Maybe you left this out by mistake, but are you implying that a person who believes in God automatically has good morality? You keep pointing to being able to base it on something, but what value does that hold? You are basing it on FAITH. Faith in God. You are not basing it on God. You are basing it on your faith in God. How is that different than, say, faith in science? Faith is a lottery if you think about it. Does it matter if you're betting on God or nothingness if you don't have any humanly verifiable proof? Furthermore, a religious person most likely has never directly spoken with God, therefore really you're basing it on your faith in a chain of peopel and books which claim to convey God's message. Is that really a much better place to base things than the most humanly verifiable proof? Doesn't this seem like something more solid?
Think of it this way, if I am wrong(I'm not) then I spend a lifetime following the Prince of Peace(Jesus) who tells me to love my neighbor as myself then I die and fade into nothing. If you are wrong, you spend a lifetime following your own desires then when you die you will spend eternity in a lake of fire (with your pet dragon). I say it takes a lot of faith to believe that once you die your consciousness dies with you because if you are wrong then we are talking about eternity. Although I believe in Jesus with every fiber of my being, I am safe either way. Nonbelievers are only safe if they are right.
It was Palm Sunday yesterday and my wife and I had a fantastic mass. Here is something the OP does not realized: it does not matter whether you believe Jesus really exist or not, the important thing is JESUS BELIEVES IN YOU. I am just a lowly disciple of the Prince of peace!
No I am not. Once again, as I tried to explicitly say in the post that you replied to, belief or a lack of belief in God does not necessarily have any correlation with how moral a person is. However, if there is no God, or no transcendent being to actually have a foundation for morality, then there is no objective morality. That is all I'm saying. As in morality is subjective, which means that nothing is actually right or wrong independent of the circumstance or the person. I believe you are also confusing epistemology with ontology. Here is an article that answers many of the objections in this thread. Hopefully it makes more sense than I am, as I am obviously not communicating my stance well: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5965 The matrix objection that he raises invalidates your argument about entirely basing worldviews on evidence, as there is no evidence at all that can prove that you are not a body in the matrix. However, I believe your objection does nothing to my argument, as I am not arguing that people base their moral views off of the Bible or any other religious book, but that without God then objective morals don't exist.
Does this mean: "Either you believe what I believe or you will burn in hell for eternity" or at least "either you believe what I believe or you risk burning in hell for eternity"? Do you think God would let 5/6 (or more) of the world's population burn in hell for eternity? What about those who never had an opportunity to believe in what you believe in? What about those who lived before Jesus? Do they also burn in hell for eternity?
If you come from the point of view of science, logic and the simplest answer, when you die, time ceases to exist, as far as you know. Whether you were Hitler or Mother Teresa doesn't matter any more. It only mattered when you were alive. You live a moral life just for the sake of living it. The only Hell is a guilty conscience.
God is not a foundation for morality. If he was, it would make no sense to say he is perfectly good (if I could just make up what's right and wrong and follow that, does that make me a good person? ... no). Moral right and wrong must be something that exists external to God.
I think he believes because he believes. There's no logic to it. But his suggestion to non-believers who insist on having "reasons" is that they believe out of fear. I don't know how someone can convince themselves of something based on fear, unless they willfully shut off the "does this really make sense?" part of their brain.
The problem with this argument that I see is that if you are saying that morality is not tied to a specific religious belief then how can you judge that morality is objective and due to God? If you take an atheist and a religious person who both say they are moral how can you prove that that morality is based off a single objective agent, God? For that matter how can you prove that two people who say they are moral but have two different religious beliefs are motivated by the same objective agent?
LOL...he gives you a video explicitly outlining Pascal's Wager and how dumb it is, and then you go and repeat Pascal's Wager verbatim. Awesome. As a Christian, what do you think about this pastor/article? Is Hell Dead? (you're doing a terrible job btw showing the love of Christ with your puffery and condescension. Take a couple hints from rhester and MadMax)
Maybe he does but his argument is fear based as you note below. Leaving aside whether they suspend their belief I don't see the Hell and brimstone argument as being consistent with the idea of "the Prince of Peace." This is an issue that is frequently brought up in these debates but it is one that I have never heard adequately answered.
Is this a form of the Euthyphro dilemma? In other words, is something good because God says it is or is something good because of some other quality that exists outside of God? On the first view, good is arbitrary because whatever God says is good is good. If He changes His mind on a subject, then his new stance is the new good. While on the second view, something is good outside of God, which means that God is dependent upon something else. The answer to this dilemma is that good, or morality is rooted in God's nature. It is who He is. And it comes out in His commands. God cannot change who He is, so good (which is rooted in God's character) will never change. Therefore good is not arbitrary, nor does it exist outside of God Himself. It is found in who God is at His core.
Wouldn't that be reducing the idea that God is omnipotent and boxing God with morality since God cannot change who he is?
Because the agent I am arguing for isn't any specific God. Yes I believe that it is the Christian God, but whatever God it is makes no difference to the argument. And I believe that the atheist and the religious person will both have a sense of what morality is, regardless of what religion they do or do not believe in. I believe there is a sort of moral intuition that we all have. (assuming there is nothing mentally wrong with us) If people say that it is there from evolution, then that is fine, but that answer means that the things we all see as good (love, selflessness) are arbitrary. There is no foundation for them, and if we would have evolved differently we might see these things as weakness or not good. I believe that love and selflessness are good not because we evolved to believe that, but because there is a higher standard than us for morality. To clarify this point, I will define God as a maximally great being, as it said in the article I posted. If there is anything greater than God, then that thing would be God. So without a maximally great being, then objective morality does not exist, because morality is nothing more than a byproduct of evolution. I hope this answered your question, although with my track record in this thread I would doubt it lol.
No? Who holds to the idea that God can change who He is? It is logically inconsistent, and akin to asking "Could God create a rock so big that He himself couldn't move it?" Or, "Could God create an married bachelor?" Those are ridiculous questions. Omnipotence assumes that God is all powerful, but logically inconsistent ideas play no part in His omnipotence. Or reality for that matter. Sorry if my tone sounded harsh. It was not meant to be.
Or you could simplify it down further and say that morality just is, and leave out God altogether. You were arguing before that God is necessary for objective morality to make sense. How so? It just seems like an extra step. If you want to argue that morality = God, then it becomes more of an argument over semantics.
Except that would rule out any objective standard for "God" since there is no agreement on what God is or if it is even one God, Gods or in the Buddhist case something that can even be personified. I am still seeing a problem of proof. If both an atheist and a religious person say they are moral but they say their morality stems from completely different causes. In that case an argument for a cause as being a supernatural agent is flawed since the atheist will not acknowledge a supernatural agent so part of your evidence doesn't support your argument. You are dismissing a big part of the evidence because it goes against what you believe. It doesn't because what you are not presenting evidence just saying that it is this way because you believe this way. This just seems to be a very limited argument you are presenting. Again I will stress that I have no problems with your beliefs but am trying to engage in an intellectual debate in regard to them. I apologize if this comes off as disrespectful.
Except you just wrote: While you may not think you are boxing in God that is what your argument is. This is one reason why I sometimes have troubles with these type of religious arguments. They come down to human arguments appealing to God as justification. That strikes me as presumptuous that we as humans could understand the mind of God enough to justify our actions according to his/her/its will.
As a species, we are trying to build the best world possible for our offspring to grow up in, right? The world that has been depicted in countless religious books, is FAR MORE ideal than the world depicted by Darwin, which is a cruel world. Darwin is the truth in my eyes, but it doesn't mean that we can't strive to build a world that thrives from our own natural instincts to help each other.
