No, you are just assuming a particular mode of non-Christianity. If I were a Christian, I could only imagine how my moral beliefs would be different by assuming that I was a particular kind of non-Christian. Let's say I converted to Islam or Buddhism. My moral beliefs as a non-Christian (and thus how they deviate from my Christian beliefs) would depend on which of these religions I converted to. Again, there are no moral beliefs common to all non-Christians, so there is no way that a Christian could accurately answer your question.
Yeah, but they are all wrong. What they are each describing are particular counterfactuals in which they become nihilists or some kind of secular humanist or egoist, but since none of those beliefs follow from Christianity being false, this doesn't tell us what they would believe if they stopped being a Christian. Rather, it tells us what they would believe if they became a nihilist, or secular humanist, or egoist.

Yeah, well I think people tend to exaggerate the role of religion in our moral beliefs, so I'm not really surprised by this. However, I'm curious why you think either Christianity or the Bible says that lying is always immoral?

I'm not really sure why you find this so mysterious. Ostensibly, the belief that Christianity is true is one of the personal beliefs of Christians. If they also believe that Christianity being true entails certain moral claims, then they'll believe that those moral claims are also true as a matter of personal belief. If they don't believe that Christianity entails certain moral claims, or they believe those moral claims are justified on independent grounds, then there is no issue.

It seems to me that your query is like asking, isn't it mysterious that most Christians accept the heliocentric theory, that they think the text of the Bible happened to coincide with it? I don't think it really is. The Bible is not a book of cosmology, nor does it pretend to be so. I'll admit, it is amusing watching fundamentalist contortions first trying to make it so, and then trying to show how the cosmology it describes is not false. But it is not mysterious how the fundamentalist understanding and interpretations of the Bible (which you seem to be assuming here) are incorrect. In a similar way, I think many people, including both Christians and non-Christians, wildly exaggerate the extent to which the Bible is actually about morality.

Your best bet on this forum for a clear explanation is probably Original Position. It's not going to stop me chiming in though (whether my usage is accurate or not).

What I mean by an objective morality is that there is an actual, correct answer to moral questions. There really is a 'right' answer as to whether a particular act is moral given a particular set of circumstances. This is separate to whether the acts which I deem to be moral must be the same as the acts which you deem to be moral. (It's also separate from another common misconception that objective morality necessitates there being some acts which are always right and some acts being always wrong - irrespective of context. I believe this latter view is called universal morality).

Even if it is a fact that a moral claim is either true or false, this doesnt contradict your essential position (which I share) that we are all making judgements about moral situations and that such judgements are necessarily subjective - they are based on culture, experience, personality and probably even mood. My belief in objective morality means I think someone can be right about their claims - not that my grasp of morality is necessarily any better than yours.

You are correct that Christians (and DS) often say that if there is no God then there is no absolute morality. (They often say "You can't get ought from is" or something like that, which I believe comes from Hume). I would think you may well share this view, since you tend to focus on what we can know and treat speculation about metaphysics as close to meaningless.

Treat all of that as a passing comment really - I havent been following this thread particularly closely, so could well be mischaracterising everyone's view (except for DS - who has made his position clear that people who believe absolute morality is possible without God are morons).

I don't use the term "absolute" morality, so I'm not sure what you mean by it either. I suspect you mean something like what I would call "deontological" morality. This is a class of moral theories that claim that the rightness or wrongness of actions depends on our duties, not the consequences of the action. Thus, deontological theories will often include general duties or rules like, "don't lie." Some deontologist take these duties to apply to all situations without exceptions, so, e.g. it would always be wrong to lie according to some deontologists.

Objective morality is even more difficult to define. I generally take it to be the view that there are true moral facts. Thus, a moral claim is meant to report a fact (it is morally right to do x), and thus is true or false based on whether things are as described in the moral claim.

I think what you are describing here is not moral objectivity, but moral impartiality. Moral objectivity doesn't entail moral impartiality. The general idea is that reasons for actions that are irrelevant from a neutral or universal or objective point of view cannot morally justify different treatment of different people.

As for your argument for partiality, I don't think it succeeds. What you are really claiming is that because people are biased it is difficult for them to agree about moral claims. However, if there is no correct answer to moral quandaries, it will be even more difficult for people to agree about what is morally right, because there isn't anything for them to agree about.

I'm also frustrated by these claims (although I don't think they derive from "absolute" morality). Christians who make this claim are clearly wrong.

Well, again, moral objectivity doesn't imply that morality comes from God. But even so, the short answer is that you have special duties and obligations towards your child that supercede your duties towards other children. It is not that God thinks that your child is more important than other children, but that God's command to protect your own child takes precedence over God's command to protect your neighbor's children.

What you really should be arguing for is that it is morally right to save your own child over other children. Aaron is right that you only confuse the issue by claiming that our moral beliefs are not consistent with what we would do in your hypothetical. People are only being inconsistent if they really thought it was wrong to save their own children in those circumstances. And perhaps if they did have those beliefs they would in fact save the other children. As it stands, you are only asserting that people's actions would be inconsistent.

I make the same mistake I said you were making here (I said this stuff was complicated!) of conflating moral objectivity and impartiality. Just because people don't accept that morality is impartial doesn't mean that they don't believe morality is objective. So there might still be a right answer under your description.

And this leads to a better rejoinder to your argument. Since objective morality is consistent with partiality about morality, the fact that people are biased towards their own good, or the good of their family and friends does not imply that morality is relative (which is what I'm assuming you mean by subjective here).

I agree that Christians who argue that specific line are wrong. But I do think that there's a reasonable thought underneath that is simply not being expressed well.

The argument, at least as I see it when it's presented well, is that if the basis of morality is man's judgement, then it is ultimately a relativistic system. That is, if man is to decide for himself what is moral, then there are time constraints and jurisdiction constraints (I'm not sure what the right word is -- but this means that there are boundaries to which these morals can be applied).

In this understanding, even a concept such as "human rights" is nothing more than just another expression of this relativistic morality. What we deem to be a human right may not be a human right 200 years from now. It also makes it hard to be justified in asserting "human rights" over other groups of humans. For example, insofar as a tribe in Africa (as an example) does not accept the authority of any other ruling body, it is hard to justify interfering in that society to bring about the protection of "human rights" if morality is merely relative. (This is somewhat along the lines of Star Trek's Prime Directive, and all the moral dilemmas which result from it.)

So right and wrong may continue to exist, but the extent to which they can exist is now restricted in a way that would not happen if morality has its basis in God. (It doesn't need to be God, just needs to have a basis in something outside of humanity and must be constant over time.)

Ok, so you agree with Deorum earlier itt that flipping a coin to decide moral issues is objective? I'm heading over to random.org to conclusively determine moral facts right now. Heads it's immoral, tails it's fine.

Murder - immoral
Slavery - fine
Rape - fine

Whew, glad murder didn't come up objectively fine. That would suck. Alas, I shall go rape me some slaves. This is indeed very useful. In fact since we don't know that God really exists but we do know that coins exist it must be the case that our coin flips are superior to so-called divine morality--you know, because that could actually be the result of some authors subjective preferences. Objective morality: its awesome.

Aaron, imo the world looks, and has progressed in a way perfectly in line with what you describe it would be like without a god. Do you feel the opposite, in that it appears to you morals have been concrete and consistent?

There is a lot of confusion in these discussions about these terms. My definitions are as follows:

Objective morality isn't addressing the bias issue. What it means is there is a code of right and wrong that doesn't depend on the opinion of any human. For instance, if every single human agreed that it's ok to torture little children for pleasure, OM would still say it's wrong. Something is right or wrong independent of man's opinion.

Absolute morality is that moral code than which there is none higher. For humans, AM would also be OM.

I guess there's a question about whether you can have an OM that is also relative. (I also want to contrast the words subjective and objective. Subjective just means what I think - if I say something is wrong for me, that's a subjective judgement). I think you can if the source of that OM is absolute. Not to complicate matters too much, I think this would describe what Craig means by divine command theory - God's commands to us may be relative to circumstances, but since the source is God they are valid and also, to us, objective, but not absolute - Israel could do no work on the Sabbath (OM), but it doesn't apply to us because we live under a different dispensation or age - it was relative to Israel.

Why get frustrated with me when you say basically the same thing in the 2nd paragraph? Let me make it clear:

In para 1 you say: "as if to imply that there can be no right or wrong without god, I get frustrated beyond belief."

In para 2 you say: "If morality truly does come from god, then it's reasonable to assume that there really is always a right and wrong answer"

DUH!

Never am I reminded more that consciousness is simply a halluicnation of an hallucination than when I read this forum.

The problem with this example is that man is still determining the answers. Man has declared "This is how we will determine morality" and then establishes morality based upon that decision mechanism.

What is going on here is an equivocation with the word "objective."

.

And if you want to claim that God guided/inspired them, vixticator can also say that God guided/inspired him. Both claims are not even wrong.

That man has recorded information regarding morality does not mean that man was the origin of that morality.

If this is standard you want to use, then man is the source of gravity.

He can claim whatever he wants. The ability to prove or disprove his claim is irrelevant to the conversation.

Edit: If there exists an objective morality, then the moral claims are true regardless of whether man knows it or not. A man who jumps off a building will fall regardless of whether he knows anything about gravity (edit: or he can even be an a-gravitist).

No. That would merely be non-human morality. Although following a code has nothing to do with morality anyway.

. If there is a higher moral option that differs then the lower moral option isn't moral. Higher/lower makes no sense in discussing morality.

etc, etc...

We can play the "source game" on virtually anything. It gets us nowhere. After we discover more unknown sources, we can try the game again. And it will still get us nowhere.

God of the gaps ftw.

It would be objective to us.

I don't disagree with this. At least, for something to be truly relative AND moral it must be based on AM. See my Sabbath example.

It's like you don't even know what "God of the gaps" really means.

But again, according to many moral philosophers, human judgement is not the basis of morality. For instance, according to Plato, morality is based on eternal truths about the nature of goodness that can only be known by a rational contemplation of its nature. Or, according to Kant, morality is based on facts about the constraints placed by the nature of reason on what can be freely willed. Or, according to utilitarians, morality is based on facts about what actions actually maximize happiness.

All of these theories are standardly interpreted (although there are relativistic interpretations of utilitarianism) as forms of objective morality--i.e. as stating facts about the universe whose truth does not depend on their being accepted by humans. All of these theories are compatible with both theism and atheism. So, if you want to claim that if there is no God then we must accept a relative morality, you must show how all of these theories of morality are false.

Now, some people have attempted to show that all these theories are false. However, these attempts usually involve proving theses about moral psychology or metaphysics that would also show that God-based moralities are also not objective. In other words, their arguments show that in general morality is not objective, not that only if there is not a God is morality not objective.

If there is no God, is mathematics relative? After all, mathematical claims are also based on human judgements about the truth and falsity of certain claims.

To sum up, the argument on the view you are presenting is:

1. All moral theories compatible with atheism must claim that morality is based on human judgement.
2. Human judgement is always relative to the person or culture.
3. Therefore, all atheistic moral theories are relative to the person or culture.

(1) is false, provably so. (2) also seems false, unless you accept general skeptical or idealist claims about human knowledge.

Here is my proof that (1) is false. Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics by David Brink details a moral theory that is naturalist (i.e. compatible with atheism) and claims that morality is not based on human judgement. QED.

Now, you might want to say, that no correct or consistent moral theory compatible with atheism can claim that morality is not based on human judgement. But then, I want see an argument. How do we fill in the blanks?

1. There is no God.
2. ...
3. ...
4. ...
5. Therefore, morality is based on human judgement.

If you read Andrew Farley's the Naked Gospel morality is a result of the fall. Man now has to grapple with questions he didn't have to grapple with before in his original spiritual state.

In a sense Christians are trying to bring their own carnal natures in conformity with their spiritual natures. Its when we lead with our carnal natures or have difficulty conforming it that we get in trouble.

Don't all the different viewpoints the philosophers express show a lack of resolution in the world of this problem? Their views are limited by their own ability to reason and so each philosopher argues the other philosopher's shortcomings. This hints that reason while extremely useful still may have limitations in our current state.

I struggle to see the problem with moral relativism. Morality is an abstract concept. The argument against people who believe raping and murdering are moral is that a society based on that is (probably) doomed to fail. The majority of people accept this therefore people who have this moral code are suppressed by the majority. This seems entirely healthy.

I struggle even more to see how the people arguing that moral relativism is morally bankrupt believe in a God who wiped out the entire population of the world at least once which seems to contradict any reasonable objective morality.

IMO, God has the moral authority to give life or take away life. He has the moral authority to determine who goes to heaven and who doesn't.

The argument Aaron alluded to is not a claim about the actual basis for morality. It is a claim about whether atheism is consistent with moral objectivity. This just seems blindingly obvious to me, so obvious that the only viable explanation I have for those who argue against it is either intellectual dishonesty (W.L. Craig) or almost complete ignorance of moral philosophy.
I don't want to pretend that there is more agreement about morality than there is. This might be a result of a shortcoming of reason or it might be a result of problems with the subject matter. However, there doesn't seem to be any viable alternative to deciding moral problems. What is it that we are supposed to use instead of reason?

After you get through defining the words "God", "of", "the" and "gaps", I probably won't.

I'm confused. I stated that

Isn't this an open admission that I believe (1) is false? In particular, your entire first couple paragraphs are highlighting this.