Moniker wrote:How precisely does one combat the immorality arguments?
It depends on which ones you are talking about. I presume you mean the "without God, all things are permitted" arguments? I have three recommendations.
First, and most importantly, you simply need to ask them what atheism lacks that God has that grounds morality. The answers are relatively predictable, and you just need to know what is wrong with them.
Second, you can bring up the
Euthyphro dilemma. The gist of the argument is that if morality is contingent on God, it is arbitrary and empty, but if is contingent on something independent, then belief in God doesn't matter. One way to get the point across is to ask why you can't have what the theist has by grounding your moral views in the will of Gadianton? Why is that any worse?
Wes Morriston has an excellent discussion of the dilemma here:
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/wes/GodGood.pdfQuoting that paper alone should be enough to start running victory laps, but I wouldn't expect people to agree with you.
This atheist message board post offers a good way to help explain it on a message board:
http://iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthread ... ost2647848Finally, and this is probably the most difficult, you can familiarize yourself with metaethics and share some of the theories that are taken more seriously in the discipline. They're all secular. Just explain that's how some atheists think about metaethics and normative theory. When I compared divine command theory to creationism, I wasn't kidding. One of the similarities is that like most theist biologists find creationism ridiculous, the same is true of theist philosophers of ethics towards these moral arguments. The field is essentially secular with these religious arguments on the fringe.
And finally, finally, as a bit of fun read this from DCP:
First, the critics' basis for criticizing Mormonism on moral grounds is unclear, and its coherence needs to be demonstrated. "Rebellion cannot exist," observes Camus, "without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right.28 But on what basis can a materialist, whose universe is exhausted by material particles and the void, claim that something is objectively wrong? Do right and wrong not become matters merely of personal preference, and, perhaps, of power? Not only existentialists but many superficial "life counselors" suggest that we should construct our own "meaning" for life. But is self-constructed meaning really meaning at all? Or is meaning not, rather, something that can only be received, from another intelligence? And why should anybody else pay even the slightest attention to somebody's self-constructed "meaning?"
Camus observes of the atheistic French revolutionaries of 1793 that, when they effectively "guillotined" God, "they deprived themselves forever of the right to outlaw crime or to censure malevolent instincts."29 "From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him in his own heart. And then what is the basis of morality? God is denied in the name of justice, but can the idea of justice be understood without the idea of God?"30 If those who deny any objective basis for morality nonetheless go on behaving morally and invoking morality, we can only be grateful that they have not pursued the implications of their position to their logical end, and that they continue to live on borrowed moral capital. Of the nihilistic revolutionaries who are the subject of his brilliant meditation in The Rebel, Camus remarks that
All of them, decrying the human condition and its creator, have affirmed the solitude of man and the nonexistence of any kind of morality. But at the same time they have all tried to construct a purely terrestrial kingdom where their chosen principles will hold sway.31
It is not surprising that, just prior to his tragic and early death in a 1960 automobile accident, Albert Camus was evidently giving serious consideration to being received into the Roman Catholic Church. He was, I'm guessing, horrified by the revolutionary excesses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and had come to suspect that only theism could provide an objective basis for moral judgments. It is precisely the same kind of reasoning that led the Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden to embrace Christianity: He found himself sitting in a movie hall in the late 1930s, in an area of New York City then heavily populated with German immigrants. As a newsreel played, depicting acts of Nazi barbarism toward European Jews, the audience around him erupted with cheers and surges of pleased laughter. Shaken by what he had witnessed, Auden realized that his secular worldview couldn't provide him with a firm moral ground from which to protest that Nazi brutality was objectively evil.
Camus and Auden may have been right. On the basis of what moral principles do secularizing critics pronounce the Church wanting? How were those principles chosen, and why should anybody else defer to them? Even if one were to grant the factual claims on which they stake their moral judgments, it is not at all clear that those moral judgments are capable of bearing any objectively real weight.http://www.fairlds.org/FAIR_Conferences ... onism.htmlHe won't be caught dead defending that online against someone who has decent knowledge of the subject.