The Christian claims to believe that an act is moral if God has ordered it. In reality, though, most Christians refrain from many things that God has ordered them to do -- e.g. stoning witches. Why? Because despite all the lip service to God, in ordinary life they usually act in accordance with their own innate moral systems. It's when the two come into serious conflict that the intolerance and bloodshed starts.

The fact that believers routinely pick and choose which parts of the Bible to follow and which to ignore indicates that they DO have an independent moral sense, thank goodness! -- they're just ashamed to admit it.

Lev

I do not think a woman or a child should have to continue to live in a home with an abusive violent husband. Don't forget however that this is how 'stolen generations' are started when kids are removed for these reasons.

Matilda - you state "We simply are moral because its in our nature to be so." But this remains just a descriptive comment (as you seem to acknowledge) - how though do you move from the descriptive to the prescriptive: how do you derive an 'ought' from an 'is'?

You seem to be implying with your reference to psychology that we can know what is right from what is 'normal'. I would say that all we can derive from such studies is that some people are different to the majority of the population. But I do not see how you can go from saying some people are different to saying that they are 'wrong' or 'immoral'.

"Morality' in your world seems to boil down to 'might makes right.' If most people happen to agree that a certain behaviour is 'wrong' then they can use their combined force to control the 'wrongdoers'. This does not seem to me to be 'morality' as normally understood.

From your comments: “MINDLESS stuff is not the sort of thing that can care . . . But WE care,” I take it that you believe that humans must have minds. I wonder what you mean by that. But it seems to me that this brings us back to the determinism question. If we have minds that are simply clockwork-operated emanations of our brains, what does it mean to say we ‘care’? Humanoid robots now can be programmed to stroke our heads and say, “I care about you, I really do,” but I doubt any of us would find that satisfying.

If there is no true volition in our thoughts, words and actions then what actually differentiates us from the rest of the mindless stuff of the universe?

You state: “Murdering people is not something I would think good, even if I believed I could get away with it” – but that’s it precisely isn’t it? You happen not to think murder is good but obviously others happen not to agree with you. In a materialistic universe, end of story.

Kenneth – I agree completely with your first point: 1 Just because the truth is unpleasant or uninteresting, it does not follow that it is not true.

Your second point: “2. If we decide to receive our morality from God . . .” is off the topic of my original article which was about an examination of what atheism leads to, so I won’t address it here.

In your third point you challenge me to “prove the existence of free will.” In my article I was making the point that atheism leads to the rejection of free will. I did not make any advocacy for free will or for belief in God. I simply stated that: “In the absence of any non-material beings all there is is matter and since matter operates mechanically that leaves no place for the actions of genuinely free agents.”

However, you seem to be uncertain yourself about what you believe about free will as you state in point 5: “Determinism does not necessarily follow from atheism.” Apart from a brief reference to "emergent properties of matter" (and as far as I am aware no one suggests that these proposed emergent properties have any causal power, they just ‘are’), you provide no grounds for your assertion that - determinism does not necessarily follow from atheism .

Maybe you should read your first point again.

it seems to me i was right: the argument amounts to "I think, therefore God is". I'm no more impressed upon hearing it for the fifth time.

GP
The reference to soft determinism is not to alternate possible states of the universe but to the understanding of the concept of ‘freewill’. The traditional way of conceiving ‘freewill’ is --not “merely” the result of a causal chain. While this SOUNDS plausible it doesn’t actually make much sense. Imagine if our actions were not dependant on our thoughts and our thoughts were not dependant on our brain states, and our brain states were not the product of experiences and our experiences were not the product events in the material world. One consequence would seem to be that I would never know what action I would take next nor WHY I HAD TAKEN IT. My own thoughts and actions would appear to ME as random events. This doesn’t sound very ‘free’.

Typically people do attribute (not very accurately) their actions and thoughts to causal chains. Reasons and experience. Under Soft Determinism ‘freewill’ simply means having ordinary control over behaviour. That is, we have ordinary levels of impulse control, the ability to revise our actions in the light of experience and so on. If we have these, we have freewill in the only way that the concept really matters.

The mere fact that we could (if we were god) trance the path of every process from the big bang to now alters nothing of significance. There is no divine plan in a materialist universe and since our thoughts and previous actions are themselves part of that causal chain – materialism is really saying no more than that we are the sum of our circumstances. Which seems to be a reasonable enough claim.

The current state of play is that “I” refers to overlapping psychological states. It is precisely because we are not a seamless single entity that we can suffer from such things as weakness of the will, impulse control etc. Even so, we must experience ourselves as a single, more or less unified entity – failure to do so is highly problematic) I use of the personal pronoun as a short-hand way of referring to this entity.
M