That is actually a cogent description of decision making from your perspective. A difference with how a Christian might ideally choose would be to do with the standard you appeal to when making a choice. Effectively you said you make a subjective choice based on what you evaluate to be your own motivations. You appeal to no external authority to guide you nor to an indwelling God for His prompting. But I hope you realise that effectively you surrender to whatever personal forces determine your motivations at a level you cannot evaluate them deep in your sub conscious existence, experience and genetic programming. I as a Christian can ideally evaluate what I would like to choose to do by a standard derived from church and scripture and thereby overcome my programming by making choices that transcend my own personal momentum.
Okay, I understand that when I said “whatever my motives happen to be,” I made it sound like a whim-of-the-moment kind of thing, but I was just being vague for the sake of the brevity. Those motives could easily include things like my desire to remain obedient to an external authority. And my process for evaluating my options could include things like being conscious my more base motives and trying to overcome them, living up to an example of good character even if in the moment I have impulses to the contrary, etc.
Of course a Christian or other theist could add something like a feeling of internal prompting or guidance from God to this process, but I see it as part of the same process I’m trying to describe here. What I really want to come down against though is the idea that this can happen in a way that steps outside of causality; conta-causal notions of free will are incoherent to me.
Some of these positions are not controversial from the point of view of scripture or the church e.g. abortion, euthanasia. There is no absolute prohibition on the death penalty or war in scripture but there are Christians who lean more towards Gods justice and Christians who lean more to his mercy, Christians who think that Christians can work for the common good through the state(and the sword) and Christians who believe that government is too flawed to be useful. There are also contextual factors like for example the abuse of the penalty or warfare by certain dictatorships which will also motivate Christians to take contextually based decisions on individual issues based on the wider agenda - so yes I agree some diversity is not necessarily hypocritical. The response to a situation is to the whole situation not just a single issue. But this actually illustrates that God has granted freewill in the church and expects us to make our own unique decisions in the situations that we confront.
All of which shows that what looks hypocritical or inconsistent to someone outside the group actually might not be once you look at all the intricacies and nuances.
One criteria of competence when it comes to thinking must surely be coming to the right conclusions many of which have been freely given to us.
What?
On what basis would an ethical non naturalist justify their ethical conclusions? Nature is a flawed foundation but the only real alternative to it is God surely. To suggest that there is a realm of pure thought in which conclusions can be drawn to justify ethical lifestyles is curious and its implicit transcendence of nature is an argument against naturalism. Maybe as a Christian I might associate this argument as one from conscience. But the Christian view is that sin has tainted conscience and so it is not a perfect foundation. But this OP is not really targeting these people, who are rare, and would have a hard time justifying their views in any kind of evangelistic way.
From what I’ve seen (again, I’m no expert on this philosophy, I just know that it exists and is defended by some competent people I greatly respect), non-naturalists view moral facts as brute facts. “Wanton cruelty is wrong.” If you ask “but why is wanton cruelty wrong,” you’re asking a nonsensical question (to them), sort of like asking “but who created God.”
They vary on how this work ontologically and epistimologically, but explanations are out there. I have issues with this approach to ethics, but those are also issues I have with a lot of theistic approaches to ethics as well.
I can accept that many of the atheistic objections to this OP have merely illustrated that particular atheists are not members of the standard atheist group I refer to, some think they are but on close examination are not and others are just confused by the question and maybe the idea that they need to defend a positive atheistic position at all.
If you try to refer to a “standard atheist group,” you will have difficulties. Remember, theism and atheism are very broad categories. If you’re trying to critique a specific train of thought you find find within one of those categories, you need to choose your words carefully (think of an atheist who says something like “theists just believe in God because they’re scared of death,” ignoring or ignorant of all the religious traditions that believe in God but not life after death).
Most people faced with the question "if not God then what?" cannot build an answer at all and either give up the effort or realise the futility of opposing God. But there is a settled modern atheistic affirmation of science and choice. That these values as understood by atheists actually contradict and undermine each other should destroy this alternative vision. Of course many people are too stubborn even in the face of defeat and merely fall into a deeper degree of brokenness and mental contradictions.
This contradiction you see between science and choice is still not clear to me. Maybe it’s there and I’m personally too dumb to see it or you just haven’t done a good job highlighting it or both, but maybe let’s not go to the extreme of suggesting that people are succumbing to some sort of brokenness under the weight of the futility of their opposition to God or some such, okay?
And while I am somewhat dismayed by the number of atheist who don’t seem to put in the effort to answer the “if not God, then what?” questions, I also understand that it is a process to first get to the point where you feel like those questions can be answered and to then set out on the very difficult path of actually doing it.
Understand, a lot of atheists come from a religious background, and it’s common that when we leave that there will be a period of time – years, maybe even decades – where we resent what they perceive as our former gullibility and that of the people they have been surrounded with. This makes us shy away from falling in with anything that looks like a pre-packaged worldview or anything that promises answers to ultimate questions, for a time at least, because we don’t want to be “taken for a ride” again.
It doesn’t help that during all of this they are constantly bombarded (often even before we left a religion) by pop apologists saying things like “you can’t have morality without God.” And then you wonder why so many atheists are relativists? It’s because this dichotomy has been drilled into them, and when the God part is no longer tenable, they’ll go ahead and grab for the relativism, not knowing there are other options because the salesmen who have been barking false dichotomies at them.
Sorry, bit of a rant there. This is something that peeves me.
