Vince: "The last thing is the concept of situational ethics meaning that the same action can be morally good or morally bad depending on the context. For example, lying is generally a morally bad act but in a situation where someone can get hurt if you tell the truth then lying can be a morally good act but it is based on the objective standard of well-being."
My posts decisively refute your point here because your point and subsequent evasive comments duck my criticism that you fail to justify the metaethical question of what makes right actions right. Why should I or anyone care about your notion of your so-called "objective standard of wellbeing" of others?" Why shouldn't I instead live by my criteria of what makes me happy and serves my best interests regardless of who I hurt, if I'm clever enough to get away with it? You continually duck this decisive refutation of your position in your replies to my posts. If my hurtful conduct creates a world that works for me, why should I (a sociopath with no conscience) care whether it works for anyone else? You can't reply that I wouldn't get away with it because you cannot know that. You cannot reply that I would be deprived of love from most others because self-love may be my core value. In short, with no assured accountability in this life or the next, you have no basis for morality and any protestations that an atheist can be a good and decent person is no more than an arbitrary expression of emotional preference.
Your moral pretenses are thus deciisvel refuted by Richard Dawkins (author of "The God Delusion") chilling nihilistic admission: ad
"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
Dr. Kenneth Miller, author of biology text books most commonly used in high school and college, confronted Dawkins on the inconsistency of this statement with Dawkins passionate life of purpose. Dawkins had no meaningful answer. Social convention, cultural consensus, and evolved human herd instincts ultimate express only the result of natural selection and genetic mutation working to the advantage of human procreation and survival, but they provide no defensible grounds for moral accountability and Right and Wrong.
Vince: "I am going to assume here that god does in fact exist. If he does then how does god know what is moral? Is god’s morality good because he says it is or is it good because it is good by itself? If god is just advocating for an objective good morality then morality exists independent of god and humans can through time discover this morality."
God cannot be moral on the basis of standards apart from Himself because God is the ground of all Being and is by definition All That Is. God is subject to nothing apart from Himself.
Vince: "If morality is good only because god commands it then morality is arbitrary and humans would be unable to reason to this morality because it is not based on reason."
Wrong! The essence of the Christian God is Love. This fact has x implications:
(1) Moral issues like justice, compassion, and patience must conceive these virtues as implications of Love, as God conceives it.
(2) In a theistic model, morality is thus "based on reason," but reason is a function of arguments with premises and conclusions; and thus the soundness of arguments depends on the assumptions implicit in the premises. These assumptions in turn are shaped by intuition and experience. So true morality is ultimately based on divinely guided intuition and experience--other terms for divine revelation. But our determination of this morality differs because some have sharper intuition and more authentic spiritual experiences than others and some understand progressive revelation differently than others. But moral debate merely reflects human limitations, not the objective grounding of morality in God's nature. The claim that morality so conceived is arbitrary is irrelevant to the fact that those who correctly perceive God's moral will are fully justified in claiming that they can be good, just, and loving. But as already deomonstrated, atheist have no grounds for claiming to be moral in any sense that is not arbitrary and purely based on social and cultural norms that have ultimately evolved through the evolution of human herd survival instincts.
Vince: "When we take god out of the morality business and try to reason to good morals we find an objective morality that we can live by. If we made a list of morally good and bad actions that most humans agree upon we will come to the conclusion that bad morals are things that cause unnecessary suffering like bathing a child in battery acid. Morally good things lead to a person’s well-being such as feeding a hungry person, most people would agree this is a good thing. (There is a lot more that goes into well-being as the basis for morality) So if we have other people’s well-being as a standard for morals then we can objectively decide if an action is moral or not based on this criteria. We can objectively say beating someone else with a hammer is objectively wrong and clothing a naked person is objectively good."
Vince: "There are many moral actions that are not as easily decided based on this criteria. These also may over time change as we gain new information on what is morally good such as asbestos, once it was morally ok to use this and expose people to asbestos dust now we know that it would be morally bad to do so based on well-being as the standard. These are still objective morals based on the standard of well-being. If you reject this notion it is like rejecting math because we cannot solve some math problems yet."
Vince: "So god cannot be the source of objective morality but only subjective morality and atheists can base their morality on reason and science without the need for a god. How can a theist be moral when they throw out reason and rely on a subjective morality form a book that is 2000+ years old? Many of the morals have been replaced with better ones such as how we treat gay people and slaves for example."