Gertie:
Well you raised the issue of atheism/theology, and in the religion forum, so I've been trying to address the concept of 'objective morality' from that angle, to show the problems associated with the claim I understood you to be making, that 'objective morality' relies on the existence of some kind of god. (Tho you still haven't defined what kind of god, or what you mean by 'objective'? Which would be helpful).
I don't think about god until I know what underlies the belief that is meaningful, substantive. Why is there a call for god to be there at all? Go here and you begin inquiry at a point that is deserving of attention. So forget god, look rather at the world. This is what science does. Certainly the most salient feature of the world is value. I argue this all over these posts and it's a kind of missionary need I have to bring this idea center stage: What does it mean to care about things? I do believe this is fundamental to one's "access to reality" (must respect the OP, and I hope to go into this).
If you simply want to discuss the nature of suffering, then as I say it's an understood part of the human reward system. The mystery lies with conscious experience itself, in all its forms, dramatic and mundane. Conscious experience encompasses suffering, well-being, memory, reason, hunger, colour, sound, every experience you have. The evolved role of the human reward system as a function of consciousness (ouch fire hurts, I won't stick my hand in a bunsen burner again, it feels bad!) isn't a mystery, the mystery is consciousness itself. All of it, from love to hate to the taste of a tomato sandwich.
I beg to differ. The mystery lies with Heidegger, I'm afraid. Sorry for name dropping, but it is a matter what he calls presence at hand. When I refer to suffering apart from the contexts that it be found in, I am pointing to presence in the world,and presence is not wht we know at all. It's like a physicist's inability to say what a force is. Can't do it because science is clueless on this. Force is a presence: it's just there, at hand, if you will, and it is not to be part of any scientist's reduction. It is intuitively there, like the the orangeness of this orange, apart from the language we put to it.
Thus, the nature of suffering is not to be understood,like a force or material substance is not to be understood. Fitting suffering into context, as playing a role in a reward/deterrence system, is only to talk about something else entirely, like talking about earth's escape velocity puts force into context. All of the world's "givens" are mysteries.
But you're picking out one aspect of conscious experience as special (and something to do with god it seems), looking at it in an unnecessarily abstracted way when we have much better empirical approaches which I've outlined, and coming to the conclusion, somehow, that morality is objective.
I want to put attention on this dimension of experience called value, yes; and examine it to reveal its nature as such. First, it makes the world a moral place, value does. If atms could not get together and make valuative experiences this world would not be a moral place. It would be a pointless nil, and no one would care, and people would be no more important that the sulfuric slim that sits at the bottom of some bog. Value is the game changer for world ontology. It makes stuff into value.
How about if I have no feeling in my arm, owing to a fault in my nervous system, is sticking my arm in fire no longer bad?
Or what about the taste of a tomato sandwich? It is qualiatively different from the taste of a cheese sandwich, or remembering the taste, or feeling hungry, or seeing a tomato and wanting to eat it, etc. Why aren't you equally puzzled about that? How about if I loathe the taste of a tomato sandwich? Is the taste of a tomato sandwich an 'absolute moral bad'?
I am puzzled about all value, which is the point. But it is a puzzling that is about the bare givens of the world. To see my position you probably have to put aside your knowledge of science and any hierarchy of values and the way all that works. Again, we did not invent value. It's a given.
Evolution explains this stuff, it makes sense that we are the way we are, that pain feels bad.
Evolution explains how it got here, but cannot begin to say what it is, any more than a physicist can say what the color yellow is.
And maybe it's me, but you seem to have shifted from god-reliant objective morality, and I'm struggling to make out what you're actually claiming.
Perhaps you could just lay out exactly what your claim is, define your terms, and show your argument, as clearly as you can? Then we'll know we're all talking about the same thing.
It is that value is the foundation of religion: This world is not morally defensible AS SUCH, as the world, because it causes, or IS suffering. Evolutionists simply assume suffering and fit in into theory. They do not take on the matter of what it is doing here at all.
As to access to reality: value in Being IS reality. It is the most salient component of our Being here, and therefore of Being in the world. we need to put aside fictions like material substance which are simply free of meaning and pin our thoughts about reality on it.