(June 30, 2013 at 6:50 pm)Inigo Wrote: My confidence in the truth of atheism has been shaken by my reflections on the nature of morality. Perhaps my reflections are poor and I am making some very great mistake. But I think that morality may require a god. That doesn't show a god to exist, of course, for perhaps morality is an illusion. But it reduces its credibility to some extent.
Here is why I think morality requires a god. first, however, I want to distinguish between moral phenomena and morality itself. I use the term 'moral phenomena' to refer to moral sensations (so, the deliverances of our moral sense) and moral beliefs. I take it as beyond question that moral phenomena exist. But it does not follow that morality itself exists, for morality is not a sensation or a belief. it is the thing sensed, the thing believed. To believe an act to be wrong is to believe the act has the attribute of wrongness. One has the belief, but whether the act really has that feature - indeed, whether such a feature exists at all - remains an open question.
Anyway, here was the though that first set me off doubting atheism. Morality is normative: it instructs, favours, commands. It is not enough for it to appear to do these things. A morality that does not instruct or favour or command is no morality at all. Morality actually does these things. This seems to be a conceptual truth about morality. Yet, for the life of me I find it hard to conceive of how anything other than an agent could do such things.
I won't ramble on further - I'll just see if I've made a mistake at this early stage! (for it gets worse!)
I am really struggling with what you mean by the question of the existence of morality.
There seems to be no evidence of its existence outside the human brain. We see no evidence of morality in nature.
What we do see in nature are a variety of mechanisms that allow social creatures to interact successfully.
Ants, for example, do not rise up and kill the queen in general. They are controlled by pheromones. This suffices for creatures with rather small brains. The same thing for bees and wasps.
As we move higher up the evolutionary ladder to creatures with larger brains we see instincts replacing chemical controls. Lions work together in a pack to hunt gazelles. A lion on the hunt will not suddenly attack one of its fellow pride members even though it has a perfect opportunity to do so.
When we get to creatures with developed higher centres of the brain, aka - us, instincts alone do not suffice. As social creatures we have therefore developed morality.
This has allowed for a much more complex set of rules to deal with a variety of situations that probably started with the hunter gatherer societies and has continued to develop as our cultures have become more complex.
The arguments that this is a development of a pre-programmed tendency through evolution include:
1. Morality changes all the time. Just look at the last 50 years to see how our attitudes have adjusted to race, sex, sexual orientation and so on.
2. Morality gets suspended as the need arises. Thou shalt not kill - unless you are at war of course.
3. Mental illness can serve to create amoral individuals. Psychopaths and sociopaths appear to lack the basic understanding of morality and therefore have to be removed from society.
None of the above undermines our deepest moral senses which are so ingrained as to make it appear to us that morality is somehow real and beyond us - as in from an outside force.
In fact it is highly likely, as far as I can see, that it was, in part, the societal desire to instil morality that religion and the idea of god(s) was borne.
I would therefore conclude that morality is entirely a facet of our evolution that we have taken and adapted for living in the modern world. Its changes and adjustments over time have given us a moral history of the world which, in conjunction with our present morality, allows us to make judgements not only in terms of the morality of our own actions but also those of others, both in the present and in the past.
