[QUOTE=Lobohan]
Of course you can say one chemical reaction is better than another. Which is better the chemical reaction that cooks a delicious hot dog, or the one that ignites the propellant that fills a gun’s barrel with high velocity gas that pushes a bullet through your spleen?
[/quote]
I beleive Shodan’s point is that if there’s an objective right or wrong, we don’t have any evidence as to what that objective right or wrong. You may have evidence that hot dogs cause more happiness than spleen injury, but how do you show that causing happiness lines up with this objective right and wrong? What if the objective right and wrong guidelines don’t like happiness? I would agree that the belief that there is an objective right and wrong has to be faith based.
[QUOTE=Lobohan]
God is a fantasy, and to suggest that you need to believe in that rubbish to not know whether existence is better than non existence is both wrong and offensive.
If you think you need god to tell you that existing is a good thing you must not value your intellect very much.
[/QUOTE]
I think you are conflating faith and religion - though of course American Media does too - the argument isn’t that you need God to have morals, it is that you need to beleive in something without having evidence to have morals, as after all, what kind of evidence could exist for an idea?
While I think Shodan is technically correct that morals can’t have evidence for them, I think it is misleading to call it faith. Faith generally refers to believing something that has a truth value without evidence. If Bob’s system of morals is designed to optimize human happiness, and Fred’s is designed to follow God’s will, is their difference of opinion on whether gay marriage is moral any more faith based than their difference of opinion on whether vanilla is a better flavor than chocolate?
Difference of moralities seems to me to be based on difference of values, i.e. Bob values human happiness and smooth vanillaness, and and Fred values God’s plan and rich, sweet chocolate flavors. My values don’t have any truth value, they don’t assert anything about the world. If I thought that kicking puppies was moral, I don’t think there’s anyway to classify that as true or false. You may find it to be appalling to your moral system and your moral system would probably compel you to stop me, but I do not beleive that there is an objective way to say that I am wrong and you are right, or vice versa.
Ugh - I feel like I just typed out “morals aren’t faith based: <the explanation of why morals are faith based>,” but I feel on some level that there’s a difference between having subjective values and having those subjective values based on faith. I think it is that I do not beleive that there’s an objective source of right and wrong, but that kind of just pushes the faith based desicision back one step to whether there is objective right and wrong.
Incidently, I’ve found that beleivers often beleive that doing what God wants is objectively right, and what he doesn’t want is objectively wrong. Why? Is it out of gratitude for our existance? Is it that he’s omniscient, and objective right and wrong existed independently, and God passed his knowledge of such on? Is it because he judges us after death? I’ve just never really seen the connection between making stuff, and deciding morality.
