General question about the possibility of objective moral truth

[LastPoet]

Do tell us chad, what more are we?

[mdpar3]

Ok, there are obviously 2 sides here. I only have one question. If you don't believe in God, what if you are wrong and go to hell? It only takes a minute to be saved so that you can be sure.

[LastPoet]

I want hell.

[LastPoet]

Sounds better than to live in a world full of sanctimonious bullshitters.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Ok, there are obviously 2 sides here. I only have one question. If you don't believe in God, what if you are wrong and go to hell? It only takes a minute to be saved so that you can be sure.

I agree! You should take a moment to accept Cthulhu as your personal devourer. Just to be sure.

[robvalue]

Ok, there are obviously 2 sides here. I only have one question. If you don't believe in God, what if you are wrong and go to hell? It only takes a minute to be saved so that you can be sure.

There are infinite sides, since there are an infinite number of possible gods. And for each of those gods, there is an infinite number of things you may need to do in order for them to reward you rather than punish you; that is if they have any interest in you at all.

Your chances of picking the correct God, and the correct way to please it, are zero. And that's if there's only one God. If there's more than one, your odds get worse...

No wait, they can't get worse. Still zero.

Also, any God that is impressed by someone pretending to believe in them and pretending to worship them is too stupid to be called a god.

[LastPoet]

Ah pascal wager... If I had a euro for everytime I've heard it...

[robvalue]

Indeed!

As for morality, it's subjective. Morality is about "good" and "bad" actions, and until you define what those words mean, it doesn't mean a thing. You first need to say what the goal of morality is, and then you can compare actions to see which best serves that goal. It so happens that humans' ideas about that goal overlap a lot, which is no coincidence. But take any two people who disagree on the basic goal, and neither can say they are objectively right.

People mistake this overlap of goals due to evolution for magic, or some mystical abstract moral code woven into the universe. It is neither.

[Faith No More]

I think, every human being who thinks about morality has to admit, that his feelings of what is right or wrong, are – if he is honest to himself – claiming to be more than just a subjective feeling. If a fighter of the IS is knocking at my door with the intention to cut off my head then I will hardly think: “OK, in my opinion it’s wrong what he wants to do, but in his own opinion it is right – so, at the end we are both equal and none of us is more right with his point of view than the other.” –Honestly, I will insist, that I AM the one who see the things OBJECTIVELY right in that moment and not the IS fighter. But I can only be right with that if morality actually can be true in itself.
If morality has NO truth in itself, then our own feelings about Right and Wrong are cheating us.

To understand morality you have to understand how we, as humans beings, develop it. Neuroscience shows that the brain is born with the capacity for morality, but it has to learn just what exactly is moral through social cues. Our neurons develop in a manner that is affected by what we experience and perceive, and the part of the brain that determines morality develops based upon what it picks up as moral from its surrounding environment. That's why it "feels" like killing is inherently wrong, because your brain has developed in an environment that found it extremely morally unacceptable. You've developed over time your sense of right and wrong through your neural structures, so that's why something can feel so profoundly wrong.

Now, of course you're going to run into universal themes that pop up throughout different cultures, because much of our ethical values are a result of problems that humankind has run into throughout the centuries, such as resource management and the concept of ownership. Each culture is going to face similar problems, so similar ethical values are going to be found in different cultures. If you study various cultures throughout history you'll find that ethics vary greatly.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Michael, I have been participating on this forum, off and on, for about three years. As another has pointed out, the objectivity and subjectivity of morality has indeed been extensively discussed. However, that repetition has allowed me to make a careful study of how atheists generally respond when asked about the source of moral guidance.

It never fails to amaze me what total dicks, you theists who think you're erudite, are to us. I guess the good news of people like you is that, by talking like an asshole, you forfeit the right to call us arrogant and "too intellectual", like most of your less-intelligent compatriots like to do. You do forfeit that right, right?

Their first approach is to present various straw man arguments they feel undermine biblical and/or theistic sources and standards.

They re-present the Eurythro dilemma which is only problematic for polytheistic religions and does not apply to monotheism.

You meant the Euthyphro dilemma, I'm pretty sure, referencing Plato... but it has no distinction between polytheism and monotheism, in that it only asks which end is which, the cart or the horse, in declaring morals are from god(s) or god(s) are from morals. So it probably felt good for you to throw out a complex word, there, pal, but at least get it right. It's not atheists who presented this idea, or who worry about this idea, because it asks the question of whether something is inherently good because God commanded it. Obviously, we think there are no gods, so this has nothing to do with us.

The point to Mosaic laws governing slavery and harsh punishments inconsistent with modern sensibilities willfully ignoring specific dispositional eras and the Moses’s temporary appointment to the divine council for governing an ancient Hebrew theocracy.

They accuse God of crimes against humanity ignoring the need to eradicate the institutionalized injustice and perversity of irreversibly corrupted cultures and how that requires choosing between what is bad and what would be worse.

Etc. Etc.

"Dispositional" eras? WHAT!?!

You mean, I presume again, "dispensational eras", which is just an evangelical apologist's way of trying to explain why God didn't just tell the Hebrews, "don't own people" while He was telling them not to make graven images and not to covet. It's excuse-making, and ridiculous on its face.

God already prohibited things everyone else did at the time of the dispensation... e.g. eating bacon/shellfish, or worshiping multiple gods, or making idols. It'd hardly be a difficult thing to expect the Eternal Lord Creator to tell the Hebrews, "Lo, for even as thou wert slaves in Egypt, whom I freed from bondage, Thou shalt have no people as captives, nor ever permit other human beings to be owned in the lands which I have given thee, having delivered thee from slavery out of the land of Egypt. Thus saith the Lord." (Easy peasy, and why your dispensationalism -- seriously, learn the word, so I don't have to teach you your theology, next time-- does not explain jack-all.)

Next they try to fill the absence of God with unsupported secular values. They have four general takes: absurdism and social cohesion, moral instinct, and enlightened self-interest. Only the absurdists have a consistent moral theory; all the rest irrationally hold mutually exclusive beliefs, as follows:

Those who refer to the evolutionary advantages of social cohesion nevertheless deny that humans have an essential human nature.

Those who appeal to positive emotional instincts, like empathy, ignore other less noble sentiments like disgust, covetousness, and envy.

Those who look to enlightened self-interest do not acknowledge a hierarchy of values terminating in a highest Good.

So while many atheists often portray themselves as the paragons of reason and defenders of logic, their own attempts to source moral values reveal how they must plagiarize religion rely on whim and sentiment to justify their favorite moral theories.

I'm not exactly sure what "unsupported secular values" means, in this context, so I'll leave that one alone. I'll just address your four "general takes" in order:

1) Absurdism, or the belief that there are no inherent moral values, is indeed consistent, despite Kierkegaard's objections to the idea. Where he posited that "[t]he absurd terminates negatively before the sphere of faith", we would argue that faith is a person's psychological opiate against the pain of recognizing that humanity, the society we build (for better or worse), and the way we treat each other in this finite life, is all that is, and all that we have. Without "objective", external morality, it is up to us individually and as societies, to determine what is suitable to our own moral conscience, as we are raised to believe in various values as being necessary ones, while others are common to all selfish yet thinking beings who wish to get along together in this world. However, I'm guessing that you refer to Camus' notion that we are just all one step away from killing ourselves... which is, frankly, the absurd part.

2) Of course humans have an "essential human nature"... we're humans. Why would you think we'd argue anything else? Why even present this argument? I'm assuming you mean "sin-nature", the preferred religious apologetics term for this concept, but it's pretty clear from evolutionary psychologists who've looked at this issue (even before the term was invented as a field of study) that humans are a competing set of motivations, some of which are selfish and some of which are social instincts, which of course some individuals lack (we call them sociopaths, specifically because they do not develop this instinct for social empathy and cohesion that the rest of us evolved). How each society decides to balance the selfish desires of each individual with the need for group cohesion essentially defines morality, or "what is moral" by the perspective and terms of that society.

3) Ignore? Um, no. We don't ignore them. We assume them. See above.


4) I have no idea what, "look to enlightened self-interest" or "a hierarchy of values terminating in a highest Good" even means, let alone what you think it means. On the hunch that you mean you feel that the Bible or some other Holy Book contains the best possible moral guide for "highest Good", I'll refer you to the dispensationalist bull-hockey that you tried to peddle, before.

So in essence, that entire load of tripe you posted boils down to "God made morals and atheists inconsistently try to claim they are moral but they're really just stealing their morals from the Godly". Am I getting all that?

Because if that's what you're trying to say, you're not just wrong, you're an asshole.