It really bugs me when people hate on religion

13th February 2012

Post reblogged from Philosopher's Dog with 81 notes

It really bugs me when people hate on religion

liberalchristian:

philosophersdog:

Haha, what books have you read? There is nothing about atheism that would make it logically inconsistent to believe in an objective morality. Absolutely nothing. You will have to explain that to me because, speaking as a moral philosopher, that makes absolutely no sense.

Moral naturalism does not claim that morality has been tested through science, just that it can be. We haven’t yet figured out how to test it. I don’t hold any hope that it will be tested (I’m an error theorist, myself), but there is nothing wrong with assuming that it would be testable. Especially given that previous things we thought were untestable actually ended up being testable.

Moral naturalists have long since given up trying to define ‘goodness’ as ‘what makes one happy’. Moore’s Open Question and the examples you have given have sufficiently invalidated that theory. Now, moral naturalists accept semantic definitions of good. Boyd, a Cornell realist, presents ‘good’ has a homeostatic property cluster and the ‘testing’ of moral terms comes through time and usage (disagreement is actually part of the scientific process in his representation). You should probably just read papers about moral naturalism for yourself (and I would suggest Boyd’s “How to be a Moral Realist”) so you aren’t simply shooting at strawmen.

Atheists who subscribed to classical theories about meaning and materialism might disagree with you. I’m not entirely sure why it matters a great deal that atheism can have objectivism, but nothing you’ve described sounds like it disproves my point. Maybe someday there will be tests for morality, and maybe someday there will be tests for God, but claiming objective morality exists based on that sounds little more than me claiming that God is an objective fact of nature. Saying it ‘could be’ is not the same as saying it is. And more than what is potentially scientifically possible, it’s the theory behind it that I question:

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that morality is socially evolving, or that scientists will have a better measure of it someday. But, if I say it comes from a personality that exists outside of human experience, that has always existed and only needs to be discovered and interpreted- much like the natural laws- then it is objective(even if the interpretation could be wrong). The question is, where does morality come from for an atheist? Science doesn’t invent physics in a lab, it is part of the fundamental character of the universe. If the same is true of morality, then why?

Source: settingmycoldheartfree

Shades of Gray

It really bugs me when people hate on religion