Is Morality possible without God

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He’s not ducking so much as refusing to submit to your necessary device.

Voltaire had a comment that weighed heavily on this. If you submit to your opponents axioms, the arguments usually flow pretty well. It’s why debates between two well-educated opponents usually never progress beyond term-stage into actual arguments. Like with Harris and Peterson.
 
He’s also not pointing out what he disagrees with or where my presentation doesn’t work. He’s just saying, Nu huh.
 
I’ve asked you how you can be an Atheist and an Agnostic at once.
 
And I addressed it, and you said, Nuh huh as a response without explaining why you have a problem with the response.
 
You mean that story about the car accident? Was that your explanation? 🤣

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Besides being incoherent, it was a good explanation.

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Not true at all. I identified that this isn’t a quantifiable phenomenon so you can’t identify where belief stops and knowing begins.

Not to mention the other points on the continuum of certainty that indicate doubt rather than certainty.

In the end, it’s not a quantifiable idea, so your ability to critique it as such will always be a bit of a category error.
 
This is relativism.

Pope Benedict with commentary by the Practical Catholic:

The Holy Father says:
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If we cannot have common values, common truths, sufficient communication on the essentials of human life–how to live how to respond to the great challenges of human life–then true society becomes impossible.
How true this is. Where there is no communication, no culture, no shared experience, there is no society; because there is no people. There remains only a vast and foreboding, unforgiving sea of individuals ready to crash upon each other and the world with the slightest wind. Without a common basis, we have not the vaulted pluralism we’re taught to embrace, but Babel, in all the confusion and madness of a society with no binding forces. Already we are seeing the tensions of this fragmentation breaking out across cultures.

Without common values and truths, such as in the socieites we find ourselves in, we find the fabric of society torn like Joseph’s cloak, by a great many tribes which would like to lay claim to the title of favored. Leftists, conservatives, anarchists, nihilists, secularists, objectivists, the shallow, the entertainers, the entertained, all vying for control against each other. Tribalism can indeed spawn differentiation, but without some common ground, and in the face of increasing jargon not only in the academies but in the cultures; we shall be left with madness. In the end this tribalism can only result in the decline of all their claims, and the alienation of one from the other. Babel is the happenstance when society tries to become God.

Pope Benedict XVI goes on to say:

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires. The church must defend itself against threats such as “radical individualism” and “vague religious mysticism”. [emphasis added]
 
I can see the error there in the category, I’m just pointing out the difference between first hand experience as a reason to believe something and only using arguments to believe something. The difference between the extremes of 0, 10 of belief scale and the numbers in between 0 and 10. That is why we test our hypothesis and don’t rely on logical hypothesis as the explanation for justified belief about reality. Religious people have belief in the supernatural but I don’t see how it’s a justified belief. It can not be demonstrated in anyway other than personal conviction and stomping your feet to be taken seriously. It’s just a claim to believe about reality with out a good reason to do so as far I understand it. Just like how Einstein mathematically concluded that Gravity Waves should exist. We were not justified to believe that was actually a true statement of reality until we had direct first hand experience of the phenomenon. We didn’t teach it as a truth of reality until 2015. We were justified in looking for it though, based on the soundness of the equations, but not to believe it with a certainty though.
The more benign the claim, the less justification you need to believe it though, like my neighbor claiming to have a new puppy. I’ll just take their word for it. If they claim to have a nuclear warhead, I’ll want to check that since it can directly affect my life. If they claim to have an invisible pet dragon or deity, I’ll blow them off as nonsensical since reality has zero evidence of that yet.
 
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I disagree with this entirely. Many of the most hardcore racists in history were/are atheists. Cecil Rhodes, a notorious British Imperialist and white supremacist, was an agnostic, and is beleived to have said that if God is dead there is nothing higher than race.In the beginning of the 20th century atheists were the biggest supporters of eugenics, which was basically the belief that “inferior” people (i.e the handicapped and people of nonwhite pigment) should be prevented from reproducing. HP Lovecraft and HL Mencken were both atheists and racists.
Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer is an Atheist who was advocated against Christianity on the basis of it’s anti-racial message. In fact the alt-right can be described as an anti-Christian movement.

www.firstthings.com

The Anti-Christian Alt-Right | Matthew Rose

As you may know, many young conservatives have left Christianity,” the message begins. “Although . . . .
www.firstthings.com www.firstthings.com
 
Can you explain how not being convinced of someone else’s claim of reality can let you know what they actually believe about reality? Or their political position, world view, or any thing else about them other than they were not convinced that your position was accurate?
Ex: I tell person A, I met bob yesterday, who’s a great guy to have conversations with and figure out how to live the good life. Person A doesn’t believe I met bob yesterday. Okay, what’s their position on capitalism? democracy? human ethics? etc?
 
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I understand all that, but that just speaks to the importance and relevance of information, which is a separate question from certainty.

I have no personal experiences of black holes and quarks, but I go ahead and take it as a reasonable belief that they are real.

To be sure, it is impossible to rationally argue someone into believing in God, particularly a strict materialist. But I find that standard is too limited to explain all that composes my humanity.
 
Damian said:
Can you explain how not being convinced of someone else’s claim of reality can let you know what they actually believe about reality? Or their political position, world view, or any thing else about them other than they were not convinced that your position was accurate?
Ex: I tell person A, I met bob yesterday, who’s a great guy to have conversations with and figure out how to live the good life. Person A doesn’t believe I met bob yesterday. Okay, what’s their position on capitalism? democracy? human ethics? etc?
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Indeed. It’s just a matter, and perhaps a function of, rather, one’s culture, intellectual formation, innate knowledge and exigent insight coming into play. These things work together synergistically, if you will, to become the epicenter of belief around which all else is integrated in a perfect spiral of interrelated points of logic. It’s rather like a sprocket on the bicycle, with the main drive chain perpetually interfacing with the cogs with little to no slippage. But not everyone rides bicycles, some like to walk. Person A might like to bicycle for ecological reasons or for ideological reasons or for the mere enjoyment of the beautiful English countryside. But person B might have a preference against bicycles because they are lubricated with petroleum products and reminds him of Big Old. Person C, however, may prefer, or even choose by pure happenstance, to use a skateboard since he holds no such philosophy regarding sprockets or ecology or the rampant and vulgar use of crude oil. So, it comes down to deciding who you want to be in life: Person A, B, or C or a combination of ABC or CAB or BAC…

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Given the same equipment that the astrophysicists use and their education level for understanding the mathematics, you can recreate their findings. Its predicable and demonstrable. Yes, currently we are “relying on the experts” to tell us this information, but we can do it ourselves if we need to and others have verified their work as well that don’t have a conflict of interest. Nothing like that even comes close to the religious claims. Anything that’s a big mystery gets dumped in the supernatural bucket instead of the “we don’t know” bucket.
 
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You can rationally argue to look for the supernatural though. Why can’t religion stop there instead of going on as if they ran the experiment and came back with positive results?
 
Yes, so belief in the supernatural is a cultural thing, like a jewish bar mitzvah. It’s fine to have cultural traditions and ceremonies, everyone does this, including atheists. That’s why we kiss photos, punch ground out of frustration, scream at the sky, etc. but claims to the truth of reality are different than just having a cultural tradition. Atheists don’t actually believe kissing the photo is actually kissing the person or that the person feels the kiss.
 
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