God versus Zamenhof

[marnanel]

Sometimes I hear people saying that they believe morality to be designed by God, and so they can't understand how atheists and agnostics can have an understanding of morality. This is not an argument I can easily get my head around. I mean, if we talk about languages for a moment, there's still no consensus on how humans as a whole started to speak. But it's still pretty obvious that individual humans learn language as they grow up from the people around them, that language exists by consensus, and that there are certain necessary features for language to be language. I don't see Esperantists going around telling everyone that they can't understand how we can speak English if we don't know who started Proto-Indo-European.

ETA:  Then again, if the Esperantists did do that, I probably wouldn't understand too well anyway.

Comments

[ewx]

I don't think there's an argument to understand, at least in the sense of a collection of statements that could convince anyone who didn't already believe the conclusion.

[simont]

they believe morality to be designed by God, and so they can't understand how atheists and agnostics can have an understanding of morality

I find I can't even work out quite what sense that's meant in. (Though presumably you're paraphrasing from elsewhere rather than quoting every word literally.) Does it mean 'Atheists and agnostics do in fact appear to have an understanding of morality (in that you often see them refraining from being nasty to people) but I am puzzled about how that can happen'? Or does it mean 'I am convinced that atheists and agnostics do not have a (proper) understanding of morality, in spite of their superficially-not-obnoxious behaviour, because I can't think of any way in which they could'?

The latter is a basically uninteresting position, I think, because it's just a redefinition of words – if you're prepared to define morality as that-which-my-particular-god-lays-down, then of course nobody who doesn't subscribe to your particular religion will have what you think of as an understanding of morality, and there's no arguing against that position without saying 'yes, but that's a silly way to define your terms'.

The former is much more interesting (not least because it's a question you can actually investigate rather than one whose answer is a trivial consequence of whatever definitions you happen to like), but I fear the latter is usually what people seem to mean...