Moral Argument for God's Existence

[bennyboy]

Or, there is the third option I've presented - figure out the fundamental drive characteristic of being a moral agent and figure out what the necessary premises are for the existence of this moral agent. The moral code derived from this would be objective and universal in its application to all moral agents.

You'll have to specifiy what you think this "fundamental drive" characteristic of being a moral agent is. It seems to me that you'll have to (arbitrarily) look for whatever you think is moral behavior, and then define the processes that arrive at it. For example, you'll have to define morality as "the willingness to serve the greater good even at the expense of the self," or whatever, and then look for the behavioral mechanism that arrives at altruistic ideas or behaviors. But this is really just subjective morality with access to a microscope.

How would you discover this fundamental drive without first subjectively defining morality, throwing yourself into a vicious circle?

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And why would that god's desire be any more representative of an objective moral code than that of a human?

Because where there are variations in mores among the individuals in a group, then situations like food shortages lead to moral conflict. There must be some non-subjective "standard measure" of morality, so everyone can refer to it and say, "Okay, the cripple gets the orange" or whatever.

The God idea, or more specifically a social institution based on the God idea, provides priests, whose job is (among others) to reconcile moral tensions by pronouncing God's will. Therefore, it has been established that the various individuals in the community will treat the subjective morality of the priest as an objective measure for everyone else.

In turn, all priests, when pondering especially difficult moral issues, should turn to higher levels of moral authority, until you're left with the pope. He's infallible by definition-- not because he makes decisions anyone else would make and call good, but because in a Catholic community, his will is taken as the standard measure, i.e. the ultimate social tie-breaker. His infallible because if he's not, then everyone's going to end up grabbing for the orange.

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Like I said before - there is no "objective morality of each individual". The part of the individual's morality that is objective - if a part is shown to be that - then it would be the same for the whole group and thus applicable in group context.

Not necessarily. That mechanism may be a device for taking experience and forming a world view, including ideas of what's "right." So even though the moral mechanism is objective (for example if you could exactly clone your brain and body and drop a million genkauses all over the world), the moral ideas that mediate behavior will still vary, and therefore be subjective.