Objective Morality

Any one who has spent some time at a University will have come across ethical discussion about Moral absolutes, Relativism and Postmodernism. For the rest of us relativism will be the ethical system that is the most held to in our society today, but not lived out very well. That’s because it is impossible to live it out when one person say’s what’s true for you is not true for me. But when that same person gets there wallet stolen they complain and want it back and cry it’s not fair, or just or right, implying by using those words that the other person is obligated to respond as they have they same morals.
Its one thing to think that we all make up our own ethical rights, but the truth is I believe we have awareness that there is objective morality. That being something’s are just right and wrong independent of people views on the matter.

The Philosopher William Lane Craig says,
“Every one of us guides his life, however inconsistently by a certain set of values. But are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by mere social conventions akin to driving on the left versus right hand side of the road or mere expressions of personal preferences akin to having a taste for certain foods rather than others? Or are they valid independently of our apprehension of them and if so, what is their foundation? Are there things, which I ought not to do, and other things, which I ought to do? Or is the sense of obligation a mere illusion due to sociological and psychological conditioning.”

What is your foundation for the existence of your ethical reasons? Are they social conventions, personal preferences or objective binding values.
Lets just try a few examples, If we lived in Germany backed by science and a large amount of people, would we agree that it was right for Hitler is burn and torture millions because they were considered to be inferior races? If that society said yes, would you agree to it?
Is what the majority says always right? The law may say abortion is ok, but does that make it right? What about personal expressions would you agree if some old man loved young boys or animals to sleep with that it would be ok? That if some people enjoy raping people, or killing innocent lives it’s ok to. Or that torturing babies for fun is ok.

Most of us who are not demented seem to have some understanding that something’s just seem that they are wrong and have nothing to do with personal preferences. Would you agree that touring babies for fun or raping them was ok ever? I would hope your answer is no. Some may say that it just goes against common sense, but what is common sense. Common sense is an agreed upon opinion, unless you want to affirm that there is an absolute moral law on our hearts that knows right from wrong.
Now some people will say, but people can do what ever they like as long as they don’t hurt others but that’s not the case as I showed in my article “ Do what you want just as long as you don’t hurt anyone”.
I will give one example from it here,
“A man slips a drug in to a women’s drink and she falls a sleep (date rape). He takes precautions so that there are no consequences to his violating her. He does all this without hurting her or even without her knowing what has taken place. Hasn’t the man been able to do what he wants without harming the women. Is this act ok with us? While the man does not physical hurt the women or psychologically harm her because he is gone before she wakes up, we all know this is wrong!” We know that her universal rights which cant be grounded from relativism have been violated. Rape is universally wrong!

It just seems that we have some inner standard that we all have deep down that we use to judge our acts and choices by. But what is this foundation? And I can hear some saying and here he comes again with his God rant. No, that will come latter after I have looked at the other options, which you will have to choose from. One cannot just reject all God talks because you don’t like the idea that a God could exist. That just shows that you hold an absolute bias before rational evidence is given.

So what do we mean by an Objective moral Value, well to say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or evil independently of whether any human being believes it to be so. That is if a bomb hit the world and all that was left were pedophiles or rapists would there actions still be objectively wrong? Similarly to say that we have objective moral duties is to say that certain actions are right or wrong for us independently of whether any human being believes them to be so.
For example to say that the Holocaust was objectively wrong is to say that it was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still be wrong even if they brain washed every body else to think it was right.

My question is again “If you believe that objective morality exists, what is its foundation?" Is it to hard to think about, that we have to throw it on the too hard shelf? And walk back in to our contradictions of relativism. I don’t think so that’s why I push the challenge.

Ok, if God does not exist why do we think that every human being has objective moral value (human rights) Is this held from social conventions, human preferences?
As William Lane Craig says, On the naturalistic view, there’s nothing special about human beings. They’re just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called planet earth doomed to perish”

The Atheist Richard Dawkins say’s of human worth “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference…We are machines for propagating DNA. From an atheist worldview to think that beings are special is to be guilty of specie-ism, an unjustified bias toward ones own species. From an evolution point of view all values are just by products of social biological evolution. Just adoption’s for survival. From an evolution point of view we have evolved by chance, all our thoughts and actions have been predetermined by prior causes, free-will is an illusion. In fact at times for the story of evolution rape and incest would have been the only options for survival and so also would have been killing off weaker inferior sick beings or animals. So how can we claim that there are objective morals? A naturalistic history of life does not seem to show the example.
Even if we could show that rape and incest and torture were not advantageous to us anymore, nothing from an atheist worldview can really say these acts are objectively wrong. Such behaviors go on all the time in the animal kingdom. From naturalism all our beliefs, not just our moral beliefs have been selected for survival, not truth.

Some Atheist philosophers try and say that objective moral properties just live in matter. But even if they did, there is no obligation why one must follow one or the other as they are there by chance and nature just “is’ there is no reason why we “ought” to have to follow on path and not the other. If nature is all there is we are free to have any of it and morality seems to be held in personal beings not impersonal matter.

If God does not exist why should we think that we have any moral obligations to do anything. Who or what imposes these moral duties upon us?
The question arises can we recognize the existence of objective moral values without reference to God? Is all life just an illusion of beliefs that we hold without any justification. Maybe the inner sense that we feel that there are acts that are absolutely wrong are because we have a moral law written from God on our hearts. This law is one mind who has put his laws in our subjective minds and hearts. And it’s justification that it is objective stands because it is independent of what any human being believes. It is also objective and true because it stands also outside of every human being in the mind of God requiring our obligation to follow it. It is also objective as this standard is eternal and does not change. Much pain and suffering comes when we chose to deny this norm. Deny the norm, and objective right and wrong vanish, human right’s vanish, and human dignity vanish. If you hold on to any of these but reject God you are basically holding on to an illusion.

Therefore,
1.If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2.Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore God exist.