Atheism and morality

[MindForgedManacle]

Yes they have. Me. I have presented arguments that establish that morality requires a god. Unless you actually address those arguments and show something to be wrong with the premises (which involves more than just nay saying) then I have done exactly as you asked. Deny that morality instructs and provide supporting considertaions. Deny that moral norms have inescapable rational authority and provide supporting evidence. Unless you can do that you're just nay saying. You just dislike the conclusion and infer that the argument must be faulty because a conclusion you dislike can't possible be true (or so I suggest).

Then it would seem prudent in pointing to the pists in question, given the 45 pages of posts in the thread.

You think you can refute an argument with a head count do you? Even if every single philosopher thinks that morality does not require a god it does if my arguments are valid and sound. And that's that. You can head count all you want, it will never show there to be something wrong with the arguments.

Okay, so now you either didn't read closely enough, or you're lying, because I explicitly stated that "Now this obviously does not make it false that morality requires a deity [...]" Christ man.

YOu acknowledge this to try and cover yourself. But then why mention the numbers unless you think it of some relevance?

I specifically noted that all that it does is show that there is good reason to find the claim dubious if the academic support for the claim is in the red. Relevant, yes. Falsifying, no... as I said before.

YOu do realise that rival metaethical views - those that are defended in the literature - are all hopeless? you do realise that? You do realise that this is recognised by the philosophers who defend them? You do realise that most of contemporary metaethical debate involves merely showing that your own favoured position is only slightly less bonkers than its nearest rival?? You do realise that moral nihilism or error theory - the view that morality does not exist - is growing in popularity among moral philosophers precisely due to the apparent inability of any rival analysis to respect morality's core features?? Perhaps most philosophers are atheists. Perhaps most moral philosophers are. But one thing is also for certain: most moral philosophers recognise that there are incredible difficulties reconciling morality with an atheistic world view and none, NONE would be so foolish as to suggest that it has been done to anything remotely close to everyone's satisfaction!!!

NONE of which I affirmed wasn't the case. In fact if I recall, I specifically said that what is actually important is that there are major problems with theistic accounts of morality and defenses of particular meta-ethical stances, and that whether or not an atheistic worldview can account for our intuition of morals is rather irrelevant to their truth or falsity.

We have a moral sense. It gives us the impression that there are instructions with which we have inescapable reason to comply.
There is only one way that I can see such things could be a reality and that is if a god exists.
This is evidence that such a god exists in the same way that your visual sense is evidence that there is an outside world.

Again, you're making this odd jump from 'we have this moral sense we've inescapable obligations' to therefore that sense reflects something actually true about reality. And then you claim that because you cannot think of any other way to account for them sans-God, they're true.

...No. That's an argument from ignorance. Aside from the fact that such a sense could merely be wrong, it can likewise have an evolutionary explanation for that sense, i.e it could've been that it was merely useful for species propagation.


I'll get the rest in a bit; my phone was slowing to a crawl in this text box.