Quote Originally Posted by Paltmull View Post
If it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral, then it is God that defines what moral is. If so, if God would have declared murder to be morally correct behaviour, then it would be. Yet I think most people, even those who are religious, would consider murder immoral. A religious person might say that God would never declare murder to be something good, beacuse God is good and murder is evil.

What does that mean? It means that moral exists independently of God.

If you base your moral values solely on religion, then it must follow that you consider any behaviour potentially morally correct. If some lost part of the Bible was discovered, that revoked the fifth commandment ("You shall not kill") and replaced it with "You shall kill", then a such a person would change his moral values regarding murder.

If you don't consider every kind of behaviour potentially morally correct, then you must accept that moral is defined by something else than God. Any other conclusion is illogical.
Who said anything about the Bible?

You are missing the point, and putting the cart before the horse. God creates the world and embeds morality within it, humans arise out of the world. We believe what we do today because of the basic morality encoded at the creation of the universe. If God believed murder was Good the universe would have been created differently and we would believe it was Good too.

So there is no contradiction.

Quote Originally Posted by Banquo's Ghost View Post
Your argument as to '2' is nonsense.

From the Stanford University Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:



If you claim that morality cannot exist without God, then tell me which god. Because Odin's morality differs somewhat from that of Ganesh.
If you are asking for a detailed moral code, I don't have one. That was not my claim, however. In order for morality to exist as anything other than personnal preference it must be universal, and that requires an extra-universal valuator.

Enter God.

Or, you abandon any claim to anything approaching reality.

Rather like you have to abandon any claim to us being more than animals without some for of soul.