dumb_hound’s comment had a lot of words and nothing much else in it, but to keep it brief:

In response to the giant lizards’ morality… morals are not about warm, pleasant feelings. I think C.S. Lewis put it best when he related morality to a piano: It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.

Instincts or intuitions are not Moral Law. Something that tells you which feeling or emotion to follow cannot be the feeling or emotion itself, those are not the Moral Law. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

You stated: “So you are saying that if you believe in God then you believe that he gave us morals.”

I’m saying whether one believes in God or not all things that we recognize as absolute, moral values flow from his nature, presence and revelation in this world. On the other hand cultural moral values, though they are values, are subject to change, but we can identify certain values that do not change from culture to culture and do not arise for evolutionary progression. One such value is self-sacrifice. This is generally held in esteem within every culture and does not benefit the standards of survival of the fittest that materialists claim. 

You said:  “I assume you are talking about the Judeo-Christian God here, so you say there was no goodness and no morals among all the other peoples of the world, Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, Babylonians, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, aborigine etc… Or did these people have their goodness and morals from your God but without realising it or believing in him etc.?  It all leaves me very confused.”

Absolute moral values are constant and are a part of what is communicated from God to mankind. The fact is not whether these cultures had morals or not, the argument is from where did they arrive. As a Christian I believe that there is strong evidence that 1- there are absolute moral values 2- Those values are beyond cultural definition and 3-materialism is dumbfounded as to the basis and reasons for those values as many of them do not help materialism in any way.  
 
You said: I’m sure that these peoples believed that their own gods brought them goodness and morals, without needing any Biblical instructions. 

I’m sure they did too because that’s the only information they had to work with.  

You said: “It seems very arrogant to say that only Your God knows the truth and can provide a moral compass.”

If he is the only true and living God that wouldn’t seem arrogant at all. If we’re living among competing gods then I would hold your view. But in my view, one God exists and there is no competition. Now, is your statement an absolute value statement or a relative value statement? What is the basis for the statement?
 
You said: “I am not a man of faith, I claim that what I know is sufficient to conclude that the gods of whatever faith were created by man to explain the unexplainable and to enforce order in society.”

Sufficient for whom? You or society in general? See you complain that I raise what is sufficient for me and proclaim it, but you do the same  don’t you? You believe that your value is greater than mine don’t you? You don’t believe in competing values only in superior values of your belief system. Then the claim is made that you are somehow superior to religion or religious values. I simply don’t buy it.

You said:  “I say that man created God to fulfil a need, and now that need is less present God should be left to die away, as the ancient gods of earlier civilisations and people has done.”

That’s an opinion. I mean that’s an age old sentiment that hasn’t gained traction in the centuries since it was thought that science and enlightenment would be the end of religion in general. In fact the evidence is that mankind is more religious to day that even in history and atheism which has existed since before Jesus only has a negligible following and effect on society. Root for the underdog, because it’ll need a lot more than that to have any type of effect on truth and what really matters to the human heart and spirit.

I think this is a very interesting topic and ’40 Year Old’ thanks for your indulgence of my arguments to your readers. I’ll not be an antagonist to you any longer, but I’ll check back for new and further interesting topics. You and the readers seem very reasonable people of non-belief-LOL and more interesting in subject matter than social and personal attacks and that’s good! So I commend all of you for that~Thanks! 

OK, Now let me get this straight…He says that he KNOWS beyond every possible doubt…OK

What do you really “know”? how much knowledge in the word do you possess? I mean tabulate up a percentage out of the knowledge of all possible knowledge within our existence…how much of a percentage of that does any ONE individual have and or possess?

If the answer is less than 100% then this guy can’t be taken seriously for ANYTHING that he further claims. If his knowledge for the known realm is short then how does he know anything about the unknown realm and IF he has a gap in knowledge about the known realm how do we know that knowledge about the unknown realm isn’t contained within the knowledge that he doesn’t have about the known realm or material existence?

I don’t care what he says…EVERYTHING that he offers after that statement is GARBAGE plain and simple.

Whereas I am a man of faith not claiming to know it all, but claiming that what I do know is sufficient to draw my conclusion and make the claim that God exists. Upon discover of him and study of his ways, it is obvious to see that whatever goodness and morality that we have we only have because of his existence…in fact without him, we have no way to even distinguish between ethical or moral good and bad. 

Thanks 

I completely agree with the author of this website that belief in God can not provide us with an objective morality, as shown clearly by these examples, which more generally illustrates the Euthyphro dilemma g : is something good just because God stipulated it is (in which case it is arbitrary, for God could state one ought to love ones foes as well as ordering the slaughter of the folks of Canaan. ) or did God ordered it because it is good (in which case there exists an objective standard of goodness independent of God) ?
However, I believe that the same challenge could be posed to any form of atheistic moral realism.
Over the past decades, numerous discoveries in neurology and evolutionary psychology have shown beyond any reasonable doubt that our moral intuitions ultimately stem from the shaping of our brain by evolution and that WITHOUT any such emotional intuition, no moral system can be built from reason alone.
This is well illustrated by the study of the brains of psychopaths: since they lack the moral emotions, they don’t consider as true most fundamental moral principles (like avoiding to create suffering, trying to promote the happiness of others) although they are quite able to reason well.
This shows the truth of David Hume’s famous principle that moral truths are the projection of our gut’s feelings on an indifferent and cruel reality : since one can not derive an “ought” from an “is”, moral truths are the expression of our emotions which we mistakenly consider as features of the objective reality.
No moral system can be created without the appeal to at least one kind of intuitions, the brute facts of nature never lead to moral duties and obligations.
Now, I want to state a version of the Euthyphro dilemma which shows the impossibility of defining an objective atheistic morality: is something good just because Evolution hardwired this conviction into us (in which case it is arbitrary, for Evolution could have lead us to believe that murder and torture are right ) or did Evolution produce our current beliefs because they are good (in which case there exists an objective standard of goodness independent of Evolution) ?

Let me now develop the first point: there is an extremely great number (perhaps even an infinity) of planets where intelligent beings like us could have evolved. Given the huge dimension of the sample, it is more than likely that many such intelligent beings have evolved conceptions of morality which would appear completely disgusting to us.
Imagine for example a species of giant lizards ( or whatever else if you’ve more imagination than I who were shaped by natural selection to value power, violence , selfishness in so far that it remains compatible with the interests of the group. When invading a city and killing or enslaving all its inhabitants, their brain generate a warm feeling of happiness, satisfaction.
When however confronted with weakness among their own folk, they feel an overwhelming indignation, anger, rage which lead them to kill the individual guilty of failure , and after having done that, their brain awards them with an intense feeling of pleasure.
Now imagine such beings arrive at our earth and conclude based on their evolutionary intuitions that it would be moral and perfectly good to enslave all human beings capable of working and to kill all others.
What would an human atheist and moral realist say to these lizards? Do they ought to behave in a way coherent with the moral intuitions they have and slaughter or enslave all humans ?
My contention is that it would be completely impossible to show to these creatures that killing innocent beings is wrong: all moral systems developed by humans which would justify this conclusion can not be deduced from the mere consideration of natural facts , they all crucially depend on one or several moral intuitions , which are not shared by the intelligent lizards, so there would be no common ground upon which one could argue that something is right or wrong.
Now, a defender of godless moral realism could agree with me it is fallacious to rely on evolution to define an objective morality in the same way it would be fallacious to rely on the commandments of a deity. But he could then argue that there exists a moral standard independent of Evolution upon which moral realism would be based.
The problem of this argument is the following:

As I have said, no moral system can be grounded by mere logic or factual analysis alone, at some point moral intuitions (due to Evolution) are always going to come into play.
Take for example the possibility of torturing a baby just for fun: almost every human being would react with disgust and say it is wrong. Neuroscience has proven that such reaction does not stem from a rational consideration of all facts but rather from instinctive gut feelings.
Afterwards, people try to rationalize their belief by backing them up with arguments and mistakenly think they feel this disgust because of their reasoning although it is the other way around.
Based on rigorous experiments in the field of neuroscience, Jonathan Haidt shows that in the case of moral reasoning, people always begin by getting a strong emotional reaction, and only seek a posteriori to justify this reaction. He has named this phenomenon ‘the emotional dog and its rational tail’: http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/haidt.emotionaldog.manuscript.pdf
And since one can not derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, there is no way to prove that ‘one ought to not torture a baby for the fun’ by a reasoning based on fact alone, at one moment or an other , one is forced to appeal to emotions.
For example, saying to a intelligent lizard they ought no to do that because the baby is cute, because he is innocent, because he has an entire life before him would completely beg the question for our intelligent alien, which would then ask: “why does the baby’s beauty, innocence, or the fact he has still many years to live implies one ought not to kill the baby ?”. After one or two hours of circular reasoning, the honest human would be coerced to recognize it is so because these things sounds intuitively bad for him.
Concerning the objectivity of morality, I am neither a moral relativist nor a moral subjectivist but a proponent of an error theory: moral statements and truths are in fact nothing more than the products of our emotional intuitions , but because of the hard-wiring of our brain, we erroneously believe they correspond to some external facts of the objective reality and try to derive them from pure natural facts, committing the is/ought fallacy.
For those interested in the line of thinking presented here, I highly recommend you to read Joshua Greene’s dissertation, where he clearly demonstrates the true nature of morality and develops a coherent error-theory.
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Dissertation.pdf
To conclude, although I am not a moral realist, I do think there is a place for ethic in each human life.
But instead of using moral absolutes such as “good”, “evil”, “right”, “wrong”, “ought”, “ought not”, referring to spooky concepts whose existence is as likely as the presence of an invisible yellow unicorn on the surface of Mars, I prefer to employ the language of desires, which correspond to indisputable facts:
We, as human being, love infant life and desire baby to growth and become happy, therefore if we want our desires to be fulfilled, then we ought not to torture babies for the fun. Contrarily to moral realism, the ‘ought’ I have used here is hypothetical and not categorical.
In the same way, I can not say the atrocities we find in the Old Testament are objectively wrong, because I don’t believe in the existence of such moral absolutes, but I can express my convictions in the following manner: if we want our intuitive feelings of love, justice and charity to be respected, then we ought to reject many books of the Old Testament as being pieces of barbaric non-senses.
The traditional moral discourse “The God of the Bible is morally wrong, we ought to fight Christianity, we are morally good whereas religious people are wicked and so on and so forth” seems to me to be completely flawed because it involves the existence of spooky moral absolutes which have no place in a scientific view of the world.
I really appreciate the critical thinking of my fellow atheists when applied to religion but I am really sad to remark they fail to apply it to their own cherished beliefs like the existence of an objective morality.
Thank you for having reading me until here !