Divine confusion: Objective Morality
Math is objectively true. That is not a highly contested claim, for it's one that dates all the way back to the time of Plato and incidentally a belief that he himself held. It has been demonstrated multiple times from formulas created in isolation that ended up holding natural implications to the Fibonacci theory, conceived after observing rabbits, that appears practically everywhere. Yet, and this belief is contested, I hold true that we have created numbers and formulas as a way to describe this objectively true math. Just how grass is objectively true, unless you're feeling Descartian, but we wouldn't have had the word 'grass' unless humans existed. Similarly if there were two rocks and we added another, without humans existing, there would now be three, surely, yet there would be no way to describe this phenomenon, no numbers and certainly not the term 'addition' or 'equals'.
The idea of objectivism has been widely discussed on another topic, that of morality. Proponents of various gods often tout it as the base of all morality, in fact they often propose that it's the only source of any moral grounding. When atheists point to evil as proof against an Omni god, they say that we wouldn't know 'evil' unless there was a 'good', which is true. Yet the idea that the concept of 'good' can only be founded with a god is one that I'd contest.
So how did we humans come to identify what 'good' would be. Well, often people make assumptions on their basis for morality, such as that all living things seek pleasure and repel from pain for utilitarianism. It takes this assumption and concludes that morality is whatever causes the least universal pain and most universal pleasure. So if killing a man would give an immense pleasure to ten people but only cause suffering to the man himself, then his death would be morally justified. The assumptions that many people that don't pertain to any religious moral system make is that we have an inherent desire of specie prolongation. And we don't need a god to define it, because cultural anthropologists have shown that initial human behaviour was starkly similar. Humans recognised that they needed rules, that helping each other meant they'd survive longer, thus those tribes that held these beliefs prolonged and passed them on.
It was said that the first sign of civilization, long before any religion, was a healed femur because it showed that this person wouldn't have been able to hunt or take care of themselves, for a considerably large period. So out of communal compassion and overall species prolongation someone must have taken care of them. The first such healed bone has been traced back to 15,000 years ago, which is amazing when you take into account the mere 4000 years the oldest religion, Hinduism, has been practiced. So the basis for species prolongation as 'good' is found in early, man-made, civilizations.
Religions, specifically monotheist ones, have appeared to have only taken initial moral beliefs and incorporated them into their own preferred dogma, often completely contradicting what we understand as species preserving natural morality. Religion didn’t get morality from some divine source but rather it took what we had acquired and plagued it with arbitrary and draconian rules about worshipping, eating, drinking, lying etc that have no implications for the ultimate goal of specie prolongation.
In Nietzsche's works he often talks about how religious morality, he particularly detested Christianity, albeit it's fair to say that most religions with similar ideals encompass in his critics, is so different from the morality of the Greeks. He often called it the slave morality, born out of jealousy. He showed how, through Abrahamic teachings, we went from idolising the strong to detesting them, how rather than scorn filled urges for improvement we looked at the weak and felt 'pity', which only encouraged it. He didn't believe that we shouldn't provide the weak with assistance, but simply that it shouldn't be as idolised as it is in many religious teachings. He talked of how individualistic thought was demonised and obedience the eternal virtue, how lack of sex became 'pure' and much more. All ‘moral’ teachings that are practically useless to the idea of specie prolongation.
The idea that morality is objective, from the religious sense holds meagre truth, because, as we understand it now, it was created by humans and it has changed, and it keeps changing. Even today morality is awfully varied no matter where you go, and each argument a Christian has for his god, a Muslim would have for his, a Hindu for his own and then you'd have even those that secularly hold their own belief system...Which is why Hobbes 'contractarianism' which justifies the law of a land is the greatest explanation of what species prolonging morality is. It is also why it is justified to not ascribe to any moral system as long as you follow that of the legal contract you have entered with your own country as part of being its citizen.
IF there was a God and IF he really cared about us subscribing to a single moral view- for now drinking wine would be alright in Christianity, haram in Islam, eating beef a sin in Hinduism but completely fine in the two aforementioned, marijuana while looked down upon in the abrahamic religions is praised in Hinduism, but still illegal in most countries- then he should make his message clearer cause clearly we humans are finding ourselves at wits end...