(June 30, 2013 at 6:50 pm)Inigo Wrote: 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.
No, I disagree with you. Morality may instruct one to do something, but it does not require an invisible agent to do it. Humans and other animals make their own morals that they think up themselves. That doesn't require a god to tell you what is right and what is wrong. Not all Christians have the exact same morals, and the same can be said about other religions, as well as Atheists.
