csteele

You seem to twist Scripture well in order to confirm your own prejudices. Most honest people are willing to look at the fruit of ones teaching. Out of your friends and family it is far more likely that non bible believers will murder their unborn babies than those who attend your brother in laws church. This scenario is far more likely than your brother in law killing one of his children. Try thinking a bit.

Reynard,
it's always tongue in cheek. Ever seen the meme about arguing on the internet? For more tongue in cheekness: how can a comment be 'unsafe', if there's free speech for all? :D

MATILDA

I don't recall anyone suggesting that Atheists must be 'committed' to Nihilism.

What I DO recall is that 'Nihilism' is the logical philsophical outcome of Atheism.

I doubt many 'Atheists' can stomach an amoral universe, so.. as you are witnessing in various posts, (including your own).. they are grasping for some kind of philosphical life preserver to comfort them in a purposeless universe.

The best an Atheist can do, is set for themselves short term goals which give personal and immediate purpose..but they don't give 'meaning' or any kind of significance to the whole shebang. That....is the issue at stake here.

No one is saying 'Atheists are without morals' what we ARE saying is.. 'Atheists have no basis for the morality they choose' ..perhaps other than happiness and survival. But they too are in the context of the futile, empty meaningless haze of a Creatorless world.

Atheist Group "A" will come up with XYZ morals.
Atheist Group "B" will come up with EFG morals.

If they meet, they might clash. (welcome to history)

Please all you atheists stop missing the point,and some honest reflection might open some blind eyes.. to Him who said "I am the Light of the World"

BOAZ_David: "I doubt many 'Atheists' can stomach an amoral universe"

Actually that's exactly what Atheists are saying, that the universe itself IS amoral. Morals are a human creation.

"The best an Atheist can do, is set for themselves short term goals which give personal and immediate purpose..but they don't give 'meaning' or any kind of significance to the whole shebang."

Isn't a personal meaning the most important kind, and the one most people act on anyway?

As for the rest of your post:

No one is saying 'Theists are without morals' what we ARE saying is.. 'Theists have no basis for the morality they choose' ..perhaps other than ancient myths and stories. But they too are in the context of the arbitrary and contradictory haze of an irrational world.

Theist Group "A" will come up with XYZ morals.
Theist Group "B" will come up with EFG morals.

If they meet, they might clash. (welcome to history)

Matilda - thanks for those comments but I don't see how they get us very far. Okay, even if it should be conceded that moral values are somehow part of the fabric of the universe, that still doesn't tell us why we should act morally even if we should be able to somehow recognise these moral values.

I presume you don't believe that the mindless stuff of the universe intentionally caused universal moral values to become part of the universe. They just happened to come into existence just like rocks happened to. Do you think the mindless stuff of the universe can or does 'care' whether people abide by these purported universal moral values?

If it doesn't and if, presumably, there is no retribution for ignoring or disobeying them, why would a rational person bother about them, especially if they conflicted with his/her desires?

At best your universal moral values would be just be another oddity of nature and one having no significance for our lives.

In relation to determinism, you imply you can make a differentiation between 'compulsions' and 'ordinary behaviour', but don't explain how that is possible. Just because we seem to be in control with 'ordinary behaviour' and not in control with 'compulsions' does not mean it is so. You sound like you believe in some sort of non-physical 'I' that is in control of our clockwork bodies at least some of the time but surely that conflicts with your materialism.

Resorting to 'soft determinism' doesn't help. Just because the initial physical conditions of the universe presumably could have been otherwise does not allow us to escape from the clockwork universe which we actually do inhabit now.

Graham

Gray has given us a simple argument from definition that, again, demonstrates the remarkable hubris of expecting us all to fall over. It takes atheists as not being able to explain or grapple with non-material phenomena, and then pitches that at materialism – game over. But this is to place arbitrary constraints on the domain of the subject. When we talk about morality, purpose and meaning there is no need to concede that they are transcendent or divinely revealed, rather than emergent relational phenomena between subjects of the environment, and this certainly doesn’t exclude their objectivity. There is also no need to conflate non-theism with radical empiricism, as is frequently the tendency, affirming my view that not only are a lot of theists unfamiliar with secular moral philosophy, but they aren’t acquainted with philosophy of science either.

As for the claim that ‘nobody is trying’ - this is a specious accusation which denies the positive character of the theistic position, and pointedly ignores the objections against it one can make without engaging in the one-truth style propositions. Now, anyone claiming one objective system of secular morality which dealt with exhaustive iterations of scenarios would be expected to aggressively defend and explain its minutia. But this is to reverse the scenario here to a non-theist article on objective morality with online comments about that. It’s a fallacy because we’re here dealing with a specific theistic claim, and the theist tendency is to ignore the claim and regress everything to a fundamental demand for a complete alternative. We are here to discuss Preston’s generalised claim, with no evidence, that no possible non-arbitrary normative system can ever exist or will ever exist with theism. For that claim, within an article purportedly ‘taking atheism seriously’, the point is it is blithely indifferent to the ever-expanding literature of moral philosophy, and how that might fit into a naturalistic worldview. In that regard, the existence of many non-theists dealing with moral ontology seriously, and an objection to the argument by definition used here to exclude other conceptions of morality, is a serious answer to the article.