Open Thread From Common Sense Atheism

February 4, 2012

This post is just a placeholder to continue this discussion from the now-defunct Common Sense Atheism blog, should any of the participants or onlookers be interested.

Posted at 7:27 pm under: Common Sense Atheism, Morality  |   Comments RSS

1 comment

A bit of the CSA discussion on moral realism has spilled over to Juridical Coherence, as invited, at “What’s morality for?—Integrity versus conformity.” (http://tinyurl.com/6mq74zp/) [So far, only from non-theist perspectives.]

I’d like to see more discussion of the question as to whether God’s existence can explain the existence of objective morality. I notice that the issue has been taken up at http://adamoriens.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/moral-knowledge-and-theistic-platonism/, where the author rejects the possibility of that explanation.

Although I’m not a theist and I’m an error theorist on explicit morality (see http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/search/label/morality), I see no obstacle to God’s creating morality (were He to exist). But my view is probably simplistic. It seems to me that God creates morality by assigning humans conducting themselves certain ways to heaven and those conducting themselves other ways to hell. The scale of the consequences makes moral behavior invariably rational.

—Stephen R. Diamond, 2-11-2012, 3:44 pm | Permalink

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