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hairyfigment comments on Discussion of Slate Star Codex: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice" - Less Wrong
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As someone who has spent a lot of time with religious conservatives, I've heard the sort of argument given by Robertson many times before. And they use it as an actual argument used against nihilism, which they tend to think follows directly from atheism. So Scott is completely right to address it as such.
I think Robertson conflates the two because he (and others like him) can't really imagine a coherent non-arbitrary atheist moral realist theory. Can anyone here give a good example of one that couldn't include what the murderer he depicts seems to believe?
What does "non-arbitrary" mean, and why is it a virtue? More, why does Robertson's religion have this property, when plainly no moral claims can logically follow from the existence of some deity unless we start by assuming a connection?
What I meant is that you could easily just define your ethics to include by definition "murder is bad" and it'd satisfy all of the other criteria (assuming you could coherently define murder). But if I imagine myself telling Robertson (or somone similar) that, they'd ask how I came up with that rule and why someone else couldn't just come up with the opposite rule "murder is good" and so it was just an arbitrary choice on my part.
When Lovecraft invented the blind idiot god Azathoth (as the human narrator calls it), he was likely just taking the Old Catholic/Aristotelian view of God and imagining what that might look like given the universe we live in. Azathoth maintains existence by sitting at its center surrounded by vast demonic dancers. There's a mediator, here called Nyarlathotep rather than Jesus or the Pope, who claims to somehow be doing Azathoth's will when he told humans to murder each other.
I mention this because we would not consider N's commands morally binding, even in that scenario. We consider hypothetical deities moral or immoral based on whether or not they agree with "arbitrary" rules like not hurting people unnecessarily, not the other way around. Nothing else in the 'philosophical' account of God actually has moral significance. Nor can it provide a foundation for the claims that it sneakily assumes.
So one big reason why I look down on Robertson's argument is that the charge he makes against atheists doesn't distinguish theism from atheism.
Some religious traditions disagree. There are, in fact, people who believe God is by definition good and therefore any known commandment of God is good if we trust its divine status, because our own moral sense is fallible but God is not.