Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

This is a good question.

And I'm surprised it's coming from a theist. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, seeing as I've come across two or three Christians here, and they all seem to be relatively thoughtful and intelligent. We'll see as time passes.

Your contention seems to be that atheism does not inform ethics or morality. Atheism is atheism and ethics is ethics right?

Well it's more complicated than that. Positions in one field of knowledge can and often do have profound implications on other fields.

Consider naturalism. This would be a scientific position, right? (Well, technically it's a metaphysical position) Well consider how much, and how pointedly, naturalism responds to theological claims: about spirits, powers, miracles etc. A clear example of how a position in one field is profoundly relevant to a position in another.

Let's try another example: The theistic concept of god as all-good. This is a well-accepted property of most standard god-concepts. And at least in theology, Christians take it to be unquestionable. Now consider what this theological concept of an all-good, omniscient God has to say about ethics. If this concept is real, it profoundly effects our perspective of ethics. All of a sudden, we would turn to the gods for authority. Forget about gods being real- if one merely believed the theological proposition that God existed, their own ethical approach would be profoundly influenced.

Consider how medicine would change based on whether God did or didn't exist. How law would change. How economics would change... Does it seem at all plausible to say there is no connection between atheism and other beliefs then? Of course not. Our position on the matter truly has a lot to say about a lot of subjects. Most of all, morality.

Which is why we can never escape the problem of prescriptive moral relativism as an atheist. We must accept it, or work to change it.

Now just because you're a theist doesn't mean you are given a free-pass. You've surely taken plenty of flak for being a Christian (which I presume you might be). In fact, I'm surprised that you are a Christian at all. I suppose now would not be the best time to convert you to atheism, though. What, after pointing out that the status quo of atheism promotes rape apologetics and all....

Sorry, but I think you are confused. You are saying that those who believe in God will have their ethics profoundly influenced. But it doesn't work that way. Most God believers (I'm thinking of fundamentalists) can be very nasty if you aren't in the same camp. That's not sound ethics at all. The non-fundamentalists are more like atheists. We get our ethics from our basic human decency. Everyone has that. Atheists have it just as much as a Christian but I honestly think for a Christian, he has to undo a lot of the bad things in religion like in our holy book. If you're in a benign religion like my church, the vicar will clean up the message for you. But you need someone to "purify" the ethics for you. Otherwise you can be pretty wicked if you follow the Bible totally. And it's not a safe bet that you will always have a benign vicar to do that. What if a fundy vicar takes over? There is not much stability in one's ethics if one is a Christian because much depends on interpretation and stuff like that. I think it's safer to depend on the basic human decency without getting ourselves polluted by ancient texts, which religion tends to do.

You said, consider how medicine would change depending on whether God existed. I don't understand that part but I think God and religion are more an impediment to progress of medicine and science than anything.

Sure, god-believers can be nasty. So what? We're not dealing with behavior, we're dealing with whether our moral values are rational. This is where you are confused.

There are good and bad Christians out there. Just like there are good and bad atheists out there. The question is not whether they are good or bad- it's whether there is any legitimate reason, as an atheist, to believe that an act is universally right or wrong. If you are an atheist, your morality undoubtedly IS informed by atheism, and very likely towards ethical subjectivism or relativism. The question is, how good is relativism if it can justify theft and abuse of others?

The solution is to mitigate the relativism of the morality, so as to keep some acts, such as killing babies, universally wrong. If we can't find a way to do that, atheism will forever remain untenable for people who are concerned with having a rational moral standard.