God and Morality

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Atheists can be moral if they behave morally, just like anyone else.  If there can be such a thing as an immoral believer, there can be such a thing as a moral atheist. 

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The original question of the thread was whether people could be moral if they were atheists.  On the traditional Christian metaphysical account, goodness, strictly speaking, constitutes the divine essence, so that nothing could be good without God.  But, even if we were to accept this account, the question of being does not necessarily implicate the question of any individual creature's belief.  One could conceivably still be good, or do good, without believing in God's existence, even if the believer insists that goodness has its origin in God's nature, which is unknown to or denied by the non-believer.

As for other conceptions of the divine that do not attribute to the divine goodness or intentional consciousness, such conceptions certainly exist, and indeed require that moral goodness has some other origin.  It's still a perfectly reasonable thing to discuss, at least.

As for Andrew's comments about thought and the materialist assumptions behind them, I think the argument he is making rather goes something like this (and please correct me Andrew if I'm wrong):  What we know to be "seeing" and "thinking" are invariably processes that require a nervous system and a brain structure of a certain complexity, and thus we cannot really conceive of anything that we could properly call "seeing" and "thought" that does not involve these material preconditions.  If God is supposed to be a spiritual being who does not have material existence, then either God does not really "see" or "think," and such activities can only be metaphorically applied to him or her or it, or there is simply no such being as the God spoken of by the Christian scriptural traditions that attribute states such as consciousness and will to him.  It's not an argument that necessarily makes unwarranted assumptions about God, but rather an argument about the nature of sensation and consciousness as we can conceive of them, and how far, or whether at all, we can attribute these processes to supposedly non-material beings.