Not Convinced Determinism Makes Sense of Moral Responsibility. Convince Me It Does

[Mudhammam]

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It seems that one of the strongest selling points for theism is moral responsibility and free will, oftentimes in a form of the Moral argument for God's existence. However, I think its safe to say that scientific research has thoroughly vindicated the old philosophical notion of determinism, which necessarily negates the traditional (if not incoherent) idea that man is *actually* free to choose his thoughts/behaviors. Determinism is held by the majority of atheists I've encountered and many of them also hold to some idea of moral absolutes, which in my mind entails duties or responsibilities. Can someone explain to me how determinists define free will differently than it has been traditionally understood and how humans can be held morally responsible for actions they were not actually the cause for?

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So... if our mind is deterministic, how can we be held accountable for what it does? Is that it?

We can, because we're dealing with two different layers of "we" in one sentence.
The low level layer is pure neuron firing...
The higher layer contains our experiences, our memories, our personality, our sensory information and decides on a behavior, based on those. Some of those decisions are made in a split second, almost automatically... others require some "cpu cycles" to gather everything. The potential punishment is one of the factors that have to go in that processing!

This is where the current scientific consensus is leading... not that it's there yet, but... it's where it's going...

Thank you for replying. I'm surprised the other responses consisted only of ignorance of the philosophical problem and the ready embrace of moral relativism. Many of the "New Atheists" obviously don't agree with postmodernism and neither do I. In fact, the only way to accuse religion of promoting evil (rather than merely going "left") is to have some objective compass of morality by which to judge religious teachings as immoral. As to your point about the potential punishment that goes into our brain processes, I'm not really sure how that's relevant. Can atheists justify moral duties--in conjunction with determinism--why a person OUGHT to do something, even if doing so results in punishment for that individual instead of reward? Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris seem to hold that determinism and moral duties can co-exist, unless I've misunderstood their views, and I'd like to understand that better.