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Fair enough. There does seem to be a contradiction. I don't think there is. Sticking with your example of children, can you explain why it is objectively morally wrong to kill a child?I would not use the word hypocrisy here. It's an issue of contradiction.
There's nothing inaccessible about the will of God. Being created in his image, we naturally have a strong sense of his moral will. It's written on our hearts and in many ways "common sense" to us. It's also clearly revealed in Scripture.
For God to forgive without a substitutionary atonement would be for God to violate his own desire for justice. God would not be pleased to do this.
Moral standard of judgment.
Similar to GE Moore's naturalistic fallacy, it actually makes no sense to ask whether or not God's will is good. It's like asking if "good" is good.
It would be strange if God appeared to violate his own commands. Is there such an instance of this?
I'm fine if we want to say that morality is subjective because it's based on God's perspective. The thing about God, though, is that he is an absolute being. So morality is based upon an absolute subject.
It sounds like you're trying to present the Euthyphro Dilemma which is, indeed, a false dilemma. Moral reality is rooted in the character of God. God is not subject to a moral norm that is outside of himself because God is himself the moral norm. But God is also not arbitrary or whimsical in his commands because his commands are rooted in the reality of his eternal and unchanging character.
I'd wager your response was basically name dropping a bunch of obscure academics, followed by a word salad that I would need to untoss.
Fair enough. There does seem to be a contradiction. I don't think there is. Sticking with your example of children, can you explain why it is objectively morally wrong to kill a child?
Well, it's always possible that I have dropped a name or two here or there. But whether I did or not, I'd concentrate more on the fact that since I've pretty much dismantled the Euthyphro Dilemma in the past, whether anyone realizes I did or not, I'd say that it really should no longer be seen as having any place at all in the skeptical apparatus of evaluation which skeptics try to use to knock the monotheistic God of the Bible off of the table. With that said, I'm at pains to see how there's much left for you or any other skeptic here to hoot about in your OP. (And yes, I'm FULLY cognizant and aware of just how jarringly audacious, maybe even narcissistic this sounds of me to say it....in just this way. But, there it is!)
On the other hand, I will give you this much, though,--- and the credit I give to you here, NV, doesn't come from any further wild gesticulations that could be made over anything Socrates might have said through Plato, --- but it rather comes from the nature of basic theology in the Bible, and it is this: if God's 'fuller moral truth' comes only by Specific Revelation and not so much by General Revelation, then you have a partial point that Christian Morality isn't objective but rather Subjective.
Moreover, your skeptical contentions here may very well reflect some of the Kierkegaardian notion about how our own individual positions of Subjectivity (by which I mean his definition of the 'Subjective' and not the usual run of the mill definition of the same term) can only partly engage with Objective attempts to marshal systemically ethical insights about the moral Reality in which we all live (or in which we think we live).
The more confident you are that you've defeated a millennia-old argument, the louder my Dunning-Kruger alarm sounds.
Oh, don't worry, NV. I'm sure that you know quite a few things that I don't and that because you're an educated, honest, rational individual with more integrity than I could ever wish to have, you'll be more than willing to read, study and evaluate with me the entirety of Plato's Euthyphro---in full---and line by pain staking line.
And I know that since you're this kind of upright, ethical individual, you'd do this because you know even better than I do that we wouldn't want to use a cheap knock off of what Plato's Socrates actually said in his Euthyphro argument and then surreptitiously attempt to apply it to a conceptual entity (like the Biblical God) that is ill-fitted for such an application.
Really! I didn't realize it at all. I would be very interested indeed in seeing how you did it.I've pretty much dismantled the Euthyphro Dilemma in the past, whether anyone realizes I did or not
That comes as something of a surprise to me, because I always felt that the arguments developed from Euthyphro's Dilemma offered an insuperable obstacle to Christians (and any other theists) who claim that morality is based on the existence of a god or gods.I'd say that it really should no longer be seen as having any place at all in the skeptical apparatus of evaluation which skeptics try to use to knock the monotheistic God of the Bible off the table.
Don't worry about it.And yes, I'm FULLY cognizant and aware of just how jarringly audacious, maybe even narcissistic this sounds of me to say it....in just this way. But, there it is!
How so? Explain why your opinion is superior to the Spartans who threw children that they deemed unfit over cliffs? Where do you get the notion that it is evil? What is "evil" and how can it possibly exist in a secular world view. How is "evil" anything more than opinion?No, of course I can't explain that. I don't believe that morality is objective, nor do I think that it is even a sensible notion.
But we don't need to appeal to philosophy to know that killing children is evil. It's obviously evil and any philosophy that comes to a different conclusion is obviously flawed.
How so? Explain why your opinion is superior to the Spartans who threw children that they deemed unfit over cliffs? Where do you get the notion that it is evil? What is "evil" and how can it possibly exist in a secular world view. How is "evil" anything more than opinion?
How so? Explain why your opinion is superior to the Spartans who threw children that they deemed unfit over cliffs? Where do you get the notion that it is evil? What is "evil" and how can it possibly exist in a secular world view. How is "evil" anything more than opinion?
No, it's not really like that, NV. You've misunderstood what I've intended to imply. What I'm implying is that you're assuming interation holds in all cases for all ideas; I'm saying it may on only in some cases, maybe a lot of cases. But where the Euthyphro Dilemma is concerned, you're yanking an old 4x6 frame off of one picture, dusting it off, repainting it, and then claiming that you can use it on a newer 11x14 picture----simply because you've decided that "Hey, a frame refurbished is still an appropriate frame!"That's like saying you have to fly in a vessel invented by the Wright brothers because versions developed with iterative improvements are knock-offs.
Yes, let's restrict ourselves to what may have been said in a document preserved from thousands of years ago. By no means should we use our own intelligence to ensure the argument holds up.
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