Atheism Cannot Rationally Explain Morals.

It is obviously not a worldview. As a theory, what you say of it is true but irrelevant. Yes, it gives us no grounds for assessing the relative importance of bugs and humans --- just like the theory of gravity doesn't, and the theory of thermodynamics, and the theory of quantum electrodynamics.This doesn't mean that these branches of science say that humans and bugs are of equal importance, it means that they don't say anything about the subject at all.Which means that --- good news, Faith! --- you can believe in gravity and still believe that you're better than a bug. As you do, Faith. When you understand why you can cheerfully and consistently do that, you will understand why I can too.

Come now, Faith, you don't really believe that things are only objective if they are grounded in the theory of evolution.

Can you prove this? It seems on the face of it to be flagrantly untrue. I can make nothing of this. Would you like to try again but make it a little less gnomic?

No. We already knew what human beings were. Do you suppose that before the ToE people were going about looking at each other thinking "I wonder what that is? Could it be an aardvark? A tree?" No, people knew what humans were. But now we also know how they came to be. How is our descent relevant to our obligations? If I shouldn't kill people, I shouldn't do it whether my ancestors were australopithecines, or made by God out of dirt, or hatched out of an egg laid by a giant space chicken. Boy, God really dropped the ball there, eh?

But these are mere facts about us, they are not definitions. If God made a man by magic, he would still be a man, wouldn't he?(And the fact that we are animals follows from the definition of animals, it has nothing to do with the theory of evolution as such.)

I am one of those people. I have said plainly and distinctly, and as recently as my last post, the one which you just read, that we are animals, descended from animals.But this does not lead me to conclude that humans have no value, because why would it?

Well, that's a weaker position than you and your creationist cohorts seemed to be taking. The argument appeared to be that atheists could not justify treating humans morally because an evolved human would have no value, or at least no more than any other collection of atoms.If all you now wish to say is that the evolutionary account of origins is less flattering to your vanity than the creationist account, then yes, maybe; that's up to you. (Personally I have never seen anything that paints a more wretched picture of humanity than Calvinism, but maybe that's a matter of taste.) However, so long as the "devaluation" you speak of does not reduce our value right down to nothing, then we still have grounds to treat an evolved man morally.

Everyone has agreed with that absolutely and without a moment's hesitation.But it is not in fact the only point that you guys have been making.

Are you going to try to argue for this bizarre assertion, or are you just going to recite it over and over?

'Cos they don't want me to kill them. I ignored the fatuous and wicked nonsense in the Bible and consulted my conscience instead.Your turn. Please answer the same questions.

I didn't say that. It's debatable.

First I need Faith to define her terms. What is an objective and what is a subjective morality?In the meantime, I would invite you to consider the word "plant". Once it included fungi, now it does not. And if it is convenient to distinguish between them, we could perfectly well have decided to distinguish between "green plants" and "fungal plants". Does that mean that whether something is a plant is subjective? That would be an odd thing to say.(Note that the qualities of plants and fungi have remained the same all this time.)

But there is an underlying reality which is unaffected by what we choose to call things. We could have used "dog" to mean cat and "cat" to mean dog, but that doesn't mean that the nature of dogs is subjective, it means that the connection between collections of phonemes and their referents is arbitrary. This is still objectively a dog ... ... it just isn't objectively called "a dog": we cannot say that the French are wrong to call it un chien, or the Chinese to call it gŏu. But it's still a dog.

You are illustrating my point. Again, that's a fact about language and not about the animal.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But there is an underlying reality that is more important then these. It makes no sense to say "It is a merely subjective opinion that the sun is hot, because we could just as well have decided that the word 'hot' should mean octagonal."