Tony (and, i hope, Tony),

i nearly entitled this thread "Moral Relativists, and why i am not one".  This should be an indication that i'm going to upset your expectations of me somewhat.  This has taken me a good deal of thought and time to work out, but i have come to the conclusion that in our early discussions on the subject of morality i fell victim to what i now believe to be a false dichotomy, namely that in order to be logically consistent one can either believe that morality comes from God or be a moral relativist, and followed the implications of that as best i could without properly examining the validity of the alleged dichotomy.  You wont have to speculate too long about who set the terms of that debate. 

The problem you face is in the very concept of 'relativism' and 'objectivism' which you've seem to have not fully understood DB. Here are the choices - morality comes from within human beings or it comes from without. If it's 'within' it's relative. If it's 'without' it's objective (and thus requiring an explanation to it's source). Either/or. No middle ground. The dichotomy seems quite clear.

You want to suggest that morality is like mathematics - to every moral problem there is a single objective right answer which is independent of human existence.  i have, in the past attempted to maintain the position that morality is like art - that moral problems may have a myriad of possible answers, none of which is objectively better than any other, but some of which i radically prefer.  i would now like to suggest to you that morality is like engineering - to every moral problem there may be several different solutions which can be objectively said to be right (i.e. the building is sturdy), but there will always be many more ways of being wrong (i.e. the building falls down).  Importantly, these right or wrong answers are independent of preference.

Morality, like engineering, is contingent on human existence (or rather, on the existence of sentient organisms which can perceive the happiness or suffering of others), but is also a domain where objective facts exist, even though they may be difficult to access.  That is because morality relates entirely to the balance of wellbeing and suffering in creatures able to experience such states, and is therefore quite complex.

You try to have it both ways, but it just doesn't work. Even in your analogy of engineering if all human beings died while the building remains intact it seems self-evident the building will be 'sturdy' irregardless of whether human beings live or die. So your claim on contigency on human existence seems false. You still face the problem of the ultimate source for your so-called 'objective' morality. If you admit it comes from 'within' human beings ever divergent and fickle judgement then it's indeed relativism. That beings suffer and die may be an objective fact, but accordingly there's no compulsion to call this 'bad' or much less care (and under evolutionary terms there's even reason to call such things 'good'). Liek wise in your analogy if the building falls down, so what? An unguided universe doesn't care. It went on for billions of years before the building was made and will go on a billion years after it collapses. Making it's existence totally meaningless and irrelevant. As such what objective incentive under your worldview do you have to call upon that says people must (or obligted) to care at all, DB?

i suspect that your first response to this, being a moral mathematician, will be to demand to see the working.  In other words, you will want to know why anyone should be concerned with the suffering or wellbeing of other beings at all.  This is rather like asking an engineer why any should want to build houses.  i may or may not have an answer that satisfies you.  Like the engineer, i can point to utilitarian reasons which apply either to only myself or to the whole of society, or i could go deeper and talk about evolved traits and kin selection (for instance, solitary creatures have very little need for complex morality.  The fact that we depend on our society for survival is what makes morality evolutionarily selective.  It could also be said to be a good reason to pay our taxes  ).  Regardless of whether or not you find these explanations compelling, in general as humans we are moved by the suffering and cheered by the happiness of others, and i believe that pretty strong evidence exists that apes have similar drives.  The exact reasons why this is the case do not directly affect my argument.

Seems here you hint at a selfish/self-centered motive. However such motives only make one obligated to care about the well-being of one's own self rather than anyone elses; and misses how it actually encourages hurting others rather than making one care for other's well-being as acts of violence or theft are often done for selfish/self-centered motives. I do find it rather contradicting that you claim an evolutionary selective motive for depending on society when evolution is all about survival of the fittest and the very notion of dependance inherently means one isn't strong enough to survive. But not so much as this implicit contradiction of 'be less selfish to be more selfish' that runs throught evolutionary explanations of morality. Indeed, it almost seems that you yourself are unconciously arguing that their are two forms of morality in your analogy. Nature's morality where the building holds up or falls down, and some other morality that is transcendant to nature's morality that judges that the building being sturdy is 'good' and falling down is 'bad'. However it's this morality above nature's morality that needs explaining. And if it judge's the "morality" evolution is responsible for it can't be accounted by evolution.

So, when you say that i "cannot give [you] an objective reason for why [you] HAVE to balance competing moral principles", i disagree.  i can ask the objective question, what is the likely outcome of Tony not balancing competing moral principles in terms of the amounts of wellbeing and suffering created for creatures able to experience them?  Let's take a concrete example, stem cell research.  We have (perhaps) competing moral principles at work here.  On one hand, we have the very real suffering of people afflicted by diseases and syndromes which stem cell research has the potential to alleviate.  On the other hand we have the alleged suffering of tiny collections of cells with less realistic potential to experience pain than a fly we would unthinkingly swat while contemplating this issue.  In other words, it's no contest.

You still don't answer the question "Why should Tony care?" If the suffering of others better fit him then by evolutionary standards it would be a 'good' outcome of the 'fit' surviving against the 'unfit', and would fall in line of the only obligatory you can appeal to in Tony's self-interest. And as far as your analogy goes given your materialistic view of human beings just being a 'collection of cells' anyway, one can ask why not alleviate those 'collection of cells' suffering from disease and syndrome by destroying them instead of going through the more troublesome and costly route of conducting research at all; which will put a burden on insuring the wellbeing of the unsickly majority 'collection of cells'?

Now you may want to frame the debate slightly differently, citing moral principles such as respect for life.  i dont really object to that - these principles are useful in the sense of being moral rules of thumb which summarise stances likely to increase the net balance of wellbeing in the world - but it is possible, as this case makes abundantly clear, to over-apply them, since a two-day old embryo has no capacity to feel pain or suffering, and should not therefore be put on a level of moral equivalency with a sentient human being.  Likewise, valuing marriage is a good thing, but using that as the basis to deny it to consenting adults of alternative sexualities is just stupid, because gay people getting married harms no one, and would actually increase the net wellbeing and happiness by granting some people their dearest wish.  These are examples of how rules of thumb have often been mistaken for ultimate truths, and applied beyond their scope to the general detriment of humanity.

Still face a dilemma of why one should 'respect life', or at least anyone else's life. Nor would your standard of pain or suffering seem to apply to those who suffers from nerve diseases being able to feel pain or are in commas (or just unconcious). Classifying them to the same status as two day old embryo's to be exploited upon for other's benifit. And from there we can see how that simply opens the door for the exploitation of other class groups, where the standard of who lives and dies is to be determined by those in power with a self judgement of what level "pain" and "wellbeing" people fall under. As such one can see, with the benefit of history, an inevitable conclusion to your standard DB. When you try to have your cake and eat it too in having the benefits of objective moral law while denying it's foundation and replacing it with a lesser more flimsi standard, you ultimately and inevitably wind up with causing more evil than prevented. Only for some other guy who thinks he's smart enough to get it right this time to do it all over again.

As usual, you start out by trying to define yourself the winner.  i think you'll find that the accepted meanings of "objective" and "relative" are slightly different from the ones you're using here.  So, your support for the false dichotomy is noted, but since it rests entirely on your own idiosyncratic understanding of the English Language i don't see any need to respond further to it here.

I note how you don't bother to give the "accepted" definition. Not that it would matter as my explanation for what 'objective' and 'relative' means IS the definition, but in typical atheistic fashion you just ignore the meaning of words in favor of your own self-imposed labeling (just as you can call practically anything 'Christian').

If you read carefully, you will see that i said quite clearly that morality is contingent upon "the existence of sentient organisms which can perceive the happiness or suffering of others".  In this analogy, a moral action is equivalent to the construction of a building, which requires at least one sentient being to be alive in order to undertake it.

And you missed the point that if morality is 'objective' then it can't in any way be contingent by the existence of any finite beings at all. Just as a building may be constructed by sentient beings but it's remaining upright or falling down isn't dependant on their existence at all. As under your atheistic world view sentient beings don't exist for all time so too can't your 'morality' by your standard of what 'morality' is. Also it's rather self-evidently ridiculous to that such an 'objective' standard be placed on such a fickle and diverse standard of 'happiness and suffering' when sentient beings often have conflicting (if not outright contradicting) views on what makes one 'happy' or not. As such since you admit your standard is entirely dependant on the existance and views of a finite creature,and that's what realtivism is - moral truth being subjective to a person who holds it.

Only if it was based on opinion or desire.  However, the suffering or wellbeing of sentient beings is a matter of fact, not of opinion or desire.  Likewise, i might wish to build a structure that is twenty stories tall and only one inch wide, but that wish does not affect the objective instability of such a building.  My subjective desires are irrelevant to the obtainable truth of the matter.  Your definition clearly needs more work.

Unfortunately for you the very notion of caring about 'suffering or wellbeing' IS a matter of opinion and desire no matter how much you deny it. Like I said the building falling down may indeed be a fact, but you still give no 'objective' reason to care or label it 'bad'. As you said yourself it's contingent on the existence of sentient beings. Not on the universe. An athesitc impersonal universe doesn't care at all about the 'suffering and wellbeing' of anything. As such it all comes down to one's personal view; and as history has shown many have caused enormous suffering for some due to the very cause of promoting the 'wellbeing' of others. You'll no doubt proclaim it's all a 'balancing act' when pointed out sometimes momentary suffering is a 'good' thing if it leads to wellbeing of one or many (turning it into some kind of utilitarian standard), but you turn around and deny your standard when facing the numerous atrocities from the last century alone that have been perpetrated by that very ideal in mind.

Ok, and why am i compelled to care that God says something is wrong?  i'm quite serious about this.  Moral statements carry an implicitly proscriptive element, but that in itself does not force the receiver to either care or act.  The fact that you say your moral principles are derived from on high does not compel obedience, even from believers.

Ranting against other's standards doesn't make the flaws in yours go away. But to answer your question it actually does compel one to care and obey. Indeed morality carries an inherently implicit prescriptive element (while evolutionary assesments tend to be simply descriptive) that makes one incumebent, such as your implicit notion that we ought to care about other's wellbeing and suffering. There is an 'oughtness'. An obligation. But under your atheistic worldview of an impersonal worldview what truly compels mankind as a whole to care? Nothing. In fact the only consequences you can appeal to are society's subjective views rather than an objective universe's consequence - Killing a competitor for food and procreation may get one thrown in jail, but that's an inconsistency to the outcome when performed by every other species in the world. Nature would call such an act 'good', while society would call it 'bad'. Since the only negative consequence under atheism comes from the changible views within society there is indeed no prescriptive element that says society ought to not adopt a more social Darwinist outlook.

Contrast that with a morality where a personal God holds everyone accountable for their actions, motives, and intent. It's the very fact that consequences follow whether one succeeds or fails to meet one's obligation that compels you to care DB. If there is no consequence then there is no obligation, and yet there is an obligation to morality. In an impersonal universe there is no ultimate consequence to our behaviour one way or another. Most consequences under atheism are self-imposed without any real obligation to impose them at all (mostly due to being grounded in theistic reasonings rather than atheistic ones), and we live and die a finite time no matter what we do. And since the consequence is ultimately the same coupled with the impersonal nature of life under atheism this gives a very compelling reason for people to do whatever the heck they want. Under Christianity's view however the consequences are NOT ultiamtely the same, and the nature of every individuals life DOES matter and is personally known by God. As such it naturally leads to the opposite conclusion where one should care about there personal behaviour.

So the prescriptive 'oughtness' of morality does indeed compel obedience. And an obligation can only be held between personal beings. And if morality is objective and to be held over all sentient beings it must ultimately come from a source that's both personal and 'higher' than all sentient beings (with which humans seem to be the only ones) to appropriately make such demands. Which seems to be basicly what describes God. As such that is why objective morality logically leads to evidence of a personal God's existence and be a characteristic that is SOLELY belonging under a theistic framework.

The universe does not care if i, or a child, or a kitten suffers – that's essentially what you're saying.  i agree.  So?

So, ultimately there is no obligation to care under an atheistic view. As such you are entirely inconsistent to say we ought to care about the wellbeing and suffering of others. It's just a personal opinion you hold true for yourself. And that's relativism.

Your understanding of evolutionary theory is always open to question, since it seems to be based on a simplistic Hobbesian fantasy.  If i thought you'd take any notice at all i would refer you to some useful books and articles on the subject of kin selection and game theory, but i guess your ignorance has the utilitarian value of allowing you to continue to seriously represent this kind of nonsense.  Regardless of your (in)comprehension, cooperation and mutual benefit strategies are common in the animal kingdom, including humans, leading to no very great mystery about how morality evolved.

As is your understanding of evolutionary theory as well, since it's just YOUR interpretation you arrogantly hold as right (and has been motified to the point of unfalsifiability). Not like there's one objective source for evolutionary theory, is there? And regardless of your condenscention you seem to miss the fact that there is just as much loner and brutal strategies in the animal kingdom. Heck, even under your 'mutual benefit' excuse that doesn't compel one to care beyond one's self as it still ultimately comes down to selfish/self-centered motives. Nor caring beyond immediate family group let alone the whole species, and naively misses how much infighting occurs in many animals 'mutual benefiting' cooperation. When an adult lion kills a younger cub within the pride, I don't see the rest of the pride throwing the guilty lion in a cave to never be let out. And if ultimately human beings are just another type of animal no different than a lion....

The question is whether the ‘collection of cells' has the capacity for happiness and suffering EB.  If it does then it is worthy of our moral concern.  If it doesn't then it isn't.

That's just your opinion. Of course it's a bit contradicting since those 'collection of cells' we call 'fetisis' and 'embryos' due indeed have the 'capacity for happiness and suffering' given a certain point in there life cycle. And if you simply hold it as an arbitrary issue of timing of not having the capacity for happiness and suffering at the precise moment of being destroyed, then it's no different than holding the 'collection of cells' we call 'adults' can be so used in such a similar manner as long as they are unconcious and thus not having the capacity for happiness and suffering at a precise moment. Which just shows how arbitrary and inconsistent your so called 'objective' standard really is.

Regarding people with an inability to feel pain, it is relevant to ask whether you think that there might be other sorts of suffering than the purely physical?

*gasp* Are you saying there may be in fact MORE to the 'collection of cells' than the purely physical DB? Careful, that's a dangerously close Christian principle DB.

Is mental suffering not also an objective thing?  And might such a person not also have found happiness in the future if not prematurely denied the opportunity to grow any older?  [The answer to all these questions is "yes", in case you were wondering].  With coma patients, the primary concern is whether or not they are going to wake up, and what potential they have for happiness when they do.  You and i have already argued the case of the brain-dead individual, who by your beliefs has only lost the use of a single non-consciousness-defining organ (yet for some reason you seem to have agreed in the past that such a person is dead), yet by mine has lost all future capacity for happiness or suffering, and therefore also their personhood.  It is therefore appropriate to exclude brain-dead individuals from moral considerations, except as objects.

It's humourus beyond belief that you appeal to the immaterial to save your crumbling standard DB, when in fact you stingently hold human beings are nothing BUT physical substances. But regardless this doesn't save you. If you admit that one's physical condition is irrelevant to the issue of happiness and suffering then by your own standard you have nothing to distinguash between coma and nerve-disease patients whose physical condition can't let them feel pain and two day old embryos who simply haven't yet developed far enough. Might not the embryo not also have found happiness in the future if not denied to grow any older?(The answer is 'yes' in case you were wondering)? The hypocriscy is just too plain to see.

Ah, an old friend – the Slippery Slope to Nazism "argument", which i recall you reacted to with a certain amount of sanctimonious hysteria when it was applied to you.  The absurd and infantile standard that a worldview is necessarily responsible for any possible distortion of it would make Christianity responsible for witch-burning, jew-bashing, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Genocide of Native Americans and the inexorable spread of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa (those last two both courtesy of the Catholic Church).  We can play that game if you want, but it doesn't seem very productive.

Applied? Last I checked all you did was compare a few random things said which I took with great amusement (if you read hysteria into it it's because you wanted it to be there). You've never understood that when examining your standards with that of many of the atrocities commited in recent history (not just the Nazis) it's with far more comparison than a few random phrases and slogans. And you never will as long as you so tightly hold on to your denial of history and what evolution is really all about or that it's not YOUR view that's the disstortion.

*Sigh*  Ok, let's compare shall we.  Most people would define relativism as the concept of points of view having no objective truth value, and therefore different opinions on the subject all being equally valid.  You can take your pick of online dictionary/philosophy resources to back this up, ranging from apologetics websites like CARM, to any less partisan option, such as this, this, this or this.  So, that's my "self-imposed labelling".  Let's turn to yours.

You say that morality comes from within human beings or it comes from without. If it's 'within' it's relative. If it's 'without' it's objective (and thus requiring an explanation to it's source). Either/or. No middle ground.

Here you are twisting the implications of the definition of relativism.

Not even a little. Because your linked definition's simply confirm MY position on what relativism is - perception's based solely on the individual's/group's opinion (and all being equal). As such relativism is morality that comes from within a human being.

Sure, relative morality can only come from within humans, either individually or collectively.  However, an objective morality could be either wholly or only partly independent of humanity.  To go back to the analogy, does engineering come from "within or without" human beings?  If it's within then engineering is relative, with no objective truth attached.  If it's without then engineering is objective, but does that mean that engineering is not contingent on humanity's existence?  Engineering exemplifies the failure of the dichotomy - showing that it is quite possible for a domain of expertise (for want of a better word) to be contingent on the existence of sentient beings, while at the same time being grounded in objective facts.  Neither relative nor objective, in your paradigm, so despite your efforts to define it out of existence, the possibility of an objective human morality clearly does exist.

*sigh* Your example just rehashes your flawed assertion. It doesn't disprove anything. Engineering is objective because it's based on objective physics and mathematics not on it's contignency to humanity's existence. This is seen when nonsentient creature's like birds or insects construct their own dwellings. And even then the notion's of being 'better' or 'worse' is still subjective. Let's use another analogy (one I'm sure you'll love) - icecream. By your explanation you can say cooking is contingent on humanity's existence. It's a domain of expertise to be contingent on the existence of sentient beings while at the same time being grounded in objective facts. The ingredients are objective. Food has an objective flavor and scent. Yet by your conclusion you would have us believe that this somehow makes the opinion of a particular flavour of being better over others an objective fact. Sorry DB, it doesn't fly. All your argument does is show that the only thing contingent on sentient beings existence is their opinions (obviously). And if that's all 'morals' are then it is indeed relativism.

i understand that that is what you think, based on your religious ethical framework, but it doesn't fly.  Ethical truths can be obtained by studying objective cause-effect relationships, without any need for divine guidance (and a good thing too, since divine guidance is so frequently ambiguous), and we are motivated to care about the impact that certain actions have on other sentient beings by our basic human compassion.  The fact that some people have this only in small measure, or that individuals and societies frequently get ethical answers totally wrong does not count as evidence against the objectivity of morality's base, for either of us.  You explain it as the result of sin, i explain it as the result of misperception.

That's what it IS even by your own provided definitions - dependant on the person/social group, "man is the measure of all things", relative to the persons or groups holding them, subjective values according to different perceptions and considerations, etc. One can clearly see relativism is all about being contingent on sentient beings no matter how you put it. Your notion that objective ethical truths can be obtained by solely studying cause-effect relationships is simply bunk. Because you still have to arrive on a personal judgement of whether that effect is 'good' or bad' and where that standard comes from. If a building collapses that's an objective effect. But absolutely nothing makes us obligated to hold this as 'bad' under atheism.

You appeal to a self-interest standard of well-being and suffering, but you have nothing to ground this standard with as an objective morality due to the impersonal meaningless nature of the universe in which atheism holds. As such your standard of which effects are 'good' and which are 'bad/evil' are simply personal opinions and are of no greater value to a standard of 'what personally pleases (insert name here)' (and is ultimately what it comes down to IMO). Or adopt a different standard of the well-being and suffering of a particular social group or simply the planet itself as opposed to all humantiy (God knows plenty have argued for mass death to 'save the planet'), and yes, even Social Darwinism. There is no single standard to asses an ethical propisition's truth under atheism. Your standard is relative just to you and is of no greater validity than others as there is no obligation to adopt yours or even care.

So no matter how you try to escape it DB, objective morality can not, has not, and will never exist under atheism. Because in the end objective morality can only exist when it is dependant on a personal being that transcends us human beings/sentient creatures.

For instance, the fact that all of us struggle to perceive that all three lines in the picture below are exactly the same length does not affect the objective reality of the situation, which is accessible to us with careful study.

It may not effect the objective situation, but if one were to hold all three were different lengths under an atheistic framework it would be no different than someone who holds them as the same length. Because even the standard of the truth being a good thing to be valued is an objective standard in which you have no means to ground the source with under atheism. Heck, by your standard if believing what is false is ultimately in our best interest than lies would be 'good' according to you.

So is engineering relative or objective?  i guess you're suggesting it is objective, but that would lead you to the Platonic absurdity of the perfect "form" of a table, house or skyscraper existing somewhere in the ether, prior to our existence.  Otherwise, how can engineering not be said to be contingent on human existence?

Because physics and math aren't contingent on human existence. Yes, since engineering is just the application of math and science to meet the needs of creatures engineering wouldn't exist without humans, but the real absurdity is that you would have us hold one "form" of a table as being more 'evil' over another.

Surely that objection applies with just as much force to the Golden Rule.  i don't think we should pretend that there is much mystery about what kind of circumstances maximise human wellbeing.  You're almost representing a relativist point of view there yourself.

Not at all. Since the Golden Rule is about basic human value and respect, rather than our own personal emotions. That one guy likes to peirce his body, you would have us believe this would allow him to start sticking things in others where ever he goes? I don't think so. You may want to pretend there isn't much mystery about what maximises human wellbeing, but the truth is (allowing for your standard in the first place) there is a lot of differing opinions. And truthfully, other than short-term effects, it just comes down to speculation.

Rather akin to saying that the heat of a fire may be an objective fact but demanding an objective reason not to stick your hand in it.  The fact is that we do care, and you and i will have different explanations for why this is the case.  For most people it takes a long process of the dehumanisation of a certain section of humanity for them to be able to kill or torture them without any qualms.  This is obvious if you look at the great genocides in history, or even just at basic military training.  We care, full-stop.  Those who overcome or limit their compassion prove the general rule by the process that they clearly had to go through in order to achieve it, and the fact that we frequently get the balance wrong does not indicate that there is no objective truth, any more than the optical illusion above suggests that light waves are relative concepts.

Heh. Your example fails to consider there are some people who....like...to be burned. That people do care is at most a reason atheism/evolution is false, and at minimum just due to theistic influence teaching people that they should. Indeed there exists many within ethical groups that don't care about the suffering or wellbeing of others (or care for the opposite conclusions to what you hold), as well as sociopaths that are indifferent to the plight or concerns of others. Under atheism there is no such thing as 'dehuminisation'. You admit there is no obligation that says people MUST care in the first place; so such behaviour is ultimately in line with (if not the inevitable conclusion) to evolutionary/atheistic teaching that devalues humanity as being no different and of no greater value to the insects and vermin we regularly kill for our own interests. As such the behaviour will continue to exist if not spread with evolutionary teaching (no secret why many atrocities happened in conjuction with it's spreading). And in a meaningless universe where our survival is as unimportant as any other animal that's gone extinct, such behaviour is ultimately equal to your behaviour of 'being selfless to be more selfish'.

i fail to see how this is any more relevant to the truth of the matter than the millions of people in history who have been killed by those espousing a God-given morality.

There's that finger pointing to hide your own logical holes again. What's relevant is that under atheism this is totally acceptable, while under a God-given morality (baring special circumstances) it generally isn't.

So it's a selfish motive then?  That appears to be what you're saying.

Heh. It's also objectively true irregardless of our motive.

Think outside the hatbox of your circular reasoning for a minute EB.  If there is no God, then our choices are either to ground our morality in the cause-effect consequences for our fellow creatures (seen through the lens of human compassion), or to pretend that there is a God and codify our moral and social customs as His divine commandments.  The lack of ultimate consequences is not a significant point if the only choices are to pretend that they do exist or accept that they probably dont.

Heh. I can think even farther than your false dichotomy DB. I can choose to ground my 'morality' into 'whatever I personally like'. I can choose 'amorality'. I can kill and rape simply because it may amuse me. Since ultimately I'm no different than any other animal who behaves generally the same way, and ultimately everyone ends up being maggot food no matter how they behave, I see no reason not to choose to just give in to every base desire and impulse I have. I can completely see the effect such behaviour would have on fellow creatures. I have no reason to care or feel compassion as causing suffering is just as equal to refraining from it. Both end with the same consequence under atheism - eventual death/inexistance. As such the lack of any ultimate consequence IS a significant point when under atheism the inevitable conclusion of our (meaningless/purposeless) life is simply to end no matter how we behave. That this leaves your framework in shambles is not a compelling argument.

Again attempting to define god into existence, as if compassion alone couldn't motivate action.  While you are of course welcome to indulge your subservient fantasies as much as you like, this is an entirely circular argument.  You assume morality must have certain characteristics based on your belief in God, whose existence you support with the assumed characteristics of morality.  Try taking god out of the equation while you consider this issue.  i realise that this will not be easy for you.

No, attempting to educate you on what is meant by people's (or at minimum Christianity's) description of 'God'. Compassion is ultimately flimsi and meanignless as there are people without it as a result of birth or conditioning. Much like you don't seem to have much 'compassion' for the unborn and potential lives destroyed by abortion. So it seems self-evidently idiotic to rely on such an unreliable emotion.

And all your denials doesn't change the facts of why objective morality can only truly work under a theistic framework (I had my doubts any answer would please you anyway). Under theism Mankind has an obligation to behave a certain way. Under atheism there is no obligation to behave one way over another and all are ultimately  equal. As such true morality can exist only under a theistic framework, while a-theism only produces a-morality. It's that simple.

i am not saying that we ought to care, i'm saying that in general we do care.  That the basis of this moral framework is contingent on the existence of creatures who are able to feel compassion does not make it relativism (if you look back at the actual definitions of that term).  It would be relativism only if there was no objective truth to be had, and you have agreed that there is.

Like I said that we do care is either a glaring flaw for evolution/atheism or at minimum only a result of religious influence. Either way people can choose to ignore it. That there is no obligation to care just makes the opinion that people ought to feel compassion or be "dehumanised"  and care about others just a subjective truth you hold for yourself DB.

Only the facts which it relates to.

Sadly for you the only facts that differentiates between the early 1900s views of evolution and yours is that we had a century to see no great utopia of science and reason would emerge and a lot of horrific acts in it's place. When it comes to the science itself there is little major change.

  Yes, and?  That's like questioning evolutionary explanations of why birds fly on the basis that not all other animals have that capacity.

Heh. Unfortunately for your strawman human beings DO have the capacity. You even note it yourself. As such lecturing other people to care and show compassion to others is about as absurd as lecturing the spider to spare the butterfly.

Like your motivations for obedience to God's ambiguously expressed desires.  Maximising one's status in the afterlife doesn't strike me as a particularly altruistic reason for behaving in a certain way.

*snort* I don't recall ever saying it was without any measure of selfishness. Unlike your views however it's simply not the entire basis of what compels us to behave one way over another. Indeed, obedience to God often demands resisting acts and behaviour (and even ways of thinking) we'd otherwise be inclined towards more often than not. And it would seem rather evident that if your morality is based largely on being selfish, then it's not truly moral.

There are plenty of non-arbitrary differences between a sleeping person and an embryo, and you already know what they are.  As i have said before, i am sympathetic to the "potential" argument when it comes to abortion, but it clearly can be taken to absurd extremes.  A sperm has the potential, only one stage removed from an embryo, to become a full-grown human with a capacity for happiness and suffering as you say.  Does that mean that, as Monty Python sang, that every sperm is sacred?  So, it's less a matter of me being "arbitrary and inconsistent" and more one of you oversimplifying as per usual.

There actually are no non-arbitrary differences between the two. There are even less arbitrary differences when you appeal to "potential" and emotional pain. And your comparison of "potential" between sperm and skin-cells and that of a fertilized egg has been debunked numerous times DB. A fertilized egg will indisputably grow into a baby without interference. Sperm indisputably will not unless there is intervention. Your notion that these are the same kind of "potential" is flawed. An embryo will always arive at a specific result when left to it's natural coarse. A sperm will not arive to such a result unless specifcly made to do so. It has the "potential" to become a human being, but it also has the potential to just end up in a test tube, a bathroom towel or to not fertilize an egg and decay. The use of "potential" in these stituations is entirely different.

The states i am referring to are only considered immaterial in your worldview EB, so you're begging the question somewhat here.

Funny, because if 'emotional pain' is nominally just 'physical pain' according to your worldview then we're back to my original objection - your standard of pain or suffering wouldn't seem to apply to those who suffer from physical conditions like nerve diseases and being unable to feel pain or are in commas (or just unconcious). Not that I concede your notion that emotional pain is indeed material pain, since you self-evidently have the problem of people with conditions not being able to physically feel it. But that's just evidence for the immaterial nature of humans I know you'll ignore.

i certainly didn't say that the physical condition was irrelevant, i said that physical pain was not the end of the story.  Even people unfortunate enough to have a congenital insensitivity to pain - meaning that they usually die young from accumulated injuries that their bodies were unable to warn them of - still have plenty of ways to experience suffering.  That is not dualism, that's readily obtainable fact.  Accordingly, there are massive differences between a CIPA patient and an embryo.  There are even big differences between a brain-dead person and an embryo, this time in the embryo's favour - it has potential.

*sigh* You just give more contridictions DB. If you hold that all human beings are is purely physical creatures and your standard involves pain than physical pain is entirely all it comes down to. As such your appeals to things like happiness and emotions are entirely contradicting as they are indeed immaterial. Tell me DB, what does 'happiness' physically look like? What's it's atomic weight? It's volume? That people experience nonphysical pain is just evidence of the nonphysical nature of human beings you refuse to accept. Not that it makes a difference to your argument as your standard is entirely based on personal opinion and is often contradicting to a purely logical conclusion. You simply hope your personal standard will be adopted by others, but since it comes down to personal opinion to begin with (and no one has your mind to navigate the labrynth of conflicting notions and reasoning) the standard can change and be altered at any time. Leaving no one safe if it's all contingent on human being's ever changing whims.

Again, this doesn't seem like a very productive area for discussion since we've been over it so many times already.  You deny that the millions of deaths in the name of Christianity say anything meaningful about Christianity, and i deny that the millions of deaths in the name of atheistic ideologies say anything meaningful about atheism.  Somehow this leads you to the, frankly idiotic, conclusion that anyone who aims to make this world a better place (rather than waiting for everything to be sorted out in the next one) is on the road to committing or enabling genocide.  idiotic or not, it is certainly irrelevant to this discussion - highly speculative consequences can hardly be said to be any sort of couter-argument against a truth claim - so why not drop it?

Heh. Funny, given how much your standard of 'wellbeing' and such is largely based on speculation. Not so different than the utopian specualtion of a better world in the 1900s in fact.

Like I said you never understood and you still don't. The difference is one has an objective source that states clearly how one is to behave. The other ultimately comes down to 'anything goes' and has no real standard for a 'better world' anyway. But the most important difference is that one source fully acknowledges Mankind's imperfect state of being, and thus fully predicts the inevitible result of our actions and reasoning. With atheism it's just repeating attempts to try over and over again and hope for the thousandth time will get a different outcome.

EB,

We appear to agree about what relativism is, but disagree about what is relativism.  i like your cooking analogy, but unfortunately for you it doesn't help your argument much, because while i am happy to agree that there can be many different and equally valid opinions about what is and isn't good food, there are also some firmly objective truths about what is healthy for the human body and what poisons it, and subjective opinions about the flavour of your arsenic pie don't alter those facts at all.  Likewise, while there may well be moral questions which have many different right answers, there are also some answers which are objectively wrong by that criteria.

Neither does blatant denial make my points disappear DB. Because as stated simple objective facts/effects do not offer any objective morality on their own. That food is objectively healthy or not is no different then the objective flavour one uses as the basis for their subjective opinions. Depending on one's standard one can say (and has said) that killing off others is perfectly 'good'. Both are based on objective facts. Under atheism however the judgement of such objective facts of being morally 'good' or 'bad' (or to even lay judgement at all) is entirely within the purview of each individual's personal opinion.

The fact that someone can say "i don't care about human wellbeing, so maximising it doesn't interest me", is no more a rebuttal to this moral framework than the fact that someone else can say "i don't believe in [your] God, so doing what he supposedly commands doesn't interest me" is a rebuttal to yours.  Both our moral systems are based in a certain frame of reference, and if someone rejects that frame of reference then they step outside the confines of our moral system.  That means that either both our frameworks are objective or neither are, as far as i can see.  To argue that no one "must" care about human wellbeing is no more persuasive than to argue that no one "must" care about God.  Both are true, but nevertheless we share, to a great extent, moral imperatives.

It's a problem for you because in an atheistic worldview both are ultimately equal - in that both standards of behaviour are equally meaningless. Under atheism ultimately the consequences are inevitably the same for each person and there is no meaningful purpose in life for one to feel obligated to behave one way over another. As such there is a huge difference when one says that they don't care about human wellbeing and ultimately the consequences are the same for someone who does care under atheism; as opposed to a theistic system where disobedience to [the] God has drasticly different consequences for a person as opposed to another who is obedient. And it's this logical fact that exposes how hollow your argument really is. That people obviously don't live in a vaccuum where immediate effects to one's actions can't be seen hardly makes your framework objective DB. Because in the end your standard is still only contingent on your personal opinion (and by such an argument relativism wouldn't  exist), and is of no greater value than someone who can see the objective consequence of killing off a particular class or ethnic group and calling it 'good'.

You believe that even someone who rejects your moral framework is still bound by it, and will eventually be judged upon it, but you have no evidence whatsoever in support of that conclusion, so it gets you no points.  i would also point out that virtually every moral framework, however fancily decorated with theistic tinsel, ultimately reduces to a concern about human wellbeing and suffering, whether it be in this life or the next.  You have more or less admitted this with our discussion of why people should follow God's rules - to maximise their status in heaven.  This is simply a human moral framework, selfishly focused and assuming the existence of life after death.

Heh. An atheist asserting denials about Christianity's validity is neither surprising nor significant DB. Under your worldview there's no judgement at all. At least none that is either meaningful or not hypocritical. Obviously I think what is morally good will result in the greater wellbeing of people; however unlike your framework that's the end result rather than the basis for morality, and I understand that as long as people opperate under the notion that morality is contingent on themselves (an inflation of ego if ever there was one) then suffering is all one is going to achieve.

The impersonal and uncaring nature of the universe is irrelevant to the objectivity of any area of human study (physics, biology, psychology) on which objective facts exist.  The fact that a human motivation is required to uncover and analyse these truths does not discredit the field, any more than morality is discredited by requiring that we as communal beings have some compassion and interest in the wellbeing of our fellow creatures.  Our monkey curiosity enables the hard sciences (we didn't have to be curious and the universe doesn't care whether we know these things or not) and our monkey compassion enables the human sciences, including morality.  i can just imagine how much you're going to love that comparison.

It's completely relevant. That you deny this because it hurts your stance is simply not a compelling argument. An impersonal and uncaring universe self-evidently doesn't care how we behave (r even live or die). So the notion that objective rules that governs how human beings ought to behave (and seemingly human beings alone) as if an impersonal and uncaring universe does care how we behave is obviously ridiculous. Under atheism our objective death or suffering has no more moral relevance than an apple falling on the ground.

How astonishing that you would think that![/sarcasm]  Seriously, you haven't given me any compelling reason to accept that assertion, so why should i?

DB, I'm well aware your too closed-minded to accept any reasoning, but it's still good to examine opposing viewpoints to see how people conduct themsleves and to let others read and decide for themselves.

The existence of the objective facts of physics and maths aren't contingent on human existence, but the academic study and discovery of those facts is.  The fact that without monkey curiosity we wouldn't have ever learned what we now know in these fields, and that nothing objective compels us to care about the discovery of such knowledge does not invalidate them as objective domains of study.  They depend on the way humans are, as does morality.

*snort* So your notion is 'human study is dependant on humans'? Seems a little asinine, don't you think? But it really just further's my point in how ultimately your so-called 'objective morality' is really 'relatvisim by any other name' - human perceptions is contingent on human beings. That you use the objective fact of human suffering to call it 'bad' is just as much a subjective perception as one who sees the same objective fact and calls it 'good'.

Really.  So do you consider it a matter of opinion whether or not it would be a good idea to put cholera in the water supply if our aim is to maximise human wellbeing?  Much mystery there?  You will probably quibble the last part of that sentence, but morality being contingent on human compassion is little different from science being contingent on human curiosity.  That doesn't make it relative.

Under your worldview absolutely it's a matter of opinion. Especially if it's opperating under an evolutionary framework where the elimination of competition maximises the wellbeing of a rival. As I said if you're going to put all your cards on human compassion being any sort of obligatory by itself then I've got about 4 thousand years (though just the last 100 is necessary) of written history to kick your notion in the teeth.

That seems to be at odds with the unrepresentatively low proportion of the prison population who are atheist, and the significantly higher murder, abortion and teen pregnancy rates in more religious countries and states.  And as usual, your understanding of evolution falls victim to a whole range of biases.

That seems to be naive in how many wrong doings don't necessarily have the consequence of ending up in prison, or that atrocities carried out in suprressing religious groups were simply legal in many nations(Pol Pot ring any bells?). Just one more reason why anyone can do whatever they personally want and have no consequence under an atheistic worldview. But as stated assertions of denial does not a rebuttal make.

A very very loose correlation over a century and a half of subjectively interpretted history is not exactly conclusive.  There may even have been some other things going on during the same time period.

A very blatant statement of historical ignorance. One easily corrected when reading the inspirations and reasonings of those like Hitler and Stalin who point to evolution and Social Darwinism as a guiding basis for their social outlooks (seriously read The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt sometime). You can assert one can have the former without necessarily the latter, but you can't deny that the two were more intertwined at the time (and IMO is only denied by many evolutionists as a logical outcome only by the benefit of historical hindsight rather than any other rationale).

i see, so it's relevant detail when you mention people killed by atheist regimes, but finger-pointing when i mention (in response, incidentally) people killed by theistic regimes.  Is that right?

In as much as your notion that we can rely on compassion seems self-evidently silly, naive, and/or insane. As well as missing the point that under atheism all such acts were opperating under the notion that 'morality is contingent on human beings' and trying to create a 'utopian' world. And you think that attempt number 1001 is going to have a different outcome? Christianity at least fully acknoweldges no such 'utopian' world is ever going to exist on our own efforts.

  Mass murder is totally unacceptable to God!  Generally.  Except in certain circumstances, i mean.  Y'know, except when it isn't unacceptable.  Like when people refuse to worship the right God.  All hail the objective God-given morality - recipe for ethnic genocide, but way better than any atheistic morality!   

Still finger pointing to hide your own ideological short comings. As well as changing the issue as "mass murder" is nominally different than 'killing a number of people'. But you have already shown to read into things regardless of what is actually written.

Irregardless you still face the problem of atheism inherently allowing any and all behaviour, while under theism there is a baiss to behave at least one way over others.

Yeah, not much for skin cells either.  i'm such a heartless b*stard sometimes.  Think of the skin cells EB!  More seriously, you do recall that i am opposed to abortion after the point where there is the smallest realistic chance of pain or experience on the part of the foetus?  Your potential argument falls foul of your ignorance of the relevant biology, so you are left with unsupportable metaphysics.  If i say that sperm have souls how are you going to disprove that?

Mockery has always been a thin veil for hiding a lack of rational reasoning. You've shown that you are only opposed to it under a subjective criteria of having certain body parts you personally deem satisfactory (and you often abandon your own criteria anyway). It's blatantly no different than those who consider other races to be not human due to their own subjective criterias and thus allowed to be destroyed or used for personal wellbeing as well and having the same attitude you regard for skin cells.

Under theism mankind has no single framework to follow, there are hundreds of thousands, all saying different things and constrained only by the limits of human compassion and credulity.  Theistic morality is the more relative of the two, since it is contingent upon which holy book or holy man you were brought up to believe in.  A scientific approach to morality divorced from dogma is the only credible alternative.  That's how simple it is.

And again we saw the result of that "scientific approach" in the last century, but the broken record keeps spinning.

Under theism there is only a single true framework to follow. That's a key difference you refuse to acknowledge in your continued quest to make theism and atheism theologically and philosophically the same DB. Under atheism all frameworks are equal so there can be potentially billions even if they all say different things, because in the end all are meaningless in a meaningless and uncaring universe. Under theism there can only be a single objectively true theology with the rest being obviously false. It's simply a matter of discovering which theistic framework is true. But thankfully that there is an objective morality is evidence in itself for a certain kind of theism that helps us narrow down the considerations - God must be a personal being that cares how we behave.

i understand that pretending to know with certainty things that you do not and cannot know is part of the fundamentalist job description, but you must be careful not to let it spill over into areas that other people actually do have knowledge on.  You are obviously gloriously ignorant of the process of gestation if you consider it to be as passive and deterministic as you suggest here.  There are so many things which need to happen in order for an embryo to grow into a baby that i wouldn't even know where to start listing them.  A sperm has just one extra requirement - to be combined with an egg.  You have only emotive metaphysical reasons for drawing the line at an embryo.

Much like your pretending to "know" comatose people will find happiness if not prematurely denied the opportunity as an excuse for them to not fit in your criteria of being able to destroy something?

You're a hoot DB. What do you think a human embryo is going to grow into? A mercedes? That an arrow on a flight path needs multiple factors to hit a target doesn't invalidate the rather obvious fact that it will always arrive at a specific and predictable flight path. Unless someone meddles with it at some point in between. An embryo is simply an arrow that's left the bow. It will always grow into a baby unless it's interfered with. This is a nominally different 'potentiality' than a sperm or skin cell where say an arrow that's simply lying on the ground by itself that has the 'potential' for someone who has a bow will fire it, or just pick it up and physically stab it in a target, or simply take it home. To pretend otherwise is both disingenuous and dishonest about the objective facts.

And of course 'potentiality' is a rather moot point anyway since a human being is a human being at the point of conception as scientificly proven. But even under your own criteria DB, you simply prove to be fickle and contradicting in your rationale of what is allowed to live and die.

Lol.  Thank you for that fascinating little glimpse of your private life, but please, no more.  There's some things i don't need to know about you.

Blame my inability to fully tune out the 'evolved' culture that you advocate.

  Presumably you think that music is the spirit of a violin, since it also has no appearance, volume or weight.  Does music go to heaven when a violin dies?

Fine, care to tell what's the frequency of 'happiness' then? Or are you simply going to give up stalling and admit such things don't have physical properties to be measured and are thus not physical?

The fact that you are apparently forced to pretend that all theistic moral systems are one and the same in order to make this argument suggests its major weakness.  Theistic moral systems are contingent on the books which lay them out, books written by human beings, each with a greater or less grasp of compassion and morality, and many of them entirely parochial which explains why religious morality has led to such a lot of tribal conflict.  Virtually "anything goes" in theistic morality, taken as a whole, so i don't see why i should have to answer for any and all "a-theist" systems.  You opportunistically flip between different sizes of category as is convenient for your argument - like how you seem to think that any atheistic system reflects on my worldview, but you wont even accept implications for things done explicitly in the name of Christianity.  Not saying that you should really, but just try to be a bit less of a hypocrite about pointing fingers that you don't want to point at yourself.

Seems my mistake was believing that your prejudices wouldn't blind you to the obvious fact that not all theistic systems can be true at the same time, and thus it's by no means "anything goes". Just simply a matter of taking some effort, as well as some inherently needed divine revelation, to discover 'what goes'.

Of course now you're just resorting to your assertions as an atheist to reject theism wholesale rather than allow for the sake of argument like I have done for atheism. Obviously your assesment of theism in general and Christianity in particular means nothing to me. Especially as it largley ignores the fact that the only way to see if what a person espouses is indeed in line with a belief is to check that belief itself. Most of what you can point to in Christianity's history was not in line with what the Bible says (regardless of wild interpretations by some random shmuck), which is why such acts were largely stopped in the name of Christianity when the Bible's increased distribution allowed people to see what was in it for themselves. This is nominally different to your atheism that doesn't have a unified source and where it's all up to the individual to behave as they please with all being equal.

But I can still indeed accept the implications of 'things done explicitly in the name of Christianity' esily enough, because it just validates the Bible's point of Mankind being inherently sinful. As a Christian I must. You simply need to accept there is nothing that we can do to change it on our own, and that the remedy for our imperfect state has been provided even if there is still lingering influence.

Have you thrown in the towel on homosexuality, by the way?  *Ahem*  So to speak... 

Wow. I think this is the first time someone actually wanted me to keep debating. I would have gone on if life hadn't interrupted, but I honestly see no point going back  since we reached an impasse long ago. Your contention that it's ok simply by force of your personal opinion since you made it clear it being natural or not wasn't an issue for you personally (and it IS unnatural ), is just the logical outcome of your general subjective opinion that we should base our actions on what makes us happy or sad, or what maximises wellbeing or suffering when there's conflict of people's subjective emotion, or simply turn to the divine will of DB for revelation when there's conflict of people's subjective opinion on conflicts with wellbeing and suffering which is itself just a logical outcome of atheism (nice to see my assesment of atheism in your Intro. thread has been validated to such an extent).

The only thing I would take further issue with is the contradiction of judging a behaviour ok, yet advocating measures to avoid the consequences at the same time. Seems to me a lot like advocating that there is nothing inherently wrong with ignoring road rules and crashing cars into each other as proper behaviour while at the same time advocating safety measures to the point people can simply survive such ordeals, and thereby implicitly acknowledging the logical consequence of such behaviour even while explicitly denying said consequences. But I'm sure the subject will come up at another time. 

Attempting to condense your argument somewhat:

simple objective facts/effects do not offer any objective morality on their own.

...because we are not compelled to care about human wellbeing and suffering or the objective facts which relate to it.  i agree.  However, as i have said, if this is a truth mutually exclusive with objective morality then you are also not in possession of objective morality, because people are very clearly not obliged to care about your moral standards either.  Even your hypothesised postmortem consequences do not reliably compel those who believe in them to behave morally

Under atheism ultimately the consequences are inevitably the same for each person and there is no meaningful purpose in life for one to feel obligated to behave one way over another.

   And yet somehow i manage to get out of bed every day.  This is really just meaningless rhetoric, because you obviously have no conception of what it might be like to live without a belief in God.  You feel compassion for your fellow humans (i assume) and think that this stems from the presence of God in your life, but i assure you that it doesn't.  It's hard-wired, and i have it just the same as you do.  Nearly everyone does in some degree, and it is the basis for our shared morality.

...in the end your standard is still only contingent on your personal opinion (and by such an argument relativism wouldn't  exist), and is of no greater value than someone who can see the objective consequence of killing off a particular class or ethnic group and calling it 'good'.

A couple of things:

1) My standard is contingent on our innate compassion for the suffering of other sentient creatures, which is rather more "just than my opinion", and,

2) your standard is contingent on your beliefs about God's likes and dislikes, which can vary radically between people and cultures, and allow for the override of that compassion to such an extent that whole societies can be led to call for the killing off of a particular class or ethnic group and call it "holy".  Therefore,

3) your standard is more relativistic than mine, because it is based on subjective theological opinions which aren't really subject to standards of proof so much as textual interpretation, especially where the scriptures are ambiguous, whereas mine is based on human instincts which are accessible to all of us.

Obviously I think what is morally good will result in the greater wellbeing of people; however unlike your framework that's the end result rather than the basis for morality

Which is why your morality is entirely amenable to directly causing great suffering in the service of what you think God wants.

An impersonal and uncaring universe self-evidently doesn't care how we behave (r even live or die). So the notion that objective rules that governs how human beings ought to behave (and seemingly human beings alone) as if an impersonal and uncaring universe does care how we behave is obviously ridiculous.

If you choose to define objective morality as the universe caring about us then that is your perogative, but it is - again - just you trying to define yourself the winner.  Plenty of objective domains of human knowledge exist without the pretence that the universe has any kind of personal stake in them.  Morality is no different.

As I said if you're going to put all your cards on human compassion being any sort of obligatory by itself then I've got about 4 thousand years (though just the last 100 is necessary) of written history to kick your notion in the teeth.

Isn't that like trying to win a fistfight by detonating a bomb strapped to your chest?  If the facts of history are fatal to my morality then they are equally fatal to yours.  Compassion is not obligatory, anymore than the ability to do long division in your head is, and the fact that many people get mathematical questions dead wrong does not imply that there is no objective truth available.

A very blatant statement of historical ignorance. One easily corrected when reading the inspirations and reasonings of those like Hitler and Stalin who point to evolution and Social Darwinism as a guiding basis for their social outlooks (seriously read The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt sometime).

Thanks for the recommendation, but the fact that you selectively interpret historical events in the most simplistic and partisan way possible does not in itself constitute an argument.  i do not deny that Hitler was influenced by Social Darwinism (which is a demonstrable misapplication of evolutionary theory) just as he was influenced by centuries of Christian antisemitism in Europe.  Social Darwinism makes as much sense as Social Newtonism - the idea that we should morally prioritise those with the greatest mass - would, and i expect you might similarly wish to disown the religious bigotry of pogroms and blood libel as being any authentic implication of Christianity.  That's fine, but what it doesn't make sense to do is to suggest that because Hitler had some nonreligious influences then all nonreligious morality is suspect, because he unquestionably had religious ones too.

Irregardless you still face the problem of atheism inherently allowing any and all behaviour, while under theism there is a baiss to behave at least one way over others.

Assuming that it is true.  That's most of the problem with your argument - it assumes from the start that your worldview is the correct one.  If there is no God then a moral system based on balancing wellbeing and suffering is the only credible option - and must, in fact, be the way all people (even religious ones) make moral decisions - but notice that i don't argue on that basis, because it would be question-begging.  And that's your thing.  Even if we assume that there is a God (and assuming that it is the one you believe in), "He" hasn't given us all that much to go on in some areas.  Is cousin marriage wrong?  How are you going to answer that question?  Consult the scriptures - they are mute on the subject.  In the end you'll come down to a calculation of wellbeing vs suffering, just dressed up with the arrogant (and even more tenuous than usual) assumption of divine sanction.

You've shown that you are only opposed to [abortion] under a subjective criteria of having certain body parts you personally deem satisfactory (and you often abandon your own criteria anyway). It's blatantly no different than those who consider other races to be not human due to their own subjective criterias and thus allowed to be destroyed or used for personal wellbeing as well and having the same attitude you regard for skin cells.

The centrality of the brain for conscious functioning is hardly a subjective opinion EB, and where did i abandon it again?  It is kind of hilarious the contortions you go through in order to avoid the inescapable fact that your mind is wholly contingent on your brain.  Continue with your dualist fantasies if you wish, but the connection between the brain and the conscious self is anything but arbitrary.  And i'm not even going to dignify your tired old "abortion/genocide" slurs with a response.

Under theism there can only be a single objectively true theology with the rest being obviously false. It's simply a matter of discovering which theistic framework is true. But thankfully that there is an objective morality is evidence in itself for a certain kind of theism that helps us narrow down the considerations - God must be a personal being that cares how we behave.

That's all assumption.  There doesn't have to be a single objectively true theology, they could all be false.  And the fact that we have a significant shared morality is not good evidence that they aren't.  There's also plenty of evidence that the idea of an omnipotent being who gives a crap about us is false.

"There are so many things which need to happen in order for an embryo to grow into a baby that i wouldn't even know where to start listing them.  A sperm has just one extra requirement - to be combined with an egg.  You have only emotive metaphysical reasons for drawing the line at an embryo."

You're a hoot DB. What do you think a human embryo is going to grow into? A mercedes?

  The fact that a process has only one optimal conclusion says nothing about either its failure rate or the resources that must be inputted at each stage of the process to avoid that failure.  i can promise you that if an embryo doesn't receive constant nutrition and stimulus from the body of the woman it is gestating inside of, then it wont grow into anything.

An embryo is simply an arrow that's left the bow. It will always grow into a baby unless it's interfered with.

Intellectual credibility reset to zero.  You crept a few points off the baseline by recommending the Hannah Arendt book, but i guess it'll be good for you to be back on familiar ground.

To pretend otherwise is both disingenuous and dishonest about the objective facts.

Matthew 7:5.  Never seen a clearer demonstration.

Fine, care to tell what's the frequency of 'happiness' then? Or are you simply going to give up stalling and admit such things don't have physical properties to be measured and are thus not physical?

fMRI studies have demonstrated physical states which correlate with emotions such as happiness.  Damage to the bits of the brain in which those states occur can remove a person's ability to feel emotion.  Whatever injury it deals to your self-image, your personhood is a product of your brain.

Your "objective" morality is contingent not only upon the existence of God (which we disagree about), but also - assuming that He exists - on the specifics of His personal opinions (which most of the world would disagree with you about).  All your talk about consequences and rewards is therefore dependent on a bunch of assumptions, by no means the majority view, and certainly open to debate on this forum.  From my perspective, you are the one espousing a relativistic morality, contingent entirely upon one's choice and selective interpretation of the available holy books.  So, assuming from the outset that you are the possessor of objective morality, let alone that without God there can be none, is classic question begging.

Now you're just wailing in the wind.

First of all this simply shows a fundemental ignorance on the issue of 'objective morality' in relationship to God. Yes, 'objective morality' to truly be 'objective' inherently requires the existance of God. It's why for the last few hundred years or so atheists have argued no objective morality exists at all because objective morality is inherently evidence for God's existence. Nothing in this is an assumption; rather it's just the inherent facts regarding objective morality. If objective morality exists then it's evidence for basic theism. Secondly if your going to pull a Euthyphora Dilemma and appeal to majority views you might as well quit now before you embarrass yourself further. The only one who's said it's dependant on God's personal opinion is you. The false dichotomy of morality either being a matter of God's personal opinion or there being laws higher than God has been addressed by apologetics a long time ago -that morality is grounded in God's inherent character.

So there's no 'opinion' or 'view' or 'personal interpretation' to the matter of objective morality. It's inherent requirement that God exists for objective morality to exist is simply the facts of the matter that no amount of denial or whinning is going to change. The only choices you have is to deny objective morality's very existence (and thus keep your mouth shut when faced with acts or situations you don't personally like or agree with), or rethink your faith in atheism all together.

Attempting to condense your argument somewhat:

simple objective facts/effects do not offer any objective morality on their own.

...because we are not compelled to care about human wellbeing and suffering or the objective facts which relate to it.  i agree.  However, as i have said, if this is a truth mutually exclusive with objective morality then you are also not in possession of objective morality, because people are very clearly not obliged to care about your moral standards either.  Even your hypothesised postmortem consequences do not reliably compel those who believe in them to behave morally

They are obliged. They are obliged because there is a personal Being who demands it of us and will personally hold each of us accountable if objective morality exists at all. That many disobey this obligation and simply deny to themselves that consequences will follow is by no means evidence for either's inexistance.

But like I said if you deny that any obligation exists under atheism then by definition objective morality prima facia can't exist and is simply 'relativism-by any-other-name'. Lamenting because theism does have an obligatory mechanism isn't going to change that DB.

  And yet somehow i manage to get out of bed every day.  This is really just meaningless rhetoric, because you obviously have no conception of what it might be like to live without a belief in God.  You feel compassion for your fellow humans (i assume) and think that this stems from the presence of God in your life, but i assure you that it doesn't.  It's hard-wired, and i have it just the same as you do.  Nearly everyone does in some degree, and it is the basis for our shared morality.

And yet it would be the same as if you never woke up or if you have no compassion at all. That all you do is simply fall back to denials and assertions on this fact with regards to atheism and evolution just shows an inherent personal blindness.

A couple of things:

1) My standard is contingent on our innate compassion for the suffering of other sentient creatures, which is rather more "just than my opinion", and,

Which is inherently 'just your personal opinion' seeing how other people either don't personally have the same "compassion" regarding the same issues, or don't have compassion at all.

2) your standard is contingent on your beliefs about God's likes and dislikes, which can vary radically between people and cultures, and allow for the override of that compassion to such an extent that whole societies can be led to call for the killing off of a particular class or ethnic group and call it "holy".  Therefore,

Which just shows you're fundamentally ignorant about how my standard works, and are now simply pointing fingers like a pre-schooler.

3) your standard is more relativistic than mine, because it is based on subjective theological opinions which aren't really subject to standards of proof so much as textual interpretation, especially where the scriptures are ambiguous, whereas mine is based on human instincts which are accessible to all of us.

  I love this. 'My morality is objective, yours is just like mine, yours is relative, but mine is objective even though it's like yours which is relative.' This is too rich DB.

Seeing how this entire debate is happening on a forum where symbols are being interpreted in order to communicate, should give you a clue on the objectiveness of textual interpretation. And I've still got about four thousand years of written history to kick your notion of 'we all have compassion and it is all we require' in it's teeth. That you think all 6 billion people has the same subjective feelings you do just shows a massive arrogance as well as a massive failing in your argument. Not that it hasn't failed for a while now.

Which is why your morality is entirely amenable to directly causing great suffering in the service of what you think God wants.

Except for the fact that if God has communicated He wants the opposite much like you have on this forum, then it's not a matter of thinking. But again, your pre-school figner pointing doesn't change the fact that yours will inevitably cause more suffering, even if theological texts are open to misuse.

If you choose to define objective morality as the universe caring about us then that is your perogative, but it is - again - just you trying to define yourself the winner.  Plenty of objective domains of human knowledge exist without the pretence that the universe has any kind of personal stake in them.  Morality is no different.

It's that obligatory element DB. One has a hard time imagining an obligation existing and simultaneously no interest behind it. I've explained to you obligation is an inherent requirement for objective morality to exist at all. And it's your refusal to acknowledge morality IS different than the other "objective domains of human knowledge" that has your entire viewpoint taking so many hits.

Isn't that like trying to win a fistfight by detonating a bomb strapped to your chest?  If the facts of history are fatal to my morality then they are equally fatal to yours.  Compassion is not obligatory, anymore than the ability to do long division in your head is, and the fact that many people get mathematical questions dead wrong does not imply that there is no objective truth available.

It's the facts of history that are fatal to your notion that everyone has compassion and that's all we need to all hold hands and sing songs around the world. Key difference being I am not the one asserting morality is dependant on 6 billion people having the same subjective emotions.

Thanks for the recommendation, but the fact that you selectively interpret historical events in the most simplistic and partisan way possible does not in itself constitute an argument.  i do not deny that Hitler was influenced by Social Darwinism (which is a demonstrable misapplication of evolutionary theory) just as he was influenced by centuries of Christian antisemitism in Europe.  Social Darwinism makes as much sense as Social Newtonism - the idea that we should morally prioritise those with the greatest mass - would, and i expect you might similarly wish to disown the religious bigotry of pogroms and blood libel as being any authentic implication of Christianity.  That's fine, but what it doesn't make sense to do is to suggest that because Hitler had some nonreligious influences then all nonreligious morality is suspect, because he unquestionably had religious ones too.

Nor does denial constitute a rebuttal (though that seems to be all you've been using for awhile). But that is just your simplistic and partisan interpretation of historical events as well as your misapplication of evolutionary theory which is subjective to textual interpretation rather than standards of proof.

But it's this refusal to learn from history that is going to have everyone eventually repeat it.

Assuming that it is true.  That's most of the problem with your argument - it assumes from the start that your worldview is the correct one.  If there is no God then a moral system based on balancing wellbeing and suffering is the only credible option - and must, in fact, be the way all people (even religious ones) make moral decisions - but notice that i don't argue on that basis, because it would be question-begging.  And that's your thing.  Even if we assume that there is a God (and assuming that it is the one you believe in), "He" hasn't given us all that much to go on in some areas.  Is cousin marriage wrong?  How are you going to answer that question?  Consult the scriptures - they are mute on the subject.  In the end you'll come down to a calculation of wellbeing vs suffering, just dressed up with the arrogant (and even more tenuous than usual) assumption of divine sanction.

  Yeah, like you aren't making the same assumption regarding atheism DB. Oh, how shocking for a Christian to hold Christianity as correct.

And I've already addressed your false dichotomy. If there is no God then we are all free to do whatever we please. We can help each other if we want, and we can cause suffering on each other if we want. It's all allowed and all equal under atheism.

The centrality of the brain for conscious functioning is hardly a subjective opinion EB, and where did i abandon it again?  It is kind of hilarious the contortions you go through in order to avoid the inescapable fact that your mind is wholly contingent on your brain.  Continue with your dualist fantasies if you wish, but the connection between the brain and the conscious self is anything but arbitrary.  And i'm not even going to dignify your tired old "abortion/genocide" slurs with a response.

Neither is skin color and race a subjective opinion DB. And yet those objective biological facts has as much to do with human rights as your personally prefered body parts (as your standard would have all animals who posses a brain indistguishable from humans). Except this time you don't have the excuse of not being able to know where such thinking leads.

That's all assumption.  There doesn't have to be a single objectively true theology, they could all be false.  And the fact that we have a significant shared morality is not good evidence that they aren't.  There's also plenty of evidence that the idea of an omnipotent being who gives a crap about us is false.

Nope, that's the facts that no amount of denial or cries of 'Assumption! Assumption!' is going to change. The only way for all that basic theism to be false is for objective morality itself to not exist. Yet we can plainly see that some things are indeed objectively wrong.

  The fact that a process has only one optimal conclusion says nothing about either its failure rate or the resources that must be inputted at each stage of the process to avoid that failure.  i can promise you that if an embryo doesn't receive constant nutrition and stimulus from the body of the woman it is gestating inside of, then it wont grow into anything.

It does say something about the 'potentiality' you envoke.

fMRI studies have demonstrated physical states which correlate with emotions such as happiness.  Damage to the bits of the brain in which those states occur can remove a person's ability to feel emotion.  Whatever injury it deals to your self-image, your personhood is a product of your brain.

  Please DB! We can already see 'physical states which correlate with emotions' when someone frowns, smiles, or cries. Hardly evidence for concluding it's all reducible to the material, especially when you can't describe a single physical trait for 'happiness', 'sadness', etc. According to your logic it would make 'saddness resides in the eye' in which simply removing the tear ducts would prevent a person from ever being sad. The fact of the matter is your notion of emotions being reduced to the material is comletely wrong, and is ultimately just philosophical question begging. Emotions are immaterial. As such your appeal to them as some kind of standard in matters of when one is allowed to destroy something is completely contradicting to your materialistic views.

Frankly, for a guy who envokes "correlation does not equal causation" at the drop of a hat it's telling how you don't seem to hold the notion now.

PS - your stance on homosexuality exemplifies the relativity of your moral framework.  Although i respect your right not to continue with our conversation on that topic, i will just go back to one section of the debate where you explained concisely your argument against homosexuality:

Yeah, because there's nothing objectivly observable about the reproduction process. I said it before and I'll say it again - You're a hoot DB. Especially when it comes to a profession you actually work for a living.

[/quote]And my response at the time, which was:

"It's wrong" = you don't like it.
"It violates the natural design of sexual behaviour" = you think God doesn't like it.
"It causes harm to themselves and others" = the only objective plank of your case against homosexuality, which you have been unable to provide support for and have just declared to be irrelevant anyway.

That's my point.[/quote]

"It's right" = you like/approve it.
"It's natural in every meaningful sense of the word" = you say so.
"It causes no harm to themselves and others" = you deny any thing you can't personally see, and simply disregard any negative consequence you can.

That's MY point. Under atheism it all comes down to subjective opinion. Because atheism can only inherently produces amorality. And nothing can change that objective fact.

i think you are mixing up two separate issues, or maybe i am.  Either way, it's time to separate them.  Issue one is whether an objective morality necessarily comes from God, and issue two is what that objective morality contains.  You state that 'objective morality' to truly be 'objective' inherently requires the existance of God.  We disagree about that, but it doesn't help that our frames of reference are so radically different (i see a whole world-full of things that exist just fine without the existance of God), so i think we're unlikely to find any common ground.

Nor does it help that your reasoning behind your disagreement on this point seems to be....well nothing. All you've seem to have given so far is denials all the while admitting there is no obligation for your morality under atheism. Something that's inherently needed for objective morality to exist.

So, when i talked about your morality being contingent on God's opinion, i was not "pulling a Euthyphora Dilemma" (kudos, by the way), but was making an "issue two" argument.  i went back to it again at the end - you claim to know, from your scriptural access to objective morality, that homosexuality is morally wrong.  In essence, you are reliant upon God's pronouncements, occasionally delivered via intermediaries (i.e. Paul), but mostly reported as direct dictation.  To say that the sinfulness of homosexuality is "grounded in God's inherent character" implies some rather strange things about the nature of God.  An omnipresent immortal deity had proscriptive instructions about human sexual behaviour somehow carved into his personality before He chose to create the first humans, or even the universe?  That makes God seem less like a creator and more like auto-install software.  Could someone be pulling his strings, do you think?

"Issue two" has actually little to do with the discussion. It's simply a red herring to deviate from the main issue. Your whole premises since you started this thread is 'objective morality can exist without God, by being contingent on sentient beings studying cause-effect relationships on the issue of wellbeing vs suffering' (correct me if this is in anyway inaccurate as I'm nutshelling). You are simply trying (again) to have your cake and eat it too in regards to being able to appeal to an objective standard of good and evil (because you may have realized you can't help BUT to appeal to one), while denying the inherent implications that an objective Moral Law inherently needs an objective Moral Lawmaker.

As such I've been trying to make you face the issue of where your standard of morality comes from or is grounded on in an atheistic framework. And as the discussion has progressed it's become clear that your 'objective morality' is only based on your personal subjective values and perceptions with no one being obliged to follow or agree with. Which is basicly 'moral relativism' by your own provided definitions earlier.

As far as "issue two" goes all it implies about God's character is that He is an intelligent Being who has intentionally designed our bodies for specificly intended functions. I'm sure if God designed our bodies in another way homosexuality wouldn't be a sin because it probably wouldn't exist at all if not for the current design. As such the 'sin' in homosexuality is more due to rebellion against the Creator's will regarding His creation which is a potential possibility no matter what His design may be. Homosexuality is just another form of expression for that sin of pride and rebellion.

Besides, by making such an argument (actually, that's according it undue dignity - it's not an argument, it's an unfalsifiable post hoc claim) you re-enter the God-is-good-and-we-define-good-as-whatever-God-does logical loop, which can hardly satisfy anyone.  If you perceive God as a conscious entity possessed of free will then you can hardly credibly state that moral trivialities of human sexuality were part of his psyche prior to the creation of the universe.  It makes just as much sense to say that morality is inherently grounded in human nature, and that is far more objectively supportable as a statement.

More empty denials. Funny one's too because there's a bit of a logical loop with those-who-are-fit-survive-and-the-survivors-are-fit problem that many people aren't satsified with either. Since I'm sure you aren't prepared to throw out evolution in it's entirety due to this logical loop and don't give a flip about someone's personal satisfaction, I'm quite amused that you think such things are going to have any effect on me.

The opinion and personal interpretation comes in when you tackle issue two.  If two people are both convinced that they have found objective truth, and they disagree, then clearly they cannot both be right.  By that logic, most of the people in the world who think that they have access to objective truth are in error.  If these two people were mathematicians then they would settle it by logical proofs; if they were physicists they would appeal to different sorts of hard evidence.  To me, that seems more credible than you waving your Bible while the Muslim waves his Qur'an, and you (perhaps inadvertantly) acknowledge the inadequacy of this approach by bringing up real world consequences of homosexuality when discussing its morality.  That endorses a non-theistic human morality.

Except under atheism who is objectively right and wrong doesn't matter at all. And under your standard "issue two" of opinion and personal interpretation is all your morality comes down to under atheism. Which is why atheism can only produce moral relativism or amorality since personal opinions themselves don't matter. Much like your mere personal judgement on the relibility of epistemological methods of testing religious truth claims matter an iota. Mostly due because it's just biased and prejudiced than anything else.

Also, my "faith in atheism" is on a par with your "faith in the non-existance of unicorns".  And believe me, i had to wrack my brains for quite a while there to come up with an example of something that you don't believe in.

Difference being I'm not the one currently in denial of evidence that directly proves the existance of that "unicorn". As your entire argument in this thread is akin to admitting a 'single horned horse' exists yet this is somehow not evidence for the existence of a 'unicorn' by virtue that you can give the creature a different label and ranting 'that's just your interpretation of what unicorns look like' every other minute.

i agree that it wouldn't be evidence against such consequences, but that doesn't make them well supported either.  What you are saying is no different to a Muslim suggesting that humans are "obliged" to pray five times a day facing towards Mecca.  If the Qur'an is what it says it is, then i suppose he would be right about that, but it's a big "if", don't you think?

How shocking since Islam actually opperates under the same principles of objective morality as Christianity given they're both advocating basic theism. That the only question of which of the two is correct because both can't be doesn't invalidate the fact the obligation is necessary for objective morality and the obligation can only come from a personal Being that transcends humanity. That's evidence of basic theism which Christianity and Islam both obviously opperate under. If Christianity is true you are obliged. If Islam is true you're still obliged. If atheism is true no one is obliged. So your continued quest to lump atheism and theism together has failed utterly.

Why must obligation exist in non-theistic objective morality, when no demonstrably effective obligation exists in your supposedly objective system?

At this point we can say 'non-theistic objective morality' amounts to little more than saying 'square-circle'. I've already given you an explanation why there's an 'oughtness' to objective morality as well as explained why an obligation exists under theism. That you have only met these exlanations with denial shows how utterly weak what little reasoning you've put into this subject is.

The fact that a minority of people are born blind, or become so later in life, does not make questions of visual perception subjective.  Increasing numbers of studies show helping behaviour performed unprompted by very young children and babies, supporting the idea that compassion is innate, not learned or taught or instilled by religious lessons.  Open your mind. 

Like being open to the fact that this is a dodge? Seeing how I never said subjective emotions aren't innate, your comment here doesn't really address anything. Especailly since the issue is more akin to two people with an objective visual perception arguing over subjective beauty. 

An altruistic pre-schooler.  This would be an ideal opportunity for you to correct whatever misconceptions i have about how your standard "works" (although i hope you noticed that i was making an issue two point there - that the specifics of your morality are dependent on subjective opinion/interpretation).

For someone who denied bringing up the Euthyphora Dilemma your phrases and responses seem to indicate otherwise. And no, I'm not going to be lead to far down a red-herring, especially since I know you don't truly care about what is actually being said over your own biased preconceptions.

Yeah, that's exactly what i was saying.   If human morality can be objective it clearly must be different from the theistic objective morality which you propose, since its precepts wont be found in any holy book, but must be discovered intellectually/instinctively.

In other words atheistic morality is based on personal perceptions and value. What was the term with that definition called again?  I want you to say it DB. It will please me.

Yes, but it is slightly more difficult to derive a coherent system of morality from a book which in one place says "do not kill" and in another place actively encourages the wholesale murder of other tribes of people over territorial or religious differences.  You believe that you have a framework for doing so, but that framework is not an objective truth, it is a subjective device.

More evidence of your textual ignorance to what is actually written seeing how the command is "do not murder", which is nominally different. If it's in any way more difficult to understand it's only due to not having the same language and cultural context in which such things were written which can be rectified with more study. Nothing of which deminishes it's objectiveness no more than someone a thousand years from now reads the phrase 'hungry enough to eat a horse' and misconstures horses were actually and regularly eatin.

A foolish strawman.  i am certainly not making a utopian argument for the wonderfulness of human nature.  Humans are and have been in the past capable of some incredibly senseless acts of brutality, and anyone arguing that morality is in any way objective has to find a way to overcome the facts of history.  i would respond by pointing out that people who have shown the most monumental disregard for the happiness of other humans can usually be shown to either have been through a traumatic process of having their compassion knocked out of them, or to have been demonstrably lacking in compassion from a very young age, suggesting an innate deficiency.  Again, that some people are unable to see anything does not mean that there is nothing to see.

That person also has to overcome the inherent contradiction of someone arguing on the reliablility of an innate trait as opposed to other conflicting traits which are just as innate. Especially when it wasn't a matter of people being 'unable to see' as much as 'not being obliged to care'. And we aren't obliged under atheism are we DB?

Yes.  It sure was nice of you to explain that to me, but now maybe you could actually support it with something other than assertion.

Oh, the irony is just too much.

Neither am i.  i am asserting that moral facts are innately intuitive to the vast majority of humans, as well as some other primates.  There is plenty of evidence in favour of the conclusion that compassion is hardwired into us, even if it can be removed - as can any other human attribute - under certain conditions, or rarely may not appear at all.  That is the foundation for a morality based in the objective facts of human and animal suffering.

Yes, moral facts are innately intuitive. However, it's your whole argument that morality is dependant on that intuition. Anger, greed, pride, and so forth are just as hardwired into us as any amount of compassion; and under atheism they are just as equal. Which is why I bring up the points of history and the inherent idiocy of depending on compassion as you've simply shown a flippant disregard for these issues.

You're accusing me of substituting denial for rebuttal in a paragraph containing nothing but unsupported assertion?  Nice self-awareness EB.  i actually gave some verifiable historical facts in my rebuttal, whereas you have given precisely none in yours, contenting yourself with parroting my assessment of the simplicity of your historical summary of the twentieth century.  Now is it me, or is that just a little bit ironic?

And a book of refrence to research DB. And your "verifiable historical facts" amounted to a personal judgement of evolution having no logical conclusion to Social Darwinism (Comparing it to Social Newtonism was it?). A rather subjective opinion as well as inherently naive of the fact that evolution does have insight on personal behaviour. And a personal opinion of no greater worth than those who actually founded evolutionary theory and believed Social Darwinism was the logical outcome.

Well, apart from hoping that you continue to believe in God for the sake of your neighbours, i don't see anything much to respond to here.  You are essentially like a man who has grown up walking on crutches loudly asserting to everyone else that getting around without them is impossble.  And you didn't answer my question - Is cousin marriage wrong?  How does your objective morality respond to that?

Saying 'nuh-uh' would have saved time DB. Sadly that you may name things that aren't explicitly mentioned doesn't negate all that IS explicitly revealed, nor what general attitudes and motivations are addressed. And speaking of explicitly revealed in regards to your specific question I'd brush up on Leviticus 18 if I were you.

Skin colour may be objective, but race isn't.  And hilarious though your continued insistence that the brain is "just another body part" when it comes to personhood is, it is not doing your argument any favours.  The mind is demonstrably contingent on the brain, in part and in whole, whether you personally like it or not.  Now you may argue that this is just a matter of the means of expression of the mind, but that would be something like me proposing that the kidneys have a soul which is really responsible for filtering the blood, and the fact that when the kidneys become diseased or die filtration slows and stops simply means that the "renal soul" can no longer transmit its filtration mojo to the body.  It might be true, but our friend William of Ockam would suggest otherwise.

It's your contintion someone isn't objectively Jewish or Asian? Really? And your continued ad nauseum reduction of the material has already failed DB. No one denys the brain is a vital organ for people to be alive and function (duh), but your strawman just goes to show more fundemantal ignorance about how I (and Christians in general) view the body-mind-soul relationship, as well as failing to address the rather obvious fact that most animals on the planet have the same physical characteristics you appeal to as a standard, yet are self-evidently different.

And your third strawman of the thread, that the simple fact of possessing a brain of any level of development would qualify an animal (or foetus) for personhood under my standard, is definitely the stupidest yet.  Still, i have faith in your ability to continue to surprise me.

Well you haven't surprised my with these responses of denials for quite awhile. Or in how you just confirm my assertion of you abandoning your own standard at the drop of a hat as you do here.

Tears may semi-reliably correlate with sadness, but people who are unable to cry for whatever reason can still feel sad.  On the other hand, damage to certain areas of the brain shown to be activated when people report sadness will actually stop people being able to feel sadness (and, usually, happiness as well).  Don't you think that makes a rather better case for emotion being contingent on the physical states of the brain rather than the physical states of the face?

Stop people from being able to feel sad? Really? And what was the physical trait of 'sadness' again? Was it rough or smooth to the touch seeing how it's supposedly an objectively observable thing according to you? Or could it be you simply infer sadness rather than truly observe it and your studies only showing a connection with the immaterial mind and material body as those pesky religions have maintained all along?

Frankly your studies of damage only prove as much about my assertion of removing tear ducts preventing people from feeling sad since the logic is the exact same. And your response is the exact same - people may feel sadness but unable to express it. So congratulations in discovering there is a correlation. Or rather just proving what people have known for thousands of years. But that you draw the conclusion that the physical is all there is, then it's as ridiculaous as saying there is no immaterial aspect of meaning to the physical symbols we call 'words' in which you're reading right now.

What do you do?  Just out of curiosity.

I read a lot.

i would characterise my position more as:

"It's right" = it causes more happiness than suffering in and of itself.
"It's natural in every meaningful sense of the word" = it exists in all human societies and is widespread in the animal kingdom.
"It causes little harm to themselves and others" = despite your efforts to show otherwise with a whole slew of highly partisan and scientifically dubious links, there seems to be no reliable correlation between homosexuality and promiscuity/STDs.

However, it is telling that you chose to make a rational consequentialist argument for the immorality of homosexuality.

And I would characterize mine as:

"It's wrong" = because it objectively is.
"It violates the natural design of sexual behaviour" = because there is an evident design which homosexuality violates.
"It causes harm to themselves and others" = because there are observable physical and spiritual consequences, as well as reliably promised unobservable consequences.

That I limited myself to what we can objectively observe has less to do with my confidence in the consequences we can't observe (yet), and more to do with the knowledge of you simply disregarding any Biblical reasoning so there being little point in advocating it to an atheist. It just shows I can beat you on your own terms.

EB,

You seem to be basing your dismissal of the possibility of non-theistic objective morality on the concept of "obligation".  But if i were to ask "obligation to do what exactly?", then you would appear to be stumped.  Theistic morality, you claim, carries an inherent obligation to comply with its precepts, because you will be judged and punished postmortem if you stray from them.  However, despite the fact that all the monotheisms certainly endorse this metaphysical blackmail, they also all differ in some degree about exactly what one is obliged to do in order to avoid it.  Your claim of some kind of unity in theism on this point seems bogus, therefore, because while almost all religions make use of this kind of threat to enforce good behaviour, they mostly disagree about what good behaviour actually is.

Irrelevant. It's the obligation itself that's necessary for objective morality to exist at all and that only exists under a theistic system. Though it's not as complicated as you seem to think since some matters are rather evident while for others we have divine revelation. How one determines which is truly divine revelation and which is false, is an entirely different matter; and the amount of differences between theistic beliefs pales in comparison to an atheistic system where you have potentially 6 billion different concepts on what "good behaviour" is. So complaining on those grounds does absolutely no good for you DB. At least under theism there can logicly be only one that's correct and others aren't, while under atheism there all the same.

If you are prepared to say that obligation exists both in Christianity and in Islam, then you are clearly only talking about the perception of obligation rather than the actual existence of it, and i don't see that as a valid reason to reject non-theistic objective morality.  After all, if (as you believe) Christianity is true and Islam is false, then despite the pronouncements of the Mullahs and Imams, there is actually no divinely-enforced obligation to pray five times a day.  It is an illusion, created by humans, which could just as well be achieved by me making up a vengeful and judgemental deity to bolt on to my belief system.  The fact that few would believe it is hardly relevant, unless you're making an ad populum argument here.

Heh. No, obligation exits under basic theism as I've already explained. Which religions like Christianity and Islam fall under. No amount of your dodging and whinning is going to change that fact. Since you admit under atheism obligation doesn't exist at all that simply means that if one acknoweldges objective morality exists atheism is excluded in it's entirety, and one must narrow down specifics within a theistic belief like praying five times a day by other investigative methods.

So, i am quite happy to agree that the perception of obligation exists in theistic morality, but does that magically confer objectivity?  Of course not.  If Christianity is right and Islam is wrong then Islamic morality contains neither genuine obligation nor objectivity.  If Islam is right and Christianity wrong then vice versa.  If they're both wrong along with all other religious systems... well, then objective morality as you imagine it was always an illusion.  So the perception of obligation is a very weak argument.

You sound like those who argue the perception of free will isn't evidence for free will. Which simply shows an active denial of facts and closed-mindedness. For those who argue against free will I mean.

And actually you're wrong, Islam DOES contain genuine obligation. It contains as such due to it opperating under basic theism (and there are some agreements between Islam and Christianity on some matters). The only thing Islam being false shows is that it's wrong in exactly what we're obligated to do, but as I've said before that's an entirely different matter. So it's not a matter of only one belief containing genuine obligation while the others don't, rather it's a matter of all under basic theism containing genuine obligation, while only one belief applying it correctly.

None of which changes the fact that since no obligation exists under atheism and all 6 billion perceptions of what constitutes good behaviour are equal, objective morality does not exist under atheism.  So again DB, your only two choices are to either deny objective morality exists and forfeit the ability to complain about anything (though you still will), or simply acknowledge God's basic existence. Or rather those are your only two rational choices.

But obligation to do... nothing specific, apparently.  You're invoking this as a unifying characteristic of theism, but in fact it is incredibly divisive.  Obligation cannot exist without clear and specific objectives, which are certainly not unified across theism.  Exactly what a theist is supposedly obliged to do in order to be "good" is entirely contingent on which variety of theism they follow, so to claim that they are all united in this is disingenuous at best.

Again, all irrelevant. Your basic premises was all about "issue one" - objective morality existing within atheism at all. It's been shown to be wrong. "Issue two" you keep trying to bring up to save your crumbling argument is simply a red herring. Under theism objective morality exists that makes human beings obligated to do something, even if people don't agree on specifics. Under atheism there is no obligation to do anything at all.

Of course it matters (in so far as moral questions relate to human happiness and suffering, which they mostly do).  The fact that moral questions aren't linked into a metaphysical threat in an atheist perspective is not the same as saying that they don't matter.  And the fact that a belief system has found it necessary to invent a spiritual cudgel with which to compel obligation is not any kind of argument for its truth.

I'll happily grant you have the perception that it matters DB. But does that magically confer objective meaning?  Of course not.

Though in all seriousness in a guideless universe where human beings very existence doesn't matter then our behaviour rather self-evidently matters even less. So no, under atheism everything is equal in that everything is equally meaningless.

You know that prefacing a strawman with "In other words..." does not make it any more convincing?

Neither does dodging the implications of your own view of human morality being based on human preceptions. Which is what relativism is entirely based on.

i am not suggesting that we aren't a mass of sometimes contradictory impulses and urges, many of them innate.  It's an interesting challenge for someone like you to explain why we don't differ significantly from other primates in our basic drives and impulses.  But one of the most basic is the urge to engage in helping behaviour when another creature is in trouble or pain, both in humans and apes.  That may not make us "obliged" to care, in the sense of someone standing over us with a big stick, but it means that we generally do care nevertheless.

And it's the fact of contradicting innate impulses and urges existing that blows your idea to 'trust our innate impulses and urges' out of the water. Especially since you have no basis to judge one innate impulse over another given that they all serve some evolutionary purpose equally. And if pointing to isolated incidents of animals without even knowing their true motive is somehow evidence that we generally do care, then I still have 4 thousand years of human history plus the general brutality of the animal kingdom as evidence that we generally don't care. Like I've said before - that we have behave compassionately is at most evidence against atheism/evolution or at least due to religous influence teaching people to behave in such a way.

Sure, just like there is nothing objectively better in the natural human thirst for knowledge than in the (apparently) equally prevalent natural human desire to bask in comfortable ignorance.  But the latter doesn't keep the electricity on and the water running does it.  That certain domains of human knowledge are contingent upon human drives does not invalidate the objectivity of the truths that they discover.

And the former doesn't have any meaning nor necessitate survival as evidence by the rest of the animal kingdom. And equally that certain domains are personally prefered by an individual does not validate them either. Especially when personal prefrence is all one has.

Ah, so although some of your instinctive moral opinions are not explicitly endorsed in the Bible, you claim that they are all somehow revealed?  That's a nice prescription for legitimising any distortion of Christian scripture.  i did, as you suggested, reread Lev.18 (had to shower afterwards) and failed to find any mention of cousin marriages.  But if the answer has been revealed to you in your capacity of mouthpiece for Jehovah, then please enlighten me, oh great one.

And it's nice to legitimise any "insticntive moral opinions" even when they are in conflict with explicitly endorsment. And since you failed to find any forbidance on cousin relationships in an area where sexual relationships were being explicitly addressed, is the logical conclusion that there is nothing innately wrong with cousin relationships too much of a leap for you DB? In actuality cousin relationships have only been frowned on since the 20th century.

A person has objectively knowable ancestry, which is not quite the same thing.  At some point in everyone's past - whether they know it or not - that ancestry crosses someone's perception of "racial" boundaries.  So objectively, we're either all mixed race, or some different categories need to be put into place utilising fractions to a probably frustratingly unwieldy extent.  Current racial categories are anything but objective.

*snort* I can understand why you're trying to hem and haw at this since the conclusion would make you uncomfortable DB. But it's not all that admirable when personal opinion is the only thing keeping you from accepting the conclusion. According to evolution we have some ancestry with the bacteria and vermin we kill by the millions. Doesn't change the fact that race can be objectively known just as genus can be. And as it's just as objective as parts of the brain you use as a standard to discriminate...

Most organs are vital for people to be alive and function, but only the brain shows a causal relationship with the mind, in terms of individual aspects of personality, memory and identity.  The human brain is not "the same" as animal brains, although it is fairly similar to other primate brains (larger frontal lobes though).  Feel free to maintain your wilful ignorance of comparative anatomy and neuroscience if you wish.

And? As I've said that the material brain has a relationship with the immaterial mind is no more evidence that the brain is all there is, than basing it on the physical mouth moving up or down in relationship to happiness or sadness. Seriously, I am curious on how you can justify the scientific-ness of your conclusion when it must inherently be falsifiable. Exactly how can one falsify the conclusion that the brain is all there is based on physical correlations when physical correlations were obviously agreed upon and the emotions themselves are immaterial?
 

i see.  So when people say that they have compassion, or that they feel the presence of God, you believe them, but when people with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex say that they can no longer feel any emotion, you think they're lying?  Removing tear ducts doesn't do that.

I think the fact that they needed to reveal that they don't feel any emotion in itself proves your 'emotions are physical and objectively observable' notion wrong.

That seems rather at odds with your earlier statement that [God] is an intelligent Being who has intentionally designed our bodies for specificly intended functions. I'm sure if God designed our bodies in another way homosexuality wouldn't be a sin because it probably wouldn't exist at all if not for the current design.  Valid point, if a little contradictory.  The design of our bodies, as well as of our minds, clearly leaves the door open (ahem) for homosexuality.  Why would God have made things that way if he didn't intend it to be acted upon?

No more at odds than the current design of roads and highways making traveling on the opposite side wrong. Perhaps if the roads were designed in reverse then traveling on the opposite side you travel on now would then be ok, but it would still leave the door open for people to travel on your current lane and violate the system. That the only way to remove the possiblity of violating traffic is to throw the whole system out, is hardly evidence that the designers must have intended people would have carte blanch when driving.

And you know about these observable consequences through your extensive association with Gay people, or through your extensive reading of fundamentalist literature?  If it's the latter, i would urge caution.  Most of the writers have probably about as many close homosexual contacts as you do, and cannot be considered authorities on the perils of the lifestyle.  And as i have demonstrated to you many many times, studies based in STD clinics do not give a representative sample of the population, so using them to make a case for the "unhealthiness" of homosexuality is bad science.

As much caution as your agenda-promoting literature who conduct highly unreliable tests (do they actively infect people to see if it's less risk?) nor do they're studies give representive samples of the population (not that much study is needed as some types of damage is just obvious to the physical process). Though I wouldn't trust an evolutionist to know what "bad science" is if it bit him/her. 

Dannyboy,

I have just read your initial post -- I'll try to catch up on the thread soon -- but I wanted to give some of my reactions.  I think you've taken a big step in the right direction in acknowledging an objective morality, and I like your engineering analogy.  As you may remember, my position on objective morality is based on an objective moral framework grounded on three overarching principles.  I don't have to struggle to find an answer in my religious book for a particular problem.  The three principles are used to arrive at the answer.  Consider them mathematical principles that an engineer applies to arrive at the appropriate practical application.  I do find the three principles to be grounded in the Good Book, although I also believe that humans accept these principles intuitively, even if it is not always clear how to apply them.  The Good Book can provide some useful guidance in that regard, but since I have the framework, the tools exist to analyze moral problems on which the book is silent. 

And although I like the engineering analogy, I tend to think it applies in the sense that there may be more than one moral resolution to a particular situation that may face an individual, but objective moral principles still remain constant (though they can be highly situation dependent, think murder vs self defense, for example).

I wrote a reply and lost it.  *miffed*