Re: Greg Koukl - What Follows?

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[randyhelzerman]

@kwmitch1 Hmmmm..... I guess I still don't get it. Seems like we are largely in agreement that both atheists and theists could, say, agree that teenagers shouldn't drink because it would hurt their grades. I don't see what adding "....and God grounds that moral fact" really adds. But that could be just do to lack of faith on my part.

[kwmitch1]

@randyhelzerman Yes. This is what I mean when I say they can have the exact same access and can provide the exact same reasons. In a purely materialistic worldview, however, the atheist cannot say where this access comes from or why these reasons are mostly universal.

[randyhelzerman]

@kwmitch1 Hmmm....I still don't understand exactly what the theist has that the atheist doesn't have in this scenario.  Suppose both the theist and the atheist agree on every specific harm which would happen to the community: they agree it would cause increased health problems, more drunk driving, more binge drinking, worse grades. What else is there left for them to disagree about? Don't they believe the same thing for exactly the same reasons?

[kwmitch1]

@randyhelzerman Let’s say, the only reason a responsible theist and a responsible atheist would agree to this would be if it didn't unduly harm the community. While they both have moral reasons for deciding so (i.e. they don’t just pick an age out of a hat) only the theist can say why considering society is beyond a materialistic worldview. Again, the atheist has the exact same access and can provide reasons and proof just as the theist can, they just can’t pin down why *it* is so.

[randyhelzerman]

@kwmitch1 Well, if you were a kindergarten teacher, you'd know there is no naturally understood order that humans know to stand in line :-) There are cultures which know nothing about lines and how to stand in them, and I would argue that if a person from that culture showed up at a grocery and cut ahead in line, they weren't doing anything wrong, because they did not know about our culture. In face "culture" is kind of a shorthand word for "all of the promises we make to each other".

[kwmitch1]

@randyhelzerman I mentioned *generic* cheating to try and separate it from infidelity (the promise). Let’s say, something as simple as cutting in line at the grocery. There’s no explicit promise. There’s no “I do”. There’s only the natural understood order. This helps my point. This natural moral order has constraints that don’t fit with a materialistic worldview.

[randyhelzerman]

@kwmitch1 So suppose a theist and an atheist come together, talk about it, reason the pro's and con's, and agree that its ok to let kids drink when they turn 21. Is the theists belief in this moral principle any more grounded than the atheists is? if so, how? what gounds it?

[kwmitch1]

@randyhelzerman To this question, I think you’re exactly right. Theists don’t have access to everything that fits on the moral scale, as it were. Government policy, taxes, etc. are extremely difficult to manage this way. To clarify, the theist, in this case,* Christian* has Scripture, but that’s not *why* he or she has access to a specific moral code. The atheist has the same access (e.g. knowing cheating is wrong). The theist is only able to ground it. 

[randyhelzerman]

@kwmitch1 How could it be cheating without a promise? If you are not married to somebody, you can't cheat on your wife, because you don't have a wife :-) And how can you cheat somebody out of money if there wasn't a promise in the first place to be fair?

[kwmitch1]

@randyhelzerman I think we’re talking around each other. You wrote that the ‘ought’ comes from the promise you made to your wife. That the promise is the creation of the ‘ought’. That’s true as far as it goes, but is generic cheating ok without a promise?  Finally, I think you would be hard pressed to find people that don’t feel cheating is wrong. Just cheat them out of their money to see their true feelings on the matter.