(June 26, 2015 at 12:21 pm)PiousPaladin Wrote: It is the natural extension of a rejection of the absolute. If life just came out of nowhere then everything is pointless and objective, why shouldn't we just do as we please?
Morality cannot exist detached from God, and we see this in the godless death culture across the western world today.
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How can morality be attributed to a being that shows no demonstrative evidence for existence?
The bible?
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Absolutism?
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Absolute moral law never refers to what humans actually do, such as what they say or what they think. It refers to what they ought to do. But such a law, even if it exists, is irrelevant and unknowable. Moral law is only relevant to the extent human beings are affected by it; some abstract law that doesn't affect the physical world just doesn't affect anything in it, like human thought. Furthermore, it isn't clear why it is "moral" as it has no relation with human morality. You might as well say that there is an abstract law that says how things are "Wright" or "Rong" - empty words that have no relation to human concepts such as "right" or "wrong".
The important part is not that god gave the law, even if he did, since what matters is not the law itself but rather its relation to human thought. The only meaningful sense of god making a moral law is that he made our moral nature. For example, He might have put in us a moral sense that works to identify what he deems right, or perhaps intervenes by whispering in our mind's ear (that, too, would then be part of human nature - it would be part of human nature in practice to frequently hear god's voice, and in constitution to identify it with goodness).
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the god who created us was malicious, and implanted in us a flawed sense of morality, one that says that right is wrong. In what sense would we be wrong? Not in any human sense. "True" morality might as well talk about "Wright" and "Rong" as far as we are concerned, it has no relation to human morality in this scenario. Because of this there can be no absolute morality. Even a god cannot provide anything except morality by decree. But saying that something is moral does not make it so, and making creatures with that sense of morality doesn't make it any more moral either. Morality is inherently relative - it is dictated by what someone considers right. Even an all powerful and perfectly good deity cannot be morally correct in some absolute sense; He can only be right in respect to His own thinking, which offers no real moral superiority to others' views except under His own morality. We aren't left with a lawgiver, but instead a dictator, passing judgment on his own creation by his own morality. This does not make his morality "right". If it conflicts with human morality, it is wrong by human standards, it is wrong for humans. god's nature is therefore irrelevant to morality.
I also addressed a much more plausible explanation invoking true Occam's Razor a few days ago that I invite you to review here:
http://atheistforums.org/post-972999.html#pid972999