Atheism and morality

[MindForgedManacle]

I would claim that a god exists.
However, my argument that morality requires a god does not, in itself, establish the existence of a god. It is part of a larger case.

Er, my post wasn't directed at you, was it?

If morality requires a god, then morality - our moral sense data - becomes defeasible evidence for a god.

Therein lies [part of] the problem, because no one has come close (in this thread anyway) to actually establishing that a sound moral framework requires a god, and a god of a certain sort no less. In fact, there are large problems with positing that, as some have already pointed out.

In addition, there is good evidence that this view holds in the philosophical community as well, seeing as most philosophers are atheists (~74%) and more than half are moral realists (~58%, IIRC). Now, that obviously doesn't make it false that morality necessitates a deity, but it does form some good reasons for thinking that such is not a very widely held belief in the field (unless nearly every moral philosopher is a believer, which they aren't).

In the same way that if you are wondering if there is any celery in your cupboard and you find that there does seem to be a jar of marmite in your cupboard, and that marmite is made, in part, of celery you have just discovered that there is indeed some celery in your cupboard (even if you didn't notice it at first because it was in the form of marmite).

I don't think that comparison is very good, since it's referring to empirical evidence that would seem to corroborate an inferencd, while the one in question relates to, as you said, a moral sense which is more abstract.

Now, most of you atheists implicitly recognise the importance of reconciling the reality of morality with your worldview. For you recognise, at some inchoate poorly thought-out level, that unless you can do this your worldview has a serious deficiency. Something that appears very real, has to be considered a hallucination. This damages the credibility of the view.

Again, this just seems, I dunno, fractally wrong. For starters, atheists are quite likely to think that morality already DOES (or could) fit quite well into the godless worldview and that theists have the real troubles, especially of the Abrahamic faiths. You also quite INcorrectly state that we recognize that bar morality, our worldview would be deficient by, because that assumes that simply because something appears to be - in William Lane Craig's parlay - "intuitively obvious", sans the truth of that impression the worldview is discredited. But that would seem to grossly ignore nearly the ENTIRE history of Western philosophy AND science, because both have dealt practically killing blows to this. If I had to rattle off a few, they'd be:

*Hume's dissection of the problems of causality

*The is-ought problem


*Scientific discoveries showing our impressions of what seemed to be the case being outright wrong, like whether or not the Earth moves or the simultaneity of events (Einstein).

It damages it because to most of us morality appears more real than the reports of our sense of touch and sight (after all, it is conceivable that those are just hallucinations - it is conceivable, very conceivable, that I am dreaming right now). Yet it is far harder to conceive that there is nothing right or wrong with anything. That's precisely why the moral argument for a god's existence has real teeth and precisely why most of you feel it so important to deny what I am saying. it is why philoosphers are currently furiously working away at trying to show that morality is compatible with atheism (and failing - just take a look at their bonkers theories).

Look at my above response.


Again, your inability to conceive of the falsity of an 'intuitively obvious' thing makes no difference to whether or not it is in fact false. Furthermore, it isn't all that hard at all to conceive of your 'moral sense' being naught but an illusion. This is why I find moral anti-realism to be a defensible position, even if I don't hold it (held by around ~30% of philosophers, if I remember correctly).

Whether or not moral theories of philosophers are 'bonkers', again, says nothing about whether or not they work. Hume's work on causality seems bonkers to me, but it still seems valid regardless.



Can we lower the post length people? My thumbs hurt.