Theism does not solve the moral argument, formally known as the Euthypro Dilemma.

Simply put, where does this god get his morals from?   

If god defines morality himself, then it is subjective, no different than you or I defining morality.

If morality is independent of god, then we don't need god for morality.

In terms of your specific reference to conscience:  Where does god get his conscience from?

some points i made earlier - but obviously i hope to reply to the remarks just made:

my approach will be, not natural law, not virtue ethics, not the end of human life, obviously not utilitarianism, but value.

think of the heart as the seat of affective responses, think of objects that may be values. we can notice differences. here are three examples. we see someone nice, beautiful chaming - our response is love. a strong man confronts us, we are afraid. a dictaor cruelly puts to death the innocent, family members are made to cheer enthusiatically - we are appauled for this is wrong.

we don't say, be afraid of me because i am cute, or love me for i am strong - we sense that certain responses are proper. our sense that cruelty is wrong is something we perceive clearly - actually, it was hitchens, arguing the case for the iraq war, that used that third example. what's interesting is that he does argue - in other words, he is claiming that the way he feels is the way others should feel. there is a claim on our assent, and it should lead to action. he is not simply telling us facts about his psychology, as if a fit of rage was like a sneeze in the presence of pepper. pepper causes sneezing, but not because it dawns on us what pepper is. suppose we are upset at the family members are cheering, then we understand their duress, when the truth dawns, we feel differently.

conscience has a commanding voice - the voice of right, but not of might.

that morality varies, i grant - but in the case of this cruelty, there was something absolutely wrong. i think this points to a personal god - but not a "dictatorial law giver". that would be to confuse might and right. my whole argument is based on the very real difference between the two.

This points to nothing other than most people seem to have some common understanding of what is right and wrong.  How does that = personal god?  And if he gave it to us, where did he get it from?  

 So this "god" of yours doesn't punish people?  How does it work for you?

TO argue that morals must come from a god is to argue that morals are useless.  For if they are useful we can derive them from their usefulness.  Are you suggesting that morals are useless? If so how do you know they are good?

punishment is hard to understand philosophically.

a president of france (mitterand?) was an atheist. his catholic friend asked, do you fear hell. he said no. after a pause he added, what i fear is deserving to go to hell.

we hate nothing more than being wrong - having a bad conscience is awful - in fact the worms that gnaw away in hell, according to aquinas, are those of a bad conscience.

i hope no one is dammned, and i feel certain that atheists can be saved - by the way they treat others, but the possibility of finding oneself with a conscience that is forever being gnawed away, i don't think such a possibility makes god a dictator. we shd think of god as a father waiting for the return of the prodigal - but perhaps there really is a self imposed exile of sin that lasts forever

Everything becomes easier to understand, is more consistent with what we now know about both the Universe and human nature, if we stop taking the "God hypothesis" seriously.

All the puzzles of the apparent contradictions of omnipotence, of why does a good God allows natural disasters, and did not intervene to stop Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all the other evil dictators of history, despite the OT stories of massive interventions to protect his 'chosen people', why bad things happen to good people, why does he punish people in Hell for things that cause no actual harm to anyone, right back to the Adam and Eve story of cursing all Eve's descendants for a harmless act of disobedience. All disappear in the light of reason - this unjust, impossible, overlord does not exist. 

The universe itself presents us with enough threats to our survival, but at least we can have confidence that the rules governing events are not subject to arbitrary change at the whim of some unknowable super-being.

I DON'T get pleasure from wanton cruelty.  None.  Never have.  Not as a child, not now.  Not just humans, either.  Being cruel to animals because they aren't humans and can't "feel" like humans, doesn't cut it for me.  And it isn't that it is intrinsically "wrong", it's because it makes me nauseous.

Morals are so that we can live together in a community.  Humans do not survive for long as singletons - even Jeremiah Johnson only stayed out ONE winter alone in the mountains.  He never went out again, not even in a group.  We have to get along with each other so we have morals to keep us from killing each other off before the cave bears get around to it.

From your drift here, I think you are getting rather Freudian.  However, Freud has been discredited since his style of psychotherapy has never been demonstrated to actually cure anybody.  So we can skip the super-ego stuff and and concentrate on getting along with each other before we manage to drive all of us to extinction.

So i'm a good person, I have a good heart and I try to always make "good" decisions.  So do I get punished for not believing?  How does that work for you?

Dreems, I don't see any post where you've stated an actual argument. If you want to discuss the moral argument for God, could you post an argument?

I gave this some thought, surely you are wrong. But the first example I came up with is invalid. I felt like I had "rescued" this little dog of mine. She was wandering around where I work which is on a busy busy road. The way it really is, I snagged her because I wanted her. The fact that she was probably going to get run over is a kind of justification. When I did the big brother thing, I was playing with a remote control airplane, and it was a good excuse to go to the park. Basicly self serving with a good excuse attached. When you do something for someone, there is the excuse, and then there is the reason.

There are probably very few times in life when you do something for someone and really expect 0 back, like donating to charity..but then if you brag about it, you have just defeated it, lol. This seems like something that would be on a criminals mind, perhaps one should not dwell too heavily on it, lest they realize fully and use it to further advantage.

Generally, humans have a kind of social contract with dogs, where we both derive a mutual benefit from each other. If you saw a rat in the same situation, you would feel a negative reaction, because we have an antagonistic relation(thanks to the plagues). So all you are reacting to is the good feelings you get from one and negative feelings from the other. So we evolved good feelings toward things beneficial and negative feelings toward things detrimental to our survival.

It is interesting how so many people will save or feel empathy for a stray dog or cat, but not much for a homeless person. I  think it is because humans will take advantage of each other more than these animals. Also we compete more with other humans than we do animals. So many people develop lower feelings of empathy for humans.

You get the good feelings of giving and helping others. Humans are often social animals, so this must be the case, there must be good feelings with social behavior in order for us to be social animals. Studies show people give and help more when others are observing.

Also, a reason why so many charities are scams is that the donors never bother to verify the charity does what they claim. Because the donation is really about making the donors feel good rather by believing they helping rather than actually doing any real help.

A reason I believe we have so many criminals is that society tries to force people into not being 'selfish', when we have no free will to be anything but 'selfish'. That is why there are so many sociopaths.

I see almost noone here tacitly agreeing to your premise, dreems. An argument from evolutionary advantage, for example, does not imply agreement to your premise for it is a direct counter proposition - ie - if morals are absolute then absoluteness of morals bears an intrinsic value such as evolutionary/genetic advantage.

Its all very well to have a reply to those who would pass over your original implication to address a more minor point in your argument but do you have any rebuttal more directly relevant to whats been posted on this thread to point out, or is that it?

I'd like to point out that I think Magus posted a decisive rebuttal to your OP statement and I can't see that you have responded to him yet. What do you have to say to his comment?

hmmm... yeah, maybe you need to broaden your horizons a bit, dreems. Hussein had many followers and was not always acting indefensibly, moreover he was hardly the only one who can be saddled with the blame of humanitarian crimes done in his country and in his lifetime, and whilesoever there are those who cooperated and enabled him in doing wrong, and there are, who are considered, even by you, defensible, one can hardly say his crimes are universally condemned. Fact is, they're just not, end of story.

In the concrete, perspectives vary, its more likely you've been shutting them out than they are not there... this sort of shit happens because someone is defending it.

There is no mystery to morality, its really just a simple matter of internal consistency in thought and action. We can point to the phenomena of evolution for a mechanism explaining the refinement of human repugnance to ill doing, but we don't need biology to resolve the fact of the matter. Consistent avoidance of the undesirable is logically dictated by the integrity of a coherent, self interested identity. Lack of morality would imply a break down in the sense of self by definition.

Feelings are free from logical dichotomy they're niether true nor false but always just are. It is the cognitive account of feelings which introduces the concept of error.  I thoroughly disagree that any actual wrongness can be intrinsic to feelings. Wrongness applies to reason, it is a subject of reason and requires reason to apprehend.

I'll be responding to various points over time. Let me just thoroughly agree with you on one point though, morality is rational consistency between thought and action. Even so, our freedom does not only concern actions. As well as the will there is the heart. Our feelings can be affective responses to values - non-intentional states just as feeling tired etc. are not responses to values or disvalues, but it remains, we can have feelings that are about something, for example, malicious joy in another's suffering. these may emerge spontaneously, and we are not necessarily free in such responses - our hearts are not in our control. but we can become aware of our feelings and say yes or no to them - our freedom consists of sanctioning them or disavowing them. to delight in wanton cruelty - something we might find emerging within us, is something we ought to regard as bad. in this sense feelings can be right or wrong - as fitting or unfitting responses to values. again, veneration for, say, hitler is a feeling - but a bad one. we should not be neutral about such feelings.

In the OP, Dreems stated that this topic was made with the assumption that P1a is true

Actually, I beg to differ. Doing something self-serving isn't anything bad and thus can be incorporated into morality. Morality doesn't mean mindlessly pleasing others, that's just losing your identity and refusing to admit your own needs--it's self-refutation. On the other hand, if you do something and consider the impact it will have on others, you have acted morally. For example, you are extremely angry and want to kill someone. Then you remember that the person that has angered you has relatives and friends who will feel grieve his death. You compare these sentiments to your own (doing so displays empathy) and realize what your actions mean to others and the pain it will make them feel. Then you think about how if everyone killed whoever out of impulse, your safety would be compromised, and in killing someone, you are likely to be prosecuted by society. You realize that self-restraint is optimal for your own welfare, sure, but you also considered it's impact on others too. This ability to feel and interact with others-- while retaining your own identity-- is the basis of morality. Since everyone has the same goals (avoid pain, survive, etc.), morals are ways to act that optimizes the fulfillment of said goals, and in doing so, we develop bonds. These bonds are self-serving, ofc, because they make us feel good, but they also make others feel good, which makes them so much more important. Mindlessly making others feel good, on the other hand, is as bad as utter, unrestrained selfishness. In both scenarios, only one person is profiting.

I understand that this is your idea of a 'wrong' feeling, however I stand firm on my point, error only exists in the intellectual account of the feeling. ie You're saying that the person is having "malicious joy" but malicious joy is a compound intellection of a raw event in the psyche, scientifically it could be called a theory of the event (and for that matter it's overly complex and therefore not a particularly good one) it is not the event itself.

Notwithstanding that I personally consider "malicious joy" a poor explanation of a psycho/emotional event with no chance of reasoned confirmation, in any case, the point remains that the event itself lacks context for the concept of error, that context is imported via the internal structure of the language you're using.

A person feels in a completely subjective manner, it is not certain, in fact it is decidely doubtful, that all individuals are feeling similarly at a time when they are expressing similar reactions to their feelings, that is to say, your example person could appear to be expressing what you perceive as joy but in actual fact is as nauseous and uncomfortable as anyone might be and only distinguished by their revelling in it. We could not say that what this person feels is wrong, we would have to say that their cognitive connection to their feelings is logically inconsistent.

exactly, this is why morality is a matter of logical consistency, agreement and disagreement are intellectual positions. Once you apply reason you are no longer dealing in the raw emotion but rather an abstract representation of it in an intellectual context.

At the risk of sounding repetitious I will point out again that "delight in wanton cruelty" is a complex intellection. You can not be sure that this delight you have percieved is indeed a feeling of delight as you imagine it. While you can say objectively that a sado-masochist is compelled to seek out whatever sensation they experience in the event of inflicting pain it is not possible to be objectively certain of the correlation that sensation has with feelings that you have experienced and ergo nor can the feeling, of itself, be judged intellectually. 

Absolutely incorrect, this is a terrible example. Veneration for a political figure or ideology is never going to be exclusively emotional by any stretch of the imagination. The error in this is example is most decidedly going to be cognitive.

Generally the points you make are good – tho i think you are misleading in places. Feelings can be right or wrong. But not all feelings. Maybe i can make it a bit clearer by looking at feelings that wd not be value responses. Suppose a chemical is created that smells delightful to some, nauseous to others. If two people were to differ on their reaction, this would not be the cause of argument. If the feeling could speak, it wd say, this is subjectively satisfying to me. But if instead we were dealing with an affective response to a value or disvalue, suppose some enjoy the fact of great suffering, others are outraged, then this is a cause of argument.

If such feelings could speak, they wd say, this horror should not be etc. It is in this type of feeling that values are apprehended. The difference between the nausea of a chemical and the emotional response to a disvalue that we ought to feel is that the latter is self-transcending. Obviously, if i did not think that conscience was self-transcending, if it was merely subjective, then the moral argument wd not work at all. I think this is pretty clear from those who defend atheism by reducing such feelings. My whole point in taking up the theme of values is to examine the phenomenon of self transcendence.

Maybe the same point cd be put in another way, if a friend dreams of evil, that's quite different from rejoicing in evil, tho the feelings might be similar. Dreams are just a step towards self transcendence.

You will say, this proves your point! That feelings as such are not right or wrong. But the truth is, i have never spoken of feelings as such. I am concerned with value responses – and this puts us in the context of understanding and judgement, as you point out very well. Still, the feelings i am concerned with are quite concrete – they are spontaneous, i simply lifted my example from the pages of hitchens – there are vivid events he narrates, and we do feel awful. There is nothing abstract or theoretical. It is "feelings as such" that is, in fact, an abstraction.

Why do i think morality points to God? Precisely because feelings do duty for judgements "this ought not to be" and because values themselves speak, they have "a word". And they speak as if they were Lord. They command. A man is tortured, his family are forced to cheer. Something in our gut says – no. Pretty much everyone in the forum, i believe, thinks the same. In other words, the people arguing with me are not, in my opinion, arguing with God! They agree totally, and are mortified to think that atheists can't be moral, as some fools think. (Of course, they always go on to betray themselves, for the next moment they point out that morality is merely subjective etc).

on nothing more than your repeated insistence that it is so. Yes, there is a drive to look after our own groups of humans, a characteristic of mighty value in an evolutionary sense. No, this behavioural imperative, culturally drilled into us all as children when we are praised for sharing and censured for being selfish, does not allow you to construe a metaverse-dwelling sky monkey who wants to be friends but says he will torture us for not loving him.

Go ahead and believe whatever you want - but don't trademark obviously universal human and animal characteristics and bolt them to your private brand of religious nonsense. Those values are our values - human values. The fact we share them proves nothing more than that. You are not entitled to use the existence of provable human feelings as evidence of an ethereal supernatural being that no one has ever seen in the history of the entire universe.

And what is it with theists? When they talk about morality they always go for the most gruesome, unlikely and weird-arsed shit they can. It's always rape or murder or torturing a man and making his family cheer as it's done. Who are you, dreem? Martin Gilbert?

My moral compass tells me to visit my mother once a week although she is a screaming fundamentalist christian who thinks I deserve to die for my sins. The extreme crimes you talk about involve what - 0.1 per cent of the population? Let's focus on the 99.9 per cent, shall we?

And what do you mean merely subjective? Your entire god is merely subjective and so are all your arguments.

Focus on this, dreems. From a survival perspective, it's smart to be one of a group that looks after its own. It's equally true if you're an elephant, a chimp, a hyena, a wolf, a tree, a bacterium or a homo sapiens. I hope you get it now.

the two statements above are in direct contradiction with each other.
 

I don't understand how one of these two reactions is transcendent when the other is not, especially when you have already stated that they both can elicit different responses in different people.

I don't understand what you mean by this at all. Could you elaborate on this statement?

How are the feelings you are concerned with "concrete?" The idea of a concrete feeling is an oxymoron in the way I typically define those words.

When you say "we do feel awful," don't you mean to say "I do feel awful?" I think Eloise has already shown more than once that not everyone will experience an awful feeling when hearing of these events.

Also, I don't understand what you meant by the last sentence in this paragraph, could you explain it?

I really do not understand how this in any way points to a personal god. Perhaps I have misunderstood you, but this is what your argument seems to be in this paragraph:

Observation: Many people will have a similar emotional response to viewing an event.

Conclusion: Therefore, god is personal.

To me, these statements seem completely unrelated. Is this what you are trying to say, or did I leave something out?

Post a video of them kissing you, so we know you're not BSing us.

I would say it's because the homeless and poor humans impose a much greater burden on you while stay cats and dogs do not. We control animal populations with mandatory birth control so they don't overwhelm us, but we don't do the same with humans. So human overpopulation overwhelms us and therefore we treat each other like shit. If you been in 3rd world countries where there are stay dogs and cats that are not fixed or euthanized, the people treat the animals like shit. Because the animal's overpopulation has overwhelmed everyone's ability to be compassionate.

It has to do with it making you feel good. That is what you get back.

how something like morality originates, and whether it has a normative force, are separate issues. To think otherwise is to think that "explaining" is the same as "explaining away. I am quite prepared to accept various evolutionary mechanisms, but this does not undermine the absolute status of morality. Ditto with reason: when a scientist has a sufficient body of evidence to make a judgement then he ought to judge - the question of how he evolved into such a being that can tell true and false is separate. we ought to go with the better evidence, we shd be humble before the facts - there are intellectual virtues etc.

as for your "neither merely subjective nor crudely objective" - i sympathise, and in fact, when i talk of "self transcending" in the future, i will be trying to articulate a middle way, but as you see, i tend toward the rather crude belief that torture of the innocent is just plain wrong. I'm sure most of you do too, but i don't think you give a good account of your own insights

You did not quote me accurately - I said that the ideas of morality being "purely subjective" or "objective" are both crudely simplistic, IOW morality is more complex than that. It involves objective facts about how our brains work, and how societies work, ie how people interact and the sort of actions that are disruptive to societies and those that help people cooperate willingly.

It also involves the subjective, in the sense that we vary to a significant degree in our personal feelings about things, what makes us feel good, what we dislike, what causes us real emotional distress, etc.

So for any set of moral guidelines to be effective, they have to take all these things into account.

The God-based idea of morality is the one "explaining away" these realities, in order to justify the 'need' for a God to regulate and get us to replace our innate sense of moral 'rules' with those that some guys many centuries ago wrote down in some 'Holy Book'. Unfortunately, many of those rules are much inferior to what we have developed since that time - a lot of people have been re-thinking those old, more primitive ideas in the intervening centuries.

From a survival perspective, it's wise to realize we're *THE* Apex Predator of our Homeworld.

We may one day decide to become The *UNIVERSAL* Apex Predator!

Morality has a social benefit - in no sense do i deny that! My position, that moral obligation has an absolute status does not require me to demonstrate the harmful effects of following themoral law!

But to reduce morality to social benefit is to imply that the only obligation is to benefit society. And we can imagine situations in which there could be a conflict. For the individual concerned this will involve a tension. Pulling in one direction is a value, pulling in the other direction is a personal satisfaction - being true to your beliefs versus popularity, say. I'm sure that both integrity and popularity could, perhaps, have their origins explained by evolutionary mechanisms, but how does that help? The point i have insisted upon is that sometimes there are things we really ought to do.

For example, if a scientist has emotionally invested in a theory he or she may find that their prejudices prevent them from seeing the force of the unwelcome counter arguments. People can be self-deceived, theyrefuse to ask questions, follow up leads, spell things out to themselves. In this case there is a lack of intellectual integrity. I'm not saying that intellectual integrity is the only virtue, or truth the only value. But it is a value. It "speaks" to us - we are called to respond. We are called to be humble before the facts.

In any case we may respond to the pull of the value, or to the counter-pull of self-satisfaction. The "pull" is a call of self transcendence. The pull of truth and goodness are in a direction that is absolute, universal, exigent. By exigent i mean utterly demanding. For example, I can say, I am an educated person, i have a maths degree, but i don't speak German. But i can't say "I am a good person, i have lots of courage, but i don't specialise in kindness or telling the truth"!

And the plain fact, it seems to me, is that we simply are not always self transcending. Still there really is a difference between people who are self-trancending to some extent because at least they recognise the claims of conscience, and those who do not. Maybe they give up trying, maybe they hypocritically persude themself that actually they are virtuous, maybe they are totally cynical and point out the dangers of moral idealism, maybe they simply bury themself in selfish desires, maybe they just fall into a deep depression about doing good, maybe they get caught up in a firery cloud of hatred.

My belief is twofold. One, that we are under an absolute obligation to do good. Two, that this points us towards God. So far, I have tended to argue the first point only.