(July 1, 2013 at 5:50 pm)paulpablo Wrote: I also wonder why you call this argument painfully obvious, yet you have spent all your life being an atheist up until fairly recently.
Well, because I didn't say that, did I? What I claimed was painfully obvious was the distinction between moral phenomena and morality itself. It is painfully obvious to me and always has been. Confusing moral sensations and beliefs for morality itself is as foolish as confusing beliefs about a chair with a chair. This doesn't stop people from making such foolish mistakes. Indeed, this seems to be 'the' major mistake that most people make when they start trying to figure out what morality might be. Rather than focussing on morality, they give historical accounts of the development of our moral sense and so on (and thereby assume they are giving an account of morality - when they are doing no such thing).
Anyway, what morality 'is' in itself is not obvious and I have never claimed it is. I have, by thinking about the matter carefully, come to the conlusion that there is only one thing morality can be, and that is the instrtuctions of a god. That is not through ignorance of other options. But I find the other options to either fail to capture the instructing nature of morality, or they capture that feature but fail to capture its rational authority. I know of no other way than mine of capturing both fetaures at once, and I think both features are essential. But it isn't obvious that morality consists in the instructions of a god. It takes careful reasoning to see it if, that is, it is true.
