How do agnostics live? (Introduction)

by Mark , Sunday, June 08, 2008, 16:58 (6010 days ago) @ dhw

To summarise the above from dhw and me: - Mark: Atheists are free to make up their own moral code
dhw: But they don't - It is true that theists and atheists broadly agree on what is right and wrong. My point was that atheists can find no basis for their morality other than to state as a brute fact that it is part of our nature. There is nothing else which tells them that they should live that way. The fact that it is part of our nature is not of itself a compelling reason. Atheists explain both this moral sense and religion with the theory of natural selection. They know that we can choose not to follow what has been bred into us. They discard God but accept the moral sense. However, the decision to accept the moral sense is reduced to a mere personal preference. There is no difference in kind, that I can see, between an atheist's decision to be against murder and his decision never to walk around on all fours.