Moral Argument for God's Existence

[bennyboy]

How do you go from individual objective moralities to a group objective morality? If we can't do that, we basically have "people are different, and they do stuff that affects others."

Guys, I have loved reading your back and forth on this. Since this above quote appears to be how the world actually is, how does that fit into the framework you're constructing?

My point in saying that is that its seems to me more a-moralistic than a good description of morality. Or, to put it another way, "moral" is just a label for the "stuff that affects others" that people in a population generally accept: there's nothing objectively good or bad about it, it's just a description of state.

Finally, about individual morality vs group morality. As is indicated by most of my arguments, I regard morality as more of a private concern than a public concern.

What if there WERE no social context? What if the entire world died of the not-genkaus disease, and only you were left? Would it make sense to say then that any of your behaviors were moral or immoral? I would say no-- the word "morality" only makes sense when individuals are being considered in a group context.

Let's take a case study: a famine and a fruit. There are in the store a dozen people hoping to find some food, and in the store there remains only one measly orange. Now, we can assume that ALL the people want that one orange, and that they all recognize that the others want it as well. So what's the moral response? Give it to the weakest, who is most likely to die of starvation in the near future? Let the strongest take it because he is needed to protect the weaker members of the group? Divide it among all, so that nobody gets enough energy to live another day, but it's "fair?" Should men defer to women, or single people to parents?

The God idea, to some degree, can be seen as an arbitrary objective measure, much as the cubic centimeter is. A purely Christian culture might decide to reconcile the many objective moralities (I call them subjective) to an independent measure: scripture. And if they've all been raised as Christians, they don't even need to ask "How shall we decide who gets the orange?" Instead, they'll be flipping pages looking for the answer. And here's where the morality kicks in: 11 will voluntarily die, giving the 1 the orange, in honor of the social contract called Christian morality.

Now, I don't happen to think scripture is any less ambiguous than a room of 12 hungry people, and I don't think this process will work. And that's why you end up with priests. Their moral weight has nothing to do with their own behavior, or an actual endowment of God. It has more to do with the need to represent the competing mores of individuals in a single deciding entity.