Quote:
Originally Posted by DoOrDoNot
it depends what you mean by Jew/Christian/Muslim.
Sure, if you
define religious as "people who hold belief X", then you will find that all religious people believe X. But that is not very useful in this discussion.
Backing up a little bit, I think you've lost track of what I'm actually arguing. I agree that there are meaningful differences in average belief between the religious and the non-religious, although I think focusing on the few issues where those differences are the largest in American culture (abortion, homosexuality) probably leads us to overstate the difference at least in relation to Americans who are not religious. But in any case, I absolutely grant that there are meaningful differences based in religion.
My point, though, is this: there is a wide variation in moral beliefs, both between members of the same cultural/religiious group, and across cultural/religious groups. The data helps to illustrate that point. The differences between religious and non-religious groups are a part of that. If you can only argue for religious moral homogeneity by excluding everyone except conservative Christians and Muslims from the "religious" then you are already conceding my point.
Further, my argument is that the diversity in human moral beliefs makes it implausible that humans share some innate metaphysical perception of an abstract realm of objective morality. You've rejected that argument also, on the grounds that your belief in the existence of objective morals requires no justification, but in any case the point about moral diversity is in support of that argument, and since I doubt there's much use in trying to further argue the point, I'll go back to the larger argument.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DoOrDoNot
A properly basic belief is something that doesn't require justification.
And yet I imagine that you do not think that all beliefs can be properly basic. I expect that you have some actual criteria for determining whether or not a belief may be claimed as properly basic. Also, I think you're nearly contradicting yourself, because you've also said that your belief is justified by your personal experience. Plantinga's epistemology doesn't say that a properly basic belief requires no justification whatsoever, he argues that it requires no
inferential justification, and can rely on the kind of justification appropriate to sense experience or memory.
On that point, I am bemused by the fact that you're arguing that anything short of a perfectly objective and transcendental morality is meaningless while appealing to a thoroughly subjective epistemology in order to justify your belief in that same objective moral order. Earlier in the thread you said that if moral claims are not objective then they are merely opinion. Why is that not the case for epistemological claims?