I'm a young-earth Christian theist. For a long time I've been trying to wrap my mind around certain things atheists say, and I wonder if people here can help me out.

Supposing that God does not exist, and I want to live an upstanding, moral life in such an environment, I can see only 2 options before me. Either I must decide morality for myself or I must learn it from somewhere else. Now there are obvious ethical and social issues that individual morality brings, so I'm assuming that most atheists would say morals are a combination of learned behavior and instinct. In other words, human society decides.

Now if this is the case, then we have to ask what part of society decides morality. Some people in human society believe homosexuality is wrong and others don't. How do I choose?

I believe the logical answer is to say that society at large decides. In other words, the majority. This brings problems though, because the majority of people are theists, and would argue that not believing in God is a punishable offense. In which case atheists, to be consistent, should admit that their views are immoral. On top of this, there is almost always universal outrage when a majority decides to kill off a minority group. This indicates that we do not fully trust a majority of society to teach us morality.

Perhaps instead we do learn it from society, but we discern true good with our evolution-bestowed instincts. In which case we are faced with the question of which instincts to follow. According to evolution, we have both the instincts to rape and dominate as well as the instinct to help one another. And we are not closer to reasoning our way to why one is better.

This leads to the final conundrum. If the universe is entirely material, then everything that exists, every choice, thought, and word, is all just chemistry. The universe is a giant flux of molecules behaving as the physical laws dictate. In which case neither atheists nor theists technically believe anything. We and our thoughts are simply chemicals, and it's impossible to judge whether one particular string of reactions is any more reasonable or moral than another. We can't say that the universe is behaving irrationally there and not here. Every belief and action is a product of natural law. And besides all this, it's impossible for us to evaluate any ideas for the same reasons a computer programmed to say that 2+2=5 cannot evaluate the validity of the program. One thought is as natural and chemical as the next. In this case, any debate can be stopped by one party saying "Well I don't see it that way," since his reasoning is as valid as anyone else's.

However, to believe these things flies in the face of all the total of human experience, both sensually and intellectually observed. We do use moral boundaries and we can evaluate ideas. Every book written is a testament to human rationale. To believe in a closed-system universe is to bear the weight of all the data ever amassed. And isn't that a sign of a poor worldview?