Moral Argument for God

Good! So you concede that without God there can be no objective absolutes such as good and evil or right and wrong. Like music there can only be patterns of behavior that lead to harmony or discord; destruction and suffering or life and pleasure; what is good for the survival and triumph of a species or what is bad for it.So we are back to what I said originally. Right and wrong do not exist objectively and absolutely. They are merely terms that have become associated with positive and negative behavior patterns.So this also means that when we feel guilt for an evil or wrong action we have not sinned against or separated ourselves from some abstract undefinable Unity. We have not done anything that can be proven to be an undefinable absolute wrong... rather this is a natural response designed to keep us on a path that ensures the survival of the species.So this also means that any outrage or sense of injustice we have at someone who supposedly did something "wrong" or "evil" is not a logical "righteous" reaction, but rather emotion, empathy, the built in species survival mechanism taking action and possibly a logical response to our own desires and our knowledge of the consequences of such actions. There is nothing inherently virtuous or meritorious in this preprogrammed sense of justice and righteousness. In fact merit and virtue are like right and wrong, just valuable survival mechanisms rather than valuable spiritual qualities that elevate us above the physical and take us deeper into the Unity which is God.Do you agree?BTW, sorry for misrepresenting you as an atheist. I guess I should say agnostic then?

Do capuchin monkeys who seem to know what's fair treatement and what isn't understand right from wrong?If you agree that they do, then where did that sense come from?

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Do you think that animals don't have morality (If think this, you either have never owned a dog or aren't a very good observer).

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What kind of morality do dogs have?What's a good example?

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Well, I don't know exactly what is going on in my dog's mind either but yet I can tell when he wants something from me, when he is happy, when he is sad, when he is embarrassed. And I know he sneaks up on the couch when I am not around.

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Well, dogs are pack animals so therefore expressive and emotional.But following rules and competing for attention doesn't mean they are moral.

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Do animals have a sense of morality? You tell me.

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I would say that most animal behavior is instinctual.However, we can look to our primate relatives for some tantalizing evidence of a real moral sense of fairness: link

I will say that I now understand what is meant by absolute moral right and wrong, and I cetainly do not agree with that definition. However, I still don't see why the christian god is the ultimate conclusion of absolute morals. Exactly what I have been trying to say. I agree. Yep. Yes. But I would also stress, that just because these are logical/instinctual reactions, does not somehow belittle them. The outcome of these reactions have real effects on our lives, and our human experience. Outside of the huaman experience, society, and the individual will for suvival, no. Yep. But again, just because they have no necessary spiritual significance, does not make them any 'less'. Again, we are prisoners of our experience here on earth and each individual does feel pain and hurt. For the most part.

The introduction of God doesn't help matters. The only way we can conceive of God is as a sort of super-human with the same sort of mind. If that is the case, then God's values are also subjective.If you try to explain God in other terms, then we come up against an unknown X called the Absolute. What does this mean? Nothing. It's meaningless.So what you are saying is that without the mystery X, there can be no objective absolutes.

It evolved somehow....? What does this have to do with what we are debating?

Yaro's definition of morality is: Here is mine:a) Maximizing harm
b) Hurting the wholeIf you didn't harm others and if you helped the social order, you are being immoral.This is objective. If everyone shot each other we would kill ourselves off. I call this right. Why is it right? Because it's harmful for humans. That simple.My premises are not subjective, they are based on observation. Murder is an objective thing, death is objective. It is an objective fact that lots of murder means lots of dead people. It is an objective fact that lots of dead folks isn't too good for a species.That's what those premesies are based on. That's where my definitions of 'good' and 'bad' come from - 'good' is what harms the species, 'bad' is what helps it.

Good I'm glad you agree. This is what I have been saying from the beginning. I guess the problem was that you never believed in as Robin calls it "the mysterious absolute X" in the first place so you had no frame of reference to understand what believers mean when they appeal to a higher spiritual concept of absolute objective right and wrong. When we do so we are not appealing to a specific written out moral code as you seemed to originally think. We are saying that particular moral actions have absolute abstract qualities with spiritual effects. We are not saying that we have completey discovered or understood which action has which particular quality for every action under the sun. Some are easier to judge than others. In my mind it does more than belittle them. It destroys them. That is one big reason why I cannot be an atheist. I would no longer be able to feel empathy or a sense of justice or care about right and wrong because logically there is no reason to do so but for my own desires which mean nothing. And in my mind logic usually overules feeling. I would still be forced to feel these things, but this would be extremely painful to me as it would conflict with my worldview constantly. So why should I put myself through this? Why should I logically deny the depth and reality of what I feel? Why not just believe in God so that my mind and feelings and others around me can coexist in harmony? So I believe. To which I would ask, "so what?" What non-selfish and non-emotional reason is there for me to care? It does if you previously believed them to be "more". If there is nothing real in them, then to me they become nothing. They are like our dreams, just some meaningless thing that we make up in our minds that disappears when we are gone. To which I would ask, "why should I care?", and to which the only response is, "I feel that I should care, and in the long run I might be hurting myself by not caring."

Since you are chiming can can I ask if you have a valid version of the argument this thread is supposedly about ? I say supposedly because if there was an argument worth anything we ought to have seen it by now.Or are you just another Christian against morality, who seeks only to knock down other concepts of morality without having anything better to offer ?

Sure it does. What would be the point of that if we know it is fallacious? I would say, "mysterious". You say it is meaningless because we have none to few concepts or vocabulary words to describe It, but we all have this idea. And the idea is what matters. When we try to describe it we lose it.I'm going to borrow something Ifen showed me once: Yeah, kinda.

By your logic atheists (or at least you, if you were an atheist) would become murderous thieving raping monsters who do whatever benefits them with no regard for the consequences of their actions to others.That hasn't happened to other atheists as far as I know.I really hope that the only reason you live your life in a moral fasion is not because a big man in the sky tells you that if you do bad, He'll freaking spank you. Morality under threat of punishment or becuase "I told you so" is not morality, it's fear and subservience.

I don't think that follows from what hangdawg said. What he said was that he would have an inner conflict between his logic and his feelings. His feelings would say, "my moral system tells me to do such and such" and his logic would say, "actually, my moral system is arbitrary." This doesn't mean that he's going to start killing people.My own response to Hangdawg is in response to this question:My answer is that this is the nature of life. What matters is the truth, not how we feel about it.

The selection I quotes seems to specifically say that, if his belief in God were to disappear, he would no longer have any reason to be a moral person.I apologize if I misunderstood.

Assuming you conclusion is valid, that there is no reason to be moral, why belive in god?You seem to be saying that the only reason to belive in god is to provide justification for your moral code. This is as arbitrary as all athiests justification for their moral code."I am moral cuz it makes me feel good."
"I am moral for the sake of those I love."
"I am moral cuz it allows me to live a better life."
"I am moral because I don't want to go to jail"
"I am moral because I belive in Zeus"
"I am moral because I belive in pink unicorns"OR"I am moral because I belivce in the christian god"See what I mean? In the end you are choosing emotion as well.