crustafa said:
So if no God, then what?
It's all relative right. What's good for you is good for you. What's good for me is good for me. Without God there is no absolutes. Without absolutes one's sense of ethics and morals are irrelevant, as they differ with emotions and circumstance.
If there's no God, then there is no point of being here. So there's no right, no wrong. Evolution = natural selection - those that are able to adapt to their surroundings are more likely to survive on pass on those characteristics to their offspring. If this is true, then what you're in essence saying is it's okay for me to go lock up 20 fourteen-year old girls and rape them in my backyard.
No God = No purpose. No morals. Why? Because what you believe as 'right' and wrong is ultimately different to the person next to you. Truth is not relative. Truth is absolute. If you put 50 people in a room and say 'which way is north?' they're all going to point different directions but not all going to be right. The same is with truth. Someone has to be right. Someone has to be wrong.
And you're wrong.
"The Case for Christ" - by Lee Strobel. A journalist who is more cynical, more skeptical and has more qualifications than you do. He set out to disprove the whole Christianity thing, he couldn't. He became a Christian. Why don't you try reading up on stuff like this? Try out "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis while you're at it. Christians aren't as dumb as you think we are. Don't go thinking we haven't thought it out, and that we're just following blindly.
Crustafa, one issue I have with your morality argument is that you argue from need to necessity. You see a world without god as a morally depraved reality in which 'anything goes' and assert that there must be a universal moral reference point. You also have an inner conviction that absolute truth exists, that it
must exist, and so you conclude that god must exist, since it is only through god's existence that you can conceive of such truth.
I believe that there that are certainly an infinite number of logical, reason derived truths which exist independent of god. Take the statement
'there are no absolute truths', which as you rightly pointed out is an 'absolute truth' kind of statement, and notice that it cannot be true. So you have your first absolute truth: 'there exists some x such that x is an absolute truth'... or you could just take the negation of the proposition in italics. Add to this the plethora of mathematical truths which, in my mind, have a kind of transcendental, platonic status.
Can we make similar arguments for morality in the absence of a god? It seems quite possible that we cannot. But this prompts another question - need this be a problem? It is not difficult to make strong arguments for why murder is wrong or why people should be afforded certain degrees of freedom/liberty. Some of them even attain that a priori ring which absolute truths so often smack of.
You say:
.........."then what you're in essence saying is it's okay for me to go lock up 20 fourteen-year old girls and rape them in my backyard".
The absence of absolute moral truth means that there is no absolute moral code which labels your actions as immoral. However, and this is a big 'however', you should note that the majority of people in the world would class your actions as immoral. For all the differences in values around the world there are still common themes which indicate that humans perhaps share some kind of common internal moral faculty.
My personal proposal is that our interpersonal ethical sensibilities arise from developed capacities for empathy and reasoning. To understand and be affected by the feelings and inner worlds of others causes us to take them into consideration when we act and make decisions. We dislike it when we experience pain and harm so, by extension, we realise that others feel similar. This awareness of the inner worlds of others should, I believe, help us to overcome selfishness and act in their interests as well as ours. A more finely developed empathic sense should allow us to extend these ideas universally to other rational (or simply feeling) beings and perhaps take up a maxim similar to the kantian 'treat other beings as ends, not means'.
It is also worth pointing out that the notion of a social contract can exist happily without an absolute ethical reference point. A social contract merely requires that the members of the society agree to the terms of the contract which, generally, will restrict members of the society but in such a way that individuals receive great benefits through distribution of labour, social support, order and stablility, common practises etc. For example, people may form a community/society on the basis of the agreement that they will not kill each other. This takes away the freedom of being able to kill your neighbours if they anger you but it also confers upon you a great amount of personal security. In this way a 'moral code' of sorts can be generated via agreement in a way which benefits the people involved, which is protected from much of the relativist argument and which can even be justified through a relativist form of utility without reference to absolute values.
I apologise if the various points I have made above lack coherence - they were just typed as they came to my head without much forethough. As to your assertion that I am wrong: grow up.
