Atheism and morality

[max-greece]

Rhythm already responded to this, but I will too since you seem to have ignored his response. You have, in one foul swoop, cut the head off of your own argument. You replied that the agent involved when we respond to pain is ourselves, which shows that your desire to ascribe an external agent as the cause of morality is entirely unnecessary. We are the agent.

This is getting tedious. Morality has more than one feature. One feature is that it instructs. Only an agent can instruct, so morality is an agent then. That does not yet establish that morality is a god, for it leaves open the possibility that morality could be us or our community or some such. Okay??

Another feature of morality is that its instructions are ones that confer reasons for compliance whatever one's interests. So if morality instructs you to X then it is a conceptual truth that Xing is something you have reason to do, and reason to do in virtue of morality instructing you to do it.

Your instructions, my instructins, and the instructions of communities do not have this feature. Therefore moral instructions are not the instructions of ourselves or our communities.

It is to satisfy THAT feature that morality has to be identified with the instructions of a god.

If by God you mean conscience then OK - otherwise no. My conscience dictates for me to do things that are not necessarily in my interest. Still no god.