Gary's Corner

[henry quirk]

The atheist can certainly construct a system of morality.

Based on what? Atheism sez there is no God, so there's no objective moral measure. What's left to the atheist but his feelings?

How about this.
Human morality exists because humans have evolved as obligatory social animals (and obligatory social animals must have predictable social behavior). This would imply that we have had morality longer than we have been humans (all our evolutionary relatives are also obligatory social animals)
The "feelings" referred to are evolved as tools to enable this morality to work.

Henry, why do you think you are going to be better off getting to "slavery is wrong" from a belief in God and the moral laws coming from this God? Certainly not, for example, from the Bible.

Mike,

As I say to phyllo just up-thread...

...it doesn't matter if deism or Christianity is right or true, only that either does what atheism, and by extension, materialism, determinism. scientism, cannot do, which is: offer a coherent moral ground.

Even if there is no Creator, and no one has a natural right to life, liberty, and property, a man will still refrain from slaving, raping, murdering, thieving, and defrauding if he chooses to recognize his fellows have natural rights.

So, yeah, I am better off with my deism and the natural rights extending out from it than with phyllo's atheism or your evolutionary traits (neither which offers diddly squat about what is and isn't permissible between and among men).

[phyllo]

So you have axioms.

You must be so proud.

[henry quirk]

So you have axioms.

You must be so proud.

I'll take that as your admission.

[phyllo]

Well, you think that you have axioms.

But assertions are not axioms.

[henry quirk]

Anything else? That is: anything in context with the actual topic on the table (can atheism offer a moral ground?).

[phyllo]

Isn't it clear, from what has been said, that atheism isn't some ideology which is "offering a moral ground".

The idea that atheism is supposed to produce axioms of morality is an invention of IC and you.

[Immanuel Can]

Isn't it clear, from what has been said, that atheism isn't some ideology which is "offering a moral ground".

The idea that atheism is supposed to produce axioms of morality is an invention of IC and you.

Atheism isn't even a sophisticated ideology, really...it's a negative, one-claim expression of petulance. So yeah, it's got nothing positive to offer, in the moral realm, or anywhere else. It's not epistemologically credible, not evidentiary, not rational...and, of course, not moral.

[phyllo]

Whoa, sounds pretty bad.

Better stay away from it.

[henry quirk]

The idea that atheism is supposed to produce axioms of morality is an invention of IC and you.

Mannie's point, and mine, is not that atheism should ground morality, but that it can't. And my extended point is none of the associated strains of thinking -- determinism, materialism, scientism -- can ground morality either.

No adherent of any of those can say slavery is wrong. They can only say I don't like it.

Anyway, I'll close with this (it bears repeating)...

"One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things — trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

[MikeNovack]

The idea that atheism is supposed to produce axioms of morality is an invention of IC and you.

Mannie's point, and mine, is not that atheism should ground morality, but that it can't. And my extended point is none of the associated strains of thinking -- determinism, materialism, scientism -- can ground morality either.

No adherent of any of those can say slavery is wrong. They can only say I don't like it.

The belief "there is no God" has nothing to do with "there is no morality" or "morality exists"

And you really aren't in a better position as a deist. You can't get ALL of morality from deism. You need a moral judgement "if there is a God, I should follow the moral dictates of that God". As a deist, you believe the "if" part true, so the conclusion true, you should follow the moral dictates of God. But to get there you needed that one PRIOR moral judgement. Where did THAT come from?

[henry quirk]

The belief "there is no God" has nothing to do with "there is no morality" or "morality exists"

Without the Creator there is no objective measure so what you keep calling morality is just, as I say, personal and aggregated preference. So, yeah God, and a belief in God, has everything to do with coherent moral grounding.

And you really aren't in a better position as a deist. You can't get ALL of morality from deism. You need a moral judgement "if there is a God, I should follow the moral dictates of that God". As a deist, you believe the "if" part true, so the conclusion true, you should follow the moral dictates of God. But to get there you needed that one PRIOR moral judgement. Where did THAT come from?

As Flash points out in the slavery thread: I'm quite retarded. Mebbe you explain what you mean when you say I need one prior moral judgement cuz I'm not wrappin' my limited head around it.

[FlashDangerpants]

And you really aren't in a better position as a deist. You can't get ALL of morality from deism. You need a moral judgement "if there is a God, I should follow the moral dictates of that God". As a deist, you believe the "if" part true, so the conclusion true, you should follow the moral dictates of God. But to get there you needed that one PRIOR moral judgement. Where did THAT come from?

As Flash points out in the slavery thread: I'm quite retarded. Mebbe you explain what you mean when you say I need one prior moral judgement cuz I'm not wrappin' my limited head around it.

Using God to justify morality is just kicking the can down the road.

If the objects in the world around us have physical properties such as height and weight, we don't ask God how tall our garden fence is, or how fat our wives are, we just measure one of them with a tape of some sort, and the other by sitting her on your face and seeing if she squashes your head. In other words, we have direct ways of finding out these properties, and the height of the fence is a known fact once it has been measured.

If moral properties are part of the world about us, we can look at the world about us and find out about them. If a tin of beans has the property of goodness, what is that goodness? How do we see it? We make up something based on whether it has niceness when we eat it, or healthiness when it comes into contact with out cholesterol or something. But goodness is something we don't seem able to discover.

An easy solution might be to ask God. Does God tell us that the beans are good, but leave it up to us to decide if the fence is more than 1.3m in height? Well, it seems we have a problem. God knows whether the fence is a certain height by refence to its physical properties, no? Ask God if your fence is 1.3m high and he's going to tell you the same thing the measuring tape does because he doesn't lie and the tape is telling you the measured facts. But how did God decide the beans were shit?

Does he just not enjoy beans? Is this merely the opinion of somebody whose opinion is only made important by him being the biggest person with the biggest opinions? Or does God examine the properties of the beans to discover goodness that is somehow impossible for us to know about?

So you either need to just tell everyone to shut up and take God's word for it about stuff and never think about how God finds out this information... which is the general idea of the thing Mike describes as

"if there is a God, I should follow the moral dictates of that God"

... or you need to have a metaphysics of morality. Something which describes how God finds out what is right and wrong. But you can't have "God says so" as the root for that. Nor will waffle about manifesting both the will and the nature of God in one and the same instance.

Fundamentally, you guys rely on a negative move. You argue that morality has to be perfect* or else it is nothing but garbage. And then you argue that atheists can't have perfect* moral knowledge, therefore they cannot have any moral reasoning because all uncertainty is randomness. And then you just claim God sort all that out for you. A handy little deus ex machina at the end of the story there.


*I don't know the full list, but this at least includes that it must be knowable, true, and consistent : if one asserts to know that slavery is always wrong it is wrong in any and all possible worlds and there is no slavery that is right under any circumstance in any possible world, excluded middles and so on.

[phyllo]

Without the Creator there is no objective measure so what you keep calling morality is just, as I say, personal and aggregated preference.

But a deist creator is not saying what the "objective measure" is. You're required to figure it out by looking around. The atheist is doing the same thing as you are ... making observations and drawing conclusions.

[Immanuel Can]

Without the Creator there is no objective measure so what you keep calling morality is just, as I say, personal and aggregated preference.

But a deist creator is not saying what the "objective measure" is. You're required to figure it out by looking around. The atheist is doing the same thing as you are ... making observations and drawing conclusions.

What is the Atheist "looking" at? What features of his natural world are available to inform him of morality? Is he going by something in biology? In physics or chemistry? Probably not, right? Is he observing culture, and assuming that whatever his particular culture does is morally informative? But which culture should he be observing, and what assures him that it's moral? Is he going by traditions? But whose traditions? Are there no immoral traditions? Is he going by his own intuitions? But intuition just means "doing what feels right," and what assures us that what people feel is always morally right?

Where are these "observations" that grant him moral "conclusions" being located? Show us just one moral precept that you believe the Atheist is obligated to follow, and explain how it proceeds from "observations" of something.

[phyllo]

What is the Atheist "looking" at?

Exactly the same world that HQ or any other deist is looking at.