I haven’t read Dawkins, but yeah, I do find it objectionable and it certainly has been a source of evil. On its best day, all religion and belief in God does is give people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available.
What are the good and bad reasons?
Believing you’ll live in eternal paradise (for which no evidence exists) for behaving morally would be a bad reason. Believing that your moral act will lead to an even marginally better world and life for you and everyone else would be a good reason. At least in that case, the results are observable and testable.
It is false religion that has been the source of evil. True religion teaches love for others and that the Creator of the Universe is on everyone’s side.
- Which is more logical if you have no other god but yourself!
But don’t you believe you alone decide what is good and right? And have absolute freedom to decide for yourself what to believe and how to live?
Not if it is true and not the sole reason. Shouldn’t good incur its own reward and evil its own punishment?
A false dilemma!
And isn’t this the shell game the Faithful always like to play? Some Christian could commit some atrocity, cite any number of scriptures passages in defense of their act, and fellow Christians would immediately insist that this person could not have been a true Christian. Because “true Christians” practice morality at all times, and to practice immorality is by definition unChristian. It’s a simple tautology.
No more logical than any supposedly Godly person who does something hideous because they believe God is their holy wing-man, or at the very least, that God will forgive them for it (even if nobody else does).
Nope and nope.
I disagree with your logic. If you don’t believe anymore, that’s one thing.
Very well put!
There is nothing in atheism that does promote better morality, or much of anything else. As I’ve said elsewhere, atheism is virtually content free.
Sorry but I thought you meant that atheism is a better source of morality from your earlier comment that “Believing you’ll live in eternal paradise (for which no evidence exists) for behaving morally would be a bad reason. Believing that your moral act will lead to an even marginally better world and life for you and everyone else would be a good reason. At least in that case, the results are observable and testable.”
Nope, that’s just good reasons vs. bad reasons. Atheism on its own doesn’t offer any sort moral framework (or an immoral one, for that matter).
Because unconscious creatures (or entities) have no capacity to suffer. For example, nobody stays up at night worrying about the well-being of rocks. Because rocks have no consciousness, and so no capacity to experience suffering. Why do we care more about the suffering and well-being of cows and pigs than we do about flies and mosquitoes? Because we have an intuitive morality that (correctly) tells us that cows and pigs have a greater capacity to suffer than do flies and mosquitoes. There’s a strong (though not absolute) correlation between biological complexity and the depths of possible conscious experience. Cows and pigs are more biologically (and neurologically) complex than flies and mosquitoes, and so we intuit that they have greater capacities for suffering and well-being.
Your appeal to an authority for this assertion is misguided. I’m not a doctor, but do I need to be one to assert that the science of medicine is geared toward improving physical health, or that everyone deserves it? No. Nor am I a chess-master - but do I need to be one to assert what it is to play chess?
Like I said, a self-justifying assumption. Yes, it took an intelligent mind to invent the game of chess and work out the rules, but that doesn’t mean that another intelligent mind can come along and “unmake” the game of chess as he sees fit. At best, they can create a new game. But chess is chess, and the rules have been established. Same with medicine. The reason it’s geared toward improving physical health is that there are facts to be known about physical health - and we can certainly not know them to our peril. But the science of medicine need not apologize for staking its claim as being about the improvement of physical health. That it took conscious minds to develop the science of medicine over the centuries does nothing to undercut its philosophical underpinnings. They must be presupposed, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Some opinions will always be worse than others, and still other opinions will fail to take into account the basic realities of conscious experience in this Universe. There’s nothing arbitrary or subjective about saying that a Universe where every conscious creature suffers all the time is bad. As I said, to dispute this point is to fail to understand the implications, or pretend to fail to see the implications - in other words, to not make sense.
Oh, I’m sorry I thought you meant by conscious creatures only humans. Sorry.
Let me clarify my point again. The goal of a game of chess is to checkmate your opponent. This goal must be presupposed before the game begins, or else you’re not playing chess. With that goal firmly in place, certain moves will always be better than others - with respect to the goal - to checkmate your opponent. There will be moves that will be unquestionably bad (and to say otherwise is to not make sense). There will also be moves, whose merits can be honestly and intelligently debated, with perhaps no consensus reached. This fact does nothing to make chess any less an objective system. It doesn’t require that we know everything all the time, nor does it require we always agree on what’s good or bad. Every scientific discipline has open questions or points of contention within it. This does not make them less scientific.
You sound like you are following Sam Harris in his book, The Moral Lanscape, this was the subject of a debate between him and the Christian philosopher, William Lane Craig, which Harris lost badly.
I am following Harris’s argument. As for his WLC debate, I had no idea that there was a point system in place. None of the youtube clips ever flashed the score on-screen. But that’s good to know. Certainly saves people the time of actually listening to the argument he makes and formulating a response.
Yes, it evidently saved you the time of doing so. But why not watch the whole thing rather than just some clips?
Sadly, I have gone to the trouble of watching the complete debate, more than once. Craig’s whole game is to take the first salvo (he had insisted to the debate organizers he be given the first opening statement, and made other stage-managing demands), and then presume to artificially narrow the parameters of the debate. This either forces his opponent to waste time rebutting non-sequitur-ish points, or to ignore them, leaving himself open to the charge that he’s being evasive.
Well, the debate was is God the foundation of morality, and the idea was for Craig to defend the idea that God was, and Harris to defend his claims in his recent book that one can have a naturalistic foundation of an objective morality.