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I will answer your question. But first I must say that your response to my question removes any doubt that you, in fact, deny there is objective evil in the world. Your answer is an honest one and I thank you for that. You even use an abhorrent example to imply that murder (the taking of innocent life) to imply that it can be described as disruptive or even destructive for a community, and make a 'moral equivalency' of life to property (prosperity).

To the contrary, your worldview is a veiw that morality is subjective, not objective.

I am thrilled with your honesty, because your world view is the case study demonstrating that man is of little or no value...(perhaps a few cents worth of iron, copper, other minerals). Your worldview clearly demonstrates what theists have been saying for years, that darwinist, atheistic, materialism yields this type of thinking. Why think that if God does not exist, we would have any moral obligations to do anything. Who or what should impose any moral duty or obligation on anyone. If there are no objective moral wrongs, how can a materialist condemn any act....child torture, rape, murder, mass murder of 6 million people because they have a certain heritage...Dostoyevsky said it...all things are permitted. But we must remember the question is not: Must we believe in God to live moral lives? Today we se no reason to believe that materialist cannot live a moral life. Similarly the question is not: Can we formulate a system of ethics without reference to God? But there is no justification as to why the materialist atheist should do so. A "shopping list" of rights and wrongs could be adopted as the relativist. Your last statement of prosperity being a good, in your world, must be seen to conflict with the notion of 'good' or 'evil', because there is no standard to guage such a classification system. It is simply horizontal laudry list of conditions (prosperity) because it cannot be determined to be good, in a moral system which declares there is none. Prosperity simply is, and to define it or question it as 'good' corrupts the observation, and makes the comment or question absurd, as your example describes it. I would simply ask, why would you ask if I can explain something which you could see as good (prosperity). Your denial of objective moral law makes the question meaningless, in your world where it cannot be allowed to reside. There, likewise, can never be a complaint about civil rights, civil wrongs, civil lawbreakers; only broken conventions of other men who consider themselves equal and therefore there can be no proximate cause of any wrongdoing, because wrong does not exist. The Germans of the '30's had conventions and killed over 6 million innocent women, children, and men. Their conventions served their purpose. Now those conventions have changed, imposed upon them by a stronger force, and will change again apart from recognizing objective morality.

Now to answer your question...Why is murder intrinsically evil, objective, evil? The answer lies in the many truths which argue the existence of God. (Can we agree that God is defined as a necessary, not contingent, metaphysical being) (You can agree for a working definition, even if you deny that as true). I will only point to what you already know,...that is the Cosmological argument, the Teleological argument, the Ontological arguments all attest to the truth that God exists. I feel, however, since I am sure you are familiar with all of these arguments that I will not expound on them. I will however expound on one other...that is the Transcendental Argument for the existence of God which says, We prove the existence of God from the impossibility of the contrary (that being God does not exist). The Transcendental proof for God's existence is that without Him it is impossible to prove anything. The atheists materialists world is irrational and cannot consistently provide the preconditions of intelligible experience, science, logic, or morality. The materialists worldview cannot allow for laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, the ability of mind to understand the world around him, or moral absolutes. The laws of logic are not conventional or sociological. The laws of logic have a transcendent nature about them. They are universal, invarient, and immaterial in nature. The laws of logic are abstract and not materialistic. As invariant, they don't fit into what most materialists would tell us about the consistantly changing nature of the world. In the theistic world these abstract entities make sense because in the theists worldview there are abstract, universal, and invariant entities such as the laws of logic,spirit, mind, etc.

As these laws of logic fall prey to the materialist they cease to be laws and become conventions as you so aptly pointed out in your example and statement. If materialists are to be true to materialism they must refuse to acknowledge logic, reason, and rational thought as tools to explain their worldview, and without logic and ratioal thought their positions become arbitrary and absurd....thus the materialist inferring that prosperity is good, an impossibility for the consistent materialist. The best they can hope for is a shopping list of conventions to be agreed upon by a majority and inforced by tyrany imposed. People cannot be satisfied by absurdity and caprice, they rely on examining a rational universe by use of laws of logic. If those are abandoned nothing makes sense.

So I present you with the arguments for God's existence, a personal, necessary existent being, which you may accept of deny. But my answer to your question....Why is it intrinsically evil,....is that given there is a Transcendent God, and the case is very, very strong, and He has revealed that we are made in His likeness, our moral duty is grounded in divine moral commands, not sociological conventions. The rejection of divine moral commands lead to the place where you find yourself,...the place where despits have gathered form millenia.

I do not say that materialist cannot be moral in their behavior, they simply cannot justify being moral, just as your confusion is demonstrated in your questions. Neither are God's commands arbitrary, but the absolute objective moral law reflects God's very character.

The materialist, atheist might ask, "Why pick God's nature as definition of the good, the answer is that God, by definition, is greatest conceivable Being, and a Being that is the paradigm which exemplifies goodness. Unles we are nihilists, we have to recognize some ultimate standard of value, and God is the least arbitrary stopping point. Thus the moral argument brings us to a personal, necessary Being Who is the locus and source of moral goodness. That Necessary Being demands, "Thou shall not commit murder."