Where do atheists get their morals from?

[Razgovory]

Sorry, but I only get to be militant and patronizing on the Internet. You're not taking that away from me.

I'm an American.  I can take anything away from anyone.

[Viking]

You insist on binary solutions to problems that are not binary.

That seems to be Viking's fundamental problem on the topic in a nutshell.

If this is a problem it is a problem with reality. You can't be a bit pregnant or somewhere on the scale from 0% pregnant to 100% pregnant.

On dualism, either a soul exists or it does not.
On materialism, either all that exists is matter or all that exists is not matter
On theism/deism/atheism, either an intervening god exists or a non-intervening god exists or no god exists

these three issues (determinism is different) you have binary (or trinary) answers. If anything exists that is soul then monism is wrong, completely wrong, if anything exists that is not matter then materialism is wrong, completely wrong. These are truth claims, they are not knowledge claims. If you make them as knowledge claims then "I don't know" is a further specific answer.

My fundamental "problem" is that I am never satisfied with "I don't know" or "I can't know" as answers or conclusions. If the first is your answer you really should shut up and not contribute. If the second is your answer you are making a statement of breathtaking arrogance that you cannot possibly know to be true. The discussion should happen between those who think they have some sort of knowledge.

[Razgovory]

Viking, you aren't going to be satisfied with most of life if that's your attitude.

[garbon]

Viking, you aren't going to be satisfied with most of life if that's your attitude.

Seriously.

[frunk]

How do demands for absolute truth fit with:

I'm sorry but you don't know shit about science if you think that it thinks it has conquered uncertainty. Only faith leads to certainty. I have no faith and I have non idea that I am certain on. Every single idea I have is subject to being changed with new evidence (check out my sig).

[The Minsky Moment]

these three issues (determinism is different) you have binary (or trinary) answers. If anything exists that is soul then monism is wrong, completely wrong, if anything exists that is not matter then materialism is wrong, completely wrong. These are truth claims, they are not knowledge claims. If you make them as knowledge claims then "I don't know" is a further specific answer.

If you are making a truth claim, then you need to set out your criteria for truth and the basis for deeming those criteria satisfied in the individual case.

My fundamental "problem" is that I am never satisfied with "I don't know" or "I can't know" as answers or conclusions. . 

That puts paid to epistemological skepticism, but the problem is that your subjective satisfaction is not an argument likely to command much weight.

[Viking]

so you are a deist non-materialist leaning towards accepting some form of a non-material part of the self with no view on determinism vs free will?

No.
By philosophical agnostic, I mean that I hold that those questions are ones that are not capable of any determinative answer, at least with the methodologies presently at our disposal.  It might be that some conceivable future experiment could be designed to resolve one or more of these matters, but it either hasn't happened yet or I don't know about it.

Fair enough. If you don't know you don't know. I suggest we do have methodologies to answer these questions

Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will

may be a good place to start on the FMRI free will vs determinism. The consequences on monism vs dualism are quite profound. These experiments really did shake up my worldview.

I'm also not committed to any particular position on these issues out of some kind of philosophical preference.  My only real beef with hard dualism is that it seems superfluous and is thus vulnerable to Ockham's Razor but that isn't real disproof.   

I never like it when adjectives are used in definitions or attributions. I can't see how if lex parsimony makes a full soul superfluous that it also doesn't make a partial soul or marginal soul equally superfluous. You will never find disproof for a claim that something exists but has no effect on the material world. Lex parsimony is specifically a reaction to claims like that that demand disproof. Sagan's and Hitchen's razors (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence) deal with this equally well.

Personally I follow certain religious rituals or traditions, for personal and communal reasons, without being committed to any particular theological viewpoint.

I have no problem with that.

[Barrister]

If this is a problem it is a problem with reality. You can't be a bit pregnant or somewhere on the scale from 0% pregnant to 100% pregnant.

Except you can, in fact, be just a little bit pregnant.  The difference between a zygote travelling down the fallopian tube, and a 40 week old fetus, are fairly profound.  If you've followed the abortion debate at all you'll note that the issue of "when does life begin" is pretty hotly contested.

[DGuller]

The set of real numbers is an either/or thing:  it's either zero, or a non-zero number.

[Viking]

That seems to be Viking's fundamental problem on the topic in a nutshell.

it's deeper than that - there is also a categorical error.

I'm goinig to have to deal with this... sigh..

If I were to ask a question "What is love?," a scientist might say that what humans experience as love is just the brain processing certain electro-chemical stimuli that have been developed over aeons in response to evolutionary processes.

That may very well be an accurate description of the physical process but it doesn't answer the question at a fundamental level - because the question relates to a human experience, not the physical mechanism that is the pre-requisite for having that experience.

You just made a deepity. If you want to think about the relation between the change in the electro-chemical environment of the brain we humans have decided to call love then we as "how do you feel about experiencing love". Personally I think Psychiatry is a science (though the issue continues to be up for debate). If you are going to insist that there is a fundamental level below the physical I'm going to have to ask you if you were honest when you claimed philosophical agnosticism on materialism and determinism, because right now it looks like you're not.

When you use the word "fundamental level" you are making no sense and you are certainly not defining your terms.

One piece of advice, never use the phrase "a scientist might say" - too many creationists have used that phrase creating science strawmen to provoke anything other than instinctive dismissal of anything that is said after that. What neurochemists or neurobiologists DO say is more relevant. 

The most obvious answer to the question "Does God exist?" is yes

- because the majority of human beings in the world have some kind of regular, direct interaction with God, whether in the form of prayer, dreams, visions, or even direct verbal communication.  One cannot reasonably claim this interaction is not "real" -- there is zero reason to believe that people who have these contacts and experiences are not accurately reporting them.  These are real phenomena.  Of course, one can claim that the people having these experiences are delusional and are systematically misunderstanding the true nature of their experiences.  But that require some objective framework or standpoint to judge which subjective experiences by others are true and which are mere delusions - and where in Viking's own belief system does that truth criterion arise?

This just makes my head hurt... The most obivous answer to the question "Does your God exist?" is no following your logic. Just because everybody is wrong doesn't mean reality changes, argumentum ad populum etc.

With regard to subjective experiences they are only truth claims of the experience, not of the truth of the content of the experience. IIRC about 42 billion humans have lived through human history and the vast majority of them has been wrong on practically every single issue of universal concern in human history. Subjective experiences, however popular, are proof of nothing since the content of those experiences vary with culture and over time as well as being mutually exclusive.

And if one does make the claim of delusion, it amounts to saying the the majority of human beings past and present are delusional with only a relatively small minority being sane. 

I am less reluctant than Viking appears to me to start making such sweeping judgments about the validity of the subjective experiences of others, and while I do think science and logic provide very useful tools for making objective statements about the world, those tools are subject to certain limitations in terms of the kinds of questions they can profitably address and the extent they can provide definitive answers.

It does not amount to a claim that the vast majority of all humans in history are not sane, but rather that fictional experience happening fully contained within the brain is normal. I have dreams every night; often I have hyper real dreams where I think i'm awake.

Alien Abduction phenomena have ,as a historical experiment, shown that the nature of the interaction with the abductors is cultural. The knowledge of what aliens are supposed to be like determines the description people have in their alien interactions. Before the idea of the existence of aliens abduction phenomena included witches, incubus (still with the anal probing) and succubus. The descriptions of these evens are always cultural. Catholics will see Mary, Protestants Jesus, Muslims the angel Gabriel etc.

[Viking]

I think you are setting up a false choice here.

There are choices other than "God exists" and "Everyone who believes god exists is delusional wrong about that belief".

fyp. I don't know what mean when you use "delusional", the word can be pretty pejorative, so define your terms in cases like this. But, unlike JR ( on the not putting words in my mouth btw)  don't seem to worry about putting words in my mouth.

Either god exists or those who believe god exists are wrong. I can reduce it even further "logically" to "Either a God exists or no God exists".

[Viking]

So the most obvious answer to the question "does god exist" is yes

Sure it does.  Pat Robertson has made millions off of him.

But if the question is whether god can cause actual effects in the real world, that is an empirical inquiry amenable to experimental analysis.  Since god, other than for the purposes of entertainment, has no point other than to generate real effects, that inquiry is probably sufficient to resolve the matter.

I found this on a different forum.

[Viking]

Oh, boy the atheist brigade is out in force today.

Hey, not all of us are militant

hey, you started this by declaring me militant without reading my post.

what do you mean by militant. Define your terms.

[Viking]

Oh, boy the atheist brigade is out in force today.

Onward, atheist soldiers, marching as to war,
vicious internet flames going on before.
Dawkins, the science master, leads against the foe;
forward into battle see his banners go!

Again the "atheism is just another religion" fallacy. To keep it at the silly level "atheism is to religion what baldness is to hair color" and "atheism is a religion like non-stamp collecting is a hobby".

I think it is sad to consider that too much noise here is generated by religiously motivated trolls declaring us crazy.

[Barrister]

Oh, boy the atheist brigade is out in force today.

Onward, atheist soldiers, marching as to war,
vicious internet flames going on before.
Dawkins, the science master, leads against the foe;
forward into battle see his banners go!

Again the "atheism is just another religion" fallacy. To keep it at the silly level "atheism is to religion what baldness is to hair color" and "atheism is a religion like non-stamp collecting is a hobby".

I think it is sad to consider that too much noise here is generated by religiously motivated trolls declaring us crazy.

Atheism is certainly not just another religion.

Your zeal in prosecuting your internet campaign against religion certainly is carried forth with religious-like fervour.

You seem to miss that many of those who are arguing with you are atheists/agnostics themelves.