Conscience and the Moral Argument as Evidence for the Goodness of God.

[Astreja]

Astreja said: "For one thing, I believe that "objective morality" is an oxymoron.  Morality is a value judgement and is automatically subjective (or, in the case of a community, intersubjective)."

How would morality be automatically subjective? Subjective morality means something is wrong for you if you believe it is. It is an opinion, not a fact. The problem is, objective moral facts are clearly not subjective in this way, unless you want to say murder, rape and theft is fine if murderers, rapists and thieves subjectively believe what they're doing is ok. In other words, it is an objective Truth that: "murder, rape, theft etc are intrinsically and objectively evil/wrong". It is not a mere subjective opinion but an objective fact and its Truth has nothing to do with the subjective opinions of the person committing the action.

How do you understand subjective morality, Astreja? and do you believe: "murder, rape, theft etc are intrinsically and objectively evil (independent of the subjective opinions of anyone who thinks they might be good/ok", as I think you would? Deep down, hardly anyone can maintain subjective morality consistently, which is another proof that awareness of the objectively moral law is innate. Even Ruse contradicted himself in another passage of his writings by saying something to the effect of: "the person who says raping children is ok is just as mistaken as the person who says 2+2=5". If so, morality, like mathematics, is based on objective facts, not subjective opinions. But they can only be so on Theism, not Atheism. Therefore, etc.

Did you miss my comment about intersubjective morality?  This is when a community, rather than an individual, declares some behaviours to be good and others to be bad.  If you've ever studied cultural anthropology (which I have), you would know that community values are not homogeneous - they vary wildly from place to place, and from era to era.

An individual who violates a community standard (for example, by committing rape) is punished by the community.  A community that does not protect its citizens from assault will be perceived as unsafe, and people will abandon it and go live somewhere else.  Thus, successful communities appear to have objective morality but in reality have well-established subjective values that are accepted by most of the community members.  

I do not believe in objective morality - at all.  I believe that all morality is subjective, including morality derived from the commands of a god.

And morality is not mathematics.  There are no moral theorems, and no proofs that can be derived.