Can Atheists be Moral? Can the Religious?

[Purple Knight]

Question for Debate: Can Atheists be Moral? Can the religious be moral?

I've heard the idea that atheists can't be moral, because physically, we're all just selfish apes, protecting and increasing our genes, and without some supernatural addition to this formula, good is not possible. The ape mother protects her child because that increases her genes. This act, the idea goes, is not moral, but selfish. Any time a human helps another human, this idea would apply.

I've also heard that religious people can't really be moral because whatever they do that is supposedly moral, they don't do it for its own sake, but for the reward. I've even heard that religious people can't be moral because their morality is unthinking. Random total obedience is morally neutral at best, so, the idea goes, if you're just blindly trusting somebody, even a powerful entity, that's not really morality.

Both of these ideas frankly seem to hold water so I'm curious if anyone can be moral.

[The Tanager]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #187]

This deceptively short statement opens a few cans of worms.

First, not all thoughts and behaviors are instinctive. While instincts do vary, an "ethical egoist's" moral instincts and mine (whatever I am) are going to be very, very similar. Even if we decide not to unpack social conditioning ("nature vs. nurture") and label everything visceral as "instinct," most social systems aren't that different. Once we're making conscious judgements about morality, though, we're beyond the realm of instinct.

I agree.

Second, you're now making two different (though parallel) arguments with different concepts of objectivity. That's not invalid, but we have to be careful and I think it's responsible for your confusion in our discussion of Paul's morality. When we argue about moral frameworks, we are necessarily making subjective value judgements about moral precepts that may themselves be either objective or subjective in a philosophical sense.

Sure.

Third, I don't why you'd imagine that an atheist would consider a bee's behavioral instincts would apply to a human society or that human morality somehow affects bees. If you're not actually claiming that you think we should consider bee morality when formulating our own, then what argument are you making? I'm guessing it's an attempt at some sort of slippery slope, but I'm not sure how you imagine it playing out.

No, I’m not claiming that. I am saying that if a human, say, wanted to kill their siblings to eliminate competition (like bees do), a consistent atheist may dislike that, but should just view that as a difference, not an objectively worse behavior.

Fourth, I'm not sure what the overall argument is. If you're just claiming that finding an optimal moral framework isn't an easy problem, then you're right. The only thing that theism offers is the option to punt on which morality is best. If we pretend a god is real, we can claim that its priests have accurately represented its moral code and follow it willy-nilly, but I'm not sure what that buys us. Unless you mean that the other way, that the obvious superiority of a particular theist framework is a signal that a particular god is real? What's your claim?

My claim is that atheism doesn’t ground objective morality and, therefore, if morality is objective, then theism is the reasonable position.

OK. How do you go about deriving a moral code from "God's act of creation?"

I think we need both that certain things objectively help/harm beings and an objective purpose that includes that we should care about that in others. God can build that objective purpose in; I don’t see how atheism can account for that.

Are God's moral dictates based on an independently derivable truth or not? If yes, we should be able to at least be able to map God's moral precepts onto that pattern. If, on the other hand, the only reason that moral precepts are moral is because a god said so, then they're arbitrary from our perspective.

Moral truths are independently derivable (in principle) apart from God saying so.

OK. The sixty-four-dollar question is if we can derive the correct moral code independent of divine revelation. If yes, then atheists can see it, too, and we're just arguing about how reality came to be with its baked-in moral reality.

Exactly.

That's quite a silver lining you're asserting, but you still haven't made a convincing argument for why that improves social cohesion or provides any other social benefit. Biblically, jealousy just leads to women being forced to drink dirty poop water (Numbers 5:14-24).

Ideally, off the top of my head and not heavily worked out, jealousy (the good core) helps strengthen the marriage relationship, providing a stable unit for children to thrive in and become responsible members of society that work for wider social cohesion and further benefits to society.

As to Numbers 5, it’s interesting to compare it to other writings around the time, such as the Code of Hammurabi. There, if a man was jealous but with no other evidence (like in Numbers 5), the woman is forced to leap into the Euphrates river and survive a trial by ordeal that would presumably be pretty tough so that they could only do this with the help of the gods. The trial in Numbers 5 is the opposite of this. She drinks water with some dust and whatever writing material they used, which wouldn’t be harmful. It would take an act of God to prove her guilty. She’s being protected by this process, unless God wanted to intervene in a miraculous way. Even if she was actually unfaithful (which has links with how Jesus treated the woman caught in adultery in John 8), God would have to choose to intervene in a miraculous way.

If she was unfaithful, maybe this would bring out a confession before going through the trial. This also seems to be a check on the husband’s jealousy. He’s got no evidence, so he turns to God and he should accept the lack of evidence of unfaithfulness.

This can only be true if there's no objective standard for "flourish." If it means something to "flourish" and it's something that can be measured, then it's something that can be optimized. Congratulations. You've just defined a moral code that's objectively tied to reality and can be derived independently of any theism. If "flourish" can't be measured, then how are you determining that your theistic moral code does indeed improve how we "flourish?"

To echo what you said earlier, I’m only talking about if objective flourishing is baked in; the ontological issue, not the epistemological one.

What you seem to be struggling with is the concept that atheists can have standards for value judgements of any kind. I value my own survival, comfort, and happienss. I value the same for my family and friends. I value the same for other people in general. Other people objectively have broadly similar sets of values, so you can't really claim that those values don't exist in a human sense. Those shared values can be used as an objectively shared framework for developing a moral code. The arguments over the details are going to get pretty subjective pretty fast, but if everyone cares about the outcome, that's inevitable. Of course, we could just punt an pick someone to do the difficult reasoning for us. We could even pick someone that's imaginary, but that seems silly.

Let’s keep the different sense of objective in mind here. Yes, you objectively/truly have standards and values that you share with many others. Those exist. Just like I objectively/truly like certain flavors and not others. That doesn’t make taste preference objective; it’s subjective.

If there is no omniscient being that baked this in, then it’s silly to reason to one set of preferences rather than another. Why not just go with the preferences we simply have? If there is such a being, then it would be wise to punt to that being when the reasoning is as difficult and complex as many of the situations we get into are.

A consistent "ethical egoist" will likely recognize that acceptance by the society will be in her long-term interest. Or, maybe she really would be better off as an independent agent, like being an outlaw in the historical sense. An ethical egoist that's super bad at math should probably just punt and be a theist.

Keeping with your analogy, the “math” atheism produces is nonsense. For you, you want an answer of ‘5’ and try to figure out how to make 2+2 equal that, the ethical egoist figures out how to make 2+2=7, for another it’s 2+2=3.

If you mean "objective" in the sense of baked into reality independent of humanity, then sure. I think that's just another way of being bad at math, though. The feeling that morality is true independent of the self as a human and our human evolutionary history is seductive, but I still think it's false. The strength of that feeling is real, though, so in that sense, the existence of that feeling is an objective source from which to start constructing a moral framework. I don't think it has a supernatural origin, though. But maybe it's my math that's bad, rather than theists'.

But your strong feelings are different from another’s strong feelings, so that’s a subjective source in the main way this discussion goes.

That's an interesting direction, but to be more than assertion, you'll have to flesh a lot out, to the point of probably needed its own, dedicated topic. Other social mammals seem to have similar emotional connections, particularly ones that approach our own human sensibilities, like the other great apes. If this is going to be an important part of your argument, I think you have a lot of work to do to show that moral agency is both qualitatively unique to humans and is most likely to be derived from something supernatural rather than plausibly an evolutionary adaptation.

Yes, that’s its own topic, not this one. Here I’m just helping you see the logic of my view.

I think you're going to have to tighten this up. If it's possible to be made to act morally, then it's possible to have evolved to act morally. That is, unless you're defining morality itself as something that must necessarily exist outside of humanity, in which case your argument is approaching circularity. As this argument stands, though, I don't think it's valid.

I haven’t defined morality as something that must necessarily exist outside of humanity. I don’t see how the bolded part above follows.

It absolutely does. If moral reality exists independently of humans, then we shouldn't see that kind of ambiguity. You might be able to explain why the human moral judgement is really counter to the morality imbued the universe by Yahweh or something, but if our moral sensibilities and the moral construction of the universe derive from the same source, as I think you're arguing, I think they should be in much closer alignment.

What do you mean by “moral sensibilities”? I think our moral views are affected by all sorts of misjudgments, lack of knowledge, reliance on our limited abilities, etc. and that this can logically account for the lack of alignment.

If we have to squint at the Bible using our frail human faculties to divine what God wanted, how does that support your contention that morality is objectively independent of human reasoning?

Objective morality doesn’t mean we will get it right (we get math sums wrong all the time, too). And the more complex the mathematical equation, the easier it is to get it wrong. I also don’t think God just left us to our frail human faculties alone. He offers us His wisdom through relationship.

If that's the case, I look forward to you supporting why selling children is a reasonable moral compromise, but things like picking up sticks on the Sabbath aren't.

They would sell themselves or children into “slavery” when they reached the end of things financially and could not provide for their basic needs. So, it’s starvation or move into a temporary situation where you can be a contributor to securing such needs for yourself or your family.

That's not what Paul says, though. He's not saying, "play it safe," or something; he says in so many words that if one thinks that something is unclean, then it's unclean. That's subjective in a philosophical sense. We can argue Paul's theology if you want, but this also fits with his broader concept of things done in the name of the Lord being holy, but the same things could be sin if done with a different reason ("whatever is not of faith is sin"). That's not, "be careful," but if anything not done in a particular frame of mind is immoral. That is a subjective moral framework by definition.

That’s situational morality, not subjective morality. In this passage, Paul is saying that for everyone in existence, (a) one should eat X unless (b) (v. 14) they wrongly think it is unclean or (c) (v. 20) it causes someone else to stumble in the faith.

Subjective morality would be that the (a) depends on who is being talked about when applied to b, c, or other situations. So, for instance, where Johnny should eat X even though they think it is unclean, Suzie should not eat X when she thinks it is unclean.

[The Tanager]

[Replying to William in post #188]

If Christianity is true, then there is a source available to Christians that isn’t available to atheists or other non-Christians. The indwelling of the Spirit is not an ordinary tool available to non-Christians that we would be labeling as something else.

Now, of course, whether such a thing is reality is another question. And a debate about that between people on different sides is another question where we must appeal to commonly available tools to help challenge the other's position there.

[William]

[Replying to The Tanager in post #192]

If Christians truly had unique moral access (indwelling Spirit), we should observe measurable differences in moral outcomes, wisdom, or behavior between Christians and non-Christians - especially given the global population of Christians.

But we don't. Christians commit crimes, support unjust systems, disagree sharply on moral issues, and perhaps even fail to outperform non-Christians in moral behavior studies. The "Spirit" produces no detectable moral advantage.

So, either the Spirit doesn't provide unique moral access, or it provides no observable effect. Either way, your assertion fails. The most parsimonious explanation: Christians navigate morality using the same fallible, shared tools as everyone else - they just add a theological label, and use that to assert a differences which is absent in reality.

[Difflugia]

No, I’m not claiming that. I am saying that if a human, say, wanted to kill their siblings to eliminate competition (like bees do), a consistent atheist may dislike that, but should just view that as a difference, not an objectively worse behavior.

Only if you think an atheist doesn't value their own values (if that makes sense). I certainly call that a difference, but it's a moral difference. It's objectively worse if one of our objective standards is the preservation of human life. If it's not, then you're right, but there's nobody else at the helm making those judgements.

Your overall thesis seems to be that if there's nobody supernatural running things, then the concept of morality is meaningless. As I said several comments ago, our sense of morality derives from pressures favoring a social existence. That sense may not be optimal and details may not be unanimous, but you can't meaningfully discuss it if part of your thesis is to simply define it away. Even if we have but a single precept, like "promoting social harmony," then we have something objective to work with.

An example would be a person stuck in the cold and trying to prioritize tasks to survive. Build a fire first? Build a shelter first? Find food first? There may be an optimal solution and there may be several solutions that are suboptimal, but good enough. The lack of an omniscient oracle to ask doesn't mean that one can't find a solution. Similarly, deciding to solve a different problem at the expense of survival doesn't mean that there aren't still answers to the survival problem, even if one ignores them.

My claim is that atheism doesn’t ground objective morality

That's true as far as it goes, but theism doesn't give you that automatically, either. Without established some universal, knowable morality, the best you can say is that your divinely inspired version of morality is inhuman, not that it's objective.

and, therefore, if morality is objective, then theism is the reasonable position.

This doesn't work in either direction. Even if you could demonstrate a universal morality, that doesn't imply theism. Even if you had proof positive that gods were real, that doesn't imply that they've baked a morality binding on humans into the universe. In fact, the way this argument is usually presented is worse than either of these options: anyone that is uncomfortable with morality not being a universal absolute should believe in a god that might have created a universal morality. That has a certain appeal, but by the same logic, if I want a million dollars, I should believe that there's a million dollars in my wallet. It's a comfottable thought and I might even start acting like I have a million dollars, but just believing that the money's there doesn't create it out of nothing. At least it hasn't yet, though I keep trying.

I think we need both that certain things objectively help/harm beings and an objective purpose that includes that we should care about that in others. God can build that objective purpose in; I don’t see how atheism can account for that.

God coutld, if He were real. That doesn't establish that He's real or, if he were, that he actually did build that objective purpose in. At the moment, you're just asserting that both of those are true. The best that can actually be established is that we as humans share certain feelings and ideas about what constitute personal and corporate help, harm, and purpose. That's true whether or not gods exist.

Moral truths are independently derivable (in principle) apart from God saying so.

If that's true, then they're equally derivable by atheists or theists.

Ideally, off the top of my head and not heavily worked out, jealousy (the good core) helps strengthen the marriage relationship, providing a stable unit for children to thrive in and become responsible members of society that work for wider social cohesion and further benefits to society.

If you want to argue the benefits of jealousy, I'm sure we could find some statistical ways to do so. I don't see it, but I also don't think it's worth discussing more unless part of your argument is that all of our moral intuitions are ideal and, therefore, potentially divinely inspired.

As to Numbers 5, it’s interesting to compare it to other writings around the time, such as the Code of Hammurabi. There, if a man was jealous but with no other evidence (like in Numbers 5), the woman is forced to leap into the Euphrates river and survive a trial by ordeal that would presumably be pretty tough so that they could only do this with the help of the gods.

That's what the Numbers 5 trial is. It's exactly a trial by ordeal that's stacked against the woman surviving unharmed.

The trial in Numbers 5 is the opposite of this. She drinks water with some dust and whatever writing material they used, which wouldn’t be harmful.

The dust is from the Tabernacle floor (v. 17). The Tabernacle is where the altar was, where animals were ritually sacrificed, exsanguinated, disembowelled, and the entrails burned. That's why the result was something akin to abdominal disease, essentially causing spontaneous hysterectomy (making her "thigh fall away," v. 22). This reads to me as a trial by ordeal that would require either divine intervention or a profound amount of luck.

To echo what you said earlier, I’m only talking about if objective flourishing is baked in; the ontological issue, not the epistemological one.

Are you just asserting that flourishing is ontologically true, or are you claiming that there's a way that we can know that? If you're just asserting that, then your claim is that theism is preferable if you think there ought to be some objective flourishing. That's fine, but it's just believing in God because you want to believe that someone's at the wheel. That's certainly popular among theists, but it's not an argument for the actual existence of gods or an actual nonhuman source of morality. If you're claiming that there's a way we can know that, then we're back to that knowledge being equally accessible to atheists and theists alike.

Let’s keep the different sense of objective in mind here. Yes, you objectively/truly have standards and values that you share with many others. Those exist. Just like I objectively/truly like certain flavors and not others. That doesn’t make taste preference objective; it’s subjective.

You're making the equivocation even as you're warning against it. The judgements themselves are subjective, but I've never said that they aren't. What I did say is that theism alone doesn't somehow force the judgements to be objectively derived. Either there's a morality baked into the universe and we no longer need to use any sort of personal judgements, shared or otherwise, to derive a morality, or there is no such morality independent of someone's judgement. Claiming that the judgement is God's as represented by his priests doesn't make the source objective, it just makes the source inhuman. If there is a universal and independent morality, then it exists whether gods are real or not. I don't think there is one, but I'm willing to have my mind changed.

If there is no omniscient being that baked this in, then it’s silly to reason to one set of preferences rather than another.

Do you think that all human reason is silly? The fact that it's sometimes difficult to agree on moral standards isn't evidence that humans are incapable of judgement. The analogy implying that ice cream flavors are equivalent to when to kill other humans doesn't hold unless you actually think that they're equivalent. I certainly don't think so as an atheist. Unless you think that as a theist, then the argument is probably a straw man.

Since this seems to be turning into the bulk of your argument, then I'll point out that the argument itself is no more than reductio ad absurdum. It's the same as when creationists argue that if scientists can't know everything, then they can't know anything.

Why not just go with the preferences we simply have?

If you think that a significant number of people (like, say, the number of people that like coffee ice cream) think that unregulated killing of other people is preferable, then I'll entertain that argument now.

If there is such a being, then it would be wise to punt to that being when the reasoning is as difficult and complex as many of the situations we get into are.

Sure, but there's not. I'm an atheist, remember?

I'm trying to track your overall argument. Is it that there's a universal morality, but atheists have to take the priests' word for what it is? You seem to be circling around an argument involving is/ought, but are trying to socratic me into inadvertently saying that humans are incapable of evaluating moral criteria. I'm claiming that in principle, we can identify criteria and assign them "better" or "worse" as a fundament. From there, we can create rules that optimize for those criteria. By virtuie of those rules optimizing for our selected criteria, we ought to follow them.

Your other prong of the argument seems to be that atheists should pick a set of rules derived by a theistic framework because one of the gods might exist. I might liken that to building our economic policies around where the leprechauns might put their pots of gold. If leprechauns are real and they put gold at the ends of rainbows, that would objectively be worthwhile. I'll leave it to you to take the thought experiment to its logical conclusion.

Keeping with your analogy, the “math” atheism produces is nonsense.

For you, you want an answer of ‘5’ and try to figure out how to make 2+2 equal that, the ethical egoist figures out how to make 2+2=7, for another it’s 2+2=3.

The goal isn't to come up with a specific answer, but to maximize one given certain inputs, which are the results of our interactions with each other. There are enough inputs that people have to estimate which variables to add to get to the highest value. If we're using instinct, we're doing a "gut feel" estimation of the numbers, like guessing the price of what's in a shopping cart by just looking at it. Once we start to learn some math, we can add more accurately, so we can get better at tweaking the inputs (how we relate to each other) to get higher numbers out. The ethical egoist thinks he can get better numbers by being selfish, he can try, but since other people have a say on what his input numbers are, he's likely to severely overestimate what his result will be. Maybe not, but I'm not an ethical eogist and I don't know many people that even lean in that direction.

Having a different standard, like theism or claiming that there's an objective morality inherent to the universe, is just saying that we don't have to do the math. The theist is saying that the gods have already done the math for us and communicated that to us through the priests. The existence of an objective source of morality would mean that there's a different way to arrive at the proper set of inputs without having to do the math. If we double-check and do the math, anyway, we should still get the same answer.

But your strong feelings are different from another’s strong feelings, so that’s a subjective source in the main way this discussion goes.

I claim that this isn't true to the extent that you're attempting to assert, or at least imply. How many people do you know that don't feel strongly about unregulated killing? How many people do you know that don't viscerally react to someone crying in agony? In order for your thesis to hold, you have to turn your ice cream example on its head: for your thesis to be true, people must feel the same way about murder, theft, rape, and economic injustice as they do about chocolate or coffee ice cream. I don't think that's true and I don't think you do, either. Feel free to correct me, though.

I haven’t defined morality as something that must necessarily exist outside of humanity. I don’t see how, "If it's possible to be made to act morally, then it's possible to have evolved to act morally," follows.

Are you denying that what we're calling moral instincts can't have an evolutionary basis? If that's important to your argument (or perhaps even the crux of it), then we should probably focus on that exclusively for a bit. Evolutionary psychology is a whole field with conclusions backed by experiment and data. If you think there's some aspect of the evolution of the mind that can't account for at least heuristic moral reasoning, then we're not going to have much common ground.

What do you mean by “moral sensibilities”? I think our moral views are affected by all sorts of misjudgments, lack of knowledge, reliance on our limited abilities, etc. and that this can logically account for the lack of alignment.

Then how are you differentiating between which moral behaviors are aligned with divine morality and which are misjudgement, et al? So far, you seem to be claiming that theistic moral frameworks are indistinguishable from atheist ones in practice, but that atheists nonetheless can't derive a morality that's as good as a theistic one. Again, I'm kind of confused about your argument. If what, then what?

Objective morality doesn’t mean we will get it right (we get math sums wrong all the time, too). And the more complex the mathematical equation, the easier it is to get it wrong. I also don’t think God just left us to our frail human faculties alone. He offers us His wisdom through relationship.

It sounds to me like you think there's some Platonic ideal of morality that exists somewhere, but that is inaccessible to us except through divine revelation. That actually makes for an elegant theology of morality, but it doesn't advance your argument for atheists being incapable of morality. More to the point, it doesn't offer a way for us to see the truth of that. You may hold it as a doctrinal truth, but you'd have to find some other way to convince of its truth.

If that's your argument in substance, then it's like the CCA thread. Even if you have something internally consistent, it needs to be somehow moored to reality to be meaningful. If your personal philosophy/theology/whatever is completely divorced from reality, then it's no different than me claiming that leprechauns or Santa Claus are the source of morality. We can argue over which one is more satisfying or pleasing or whatever, but there's no valid way to determine which one is true. You've claimed that atheists can't be moral. If that just becomes an unfalsifiable theological claim, then we haven't much to discuss.

They would sell themselves or children into “slavery” when they reached the end of things financially and could not provide for their basic needs. So, it’s starvation or move into a temporary situation where you can be a contributor to securing such needs for yourself or your family.

They also might steal. Why is the command against theft unequivocal, but human trafficking is allowed in certain circumstances, presumably as a moral act or concept?

That’s situational morality, not subjective morality. In this passage, Paul is saying that for everyone in existence, (a) one should eat X unless (b) (v. 14) they wrongly think it is unclean or (c) (v. 20) it causes someone else to stumble in the faith.

Subjective morality would be that the (a) depends on who is being talked about when applied to b, c, or other situations. So, for instance, where Johnny should eat X even though they think it is unclean, Suzie should not eat X when she thinks it is unclean.

Are you claiming that the "should" as it relates to (b) isn't a moral "should?" For the morality to be objective, we need to be able to determine if Suzie should (in a moral sense) eat the hoopoe, regardless of how anyone feels about it, including Suzie. If Suzie is alone and thinks that it would be immoral to eat a hoopoe, then an oibjective morality would say that it's still not immoral. Is that what you're claiming for Paul's theology of sin? If so, I'd disagree that Paul meant that, but at least your understanding of Paul's theology would be consistent with objectivity and subjectivity in a philosophically moral sense.

[William]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #194]

If that's your argument in substance, then it's like the CCA thread. Even if you have something internally consistent, it needs to be somehow moored to reality to be meaningful. If your personal philosophy/theology/whatever is completely divorced from reality, then it's no different than me claiming that leprechauns or Santa Claus are the source of morality. We can argue over which one is more satisfying or pleasing or whatever, but there's no valid way to determine which one is true. You've claimed that atheists can't be moral. If that just becomes an unfalsifiable theological claim, then we haven't much to discuss.

The CCA is not unfalsifiable. It grounds morality in the Source’s coherence - which is accessible through formation, observation, and reason. That’s a real mooring.

viewtopic.php?p=1185679#p1185679

Your critique of supernaturalism is similar to the CCA's.

viewtopic.php?p=1185677#p1185677

Your resistance to CCA is similar to why a supernaturalist resists it. You want to remain where you are most comfortable. Where you think you have the upper hand.
What materialism doesn't understand fully, is that arguing from irreconcilable positions has never and will never resolve anything. That is the one thing materialism has in common with supernaturalism.

The CCA stands outside both. It offers the bridge.

[Difflugia]

The CCA is not unfalsifiable. It grounds morality in the Source’s coherence - which is accessible through formation, observation, and reason. That’s a real mooring.

I tried to engage with both the logical and scientific framework of your CCA in the other thread. You deflected, dismissing my arguments as scientisticism. Your excuse was that the CCA thread was addressed to other theists, who are equally unanchored to reality.

This thread is addressed to atheists, where one should expect sctientistification, along with things like good methodologicalism, data collectionism, and statistical analysisism. If you feel like discussing the CCA in this thread and in terms of actual reality, I'm still game. I'm also game if you want to discuss gods, leprechauns, and Santa Claus in the other thread. If you just want to keep dismissing arguments without engaging them, though, I'll go back to watching the fascinating conversation you're otherwise having with yourself.

[William]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #196]

You have made a few unsupported assertions here Difflugia.
On The Copenhagen Interpretation

[The Tanager]

[Replying to William in post #193]

[Replying to William in post #193]

My assertion wasn't that Christians clearly are objectively more moral. That would require agreeing on what is moral, who is a Christian and who isn't, having access to everything everyone does, which is clearly beyond our capabilities.

My assertion is that if Christianity is true, then they have a moral advantage. This would primarily be on the individual level, where it would lead to Jimmy and Suzie and Frank being better people than they would have been otherwise. We certainly have no way to measure that.

It would also have effects at the societal level. And there are studies that speak to Christians giving more and volunteering more and others that question that. But, then we are still at the problems I mentioned above.

Those aren't rational reasons to say my assertion fails and parsimony only plays a role if all else is equal, which I don't think is the case when talking about if Christianity is true or not.

[William]

[Replying to The Tanager in post #198]

If your asserted 'special access' produces no detectable difference in moral behavior or reasoning, then it is functionally irrelevant to whether atheists can be moral.
Both atheists and religious people navigate morality using the same fallible, shared tools (reason, experience, conscience, facts about harm).

No special access has been demonstrated.

Therefore, both can be moral - equally, fallibly, genuinely.

You have not shown otherwise, only asserted an unverifiable advantage - which, even if true, does not make atheists incapable of morality. It only makes Christians (in their view) additionally sourced.

You asserted a unique source (indwelling Spirit). I responded: if that source exists and provides moral access, it should produce observable effects. It doesn't. Therefore, your assertion fails on empirical grounds.

The OP isn't asking whether Christianity is true or not.

[The Tanager]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #194]

I’m trying to summarize and make this more manageable. If I’ve missed something important, please just bring it back in.

I’m not saying that one should believe in God because they want objective morality to be true or because they want to believe someone is at the wheel. I’m not saying that atheists should pick morality from a theistic framework because the gods might exist. I’m also not asserting that morality is objective. I’m not arguing that there is a Platonic ideal and that it is inaccessible to us except through divine revelation. I’m not talking about epistemology, but ontology. If objective morality is true, then, yes, both theists and atheists could derive moral truths without taking the priests’ word for it. I’m not talking about the epistemological issue of morality, but the ontological one (the baking in). I’m not saying atheists can’t do moral things.

My main point is that there are no objective standards on atheism. That doesn’t mean people can’t choose to share goals and work towards those. That doesn’t mean evolution can’t account for moral instincts. Evolution doesn’t account for those moral instincts being how a species should act, though. That’s not defining anything away, but distinguishing what morality is if atheism is true versus objective morality.

You and Johnny are together in the cold. You have fire, you have shelter, you found some food but it’s not much. Your goal may be for both of you to survive. Johnny’s goal may be for him to survive. Johnny may come to a decision point to kill you or keep you alive to try to reach his goal. If atheism is true, there is no objective standard to judge your differences against. There will be an objective answer (in principle at least) to how to best reach your goal. There will be an objective answer to how to best reach Johnny’s goal. Those could be the same or they could be different. But there is no way to judge one as better than the other.

I agree that some theistic models don’t result in objective morals. Mine does, though. And mine wasn’t ever presented as claiming that God’s judgments as represented by his priests makes the source objective. It was His act of creation including giving us moral agency as part of who we are designed to be.

As to the ice cream analogy, my point is that consistent, rational atheists wouldn’t trust the feelings they do have about murder, theft, rape, etc., as, logically, they should feel the same way about those as they do about ice cream differences.

As to Numbers 5, the text doesn’t specify that this dust was a cesspool of disease. The tabernacle had different areas. The priests were regularly in these areas and not dying off. But this is tangential to our discussion.

As to Romans 14, you seem to be talking about absolute morality rather than objective morality. The absolutist says the question of “should Suzie eat the hoopoe” must always have the same answer. A situationist says the answer depends on the situation. A subjectivist says the answer depends on the subject. I’m saying that Paul is a situationist.