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Hey 3unitz: If you want to read up on accounts of morality from evolutionary biology and what they might imply I would recommend a recent book called The Evolution of Morality by ANU/USyd philosopher Richard Joyce. Also I've also attached a pdf of a 2005 review from the journal 'Nature' about...

Hey Bradcube, there are still a couple questions that I am interested in hearing your answers to: (1) What is your account of morality? Reiterating the examples I gave previously: Some believe that moral claims (such as 'torture is wrong') are made true or false by virtue of different...

Certainly. If nothing else, it indicates at least the possibility of a way out for the christian theist (if they can show that god cares for factors other than the state of suffering which may, at least potentially, conflict). The only problem is that the way out is guarded by point (1). While I...

Aye, but note that point (1) still makes it difficult for you to use point (2) in that way. Even you (seem to) admit that needless suffering is bad. I assume that christian doctrine involves a god which would not generate suffering unless it was a necessary means to another end, such as...

Ok, we can grant this point but then you can't make the following argument: To argue that suffering is a necessary feature of a world which contains knowledge of a certain form you have to be able to show that such knowledge is impossible without suffering. I doubt that one can show this...

Noted :). Aye, but even within a limited subset of choices randomness will turn up if free will is present. Ultimately, if there is more than one option to choose from (even if there are only very few!) then a free choice from amongst those options will have to be random. If the choice is to...

Yeah, that's fair enough. As I have mentioned, I an a moral relativist and so I play devil's advocate to a degree in some of the things I am saying here (some things are said simply for the sake of stimulating discussion of getting people to think). I am thus interested to know what you think...

I agree, actually. Which is why I don't think morality can be derived from tenets of logic/reason (as I have mentioned, I am a moral relativist). If you don't allow that logic and reason hold independent of god's existence then I'm not sure whether we can hold any proper debate. To suggest...

This is why I am agnostic.

You're right regarding consciousness - noone has succeeded in providing a naturalistic explanation for consciousness yet. This means that my case cannot be made in a logically flawless manner, but I'm not really bothered. Bar physics, science is rarely so straight forward, and I am happy enough...

Also, as an addendum to the above: You claim that "without God there are no moral truths whatsoever", but what about logic/reason? If logic/reason are able to exist independent of god AND it is also the case that god given morality is justified by logic/reason (as suggested above) then it...

It seems that you might fall into the Euthyphro dillemma, which is so named because in Plato's dialogue Euthyphro Socrates asks "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" Updating this question for debates centered around Abrahamic gods...

But the will cannot be properly free if it is constrained by reason. Either our will is essentially random or it is determined by one factor or another. If it is not random and is to be made relevant to who we are as people then it must be constrained. Reason is such a constraint and, in my...

Ok, I'm going to try and remake my case for rejecting free will - apologies for length. One thing I want to make clear at the outset is that I don't think that the responsibility issue is relevant in this argument. Certainly, it will be affected by the outcome of the free will debate but the...

We're talking about two different types of responsibility - a strong form (S-responsibility, say) and a weak form (W-responsibility). S-responsibility requires absolutely free will and so, on my account, we lack S-responsibility. The concept of W-responsibility holds one responsible if their...

Certainly. It seems inevitable to me that we are largely shaped by our parents and other social forces (interacting with our genes of course) and so it makes a kind of sense to introduce an attenuated form of responsibility. I can't give a simple answer to this, because sometimes people will...

No problem dude. Thanks for engaging with the debate. You probably wrote this as I wrote my previous response, but if you look to (2) you'll see that my conception of free will (i.e. will which is relevant to who one is as a person) is compatible with this kind of repsonsibility - i.e. that...

(1) Note that people who have bona fide psychiatric hallucinations will often believe what they see/hear/smell/etc. Sure, a person who believes they spoke to Jimi Hendrix in the year 2007 harbours a false belief. All this tells us is that the belief-forming processes in our brain can go awry and...

But then you have to find a way of explaining how rationality manages to affect the choices of the will. In particular, you have said that having a free will1 means that you could have chosen otherwise. Alright, so lets suppose that we have a decision set for any given agent which is constrained...

(1) Beliefs can exist in the absence of free will. A lot of our beliefs seem to be explainable by means of deterministic cognitive processes, e.g. the visual input/recognition of a bass guitar acts to form the belief that there is a bass guitar in my room. In some cases rational reflection may...