(June 5, 2024 at 1:06 pm)Lucian Wrote: 1. I am interested in what reasons atheists have for believing such morality can exist in a godless universe, but not if it is appeals to intuition without grounding that further.
I'd suggest that it's logically necessary. If we agree that there is such a thing as morality and that we choose which morals to follow then it would appear that we're all using subjective processes for arriving at our moral systems. Us godless heathens pride ourselves on figuring these out on our own using systems that others have already detailed better than I possibly could. Similarly, you god-bothering pew-polishers use subjective criteria for selecting the god(s) that you worship, the particular religion, church, and morals that attach to all of that. Unless there's some objective process for determining The One True God that I missed out on. If there's an objectively true set of morals out there then nobody has stumbled onto them yet.
FWIW, I don't see morals as being anything more mystical than the necessary behaviors of individuals within a society. Individual behaviors that deviate from the moral norms harm the society as a whole and that gets them punished. once the harm done exceeds the effort of correcting the deviation. Show me a society without a prohibition on murder and I'll show you a short-lived society. Replace murder with any other behavior that's a net negative and you get the same result.
As others have suggested, morality is an emergent property of society. As such it is independent of any single mind within that society. No individual writes the social contract and it continues to exist despite the death or departure of any particular person.
