john9blue wrote:The Weird One wrote:- There are no objective morals
- True justice does not exist
- Good and evil is subject to individual biased opinion, and does not actually exist in absolute form
- Rape, theft and racial segregation may be subjectively wrong, in your opinion, but that opinion holds no validity because there is no mind before the human mind to separate right from wrong, its all relative
is there an atheist here who can explain how any of these could possibly NOT be true if god does not exist?
if you can't, then you have to accept that these are the logical implications of your worldview (and yes chang, it is a worldview)
In turn
- An absence of God does not necessarily entail an absence of objective morality. Much like an absence of God does not necessarily entail an absence of objective mathematical truths. Such things may exist without the necessity for a divine being to create them. They may be basic characteristics of the universe.
- This very much depends on what "true justice" is defined as. I think this is a reference to the way that within christian doctrine everyone goes to heaven or hell based on what they deserve from this life. I would argue that this is not justice at all, as a serial killer who has a personal, genuine conversion on death row may enjoy eternal paradise despite raping, torturing and killing many people, while an atheist who does good charitable work all their lives and indeed knowingly sacrificed their life to (for example) save a class of pre-school children from a crazed gunman, will spend eternity in hell simply because they will not acknowledge God.
- As point 1, I could claim that good and evil exist as real objective qualities without needing to insert a god or gods into the mix (I don't, but I could). I would be required to explain in some way how these qualities could be detected before I could claim it was anything more than idle metaphysical ramblings. As we saw in this thread at least once when challenged to even imagine a test for good or evil or explain in any way what they are (a kind of matter/energy? a particular harmonic resonance? something else?) theists suddenly go very quiet.
- The final kind of argument is based on a flawed premise, that we all get to decide our own subjective morality in the absence of a god-given objective set of rules. That's just not how morality works. My morality for instance is a western secular morality, and for me to be justified in claiming that any action is right or wrong I must weigh that action against it's intentions and consequences (intended and unintended) within that larger code. I could honestly intend to save someone from a fire, but end up costing the lives of 3 firemen who later turn up and have to try and save me from being trapped in the burning building myself. The intentions are good, but the consequences are not, and overall the action is frowned upon as being something that is not good, demonstrated by the way we are taught by society that we should not take huge risks entering a burning building and wait for people with proper training and equipment.
We have the following problem when trying to hijack morality to be something religious:
Either:
- Objective morality exists, like objective mathematics, separate from God (whether he created morality or maths is a different argument).
- Morality is whatever God says is good.
- Morality is a societally created set of rules, designed by man to increase the chances of the society prospering and maximising happiness and well being for all.
The problem with the first option is that if there really is an objective morality separate from God, then why do we need God to learn about it? Do we need God's words to learn about maths, history, etc? What makes morality different from anything else where we work on the clear assumption that we look at the facts and evidence to discover, as far as possible, the objective truth of any given situation.
The problem with the second is that somehow believers claim that a higher being's subjective moral code is somehow objective truth. In reality, any subjective moral code is just as arbitrary as any other subjective moral code. For any being's subjective moral code to be accepted as an objective moral truth, that being must also be shown to be morally perfect. Given that the teachings handed down in a book that is supposedly the divine word of God are not morally perfect, in fact they are downright immoral in very many cases (examples could include a woman being forced to marry her rapist, children should be killed for disrespecting their parents, people should be killed for working on a certain day, the whole world should be drowned because too many people don't worship you any more, or the very basic fact that christianity is a cult of human sacrifice), then we have no evidence that what we based christianity on is the perfect message from a perfect moral being. The opposite in fact.
The problem with the third option is it's arbitrariness. The romans decided that slavery was OK, but here we are 2000 years later and we believe that slavery is very wrong indeed. Who is to say that we are correct and the romans were wrong?
In fact atheists, along with everybody else in the entire world bar a few extremist religious nutjobs, DO have a kind of objective moral code, and that is in the principles we apply for how you decide if something is right or wrong. We don't all agree on the exact wording, but maximising happiness / minimising suffering / etc could be defined as an objective testing stick for what is right and what is wrong. Much like we have built systems to understand mathematics such as algebra, calculus, etc, we have built systems to understand morality. Do most people say that we can understand number systems, therefore God must be the only way to know maths? No (almost universally). Do the same people say because we understand ethical systems God must be the only way to know morality? No (generally).
