Marc:

Dostoyevsky was wrong.  Positing God as a root of ethics doesn’t really answer the question of what is right and wrong, just as positing God as the Creator doesn’t really solve the First Mover problem (cf. Kant’s Antinomies).  It only moves the questions back a level.

*Why* should particular behaviours be ethical and others unethical?  If you say, ‘because God said so’, it seems to me that you still need to answer the question—that is, why does God find X ethical and Y unethical? 

If there is no reason *that we can understand in normal human terms*, it seems to me that using God as the root of ethics is no more or less capricious than anything a secular humanist may propose.  Plato’s Forms provide firmer moral grounding.  (Hang on, I can hear your objection.  I’m getting to it.)

But if you *can* provide human-comprehendable reasons for why God would want us to do X or Y, it seems that maybe we can have a non-God-based ethics.  …

(The human-comprehendable qualifier is important, btw.  While you can argue that the reasons for God’s morality are just beyond our comprehension, that basically stops the discussion, as you can’t go anywhere from there.  It becomes simple faith, and not really useful in making real-life ethical decisions.)

I understand the appeal, the comfort, of being able to root ethics in God.  I just think it’s a false comfort.  Instead of taking responsibility for making moral choices - figuring out what is right and *why* - we abdicate that responsibility.  What scares me when someone bases their ethics on God is the implicit statement that a) people are nasty and brutish, and b) that person would not act ethically if there were no God.  So what, are they ethical only because they’re afraid of judgment day?

The Categorical Imperative, the golden rule, etc. just make sense - practical, emotional, and moral - whether you are religious or not.

First, I've never seen any reason why, if God did not exist, I should act ethically. What reason would there be? Perhaps, I'd feel some sort of emotional pain if I hurt others, but then all I've done is exchanged fear of punishment with the in-comfort of pain. It may explain why I would care, but not why I should care. I really can't see why it would matter to me. And if that scares you, Marc, I'm sorry. But I don't see any reason here.

But where Marc's argument really falls to pieces is that Marc is ignoring that logic requires premises from which to draw conclusions. And Marc hasn't considered where his premises have come from. He may claim he logically deduced them, but that means he had premises from which to deduce them. Ultimately, at some point we all have to make assumptions on which to base our lives. For Andy and me, those assumptions involve religious teachings. For Marc, they are something else. But they are still assumptions. And they still leave a gap in his chain of logic.

And remember, Marc can't just justify his assumptions based on "it makes sense." Why is what makes sense automatically correct? Does it make sense that if I throw a ball at a brick wall, there's a possibility that it can pass through without disrupting any of the atoms in the wall? Well, it is possible according to physics, as unintuitive that that is. Not everything makes sense. And even if it did, our mind's ability to perceive what is sensible would not necessarily be accurate. Our minds do play tricks on us. Sense is not a sure test for veracity.

And if you want to take this argument one step further, why is logic correct? We don't know it is. It seems to be correct in that it predicts well, but that is no sure proof. There could be exceptions. Moreover, our perceptions of what happens may make us think logic predicted correctly when it didn't.

But more importantly, even if we assume that logic is correct in all its predictions, why does that even matter? Because it makes sense that a process that predicts accurately must be a valid process? Because it is logical? It seems to me that any argument that logic is a good assumption is itself a logical argument—you can't justify the usefulness of logic by appealing to logic. You can't use an unproven process to prove the accuracy of the process. Especially when I used logic to argue above that logic doesn't prove the accuracy of logic (the argument is inductive not deductive, and induction is not watertight).

Now, I'm going to make one final point. Everything I've written here is argument based on logic. And we've assumed that logic works; we don't know it does. So logically speaking, everything I've written here could be invalid. I can't even be certain of what I've written here. This of course begs the question of what I can be certain of.

And that's the whole point! We can't be certain of anything. We are starting from scratch—no knowledge, not basic principles—when we are born and we adopt assumptions, values, and principles on which to base our lives. These answer questions like "what should my goal in life be?" and "how should I conduct myself towards others?" Some of us choose to find these answers in religion. Others don't. But in all cases we are making some fundamental assumptions to approach life. These assumptions are no more than faith.

So Marc, if you want a human-comprehendible set of reason behind your ethics, that's fine. But you're ultimately still basing your understanding of those ethics on nothing more than blind faith. There's nothing move valid in your approach than Andy's or mine. It's different and I'm sure each of us has very good reasons why we choose our approach. But there's no independent criteria by which you or Andy or I can justify one approach as superior than the other. It really boils down to nothing more than preference. (I had a similar discussion with Steve Smith on this point back in March.

On a final note, this argument also illustrates why I argued what I argued in my previous post. We can't all agree on morals because we don't have any independent basis for determining what morals should be. Political structures get around this by creating agreement on some basic values and ideals and leave the rest to political and judicial processes for resolution.