The difference between ethical atheism and nihlism is that ethical atheists have more faith

[genkaus]

You have an interesting sense of the word objective. You seem to think that phenomenological perceptions (if they are separated from carnal bias through having no wants and needs associated with them) can yield "objective" knowledge.

That seems pretty self-evident.

1. Sense perception is ALWAYS tied to wants and needs. The quantity of ones wisdom which informs ones presuppositions is always tied to economics, of the individual and the culture. The quantity and quality of sense perceptions are always related to time and skill, which is always related to economics, funding for specific programs, cultural values, the spirit of the society which takes it as their duty to appreciate the nature of things. It is incredibly naive to suppose that sense perception can be disconnected from wants and needs.

Prove it. Prove that sense perception is ALWAYS tied to wants and needs - not just usually tied to it - and cannot be separated from it.

2. Even if every single person in the world, through a rigorous process of science, set out to study the nature of something, and they expended thousands of dollars (perhaps financed through political pro-science campaigns), their sense perceptions would never describe things in themselves (the ding an sich), they would only describe the collective experience. People really have no sense what the intrinsic nature of things are or what their goals are, apart from science.

Given that I don't buy Kant's premise of a noumenal world - this argument is meaningless to me. I'd say that our collective experience- no, even an individual experience - separated from subjective bias can and does give us knowledge of the intrinsic nature of things. Their goals, however, are a different matter, since I also reject the idea of intrinsic goals.

3. The compatibility between metaphysics and naturalism is debatable. Many philosophers have expressed misgivings about metaphysics, I think they are wrong, but I do not know if you can actually accept naturalism and be consistent with scientism and accept metaphysics or teleology.

Now that's just silly. Naturalism is a metaphysical position Its contradictory to say that something that belongs to a category is not compatible with it.

4. Hume taught that you could not derive an "ought" from an "is". I think this applies to empirical statements but not teleological statements. People can have knowledge of what the ends of things are, but it is not through science. I think actually it is through appreciating their wants and needs. The material universe has, in part, its essence or its goal in human wants and needs, because the material world is created by God. So people can know what they should do by observing their wants and needs, which relate to their inner sense of human nature and their biological requirements for survival. People are wise to take heed to this. At the same time, science cannot demonstrate that this survival instinct is a goal of human life. If you take the words "human life" and say, by definition, people must life, but there is no reason to think if naturalism is true a human exists as having a greater teleological, goal driven processes to it than a severed human limb. They are just different chemical, material organisms.

A lot of unjustified assumptions in this load of crap. Hume himself postulated that ought can be derived from is on the basis of subjective needs and wants. As for the rest of it - there is no justification for assuming that there is a god or that he created the material world or that he created it with a purpose in mind or those purposes are somehow reflected in human wants and needs or that humans themselves would have certain teleological ends. So, really, there is no reason for me to even refute these unfounded assumptions.

Where, in the language of chemistry, biology or physics can you say that a human life has a goal behind it that is different from a severed limb? You could observe some similarities between the two of them. Of course, this becomes very significant when you get into issues like abortion.

Like I said before, since I don't buy the idea of inherent or intrinsic teleology, this is not a problem for me.