Atheism and morality

[genkaus]

Why do you keep suggesting I am making a 'god of the gaps' type case? That's bonkers. I'm not arguing like that at all. You're simply displaying a kind of prejudice - you're assuming that if someone has argued for the existence of a god they just 'must' be committing some kind of fallacy.

The argument is quite straightforward. It is that something we experience - morality - is composed of the instructions and favourings of a god.
Our experience may, of course, be a hallucination. It is if atheism is true. But our moral experiences provide defeasible evidence for a god.
I presented my argument in the form of some deductively valid syllogisms. That means you HAVE to deny one or more of the premises to resist my conclusion. It isn't enough to dislike it.

One argument goes as follows (this argument does NOT establish that moral instructions are those of a god, but it gets us on the way):

1. Morality is composed (at least in part) of instructions and favourings
2. Only an agent - something minded, something capable of believing and desiring - can issue instructions or favour something
3. Morality is composed of the instructions and favourings of an agent (or agents)

Premise 1 is non-negotiable. I'm just defining what I'm talking about. If you mean something else by morality - if you are talking about something that doesn't instruct or favour - then you're just not talking about what I am talking about.

Premise 2 seems solid to me. After all it is absolutely certain that agents can issue instructions and favour things - for I am one and I can do those things. And nobody has yet come up with an example of a real instruction that has no agent behind it as a source. Indeed, it seems quite apparent then whenever we discover that there is no agency behind some apparent instruction that the instruction is, well, merely apparent and not real.

Here's where you go wrong on both premises.

Your first premise is correct. What you understand by it, is not. Morality is composed of instructions and favorings. That does not mean that it instructs or favors. We are talking about the same thing. A system of ideas containing instructions and favorings regarding our actions and behavior. To deduce from "contains X" that is "does X" is deductively invalid.

Second premise goes wrong on the following point. The issue and the acquisition of an instruction are two different things. An instruction can exist which has both an issuer and an acquirer, but it doesn't require both to be an instruction. To consider the snail on a map analogy, even if a snail accidentally spells out the words "here there be gold" on a map, a map-reader will acquire an instruction of "go here for gold" even though there is no intelligent being issuing it. The instruction may or may not turn out to be correct, but it is an instruction nonetheless. Here the instruction is formed as a result of combining a fact with the receiver's own desires and beliefs. Similarly, the instruction "don't touch the fire" would be the result of a fact (fire burns) and your desire (not to get burned). You don't need an agent to issue the instruction.

Which is your conclusion should be, "morality is composed of instructions and favorings by an agent or for an agent or both".

The second argument goes as follows.

1. Moral instructions have inescapable rational authority (they are instructions that anyone to whom they apply has reason to comply whatever his or her ends).
2. Only the instructions of an agent who has an immense amount of control over our interests in an afterlife would have this feature.
3. Moral instructions are the instructions of an agent of the kind described in 2.

Premise 1 of that argument articulates a conceptual truth about morality. I am happy for someone to dispute it, but I want to see their evidence that it is false (there's stacks that it is true).
Premise 2 - well, challenge away. But so far as I can see satisfying this condition does require positing a god and an afterlife. There seems no other plausible way of doing it.

Premise 1 is wrong and the existence of many, many moral instructions without any inescapable rational authority behind them proves it. For example, here's a moral instruction for you: "You should send me all your money". It has all the features of a moral instruction as argued in the previous argument. It is a favoring, issued by an agent (me), to an agent (you).

You never established that a moral instruction by definition must have a justification for it - much less a rational and inescapable one - therefore, this is a moral instruction. Your response to this has been that if it doesn't have a rational and inescapable justification, then it is not a moral instruction - which is a classic example of begging the question. The fact is, as we see in moral instructions everywhere, having a rational inescapable authority behind it is not and has never been a requirement for an instruction to be a moral one. That is not a conceptual truth about morality and your saying it doesn't make it so.

Premise 2 is wrong because, as we've also seen in the previous argument, there doesn't need to be an agent issuing the instructions. Even if a particular, hypothetical morality had an inescapable, rational authority behind it, that could just as easily be a law of nature. It doesn't even require a existence of afterlife. If a hypothetical law of nature was that you'd feel guilty and tormented every time you commit a certain kind of act, then the entire system of morality would be built by the the fact of this law and your own desire not to feel guilty or tormented. This would be just as rationally and inescapably authoritative as your hypothetical agent.

Another problem is your conception of what it means to be "rationally inescapably authoritative". You assume that such an object, be it a law of nature or a vengeful agent, would create a reason that you have to comply with regardless of your personal desires. But that's a pipe dream to begin with. Any such reason is conditioned upon your own desires to begin with. The reason provided by your vengeful god is conditioned upon my desire not to be tortured in afterlife. The reason given in karmic morality is conditioned upon my desire not to suffer in the next life and the reason given in biological morality is conditioned on my desire not to feel guilt or torment. Such conditions are not inescapably compelling. Which means even your own morality does not give us a reason to comply regardless of our own ends. If providing an inescapable reason to comply was a necessary feature of moral instruction, then even your own moral instructions wouldn't qualify.

This still doesn't establish the existence of a god. But what it does do is establish that our moral sense data is defeasible evidence for a god. And it establishes that morality and atheism are incompatible. Not moral sensations and beliefs- those are perfectly compatible with atheism - but those sensations constitute a hallucination if atheism is true, and the beliefs are all false if atheism is true.

You're not entitled to have this argument fail. You're not entitled to there being some error in it. Be open minded and follow reason, not fashion.

Given the utter and complete failure of your arguments, moral sense data is not defeasible evidence for god. Given that our moral sense data could refer to man-made morality, morality derived from natural law or karmic law, I'd say that it is completely compatible with atheism.

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A Karmic universe that lacks any god in it does not contain morality.

Yes it does.

Morality instructs and favours.

No, it contains instructions and favorings. I've explained the difference to you many times already. What it contains does not imply that it does or doesn't do anything.

That's absolutely essential to it. And a law of nature - or supernature - does not instruct or favour. How can they? They are not agents. They have nothing they want you to do. They are just descriptions of what happens. THey enable us to make predictions (or can do). But they don't make the predictions, we do!

And those predictions, when combined with our own desires, lead to the creation of morality. We are the agents who interpret the instructions based on our own desires.

This simple point destroys the karmic view. Morality's instructional nature is essential to it, and the Karmic view cannot capture it. So it doesn't even get out of the starting gate.

It can - and does, if it has agents with personal desires derive those instructions based on karmic law.