The point is we can't induce moral principles by observing nature. This is the naturalist fallacy aka the is/ought problem of Hume. I can look at nature through a darwinian will to power worldview or a Christian worldview and arrive at completely different conclusions.
The creator has also given us a conscience, rationality and intuitive common sense by which to discern what is right.
All of those are subject to interpretation though. Yes, we have the moral law on our hearts but we're also fallen, weak minded, sinful, susceptible to delusion and deception, etc. We can only discern what's right with God's help and by following His commandments.
Hume's is/ought problem assumes that things are the way they are for no reason. If instead you assume things are the way they are for a reason (which is intuitively obvious) then the way things are can potentially tell you about what ought to be (although we haven't defined what "ought" means). Specifically, if you assume that things were created by intelligent design for some purpose (that everything happened by chance for no reason is literally retarded, putting deductive logic and epistemology aside because then you literally can't prove anything) then it makes sense that we might be able to discern some of the purpose and principles behind the design, and we might decide to call things in line with those principles and ultimate purpose how things "ought" to be.
Is it subject to interpretation? Yes. Does that mean any interpretation is legitimate and there are no right or wrong answers? No. It's like trying to estimate the mean of a population and other characteristics of it from a sample. There are correct answers even if we don't know what they are, and there are rational methods which will give us a decent estimate of the correct answer from what we can observe. These methods are not irrational and arbitrary, which is why virtually every culture in history (that I've heard of) has inferred the existence of a creator(s) despite not directly observing one (until rationalism came along).
Man has a natural ability to interpret nature even if it's not always correct. Neither is the conscience always correct, nor our intuitions, nor is nature always good. Hardly anything is always correct or known for certain, which is why man has an ability to work with fuzzy logic and why it was wrong to try to prove everything deductively from first principles. It would be nice if things were that easy, but God apparently doesn't want to make it too easy and wants us to figure stuff out the hard way, which would explain why he keeps himself hidden and doesn't interact with us directly. The way God guides us is through life and nature that he has designed, and these teach us to learn and develop ourselves so we can overcome challenges, not expect someone or something else to have all the answers and always be there to rescue us.
Yes, Hume assumes a skeptical position and his problem is critique of naive empiricism (along with his problem of induction which is a classic defeater for empiricism). He demonstrates that observation of what is alone can't tell you what is good, preferable, desirable, etc. There is an epistemological gap between knowledge of how things are and how they should be. So everyone has to appeal to some other paradigm that informs morality. The problem is, atheists and materialists can't justify the existence of a moral standard because their paradigm only accepts empirical observation and sense data. Their position always reduces to moral relativism where nothing is inherently good or bad, but everything is a matter of personal preference.
So for moral realists, the question ultimately is what is the standard for morality and how do we have knowledge of it. I'd argue only the Orthodox Christian worldview can give a coherent, consistent and holistic worldview that can justify and answer those questions. In essence:
metaphysics: God is the ultimate good and we're created in His image with free will that allows us to choose the good.
epistemology: we know what's moral through divine revelation and through our communion with God in His Church (participation in the divine energies).
The reason why our intuition and reason alone is insufficient to have that knowledge is our fallen nature which inclines our free will away from God, thus being deceived into choosing evil/sin.
All objective morality has to appeal to some standard. And then the question of "Why is that the standard?" shows that it likewise is in some sense relative. You can answer that question with some reasons, like God having authority to decide what is moral in his creation, but it never disproves other standards of morality which are justified by other reasons, such as the atheist's "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral".
Yet again, the problem is trying to justify everything from first principles. It's impossible because it will always go back infinitely, use circular logic or go back to something unjustified. Instead it makes more sense to base things on what is unprovable yet intuitively obvious, like other people having agency, some actions being wrong, and that wrong actions by those with agency should be punished.
That is in fact what everybody does, looking into their conscience, and to the extent one looks to an outside source for morality, it is rarely to go completely counter to one's conscience. Hence why Christians deep down don't believe slavery as practiced in the Bible is A-OK, don't believe children who curse their parents deserve death, don't believe it's ever OK to kill a whole city including women and children (or capturing the women for soldiers to have), and don't think it's normally a good idea to give a woman to her husband's brother or a man who raped her. Likewise I judge nature by my conscience while also trying to learn what is good from nature.
And if we trust our consciences (and we all do) we need an explanation for why they are trustworthy. The obvious explanation is that they were meant to guide us, being given to us by the creator(s). And then it only makes sense that the creator would have a similar sense of morality to our consciences, and being the source of our consciences is a more reliable measure of what is moral - for we know our consciences do not always agree. And knowing this creator also made other people's consciences, as well as the whole of nature, it follows that we can get closer to the creator's morality by studying the consciences of others and the things of nature, which appear to be made for our benefit, given how so many of them are good for our health in contrast to artificial things.
All objective morality has to appeal to some standard. And then the question of "Why is that the standard?" shows that it likewise is in some sense relative. You can answer that question with some reasons, like God having authority to decide what is moral in his creation, but it never disproves other standards of morality which are justified by other reasons, such as the atheist's "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral".
That's why such debates boil down to worldview comparison and transcendental argumentation - which worldview can justify the thing in question, in this case morality. The problem with the atheist position is that they can't justify their claims within their worldview. Why? Because atheists believe in a meaningless and purposeless deterministic universe of random chemical processes in constant flux. They can't give an account how the laws of logic, metaphysics, knowledge and ethics exist in such a universe. It's a self-refuting position. But even if we grant them the proposition "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral", they can't answer why it is the case and how they know that without being ad hoc or circular. Even if the proposition is true, it's not a justified belief but an axiomatic/self-evident one. But nothing can be self-evident and everything needs to be justified.
And if we trust our consciences (and we all do) we need an explanation for why they are trustworthy. The obvious explanation is that they were meant to guide us, being given to us by the creator(s). And then it only makes sense that the creator would have a similar sense of morality to our consciences, and being the source of our consciences is a more reliable measure of what is moral - for we know our consciences do not always agree. And knowing this creator also made other people's consciences, as well as the whole of nature, it follows that we can get closer to the creator's morality by studying the consciences of others and the things of nature, which appear to be made for our benefit, given how so many of them are good for our health in contrast to artificial things.
Those are a lot of assumptions. Maybe the creator is the evil demiurg of the Gnostics? Maybe we're supposed to rebell against the evil demiurg and transcend the limitations of the nature he created by using artifice and becoming transhumanists? Maybe the creator didn't make all people the same and maybe some people don't even have a soul and are vessels for evil spirits (shout out to Scientology)? The point is without God's explicit revelation we can't know any of this just by looking around.
This is not to say that outside of Christianity people can't be moral - they can and they have been historically obviously (which is in line with the Christian teaching of God's law being written on our heart). What they can't do is justify objective morality.
The point is we can't induce moral principles by observing nature. This is the naturalist fallacy aka the is/ought problem of Hume. I can look at nature through a darwinian will to power worldview or a Christian worldview and arrive at completely different conclusions.
All of those are subject to interpretation though. Yes, we have the moral law on our hearts but we're also fallen, weak minded, sinful, susceptible to delusion and deception, etc. We can only discern what's right with God's help and by following His commandments.
Hume's is/ought problem assumes that things are the way they are for no reason. If instead you assume things are the way they are for a reason (which is intuitively obvious) then the way things are can potentially tell you about what ought to be (although we haven't defined what "ought" means). Specifically, if you assume that things were created by intelligent design for some purpose (that everything happened by chance for no reason is literally retarded, putting deductive logic and epistemology aside because then you literally can't prove anything) then it makes sense that we might be able to discern some of the purpose and principles behind the design, and we might decide to call things in line with those principles and ultimate purpose how things "ought" to be.
Is it subject to interpretation? Yes. Does that mean any interpretation is legitimate and there are no right or wrong answers? No. It's like trying to estimate the mean of a population and other characteristics of it from a sample. There are correct answers even if we don't know what they are, and there are rational methods which will give us a decent estimate of the correct answer from what we can observe. These methods are not irrational and arbitrary, which is why virtually every culture in history (that I've heard of) has inferred the existence of a creator(s) despite not directly observing one (until rationalism came along).
Man has a natural ability to interpret nature even if it's not always correct. Neither is the conscience always correct, nor our intuitions, nor is nature always good. Hardly anything is always correct or known for certain, which is why man has an ability to work with fuzzy logic and why it was wrong to try to prove everything deductively from first principles. It would be nice if things were that easy, but God apparently doesn't want to make it too easy and wants us to figure stuff out the hard way, which would explain why he keeps himself hidden and doesn't interact with us directly. The way God guides us is through life and nature that he has designed, and these teach us to learn and develop ourselves so we can overcome challenges, not expect someone or something else to have all the answers and always be there to rescue us.
Yes, Hume assumes a skeptical position and his problem is critique of naive empiricism (along with his problem of induction which is a classic defeater for empiricism). He demonstrates that observation of what is alone can't tell you what is good, preferable, desirable, etc. There is an epistemological gap between knowledge of how things are and how they should be. So everyone has to appeal to some other paradigm that informs morality. The problem is, atheists and materialists can't justify the existence of a moral standard because their paradigm only accepts empirical observation and sense data. Their position always reduces to moral relativism where nothing is inherently good or bad, but everything is a matter of personal preference.
So for moral realists, the question ultimately is what is the standard for morality and how do we have knowledge of it. I'd argue only the Orthodox Christian worldview can give a coherent, consistent and holistic worldview that can justify and answer those questions. In essence:
The reason why our intuition and reason alone is insufficient to have that knowledge is our fallen nature which inclines our free will away from God, thus being deceived into choosing evil/sin.
All objective morality has to appeal to some standard. And then the question of "Why is that the standard?" shows that it likewise is in some sense relative. You can answer that question with some reasons, like God having authority to decide what is moral in his creation, but it never disproves other standards of morality which are justified by other reasons, such as the atheist's "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral".
Yet again, the problem is trying to justify everything from first principles. It's impossible because it will always go back infinitely, use circular logic or go back to something unjustified. Instead it makes more sense to base things on what is unprovable yet intuitively obvious, like other people having agency, some actions being wrong, and that wrong actions by those with agency should be punished.
That is in fact what everybody does, looking into their conscience, and to the extent one looks to an outside source for morality, it is rarely to go completely counter to one's conscience. Hence why Christians deep down don't believe slavery as practiced in the Bible is A-OK, don't believe children who curse their parents deserve death, don't believe it's ever OK to kill a whole city including women and children (or capturing the women for soldiers to have), and don't think it's normally a good idea to give a woman to her husband's brother or a man who raped her. Likewise I judge nature by my conscience while also trying to learn what is good from nature.
And if we trust our consciences (and we all do) we need an explanation for why they are trustworthy. The obvious explanation is that they were meant to guide us, being given to us by the creator(s). And then it only makes sense that the creator would have a similar sense of morality to our consciences, and being the source of our consciences is a more reliable measure of what is moral - for we know our consciences do not always agree. And knowing this creator also made other people's consciences, as well as the whole of nature, it follows that we can get closer to the creator's morality by studying the consciences of others and the things of nature, which appear to be made for our benefit, given how so many of them are good for our health in contrast to artificial things.
That's why such debates boil down to worldview comparison and transcendental argumentation - which worldview can justify the thing in question, in this case morality. The problem with the atheist position is that they can't justify their claims within their worldview. Why? Because atheists believe in a meaningless and purposeless deterministic universe of random chemical processes in constant flux. They can't give an account how the laws of logic, metaphysics, knowledge and ethics exist in such a universe. It's a self-refuting position. But even if we grant them the proposition "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral", they can't answer why it is the case and how they know that without being ad hoc or circular. Even if the proposition is true, it's not a justified belief but an axiomatic/self-evident one. But nothing can be self-evident and everything needs to be justified.
Those are a lot of assumptions. Maybe the creator is the evil demiurg of the Gnostics? Maybe we're supposed to rebell against the evil demiurg and transcend the limitations of the nature he created by using artifice and becoming transhumanists? Maybe the creator didn't make all people the same and maybe some people don't even have a soul and are vessels for evil spirits (shout out to Scientology)? The point is without God's explicit revelation we can't know any of this just by looking around.
This is not to say that outside of Christianity people can't be moral - they can and they have been historically obviously (which is in line with the Christian teaching of God's law being written on our heart). What they can't do is justify objective morality.