Just because many people choose to be evil, so too, do many chose not to be.  Being decent and gentle doesn’t make you weak.  If anything, it shows inner strength not to fall prey to the baser sides of the human condition.  Miss you Angie.

This is a very thought provoking discussion. I am a mother of 2 children. 2 complete opposites in nature. My son, who is 9, appears to show little or no concern to others (and little or no morals). Yet, my daughter (6) repeatedly and quite naturally has genuine concern and understanding for all people. After reading these comments I am wondering, do I have atheist for a son and what can I do to change that? Besides prayer, regular church, bible reading and being a positive, consistent example of Jesus.

The reason the forbidden tree was called ‘of the knowledge of Good and Evil” is because one can’t create or maintain an ethical society without knowing good and evil. Before man’s coup, symbolised in eating of the forbidden fruit, such knowledge was God’s - he knew what was good and what was evil because he was God. After the fall man was left holding the bag he grasped, namely the responsibility that comes from knowing good and evil which is the job of trying to govern the world, or if you like administer a system of law and justice that will enhance goodness and restrict evil.  Solomon knew just how impossible this was, which explains why he had the good sense to ask for wisdom to rule over God’s people. In a sense he was asking God to take back the scepter. 

So I would say that not only has all man the ability to know the difference between good and evil, he also has a vested interest in trying to maintain an ethical world because the failure to do this leaves him having to admit failure.

We like cops and robber shows but only if the guilty cop it and the the innocent go free, we find it hard to forgive, and we hate crime because all these things not only make life unbearable, they also show we have not done well with the knowledge of good and evil. Our friend Dawkins is doing no more than the rest of mankind - namely kid himself into thinking he can create a decent society without reference to a higher authority than himself.

Morality and Immorality, these are understood by shading the difference between good and evil. This is common for every culture, as just about every culture in the world, understand morals through the role of religion.

How would one teach his/her child, that we should be good on the basis of our chemical producing brains, and our understand of being good is developed through social evolution?
So what is the child actually lead to believe?
Another good example, as a lot of teens in college segregate themselves from religion, as a means to grant themselves freedom. Reminds me of a saying “absolute freedom is the rejection of all morals and ethics”.
Honestly if brilliant humans attribute morals as a part of some weird coincidence through evolution or etc, technically speaking then morals don’t exist, aren’t governed, and any form of modern law is truly irrelevant.
You might as well follow the animals, and conduct inbreeding, cannibalism (which could be concentual) and a lot of other things we today consider immoral.

Euthypro’s argument boils down to “Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?”.

A chief difficulty in the argument is that it seems to imply that either what is good is arbitrary since God could have decided that “killing babies for fun” was good or that goodness is defined without reference to God and therefore the explanatory power of theism over against atheism is lost.

I think there is a fundamental problem with the argument, which comes about from exporting the argument from its original surroundings of the greek pantheon of gods and applying it to the Christian God. The argument is cast in terms of God’s will, which allows the possibility that everything is arbitrary, a matter of his personal fancy (notice how God’s will is seen in anthropomorphic terms, just as would have been appropriate for describing the petty squabbles of the greek gods).

However the Bible says that God is good that he is light, etc. In other words moral good is an expression of the nature and hence character of God not an arbitrary decision. The bible says that out of the character of our hearts the mouth speaks. Our actions and decisions proceed from who we are. God’s will likewise proceeds from his nature.

The original argument fails since it assumes that the will is the fundamental basis for all God’s moral law when actually it is a reflection of his nature. The moral good as with everything else can have no independent existence of God.It exists as a part of his nature.

Even if we grant that moral reasoning is a product of evolution—that still doesn’t let the athiest off the hook.  There is still the question of ultimate explanation—that is, why should the universe exist in such a way that we have come to desire “goodness”, healty, nuturing and meaningful relationships based on honest, integrity, courage, love—that we desire belonging.
We all universially recognize these laws (so to speak) of successful human interpersonal relationships that transcend culture.
What kind of “ultimate explaination” best FITS these features of our human existence?  I find it very difficult to see how this can fit an athiestic, non-personal, purely naturalistic explaination.

Good reason to believe. To present the often used analogy, if we compare Mother Theresa and Hitler, it is obvious which one is the most morally and ethically correct individual. However, if we remove divine authority, (the precise method of the evoluton of ethics, evolution of a moral code, ect, is not important) on what grounds do we say that the actions of the later were any worse than the actions of the former? We could judge on general consensus of opinion, but, if we judge something to be un/ethical based on the percentage of the population that agree with it, atheism is unethical as most of the population are theist.

Ethics as described and exemplified in the biblical writings can be put forth as a good example (if we refute or ignore their supposed divine inspiration) of humans striving to create a code for most people to live by, as worked out by trial and error over many millenia - it is not necessary to have these rules attributed to a divine authority.

Very interesting and a good starter for absolute morality. I am very interested to hear what you think of the Euthyphro argument.