The Problem of Evil, Christians, and Inconsistency

[Mudhammam]

Pickup. You ask why we would consider something virtuous. That to me is something I explore through my faith. I do have a trust that God is good (something all faiths share, despite those faiths coming from times of great hardships). And I trust that God calls us all to goodness, to virtue. Though we have the life and teachings of Jesus to help guide us as Christians, I think all people sense that in their conscience. The Catholic Church puts it rather poetically ....

"Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment. For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His conscience is man's most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths."

I could be wrong, but I sense that all people who are concerned about doing the right thing will end up with a lot in common, though the are always points of tension (the tension between justice and mercy being a key one, and that is still a tension and point of theological difference within Christianity).

So I explore virtue through my faith, through scripture (especially the life and teachings of Jesus), and through prayer and being quiet enough to let my conscience speak.

How would you explore goodness as an atheist? (And I don't mean that as saying you can't).

I'm a consequentialist, so I view good/evil and right/wrong as ultimately boiling down to pleasure/pain. My problem with the faith approach to questions of morality is that faith can lead to very disastrous actions, and there's no rebutting "faith in goodness and virtue" if a person's ideas of goodness and virtue deviate from the actual consequences of pleasure/pain in the real world (as they often seem to do). From my view, however, moral perceptions can (and in my view should) be corrected through reason because my basic assumption (pleasure=good, pain=evil) has measurable correlates in the physical and mental domain. Obviously, it's not so simple as I'm making it sound but that's the gist of it. One further point: basing morality on this rationale rather then some sort of vague notion of God's goodness allows us to argue in terms of universal morals, granted we accept that reason, if it is to be reason at all, must be consistent and universal. All that is to say is that the Golden Rule (and its reverse) are logical axioms. On the contrary, on the theistic view, which is supposed to be anti-relativistic, I find a wide variety of moral beliefs, not only between religions but in the same God himself (example, Old Testament versus New or personal revelations).