Morality cannot logically come from a God

[an7222]

"Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century.. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed...
...if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in the situation: is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for god Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that god is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiat's are good and not bad independent of the mere fact that He made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God."

Bertand Russell, "Why I am not a Christian", p19; 'The Moral Arguments for Deity'

 

[MoonlessNight]

All this discussion about whether morality comes from God is pointless anyway until we agree what morality is.

 

[mepalmer3]

Did Russell say all that? He should have read more stuff from Augustine 1700 years ago or so.

"Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century.. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed...
...if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in the situation: is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for god Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that god is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiat's are good and not bad independent of the mere fact that He made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God."

Bertand Russell, "Why I am not a Christian", p19; 'The Moral Arguments for Deity'

Augustine and others have argued, rightfully so I believe, that evil is privatio boni, or that evil is a lack of goodness. As a similar example, one might say that darkness isn't a substance, rather it is the lack of light (which is a substance). Because of this fact, we can create flashlights, but we can't create flashdarks.

If goodness legitimately exists, then it cannot be arbitrary or made up, it must exist in it's absolute form in the absolute first existence/thing/god. It's the same sort of thing with logic. If logic is an objective thing, then the very first god must be absolutely logical, otherwise logic has been created, and thus it is arbitrary.

So in short this means that God, or his nature, would not be both right and wrong, rather he must be absolutely right and anything that deviates from his nature would in effect be creating "wrong" or evil.

I think saying that an action is "right" or "wrong" isn't always the best way of looking at it. If God created us, then he intended for us to act the same way he does, by the same nature he does. He would intend us to be creatures with his values, his logical nature, and so on. So a "right" act is just an act that is in accordance with the will of God, whereas a "wrong" act is against the plan of God. To take it a step further, these morally right or good acts will, if done by all, will result it a great deal of peace, love, and so forth. But the morally wrong acts rebel against God's plan and the entirety of it's creation. It's like a ship in a fleet that all at once changes course and crashes into the ships around it.

Anyway... I think Russell simply didn't understand the idea of evil being an absence of goodness, or he simply chose to not accept it. But clearly morality can logically from the very first God. And I think clearly it can only come from that first god, otherwise it is arbitrary.

If we speak of morality as being a "subjective" morality, such as a person's personal opinions, then it doesn't seem to matter where it comes from as none of it is more right or less wrong than anything else.

 

[z3ro]

I think saying that an action is "right" or "wrong" isn't always the best way of looking at it. If God created us, then he intended for us to act the same way he does, by the same nature he does. He would intend us to be creatures with his values, his logical nature, and so on. So a "right" act is just an act that is in accordance with the will of God, whereas a "wrong" act is against the plan of God. To take it a step further, these morally right or good acts will, if done by all, will result it a great deal of peace, love, and so forth. But the morally wrong acts rebel against God's plan and the entirety of it's creation. It's like a ship in a fleet that all at once changes course and crashes into the ships around it.

This arguement is nonsensical; before man(according to the bible) there was nothing. That means that god couldn't murder anyone, god couldn't steal, god couldn't act in any way that is good, according to the bible. The only rule god could follow was the worship of god, which leaves us with a narcissistic god who only created us to glorify himself. None of the actions you speak of are atributable to god, your arguement falls apart if god can't do the things that would make him god.

 

[beechy]

The most interesting problem I've seen regarding the question of "truths" existing apart from God is in the context of Dr. William Lane Craig's essay on the exclusivity of salvation through Christ. In this article, Dr. Craig attempts to explain why, if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, He would create a world where those who weren't Christian would be damned to hell. Why those who He, by virture of his omniscience, knew would make the wrong decisions and end up in hell were ever even born.

Iin his article, Craig comes to the conclusion that because God wanted us to have free will rather than be puppets, He created a world with conditions that maximize (given how very many people there are) the number of people who would go the heaven instead of hell.

God has actualized a world containing an optimal balance between saved and unsaved, and those who are unsaved suffer from transworld damnation . . . God desired to incorporate as many persons as He could into the love and joy of divine fellowship while minimizing the number of persons whose final state is hell. He therefore chose a world having an optimal balance between the number of the saved and the number of the damned. Given the truth of certain counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, it was not feasible for God to actualize a world having as many saved as but with no more damned than the actual world.

I actually went to a lecture where Dr. Craig was presenting this theory from the pulpit. At the end there was time for some Q&A. I asked him what it was that was constraining God within the boundaries of "feasibility". Did this concept of "feasibility" mean that God Himself is circumscribed by certain a priori principles of "possibility"? All Craig said was he "didn't think God was up in heaven saying, 'I want to sin,' 'I want to sin,' . . . but I just can't!" Not much of an answer, if you ask me . . .

 

[Gerry Hunter]

This arguement is nonsensical; before man(according to the bible) there was nothing. That means that god couldn't murder anyone, god couldn't steal, god couldn't act in any way that is good, according to the bible. The only rule god could follow was the worship of god, which leaves us with a narcissistic god who only created us to glorify himself. None of the actions you speak of are atributable to god, your arguement falls apart if god can't do the things that would make him god.

God is a Trinity of persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Love - agape love, to be precise - is part of God's very nature, and has been manifested for all eternity between the persons of the Trinity. There is no contradiction in that.

And you really are mangling Holy Scripture when you interpret it as above.

Blessings,

Gerry

 

[setzie]

Hmm, there seem to be some unlogical statements in this text.

It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed...

Well, that's only an assumption.

...if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in the situation: is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not?

Ultimately there is no right and no wrong from a general point of view. It's always a decision you have to make.

If it is due to God's fiat, then for god Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that god is good.

Well there would be a difference for God since he made that difference. If there was no difference for God then he wouldn't differenciate between good and wrong.

If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiat's are good and not bad independent of the mere fact that He made them.

Why does the meaning have to be independet of God's fiat?

If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God."

No, far away from that, why shold they be older than that? But, allowedly, you could put it that way and it wouldn't even be illogical since God is eternal. I mean fair enough nothing is impossible.

Bertand Russell, "Why I am not a Christian", p19; 'The Moral Arguments for Deity'

oh...I presumed the title to be rather something "I am trying to think, but thinking is not my strength"

 

[setzie]

This arguement is nonsensical; before man(according to the bible) there was nothing. That means that god couldn't murder anyone, god couldn't steal, god couldn't act in any way that is good, according to the bible. The only rule god could follow was the worship of god, which leaves us with a narcissistic god who only created us to glorify himself. None of the actions you speak of are atributable to god, your arguement falls apart if god can't do the things that would make him god.

Well that's not entirely true.
We are humans and therefore we can not possibly understand God's thinking as a whole. Hence logical thinking is not necessarily an approach which will make you understand things ultimately. I don't know, maybe there is no way you can understand things ultimately.

 

[jayem]

I've never understood how any form of the moral argument is valid for God's existence. Even if you accept the premise that morality is dependent on a God, this is only a prudential argument at best. In no way is it evidential.

 

[pinqy]

Kant? Plato made this argument (with Socrates as his protagonist) in Euthyphro. It's slightly different, since Plato was writing about more than one god, but the basic conflict between good and God started there.

 

[Simonline]

This arguement is nonsensical; before man(according to the bible) there was nothing. That means that god couldn't murder anyone, god couldn't steal, god couldn't act in any way that is good, according to the bible. The only rule god could follow was the worship of god, which leaves us with a narcissistic god who only created us to glorify himself. None of the actions you speak of are atributable to god, your arguement falls apart if god can't do the things that would make him god.

Are you referring to the argument that you quote or to your argument itself when you say "This argument is nonsensical" since it seems to me that, of the two arguments, yours is the nonsensical one?

According to the Biblical account of the Creation (Genesis 1 and 2) Man ,as the pinnacle of the creation, was the last thing to be created and not the first, therefore, 'before Man' there was the rest of the Creation.

God as Infinite Immutable and Eternal doesn't 'act' anyway since 'action' is the exclusive preserve of finite creatures. Unlike finite creatures, God has no potential to actualise. Therefore, in his Eternal existence (devoid of time, space and change) God cannot do (nor does he need to do) anything. God simply is (1Jn.4:8). God, by Nature, IS Good. He does not need to do good things in order to be Good. It is His essential Nature and Character (and not His fiat) that define Goodness. Therefore, anything which does not conform to God's absolute, Infinite Immutable Eternal Nature and Character is by definition 'sinful'. In other words, it is less than Good. The definition of sin is 'to miss the mark'. The degree to which one misses the mark is irrelevant. If one has 'missed the mark' then one has sinned. Sin is not a measure of how bad we are but rather is a measure of how good we are not. Sin is an absolute term, not a relative one. One is either Perfect (in the absolute sense) as God is, or one is a sinner. No third option.

Evil on the other hand IS a relative term since evil is the breaking down or corruption of that which is (or was) good. By its very nature evil is not a created entity but is simply relative to goodness. Therefore, one can have goodness without evil (since the existence of goodness [Perfection] is not dependent upon the existence of evil) but one cannot have evil without goodness since evil needs to have something to corrupt or break down.

Thus one can have degrees of Evil where one cannot have degrees of Perfection (since, unlike evil, Perfection is an absolute term).

God does not 'follow' rules (as Plato mistakenly believed) he sets them for everyone else according to his Perfect Nature and Character.

God does not need to do things in order to 'qualify' as God. He is not, on the 'McDonald's principle', a bigger 'Infinite' sized human being who is applying for a job vacancy, as you seem to think. God is God because of What and Who he is, not because he was the 'successful candidate' for the job?!

Furthermore God is neither narcississtic, nor schizophrenic. Divinity does not worship Divinity. Only finite creatures worship Infinite Divinity.

It seems like you need to go back to the drawing board my friend?

Simonline.

 

[mepalmer3]

I've never understood how any form of the moral argument is valid for God's existence. Even if you accept the premise that morality is dependent on a God, this is only a prudential argument at best. In no way is it evidential.

Why do you say it's not evidential? There's a good deal of evidence that people rationally believe that some behaviors are morally better than others. You can observe this evidence on a daily basis if you listen to almost any discussion on politics. "Such and such should not have done this or that." There's also the evidence of the majority of civilizations following a very similar moral code (at the fundamental level).

So I think there is very good reason to believe there is evidence. But the evidence is not gained by using our senses of sight, hearing, touching, and so on, but it's gained through introspection. It's like the sense that tells us we are rational (or capable of being rational) creatures. In the same manner a man may see evidence that logic exists, so does he see evidence that morality exists.

I personally think the evidence is so strong that an objective morality is undeniable.

 

[setzie]

Kant? Plato made this argument (with Socrates as his protagonist) in Euthyphro. It's slightly different, since Plato was writing about more than one god, but the basic conflict between good and God started there.

Do I have to become a philosopher in order to understand this thread?

 

[pinqy]

Do I have to become a philosopher in order to understand this thread?

Nah, the basic argument is fairly simple. Assuming God (or gods) exist, the question is whether God is good or whether good comes from God.

If something is only good because it is what God commands, then no act can be judged good or bad until it is commanded or forbidden by God. Or an act can be good one day but bad the next depending on God's command (whether or not He would doesn't matter, it's a question of what he could). In Plato's version, since the gods disagree, then an act can be good and bad at the same time if we use the definition that something is only good if a god commands it.

On the other hand, if we say that something is good outside of whether or not God commands it, we have problems because we're limiting God. We're asserting a power/force that controls what God does (assuming that God does only good).

In short, if we say something is good because God says so, we have an arbitrary definition of "good," but if we say God does things because they are good, then we are claiming a good outside of God, which few religions would accept.

 

[setzie]

Frankly, it might be an interesting discussion then, but do you think that a person that believes in God sees the things in the same way?

Only because someone doesn't believe in God, that doesn't mean that the person doesn't get his ideas about "good" and "bad" from a neutral, objective source. If you develop your own ideas of "good" and "bad" then they depend upon your personal point of view.
Hence, if someone claims that God is good and that God defines "good" and "bad" then to be fair you can't challenge that claim.

Furhermore, you say "...God does things because they are good, then we are claiming a good outside of God, which few religions would accept."

My answer is simple: I don't know why God is doing things.

But if we agree on that, that he is doing things because they are good, then this is also only an arbitrary definition for us. "Good" could actually mean useful, helpful, alleviative or something else. "Good" is only a description of something which helps us to understand or imagine things better.

Anyway, why do you think that few religions would accept that?

" On the other hand, if we say that something is good outside of whether or not God commands it, we have problems because we're limiting God. We're asserting a power/force that controls what God does (assuming that God does only good)."
If we assume that God is doing good things and that we are doing good things, because we were taught by God on the issues of "good" and "bad", then there is no discrepance.


Maybe, ( or quite probably ) I didn't get your point. Could you explain this "if we say that something is good outside of whether or not God commands it" a bit more. Maybe an example or something

 

[kedaman]

"Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century.. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed...
...if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in the situation: is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for god Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that god is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiat's are good and not bad independent of the mere fact that He made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God."

Bertand Russell, "Why I am not a Christian", p19; 'The Moral Arguments for Deity'

That God is good is derived trough analysis if that's what Russel meant with not significant. Kant's moral argument is that believing in God is practically necessary, this is also derived trough analysis.

 

[mepalmer3]

In short, if we say something is good because God says so, we have an arbitrary definition of "good," but if we say God does things because they are good, then we are claiming a good outside of God, which few religions would accept.

That summarizes the alleged problem well I think.

Here is my take on it and why the alleged problem misses the mark.

Either goodness has always existed or it has been made-up. It must be one of these 2 options by the law of excluded middle. If it's been made-up, then it is arbitrary. This is why any form of "man-made goodness" is not objectively right, rather it is arbitrary.

So with God we either have the option of:

A. God made up goodness
B. Goodness exists apart from God, and God does what is good.

First B. If goodness exists apart from God, then it means goodness existed before God. This would have to be true because goodness can't be made-up, otherwise it is arbitrary. So the only way for goodness to avoid being arbitrary is if it always exists. So in this case we are suggesting that goodness has existed "before" God. However, this is illogical as goodness itself or logic itself cannot create a universe. So there still must be a legitimate "creator" that embodies goodness if it exists. So B is illogical.

Now to A. God made-up goodness. Now initially we might say, "A ha, if God makes it up, then goodness is arbitrary". However, this excludes one vital key to God's nature which christianity professes. And that is that God doesn't change, his nature is constant. This seems logically true if God is absolutely the first existence, then anything he does would be by his own plan, his own nature/essence. AND God couldn't do something against his own nature. He would not be bound by any natural laws or instincts of course, otherwise those laws and instincts would have needed to exist before him. So instead, he is necessarily bound permanently to his own nature. He cannot and thus he does not change.

So now... If God doesn't change, then if he says "Act X is good", then it necessarily is and always will be good. So in this sense, God has not "made-up" goodness, rather he has just expressed it, but he expresses what his absolute nature is.

So the charge that God could do something "arbitrary" seems unfounded, otherwise that being wouldn't actually be the original and only God, rather it would be some sort of lesser god or being that does change and is necessarily affected by other things.

In essence the argument falls apart against God. There's still the rather simple unrefuted argument that if goodness exists, it must be an absolute quality of an absolutely perfect God.

 

[Maynard Keenan]

If good is whatever God says it is and bad is whatever God says it is, murder and rape cane be good if God says it is. Hmm, in the OT there are times when God commends and commits muder and/or rape. You can't say God is good if God is the standard of good because nomatter WHAT Goes does it will be according to his will and therefore fitting the supposed definition of good. If God chose to start torturing every one of us for no reason it would be good. If God just said to hell with it and killed everyone on earth and threw us in hell it would be good. If God did anything we see as evil, it would be good because it is according to his will.

 

[mepalmer3]

If good is whatever God says it is and bad is whatever God says it is, murder and rape cane be good if God says it is. Hmm, in the OT there are times when God commends and commits muder and/or rape. You can't say God is good if God is the standard of good because nomatter WHAT Goes does it will be according to his will and therefore fitting the supposed definition of good. If God chose to start torturing every one of us for no reason it would be good. If God just said to hell with it and killed everyone on earth and threw us in hell it would be good. If God did anything we see as evil, it would be good because it is according to his will.

Well... if God does exist, and he did something we thought of us evil, then our idea of evil is an illusion. I think I already demonstrated that in earlier responses. So it is illogical to say that God exists and he does something wrong.

As far as God's actions as described in the OT. I think overall people grossly misunderstand the situation.

But I think you are right in saying that if god did do something we saw as evil, then in reality it really would be good, just our understanding of right/wrong would be horribly wrong, which would make sense as the absolute omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being will probably do a number of things that aren't understood by pretty unreasonable, unruly people.