Epositive:
Hello all, this question is borne out of a thread I read some days back about a girl who break with the op due to his atheistic position.

As a secular humanist myself, who is family-oriented and intend to raise kids in the near future. I believe I could get useful tips from your knowledge and experiences.

Kindly share, how do you guys cope with religious partners, long-term ones (wife or husband/ fiance or fiancee) in particular?
Do you get discouraged about their religious leanings, and, perhaps, de-convert them in the long run considering the low population irreligious persons in the dating pool?

Wilgrea7:

At the end of the day, they are both subjective. Subjective in the sense that the definitions of right and wrong have shifted from personal opinion among different humans, to personal opinion among different gods.

Endtimer:


A few glancing blows as I am otherwise preoccupied. This bit is an obviously disingenuous red herring. You purport to address the moral argument which presupposes God's existence and quickly tell us to prove God's existence. You've defeated your own point by making it clear that objective morals do exist in the theistic faiths, so you've adjusted to arguing which set of morals should be considered objective. The argument is about morality and not the existence of God and is completely sound on its own. If you wish to address God's existence and why we are Christians rather than Muslims or Jews, go ahead a create a post to discuss it, but do not pretend that this is a challenge to the moral argument.

Endtimer:
... Living like He does therefore strangely provides otherworldly fulfillment ...

Endtimer:
... failure to live like God will result in damnation. This and the two above are some reasons to live like God ...

Endtimer:

This is from the top of my-tired-head so I expect to do a lot of qualifying and explaining when I get back.

Endtimer:


This is pathetic. I mean that in the most utmost sense of the word.

I stated that objective morals cannot exist in God’s absence and people here rush to support me so quickly that I’m left blushing at their kindness.

If objective morals exist, then so do objective ”immorals”. The reason everyone here is rightly angered by abuses committed by some professed Christians is that they perceive those crimes as immoral. I’m stating that the reason you all perceive those crimes as evil is because you are culturally Christian. If you were Mongols, you’d revel in the destruction and subjugation of enemies. War history would be a matter of pride. If you were samurai, you’d see defiling pre-adolescent boys as normal.

The things you see as good and bad are the result of Christianity because you are in a predominantly Christian culture. It isn’t your nature or evolution. Christianity has major bearings on what you believe good and bad to be, which is why we can agree that these wars are silly and those boys should’ve been protected from those men.

Don’t you truly believe that your moral values are superior to those of others (homosexual predators for instance)? You certainly seem to believe they are superior to mine. Why then, would you disagree with objective morals?

Endtimer:


Actually I can rule them out if they are obviously irrational and untenable, but first you’d have to state your position and defend it.

Endtimer:


Notice that your response doesn’t invalidate my claim that his meta ethics assumes good and evil based on personal taste.

Also, what everyone here calls meta ethics is part of what I already consider regular ethics. Soon we’ll be talking about things like the Euthyphro dilemma and what good is and how God is good. These are issues I’ve already addressed here on Nairaland so I’ll provide links to ease the discussion.

Endtimer:

List of fallacies invoked:
1. Appeal to authority.

Endtimer:

2. Ad hominem.

You are basically saying you don’t have to prove anything because I am too stupid to understand your gospel.

Endtimer:

I predicted you’d dodge the question because you don’t want to reveal the weakness of your position.

Endtimer:

Once again, we both used a lot of words, but I actually made a point.

Near1:


The alleged presence of Christian morality didn't do much to help those poor Catholic altar-boys. Didn't help those poor Baptist kids.

Setting aside the fact that arguing from effect to cause is slipshod thinking, the fact is that millions of people sharing Christian values have committed millions of atrocities. Were your logic sound, your Christian morality wouldn't be exempt from harsh judgement. Fortunately for your faith, your argument is vapid.

tctrills:

These last 2 years had made many of us suspicious of corruption and so much more in the scientific community. We were told to follow the science but we are learning that the science can be manipulated by men.

The proof of God is not a science.

Endtimer:
Good of you to explain what you mean when you use the term meta ethics. Maybe we can come to understand one another and have a discussion. Understanding one another is the entire point of these things.

First, I do not want to harm or kill anyone. That is just absurd: this is the internet so I can’t and more importantly, I don’t want to.

Concerning what you wrote, the important part is that “we” decided that harm arbitrarily constitutes immorality. There is nothing intrinsic in harm that can make it bad without appealing to unspoken first principles. We could have as well decided that anything that doesn’t cause harm is immoral and that harm is the highest good.

I also agree that if x is good, then it is good. In addition to that I only believe that x is good because it is in God’s nature. That it is imitative of God’s nature makes it moral. From what I can tell meta ethics simply decides that something is good or bad based on personal taste. For instance, harm is bad because we the people say it is; while it was good to vikings as they said it wasn’t. I’m not endorsing their terrorism, but it was also personal taste that flew those planes into those buildings back in 2001.

I believe I started this discussion by stating that most here are making the mistake of looking at our ultra-civilized Christianish world and concluding that if we decide to make up good and bad as we go it’ll be alright. Perhaps those people would like to read about the ancient samurai tradition to sodomize little boys (and only little boys) to see what happens in the absence of the Christian morals they think are natural.

I look forward to your response.

Tamaratonye1:

The nutshell version is that no specific meta-ethical position has been demonstrated to be necessarily inconsistent with ethics and morals as they exist in the real world.

Endtimer:

In other words, you want us to both be right as none of our positions has “specifically...been demonstrated to be necessarily inconsistent with ethics”. I agree that I am right. You, on the other hand will do well to not assume that anyone agrees with you and prove your points with examples and analogies like the rest of us educated folks do.

Endtimer:
From what I can tell meta ethics simply decides that something is good or bad based on personal taste.

Metaethics is a branch of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words. Whereas the fields of applied ethics and normative theory focus on what is moral, metaethics focuses on what morality itself is. Just as two people may disagree about the ethics of, for example, physician-assisted suicide, while nonetheless agreeing at the more abstract level of a general normative theory such as Utilitarianism, so too may people who disagree at the level of a general normative theory nonetheless agree about the fundamental existence and status of morality itself, or vice versa. In this way, metaethics may be thought of as a highly abstract way of thinking philosophically about morality. For this reason, metaethics is also occasionally referred to as “second-order” moral theorizing, to distinguish it from the “first-order” level of normative theory.

Metaethical positions may be divided according to how they respond to questions such as the following:
What exactly are people doing when they use moral words such as “good” and “right”?
What precisely is a moral value in the first place, and are such values similar to other familiar sorts of entities, such as objects and properties?
Where do moral values come from—what is their source and foundation?
Are some things morally right or wrong for all people at all times, or does morality instead vary from person to person, context to context, or culture to culture?
Metaethical positions respond to such questions by examining the semantics of moral discourse, the ontology of moral properties, the significance of anthropological disagreement about moral values and practices, the psychology of how morality affects us as embodied human agents, and the epistemology of how we come to know moral values. The sections below consider these different aspects of metaethics.

Endtimer:


Since I've come to understand your point, I can't say this discussion has been fruitless; painful perhaps, but far from fruitless. I'll use your post to illustrate something to someone who thinks. Wilgrea7, this woman has demonstrated exactly what we've been talking about for a while now, so I'm going to demonstrate the untenability of Godless morality using her ideas as a foil. That way something sensible can result from my interaction with her and perhaps objective third parties can come to see what I'm talking about.

She starts her reply by indicating that morality is sourced from individual wants. She quickly refutes herself, but I'll stick to debunking her claims for now (you might want to read the quoted text in its entirety for context). If morals really did come from what people want, then the Holocaust would certainly be the greatest moral accomplishment in the history of the world as it fulfilled Hitler's desires admirably.

She undoes herself by following her first point with a short paragraph where she struggles to demonstrate innate human goodness through evolutionary appeal. I'm not one to reference Richard Dawkins but she might want to read The Selfish Gene. Contrary to her Powerpuff Girls influenced fantasy, humans are demonstrably bad. We've been at war throughout our existence and when we take time off from that, it's to enjoy the spoils of battles won: captive women, slaves, stolen goods and property. If her argument here is that we naturally manifest (what her Christianity-influenced mind considers) moral sentiment it is only because we live in a civilization only 3% as old as the time we've spent on this earth. Furthermore, her point about survival being contingent on empathy is as ludicrous as it is absurd. Empathy is hardly an important trait in determining the survival of a species; not to mention that survival cannot be seen as determinant of morality because it often involves killing (another thing most Christian-influenced atheist minds consider bad). If that was the case anything required for survival (essentially doing your part in perpetuating your genetic heritage) would be moral. Things like killing, stealing, rape, theft, and most of the other things constitutions ban would be alright depending on the situation.

Next, is another short paragraph where she states that her happiness about the wellbeing of others is enough to bring about morality. If people should do good things only because they make us happy, then the same can be said about bad things. No sensible person can honestly believe this (as we'll see at the end of her post). Once again she fails to grasp that some people do not think like she does and solipsistically declares that people will be good little boys and behave in the absence of objective morals because it makes her happy to see others happy. It also made Nazis happy to throw people in gas chambers and Bin Laden happy when the second plane hit the building. Furthermore, no adult should believe that goodness is contingent on our happiness because happiness is a flimsy emotion. One moment we wish to be alone in the world and the next to be surrounded by friends and family. Emotional transience would render all morals super-arbitrary as they not only change when one person's happiness fades but were never even in place as different people are made happy by different things. Some people would be happy if we all died so they could claim our land.

She says something about Saudi's.

Then, she assumes the ironic position of the holier-than-thou atheist by borrowing my morals and attacking me for believing in a God that commands the "suffering of innocents"; all this despite having stated her disbelief in objective morality elsewhere. How can I be bad, if good and bad are matters of personal taste. Isn't that just her isolated, valueless opinion.

Finally, she proves my point by accusing me of evil and demanding my immediate arrest and imprisonment without the possibility of bail and without a fair trial, all because I, the Christian, am a mass shooter and arsonist (I'm as shocked as you are, as I was just informed). Her last paragraph is proof of what I've been saying all along: she wants me locked up for not believing what she believes. The significance of this is that atheist morality is dependent on personal opinion. Our laws are codified morals and would-be tyrants would have me (and all other believers) locked up for believing a logically unassailable position (moral contingence on deity). Ironically, from her post history she feels oppressed as an atheist in Nigeria, but finds it within herself to call for the arrest of someone for believing in God. I'm curious as to whose morals would inevitably lead to totalitarianism as they aren't morals at all; just what she woke up feeling.

Sorry for the long text. I'm tired so I'll post my proposed solution to Christian antinomianism some other day. Happy independence.

afficionado7:



I'm an agnostic with a bias for philosophical taoism, although my belief or unbelief is always in flux- I'm constantly learning. So this question doesn't apply to me.

What I've deduced though is that belief in a god is a crutch, much like using drugs, or being an alcoholic. It serves an emotional purpose for the theist, and that's why even the most intelligent individuals can be fervent adherents. It's an emotional salve.

PS: OP I salute your clarity of expression. You have a way with words.

Endtimer:


So what? What you’re saying is that most people do what everyone else does. What I’m saying is that it isn’t warranted whether or not the people in question are aware.

You are simply saying that in the absence of your hypothetical church-laws, people (due to ignorance) would continue to act properly. I’m asking why they should. Saying that they ignorantly will is a cop-out. I’ll restate the question: if God doesn’t exist, why should anyone do the right thing?

Hopefully, you won’t say, “because we’ll throw them in jail otherwise”. The question would become: why should we throw them in jail? If you say, “because killing people (as an example) is wrong”; the question becomes: why is it wrong? If you say, “it just is”; the question becomes: why? That’s enough prediction from me, but just in case you say that we just know what is good and what isn’t you’d have created the basis for rationalization of whatever anyone does based on their subjective knowledge of good and bad.

Hopefully you see why I have to continue explaining myself.

Endtimer:


This much is self-evident or properly basic. I’ll have to redirect that back to you and ask that you explain how objective morals can exist authoritatively without God.

There are many theories on how to create matter from nothing – especially as quantum physicists have tried to better understand the Big Bang and what could have caused it. We know that colliding two particles in empty space can sometimes cause additional particles to emerge. There are even theories that a strong enough electromagnetic field could create matter and antimatter out of nothing itself.

But, managing to do any of these things has always seemed impossible. Still, that hasn’t stopped scientists from trying, and now, that research seems to have paid off. As Big Think reports, in early 2022, a group of researchers created strong enough electric fields in their laboratory to level the unique properties of a material known as graphene.

With these fields, the researchers were able to enable the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs from nothing at all. This proved that creating matter from nothing is indeed possible, a theory first proposed by Julian Schwinger, one of the founders of quantum field theory. And with that knowledge, we can hopefully better understand how the universe makes something from nothing.

TenQ:

Every moral law of God has and will be violated by man.
Even as a Christian, we many times violate God's laws!

TenQ:

Can you please show the Evidence to prove that conscience EVOLVED and from what?

LOL!

TenQ:


Why didn't you respond to my questions?

TenQ:


When you see a house, you don't assume it built itself
When you see a helicopter, you don't assume metals just randomly glued themselves together
When you see a computer, you doesn't ever thing itself assembled itself.

All these are systems any one can say the function of their components.

TenQ:

It still doesn't dawn on you that these are SYSTEMS and as such could not be a product of random collection of atoms!?

TenQ:


Are you underestimating our medical knowledge to make copulations between man and animals safe?

TenQ:


Your only alternative then is to conclude that infinite regress of cause and effect is the reality (even though the law of entropy is grossly violated).

TenQ:

I didn't ask you what the cause of causality is:

TenQ:

Can you please quote Prof. Don Lincoln where he says space, time and matter "evolved independently"...LOL!

TenQ:

Complexity is relative my dear: I'm surprised you didn't know that!

TenQ:

Do you need to accept anything!?
No!

As it doesn't change the truth.

TenQ:

...A Miracle is the suspension of the Natural laws set by God for a purpose...

TenQ:

Half knowledge is very dangerous
1. Confirm if Time, Space and Matter were created simultaneously
2. If time, space and matter were created simultaneously, confirm the time.

Note:
Before the big bang/inflation time, space and matter did NOT exist!