What would you lose if Christianity were not true?

FireDragon76 · Nov 28, 2019

Here's an in-depth discussion of Divine Command morality:

https://www.iep.utm.edu/divine-c/#H2

I agree with Michael Boylan, that ethical obligations must trump religious obligations in a just society, and therefore I don't see a role for divine commands in ethics. Religions may give us some basic tools to articulate a moral framework, but they tend to do so haphazardly and are inferior to phenomenological accounts of reality.

FireDragon76 · Nov 28, 2019

Redac said:
Hope no one minds if I chime in on this part specifically.

This is interesting objection to the common answer given to the Euthyphro dilemma. I'm not sure I agree that the dilemma still stands, but it is the sort of thing that requires more digging to explain the Christian position. I'll try to give a sort of Scholastic or Thomistic response to this -- though admittedly I probably won't represent it as well as it could be represented.

In the Scholastic view, will follows from intellect (in contrast with some other views), so we might say God acts according to reason. It states that what is "good" or "bad" is determined by the telos, the ends, that are set by our very nature. It is also states that there are certain things that are absolutely good or bad for us. Since God's intellect is utterly perfect, and because will follows thereupon, then in principle He could not command us to do some thing which would be an absolute "bad" for us given our nature. That eliminates one option, since here God's commands are not at all arbitrary; He could not just order us to kill toddlers for fun because there is no way in principle that such a thing could ever be anything but bad for us. On the other hand, the essences which determine the ends of things aren't said to exist independently of God either. My understanding is that in the Scholastic view those essences pre-exist in God's intellect as a sort of reference that He makes use of. Thus the other option also falls away, and the dilemma along with it.

So yes, God is goodness -- which, according to divine simplicity, is synonymous with His will, his existence, and so on -- but I don't think it's accurate to say that God's nature is arbitrary or that it "could be anything."

I think the bigger issue is religious epistemology. Religions typically make bold, poorly substantiated, and conflicting claims about knowledge of God's will or ultimate reality. If you were a shrewd gambler, you'ld be reluctant to cast your lot with them.

That issue of religious epistemology is one reason that Christian fundamentalism has been cool towards modernity, and absolutely terrified by postmodernism.

InterestedAtheist · Nov 28, 2019

Redac said:
In the Scholastic view, will follows from intellect (in contrast with some other views), so we might say God acts according to reason. It states that what is "good" or "bad" is determined by the telos, the ends, that are set by our very nature

Hello again, Redac.
An interesting point. But it doesn't seem to do anything to resolve the dilemma. We still have to ask: under the system you propose, how do goodness and badness have any meaning? How can we tell the one from the other?
All you seem to have done is rephrased the problem without solving it. We have gone from "God knows what good is," to "goodness is God's nature" to "Goodness is set by our very nature," and all three of them have the same flaw: none of them tell us what goodness is, or how we can tell it from badness.

Redac said:
It is also states that there are certain things that are absolutely good or bad for us.

How do we know?

FireDragon76 · Nov 28, 2019

InterestedAtheist said:
Hello again, Redac.
An interesting point. But it doesn't seem to do anything to resolve the dilemma. We still have to ask: under the system you propose, how do goodness and badness have any meaning? How can we tell the one from the other?
All you seem to have done is rephrased the problem without solving it. We have gone from "God knows what good is," to "goodness is God's nature" to "Goodness is set by our very nature," and all three of them have the same flaw: none of them tell us what goodness is, or how we can tell it from badness.

How do we know?

That's ultimately about epistemology.

This isn't just an academic issue, either, but has real world implications. Religions differ in their attitude towards things like premarital sex, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, genetic engineering, the death penalty, etc. Whose conceptualization of good do we believe in?

InterestedAtheist · Nov 28, 2019

FireDragon76 said:
That's ultimately about epistemology.

This isn't just an academic issue, either, but has real world implications. Religions differ in their attitude towards things like premarital sex, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, genetic engineering, the death penalty, etc. Whose conceptualization of good do we believe in?

Well, absolutely. Here we are having a discussion in which certain Christians claim to be able to tell what right and wrong is, when it's obvious that Christianity itself has no idea at all.

holo · Nov 30, 2019

Sanoy said:
You ask why we should obey the highest authority. There are several reasons, the most obvious being what the term authority means - the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience.
This is further self explanatory in regards to why we should optimize good.

This looks to me, basically, like might makes right.

Sanoy said:
Yes, each of us believes our intellectual faculties. The difference is I have a reason which can make that belief valid, you do not.

It looks to me like you're just pushing it back one step. Our sense of morality is perfectly in line with evolution, as far as I can tell.

Sanoy said:
You and I both have the same moral intuition here, that our moral faculties point toward something fundamentally true in and of itself. We can make that same statement in regards to our intellectual faculties. Both faculties came from the same source, God or evolution. You cannot doubt one without doubting the other. When your actions accord with your moral faculties rather than your intellectual faculties, as with your kids here, you are acting in faith. You are trusting that intuition over your own intellectual intuitions. So your actions are contrary to your intellectual world view.

This isn't true, because I don't claim to act, or even see the world, in strictly intellectual terms. Like if I see a mother hugging her newborn, I can say that it's all hormones and oxytocin and blah blah blah, but that doesn't mean I'm not acknowledging the reality of the experience.
I know I have no grounds to say my children are objectively the most valuable things on Earth. I also know it's perfectly natural for me to feel like they do. There's no contradiction here.

Sanoy said:
There are two objective moral rules. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Love your neighbor as yourself. It's objective because God created all that there is and set these objectives.

That may be true, but how would I know? I guess that's for another thread, but it's certainly not like these laws are self-evident, like we could find them in nature or something.

Sanoy said:
Genocide, Morals and consistency.
You say that it's 'hard to use God's nature as a base for morality when He commands Genocide'. But that belies the very issue I have been stating, that you are a moving in and out of your world view using two paradigms. You are creating a dialectical loop in your head, Good refers to God's nature, God is good, God is doing what is not Good. You are combining my paradigm in the first case, but reverting back to your paradigm to determine what is Good. Your paradigm doesn't matter in regards to what God does. And unless you can affirm an objective standard in regards to what a perfectly moral person looks like you can't objectively state that they wouldn't commit genocide. All you are doing is stating the result of an ion exchange in your head, not objectivity. You said earlier that you don't believe in shoulds, but you do appear to believe in should nots, as in no one should commit genocide.

I think you're misunderstanding me. Of course I acknowledge that I have moral intuitions and that things do in fact appear to me to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong. I just realize I can't actually point to that supposed objective moral rule. Whether or not God exists, I will still have my moral intuitions.

Sanoy said:
Greed and Charity
Your sentence regarding what things drive our morality, is either wholly mistaken or being retroactively attributed. You state.

"Morality isn't the only thing driving our actions. It's a balancing act between greed and charity and many other competing desires."
I agree you meant many other things besides greed, as you follow through with "and many other competing desires". But the whole statement declares that our actions are in competition from moral desires, and non moral desires. There is no other way to read this, you are stating that Charity is moral and Greed is not moral. I understand your point from that statement, but my point in bringing it up is that you are not being consistent with your world view.

OK, scratch what I said about charity being moral. Again, my point is only that we are driven by competing desires and that some of them can be understood in moral terms.

Sanoy said:
Moral and intellectual doubt.
I believe I received my moral faculties from the same source as my intellectual faculties, God, who placed them there to point toward Him.

Fair enough, personally I'm not convinced that there even is a god.

Sanoy said:
A secret law is one that no ones knows. Who taught you to eat and drink? Was it a secret? No, it entered your consciousness to do so. All our laws come from what we apprehend from our moral faculties. Just because something can't be fully semantically represented doesn't mean it's not a very concise thing when it is apprehended. Describe the Blue, no matter who I ask, no one can tell me exactly what it is.

My point is that if someone has authority to make a law and think it's important that people keep it, they will do their best to make that law known. That's one of the main reasons Christianity doesn't make sense to me anymore. Knowing God is supposedly the most important thing in the universe, yet God and his will is for some reason elusive, leaving us to speculate, argue and even go to war over our wild guesses at what God wants and values.

Sanoy said:
You seem disappointed that Good only means God. Good is meaningless right now in your world view, it's literally whatever you think it is.

Just like for you.

Sanoy said:
Inconsistency in World View.
I don't need to have intellectual faculties that can see reality exactly as it is. Instead I see exactly as I was created to see it, for a purpose that includes my well being. I don't need to see ultraviolet light, I need to see what God wants me to see because He created me for a particular purpose. In our actual lives we all screw up and act inconsistent with what we want to do. But that is different from intellectually vacillating between two world views, to defend the world view that hold to. If we have to step out of our world view to defend our world view that world view is broken and effete.

Again, if the point of our lives is to know God, I would've expected our faculties to actually lead us to him.

Sanoy said:
The value of life is greater than ones own as Jesus demonstrated on the Cross.

Not sure what you mean here. Is it that life itself, or the lives of many, is worth more than the life of one single person?

Sanoy said:
Evolutionary Morality.
Your expectation of evolutionary morality is that it would be uniform with a lot of differences. That is an oxymoron.

No, it's a qualification. It's like saying humans have noses, but not all noses are exactly the same. That's why I said largely uniform, not completely uniform.

Sanoy said:
You have hedged your bets so hard here that I can't tell what this even means. In any case differences between one person and another person isn't what I called into question. What I called into question is that the vast majority of this uniformity goes against genetic propagation.

It's true that some of our moral intuitions, at least today, seem to be working against genetic propagation. Like, why take care of the very old and sick at all? Why should I care about some kid in Cambodia whose life will never make a difference to me anyway? But like I said, our morality doesn't have to be perfectly in sync with the "demands" of evolution. It just has to be, on a large scale, better suited than the alternatives. I could try to propagate my genes as much as possible by raping every woman I saw, but the a society of rapists would probably go extinct in competition against one which values things like compassion and cooperation.

Sanoy said:
Mental consequences of this world view.
According to my world view my faculties are functioning as intended. According to yours they are not intended to function.

True. Not "intended" as in we are what we are because of evolution, not the will of some deity.

Sanoy said:
I didn't see an explication in regards to why your world view wouldn't make you insane.

I shouldn't have to explain why it doesn't make me insane. Like I wrote above, I'm not claiming to live my life in a perfectly "rational" manner. The fact that objective values don't exist doesn't mean it's pointless or "insane" of me to find value in things.

You assume life itself must have some sort of external purpose. I don't. Simple as that
I know that any meaning I find in life is 100% subjective and will be gone when I'm gone. I'm fine with that.

Sanoy said:
And further if your perceptions of reality don't match reality, or any designated purpose why should anyone, including yourself, believe your world view is true. You could give a reason why, but that would immediately be undermined by your world view.

Sure, I can't point to an objective "should," but again neither can you. You can just point to God.

Sanoy said:
What I meant by example of eating or helping your kids is that you are operating contrary to your world view on a consistent basis. You claim that your intellectual world view is correct, but you act according to your moral world view. That tells me you have greater trust in your moral faculties than your intellectual faculties which is the exact opposite of what you claim.

Again I don't see the contradiction. I don't claim to live strictly rationally. If I did, I would hardly be human.

Sanoy said:
Objectivity of a moral standard.
A christian who believed slavery was OK is mistaken, not insane. The reality of morality is that acting morally or immorally changes ones own nature and has eternal consequence.

If he's mistaken, how could we correct that? And how can you trust in your own moral judgments if someone who was probably just as sincere as you, could be that wrong about something so horrible?

Sanoy said:
Reliable intellectual faculties.
The reason why our eyes mistake this optical illusion is because we have cells in our visual system which turns certain lines into shapes so that we can quickly identify something. You can turn that off and lose the illusion, but not without consequence. What we have are intellectual faculties that were created according to God's purposes. They are not what they should be in this age, but that is our doing. They don't need to be without mistake, they need to be reliable.

And they are reliable in our day to day lives, that is, they pretty much get the job done. When it comes to God and such, they seem untrustworthy.

Sanoy said:
Now you state that you don't see why God is necessary for our faculties to work, and yet I have repeatedly ask why working intellectual faculties would be likely on evolution. Until you actually have a reason why our intellectual faculties should work, you should claim that isn't necessary. He is necessary because there is nothing else that would make it likely that our faculties would result in a true belief.

Not sure what you mean by "true belief," but I think no matter how smart we become and how much we learn, we will never have a true (or complete) grasp of reality. If we did have something like that, then I agree it would be pretty remarkable and a weird thing for evolution to produce.

I don't know why we are conscious, that's still a mystery. It could be that consciousness happens by itself once a system (like a brain) becomes complex enough, or consciousness may actually be fundamental in the universe. It makes sense that we make calculations and have memory and such, but those things can exist without there being an actual experience, a consciousness, of it. It may be consciousness is God-given somehow. I just don't know, but I can't take the fact that it exists as proof that there is a god. Or gods, for that matter.

Sanoy · Nov 30, 2019

holo said:
This looks to me, basically, like might makes right.

It looks to me like you're just pushing it back one step. Our sense of morality is perfectly in line with evolution, as far as I can tell.

This isn't true, because I don't claim to act, or even see the world, in strictly intellectual terms. Like if I see a mother hugging her newborn, I can say that it's all hormones and oxytocin and blah blah blah, but that doesn't mean I'm not acknowledging the reality of the experience.
I know I have no grounds to say my children are objectively the most valuable things on Earth. I also know it's perfectly natural for me to feel like they do. There's no contradiction here.

That may be true, but how would I know? I guess that's for another thread, but it's certainly not like these laws are self-evident, like we could find them in nature or something.

I think you're misunderstanding me. Of course I acknowledge that I have moral intuitions and that things do in fact appear to me to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong. I just realize I can't actually point to that supposed objective moral rule. Whether or not God exists, I will still have my moral intuitions.

OK, scratch what I said about charity being moral. Again, my point is only that we are driven by competing desires and that some of them can be understood in moral terms.

Fair enough, personally I'm not convinced that there even is a god.

My point is that if someone has authority to make a law and think it's important that people keep it, they will do their best to make that law known. That's one of the main reasons Christianity doesn't make sense to me anymore. Knowing God is supposedly the most important thing in the universe, yet God and his will is for some reason elusive, leaving us to speculate, argue and even go to war over our wild guesses at what God wants and values.

Just like for you.

Again, if the point of our lives is to know God, I would've expected our faculties to actually lead us to him.

Not sure what you mean here. Is it that life itself, or the lives of many, is worth more than the life of one single person?

No, it's a qualification. It's like saying humans have noses, but not all noses are exactly the same. That's why I said largely uniform, not completely uniform.

It's true that some of our moral intuitions, at least today, seem to be working against genetic propagation. Like, why take care of the very old and sick at all? Why should I care about some kid in Cambodia whose life will never make a difference to me anyway? But like I said, our morality doesn't have to be perfectly in sync with the "demands" of evolution. It just has to be, on a large scale, better suited than the alternatives. I could try to propagate my genes as much as possible by raping every woman I saw, but the a society of rapists would probably go extinct in competition against one which values things like compassion and cooperation.

True. Not "intended" as in we are what we are because of evolution, not the will of some deity.

I shouldn't have to explain why it doesn't make me insane. Like I wrote above, I'm not claiming to live my life in a perfectly "rational" manner. The fact that objective values don't exist doesn't mean it's pointless or "insane" of me to find value in things.

You assume life itself must have some sort of external purpose. I don't. Simple as that
I know that any meaning I find in life is 100% subjective and will be gone when I'm gone. I'm fine with that.

Sure, I can't point to an objective "should," but again neither can you. You can just point to God.

Again I don't see the contradiction. I don't claim to live strictly rationally. If I did, I would hardly be human.

If he's mistaken, how could we correct that? And how can you trust in your own moral judgments if someone who was probably just as sincere as you, could be that wrong about something so horrible?

And they are reliable in our day to day lives, that is, they pretty much get the job done. When it comes to God and such, they seem untrustworthy.

Not sure what you mean by "true belief," but I think no matter how smart we become and how much we learn, we will never have a true (or complete) grasp of reality. If we did have something like that, then I agree it would be pretty remarkable and a weird thing for evolution to produce.

I don't know why we are conscious, that's still a mystery. It could be that consciousness happens by itself once a system (like a brain) becomes complex enough, or consciousness may actually be fundamental in the universe. It makes sense that we make calculations and have memory and such, but those things can exist without there being an actual experience, a consciousness, of it. It may be consciousness is God-given somehow. I just don't know, but I can't take the fact that it exists as proof that there is a god. Or gods, for that matter.

Ought
Why do you object saying "might makes right" as if it isn't moral when you have no objective moral standard? It isn't might makes right remember? Good refers to God's nature, not His power. Think about it, you have this intuition of ought, and that this ought is right, what explanation could you ever give for that ought than God? You have these questions because you want answers for the expectations derived from your moral faculties, and yet you carry a world view that doesn't satisfy them but denies them. When will you ask these questions of your own world view? I could just say that God's God and you aren't and that would be as intellectually satisfying as your world view that just denies them for no reason.

You later state that I can't point to an objective should, but God is an objective should.

Warrant.
You say that your sense of morality is perfectly in line with evolution but you haven't been able to answer any of my questions on it. If you disagree that Genghis Khan was the greatest moral person that has lived then you should disagree with evolution fitting perfectly in line with our morals. And again, by what intellectual faculties do you make the claim that evolution fits perfectly in line with our sense of morality?

Moral faith
There is a contradiction in your behavior. "acknowledging the reality of an experience", is the acceptance of a proposition, not an action. When you feel like beating your kids, but stop because it might be wrong you are acting according to a reality you know is not real. You state that that things do in fact appear to you to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong, and you act according to that appearance rather than your intellectual knowledge of reality. So if you aren't even acting as if your world view is true, and you don't claim to have the intellectual faculties capable of confirming that your world view is true, why should anyone, especially you believe it's true?

Genocide, Morals and consistency.
This is exactly what I am talking about in switching paradigms. You stat that things do in fact appear to you to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong, and so you make objections, like genocide, based on that appearance. However that is a paradigm you intellectually reject as not objective, and only seem to bring up for God, rather than your own world view. Is your own world view morally right or wrong? No, it isn't. You might say it's morally right or wrong for you, but then why bring it up for God? Here again you act contrary to your world view in acting morally rather than intellectually. If your world view is true, and you believe it's true, you should be acting as if it's true, however you show that you don't actually believe it with every moral objection.

Secret Laws.
You state God should have made His moral law clear, as if He hasn't, and yet you just stated - things do in fact appear to me to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong. According to Romans 2:15-16 that is all the law they need.

They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them 16on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

Moral reliability.
On your world view Good is whatever our moral faculties point toward, however our moral faculties could point toward anything. You are mistaken when you say that is true for me too, because on my world view our moral faculties could only point toward God who made them.

Inconsistency in world view
You have said nothing in response to why your vacillate between your world view and mine. Instead you say our faculties should lead us to Him, which is odd because you used to be a Christian. So it seems that they did, and in fact they do. Studies have shown that we have what is called intuitive theism, which is a teleological intuition about the world. If God doesn't exist how else would there be so many religions if we didn't innately have a religious tendency toward religion?

You later excuse yourself from this inconsistency by saying you don't live strictly rational. Yeah I would agree you live like an insane person with brief windows of sanity according to this world view.

Value of life
I think that Jesus would have died for a single person.

Evolutionary morality.
If our moral intuitions don't align with evolution then what reason is there to believe that they are from evolution? Why believe an explanation that doesn't fulfill it's conclusion? A society of rapists wouldn't go extinct, one side would just win and women would become cattle and a flourishing society of genetic propagation would begin. If you think that would be bad then it's a problem that you uphold evolution to explain your moral faculties.

World view and insanity.
You object that because you don't live a perfectly moral life, your inconsistency with reality doesn't make you insane. But I never said you did lead a perfectly moral life, and an insane person doesn't lead a perfectly insane life. Look at your objection here....You appeal to your lack of moral perfection to save yourself from the accusation of insanity. So the option is, lead a perfectly moral life of insanity, or a perfectly immoral life of sanity. Look at that! That is you without God. What have you done.

Moral epistemology
Why is morality progressive? Why is knowledge progressive? Because it builds on information and the conjunction of a host of intuitions. It's not a rule book, it is a guide to create a rule book.

Intellectual reliability
You claim God would be an untrustworthy source of our intellectual faculties, and yet you claim that your own intellectual faculties came from evolution. That makes no sense Holo. The only way we could trust our intellectual faculties is if they came from God. I've asked you, you can't tell me why we should trust our intellectual faculties on your world view. So if we can't trust our intellectual faculties, we can't trust the claim derived from those faculties that God is untrustworthy.

True belief means beliefs that are true. Not knowing the complete set of true propositions says nothing about how many true propositions we have discovered with our intellectual faculties which you claim is derived from evolution. This is inexplicable on evolution.

Consciousness.
Pantheism, and complexity are all specious consciousness of the gaps claims. There is no reason to believe those things other than the personal reason that they could explain it without God. They are wholly unevidenced gap claims. It's observable, life comes from life - every time. We should expect no different here. It doesn't solve the problem either, you can slide it out of view here, but it just shows up in fine tuning later.

InterestedAtheist · Nov 30, 2019

Sanoy said:
Ought
Why do you object saying "might makes right" as if it isn't moral when you have no objective moral standard? It isn't might makes right remember? Good refers to God's nature, not His power. Think about it, you have this intuition of ought, and that this ought is right, what explanation could you ever give for that ought than God? You have these questions because you want answers for the expectations derived from your moral faculties, and yet you carry a world view that doesn't satisfy them but denies them. When will you ask these questions of your own world view? I could just say that God's God and you aren't and that would be as intellectually satisfying as your world view that just denies them for no reason.

You later state that I can't point to an objective should, but God is an objective should.

Warrant.
You say that your sense of morality is perfectly in line with evolution but you haven't been able to answer any of my questions on it. If you disagree that Genghis Khan was the greatest moral person that has lived then you should disagree with evolution fitting perfectly in line with our morals. And again, by what intellectual faculties do you make the claim that evolution fits perfectly in line with our sense of morality?

Moral faith
There is a contradiction in your behavior. "acknowledging the reality of an experience", is the acceptance of a proposition, not an action. When you feel like beating your kids, but stop because it might be wrong you are acting according to a reality you know is not real. You state that that things do in fact appear to you to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong, and you act according to that appearance rather than your intellectual knowledge of reality. So if you aren't even acting as if your world view is true, and you don't claim to have the intellectual faculties capable of confirming that your world view is true, why should anyone, especially you believe it's true?

Genocide, Morals and consistency.
This is exactly what I am talking about in switching paradigms. You stat that things do in fact appear to you to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong, and so you make objections, like genocide, based on that appearance. However that is a paradigm you intellectually reject as not objective, and only seem to bring up for God, rather than your own world view. Is your own world view morally right or wrong? No, it isn't. You might say it's morally right or wrong for you, but then why bring it up for God? Here again you act contrary to your world view in acting morally rather than intellectually. If your world view is true, and you believe it's true, you should be acting as if it's true, however you show that you don't actually believe it with every moral objection.

Secret Laws.
You state God should have made His moral law clear, as if He hasn't, and yet you just stated - things do in fact appear to me to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong. According to Romans 2:15-16 that is all the law they need.

They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them 16on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

Moral reliability.
On your world view Good is whatever our moral faculties point toward, however our moral faculties could point toward anything. You are mistaken when you say that is true for me too, because on my world view our moral faculties could only point toward God who made them.

Inconsistency in world view
You have said nothing in response to why your vacillate between your world view and mine. Instead you say our faculties should lead us to Him, which is odd because you used to be a Christian. So it seems that they did, and in fact they do. Studies have shown that we have what is called intuitive theism, which is a teleological intuition about the world. If God doesn't exist how else would there be so many religions if we didn't innately have a religious tendency toward religion?

You later excuse yourself from this inconsistency by saying you don't live strictly rational. Yeah I would agree you live like an insane person with brief windows of sanity according to this world view.

Value of life
I think that Jesus would have died for a single person.

Evolutionary morality.
If our moral intuitions don't align with evolution then what reason is there to believe that they are from evolution? Why believe an explanation that doesn't fulfill it's conclusion? A society of rapists wouldn't go extinct, one side would just win and women would become cattle and a flourishing society of genetic propagation would begin. If you think that would be bad then it's a problem that you uphold evolution to explain your moral faculties.

World view and insanity.
You object that because you don't live a perfectly moral life, your inconsistency with reality doesn't make you insane. But I never said you did lead a perfectly moral life, and an insane person doesn't lead a perfectly insane life. Look at your objection here....You appeal to your lack of moral perfection to save yourself from the accusation of insanity. So the option is, lead a perfectly moral life of insanity, or a perfectly immoral life of sanity. Look at that! That is you without God. What have you done.

Moral epistemology
Why is morality progressive? Why is knowledge progressive? Because it builds on information and the conjunction of a host of intuitions. It's not a rule book, it is a guide to create a rule book.

Intellectual reliability
You claim God would be an untrustworthy source of our intellectual faculties, and yet you claim that your own intellectual faculties came from evolution. That makes no sense Holo. The only way we could trust our intellectual faculties is if they came from God. I've asked you, you can't tell me why we should trust our intellectual faculties on your world view. So if we can't trust our intellectual faculties, we can't trust the claim derived from those faculties that God is untrustworthy.

True belief means beliefs that are true. Not knowing the complete set of true propositions says nothing about how many true propositions we have discovered with our intellectual faculties which you claim is derived from evolution. This is inexplicable on evolution.

Consciousness.
Pantheism, and complexity are all specious consciousness of the gaps claims. There is no reason to believe those things other than the personal reason that they could explain it without God. They are wholly unevidenced gap claims. It's observable, life comes from life - every time. We should expect no different here. It doesn't solve the problem either, you can slide it out of view here, but it just shows up in fine tuning later.

Hmmm. While I quite understand that you don't want to engage two people at the same time on this - and there's nothing wrong with that - I'll just state that, as a bystander, not much of what you're saying seems to make sense.

FireDragon76 · Nov 30, 2019

Sanoy said:
Ought
Why do you object saying "might makes right" as if it isn't moral when you have no objective moral standard? It isn't might makes right remember? Good refers to God's nature, not His power. Think about it, you have this intuition of ought, and that this ought is right, what explanation could you ever give for that ought than God? You have these questions because you want answers for the expectations derived from your moral faculties, and yet you carry a world view that doesn't satisfy them but denies them. When will you ask these questions of your own world view? I could just say that God's God and you aren't and that would be as intellectually satisfying as your world view that just denies them for no reason.

You later state that I can't point to an objective should, but God is an objective should.

Warrant.
You say that your sense of morality is perfectly in line with evolution but you haven't been able to answer any of my questions on it. If you disagree that Genghis Khan was the greatest moral person that has lived then you should disagree with evolution fitting perfectly in line with our morals. And again, by what intellectual faculties do you make the claim that evolution fits perfectly in line with our sense of morality?

Moral faith
There is a contradiction in your behavior. "acknowledging the reality of an experience", is the acceptance of a proposition, not an action. When you feel like beating your kids, but stop because it might be wrong you are acting according to a reality you know is not real. You state that that things do in fact appear to you to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong, and you act according to that appearance rather than your intellectual knowledge of reality. So if you aren't even acting as if your world view is true, and you don't claim to have the intellectual faculties capable of confirming that your world view is true, why should anyone, especially you believe it's true?

Genocide, Morals and consistency.
This is exactly what I am talking about in switching paradigms. You stat that things do in fact appear to you to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong, and so you make objections, like genocide, based on that appearance. However that is a paradigm you intellectually reject as not objective, and only seem to bring up for God, rather than your own world view. Is your own world view morally right or wrong? No, it isn't. You might say it's morally right or wrong for you, but then why bring it up for God? Here again you act contrary to your world view in acting morally rather than intellectually. If your world view is true, and you believe it's true, you should be acting as if it's true, however you show that you don't actually believe it with every moral objection.

Secret Laws.
You state God should have made His moral law clear, as if He hasn't, and yet you just stated - things do in fact appear to me to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong. According to Romans 2:15-16 that is all the law they need.

They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them 16on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

Moral reliability.
On your world view Good is whatever our moral faculties point toward, however our moral faculties could point toward anything. You are mistaken when you say that is true for me too, because on my world view our moral faculties could only point toward God who made them.

Inconsistency in world view
You have said nothing in response to why your vacillate between your world view and mine. Instead you say our faculties should lead us to Him, which is odd because you used to be a Christian. So it seems that they did, and in fact they do. Studies have shown that we have what is called intuitive theism, which is a teleological intuition about the world. If God doesn't exist how else would there be so many religions if we didn't innately have a religious tendency toward religion?

You later excuse yourself from this inconsistency by saying you don't live strictly rational. Yeah I would agree you live like an insane person with brief windows of sanity according to this world view.

Value of life
I think that Jesus would have died for a single person.

Evolutionary morality.
If our moral intuitions don't align with evolution then what reason is there to believe that they are from evolution? Why believe an explanation that doesn't fulfill it's conclusion? A society of rapists wouldn't go extinct, one side would just win and women would become cattle and a flourishing society of genetic propagation would begin. If you think that would be bad then it's a problem that you uphold evolution to explain your moral faculties.

World view and insanity.
You object that because you don't live a perfectly moral life, your inconsistency with reality doesn't make you insane. But I never said you did lead a perfectly moral life, and an insane person doesn't lead a perfectly insane life. Look at your objection here....You appeal to your lack of moral perfection to save yourself from the accusation of insanity. So the option is, lead a perfectly moral life of insanity, or a perfectly immoral life of sanity. Look at that! That is you without God. What have you done.

Moral epistemology
Why is morality progressive? Why is knowledge progressive? Because it builds on information and the conjunction of a host of intuitions. It's not a rule book, it is a guide to create a rule book.

Intellectual reliability
You claim God would be an untrustworthy source of our intellectual faculties, and yet you claim that your own intellectual faculties came from evolution. That makes no sense Holo. The only way we could trust our intellectual faculties is if they came from God. I've asked you, you can't tell me why we should trust our intellectual faculties on your world view. So if we can't trust our intellectual faculties, we can't trust the claim derived from those faculties that God is untrustworthy.

True belief means beliefs that are true. Not knowing the complete set of true propositions says nothing about how many true propositions we have discovered with our intellectual faculties which you claim is derived from evolution. This is inexplicable on evolution.

Consciousness.
Pantheism, and complexity are all specious consciousness of the gaps claims. There is no reason to believe those things other than the personal reason that they could explain it without God. They are wholly unevidenced gap claims. It's observable, life comes from life - every time. We should expect no different here. It doesn't solve the problem either, you can slide it out of view here, but it just shows up in fine tuning later.

In my experience we should be doubly suspicious of anyone claiming to have the market cornered on "objective" reasons for a given belief or moral stance. Usually that's simply a claim to power masked by some kind of sophistry or scientism.

holo · Nov 30, 2019

Sanoy said:
Ought
Why do you object saying "might makes right" as if it isn't moral when you have no objective moral standard?

The question isn't whether or not it's in line with my moral standard, I'm asking if your view doesn't ultimately boil down to that - God's authority.

Sanoy said:
I could just say that God's God and you aren't and that would be as intellectually satisfying as your world view that just denies them for no reason.

And that's basically what you're saying, isn't it? "God is God."

Sanoy said:
You later state that I can't point to an objective should, but God is an objective should.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that. I don't see how God would be objective rather than subjective just because he's the ultimate authority or whatever. And I still can't see how values can be objective, even in principle.

Sanoy said:
Warrant.
You say that your sense of morality is perfectly in line with evolution but you haven't been able to answer any of my questions on it. If you disagree that Genghis Khan was the greatest moral person that has lived then you should disagree with evolution fitting perfectly in line with our morals. And again, by what intellectual faculties do you make the claim that evolution fits perfectly in line with our sense of morality?

From what I know about evolution and how it works, it seems to fit very well with the morality I see in the world. It doesn't mean I'm condoning anything or everything people have done through history. It just means I see evolution as a reasonable explanation for why people do the things they do.

Sanoy said:
Moral faith
There is a contradiction in your behavior. "acknowledging the reality of an experience", is the acceptance of a proposition, not an action. When you feel like beating your kids, but stop because it might be wrong you are acting according to a reality you know is not real.

Morality is real though. Compassion and art and self-control etc, is all real. It just doesn't exist outside of and independently of the human mind. So yes, I won't beat my kids because I believe it's wrong. Just like I listen to Bob Dylan because I personally think he's great. Would you say I'm acting contrary to my world view when I find something to be beautiful, because I don't think beauty is an objective quality?

Sanoy said:
You state that that things do in fact appear to you to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong, and you act according to that appearance rather than your intellectual knowledge of reality. So if you aren't even acting as if your world view is true, and you don't claim to have the intellectual faculties capable of confirming that your world view is true, why should anyone, especially you believe it's true?

I am acting as if my worldview is true. My worldview is that morality is a major component and driving force in both my emotional life, my reasoning, and in culture. Again, just because I don't see how things can be objectively valuable, doesn't mean I can't personally find value in them. I couldn't not make moral judgments even if I tried, just like I can't perceive things in more than three dimensions even though there possibly are more dimensions "out there".

Sanoy said:
Genocide, Morals and consistency.
This is exactly what I am talking about in switching paradigms. You stat that things do in fact appear to you to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong, and so you make objections, like genocide, based on that appearance. However that is a paradigm you intellectually reject as not objective, and only seem to bring up for God, rather than your own world view. Is your own world view morally right or wrong? No, it isn't. You might say it's morally right or wrong for you, but then why bring it up for God? Here again you act contrary to your world view in acting morally rather than intellectually. If your world view is true, and you believe it's true, you should be acting as if it's true, however you show that you don't actually believe it with every moral objection.

Sorry, I'm not following you here.

Sanoy said:
Secret Laws.
You state God should have made His moral law clear, as if He hasn't, and yet you just stated - things do in fact appear to me to be objectively and obviously morally right or wrong. According to Romans 2:15-16 that is all the law they need.

They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them 16on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

Quoting the bible is of limited value to an unbeliever. But in any case it's
clearly not true that everybody somehow knows God's law. You could argue that the vast majority of people seem to have an aversion against killing, for example, but people's morality is all over the place. If God's law is known to everyone, how can it be that God-fearing people ever had slaves?

Sanoy said:
Moral reliability.
On your world view Good is whatever our moral faculties point toward, however our moral faculties could point toward anything. You are mistaken when you say that is true for me too, because on my world view our moral faculties could only point toward God who made them.

Yes, they can point toward anything, basically. Like God. Or Allah, or some Hindu gods, or you name it. They can all make the exact same claims you are making, and how would I know - from analyzing morality - which of you are right?

Sanoy said:
Inconsistency in world view
You have said nothing in response to why your vacillate between your world view and mine.

Actually I don't. But you seem to think that I'm saying both that morality is objective AND that it can't be. When I say I believe something is right or wrong, again I'm not suggesting there actually is an objective standard, it just feels like (to you and me and everybody) like there is.

Sanoy said:
Instead you say our faculties should lead us to Him, which is odd because you used to be a Christian.

One of the reasons I lost faith was that evidently, our faculties do not in fact lead us to the Christian god. People believe in all kinds of stuff, so if God designed our faculties to lead us to him, it seems he did a bad job.

Sanoy said:
So it seems that they did, and in fact they do. Studies have shown that we have what is called intuitive theism, which is a teleological intuition about the world. If God doesn't exist how else would there be so many religions if we didn't innately have a religious tendency toward religion?

Because believing in common myths is an extremely powerful mechanism for holding a group together and organized and therefore stronger.

Sanoy said:
You later excuse yourself from this inconsistency by saying you don't live strictly rational.

Nobody does.

Sanoy said:
Evolutionary morality.
If our moral intuitions don't align with evolution then what reason is there to believe that they are from evolution? Why believe an explanation that doesn't fulfill it's conclusion? A society of rapists wouldn't go extinct, one side would just win and women would become cattle and a flourishing society of genetic propagation would begin. If you think that would be bad then it's a problem that you uphold evolution to explain your moral faculties.

A sociopathic serial rapist who doesn't care about neither his woman nor his children will be outcompeted. A child whose parents (and grandparents and village) stay together and cooperate will be much more successful. In the animal kingdom it will often be the other way around, where the offspring depends mostly on the mother. Still there are species, like penguins, where both parents will feed and take care of their offspring. Because those that do that are more likely to survive in the condition they are in.

Sanoy said:
World view and insanity.
You object that because you don't live a perfectly moral life, your inconsistency with reality doesn't make you insane.

Huh?

Sanoy said:
Moral epistemology
Why is morality progressive? Why is knowledge progressive? Because it builds on information and the conjunction of a host of intuitions. It's not a rule book, it is a guide to create a rule book.

Can our moral intuitions lead us toward the ultimate rule book, some perfect knowledge of right and wrong?

Earlier you gave "love the Lord with all your heart" etc as an example of an objective moral rule. Again, how do you know? We seem to be born with certain moral values, or inclinations at least, but I don't think this one is among them. It seems to be, practically speaking, a secret law.

Sanoy said:
Intellectual reliability
You claim God would be an untrustworthy source of our intellectual faculties, and yet you claim that your own intellectual faculties came from evolution. That makes no sense Holo. The only way we could trust our intellectual faculties is if they came from God.

No, why would that be so?
How do you figure your faculties come from God? Through those very faculties, right? So how does that make God the only possible explanation?

Sanoy said:
I've asked you, you can't tell me why we should trust our intellectual faculties on your world view. So if we can't trust our intellectual faculties, we can't trust the claim derived from those faculties that God is untrustworthy.

I think I've answered that already, but as I'm sure you agree we have to base everything on certain axioms. From there, we can investigate if what our intuitions and faculties tell us (again, assuming from the beginning that we can put some level of trust in them - that's the case for both of us) seem trustworthy.

Sanoy said:
True belief means beliefs that are true. Not knowing the complete set of true propositions says nothing about how many true propositions we have discovered with our intellectual faculties which you claim is derived from evolution. This is inexplicable on evolution.

How so?

Sanoy said:
Consciousness.
Pantheism, and complexity are all specious consciousness of the gaps claims. There is no reason to believe those things other than the personal reason that they could explain it without God. They are wholly unevidenced gap claims. It's observable, life comes from life - every time. We should expect no different here. It doesn't solve the problem either, you can slide it out of view here, but it just shows up in fine tuning later.

What we know as life comes from life, that's true. But we don't know how "proto-life" came to be, and it's actually harder to even define life than people would think. Arguments that boil down to "God has always existed" or "God is outside of time" doesn't seem convincing to me. It may be that there is in fact something "outside" the universe or "outside" of time as we know it. I don't see why we should assume that our consciousness must come from some other, greater, consciousness.

yeshuaslavejeff · Nov 30, 2019

holo said:
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that. I don't see how God would be objective rather than subjective just because he's the ultimate authority or whatever. And I still can't see how values can be objective, even in principle.

By "objective", if we mean unchanged and not subject to change by people's opinions, then
God is by definition objectively true - nothing changes Him no matter what people think or feel or do.
Same with His permanent, eternal true values - nothing changes those. People change, getting better or worse, saved or dying or lost, but the values never change no matter what happens.

holo · Nov 30, 2019

yeshuaslavejeff said:
By "objective", if we mean unchanged and not subject to change by people's opinions, then
God is by definition objectively true - nothing changes Him no matter what people think or feel or do.
Same with His permanent, eternal true values - nothing changes those. People change, getting better or worse, saved or dying or lost, but the values never change no matter what happens.

The question is, does God himself have an opinion?

yeshuaslavejeff · Nov 30, 2019

holo said:
The question is, does God himself have an opinion?

Whatever God thinks , that is TRUTH. As written in some paraphrase, or commentary , or original language (I don't remember where),
"our opinions" - the Apostles, the Ekklesia, yours and mine, our opinions DO NOT MATTER (they all are subject to change, and temporary in nature, very short-lived) ...
GOD'S OPINION, what God Thinks, is eternal, and is what is important.

redleghunter · Nov 30, 2019

BigV said:
If this life is all there is, and you followed a Christian lifestyle, what would be your loss if this life is the only existence we have?

Just to elaborate, I know Christians who claim they would lose nothing, but I think it's a contradiction, because same Christians claim they have given ALL to Christ also, like the hymn says... "I surrender all.."

You mean a Christian who knows Christ someday stops knowing Him?

Redac · Nov 30, 2019

InterestedAtheist said:
Hello again, Redac.

An interesting point. But it doesn't seem to do anything to resolve the dilemma. We still have to ask: under the system you propose, how do goodness and badness have any meaning? How can we tell the one from the other?
All you seem to have done is rephrased the problem without solving it. We have gone from "God knows what good is," to "goodness is God's nature" to "Goodness is set by our very nature," and all three of them have the same flaw: none of them tell us what goodness is, or how we can tell it from badness.

How do we know?

Well, the dilemma suggests that either morality is either external to God, or that morality is whatever God says and is thus purely arbitrary. The dilemma is resolved in that a third option is given that is distinct from the other two. Something "good" for us means something that is in accord with our human nature and the final ends set by that nature. By this view, these are objective facts of reality that ultimately have their roots in God's own nature and creative purpose, neither of which are really arbitrary.

The question you seem to be asking is related but different from the one in the Euthyphro dilemma. As FireDragon76 says, it's really an issue of moral epistemology. I don't know how deeply we want to delve into that subject, though, since it's the sort of thing where we could be writing book-length responses to one another about it until the end of time.

BigV · Nov 30, 2019

redleghunter said:
You mean a Christian who knows Christ someday stops knowing Him?

Yes. A Christian who believes (knowing Christ is a matter of faith at the end of the day) and then stops believing.

yeshuaslavejeff · Nov 30, 2019

BigV said:
Yes. A Christian who believes (knowing Christ is a matter of faith at the end of the day) and then stops believing.

This is totally and perfectly in line with the Hebrew thoughts and lives of faith - they knew that they had to live daily trusting, not just as if okay I raised my hand so I'm good (that's a false gospel, btw) ....
whoever continues trusting Jesus has life...
whoever continues not trusting Jesus has not life...
simple as stated by the Father ....

redleghunter · Nov 30, 2019

BigV said:
Yes. A Christian who believes (knowing Christ is a matter of faith at the end of the day) and then stops believing.

What do you think the faith a Christian has really is?

BigV · Nov 30, 2019

redleghunter said:
What do you think the faith a Christian has really is?

Faith is a conviction that something or someone unseen exists. That's my interpretation.

redleghunter · Nov 30, 2019

BigV said:
Faith is a conviction that something or someone unseen exists. That's my interpretation.

Would not unseen mean not knowing?

I stated earlier that those in Christ know Him. I asked based on your question that would mean one would have to cease to know Him. I asked how does that happen.

The reason I asked in the way I did is knowing Christ is not just reading a book, becoming intellectually convinced of Him and His work. That’s knowledge not faith.

Christian faith is a supernatural calling of the Holy Spirit convicting the sinner of his/her state and need of salvation through Jesus Christ. This comes from hearing His Gospel.

So when such a God ordained relationship begins by regeneration of what the Bible calls our inner man, not only do we have knowledge of His redemptive and restorative plan but the very relational proof as God comes to live with us.

That is why the OP question is odd to me. How could I un-know Who I know?

How could I un-know the God Who has tested me, loved me, and delivered me?

When Christians speak of their Hope in Christ Jesus, they are not meaning closing their eyes shut tight and wishing it all comes true. The Hope is something we know will be completed one day when we are resurrected from the dead. We base this on the fulfilled promise in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And it is not blind faith. We have the example of Christ Jesus and we also have the regenerative work He has done in us as a pledge of our inheritance.

What would you lose if Christianity were not true?

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