It's not an "ontological comparison". It's also not a complete analogy, and isn't meant to be. No analogy is complete. If it were, it wouldn't be an analogy. It's an arbitrary example meant as a specific point of illustration about the attempt to split the horns of the dilemma.
Yeah, you can just tell me that, if you want to. If you want to be taken seriously though, you'll have to provide some kind of reasoning behind it.
Eight Foot Manchild, in response to your previous rebuttal, and in following up from what I only briefly said in post #56 above, here are a few additional thoughts on this matter. These are by no means my only or my final thoughts, but nevertheless here we go ...
And for those who haven't seen the video being referred to by Eight Foot Manchild earlier, here it is again for reference:
In the video, SR [or Sisyphus Redeemed] says we can't avoid what is typically passed off today as “the Euthyphro Dilemma.” That could be, but whether it can be avoided or not, I'd first aver, as I've done elsewhere, that we need to stop referring to the dilemma as the Euthyphro Dilemma and instead tack it with a better, more appropriate label. I say because the actual conceptual excision which Plato's Socrates makes in the Euthyphro is of a different nature and born from the realization that multiple gods are morally at odds with each other, implying the existence of a Moral Source outside of themselves.
However, when we meet the Monotheistic collection of divine attributes in the Hebrew Scriptures, we're not afforded the same points of conceptual excision through any reasoning and we instead arrive with a problem born of a different conceptual nature. And we need to fully realize this without blithely ignoring it and bull-dozing our way on to apply what we think is the same dilemma of 'old.' To do so would be to lean toward a
Nietzschean act of Will and resentment toward biblical type beliefs
rather than one which attempts to, perhaps, analyze the concepts of the biblical God that we think we have (such as has been seen among
Logical Positivists like Bertrand Russell or A.J. Ayer who instead just see religious knowledge and religious language as mumbo jumbo rather than 'slave language' and 'slave sentiments').
So, with that, I'm going to instead refer to what I see as a misapplication of the Socratic Dilemma as the “Modern Moral Divinity Problem” [or
MMDP, or whatever anyone else wants to call it, just as long as we don't call it by the misnomer, the Euthyphro Dilemma].
Going on. SR then says, in contention with the argument of another interlocutor in his video, that we can not avoid the MMDP by splitting horns and asserting a trilemma through which we “simply” appeal to God's Nature as the 'Ground of an the Moral Good.' In his view, the trilemma not only falls by the wayside, but this recognition of his can be taken one step further by stating t
hat any attempt to split the horns will simply collapse back into the same dilemma, compelling us to recognize and ask:
- Does God have control over his nature? (If so, do we have to think God is Morally Capricious?)
- Or Does God not have control over his nature? (If so, do we have to ask if God is still Omnipotent? Or do we also need to ask, isn't something 'other' than God actually dictating what God's nature actually is? Would this 'external force' be the true ground of morality?
SR then says we could always ask “why” at this point, but he thinks this is an attempt of futility because the dilemma then breaks down to an infinite regress. On that level, he may be correct, or at least, I think, partially correct.
SR concludes by insisting that the MMDP—again what he still calls the Euthyphro Dilemma--- “is more than a riddle or test of one's faith,” [4:32] “It's an intractable and insoluble problem that completely vitiates the central doctrine of nearly every monotheistc religion on the planet. No one has ever given a satisfactory response to it in over 2,300 years of desperate attempts to do so. Divine Command Theory was dead long before Christian apologists ever tried giving birth to it... “ Then he essentially says that Divine Command Theory should be buried, say a brief eulogy, “and if we must, mourn the passage of yet another simplistic solution
to a major existential problem.”
And if that's not enough, he wants to make sure we understand that
“... even if the apologists insist on continuing to parade this necrotic argument around like the world's longest running snuff film in the hopes that someday it might be brought back to life like their misbegotten savior, they at least have to realize that it shan't be resurrected by appealing to something as tawdry as the charge of a false dilemma. Frankly, you have much better luck clapping your hands saying, “I do believe in Jesus, I do, I do!!!”
Well, with those encouraging words **cough, cough !!**, SR seems satisfied with having shot down what he sees as a vain attempt by Jewish and/or Christian apologists to salvage their favored notion of God. I will say that I do agree with him that this can be seen as a “major existential problem,” but in my estimation it need not be on the whole.
In fact, we could look down at our feet and turn his argument around upon itself by taking our shoes off and transposing them between feet, feeling the cognitive discomfort in thinking that all things are equal [when they're not] and that one foot is the same as any other foot simply because we feel we have the freedom to be cavalier in our denotations of 'things' in our world, calling a shoe a shoe or a foot a foot, even though no shoe is ever just a shoe and no foot is exactly just a foot. And where SR sees an infinite regression, we might instead see a mystery we can't tap into, one that deserves perhaps a different kind of human complaint, being that in the final analysis it would still be Existential and Subjective in nature, either way, whether we end up valuing the Moral qualities of the biblical God or we detest them and Him.
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So in sum---here's my gripe about SR's overall contention. His claim that his modern [and now days cliché] attempt to cajole and excise out what he thinks (and only thinks) are contending active qualities regarding the concept of “control” within the biblical God's nature is, in my reasoning, a gross form of question begging.
SR hasn't fully explained 'why' he thinks there is a collapse back into a dilemma from a proposed 'third alternative X.” No, all that has happened in this video of nearly 6 inadequate minutes is that he simply complains about the simplicity of a 'third alernative X' and bulldozes his way ahead by all too briefly referring to the possible presence of an infinite regress and states that … he thinks the collapse is inevitable.
Simply saying that a collapse into a dilemma is inevitable isn't the same as discerning an actual collapse. On the other hand, I do empathize with the idea that if there is no collapse, then we could become conceptually 'stuck' in a sense. But if so, so be it. Besides, didn't Jesus and His Apostles say things to the effect that God would have to 'do something' to help any one of us to believe, taking us individually beyond the existential limits of our applied reason ... ? If so, then our understanding of God's Good and His Moral Plan and Standard for humanity will be somewhat Subjective and dependent upon His further agency in our individual lives.