keyser_soze

Indeed. And such a pitiless and petty deity's code of morality at that?

Hawkingfan

As K already pointed out, morality developed with evolution. In order to maximize survival, early man had to form social groups. Morals came from the desire in those groups to pass ones genes along. Basically, if you behaved badly, your chances were not so good.

Jamie_L

No one possesses a moral standard that exists apart from human beings. All moral "standards" are passed from human being to human being, or invented by human beings. There is no external reference that we can check.

All morality is based on a) what an individual thinks is moral and b) what other people have taught that individual is moral.

So, what makes it more logical to use a "standard" passed to you by a person in authority than to use a "standard" passed to you by your parents, or even a "standard" put together in your spare time through personal philosophy?

Jamie

Philosoft

How did this topic get in here? Off to MF&P...

Ganymede

It is perfectly possible to lack belief in the 10 commandments being a direct communication from God, while still believing that it is wrong to kill, steal, covet thy neighbours farm animals, etc.

bd-from-kg

The question that Violent Messiah really has in mind, I think, (and which, as Jinto pointed out, has been posed many, many times before) really has nothing to do with the Ten Commandments, or with anything else in the Bible for that matter. What’s troubling him was described very well by C. S. Lewis in his book Miracles (in Chapter 5):

Here Lewis mistakenly assumes that the moral theory known as Emotivism is the only viable alternative to objective moral theories (which is more or less excusable since Emotivism was in vogue at the time he wrote this). But that isn't really essential to the point he's making.

The problem Lewis is getting at is not that, absent a belief in God, men cannot find any reason to act in the ways generally described as “moral”, (obviously they can and do) but that it seems that, in a purely naturalistic world, there cannot be any objective foundation for moral judgments. For example, take the sorts of things that Saddam Hussein is said to have done – ordering men to be thrown into a machine for shredding plastics, say, or torturing men’s wives and children in order to get them to talk or threatening to do so to get them to do what he wanted. Although almost everyone recoils in horror from such things, it would seem that (in a purely naturalistic world) we have no basis for saying that such things are objectively wrong. In fact, it would seem that calling such things "wrong" is ultimately meaningless, except in the sense that it expresses our own feelings or attitudes toward them.

Thus what theists like Violent Messiah find unacceptable is the idea that there is no transcendent moral reality – no set of “moral facts” which is completely independent of what anyone (at least any human) thinks or believes, or even what any human would think or believe under appropriate conditions (for example, if they had more knowledge and understanding). Although it’s logically possible that there might be such a transcendent moral reality in a world without God, almost no one finds this idea at all plausible. It would mean that there is a set of facts which are not facts about the “physical world” and which have no source or origin whatsoever - which seems unintelligible. In fact, it seems to be impossible to give any coherent account of the nature of such supposed “facts”.

In the end, we can only agree with VM that atheism does pretty much imply that there is no transcendent moral reality. Atheists have mostly learned to come to terms with this fact one way or another. Although they generally continue to use moral language, they simply do not mean the same thing when they say that someone ought to do something, or that an action is right or wrong, as theists imagine that they mean. In fact, they consider most theists’ understanding of what such statements mean to be ultimately incoherent.

Eudaimonist

Eh....

Please guys, don't lump all atheists together like this. Some atheists have a philosophical basis for their morality (Objectivism, Eudaimonism, Existentialism, Stoicism, Secular Humanism, and others), and some simply adopt cultural standards, or use common sense, and leave it at that.

(The variety of atheistic ethics possible doesn't mean that atheists feel that "anything goes", any more than the large number of religious moral codes mean that theists feel that "anything goes".)

sourdough

I think you need to read here;
www.atheists.org
click on atheism

DRFseven

Atheist, theists, subjectivists, objectivists; we all have the same basis for morality - we learn to think of some things are good and bad, right and wrong. I don't care if it's from books, preachers, parents, teachers, observation, inspirational speakers, treks in the woods, religious experience, drugs, the school of hard knocks, long periods of contemplation; it's all learned through personal circumstances. Those of us who possess any sort of morality truly feel there is a rightness or a wrongness to certain behaviors because we have learned to feel that way. Learning to feel that right and wrong is always the basis and is laid in childhood.

bd-from-kg

DRFseven:

Either you’re mistaking what VM means by a “basis of morality” or you’re just changing the subject; at any rate you’re not using the term “basis” in the same sense that he is. What he’s saying is that (in a purely naturalistic world) there is no objective basis for saying that something is good or bad, right or wrong. Thus, although there are presumably causal factors that can account, say, for Smith’s thinking of a given act as “right” and Jones’s thinking of that same act as “wrong”, there is no objective way to decide between these views. Contrast this with Smith’s belief that lead is denser than gold vs. Jones’s belief that it isn’t. Again there are presumably causal factors that account for this difference in opinion, but we can also determine objectively who’s right. And if Smith’s belief is based on the facts that make it true, he has an objective basis for it. VM is saying that in a naturalistic world it seems that there cannot be any such objective facts that make some moral opinions true and others false. Moreover, it seems to me that he’s absolutely right about this. That is, what he means when he says that a given act is “right” is that the statement “This act is right” is objectively true – i.e., that it “corresponds to reality”. This requires that there be a “transcendent moral reality”, which is independent of what anyone thinks or feels, for it to correspond to. And in a naturalistic world it seems clear that there can be no such thing, and that therefore when he calls an act “right” or “wrong” his statement is meaningless or nonsensical because it is based on false assumptions about the nature of reality. In other words, his moral beliefs are meaningless in the same way that beliefs about the present whereabouts of the king of France are meaningless because they are based on the false assumption that there is a king of France.

But this is exactly the sort of thing that, as VM correctly points out, doesn’t make sense under naturalistic assumptions. The only reasonable interpretation of “there is a rightness or wrongness to certain behaviors” is that certain behaviors have the property of “rightness” and others the property of “wrongness”. And this is exactly what cannot be – in fact, doesn’t even makes sense – under naturalistic assumptions.

We do in fact all feel at times that a certain action is “just plain wrong”. Not just that we disapprove of it, or that it fills us with horror, or that we personally have some particular reaction to it, but that it is wrong in itself. And this is the kind of feeling that we must give up as being completely mistaken if we adopt a naturalistic philosophy. We must accept that there is no such thing as an act being “wrong in itself”, independently of what anyone thinks or feels.

What VM (and Lewis in the passage quoted earlier) are arguing is that naturalism must be wrong because this conclusion is obviously false; some actions are “just plain wrong”, and would be even if everyone in the world approved of them wholeheartedly. I think that they’re wrong about this, but the argument is perfectly valid: if some actions are “just plain wrong”, then naturalism cannot be true. One cannot accept naturalism and continue to believe that some acts are “really” wrong, as opposed to believing that one disapproves of them, or that most or all people disapprove of them, or that most or all people would disapprove of them if certain conditions were to hold. And therefore those who are unable to give up the idea that some acts are “just plain wrong” – i.e., “intrinsically” or “objectively” wrong –are logically compelled to reject naturalism. Of course, a rejection of naturalism doesn’t logically entail theism, but rejecting naturalism on these grounds is almost always accompanied by an acceptance of theism, for the reasons I mentioned earlier.