No, there are no other means of determining objective morality..if there is no God.. there are no objective moral values and duties so nothing is "appropriate" or "inappropriate." Good and evil are opinion... not real things. Illusory. In other words..there's nothing "evil" about raping babies because objective morality doesn't exist. You might claim it's not beneficial to the propagation of our DNA.. but that doesn't make something "evil." Obviously, we don't live according to that, do we? Why is that? Because our experience tells us that there is something objectively wrong with it. Why? My question would be to the atheist, if you believe raping babies is objectively morally wrong, what do you base that on? So your question "Do you believe we would have other means of determining such horrid behaviors as being wrong?" is the question for the atheist to answer.
Regardless as to whether or not morality is subjective or objective, you need to understand that me and most other atheists do consider rape and child abuse to be wrong. We don't need to know how we ultimately came to this decision to understand this fact.
You will readily accept that God grants us morality, because God's words are objective. But why is it his laws are objective and the laws of man are subjective? You will argue that it's because God is an authority. But, like other humans, what if you disagree with the authority figure? Let's suppose God revealed himself to be real and demanded I kill my own family. I'll be honest, I wouldn't obey him.
Why would I disobey God if God told me to kill my own family? His word is objective, my word is subjective. Yet, in the end, it's still a choice. Would I burn in hell for all eternity if I disobeyed God? Perhaps. But then this just tells us what we already know - that actions tend to have consequences.
So what difference would it make if God's word was objective or subjective anyway? To be quite frank, it doesn't matter. If God told me to kill my family and I disobeyed, I would suffer the consequences. The same would reign true if I was told to kill my own family by a Nazi in a concentration camp.
You claim your morality stems from God. But I believe morality stems from man. Does this mean morality loses all meaning and we should no longer worry about what is right and what is wrong? Of course not! If God isn't real, then we must take advantage of the simple reality that we DO have emotions, and those emotions lead us to protecting one another (for the most part).
God or no God, I will do what I feel is best for myself and others. I guess we're pretty fortunate most people think that way.
Yes our mind and senses tell us about the physical world around us. So thoughts are nothing more than chemical reactions created by our physical brains in your opinion. Animals survive because of their senses and instincts. Yet I asked about human rationality. Self awareness...second order thoughts..logic...rationality. Why do we ponder and why do we trust our conclusions on these things?
Because our trust in our senses, our rationality, our thoughts,
WORK.
If our rationality is nothing more than just atoms colliding... seems strange to trust it.
Just because our rational isn't flawless doesn't mean we can't trust it at all. Even with our flaws, trusting in our rational helps us survive.
You're under this impression that the only way something can work, is if it's flawless. And because our minds aren't flawless, we must have a flawless mind that prevents our own minds from being completely unreliable. It's a flawed assumption to think our minds must be either a.) completely flawless, b.) flawed, but guided by a perfect mind, or c.) our minds aren't flawless and therefore must be completely unreliable. You're ignoring d.) our minds are flawed, but not completely unreliable.
This leads into the argument from reason that C.S. Lewis brings up.
What he said doesn't back up your argument, it is just an entirely different argument against naturalism.
Essentially, Lewis is arguing that naturalism itself is a rational inference, which contradicts the idea that rational inferences alone can't determine the validity of claims. The problem with this argument is that naturalism is the observation of what can be observed. Naturalists fully accept the possibility that there may be supernatural substances or entities, but it claims that if such exists - then it wouldn't be provable to begin with. Therefore, there's absolutely no difference in assuming whether supernatural phenomena exists or not.
Keep in mind, naturalism isn't necessarily gnosticism, in that we KNOW there are no supernatural entities. Most naturalists are agnostic, and refuse to waste time trying to justify reasons to believe in something that is by definition - unknowable.
