Atheism and Ethics

[Lucian]

It may be all you can do, in the end.  Sort of wound in to the hypothetical setup.  You've got a christian who believes in objective morality if there's a god..and doesn't believe in an objective morality if there isn't.  That's the antithesis of a coherent worldview and literal nonsense.  Sometimes people are just wrong and there's not much more you can say about it because they're wrong in such a simple way there really isn't anything left after the simple explanation.

Brings me back to that q you asked.  Whether we care if a statement is accurate or whether we care if we're moral by any metric is, I think, dispositional and fundamentally subjective.  Not argued into place.  So lets say you point out that your friend is spouting literal nonsense.  If that's true - will your friend actually care?

I don’t disagree with you that this is the case with some people, and my friend I genuinely believe is one of them. That said; not all my friends are though and some are willing to accept where they have bad arguments even if it doesn’t change their wider beliefs. Perhaps it would just make them accept atheism as a more tenable position, and treat it more seriously than they do now. 

But still further, I care what I should believe. If there is good reason to believe that there are objective morals then in some sense I would prefer that to the view that there aren’t. I happen to think there aren’t and am an error theorist at the moment, but haven’t read widely enough . As mentioned in the other thread you commented on, I am new to actually adopting the position that there are no gods, rather than shrugging my shoulders about everything and simply not having a belief in them. It would be nice to have a coherent worldview for myself, and that includes how I think about morality.