It doesn’t make sense to me; even when they are separate. “Higher” requires the comparison of two magnitudes; and I just don’t see how that applies.
That’s a very poor wording, an atheist by definition doesn’t believe in any deity. Also morality is entirely subjective, and this of course includes religious claims for morality, as these cannot be supported by any objective evidence.
I agree it’s a meaningless question to ask an atheist, but then I can’t imagine any atheist ever asking such a question.
Who here has claimed it is?
I disbelieve in deities for the same reason I disbelieve any claim, because they are not supported by any objective evidence. This argument has no bearing on that.
As for morality I have given the matter some thought, and it is clear to me that all morality is subjective. However we either can or cannot differentiate between moral rectitude or turpitude, if we can there we don’t need divine diktat, if we can’t then no one can justify calling divine diktat moral, as they wouldn’t know.
The fact that there is objective evidence that other animals that have evolved to live in societal groups exhibit morality also suggests to me that morality is an evolved trait, and not derived from any deity. Though either way since there is no objective evidence for any deity I must disbelieve in them.
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This again is very OT, but it is so terribly wrong that I have to chime in.
I happen to live in Finland and can tell you that there is a very very strong lutheran tradition here. True - also here people are losing their intellectual connection to the faith and so only about 67% are member of the lutheran church, but about 20 years ago, there were 85% (not counting the orthodox and other denominations). So all these benefits that you quote have been established by christian communities. It stands to see if the agnostic societies will maintain them.
Also, Atheism is not so common, even in other european countries. It’s more the "none"s, i.e. those that grew up in christan homes and christian societies but lost connection to the church. They would call themselves “spiritual” but don’t know which religion is true. There are not so many actual atheists here.
Ah, but now I remember that you conflate Agnostics and Atheists. I’ll answer to that in another reply.
Oh, BTW, that is quite easily visible on Wikipedia, for all those members of this forum that find many words daunting: Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland - Wikipedia
Why did you not mention the countries that really are predominantly atheist and have been for a long time: Japan and China. Now do some research on “lying flat” and “Hikikomori”.
Oh, and communist russia is also a good example of rigorous state-atheism. I have been to a church in St.Petersburg that had been converted into a swimming pool. From russia it spread forcefully to east europe. Especially the ukranian conflict (the only war currently happening in Europe) has its roots in communist/church history.
Let me guess: You are living in the U.S.? At least your strong opinions despite considerable ignorance about europe tells me that.
Hello there. Yes I am serious.
Thank you for actually engaging the question! 
When I was trying to figure out which argument one could use to call the dilemma a “threat to theism”, I figured this one out:
- you assume that morality and reason must match. I.e. there cannot be a morality which conflicts with things that our reason shows to us. In my example that reason tells us that cooperation is good and moral. The assumption is, that there cannot be a morality that conflicts with reason.
I do agree with that (and so does Leibnitz), but I can find only christian reasons for that. I don’t see an atheistic reasoning to establish that god could not create such a conflicting morality. Especially, no reasoning is given in combination with the claims.
- Assume that the second horn of the dilemma (the gods “will” morality) means that morality must be “free from” constraints through reason. A morality in this case must be totally arbitrary.
I say that again there is no reasoning for this assumption. The obvious christian answer is that God is the author of reason and morality and so assuming that they must match, they just naturally flow from each other. God can create morality without it having to be “arbitrary” (whatever that means in this context).
I argue this very same thing in the OP, but with more repetition and lenghty quotes from the wikipedia article.
I cited a proof you posted, it contains presumably 3 lines, that looks like gibberish to me. Could you please address them; perhaps starting with your conclusion (that seems to go nowhere)? For example: can you explain the exact contradiction you cited?
What moral rectitude in your opinion is a theist capable of, that an atheist is not? Beyond adherence to faith based dogma of course.
Intellectual connection? That implies a loss of intellect is causing atheism, care to demonstrate some objective evidence for this claim?
that seems a pretty facile oversimplification, but that aside, at the very least those countries are minting highly moral societies despite the majority of people being atheists, and their governments largely secular. The fact they can do this rather contradicts the idea they need to be theists at all in order to be moral.
That’s not true, and the trend in most western democracies has been towards atheism for some time. In your won country a 2018 survey only 34% claimed to be theists, and the number of people with no religious affiliation has doubled in two decades. Not that this tells us anything about the existence of any deity of course.
Again in a 2018 international ISSP survey in Finland, 40% of the Finnish population said they did not believe in God.
I’m not sure that is true either, it may have been the case in the former Soviet Union, but the trend has been reversed in Russia since the Soviet Union collapsed.
No, as you can see in my wording I implied the opposite direction.
If you limit yourself to reason, then atheism is a credible position.
There is a position called “scientism”, which I disagree with.
See, in german we have two words for what in englisch is “to know”:
a) wissen = to know facts
b) kennen = to know persons
When I interact with another person, I do not demand or even consider I could ever aquire perfect fact-knowledge about him. I can trust him even though there is no guarantee that he is not lying. To a certain extend that is the most common way in which we know things: By trusting others. Fundamentally we trust our senses and our thinking capability, although in the great scepticism even that was and is doubted. It’s mostly abandoned, because it leads nowhere.
So when I say that you “restrict yourself to reason” then I mean you should not reject (selectively) some things that cannot be experimentally proven.
Oh, now I understand you.
Did I express myself so badly?
I did not ask you or anybody here to give me proof for atheism or proof against god.
Though I do not fully agree with your simple shifting of the burden of proof, this debate topic is not at all about it.
And here I was wondering why nobody engages the question and everybody jumps on the unfortunate theist that comes to this forum to demand scientific proof for God.
Calm down!
You should see that we have a fundamentally different understanding of reality, so I don’t think that we should start our relationship by throwing our best proofs at each other.
Please have a look at the topic for this debate room and think about the question.
My apologies I misread that.
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Sorry, but as you can see in my long-winded answers, I am a man of many words.
Your short and concise request is not understandable to me. It seems to be the same request as last time and I thought that I answered it.
I forgot to go into details on “the contradiction”, which I assume is the third line that you mention.
The first assumption was that morality and reason must match.
The second assumption was that in horn 2, morality must not match reason.
So horn 2 is impossible. As we have already excluded horn 1, we have disproven all possibilties, leaving to space for god.
That at least is the best argument that I could make out of the many “critizisms” on the wikipedia page that proport to be a threat to theism.
I find that reasoning bad because the assumptions are not justified (and not justifiable). And that is even ignoring the missing third (i.e. the false dilemma option).
I’d like you to explain the marked part. How do these two first lines, lead to the conclusion that line 2 is impossible? I’m like 99% certain that isn’t a valid deduction.
It sounds like you’re isolating what Atheists think about morality as a claim and it comes off judgmental. So the hint I’m taking away from this sentence is “If you don’t believe in my God, then you have no morals.” which is something Christians get wrong all of the time, aka argumentum ad populum.
I pointed out that particular question was stupid. I didn’t say all of your questions were stupid. The question came off pretty invalid and judgmental. Christianity did not invent Morality.
It isn’t relevant to me as an Atheist.
I’d need an example, I also don’t like the word proven, and prefer evidenced, as that is how science works. I also am not sure what we mean by reject here, I prefer disbelieve myself. If a claim is unfalsifiable I cannot be other than agnostic about it, however I would still disbelieve such claims, as I cannot rationally believe them all, and believing some or one seems obviously biased and therefore closed minded to me.
Well not that badly, I just have learned to be very cautious about how I word things.
Again I prefer evidence to proof, and it’s irrational to ask someone to evidence a disbelief, so I’m glad you’re not doing that. Though many theists do precisely that, it seems a tactic very much in vogue in among religious apologists at the moment.
I can assure you I am perfectly calm, I’m not sure why you’d think otherwise. Nor have I ever demanded scientific evidence for any deity, only some objective evidence.
Well yes it’s a given, and while I am happy to discuss and debate, I reserve the right to maintain my own criteria for belief and disbelief, which is the same for all claims.
I have read it, and I’m not sure it has any relevance, also I’m not sure what you mean by “threatens theism”? Since I already disbelieve it seems to have no relevance to my atheism, and I can’t really say whether theists might find the argument compelling, though in my experience most theists seem pretty intractable as far as their religious beliefs go. I mean if they choose to believe in a deity they cannot demonstrate any objective evidence for, then I’m not sure why arguments against that belief would matter?
As you say, and as my experience has borne out many times before, we view the world differently, as my criteria for belief is that sufficient objective evidence can be demonstrated to support a claim, and while I value argument, especially cleverly constructed arguments for their own sake, I don’t believe you can argue anything into existence, ipso facto I’d have to infer you can’t argument something out of existence, if it is real.
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70% of Japan is mostly Shinto. They worship Tenjinsama along with the other 8 million Kami of that religion. Buddhism isn’t as common there as it is in China.
Norway is another Nordic country with a strong lutheran background. From 1736 to 1912 the law demanded that everyone had to go through confirmation before the age of 19. If you didn’t, you were tossed into jail or put on display in a pillory, and you couldn’t get married or get work in the public sector, plus a lot of other shit to make life difficult for dissenters. In other words, people were forced to, by law, to confess to christianity. Real christian values, in other words.
Voting rights for women was introduced in 1913, but only after heavy resistance from the lutheran church, whose clerics bashed their bibles and argued that it was against the word of god. Again, good christian values.
Same-sex marriages were allowed from 2009, against heavy resistance from religious people. And yet again, real christian compassionate values.
And, as everywhere else, the church has fought against family planning, allowing abortion, and they have been an extremely conservative actor in placing stigma on kids born outside wedlock (as if it’s their fault), against allowing homosexual relations, and against allowing women get an education and work for a living, instead of staying at home in the kitchen, and depend on their husband.
There’s more, but I think I’ve made my point – a lot of the nice things in Norwegian society came to be despite the church and christianity, not because of christianity.
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Oh dear, it’s canard time.
Time to introduce this:
Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies by Gregory S. Paul, Journal of Religion & society, Volume 7 (2005)
From that paper:
And that’s just the abstract. Delving further into the paper, we find this:
The author then moves on to:
While the immediately following paragraphs are informative, especially about the duplicity endemic to creationism, I need not quote them here as I’ve provided a link to the full paper. However, later on, one part that really needs emphasising here is this:
Now Finland isn’t included in the data set for that paper, but my understanding is that Finland is pretty much compatible with the view of Scandinavian nations as primarily social democratic, and markedly secular. For example, those with no religious affiliation grew from around 13% in 2000 to over 28% in the present, and that’s according to Finnish government census data.
However, you’ll find there’s plenty of data in that paper for other European countries, and for several European nations, the percentage of non-religious persons hovers around 30% and is growing.
Looks like more naive assertions have been refuted.
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OK. @Calilasseia did some debunking superpower flexing. The graphs in the paper are a bit hard to read, so I’ll just add a few numbers relevant to where I live (Norway), which should also be somewhat relevant to Finland:
According to a poll that the Norwegian Humanist Association conduct every four years, the 2016 data (2020 data are practically the same) shows that religious people are in the minority. Some key data:
68% are members of the main lutheran church (Church of Norway, formerly Norwegian State Church), but this number is misleading, as a lot of the members do not believe in God/a god, and only remain members because they haven’t gotten around to leave, or because the don’t care. At the same time, only 30% of the population answer that they believe in God/a god, 48% do not believe, while 21% don’t know.
So there you have it, only 3 out of 10 Norwegians actively believe in God.
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Out theist visitor has a tendency to warp facts or just plain misrepresent. That is why I do not wish to engage this one.
The problem with polls like these, it depends on how the question is asked.
If the poll asks the question, “are you an atheist?”, the results will show lower numbers, than if the question that is asked is, “do you believe a god exist?”.
Seems, the misappropriated Communist baggage that is tacked on to the term “atheism”, is pretty strong, still. Either that, or maybe people (like our fearless OP) seem to think atheism is a dogmatic position (instead of a provisional one), so they don’t want to be labeled as being part of yet another religion. So, people are much more likely to say they are nonbelievers, than they are to say they are atheists.
I agree, the survey I found said that in Finland in 2018 40% did not believe in a deity, 34% believed in a deity, and 26% were undecided.
Firstly atheism is the lack or absence of belief, it is not a decision a deity does not exist. You can not know a deity exists, but if you accept you don’t know, then how can can you not know if you believe a deity exists?
The question ased was “Do you believe in God?” The organization that contracts these polls wants the result to be as accurate as possible.
Do not confuse the bastardized US perception of the word “communist/communism” with how it is perceived in Europe. Neither “communist” nor “atheist” have the same super-negative connotations as in the US.
So my assumption that this was relevant/comparable to Finland was pretty accurate then.
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