Quote:
Originally Posted by TexArcher
Would you care to elaborate on how atheists claims to morality don't match their worldview?
I think Keller in his book
The Reason for God in his chapter "The Knowledge of God" gets at the core of some of Megenoita's argument.
Keller writes, "In many cases I have to put on my philosophy-professor hat in order to be a good pastor to people. A young couple once came to me for some spiritual direction. They "didn't believe in much of anything" they said. How could they begin to figure out if there was even a God? I asked them to tell me about something they felt was really, really wrong. The woman immediately spoke out against practices that marginalized women. I said I agreed with her fully since I was a Christian who believed God made all human beings, but I was curious why she thought it was wrong. She responded, "Women are human beings and human beings have rights. It is wrong to trample on someone's rights." I asked her how she knew that.
Puzzled she said, "Everyone knows it is wrong to violate the rights of someone." I said, "Most people in the world don't 'know' that. They don't have a Western view of human rights. Imagine if someone said to you 'everyone knows that women are inferior.' You'd say, 'That's not an argument, it's just an assertion.' And you'd be right. So let's start again. If there is no God as you believe and everyone just evolved from animals, why would it be wrong to trample on someone's rights? Her husband responded: "Yes, it is true we are just bigger-brained animals, but I'd say animals have rights too. You shouldn't trample on their rights, either." I asked whether he held animals guilty for violating the rights of other animals if the stronger ones ate the weaker ones. "No, I couldn't do that." So he only held human beings guilty if they trampled on the weak? "Yes." Why this double standard, I asked. Why did the couple insist that human beings had to be different from animals, so that they were
not allowed to act as was natural to the rest of the animal world. Why did the couple keep insisting that humans had this great unique individual dignity and worth? Why did they believe in human rights? "I don't know," the woman said, "I guess they are just there, that's all."
The conversation was much more congenial than this very compressed account conveys. The young couple laughed at the weaknes of some of their responses, which showed me that they were open to exploration and that encouraged me to be more pointed than I would ordinarily have been. However, this conversation reveals how our culture differs from all the others that have gone before. People still have strong moral convictions, but unlike people in other times and places, they don't have any visible basis for
why they find some things to be evil and other things good. It's almost like their moral intuitions are free floating in midair - far off the ground.
Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz spoke of this:
What has been surprising in the post-Cold War period are those beautiful and deeply moving words pronounced with veneration in places like Prague and Warsaw, words which pertain to the old repertory of the rights of man and the dignity of the person. I wonder at this phenomenon because maybe underneath there is an abyss. After all, those ideas had their foundation in religion, and I am not overly optimistic about the survival of religion in a scientific-technological civilization. Notions that seemed buried forever have suddenly been resurrected. But how long can they stay afloat if the bottom is taken out?
I don't believe Milosz is right. I think that people will definitely go on holding to their beliefs in human dignity even when conscious belief in God is gone. Why is this the case? I have a radical thesis. I think people in our culture know unavoidably that there is a God, but they are repressing what they know."
He says alot more about moral obligation, the evolutionary theory of moral obligation, the problem of moral obligation and the difficult issue of human rights, the argument for God from the violence of nature and the endless, pointless litigation of existence, but its too long for me to type or summarize cogently.