This contradicts atheism, so atheism must be false.
I once heard somebody arguing for the existence of an absolute morality in a way that didn't require a god to have dictated it. His thesis, as I recall, was basically that the behaviour of sentient minds in the presence of an absolute morality is analogous to that of iron filings in the presence of a magnetic field: morality pervades the universe in such a way that sentient minds can attune to it, and this is why most people's basic morality agrees on things like rape and the Nazis – like the iron filings, most people's internal moral senses end up pointing in basically the same direction. But, of course, local friction and crowding effects mean that not all the filings point in exactly the same direction, and a few point way off the mark – and so it is with people, where we see a lot of lively discussion around areas less clear-cut than rape and Nazism, and a few people are rapists and/or Nazis regardless of the prevailing force. I think his suggestion was that the general agreement of people's moral senses on the basics actually constituted evidence for the existence of an absolute moral force gently pointing them all in the same direction.
I don't believe a word of it, naturally, but I thought I'd just chuck it in to complicate the argument, by giving a possible way of decoupling absolute morality from God :-)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-11-22 10:53 am (UTC)I once heard somebody arguing for the existence of an absolute morality in a way that didn't require a god to have dictated it. His thesis, as I recall, was basically that the behaviour of sentient minds in the presence of an absolute morality is analogous to that of iron filings in the presence of a magnetic field: morality pervades the universe in such a way that sentient minds can attune to it, and this is why most people's basic morality agrees on things like rape and the Nazis – like the iron filings, most people's internal moral senses end up pointing in basically the same direction. But, of course, local friction and crowding effects mean that not all the filings point in exactly the same direction, and a few point way off the mark – and so it is with people, where we see a lot of lively discussion around areas less clear-cut than rape and Nazism, and a few people are rapists and/or Nazis regardless of the prevailing force. I think his suggestion was that the general agreement of people's moral senses on the basics actually constituted evidence for the existence of an absolute moral force gently pointing them all in the same direction.
I don't believe a word of it, naturally, but I thought I'd just chuck it in to complicate the argument, by giving a possible way of decoupling absolute morality from God :-)