Are you a sincere seeker who has questions about Christianity, or a Christian with doubts about your faith? Post them here to receive a thoughtful response.
CeT-To wrote:B.W. i have this forum to thank and especially you for achieving this conclusion! I finished reading your book today and it gave me so much insight on everything around me! Thank you so much ! God Bless you B.W. Melvin and everyone on this board, you guys have truly changed my life! <3
Francesco
Hi Francesco, Be thankful and praise God - not us - we are just fellow laborers for Christ - amen!
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Yeah i realised i didnt write that i thanked and praised God but dw i did straight after i wrote the post
But joy and happiness in you to all who seek you! Let them ceaselessly cry,"Great is Yahweh" who love your saving power. Psalm 40:16
While I don't think that morals can be used as direct evidence to say "Christianity is correct", morals themselves can be seen as an expected result of a supernatural origin to human intelligence. The morals of compassion, generosity, mercy, etc, are completely contrary to "survival of the fittest" evolutionary traits.
However, since we have no empirical evidence of what human behavior would be like in a society that had never even encountered religion to have a glimpse at what morality is (all societies have been formed in great part by religion), it is pretty ignorant to say that atheism inherently has its own morals. We'd need an actual example before that claim can be verified as true or false.
-- Josh
“When you see a man with a great deal of religion displayed in his shop window, you may depend upon it, he keeps a very small stock of it within” C.H. Spurgeon
1st Corinthians 1:17- "For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel””not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power"
I actually think morality is sort of a brute fact kinda like the law of non-contradiction. i mean its obvious what is right and what is wrong and if there comes a time that you don't know at the spot just have a little think about if the end result is going to be a good one or a bad one, unfortunately most of the time we blind ourselves with excuses we create to justify the wrong things we do. All you have to do is love! It is so simple yet we fall short almost every single time.
I think you are referring to that if we ever do meet a society that has not been touched by some sort of religion, will they have a different moral law/standard? hmmm... think about it for a second ... does something Just ever become something Unjust? Like the example i gave about licking the ice-cream, are the 2 choices i gave you both the best? The law of non-contradiction states that opposite ideas cannot be true at the same time and at the same sense. So yes in a sense morals Can be used as direct evidence to say "Christianity is correct" because if another religion says something wrong in their holy book or where ever they obtain their source of knowledge.... then it's a false religion.
But joy and happiness in you to all who seek you! Let them ceaselessly cry,"Great is Yahweh" who love your saving power. Psalm 40:16
With regard to the Atheist assertion that there are no absolute moral truths, the simplist, most effective retort is the question, "Is that absolutely true?" The statement itself is self-defeating; if there are no absolute moral truths, then asserting as much cannot be absolutely true.
If the Atheist asserts that one can be moral without religion/God, I find it is best to respond, "yes-- in fact, I know some atheist who are more moral than some Christians-- but they have no logical reason for doing so." Usually the response to this is an explanation that one does not steal, for example, with the understanding that stealing from others may encourage others to steal from oneself. At this, remind the atheist that someone exhibiting this behavior is being pragmatic, not moral. If, hypothetically speaking, one could steal something with the knowledge that one would never be caught and that nobody would ever notice the item was missing at all, what possible justification could one give for NOT stealing the item, given the previously stated justification for refraining from theft generally?
If the atheist says something about how morality is the product of evolution, at it's core it's very similar to the above argument-- what is moral is what works, or at least what has worked throughout man's evolution. Again, a person can act "morally" in this way, but can give no logical reason to call it "moral," nor to act morally out of any sense of moral obligation.
A more difficult an nuanced discussion is necessary if the atheist points to acts of God (especially in the old testament) and argues that these acts of God are inconsistent with Christian morals themselves. Responding to these arguments requires a good knowledge of scripture as well as understanding of Christian theology (which, obviously, is a subject too big and deep to tackle here).
