wouldn't do or order that". If your god is the author of morality, then the fact that he behaves in ways he tells us are immoral means that morality is subjective. If your god is not the author of morality, then it should be acknowledged that the acts attributed to him in your own scripture violate the moral code he is alleged to have passed down to us.

If you are referring to when God literally talks to people in the Old Testament, I don't believe that ever happened. I believe Jesus is God, and I believe in what He taught us about morality - doing good for others as we want them to do for us, loving others as ourselves, and forgiving our enemies, etc. I believe that is the basis for all of morality.     

Your faith makes sense to you -- great. But the fact is that it doesn't make sense to the majority of the people in the world, and while you're here expounding it, you cannot explain why anyone else should believe as you do. How is that not, in its very essence, subjective? Can you justify your own morality in an objective manner without appealing to your own personal reasons for believing (which are entirely subjective, as you've just admitted)?

How is that not subjective morality?

I'm not trying to explain why anyone else should believe as I do. Also, there is no way I know of to convince anyone. I think it's something that a person would need to conclude for him/herself based on their own understandings. I don't understand how that ties in to objective morality though. Perhaps you can clarify?   

Some things about God have been revealed to us, others have not. I believe the Church's teachings on faith and morals come from God, and those are the things we have a firm belief in. Those are the things about God that we believe have been revealed to us. The rest are unknown, and among those unknowns are some of the questions I always see here, such as "why doesn't God just personally tell us He's real" ...or something along those lines. With questions like that, all we can do is speculate and come up with theories. But at the end of the day, they are still unknown because they have not been revealed to us.

How do you know that what has been revealed is actually your god's mind, and not some human interpolation subject to the fancy, whim, and error that accompanies such an endeavor?

My answer for this is the same as up top (the why are you Catholic question, basically). I think the first part of my response works to answer this.