I disagree with theists who assert that there is no basis for morality among atheists. I also disagree with the atheists who say that morality is an arbitrary construct.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, human empathy is a perfectly legitimate basis for a system of morality among atheists, and it does not require invoking any supernatural being.
I believe human empathy is an evolved, inborn trait for normal human beings. That is the reason the Golden Rule crops up in so many different religions. From the Golden Rule (i.e. from human empathy) all morality flows.
This is exactly the point I keep trying to make. Basing a moral system on “what god wants” is a complete fallacy since there is no way to know what God wants. It would be just as valid to start with a completely unsupported assumption that morally superior creatures live on Jupiter and that we should base our moral system on what those creatures would want. The only problem is, we have no contact with those creatures, we can’t even prove they exist, and so we have to simply guess what those morally suprior creatures would want.
Any moral system which asserts divine authority is really a system based on guessing.
Unless someone can show me a way to know for sure what God thinks is moral then I’d have to say that it’s far more rational to build a system which has some foundation in principles which serve to preserve human communities and reduce disorder and suffering. Shodan’s use of the word “valid” is basically a red herring. If a moral system works to achieve the goals that it was devised for, then it’s “valid.” If it doesn’t, then it’s not. The “validity” of human institutions or cultural constructs is defined by effectiveness not by authority…especially not by a guess at what some invisible, silent and unproven authority might think.
spoke-, you can say how reasonable, logically consistent and legitimate such a morality is until you’re blue in the face. Shodan is asking you to somehow demonstrate that it is “valid”, or “prove” that it is not arbitrary.
I hope we’d agree that he is asking us to give him a glass of apple juice using only oranges.
Actually, I’d go one further: even IF someone can show me how to know what an omnipotent being considers “good,” if I have no independent way to come up with a definition of “good” for myself, then I still have no basis for an ethical system. How may I distinguish between the benevolence of YHWH and the malevolence of Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos? If I don’t have a moral system before I meet God, then I don’t have a moral system after I meet God, either.
The stipulation is that atheists don’t have a valid moral system per Shodan’s mysterious definition of “valid.” I submit that by his definition, theists also don’t have a valid moral system, and therefore we may not argue against atheism by pointing to a lack of a valid moral system. Indeed, we may dispense with the idea of a Good God, since “good” is an invalid term.
Maybe. Shodan himself will have to address that question.
I would argue that my empathy-based morality is “valid” even by Shodan’s nebulous standard, inasmuch as any universal rule of morality must be based, in some way, on the Golden Rule. As such, individual rules can be “validated” by that standard.
Several posters have mentioned ‘Human’ morality. Do animals have morals? Consider this site.
OK the experiment was pretty sick, and the site is actually dedicated to convincing people to not eat meat. However, it brings up a valid point to this discussion.
If animals do indeed have morals when faced with their own needs vs doing harm to other creatures, what does that say about morality being derived from religion or God?
Could it be that the synapses in our brain are responsible for moral decisions? Do chemicals cause emotions like happiness, love, spirituality and morality?
Earlier this year I was horribly depressed. I was even thinking about suicide. Well, I went to my doctor and he gave me anti-depressants. Now, after a few months, my attitude towards life is much more positive. I’m not depressed or suicidal. What changed? I didn’t ‘find God’. My life is not markedly different that it was 6 months ago. All that changed is that more seratonin has been added to my brain.
Yes, the chemicals in the brain can do some interesting things.
Now, back on topic. What are good arguments for theism from an atheistic point of view. I’ll concur with at least one other poster and say the question of ‘where did the universe come from?’. This still boils down to a ‘God of the gaps’ question however.
When I refer to something being morally right, I mean that it is morally right according to my own definition of morally right. The definition is available to anyone who asks.
I find it amazing that you’re still unable to understand this. Theists assert a factual claim based on “that’s how I feel”. We don’t. As I have said repeatedly, morality is opinion.
Trying to escape your former statements isn’t exactly impressive. As SentientMeat said, you’ve said “If there is no God, there is no such thing as evil. The word is a meaningless noise.” Of course you can run through a loophole and say “I never said evil existed if God does, just that it didn’t if God doesn’t”, but I was kind of expecting more from you. Please answer my oft-repeated question.
I’m surprised at the number of theists here who say that the existence of evil is the best agrument against god. I would have thought that it was the fact that there has never been one whit of objective evidence for the existence of god, while it would be expected that evidence would be literally everywhere. In fact, to hold a belief in god in this modern day, you have to define your god in a very arbitrary way - he is all-powerful, but refuses for some reason to actually allow himself to be observed. It’s like he’s playing peekaboo, with believers only. If you consider evil to be the best argument, have you even considered this one?
As for me, an atheist, I consider the thorniest issue to be consciousness.
Choosing the Golden Rule as your standard for morality is also an arbitrary choice. There is, in other words, no more reason to choose that than anything else. Unless you can give some rationale for choosing it over anything else. In other words, why is the Golden Rule any better than murder or torture?
What I mean by “a valid moral system” is a system whose principles possess some property that justifies choosing those principles over something else, or nothing at all.
Right, I understand that part. What I am saying is that there is no standard by which we can evaluate the goals.
If morality is entirely subjective, and based on nothing more than what amounts to a general whim, then we lose all capability to evaluate moral actions. There is no sense in arguing whether anything is “right” or “wrong”. The only question that can be answered is, did the actor want to do what he did? If so, the action is now completely “moral”, insofar as the term can be applied. If I intended to sacrifice my life for a stranger, that was a moral action. To exactly the same degree, if I actually felt like kidnapping and torturing a baby, that was equally a moral action, and there is no way to distinguish between the two actions.
Thus it is meaningless for an atheist to argue that someone else should or shouldn’t do anything. The instant that the atheist presents some action as more or less desirable than any other action, he is implying that there is some standard outside himself and his own preferences that “ought’” to be accepted by others. As we seem to be agreeing, there is not and cannot be any such standard. Thus for the atheist to say that Hitler was a bad person and Gandhi was a good person, or that Stalin did bad things and Mother Teresa did good things, is in each case meaningless. All four did what they wanted to do. There is no standard by which we can evaluate anything of what they did.
In other words, morality for atheists is very similar to theism - a completely unsupported personal opinion, and corresponding to nothing in the external world.
Good thing I am not doing anything of the sort.
For the purposes of argument, I am granting you your presumptions.
Assume there is no God. Now, how do you establish morality? So far, you do so by presenting what you want as the basis. So, we further suppose that I don’t care in the least what you want, or what anyone else wants.
At that point, you have run out of things to say. There is no reason that you can present why I should give a tinker’s damn what you prefer. Nor is there any reason that I should care what anybody prefers, including myself. It is all completely a matter of unsupported opinion.
Close.
But I wasn’t arguing against atheism. I was agreeing with the refutation of the atheist argument against theism based on the presence of evil. If good and evil consist of nothing more than “what I prefer”, then you cannot argue that God doesn’t exist, just because you would rather He didn’t.
If “you cannot prove a system”, as SentientMeat states, then you cannot use a system of morality to argue against theism. If you want to pick things at random to base your morality on, that’s fine too, because there is no non-arbitrary standard to evaluate moral choices. What you still lack is any basis for criticism of any other person’s actions, no matter what those actions are.
And therefore an atheist who criticizes the actions of Fred Phelps or gay-bashers or abortion clinic bombers or George Bush or anyone else is making meaningless statements. Because there is no reason to say that Phelps should do what you want instead of what he wants. And arguments to the contrary are simply noise.
Do we agree on that? Or would you care to offer some reason why basing a morality on gay-bashing or the Red Sox is any different from basing it on altruism?
For the last time, you can’t. Ever. Why do I have to answer this question more than once?
Now I’m asking you the famous unanswered question for the fifth time. Assume there is a God. Now, how do you establish morality?
Correct. What’s your problem with this?
My morality is simply a guide for me. It’s not even that; it’s just a handy name for “what I personally think is good”. I have thought things through, come up with what kind of world I want to live in and what kind of people I want to know, and tried to work out how to act to promote that kind of world and that kind of people. The result is my morality. That’s all it is.
In discussions with others, it is useless unless they agree with its basic tenets, namely that pleasure is pleasant and pain is painful. If they agree with that, I can make a case that they, too, should follow my morality. Can I prove it? Of course not. If they reject my morality, what can I do? Precisely nothing. Possibly argue about it a bit more.
If someone disagrees with those basic tenets, then any statements I make about gaybashing or blowing up abortion clinics are meaningless. If they do agree, as almost everyone does, we have a common ground from which to discuss. Does that make it “scientific” or “right” or “proven”? Nope. And I have no problem with that.
As I stated in my last post, I’m going to stipulate that you’re right, purely for the sake of argument. Why do you say that “an atheist who” instead of saying “a person who”? How is your argument changed by the belief in an omnipotent being?
Although the rest of your post is chockablock with errors and oversights, I’m going to overlook those myself until you answer this question; I hope other folks will make the same stipulation for a couple moments until you answer this question.
I suppose the best argument I’ve heard for theism was “God exists”- from Authority Figures, at my Catholic school, when I was a child. It did have me convinced until I was old enough to think things over for myself and come to my own conclusions.
The best argument for the other side, which got me into the atheist camp, is the lack of proof part. Plus the fact that God doesn’t seem neccessary. His existance doesn’t really answer any great pressing questions, it just bumps them back a notch. “Where’d the universe come from?” gets bumped to “Where’d God come from?”. Moral absolutes get bumped back to whether things are good because God says so (so he can change them, so no absolutes) or whether they’re good because of some higher standard that God has perfect awareness of (in which case there’s something higher than God, and its authority becomes the mystery). I don’t have any personal experience that tells me there’s a God, so the whole consept seems like an uneccessary level of complication to the universe, without any good reason to believe that level’s there at all.
Ok, I’m starting to see where Shodanthinks he has a point- but he doesn’t.
Let me address this first:
Morality is not based on “whim” but is logically constructed a means to end. “Right” or “wrong” are terms which have validity only in relationship to the goals of that construct. Whatever facilitates the goal is “good,” whatever obstructs it is “wrong.” This holds true whether your goal is to achieve a utopia or to go to Heaven. This is tangential to your ultimate point, which I’ll get to, but i thing you’re getting too hung up on a specific semiotic for words like “morality,” “right” and “wrong.” You see them as having an independent reality or essence outside of their specific applications towards a given objective. I see them as only being relative to the objective.
This is totally incorrect. There is no need at all to acknowledge anything “outside” myself. My morality comes completely from within and is based on specific objectives which I personally find desirable. I believe that I should conduct myself in a manner so as to cause the least harm and suffering to others. I do this for completely selfish reasons. It makes me feel bad to hurt people and it makes me feel good if I can help them. I have no fear of punishment and no expectation of reward for my actions and I have no belief that my “morality” has any reality outside of my own mind.
Not so Hitler was “evil” and Gandhi was “good” relative to my own internal sense of morality. I decide what is moral to me and I assign relative qualities of “good” and “evil” according to how they jibe or conflict with my own personal ethic.
Again, this is completely untrue. My morality is constructed as a set of conclusions about how my behaviour will affect certain goals. All of my personal moral judgements are made relative to my personal ethic. My morality or goals may not mean anything to anyone else but that doesn’t mean that they are random or capricious. My ethics are specifically selected so as to achieve something.
Ok, here’s the rub of your argument and here’s why it’s not as clever as you think it is.
You say that I can’t use the existence of “evil” to to argue against the existence of God because if God doesn’t exist I can’t prove that evil doesn’t exist.
The latter part is the fallacy. I can prove that evil exists. Evil is whatever I say it is because I define it entirely in terms of my own personal morality (and don’t think that theists are any different). When it comes to being personally convinced of the existence of God, it is perfectly reasonable for me to say that I don’t believe that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being could allow the existence of evil as I define it.
It doesn’t matter how anyone else defines it because evil is just a descriptive term for stuff I personally find abhorrent. To put it simply. I am not convinced that a compassionate God could allow the holocaust to happen. Saying that I can’t prove to you that the holocaust was “evil” really misses the point. I am setting my own standard for the morality I require in a God. If evil- as I define evil- exists, then God either does not exist or is not sufficiently good to deserve my worship, or is not sufficiently powerful to be called “God.”
Any God who wants my fealty will have to conform to my morality. I’m not conforming to his.
The best argument for theism I’ve heard is ironically also the best argument I’ve heard against it.
alimarx: How can you say there is a god? Missionary: Because I’ve read the scriptures, felt the warm feeling in my heart, and know it to be true! How can you say there is no god? alimarx: Because I’ve read the scriptures, felt the warm feeling in my heart, and know it to be true.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
Choosing the Golden Rule as your standard for morality is also an arbitrary choice. There is, in other words, no more reason to choose that than anything else. Unless you can give some rationale for choosing it over anything else.
[quote]
But it is NOT arbitrary. As I stated, the Golden Rule is derived from what seems to be an internalized sense of empathy, which we all (or those of us who aren’t sociopaths) seem to possess. Nothing arbitrary about it. I think we all have an internalized “Golden Rule” which we apply intuitively and with which we are born.
Huh? This makes no sense.
Try this experiment. Name a moral precept which is not based in some way on the Golden Rule.
Don’t kill? (Well, you wouldn’t want someone else to kill you.)
Don’t steal. (You wouldn’t want someone else stealing from you.)
Don’t commit adultery. (You wouldn’t want someone else to sleep with your spouse without your consent.)
Etc., etc.
[quote]
What I mean by “a valid moral system” is a system whose principles possess some property that justifies choosing those principles over something else, or nothing at all.
[quote]
And the Golden Rule is such a system, because (I would argue) it is based upon the empathy which we all possess as humans.
[quote]
Thus for the atheist to say that Hitler was a bad person and Gandhi was a good person, or that Stalin did bad things and Mother Teresa did good things, is in each case meaningless.
[quote]
Not under the system I am demonstrating. Hitler was bad because he violated the Golden Rule six million times over.
Gandhi and Mother Teresa were “good” because their actions embodied the precept of the Golden Rule. (That is, they exhibited highly-developed senses of empathy.)
But it is NOT arbitrary. As I stated, the Golden Rule is derived from what seems to be an internalized sense of empathy, which we all (or those of us who aren’t sociopaths) seem to possess. Nothing arbitrary about it. I think we all have an internalized “Golden Rule” which we apply intuitively and with which we are born.
Huh? This makes no sense.
Try this experiment. Name a moral precept which is not based in some way on the Golden Rule.
Don’t kill? (Well, you wouldn’t want someone else to kill you.)
Don’t steal. (You wouldn’t want someone else stealing from you.)
Don’t commit adultery. (You wouldn’t want someone else to sleep with your spouse without your consent.)
Etc., etc.
And the Golden Rule is such a system, because (I would argue) it is based upon the empathy which we all possess as humans.
Not under the system I am demonstrating. Hitler was bad because he violated the Golden Rule six million times over.
Gandhi and Mother Teresa were “good” because their actions embodied the precept of the Golden Rule. (That is, they exhibited highly-developed senses of empathy.)
Pardon my Anglo-Saxon, but WHO THE FUCK IS DOING SO?
You are not arguing with me (and I note that you ignored my entire previous posts except for cherry-picking a quote to use against someone else), but with some imaginary viewpoint you have invented in order to evade the central point, which is this:
You have not offered any reason why you continue to specify ATHEIST morality when your “critique” (such as it is) applies to ANY morality.
Please do so now in order to show that you are debating in good faith and not being wilfully obtuse.
Anyone who uses the problem of evil to argue against theism, as I mentioned in my post, and which is the subject of the OP.
And specifically, Diogenes the Cynic, when he posts:
The problem being that this is exactly the same reasoning as the theist who argues that God exists because “that’s how I feel”. And therefore just as valid.
Because atheism vs. theism is the subject under discussion.
Because atheist morality was the subject of my first post, in which I agreed with FriarTed. As I have mentioned before.
I am granting the premises of the argument, and showing how they lead to internal contradiction. It is not possible to use any non-theistic morality to argue against the existence of God.
I keep pointing out that the principles on which any non-theistic morality are founded are entirely arbitrary, and based on nothing more than personal preferences, with no more universality than a taste for Krispy Kreme doughnuts. You all keep arguing that it is entirely logical to base a morality on Krispy Kreme doughnuts, because Krispy Kreme doughnuts are the summum bonum of existence, or very popular, or something. And when I point out that there is no reason to choose Krispy Kreme doughnuts over literally anything else in the universe, you complain that I am not understanding your moral choices.
I do understand them. They have no universality at all, and, by your admission, cannot. There is no way to justify your premise, and therefore your morality is no more valid than the fundamentalist belief in the inerrancy of the Old Testament.
It is logical to define the absence of suffering as the basis for a morality, and to say that actions are "moral’ because they tend to that end. It is equally logical to say that maximizing suffering is the basis for a morality, and to say that actions are “moral” because they tend to that end.
But that is just as arbitrary as anything else. Your assumption is “whatever feelings all non-sociopaths are born with is a valid basis for morality”. On what basis do you choose that principle over any other? Because it makes people happy? Again, why is “making people happy” better than “making people miserable” or “killing everyone so nobody suffers” or literally any other basis? Again, you can’t use your premises to justify your premises.
Same objection to Diogenes the Cynic when he posted:
The means are not whimsical. The premise as to what is a proper “end” is entirely whimsical. Therefore, morality is based on “whim”.
I am not challenging your logic “if A then B”. I am asking if you can justify your A. AFAICT, we are in agreement that by definition, you cannot. You can offer no reason to choose one premise for morality over any other.
That’s not proof. It is assertion. Unless you can justify “whatever you say”, your argument holds no force.
As far as I can tell, we have reached consensus that atheists cannot establish a morality based on universal principles. We have further established (correct me if I am wrong) that the problem of evil cannot be used to argue against theism. And finally, we have established that theism based on a feeling is no more or less valid than an atheism based on the same.
Yes? If not, I am willing to continue along those lines. If so, then we can go on (if you like) to the question of whether the existence of God can be used to establish a valid morality.
