Is morality objective, even without God?

[Aaron112]

Some people claim to be able to identify them by the interpretation of scripture they adhere to.

More correctly stated as "by their fruit" which means by their teaching, not interpretation which is not given to men to exercise.

Most teaching(s) in the world are far from God, far from Scripture, far from Truth, far from Jesus and opposed to Jesus. Good teaching, true teaching, i.e. good fruit, is rare.

 

[Bradskii]

See the results of those you can find, if you can find any these days, who have
cured countless cases of health problems in spite of the druglords opposition to it always.
If it becomes known you agree and advocate curing health problems, and preventing them, naturally, instead of under the druglords outrageously expensive rip-offs,
you will be becoming a target(one of many) of them, and might disappear soon.
If necessary, be quiet , be still, and know that God is God. He might be of some help - His Choice.

That made no sense to me. I just would like to know your best alternative to determining objective facts.

 

[Aaron112]

That made no sense to me. I just would like to know your best alternative to determining objective facts.

Ignore forums and most internet sites.

 

[Bradskii]

Ignore forums and most internet sites.

Please, stop telling me what you think won't work. And tell me what you think will work.

 

[Aaron112]

Please, stop telling me what you think won't work. And tell me what you think will work.

If you trust sources that are unreliable, that won't work. Like building a house on quicksand.

However, let's simplify if possible to get a positive result.......

1)What is your goal ?

2)Has posting ad infinity on this forum garnered any good solid positive provable results ?

 

[Bradskii]

However, let's simplify if possible to get a positive result.......

1)What is your goal ?

To get objective facts about the world

2)Has posting ad infinity on this forum garnered any good solid positive provable results ?

None. So we can discount this forum as a means. So...again...what would you suggest?

 

[o_mlly]

But I can ask you. In fact, I have to ask you because you say...

And I would refer you to the same Omniscient authority.

So atheists can ask for help from something in which they do not believe?

Possibly and preferably, but He doesn't need a special request to help you. Isn't He awesome?

You are either right all the time. Or sometimes you'll have it wrong. I'm in the former category.

So, now you claim to be omniscient? Your record in these boards just does not support that claim.

 

[o_mlly]

I suspect you would say that it is God's moral authority you are promoting, not your own.

Good. But replace the word "promoting" with "proposing" and you'd even be better.

 

[Jerry N.]

At the beginning of this thread, Singer suggested that moral absolutes are independent like math; however, we perceive moral absolutes in three different ways: innate, society imposed, and religiously imposed. How can these be separated? Math can be empirically tested, but how are morals tested?

 

[em3ry]

In the video below Peter Singer equates morality/ethics with mathematics, which is a concept that I'd never considered before. Most people probably agree that mathematics is objective. It's true independent of our opinions about it. And I can see how it could be argued that morality is exactly the same. In math the understanding that 1+1=2 doesn't instantaneously lead to an understanding of Pi, because although the latter is equally true, coming to understand that it's true is a complicated process. Perhaps the same is true with morality. As with mathematics, morality may be objectively true, but understanding why it's true may be just as complicated as understanding why Pi is true. You don't instantly go from understanding that math exists, to understanding trigonometry, and you don't instantly go from understanding that morality exists, to understanding that slavery is immoral.

Thus there may be an objective morality, but as with math we're still in the process of understanding it, and the fact that we may disagree about what's moral doesn't by necessity mean that morality is subjective. It just means that we don't have a sufficient understanding of morality so as to understand why things are moral, and so instead, morality without God looks subjective, when it really isn't.

And in my opinion, having some God attempting to dictate to me what is and isn't moral will never be as gratifying as actually understanding why things are immoral without a need for that God.

There are no moral laws but there are civilized laws. The more a society treats everyone as equals the more civilized it is. ("god" is defined as the source of moral laws).

 

[Jerry N.]

There are no moral laws but there are civilized laws. The more a society treats everyone as equals the more civilized it is. ("god" is defined as the source of moral laws).

If one doesn’t believe in God, then one can argue that there are only civil laws, but there seems to be innate human laws. I do find it interesting that God’s laws are rather simple, not counting the laws related to the Temple. Man-made laws are incredibly complex and fill many volumes of books.

 

[partinobodycular]

("god" is defined as the source of moral laws).

I can actually accept God as an answer... so long as one is willing to reexamine their understanding of God.

 

[Bradskii]

And I would refer you to the same Omniscient authority.

You are not likely to ask Shiva for advice. I won't be asking him either. And for the same reason I won't be asking God. But you said that He gives you the answer to moral problems. So I can ask you.

Possibly and preferably, but He doesn't need a special request to help you. Isn't He awesome?

So the solutions I have to those problems are from God? Unbidden? Yeah, awesome. But how come some their different to yours? Hang on, I know. Your answers are always right and sometimes mine are wrong. So I'll still have to ask you.

So, now you claim to be omniscient? Your record in these boards just does not support that claim.

Oops. That should have been latter. See? I get it wrong sometimes. But that does raise the question: Do you get it wrong sometimes? That's surely not possible if God is your guide. So are you therefore omniscient? That can't be possible either. So you must be wrong on times. Anyway, I'm sure you'll let us know.

 

[Zaha Torte]

It's obviously not in this case.

I wouldn't be so sure.

I see you trying to find "wiggle room" so you can claim that either there is no God or that He is not Good.

Just anything to justify the committing of sin.

We are trying to see if a command is inviolate or whether there is some 'small print' one can refer to.

If you want to get into it, we can get into it.

All human beings violate the Law and Justice demands that we all immediately die and be separated from God forever.

Think of the Law as Gravity - it does not care for our circumstances - if any person who to step off of a cliff - the effect would be them falling.

It does not matter why the person stepped off the cliff - if they did it on purpose or not - the effect remains the same.

However, through the suffering and death of Lord Jesus Christ - He became our Mediator and our Advocate - He Redeemed us from the Fall.

He was somehow able to - through the application of some divine and eternal Laws that we do not fully understand or are aware of - take upon Himself the punishments of all our sins.

And now that He has suffered these things for all - He is able to forgive us our sins according to His Judgment and Mercy.

Back to the Gravity example - imagine that all people were falling - yet someone who was not foolish enough to step off of the cliff - somehow found a way to save everyone from the impact - at the cost of himself.

He was somehow able - through some techno-age space babble - to slow us or otherwise give us Time - to fulfill the instructions he relayed to us as best as we could - in order to transfer the force of all our collective impacts onto himself and save us all.

And he is somehow able to help us through our descent- so that as long as we did as much as we could on our own - he could make up the difference and complete the transfer.

And if we decided not to follow his instructions - we would suffer the effects of our fall.

The Lord Jesus Christ is the Eternal God and He has given us commandments and He can justify our violations of the Law as long as we are doing the best we can with what we have been given.

The fifth commandment about honoring our parents is the first on the list in respect to our relationships with our neighbors and our duties to our fellow Man.

The first and most fundamental of our duties towards our fellow Man begins with our parents - which lies at the root of all our social relations - the first one we naturally become conscious of.

This commandment reads, "Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."

The many promises that God gave to Israel about them and their inheritance of the promise land were conditioned upon their faithfulness to His commands.

This particular commandment claimed that a person would need to honor their parents in order for their time in God's promised land to be long.

And all the Law and the Prophets hang on the principle of loving God above all and to love your fellow Man as ourself,

"Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,

Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

This is the first and great commandment.

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40)

Violators of the Law were punished according to their crimes - the man in your horrible example would have been put to death - and that is a mercy to prevent him from compounding his sins further.

He was violating both God's Law and nature - we all know it - and part of honoring one's parents is to help them become aware of and repent of their sins.

So at what point does the girl determine that her father is disobeying God's rules? Who decides this?

Are you being serious? You don't think human beings have a natural understanding that the horrible scenario that you concocted is a violation?

This sounds like a question that lawyer who tried to tempt the Lord would ask.

You think the girl would love her father simply because he is her father? Is this another rule she must obey? I can't see someone consciously deciding to love someone. That makes no sense.

Love is a state of being that we should all live by.

 

[Zaha Torte]

There's my short answer, and there's my really, really long answer. I don't think that anybody wants to hear my really, really long answer.

Unfortunately, if you haven't spent fifty years thinking like a solipsist this explanation may be very difficult to follow. But I'll give it a shot.

So here we go:

From my perspective as a solipsist, objective truths are those things which are true by necessity.

For example, cause precedes effect. Since I exist, this rule must be objectively true because it would be impossible to create a coherent reality without it. And without a coherent reality the thoughts which are the hallmark of my existence, wouldn't be possible. Therefore, since 'cogito ergo sum' is self evidently true... cause must precede effect.

From there it's just a matter of taking that which is demonstrably true, and deducing from it that which must necessarily be true.

Like I said, this is the short answer. Does it mean that Christ must've risen from the dead... nope. Does it mean that He didn't... nope. It simply means that there must be a logical reason for why people believe that Christ rose from the dead.

How do you apply your solipsist perspective to issues like morality?

 

[Zaha Torte]

The scientific method.

How do you apply the scientific method to issues of morality?

 

[Bradskii]

I wouldn't be so sure.

I see you trying to find "wiggle room" so you can claim that either there is no God or that He is not Good.

No. I'll accept that God is good. What I'm trying to work out is how people know what He wants. Because different people have different views on that.

Are you being serious? You don't think human beings have a natural understanding that the horrible scenario that you concocted is a violation?

Yes, we do. And I used an extreme example so that it was obvious. So the command to honour your parents does come with small print. Which says that if your father beats and rapes you then he is not fulfilling his half of the bargain so you don't have to.

Now, in this case it is plainly obvious. But say he slaps her. Is that enough to disobey God's command? If he beats her just the once? If it's a regular thing? The point that I am making, which should be blazingly obvious, is that we have to decide what is right. We have to decide if someone is wrong. Even if the command from God is specific and there seems no room for doubt we still have to consider it within context.

Love is a state of being that we should all live by.

Unfortunately we live in the real world where it's not always possible. The father didn't love his daughter. It seems naive to think that she should love him.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

How do you apply the scientific method to issues of morality?

I think one has to start with a few building block principles/ Hans Blaster came up with a few such as
"informed consent" - Don't do something someone without their knowledge, understanding and approval

"minimization of harm" - In medicine it is “Primum non nocere” is a Latin phrase that means "first do no harm". Sometimes it is impossible to do good without first doing harm so minimize it.

"personal autonomy" - Let each person decide for themselves what is in their own best interest.

perhaps we can add:
Justice: Treating all people equally and fairly
Beneficence: The duty to act in the patient's best interest
Truth telling
Confidentiality


But then let's take something like the hot issue of abortion. I think we have a conflict between the consent of the mother and the consent of the fetus. It is just for the fetus? And now also the issue of confidentiality it is the governments business what woman does in the clinic?

I think there can certainly be moral principles without God. But when it come to the question of when personal rights begin it seems to require a faith based understanding of what it means to be a human being.

 

[Bradskii]

How do you apply the scientific method to issues of morality?

You don't. You determine the objective facts of the situation (using the scientific method). And then use them to determine how you should act.

 

[Zaha Torte]

I think one has to start with a few building block principles/ Hans Blaster came up with a few such as
"informed consent" - Don't do something someone without their knowledge, understanding and approval

"minimization of harm" - In medicine it is “Primum non nocere” is a Latin phrase that means "first do no harm". Sometimes it is impossible to do good without first doing harm so minimize it.

"personal autonomy" - Let each person decide for themselves what is in their own best interest.

perhaps we can add:
Justice: Treating all people equally and fairly
Beneficence: The duty to act in the patient's best interest
Truth telling
Confidentiality


But then let's take something like the hot issue of abortion. I think we have a conflict between the consent of the mother and the consent of the fetus. It is just for the fetus? And now also the issue of confidentiality it is the governments business what woman does in the clinic?

I think there can certainly be moral principles without God. But when it come to the question of when personal rights begin it seems to require a faith based understanding of what it means to be a human being.

I don't understand how the scientific method applies to any of these things.

Does the scientific method determine what is or is not "good"?

How does the scientific method determine that we should have "informed consent"?

How does the scientific method determine what "harm" is and that it is something that should be avoided?

How does the scientific method determine that each person has "autonomy" at all?

How does the scientific method determine what "justice" is? Fairness? How does it determine that these are desirable goals?

How does the scientific method determine what is the "best" in terms of a person's interests?

Why is telling the truth a desirable goal? Why is confidentiality something to be valued?