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Originally Posted by lagtight
[]There is literally NOBODY in the 2+2 Forums that I respect more than you. Your posts are almost invariably respectful, thorough, logical, factually accurate, clear, and on point. I know that you value very highly truth, ethics and your fellow human beings.
Cheers.
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From the perspective of my Christian worldview, I believe that you value all of these things because you in your heart of hearts know that all people are made in the image of God. You know people aren't merely bags of chemicals. You value your friends, loved ones and many others in spite of your professed worldview of Naturalism. In every post, you demonstrate for all to see a commitment to truth and goodness and respect. Truth and goodness and respect are religious concepts. You know that the "from the goo to the zoo to you" paradigm can't get you to love. Love isn't reducible to the mere interaction of matter in motion. You, me and EVERYONE is saturated almost every waking moment of the transcendence of all that we hold dear as humans.
I'm under the weather again (big surprise ), so I'll have to rest a bit before I can say more.
There are two different issues here that you need to keep separate that I don't think you are.
First, like many Christians you believe that non-Christians in some sense actually
do know that God exists, and that non-believers are in a state of rebellion towards God rather than a honest and true skepticism towards God's existence when they deny His existence. Thus, "sincere" atheists are lying to themselves on some level about their lack of belief, even if not exactly on purpose. The evidence for God's existence is actually extremely clear and it is the sin nature of these atheists that causes them to look away and claim "not enough evidence," not just a disinterested search for the truth (I will briefly pause here to note the similar structure to postmodern criticisms of science and liberalism).
However, it is crucial to note that this is a
psychological claim about atheists, not a
philosophical claim about atheism. This is the claim that
atheists, the actual people who claim to not believe in god, are wrong about their own introspective analysis of their own beliefs, that in fact humans can't help but believe in God. But this claim does not imply that atheism as an intellectual construct somehow implies that God exists. Rather, this is a claim about human nature, that we should be viewed as fallen people with a sin nature infecting our minds and inclining us to away from what is right and godly.
On the other hand, atheism as an intellectual construct generally rejects this view of human nature. Thus, even if Christians are in fact correct about human nature and atheists actually do know in some sense that God exists, that wouldn't mean that God's existence is somehow an intellectual implication of atheism. It is accepted, among Christians as well as atheists, that human psychology is different than logic. Describing how humans think is not a logical proof.
So when you say atheists who are moral are doing so because of religious precepts, while that might be true as a psychological matter, it doesn't demonstrate anything about either atheism or physicalism as theories of the world. This is where you fail to demonstrate your claim. I have repeatedly and at length demonstrated moral theories logically compatible with both atheism and physicalism. Regardless of whether it is
psychologically possible for humans to be motivated by these moral theories, their
logical compatibility are sufficient to demonstrate the compatibility of atheism/physicalism and morality philosophically.