Can morality be objective in a world without God?

No, it is fiction. The separation is true.

Fiction and non-fiction usually involves at least a bit of reality. One can't talk about a story without the presence of time and space (or can you?). The fundamental difference is whether the event has truly happened or whether the idea presented is real and the only universal similarity to the truth is the basic precondition of all stories, that is that time and space exists, and matter exists.

True, Ray. A fiction has no plausibility--it can't function as a story--if it is not grounded in our experience of common sense reality (of course that's a philosophical issue all by itself).
But all truths are ultimately based on fictions, if we understand "fiction" to be what is man-made. All our "knowledge" rests on tacit presuppositions of our culture that are man-made. And the artifactual (artificial/man-made) status of those presuppositions is forgotten; they are treated as self-evident/apriori truths, as givens of reality.

-edited

This subject in itself is fiction if you ask me. There is no clear line that separates truth from fantasy. Fantasy becomes truth as easily as truth becomes fantasy. They are inseperable. So this subject is truth also. Perspective, that's what matters, as always.

As a general point, the fact that there is no clear line between two things does not make them the same, or mean there is no real difference between them. After all, you look at a rainbow and there's no clear line between green and blue, that don't mean they are the same colour...

see below

Yes, perspective and context. Two things, aspects, qualities, etc. can be similar in some respects and contexts and different in others. Absolute distinctions minimize the dynamic complexity of life.

Jl, I have a problem with calling truths man-made. We can't see reality without having reality to be there. True, that another person might not see a flower in the same colour, or might not see it at all, but the flower is there.

JL Nobody




In some ways, I could agree with you. The point is: truths exist independent of man, as in Platos philosophy? Or, truths are those human artifacts, produced within a culture?
But, even in this last case, there are truths that "work" and other that don't.
See the case of the lightning. Many cultures established as truth that lightning was the expression of a god's wrath. Others, like our, establish that it is a natural phenomena.
There is no reason to make any relation of superiority between the two "truths". Unless ... unless you want to protect yourself from the lightning and create a lightning-rod. In this case, you must assume that lightning is a natural phenomena. And the lightning-rod works. Why does it work? Because there is some kind of adjustment between the concept of a natural phenomena and the instrument you create to protect yourself.

Ray and Val, I have said in my threads that I distinguish between truth and reality. To me, truths are propositions about the nature of reality. But, as Val notes, they may just be statements which simply work, i.e., the have pragmatic value. They do not work because they are true; they are deemed "true" because they work. Eventually, they will be cast into the wastebasket of former truths when better propositions replace them. Reality, on the other hand is beyond our reach, except in two ways. We can form (Ray: man-made) propositions that partiallly (or, for practical purposes, sufficiently) correspond with its structure and thus serve our purposes (as in engineering and medicine) and, second, our very experience at all moments is a non-theoretical immediate expression of reality (refracted, of course, by--or combined with--our nature).

Isn't that a confusing way of defining truth...?

EDIT: I think what you're describing are proposals of what is true(propositions that are synonymous to reality). Of course we are under limitations of our senses, but isn't this, coupled with reason, the only way of knowing reality? If we don't have the senses we won't know what reality is, we'd be the reality sleeping without an awareness of its own existence.

Ray, I define truth as propositions about the nature or structure of reality so that we do not confuse the two. Reality is simply what is the case. It existed before the existence of human beings. But truth, like knowledge, does not exist without knowers. And knowledge is always temporary--what is considered true today is considered a precursor to the truths of the future. Knowledge is a function of the knower, truth is no more than claims to knowledge of the nature of reality--propositions justified by various epistemological criteria, e.g., convention, authority, empirical evidence, logic, intuition, etc. And the justification may not be accepted by all "truth seekers". Notice that these last two words are misnomers from my perspective. A philosopher or scientist proposes truth; he does not seek and find it. He finds reality, every second of his life and truth consists of his explanations of what he finds.

What if truth is in reality? What if it is not a bunch of labels that we have attatched to what is, labels that are temporary and bound to alter as our whims change?




I am not sure i agree. Truth, even knowledge, has it's separate existence in the things themselves. The tree is no different from a book, wich we all would agree contains truth and knowledge. Well, one difference, the book is made by man, so it's value presents itself to us. But the language of the trees and plants is even easier to read, so easy that we forget that we do it. All books are merely translations of truth from this language. What I mean is simply that no matter who taught you about trees, no matter who taught him, and so on, the first guy to ever open his mouth about trees had studied the trees, their interaction with their surroundings.

So truth is not all information about the tree, but the thing that all this information points to, the tree itself. If the information points to nothing, then truth may not be present. Truth is value.

Since you are discussing trees and truth within the context morality consider this:

To a "civilized" Western observer, the cutting down of trees in Brazilian rainforests could be considered "immoral" because it has negative implications for others via climatic or atmospheric changes. However a fundamental problem arises from different relationships with the concept "tree" from the viewpoint of locals versus non-locals.
For the native as opposed to the remote observer, "tree" is enmeshed with the concepts "income" and "immediate survival". It is such relationships which constitute truth , and moral dilemmas arise only arise when conflicting "truths" are observed.

There is no "objective reality" for "us" or "trees". The concepts "we" and "trees" are in constant flux of shifting inter-relational definition …..and "God" is the mythological objective agent who is deemed to stand outside this flux.

Cyracuz. All I can see, with my myopia on this matter is, in answer to your statement that "truth is not all information about the tree, but the thing that all this information points to", that the thing (tree) that truths point to is reality. The truth is that with which we point to the reality. We ARE talking about definitions, of course. And in that we have considerable latitude. But I think we do well to distinguish between what we propose and that about which we propose. This presents another philosophical problem, I know, but it isn't solved by fusing truth and reality, not if we see truth as the value we place on a behavior, e.g., the merit of a proposition about the nature of something.

Cyracuz, perhaps an analogy between truth/reality with map/territory might help. A map is a claim about the layout of a territory. It is not the territory itself, of course, but its value lies in their correspondence. And, of course, the correspondence is never complete. In addition to their difference in size, maps do not have grass, rocks, houses, etc. on them.

Fresco, I agree, of course, with your perspectivism. I'm just saying that with regard to the meanings, "truth" and "reality," the latter is relatively (or can be treated as relatively) more objective than the former. Having to do solely with meaning, truth is more explicitly culture-bound and behavioral in nature. "truth" has more to do with epistemology; "reality" has more to do with ontology; even though on the bottom line all is epistemology.
Good to hear from you. I wonder how Twyvel's doing.

Fear of God and hell make objective morality impossible

JL, if I was unable to find any ground that this map corresponded with I'd be forced to conclude that this map was fiction. The map points to the territory, as you say, but before that the territory pointed to the map. Someone drew the territory on a sheet of paper. Many have done this, and not all rightfully. How many lawsuits are there about property lines, both in my country and yours? The truth of the map is determined by the reality of the piece of land.

And so I maintain that that is how it is with all things. Truth is in the object, not in our understanding of it. Once upon a time the world was flat. The sun revolved around the earth. The people who disproved this did so by observing reality, by drawing new maps that were more accurate than the old ones.

Maybe truth is the dualistic counterpart to reality, as time is to evolution. Can it be said that truth and reality make up the sum of our perception?

Cyracuz




Cyracuz, but you are talking about adjustment between a belief and a fact. Truth is not in the sun or the earth. Truth is nothing more than a relation between an human belief and an human observation. There is no truth in things. Remember: we establish relations between things and try to explain them, within our experience.
Here, I must agree - at last! - with JL Nobody.

Val, I agree with you more often than you think. I just comment only when I disagree.
Cryacuz, I appreciate your provocative notion that "Truth is in the object, not in our understanding of it." A correspondence theory of truth would agree that a belief is true to the extent that it matches the reality of the object of belief. Concretely, a map works to the extent that it corresponds to some characteristics of its referent (the territory). But I agree with Val that we must not confuse correspondence with identity.

Cryacuz, I also like your statement that "truth is the dualistic counterpart [of] reality. All STATEMENTS about reality are dualistic; but Reality is itself unitary/non-dualistic. But notice that in acknowledging this possibility you are also acknowledging a difference between truth and reality.