Atheism and morality

[max-greece]

So why would these instructions need to come from a god, if you want to call them instructions.

Because it is a conceptual truth about moral instructions that if one exists and applies to you, you thereby have reason to do as it instructs. My instructions are not like this, nor are yours, nor is some collection of them. The only way that I can see that an agent's instructions to us would be ones we'd always have reason to comply with is if the instructor in question has control over our interests in an afterlife. So long as that person is vengeful and will harm the interests of those who do not do as she instructs, her instructions will be ones that everyone has reason to comply with, whatever their interests.

This is a conceptual claim. It is a claim about what it would take for morality to exist. The existence of moral sensations and beliefs is not in quetsion. They don't require a god. What requires a god is the actual existence of external instructions that confer resaons to comply to all. .

Unless those instructions come to us through the evolutionary process. No external agent required.