Tenek

This wasn't directed at me, but I'll take a shot anyways.

You don't "know", absolutely, that murder is wrong. Murder is wrong because it is a selfish act which denies others that which is theirs.

I'd like to invoke Godwin's Law here. But it probably won't work.

Examine different people who get their morals from God. Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, suicide cultist, etc. (All fundementalist). Shouldn't they agree? No? Uh oh. You can set God as the absolute standard, but then you deny yourself any way of knowing what God's morality is. At least, currently.

If God told you to launch a nuke at Beijing, would you? (Assume He took such pesky things as security out of the picture.)

No, who are we to believe, my head, your head, somebody else's head? You can claim to have God's morals until you're blue in the face but so could I, and I declare that God says you are evil and should be killed immediately. Please refute.

Did God create logic? Or is it just innate?

Nobody professes Kant's work to be the Word of God. If you're going to advance something as a absolute standard of morality, you'd better have a damned good justification for it.

Oh, no you don't. Muslims and Hindus have their own Absolute Truths. There are two types of people in the world, those who claim to have God's Truth, and those who don't. Christians are but a part of the former. How is the morality in the Bible better than that in the Qu'ran? How are you going to judge which is better, your own flawed sense of morality? Uh oh.

There are, apparently, some people who have accepted God, but have not been chosen by Him...

Neither the acceptance of the many or rejection by the many makes an argument true. The educated majority, however, have much better arguments than I, which are not subject to the ad populem fallacy.

Prove to me that morals come from God. You're saying that the atheist worldview (whatever *that* is) is incorrect because morals come from God. I have never believed in God. I didn't get doctrine crammed down my throat from a young age. Yet I still have a sense of morality. Oddly enough, it's independent of religion. I will not accept so much as "Thou shalt not kill" solely on the basis of its being the alleged Word of God.

Perhaps basic, alterable morality is simply a consequence of self-awareness.

Ensign Steve

Because human life is intrinsicly valuable, and to murder somebody is to rob them of that valuable life.

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Just for sake of argument let us assume that morals do just come from our heads.

I never said that morals come from our heads. It is not necessaary for the sake of argument for us to assume that, because neither one of us thinks that is the case. That is one of the things we do agree upon, so to assume the opposite for the sake of argument is pointless.

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You are absolutely correct we do know they exist and we can’t agree on where they come from but that is the argument. Where do morals come from? You say your head. I say God. Who are we to believe your head or God?

I did not say they come from my head. Maybe you didn't get my joke. When I said "you know, the one's that come from my head" that was me teasing you, because you said they come from my head. But aside from my joke, I never seriously said I thought morals come from my head. I don't.

My point was that I don't profess to know where objective morals come from. I don't know where objective morals come from. I am not going to default and say "well, they must come from god, then" because I don't even believe that god exists. I might as well say morality comes from Santa Claus or leprechauns. From my point of view, each of those claims is equally absurd. What I said was, just because I don't know where they came from that does not mean I can't study them, explore them, and live by them. I can also theorize about where I think they may come from, but as yet I haven't come to a conclusion.

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You have already rejected him you are an atheist but that is beside the point. Let us assume just for argument that God does exist. ...

Let's not.

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You tell me not to quote scripture yet you quote Kant. Maybe I don’t agree with Kant.

I was using Kant as an example. There are many schools of thought that tell us where morals may have come from, besides God. Kant's was one of those, and I was citing it as an example. I never said I agree with him, or that you should. The difference is when you quote scripture at me, you are asserting it as fact.

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Let us clarify the debate. There are only two types of people in the world Christian and non-Christian. I am a Christian you are a non-Christian. The Islamic and Hindus are not Christians, you have add an unnecessary element to the argument.

This is the first time I've even heard you say you were Christian. I thought this argument was about god, not necessarily Christ, specifically. Hindus and Islamics believe in god, also, so they are not an unnecessary element to the argument. They are precisely what this argument is about.

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That is just the point God has not chosen everybody on the planet that is why there are some who have rejected him. But this is turning into a theological debate instead of a moral one. Let’s get back on the point.

In other words, let's get back to a point you can argue? No way, you're not getting off that easily. I expect an answer to at least one of the above 2 issues, or else I will consider your argument lost.

Not quite. I just didn't feel like typing out for the umpteenth time the same tired arguments that I use every time somebody tries to tell me I can't have morals without god. So instead, I tried to point you to a resource where a much more eloquent writer than me has explained it better than I could, and possibly in a way that you might understand. Tell me, did you read the piece?

I don't need to travel around the world to agree that it is round.

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This is what the debate is about. This is the issue which we disagree. Do morels require God. You asked me to give you evidence that they do. Well I could give material evidence tell I tern blue. I could, like you comet the fallacy ad populum and tell you that educated people since the beginning of time have believed morals require God. I could tell you that Gods morals have never changed and are the same as the ones we have today. But no mater how compelling the evidence you would not be convinced for you have purposed in your heart not to believe. So here is a question for you. Prove to me that morals come from any wear else but God. I believe you can not so give it your best shot.

You have given me no material evidence that morality requires a god.

Tell me, if the god of the bible is the god you are referring to, and his morals never change, why am I not allowed to own human slaves anymore?

pudgyfarmer

To Ensign Steve

I have to make an apology for not defining my terms at the beginning of this debate. I am a Bible believing Christian and the God I keep referring to is the God of the Bible.

“human life is intrinsically valuable”

Is it? Who told you so? How do you determine if something is intrinsic or not?

“I don’t know where objective morals come from”

You don’t know were your morals come from? So how do you determine what they are? This is getting interesting. Did you have an epiphany? Did they arrive UPS? Please inform me. From what source did you receive them?

“You have given me no material evidence that morality requires a god”

Ok. Here's my evidence. You have not and cannot give evidence that morals come from any wear else but God. In fact you have no clue wear they do come from.

Here’s my question. If you do not know wear morals come how do you determine what they are?

Nowhere357

I wonder if you are familiar with the words "reason" and "empathy"?

wordfailure

Not to mention "observation".

Ensign Steve

I don't have to be told that human life is valuable. There is a reason most people do not look forward to death, even those who believe there is an afterlife to go to. They feel their life on this earth is valuable in and of itself. As an atheist, that life is really freakin' valuable to me, as it is the only one I get.

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“I don’t know where objective morals come from” You don’t know were your morals come from? So how do you determine what they are? This is getting interesting. Did you have an epiphany? Did they arrive UPS? Please inform me. From what source did you receive them?

One does not need to know the source of objective morals in order to know they exist and study them. Normally I would give the nature of the universe as an example, but I refrained as I suspect you think god is also the creator of that, and that's not the debate. But scientists, cosmologists, who may or may not believe in god are able to study the universe and learn its nature, even if they cannot agree on its origin. The same goes for morality. We can agree that objective morals exist, even if we can't determine the origin.

How do I personally determine what they are? Well, that's a personal question, but I'll go ahead and share. I use a combination of instinct and logic. It doesn't feel good to hurt people. Does that mean hurting people is wrong? My instincts say yes. Why do I feel bad when I hurt somebody? Was I born with that instinct? Is guilt a result of the social construct of my upbringing? Maybe it was a combination of the two. Was it a gift from some god, like you say? I don't know. I don't have to know why. It is still the case, whether I know why it is or not.

You are seriously committing the fallacy of Argumentum ad ignorantiam. Argumentum ad ignorantiam means "argument from ignorance". That is arguing that something must be true, simply because it hasn't been proved false.

Just because I don't profess to know where morality comes from, that does not mean the answer automatically defaults to god. I could make that exact same non-argument to prove that morality comes from Santa Claus. You have not and cannot give evidence that morals come from anywhere else but Santa Claus. Or Bhudda, or Mohammed, for that matter.

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Here’s my question. If you do not know wear morals come how do you determine what they are?

I already answered that above. I will expand. I personally use a combination of instinct and logic. I also read many different theories and standpoints on the subject, by different philosophers from different cultures. Tell me, did you read the Plato piece? That's just one of them. I also enjoy engaging others in debates like this one, because I am challenged to think about what I believe and why.

For me, morality is a continual learning and growing experience. Morality is very important to me, and I put a lot of thought into it. I don't just let somebody arbitrarily assert morals at me, and at the same time, I do not assert morality to anybody else. "Why not?" you ask. "I thought you said morality was objective!" I did.

However, not only do I not profess to know the origin of objective morals, I don't even profess to know what they all are! I can make my best, most educated estimations, based upon the above criteria, but there will never be a day when I say, "Okay, I'm done. I've learned everything there is to know about objective morality, and my journey is over." That would be absurd, especially since (IMO) a good moral to have is to constantly strive for self-improvement.

How or why does any of that require a god?

Alonzo Fyfe

A biblical source of ethics has a number of serious problems.

(1) There is no God. What those who defend a biblical ethics are doing is holding up the prejudices and bigotries of people who have been dead over two thousand years as the highest ideals of the contemporary world.

(2) If we look over the moral improvements of the past several centuries -- freedom of religion, the demise of the European monarchies, development of private property, advances in medicine (including the study of the human body by cutting up corpses), immunizations from disease, the end of slavery, equal treatment for women, and so on, every one of them has been a fight AGAINST established religious doctrine. In no instance did a church lead the way. So much for the "objective good" of religious doctrine.

(3) If there is a standard of "objective good" that comes from religion, why is it that no two people agree on what it is? Not only will you find no two people in agreement, they have no way to resolve their disagreement. Whereas at least the rational thinker has a method of resolving disagreements.

(4) Indeed, it was rationalist thinkers, noting inconsistencies in the religious ways of thinking, who gave us the arguments for freedom of religion, democracy, capitalism, the advances in medicine and our right to pursue them, the end of slavery, and the like. Read the writings of the great philosophers of the past several centuries, and you will find almost no references to scripture in the defense of their moral arguments. They did not get their views from revelation, but from reason.


On the issue that murder is wrong

Also, I would like to point out that murder is wrong is a tautology. Murder is wrongful killing, and to say that wrongful killing is wrong would hardly be a shocking discovery of either reason or revelation -- about as shocking as the discovery that triangles have three sides.

The real moral question is the objectivity of "X counts as murder".

If we look at biblical references and compare them to contemporary laws, we presently identify a lot of killings as unjustified that biblical references command.

For example, the bible commands the execution of those who wear clothes of two different types of cloth, adulterers, people who work on the sabbath, and people who violate the 1st Commandment "thou shalt have no God before me" (i.e., the execution of any non Judeo-Christian. Contemporary society holds that the execution of such people counts as "unjustified killing" -- or murder.

The problem is that all of these improvements count as violations of religion's "objective morality".

Also, the "objective morality" of the bible gives no condemnation of slavery -- indeed, it identifies those who one may legitimately enslave (people from other countries), and the proper treatment of slaves (that you cannot force them to work on the day of the sabbath either). Where is the objective wrongness of slavery?

In addition, the bible does not condemn rape, nor does it condemn the torture of children (so long as the torturer does not kill the child).

jlowder

If you define moral objectivism in such a way that it requires God, then you will have a valid argument from moral objectivism to God. On the other hand, you will have accomplished nothing substantive. All you will have done is prove that you're speaking a different language from the rest of us. Ordinarily (and perhaps somewhat crudely) we say that something is objective just in case it exists independently of mind, while something is subjective if it is dependent on a mind. To say that ethics is objective, then, is to say that ethical properties are properties of actions and states of affairs (and are NOT properties of minds). Given the ordinary usage of the word "objective," then, there does not seem to be any reason why objective morality requires God. I can also put the point another way: there is nothing about atheism that makes moral objectivism false. If moral objectivism is false, it isn't false because of the nonexistence of God.

You seem to think that if someone doesn't believe in morality as consisting in a set of divine commands, the only alternative is for each individual person to just invent their own set of moral rules. However, this is a false dilemma. Those are not the only options. Another option is that moral truths are not invented by anyone and are instead discovered in much the same way as the truths of mathematics and logic are discovered. Even the vast majority of fundamentalist Christians believe that God did not 'create' the truths of logic. Along these same lines, many prominent philosophers--including theists and atheists alike--have defended secular versions of moral objectivism that do not need God.

I agree that theism and morality have much to do with one another. However, the idea, "Objective morality requires God," is backwards. Since part of the concept of God is that God is (objectively) morally good, God requires objective morality. If there is no objective morality, then God cannot exist.

Sincerely,

Jeffery Jay Lowder

jlowder

Moral objectivism is a metaethical position, not an epistemological one. One can consistently be a moral objectivist and a moral skeptic: one could believe that there are objective moral truths, but not know what they are. This is elementary moral philosophy. Such a position would be no different from what commonly happens in the natural sciences. For example, many scientists would say there is an objective fact of the matter about whether Mars ever had flowing water on its surface, but do not claim to know what the fact of the matter is.

That question is based upon a false assumption, namely, that morals had to 'come from' anywhere. Real moral objectivists don't believe that objective moral truths 'came from' anywhere, just as most philosophers believe that the laws of logic did not 'come from' anywhere.

Jeffery Jay Lowder
"Atheists do not so much reject God as bad arguments in His favor" -- unknown

NearNihil Experience

Ever notice how morals and ethics become entangled in life and decisions only when we are taking action? Ever see a tree worry that it was blocking too much of the sun form the grass below it?
Ever notice how things like green, 3, and good only become apparent when trying to make sense of the world? You never even consider them unless they are attached to something in mind. Even your morals are subjective, pudgy. It's just that God's morals are subjective to Him and you happen to feel as though you were somehow privilaged to this intimate knowledge as to God's every whim. This gives you the mistaken sense that your morals are objective. But you have the final say as to how you act upon something, therefore your actions are subject(ive) to your interpretation of God's morals...and boy are they clear and easy to understand anyway

"And, on the last issue, we do not choose God, God chooses us. So, it is not a moral choice. "

This just proves to me that you and people like you are dengerously delusional. Anyone willing to give up moral responsibility to an archaic system of superstitious values should be charged with negligence and wreckless endangerment. PLease tell me you have some criteria for identifing false prophets before its too late? Or do you just communicate directly with the Holy Ghost? That little voice in your head that tells you to do and not do things...keeps you company, reassures you on any action you take...tells some people to do crazy stuff, like David Berkowitz...

No, you probably like to pick and choose from the "best of books".
Bible believeing Christian you said. A little OT here for discipline and history, some Jesus to make you feel better about yourself, and some Paul to make you feel more justified in the face of reveling in the eternal torment of those trying to get along out of the shadow of God...

Unless you can temper your needless and illusional objectivity, and start taking some responsibility for uyour own actions and stop worrying about who doesn't get along with God so well,your gonna need to live a heavy dose of compassion and hope the people around you are patient...at least more patient than me.

And morals and ethics are human creations. Thats why no one ever agrees. Even you Xtians can't agree on what is right and wrong...probably don't consider catholics Xtian, huh? Mormons? Pentacostals? Adventists? Unitarians? see a pettern forming? Morals are subjective, relative, and temporary. And I don't take moral advice from a God that wantonly destories cities, kills his own Son to pay a debt for someone else, and overall leaves his pets in the lerch.