What would you lose if Christianity were not true?

[FireDragon76]

But your explanation is better, right?

It isn't wedded to unprovable metaphysical assertions, unlike the explanation offered by Christians.

 

[InterestedAtheist]

Obviously.


This is based on your faith statement above that you don’t believe in God.

Or that they had knowledge but not a relationship. Again you are building on your own faith statement that God does not exist.


I don’t see this as an equivalence. Perhaps you could expand on this.

Truth is not fungible. Something is either true or it is not.

I have encountered statements from other men and women that I thought to be true but discovered their statements to be false or incomplete after further examination. This is to be expected of the ways of fallen mankind.

As I stated to Big V earlier, a Christian does not just read a book and mentally affirm the Truth of the Gospel. That’s part of it as the Scriptures state “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.”

More is happening to even bring a child of wrath dead in their trespasses and sins to the Light of the Gospel. The Gospel comes in the power of God. God calls spiritually quickening us. It is called the ordo salutis or order of salvation. Not to be confused with the historia salutis or
history of salvation.

The historia salutis is the history of salvation, and most of the Bible is concerned with it. When we do theology from the perspective of the historia salutis, we consider what Christ our Head has done and what He has been given, and then we consider what we as members of Him participate in. He suffered and was glorified, and in union with Him so have we. He was raised, ascended to heaven, and sits enthroned; in union with Him we have these privileges in essence now, and look forward to their fulness in the world to come. He judges all men, and we in union with Him will also judge the world. This is the way theology is done in terms of the historia salutis.

The ordo salutis is the order of salvation. This focuses on the acts of God and the response of the individual in salvation. God calls us, produces regeneration in us, so that we respond with repentance, faith, and obedience. Behind the divine call is God’s electing decree. The ordo salutis is not concerned with a temporal sequence of events, but with a logical order.

Paul provides a condensed form of the ordo salutis in Romans 8:29–30. He tells us that God foreknew certain people and predestinated them to be conformed to the image of His Son. Since God exists in eternity, foreknowledge and predestination are not sequential actions on His part, but logical aspects of His decree. Romans 8:30 says that God called these people to His kingdom, and that those who are called are justified. Since we are justified by faith, we can insert faith between calling and justification. In fact, God’s inward call produces regeneration in us, which causes us to cry out in repentance and faith, so that we are justified.

“And those He predestined, He also called; those He called, He also justified; those He justified, He also glorified” (v. 30).​

- Romans 8:29-30​

You're rather missing the point, I'm afraid, which is a very simple one:
An ex-Christian is a person who thought that God was real, but then realised they were wrong.
Or, to see it from the Christian point of view, an ex-Christian is a person who once believed in God, but then decided they had been mistaken.

I hope I've explained it?

 

[FireDragon76]

You're rather missing the point, I'm afraid, which is a very simple one:
An ex-Christian is a person who thought that God was real, but then realised they were wrong.

Or it could be a Christian that converted to Judaism, Islam, or Hindusim.

There are also people like me that are less strictly atheist and more apatheist.

 

[InterestedAtheist]

Or it could be a Christian that converted to Judaism, Islam, or Hindusim.

There are also people like me that are less strictly atheist and more apatheist.

Could be, of course. But, in the context of this thread, we're discussing people who decided that God does not exist.

 

[redleghunter]

An ex-Christian is a person who thought that God was real, but then realised they were wrong.

Oh yes the question is quite clear.

Or, to see it from the Christian point of view, an ex-Christian is a person who once believed in God, but then decided they had been mistaken

Right and I explained the distinction.

I hope I've explained it?

You sure did, but did not consider what I posted.

 

[redleghunter]

It isn't wedded to unprovable metaphysical assertions, unlike the explanation offered by Christians.

You views are wedded to your faith view. Which I cannot fathom is based on anything objective.

 

[FireDragon76]

You views are wedded to your faith view. Which I cannot fathom is based on anything objective.

"Faith view?" My "worldview" isn't based on faith at all.

 

[redleghunter]

"Faith view?" My "worldview" isn't based on faith at all.

Every worldview is based on some faith statement.

 

[FireDragon76]

Every worldview is based on some faith statement.

Presuppositionalism isn't a very persuasive position to take and it's full of absurdities.

Needles to say, I don't agree that every "worldview" is based on faith.

 

[redleghunter]

Presuppositionalism isn't a very persuasive position to take and it's full of absurdities.

Needles to say, I don't agree that every "worldview" is based on faith.

Even unbelief is a faith statement.

 

[FireDragon76]

Even unbelief is a faith statement.

Unbelief is the absence of belief.

 

[Sanoy]

Again, I'm not making a moral judgment on the claim that "might makes right," I'm just saying that that's what your view seems to in fact boil down to: God is right because he is ultimately powerful. I don't have a problem with that statement per se, I'm just pointing out that if might does indeed make right, then "right" doesn't really mean what we think it does. It means that God doesn't do something because it is right, but that it is right because God does it.

I'm not sure what you mean by surmount here. If you mean that none of us can escape a sense of moral obligation, I think you're absolutely right, with the possible exception of truly psychopathic people.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that. The more I learn about evolution the more sense it makes to me. Without faith in God, I admit the options for explaining the universe are more limited. But it's not like evolution is the only view that can be attacked for being ad hoc. Your preposition is that God exists, and hence you will tend to try to find justifications for his existence in nature.

And that's what we got. But it's not the ONLY thing we got. It's obvious when we look at history, or even society today, that on the grand scheme of things, rape is generally not the best way to propagate genes. The fact that a few people have had "success" with it doesn't mean our species as a whole would prosper better with such behaviour.

I don't know what that means, to "act upon its beauty." I still don't see how I'm acting contrary to my worldview just because I value things.

Anyway I think we actually agree here, we've just been talking past each other. I assume you find your family to be more valuable than, say, mine. Or that you find value in some sort of art. And I'm pretty sure you agree with me that a painting or a sunset doesn't have objective value, like the value is inherent in it. Right? So are you acting "contrary to your worldview" when you enjoy something? Of course not. The fact that we value things isn't contrary to anything. It's just how we are. I've never suggested that just because value isn't intrinsic/fundamental/objective, that it's therefore somehow unreasonable to value anything (or to detest other things, for that matter).

No, because again my worldview doesn't mean that we should, or should be expected to, act like machines.

No, what I'm doing when I mention genocide etc, is to point out that God doesn't seem to act according to his own moral values. This of course depends on how we interpret the bible, but it doesn't make sense to say for example like many Christians do, that God is both a righteous judge AND that he's right to torture people for eternity. I know this may not be your personal conviction, it's just an example.

If my morality is given by God, then I guess whatever he does should appear to me, instinctively, to be right and good and justified. Unless, as you propose, my morality is tainted or damaged - but in that case, how would I even know which of my moral judgments are in line with God's?

That is supposing the scriptures are in fact the word of God and that our interpretation of them is trustworthy.

It may be that the terrain (me) is faulty here, but it's also possible that it's the map (the bible).

I can't really make claims about God's nature because I don't think I can really know. But when someone does make those claims, I have to ask if they make sense, are backed by some evidence or logic, if they're internally consistent etc.

I've said quite a lot in support of my view. You may disagree with it or dismiss it, but you can't say I haven't supported it.

Yes, and I think that's the case when it comes to Christianity just like all the other religions.

That would be inconsistent of me, yes. But I haven't brought up moral standards as if they are objective. I've repeatedly said that I don't believe such a thing exists, it just feels that way to us.

Not true. What I have done, or at least tried to, is to correct your misinterpretation of my intent. I'm not saying that's all your fault, I'm sure I could get better at getting my points across.

I agree

But I can't just choose to value some bible verse, or choose to believe it's true.

I don't see why I should be obliged to participate in any particular religion.

That said, ideas like humanism are basically just as religious as Christianity. Like other religions it's based on metaphysical (or at best philosophical) claims like people have human rights. "Rights? Says who?" Well, we do. And personally I think it's a great idea and I believe humanism and related concepts will turn out to be better for us than (other) religions.

If I'm reading you right you're suggesting I'm no longer a believer because it was a chore. I can assure you that's not the case. I lost faith against my will. I fought to keep it for years, using every option I could find in prayer, support from other believers, apologetics and even the sheer desperate will to believe. Life without faith in God seemed like death to me. And for a long while, it was. Still, I lost my Christian faith. I couldn't deceive myself any longer, I had to admit that I didn't have sufficient reason to believe. Now maybe you do - I'm not really in a position to be the judge of that. But I honestly don't.

Thankfully and amazingly, I have found that it's very possible to find all the meaning, comfort and hope I need, apart from believing in God. I believe the universe and human life is ultimately meaningless. Yet we create all this meaning, all this goodness and charity, music and dancing, in spite of that (maybe even in response to that), and I think that's absolutely beautiful, magical, miraculous.

We're all victims of cognitive bias. I know from experience that that's at least as true for Christians as for atheists.

But he was outcompeted in the end. He was an outlier. Even though he got to spread his genes far and wide, even among his "children" it's evident that there are better ways to go about it. It's not enough to be a sociopathic narcissistic rapist, there are lot of things that need to be in place to produce a Genghis. A tribe of narcissists won't last very long in history even if they rape a lot of women.

Ought
Oh okay so this "might makes right" comment is just another attempt to reframe my statements into the Euthyphro. Got it. I have stated what good refers to very clearly. I think you should put your efforts into something other than continually trying to reframe my statements into a strawman so that you can employ the Euthyphro. You asked why we should obey the highest authority, that is because there is a consequence if you don't.

One cannot overcome their moral duty, there is an unavoidable consequence in how we respond.

Warrant.
If you are learning about evolution then you should be able to explain why what we observe is expected on evolution. Anyone can ad hoc their way into an observation. There is no need to agree or disagree here, you should have reasons for your beliefs that can be stated.

Mass Rape through conquest is the best way to propagate your genes. Especially if you are unlikely to propagate your genes with willing participants. You say we have achieved Darwinian expectations with Genghis Khan, but he was one man, an outlier. Now our thoughts are predominated with not propagating our genes. You bring up the prosperity of our species as if Evolution is concerned with that. It isn't. It isn't concerned with anything. It embeds behaviors and capabilities that lead toward the passing on of genes. That said it is debatable whether a particular type of species cohesion would lead to greater propagation, but it isn't striving for any prosperity. Most societal animal and insect groups do not have free ranging genetic propagation among it's members. The alpha animal or insect exclusively owns propagation while the other animals receive survival. I think you are light years from claiming we are any way near what we should expect from evolution.

Moral Faith
Acting upon beauty, or rather acting upon the acknowledgement of your intuitions is to take action in accordance with that intuition. You keep equivocating between action, and subjective experience. It is not contradictory to your world view to acknowledge your subjective experience, it is contradictory to act upon an intuitive duty when you believe it is contrary to reality.

We don't agree. I don't believe the value of life is set by me, as you do. So your family is no more valuable than mine. That is however objectively true for both of us. Your example of the value of a painting is conflating two different things. Subjective experience, and subjective duty. My comment is over subjective duty, IE not to eat your kids.

You do contradict your world view because you act according to a duty to your kids, even when it would be easier sometimes to abandon them. You are choosing to abide by a perceived duty that does not exist according to your world view. That isn't just acknowledging the perception of it, that is acting to abide by it as if it is true.

Genocide, Morals and Consistency
Ah, but when you say that God doesn't act according to his own moral values you aren't declaring those values from scripture, you are declaring those values from what you apprehend by your moral faculties. So you are indeed presenting a moral paradigm as if God should follow it, and verifying what you deny in the process. You further bring up Eternal conscious torment. Where in scripture does it say that ECT is wrong? You can't. And if you are going to bring up scriptural reliability I'm afraid you are just shooting yourself in the foot because that will just make it even harder for you to show it. So again you are presenting the product of your own moral faculties as a paradigm to condemn God. That's a problem Holo. I am also not an ECT but an annihilationist.

It's not true that whatever morality you are given is going to mean that you agree with it. As I said there are wheat and tares, Wheat will love Gods nature, and Tares will love part of God's nature. That has an ultimate consequence, and it will have a consequence on earth as well because God created this world and wheat is the only thing that accords with it.

Secret Laws.
You are making claims about God's nature Holo, several of them in fact. You literally just challenged God's nature through perceived genocide. So I continually challenge your intentions when you ask questions about God's nature, make challenges about God's nature, while seeing limited value from theological sources that describe God's nature. That is a serious conflict of interest. The only thing I have asked support for, in regards to your world view is why it is true, for which you can only respond with 'why is it false' statements, and support for why you can trust your intellectual faculties, especially when you don't trust your moral faculties which has only been supported by your beliefs about evolution. I am unable to identify what you mean when you say you have supported your world view.

Moral reliability.
It is your belief that mankind constructed Christianity, but I fail to see how that makes any sense. People created the idea that someone who just died by the state for His beliefs is alive again and we should continue in the same belief that just resulted in His gruesome death? I think you just made up your world view Holo, that is far easier to claim that what you just did.

Inconsistency of world view.
You are bring up moral standards as if they are objective, as I just mentioned. You do not use scripture to condemn God of His actions, therefore you are using what you perceive from your own moral faculties. I don't think you realize that, but that is the case. You can try to use scripture, but you just undermined it's reliability, so it would be pretty disingenuous to suddenly find value in scripture. I think you have shot yourself in the foot here.

Intuitive Theism.
Good, we agree that there is no reason on scripture that we should expect our moral faculties to lead to an explicit view of God. You don't have to value scripture for a reality claim here, all you are being asked to do is value it for theological claims. You certainly valued it when you claim God committed genocide, you seem to only not value it when it problematic for you. That is disingenuous Holo..

You aren't obliged to do anything, and yet you are acting according to evolutionary obligations for everything else. You simply choose what you want to do. And if you think religion is an evolutionary product that facilitates societal progress then you should be supporting it, but instead you will prefer your intellectual faculties. Mankind has no rights under humanism, they have actions that are tolerated and actions that are not. Humanists can thrive in a small society of people that all agree, the problem is that in large societies you have a large group that doesn't agree. Humanism could very well be killing all those with down syndrome and intellectual and physical defects. If you are just going to draw a circle somewhere based on like minded ideology and call that humanism you are free to do so, but acting like it's progress is literally just self congratulation.

I'm not saying you adhere to whatever is convenient and enjoyable to you back then, but now. Whatever sense of self questioning you went through back when you were a Christian ceased as soon as you found satisfaction in your new belief. You could have found meaning in Christianity, or not Christianity, neither means anything objectively in this case. All you did is pass over a different wave. You convinced yourself out of one wave for another, on and endless ocean. You may get swept up by another wave and become a Muslim and find it beautiful, magical, and miraculous. So defining your wave as that is really unspecial. That is the reciprocal claim to that you made of Christianity among other religions.

Evolutionary Morality.
Genghis Khan wasn't out competed in the end. He could only be out competed by someone whose rape conquests exceeded his own. He eventually lost, but evolution doesn't care if you die, it cares if you survive to procreate. So I really don't know what you mean here. Narcissim and rape is what evolution is all about, that is easily expected on it. What you need to do is show why it isn't, because Genghis was an evolutionary paradigm.

Hunh?
I reply in complete sentences. What you aren't understanding was taken from your own reply. Those aren't my points.

Moral epistemology
You already believe in the trustworthiness of the Bible to speak of God don't you? Didn't you just claim God committed genocide? I don't think you should contrive your replies this way.

Point two, God's ontology, does not soley derive from point 1, scripture it is merely assisted in point 1. Point two an come solely from philosophy of MGB.

Intellectual reliability.
You seem to only have questions for me, not your own world view. You fail to provide any reason why your claims are likely to be true beliefs, and only question the sole grounding which would make them likely. Further you fail to understand the abuctive nature of the argument. It's not circular, it's abductive. If we postulate a wicked creator of our intellectual faculties we wouldn't have any more reason to trust that our beliefs are true than if evolution were responsible. The ONLY source of intellectual faculties which makes the breadth of human truth claims reliable is a God whose purpose was to give us intellectual faculties that can be used to derive true belief. My belief is the only belief from which I have warrant to make truth claims. You don't, nor have you succeeded in giving warrant for you claims, all you have attempted to do is undermine my ability to make claims as if that give you any ability to make claims. You fail to even qualify what "some truth" your intellectual faculties can lead you too. If some truth is 50% that claim is just as likely false as true. If you go over 50% you have some explaining to do. Like I said earlier it's a rock and hard place situation.

Proposed reasons why I believe in God.
It's only fair for my own motivations to be challenged. I am not afraid of a universe without God, however I don't know how to live sanely in such a universe, nor does it seem logically possible. I would not believe in God because it is convenient to, I think it would be more convenient to create my own paradigm of self satisfaction than one where I constantly fail to meet that paradigm. Does this hypothesis reflect why you believed in God?

How So?
I'm not looking for mere responses but reasons. Those you have not given in any way that would obtain your claims. You have called me to evidence and reason so I think it's fair to ask the same.

Evolutionary hypothesis.
The problem is it is very easy to ad hoc what is expected on evolution, that is why I ask you to explain why it is expected. Anyone can write stories on how it happened.

Consciousness.
The predominant theory is that that the universe had a beginning. So I don't know what you mean when you say you don't claim life came from anything other than life. There is not gap theory in following a sequence, that is the exact opposite of a gap theory.

 

[holo]

Ought
Oh okay so this "might makes right" comment is just another attempt to reframe my statements into the Euthyphro. Got it. I have stated what good refers to very clearly. I think you should put your efforts into something other than continually trying to reframe my statements into a strawman so that you can employ the Euthyphro. You asked why we should obey the highest authority, that is because there is a consequence if you don't.

Like I said earlier, I think @InterestedAtheist will do a better job debating solutions to the Ethypro dilemma, so I'll leave that for now.

One cannot overcome their moral duty, there is an unavoidable consequence in how we respond.

I agree with that. Everything we do has consequences, if not for us in eternity, then certainly for others here and now, which for me is all the reason I need to act morally.

Mass Rape through conquest is the best way to propagate your genes.

Not true at all. A sociopath may father other sociopaths, but since they are much less likely to care for their family and ensure their children grow up, they will be outcompeted. This is clearly the case among many species - again, penguins for example. A promiscuous male penguin may fertilize a lot of eggs, but few of them will ever grow up, because the parents take shifts gathering food and warming the egg. So if we look at penguins and ask why they act this way, evolution has a pretty good answer - the genes of those who for some reason didn't participate in caring for their young, had a tendency to die out.

Especially if you are unlikely to propagate your genes with willing participants. You say we have achieved Darwinian expectations with Genghis Khan, but he was one man, an outlier. Now our thoughts are predominated with not propagating our genes. You bring up the prosperity of our species as if Evolution is concerned with that. It isn't. It isn't concerned with anything. It embeds behaviors and capabilities that lead toward the passing on of genes. That said it is debatable whether a particular type of species cohesion would lead to greater propagation, but it isn't striving for any prosperity. Most societal animal and insect groups do not have free ranging genetic propagation among it's members. The alpha animal or insect exclusively owns propagation while the other animals receive survival. I think you are light years from claiming we are any way near what we should expect from evolution.

I agree that evolution isn't concerned with anything, as if it were an entity. It's just the mechanism by which different lifeforms have come to be. Some species depend on two participating parents or even a tribe for the young to survive, others don't. Man's place on the "tree of life" places us right in the middle of typically social species where the offspring depend on their family for a rather long time.

Moral Faith
Acting upon beauty, or rather acting upon the acknowledgement of your intuitions is to take action in accordance with that intuition. You keep equivocating between action, and subjective experience. It is not contradictory to your world view to acknowledge your subjective experience, it is contradictory to act upon an intuitive duty when you believe it is contrary to reality.

We don't agree. I don't believe the value of life is set by me, as you do. So your family is no more valuable than mine. That is however objectively true for both of us. Your example of the value of a painting is conflating two different things. Subjective experience, and subjective duty. My comment is over subjective duty, IE not to eat your kids.

Again, you're talking as if I mean that since nothing has objective value, I should act as if nothing matters.

I'll try to make it simple:
1. Do you personally think, say, a particular piece of music is beautiful?
2. Do you think that the beauty of that music is inherent in that music itself, in other words, does it exist objectively?

You do contradict your world view because you act according to a duty to your kids, even when it would be easier sometimes to abandon them. You are choosing to abide by a perceived duty that does not exist according to your world view.

Of course it exists, I have never said it doesn't. It just doesn't exist outside of, or apart from, me and my relationship with my children.

Genocide, Morals and Consistency
Ah, but when you say that God doesn't act according to his own moral values you aren't declaring those values from scripture, you are declaring those values from what you apprehend by your moral faculties.

No. I'll clarify this one last time. When I talk about genocide in the bible etc, I'm not judging God according to my personal morality. I'm questioning the internal consistency of those who claim that God can both be good AND order genocide and infanticide at the same time. As far as I can tell, those two things are mutually exclusive. Now if you claim that God isn't ultimately good, or that he doesn't really want everybody to be saved, or whatever, then genocide isn't a problem, it doesn't go against God's supposed morality. When I read the bible it does seem to contradict itself. Maybe my understanding of it is wrong.

So you are indeed presenting a moral paradigm as if God should follow it, and verifying what you deny in the process. You further bring up Eternal conscious torment. Where in scripture does it say that ECT is wrong? You can't.

Sure I can, because there are also verses that say God will judge righteously. I don't see how he can both judge people fairly while also condemning anyone to eternal torment.

Secret Laws.
You are making claims about God's nature Holo

Actually I'm responding to other people's claims about his nature.

The only thing I have asked support for, in regards to your world view is why it is true, for which you can only respond with 'why is it false' statements, and support for why you can trust your intellectual faculties, especially when you don't trust your moral faculties which has only been supported by your beliefs about evolution. I am unable to identify what you mean when you say you have supported your world view.

We agree on most things. You are asserting that objective morality exists. My objection to that is that 1. Objective morality can't exist by definition, and 2. where exactly is this morality, how is it found, in short, how do you know?

Moral reliability.
It is your belief that mankind constructed Christianity, but I fail to see how that makes any sense. People created the idea that someone who just died by the state for His beliefs is alive again and we should continue in the same belief that just resulted in His gruesome death?

Yes. And tellingly, that's not by far the craziest religion people have invented

Inconsistency of world view.
You are bring up moral standards as if they are objective, as I just mentioned.

You keep saying that, and I keep saying they aren't objective, they just feel like they do. Of course I feel and act as though moral values are objective, I'm just asserting that they aren't in fact that, and neither can they be.

You aren't obliged to do anything, and yet you are acting according to evolutionary obligations for everything else. You simply choose what you want to do. And if you think religion is an evolutionary product that facilitates societal progress then you should be supporting it

No, I may support some religions, but of course I'll never support a religion that practices human sacrifice or slavery, for example. Just because something is a result of evolution doesn't mean it's always good.

Mankind has no rights under humanism, they have actions that are tolerated and actions that are not.

Basically the same thing. What is tolerated is based on the idea that there are rights.

Humanists can thrive in a small society of people that all agree, the problem is that in large societies you have a large group that doesn't agree. Humanism could very well be killing all those with down syndrome and intellectual and physical defects.

True. So I'm glad to see that in functioning democracies, especially secular ones, things like fascism and communism seems to be the exception, when seen on a large scale. Secularism and humanism has a pretty good track record so far, especially when compared to theocracies.

I'm not saying you adhere to whatever is convenient and enjoyable to you back then, but now. Whatever sense of self questioning you went through back when you were a Christian ceased as soon as you found satisfaction in your new belief.

It's true that when I found new ways to see reality and acting out my spirituality, I could simply drop a lot of the questions I struggled with as a believer and reluctant agnostic. For example the religious idea of sin is basically meaningless to me now.

All you did is pass over a different wave. You convinced yourself out of one wave for another, on and endless ocean. You may get swept up by another wave and become a Muslim and find it beautiful, magical, and miraculous.

Could be, but I seriously doubt it. I can't even imagine what it would take to convince me that Islam's claims are correct. Probably the same for you.

But yeah, I'm on this wave now and I was on another one years ago. Every day is a new wave, because we're never exactly the same two days in a row.

So defining your wave as that is really unspecial.

Absolutely. It's quite amazing to me, it doesn't have to be special to anybody else.

Hunh?
I reply in complete sentences. What you aren't understanding was taken from your own reply. Those aren't my points.

I'm none the wiser.

Moral epistemology
You already believe in the trustworthiness of the Bible to speak of God don't you? Didn't you just claim God committed genocide?

According to many (most?) Christians, he did. It's what the bible appears to say.

Intellectual reliability.
You seem to only have questions for me, not your own world view.

That's because I don't make claims about the existence of invisible, logically impossible laws or principles

The ONLY source of intellectual faculties which makes the breadth of human truth claims reliable is a God whose purpose was to give us intellectual faculties that can be used to derive true belief. My belief is the only belief from which I have warrant to make truth claims.

God could be a liar. You could be deceived. You assume not only his existence, but his personality.

You don't, nor have you succeeded in giving warrant for you claims, all you have attempted to do is undermine my ability to make claims as if that give you any ability to make claims.

We base ourselves on the same axioms though - that our faculties are, at least to some extent, able to tell us some truth about reality.

Proposed reasons why I believe in God.
It's only fair for my own motivations to be challenged. I am not afraid of a universe without God, however I don't know how to live sanely in such a universe, nor does it seem logically possible. I would not believe in God because it is convenient to, I think it would be more convenient to create my own paradigm of self satisfaction than one where I constantly fail to meet that paradigm. Does this hypothesis reflect why you believed in God?

I think I believed in God first and foremost because my parents did, which is usually the strongest predictor of what people believe. I didn't really question the faith before my late twenties, and then only reluctantly. Especially since I didn't believe in a legalistic form of Christianity then, but rather one that actually did me (and many around me) a lot of good.

How So?
I'm not looking for mere responses but reasons. Those you have not given in any way that would obtain your claims. You have called me to evidence and reason so I think it's fair to ask the same.

You say knowing truth is inexplicable on evolution. I don't see why that must be the case. Sure, evolution would be more "concerned" with having us survive, and knowing the truth about things would be selected for to the degree that it meets that end. We've made more than enough discoveries to know that we see at best only a little part of reality - we only see a fraction of waves for example. But that doesn't mean we can't possibly be justified in believing anything.

Evolutionary hypothesis.
The problem is it is very easy to ad hoc what is expected on evolution, that is why I ask you to explain why it is expected. Anyone can write stories on how it happened.

And anyone can (re)interpret their religion to fit better with how the world seems to operate. Christianity has certainly evolved over the years.

Consciousness.
The predominant theory is that that the universe had a beginning. So I don't know what you mean when you say you don't claim life came from anything other than life. There is not gap theory in following a sequence, that is the exact opposite of a gap theory.

"Life comes from life" is kind of like saying "human comes from human." That's obviously true, but if you go way way way back you will eventually find an ancestor of yours that wasn't actually human. Or take the evolution of musical styles as an example. This jazz came from that jazz which came from yet another type of jazz, but in the end you'll find some predecessor of jazz that isn't itself jazz. Know what I mean? Life as we know it may only come from previous life, but there may be something like "life as we don't know it." Nobody knows exactly how life, or the universe itself, came to be. A theist can fill those "holes" with God.

 

[Sanoy]

Like I said earlier, I think @InterestedAtheist will do a better job debating solutions to the Ethypro dilemma, so I'll leave that for now.

I agree with that. Everything we do has consequences, if not for us in eternity, then certainly for others here and now, which for me is all the reason I need to act morally.

Not true at all. A sociopath may father other sociopaths, but since they are much less likely to care for their family and ensure their children grow up, they will be outcompeted. This is clearly the case among many species - again, penguins for example. A promiscuous male penguin may fertilize a lot of eggs, but few of them will ever grow up, because the parents take shifts gathering food and warming the egg. So if we look at penguins and ask why they act this way, evolution has a pretty good answer - the genes of those who for some reason didn't participate in caring for their young, had a tendency to die out.

I agree that evolution isn't concerned with anything, as if it were an entity. It's just the mechanism by which different lifeforms have come to be. Some species depend on two participating parents or even a tribe for the young to survive, others don't. Man's place on the "tree of life" places us right in the middle of typically social species where the offspring depend on their family for a rather long time.

Again, you're talking as if I mean that since nothing has objective value, I should act as if nothing matters.

I'll try to make it simple:
1. Do you personally think, say, a particular piece of music is beautiful?
2. Do you think that the beauty of that music is inherent in that music itself, in other words, does it exist objectively?

Of course it exists, I have never said it doesn't. It just doesn't exist outside of, or apart from, me and my relationship with my children.

No. I'll clarify this one last time. When I talk about genocide in the bible etc, I'm not judging God according to my personal morality. I'm questioning the internal consistency of those who claim that God can both be good AND order genocide and infanticide at the same time. As far as I can tell, those two things are mutually exclusive. Now if you claim that God isn't ultimately good, or that he doesn't really want everybody to be saved, or whatever, then genocide isn't a problem, it doesn't go against God's supposed morality. When I read the bible it does seem to contradict itself. Maybe my understanding of it is wrong.

Sure I can, because there are also verses that say God will judge righteously. I don't see how he can both judge people fairly while also condemning anyone to eternal torment.

Actually I'm responding to other people's claims about his nature.

We agree on most things. You are asserting that objective morality exists. My objection to that is that 1. Objective morality can't exist by definition, and 2. where exactly is this morality, how is it found, in short, how do you know?

Yes. And tellingly, that's not by far the craziest religion people have invented

You keep saying that, and I keep saying they aren't objective, they just feel like they do. Of course I feel and act as though moral values are objective, I'm just asserting that they aren't in fact that, and neither can they be.

No, I may support some religions, but of course I'll never support a religion that practices human sacrifice or slavery, for example. Just because something is a result of evolution doesn't mean it's always good.

Basically the same thing. What is tolerated is based on the idea that there are rights.

True. So I'm glad to see that in functioning democracies, especially secular ones, things like fascism and communism seems to be the exception, when seen on a large scale. Secularism and humanism has a pretty good track record so far, especially when compared to theocracies.

It's true that when I found new ways to see reality and acting out my spirituality, I could simply drop a lot of the questions I struggled with as a believer and reluctant agnostic. For example the religious idea of sin is basically meaningless to me now.

Could be, but I seriously doubt it. I can't even imagine what it would take to convince me that Islam's claims are correct. Probably the same for you.

But yeah, I'm on this wave now and I was on another one years ago. Every day is a new wave, because we're never exactly the same two days in a row.

Absolutely. It's quite amazing to me, it doesn't have to be special to anybody else.

I'm none the wiser.

According to many (most?) Christians, he did. It's what the bible appears to say.

That's because I don't make claims about the existence of invisible, logically impossible laws or principles

God could be a liar. You could be deceived. You assume not only his existence, but his personality.

We base ourselves on the same axioms though - that our faculties are, at least to some extent, able to tell us some truth about reality.

I think I believed in God first and foremost because my parents did, which is usually the strongest predictor of what people believe. I didn't really question the faith before my late twenties, and then only reluctantly. Especially since I didn't believe in a legalistic form of Christianity then, but rather one that actually did me (and many around me) a lot of good.

You say knowing truth is inexplicable on evolution. I don't see why that must be the case. Sure, evolution would be more "concerned" with having us survive, and knowing the truth about things would be selected for to the degree that it meets that end. We've made more than enough discoveries to know that we see at best only a little part of reality - we only see a fraction of waves for example. But that doesn't mean we can't possibly be justified in believing anything.

And anyone can (re)interpret their religion to fit better with how the world seems to operate. Christianity has certainly evolved over the years.

"Life comes from life" is kind of like saying "human comes from human." That's obviously true, but if you go way way way back you will eventually find an ancestor of yours that wasn't actually human. Or take the evolution of musical styles as an example. This jazz came from that jazz which came from yet another type of jazz, but in the end you'll find some predecessor of jazz that isn't itself jazz. Know what I mean? Life as we know it may only come from previous life, but there may be something like "life as we don't know it." Nobody knows exactly how life, or the universe itself, came to be. A theist can fill those "holes" with God.

Ought
It's the reframing of what I say to fit into the only objection people know of, the Euthyphro that is the problem. It doesn't matter who takes that up, reframing what people say isn't the way to search out the truth. In any case the Euthyphro is doubly outdated. It was brought up in ancient times, then revitalized as an argument against God decades ago, but has fallen out of use since it failed to provide a dilemma. You very rarely see it trotted out in professional debate. It won't really matter who defends a specious rebuttal.

I think we actually disagree when it comes to overcoming moral duty. I believe that apart from God we very much can overcome our moral duties because they are not duties, we are not obliged to them, and there is no force applying a certain consequence. You claim that the reason you act morally is out of a consequential duty toward others. That is exactly what I mean when I say you act according to your moral faculties, which you deny, rather than your intellectual faculties from which you confirm your world view. Please don't come back saying "oh but I meant x". There has been quite enough double speak already, one can only back track so much before exhausting ones sincerity.

Mass rapists don't need to care for their family. A person who cares for their family may have 2-3 kids. A mass rapist, like Genghis Khan successfully propagated his deny so much that you are more likely a related to him than anyone else. It has been calculated that 1 in 200 men are descended from Genghis Khan. He was basically Conan who paraphrased Khan when he said that what is great in life is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. Are you really going to tell me that soccer man was a better evolutionary product that Khan? Your example of the penguin is one of extreme cold conditions. Are people living in Antarctica? Outside of those there for research they are not. Do you really intend to use antarctic conditions to explain non antarctic conditions?

While some species depend on two parents to survive we do not. We need a tribe, but that tribe is still there in conquest. So I don't know what point is to be made from these facts.

Moral Faith
I don't think that you should act as if nothing matters, I think you should act as if nothing really matters, which is the conclusion of your intellect which you hold in higher esteem than your moral faculties. When you act according to a duty that you don't believe actually obliges you it shows you have more faith in your moral faculties than your intellectual ones. That is both contradictory to your prior claims, as well as your world view. Your questions again equivocate between subjective experience and action in regards to duty.

You have no duty, at all, under your world view. You act as if you can get by through relegating this duty to you and your children, but you just said earlier that your duty was to others. So it's not just your relationship with your children is it. You say the duty certainly exists, but not how, who or what causes the obligation? You? That isn't a duty, that is a commitment to a methodology, not a moral duty.

Genocide, Morals and Consistency
So you find scripture to be unreliable in it's description of God's nature, but find what other people, not me mind you, say about Him to be reliable to judge God against? How is that suppose to make your statement any better here. Do you expect me to believe that was your intention here Holo? To present things other people have said about God, which I denied earlier, as if I should see an inconsistency with Gods nature vs what other people say about Him? That is what I'm supposed to believe you meant? Really? No Holo, that isn't what you meant. This is cookie jar defense.

Now you say that you can judge God's moral nature against verses that say God will judge righteously, but where does that say anything about genocide? You are determine what righteous means from your own moral faculties, just as I said you were. You are using your own moral intuition to define what righteousness means.

Secret Laws.
If you are using other peoples claims as an argument condemning God you are strawmanning. You are just making things worse here. We agree on very little in fact. I appreciate the desire to find common ground, but not through equivocation. You responded to my call for you to give support for your beliefs by giving me objections to my beliefs. Where is the support for yours? I have given support for mine, namely the same source that provided our intellectual faculties provided our moral faculties, I cannot doubt one without the other.

Moral reliability.
I asked you to explain how it makes sense to say that people constructed Christianity, and you just shrug that off with a joke? How is Christianity any more crazy than thinking you have a duty to others?

Inconsistency of world view.
It's fine if you state that moral standards feel objective, it's another thing when you act as if they are objective. It's not a problem to feel certain things, it's a problem to make claims and do things contrary to those claims.

Why wouldn't you support a religion that practices human sacrifice and slavery? You expressed concern over societal cohesion and progress. It behooves you to enslave as many people as you can Holo. The more slaves you can own the better opportunity you can provide for your kids. You can't merely evoke evolution as a convenient excuse, and then abandon it elsewhere. And why not child sacrifice? Child sacrifice is mentally satisfying to the society that includes it. If you are going to praise evolution as a prosperous source of moral faculties then why exclude slavery which is highly prosperous for a society? And I don't mean create an ad hoc contrived story like antarctic penguins. I mean why should I expect 'not slavery' on evolution? In reality your view of what evolution does and doesn't do, is simply you chasing your moral paradigm with an ad hoc evolutionary excuse. Your moral paradigm is not expected at all on evolution.

Sure what is tolerated is based on the apprehension that we have rights, but we don't have rights. That is not basically the same thing, in one case they change and one case they never change but are violated.

You can be glad that fascism and communism are present exceptions but you could wake up one day and democracy is the exception and fascism and communism is considered humanistic. It's just self congratulation to say that your circle is progress. Humanism has no real track record and what are you even appealing to when you say track record? It has a record, but it's no more privileged than any other societal record. Secularism has a record but I wouldn't appeal to it. One might excuse the embarrassing accounts of secularism, but in reciprocation one can excuse the positive accounts of secularism just the same.

When you question only certain world views, there is a real lack of sincerity toward true beliefs. Unless most of your life is behind you, you have no reason to believe that the wave you're on is any more stationary than the wave preceding it. The same things you say now would probably have been said when you were a Christian. The same things you are saying now have been said be people who later became a Christian.

Hunh?
If you don't know what you said, how should I explain it.

Moral epistemology
The meaning of an ancient document is not derived from a majority of opinions. In fact I challenge your claim that the majority of Christians even claim that God committed Genocide. Further I find it disingenuous that you find the claims of Christians of greater value than the actual text those claims are presumably derived from.

Intellectual reliability.
What logically impossible laws or principles do you claim that I hold? And if you think your world view is undeserving of scrutiny you aren't really holding it for intellectual reason, but self serving reasons. Why should I believe what you hold to be true for self serving reasons?
I think you still miss what abductive means. It is an appeal to the best explanation. I am not appealing to a liar, I am appealing to a teleological source of my intellectual faculties as the best explanation for intellectual faculties that lead to true belief. I have asked you several times to appeal to a source that can warrant your claims as true beliefs but you have failed to do so. Instead you continually try to knock me off my warrant as if that somehow gives you warrant - it doesn't. Scorching the earth doesn't make your world view a true belief.

All axioms are the product of the very thing in question, intellectual faculties. If my world view is true I have warrant for my claims. If your world view is true you do not have warrant for your claims. You earlier tried to accuse me of being circular and yet you are making a circular argument. Your interest in reason seems unidirectional.

Proposed reasons why I believe in God
This is cookie jar mentality again. You didn't believe in God because your parents did. That is what you tell yourself in retrospect to justify your position. If I asked you back then you would have given me an answer for why you believed in God, and it wouldn't have been because your parent did. The only honest answer for you believed is what you would have stated if asked when you believed.

How so?
I have stated earlier that one could have reliable intellectual faculties on evolution. But that doesn't mean it's likely on evolution. When a rat avoids an electrified floor he doesn't do so because he has a true belief about electricity. Evolution is only concerned with behavior that leads toward survival that culminates in genetic propagation, not true belief. Any behavior that leads to such survival can be attributed to a variety of beliefs, of which only one is true belief. Even if there is only one possible non true belief that can lead to the same survial action that is a 50% likelihood that one carries a true belief. Your job is to show that it's likely that you have such faculties, not make an appeal to nominal possibilities.

Evolutionary hypothesis.
Reinterpretation is not the same as ad hoc. Nor does this tu quoque attempt excuse your need to make non ad hoc appeals to evolution.

Consciousness.
You are yet again attempting to reframe my comments to what is convenient for you. I said life comes from life, not humans come from humans. Whenever you don't have something to say you strawman me instead. That is not a good way to discover the truth. All you have done in your reply to this section is appeal to ignorance instead of a gap. I am appealing to what we observe.

 

[holo]

I think we actually disagree when it comes to overcoming moral duty. I believe that apart from God we very much can overcome our moral duties because they are not duties, we are not obliged to them, and there is no force applying a certain consequence.

To a certain degree at least. My selfishness is certainly stronger than my sense of fairness or compassion sometimes.

You claim that the reason you act morally is out of a consequential duty toward others. That is exactly what I mean when I say you act according to your moral faculties, which you deny, rather than your intellectual faculties from which you confirm your world view. Please don't come back saying "oh but I meant x".

But I have to come back to it, since you keep repeating that I deny my moral faculties. I don't. I have a sense of morality, and I act accordingly. It's perhaps the strongest drive I have. I know for some people at least, their sense of morality trumps even their will to sustain themselves.

Mass rapists don't need to care for their family. A person who cares for their family may have 2-3 kids. A mass rapist, like Genghis Khan successfully propagated his deny so much that you are more likely a related to him than anyone else. It has been calculated that 1 in 200 men are descended from Genghis Khan. He was basically Conan who paraphrased Khan when he said that what is great in life is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. Are you really going to tell me that soccer man was a better evolutionary product that Khan?

Yes. A bunch of soccer moms (and dads!) will, on a grand scale, be more successful in propagating their genes than a rapist.

Your example of the penguin is one of extreme cold conditions. Are people living in Antarctica? Outside of those there for research they are not. Do you really intend to use antarctic conditions to explain non antarctic conditions?

Not at all. The penguins are an example of a species where family ties beat rape, hands down. Again, there are other species where the offspring doesn't depend on a caring father, and so the father tends to run off as soon as he's impregnated a female.

What we seen in nature, be it among animals or humans, is basically whatever has best stood the test of time. It's the things that have been selected for by evolution. Evolution doesn't demand that every single generation or individual is behaving exactly in the most beneficial manner (procreation wise), just that over millions and millions of years, some traits turn out to be "better" than others.

Of course, it's possible that evolution is false and that we simply misunderstand all the things that seem to support it, but I find it very unlikely.

I don't think that you should act as if nothing matters, I think you should act as if nothing really matters, which is the conclusion of your intellect which you hold in higher esteem than your moral faculties. When you act according to a duty that you don't believe actually obliges you it shows you have more faith in your moral faculties than your intellectual ones. That is both contradictory to your prior claims, as well as your world view. Your questions again equivocate between subjective experience and action in regards to duty.

Just because I don't think morality exists independently of myself, doesn't mean I have no reason to act on it. As I said, it's perhaps the strongest intuition I have. I just happen to realize that it is just that - an intuition.

But you didn't answer my questions. If you don't believe a piece of music is in fact inherently beautiful or valuable, would you still listen to it? I can ask it in a different way: If you held my worldview, would you act as though nothing matters?

You have no duty, at all, under your world view. You act as if you can get by through relegating this duty to you and your children, but you just said earlier that your duty was to others. So it's not just your relationship with your children is it. You say the duty certainly exists, but not how, who or what causes the obligation? You?

Yes. Like any other emotion or hunch or drive I may experience, it happens in me, it originates in me. It's most likely grounded in biology and shaped by culture. It doesn't exist outside of my body or my brain. If you think it does, again I think you have the burden of proof.

So you find scripture to be unreliable in it's description of God's nature, but find what other people, not me mind you, say about Him to be reliable to judge God against? How is that suppose to make your statement any better here. Do you expect me to believe that was your intention here Holo?

Yes. Well, I did expect you to believe what I was saying, but you keep insisting I've said something else entirely. If you don't know what I mean, I like you to ask me, rather than making assertions of what you think I mean.

I think I've been clear that my intention here is that IF you say God is good AND that he's a mass murderer, then it seems to me you are internally inconsistent, self-refuting.

You are determine what righteous means from your own moral faculties, just as I said you were.

We all do.

You are using your own moral intuition to define what righteousness means.

Well, if killing innocent babies can be righteous, then the term righteousness is completely meaningless to me. Don't you agree?

If you are using other peoples claims as an argument condemning God you are strawmanning.

True, but that's not what I'm doing. I'm not saying God is neither good nor evil. But if others make such claims, I think it's fair to examine if they can be right.

You responded to my call for you to give support for your beliefs by giving me objections to my beliefs. Where is the support for yours? I have given support for mine, namely the same source that provided our intellectual faculties provided our moral faculties, I cannot doubt one without the other.

Well I don't believe in God, I think evolution is true and that what we see in the world fits quite well with that theory, and I've explained why (I don't mind discussing that further, but don't say "where is it" as if I haven't said anything at all.

We agree on the axiom that we can know some truth about reality through our mental faculties. You make some assertions which I don't think you've given good evidence for:
1. There is a god.
2. Objective morality is both possible and does exist.
3. Our faculties must be given by God or else they can't be trusted at all.
4. If our faculties are given by God, they must be trustworthy.

My question to all of the above, is why and how do you know. Why can/must we assume that if God gave us faculties, that they are therefore trustworthy? How do you know objective morality exists?

I asked you to explain how it makes sense to say that people constructed Christianity, and you just shrug that off with a joke? How is Christianity any more crazy than thinking you have a duty to others?

I don't think neither the sense of duty, or religion, is crazy. Both are natural phenomena. But I'm sure you'll agree that there are some pretty weird religions out there, right?

It's fine if you state that moral standards feel objective, it's another thing when you act as if they are objective. It's not a problem to feel certain things, it's a problem to make claims and do things contrary to those claims.

Why exactly is that a problem?

Why wouldn't you support a religion that practices human sacrifice and slavery?

Because I think it's wrong.

You expressed concern over societal cohesion and progress. It behooves you to enslave as many people as you can Holo. The more slaves you can own the better opportunity you can provide for your kids.

In another time, that may have been true, and it probably was true for many people in the past. In a kill-or-be-killed world pillaging and taking slaves may very well be beneficial to the strongest tribe. But thankfully, humanity has progressed.

And why not child sacrifice?

If you didn't believe in God, would you think child sacrifice could be a good thing?

If you are going to praise evolution as a prosperous source of moral faculties

That's the thing though, I'm not "praising" evolution for anything. I'm just convinced that it's a reasonable explanation for why things are as they are.

I mean why should I expect 'not slavery' on evolution?

I'm not sure we can really "expect" it - i.e. we probably don't know enough about how evolution and nature as a whole works, so that we could somehow predict it. But one reason springs to mind: societies that abandon slavery etc for more humanistic and/or secular values, seem to grow richer, bigger and more stable than those who don't. When I look at the world, it seems like democray, secularism, freedom of expression, human rights, universal healthcare, a free market etc produces happier, healthier, richer and more powerful people than theocracies, dictatorships, communism and so forth. So the former generally outcompete the latter.

Sure what is tolerated is based on the apprehension that we have rights, but we don't have rights.

True, the idea of rights is basically just something most of us have agreed on. You'd be hard pressed to point to some "right" floating about somewhere in space

Rights are real in the same way that the rules of football are real.

You can be glad that fascism and communism are present exceptions but you could wake up one day and democracy is the exception and fascism and communism is considered humanistic. It's just self congratulation to say that your circle is progress. Humanism has no real track record and what are you even appealing to when you say track record? It has a record, but it's no more privileged than any other societal record. Secularism has a record but I wouldn't appeal to it. One might excuse the embarrassing accounts of secularism, but in reciprocation one can excuse the positive accounts of secularism just the same.

Secularism, democracy etc are still extremely new phenomena historically speaking, but I would definitely say they have resulted in more health, happiness and freedom than theocracies or dictatorships ever had. So if I can choose, I'll go for that, and I will fight for it because I know it can't be taken for granted.

When you question only certain world views, there is a real lack of sincerity toward true beliefs. Unless most of your life is behind you, you have no reason to believe that the wave you're on is any more stationary than the wave preceding it.

I agree 100%. I think "wave" is the perfect term here because if there's something we're not, it's stationary. I try to be open to changing my worldview again, because I have in the past, and there's practially infinitely more I don't know than I do know. But that doesn't mean I can't be justified in believing anything at all to be true.

If you don't know what you said, how should I explain it.

Still no idea at all what you're talking about. If it's something important, please explain.

The meaning of an ancient document is not derived from a majority of opinions. In fact I challenge your claim that the majority of Christians even claim that God committed Genocide.

I may be wrong about that. It's a common belief in the Christian milieus I grew up in and still know.

Further I find it disingenuous that you find the claims of Christians of greater value than the actual text those claims are presumably derived from.

Not sure what you mean by value here. Again, if a Christian makes self-contradictory claims about God, I'll point that out, regardless of what the text may say.

What logically impossible laws or principles do you claim that I hold?

That moral values can be objective.

And if you think your world view is undeserving of scrutiny you aren't really holding it for intellectual reason, but self serving reasons.

What self serving reasons do you mean?

I have asked you several times to appeal to a source that can warrant your claims as true beliefs but you have failed to do so. Instead you continually try to knock me off my warrant as if that somehow gives you warrant - it doesn't.

It seems the only source you could possibly accept is God, which I obviously can't give.

All axioms are the product of the very thing in question, intellectual faculties. If my world view is true I have warrant for my claims.

If you are right that God exists and that our faculties therefore necessarily must be trustworthy, yes. But I don't see good reasons to believe either of those claims. Why can't God be evil, for example, or why can't there be more than one god, etc.

If your world view is true you do not have warrant for your claims. You earlier tried to accuse me of being circular and yet you are making a circular argument.

I'm freely admitting my axioms.

This is cookie jar mentality again. You didn't believe in God because your parents did. That is what you tell yourself in retrospect to justify your position.

Again, please ask me what I mean, don't tell me. I believed because I grew up in a Christian family, that's what I mean. Kids usually believe what their parents tell them. I was immersed in Christianity on most sides throughout my childhood and youth, and I interpreted everything through the lenses of faith.

If I asked you back then you would have given me an answer for why you believed in God, and it wouldn't have been because your parent did.

True. I would've told you how I believed because God had answered my prayers and that the universe couldn't come into existence by itself and so forth. But when I look back, I see those weren't the real reasons I believed. When I began questioning my own faith, I began seeing that it all originated with what my parents taught me, and I didn't see proof of God because they were actually there, but because I expected them to be.

I have stated earlier that one could have reliable intellectual faculties on evolution. But that doesn't mean it's likely on evolution. When a rat avoids an electrified floor he doesn't do so because he has a true belief about electricity. Evolution is only concerned with behavior that leads toward survival that culminates in genetic propagation, not true belief. Any behavior that leads to such survival can be attributed to a variety of beliefs, of which only one is true belief. Even if there is only one possible non true belief that can lead to the same survial action that is a 50% likelihood that one carries a true belief. Your job is to show that it's likely that you have such faculties, not make an appeal to nominal possibilities.

I can't. I can't even say that it's likely that other people than me have a consciousness. Again, it's an axiom. This could all be a dream. Even the concept of spacetime may actually just be a mental interpretation in our heads that happens to help us survive. Fundamentally, I don't see how we can truly know anything. And I really don't see how asserting God's existence makes it any better.

Reinterpretation is not the same as ad hoc.

Maybe not, but it's certainly possible at least to be convinced of a pretty broad spectrum of interpretations.

You are yet again attempting to reframe my comments to what is convenient for you. I said life comes from life, not humans come from humans. Whenever you don't have something to say you strawman me instead. That is not a good way to discover the truth. All you have done in your reply to this section is appeal to ignorance instead of a gap. I am appealing to what we observe.

No, I mention humans and jazz to exemplify what I mean, not to strawman anybody. Again, life as we know it comes from life, but there may be such a thing as "proto-life." Just like even though only humans can beget humans, it's still possible that if you look back through the generations, you'll find an ancestor that wouldn't meet the criteria of what we call human.

 

[Sanoy]

To a certain degree at least. My selfishness is certainly stronger than my sense of fairness or compassion sometimes.

But I have to come back to it, since you keep repeating that I deny my moral faculties. I don't. I have a sense of morality, and I act accordingly. It's perhaps the strongest drive I have. I know for some people at least, their sense of morality trumps even their will to sustain themselves.

Yes. A bunch of soccer moms (and dads!) will, on a grand scale, be more successful in propagating their genes than a rapist.

Not at all. The penguins are an example of a species where family ties beat rape, hands down. Again, there are other species where the offspring doesn't depend on a caring father, and so the father tends to run off as soon as he's impregnated a female.

What we seen in nature, be it among animals or humans, is basically whatever has best stood the test of time. It's the things that have been selected for by evolution. Evolution doesn't demand that every single generation or individual is behaving exactly in the most beneficial manner (procreation wise), just that over millions and millions of years, some traits turn out to be "better" than others.

Of course, it's possible that evolution is false and that we simply misunderstand all the things that seem to support it, but I find it very unlikely.

Just because I don't think morality exists independently of myself, doesn't mean I have no reason to act on it. As I said, it's perhaps the strongest intuition I have. I just happen to realize that it is just that - an intuition.

But you didn't answer my questions. If you don't believe a piece of music is in fact inherently beautiful or valuable, would you still listen to it? I can ask it in a different way: If you held my worldview, would you act as though nothing matters?

Yes. Like any other emotion or hunch or drive I may experience, it happens in me, it originates in me. It's most likely grounded in biology and shaped by culture. It doesn't exist outside of my body or my brain. If you think it does, again I think you have the burden of proof.

Yes. Well, I did expect you to believe what I was saying, but you keep insisting I've said something else entirely. If you don't know what I mean, I like you to ask me, rather than making assertions of what you think I mean.

I think I've been clear that my intention here is that IF you say God is good AND that he's a mass murderer, then it seems to me you are internally inconsistent, self-refuting.

We all do.

Well, if killing innocent babies can be righteous, then the term righteousness is completely meaningless to me. Don't you agree?

True, but that's not what I'm doing. I'm not saying God is neither good nor evil. But if others make such claims, I think it's fair to examine if they can be right.

Well I don't believe in God, I think evolution is true and that what we see in the world fits quite well with that theory, and I've explained why (I don't mind discussing that further, but don't say "where is it" as if I haven't said anything at all.

We agree on the axiom that we can know some truth about reality through our mental faculties. You make some assertions which I don't think you've given good evidence for:
1. There is a god.
2. Objective morality is both possible and does exist.
3. Our faculties must be given by God or else they can't be trusted at all.
4. If our faculties are given by God, they must be trustworthy.

My question to all of the above, is why and how do you know. Why can/must we assume that if God gave us faculties, that they are therefore trustworthy? How do you know objective morality exists?

I don't think neither the sense of duty, or religion, is crazy. Both are natural phenomena. But I'm sure you'll agree that there are some pretty weird religions out there, right?

Why exactly is that a problem?

Because I think it's wrong.

Ought
That in one world view our moral duties can be overcome while in the other they are not is very much why the duty for under one is objective and the duty under the other is not. Further it's not a duty at all under your world view.

I'm not saying you deny your moral faculties, I am saying you deny that they point to anything real. They point to something, but they are not pointing toward where our faculties would have us believe they are pointing, IE objective morality. We both agree you have moral faculties, we both agree they point somewhere, we both agree they don't point to anything objective. That isn't at issue, what is at issue is that you are using your intellect to determine what your moral faculties are actually pointing too, however your intellectual faculties come from the same source as your moral faculties. Further, you hold and claim the belief that your moral faculties are not pointing toward an objective ought, and yet your behavior follows the very thing you deny. And you claim as much here, that you act according to your morality. So why should I believe your world view is true when you admit that your actions don't follow what you claim is true, but rather what you deny is true. That is a problem. Your question about music is equivocating between subjective experience and action in regards to duty. It will only serve to confuse the conversation, if you take my answer to it, to speak on action in regards to duty you would be conflating. That is why I don't answer it, it will simply confuse the conversation. If you insist that it's important, I will answer it, up to you, but it is equivocation.
Going back to the rapist vs the soccer family.

You state that a bunch of soccer families will out compete a rapist, but you are comparing several families to a single rapist just to out compete him. That simply confirms that rapist is a more advanced evolutionary trait, that 1 rapist is comparable to several non rapist soccer families.

Penguins are an example of how harsh environments require more support for children. No one is living on Antarctica. It is the situation that warrants this behavior, but that situation is not a part of what we are discussing. What you see in evolution is confirmation bias, whatever you think are right things you attribute to evolution, and what isn't right you attribute to a temporary flux I suppose. That isn't evolution, or science. That is confirming your own bias. If evolution is the progressive advancement toward procreative fitness then we should should expect behaviors to be toward that end, and deny behaviors that are not. We cannot just incorporate the behaviors that personally satisfy ourselves as an advancement of evolution when it is not expected on the mechanism of evolution.

Moral Faith
You have stated that I have a burden of proof when I say that our moral faculties point toward objective reality. You're right I do. And consequently so do you when you claim your intellectual faculties point toward objective reality. You ask me to bare my weight but you can't bare your own. All my faculties came from the same source, logically speaking I don't get to pick which ones I believe lead to true belief. That would be cherry picking. The only way I can confirm my moral intuitions, is to confirm my intellectual intuitions. The only way to warrant my intellectual intuitions is the attribute them to God, which warrants my moral intuitions. Further, I cannot act morally and sanely unless my moral intuitions refer to a moral reality. So if I'm going to act according to my morals I am already insane which creates the same dialectical loop as doubting ones intellectual faculties.

Genocide, Morals Consistency.
I explained to you early on that I don't believe the Bible spoke of Genocide, and you acknowledged that in your reply to it, so why should I believe that you expected me to believe in Genocide when I explained that I did not. You stated that you assumed I would agree with you on the morality of genocide, not the doctrine of genocide. You even stated that you believe it's wrong, and that it was obviously an immoral act. You didn't quote scripture, you didn't mention other people you drew upon what you believed about morality, and what you believed a perfectly moral human would be like. I am drawing upon what you actually say, not what you retroactively re-attribute to because your re-attributions do not make sense of the statements you made. It takes nothing to backtrack and say "oh I really meant this", it takes something else entirely for that re-attribution to actually make sense inside of what was stated, or the context it was stated in.

When you agree with me that you were 'determining what righteous means from your own faculties' you are confirming that you were not condemning God by His own standard, but by your own standard of righteousness determined by your own moral faculties. That blatantly contradicts your prior re-attribution that you were simply using what other people say about God. You weren't condemning God by His own standard, but by your standard of righteousness derived from your own moral faculties. So you are raising your own moral intuition as an objective standard to condemn God. That is contrary to your world view, and your claim that you were merely comparing God to how He is described. This is why I post as I do. It's so I understand what I am replying to rather than simply reacting on a sentence by sentence basis, which in this case, has incidentally revealed the truth about your prior statement.

You ask me that if killing innocent babies can be righteous, then the term righteousness is completely meaningless. It already is completely meaningless on your world view Holo. Why protest as if there is a dying of the light? There is no light on your world view.

I told you at the beginning that on my position good refers to God's nature. So even when you say God is neither good nor evil you are strawmanning my position, or you are equivocating the term Good. If you are equivocating the term, then you are again using your own moral paradigm, because to condemn God on the world view that He exists is to use the term of that world view, nor your own world view. In shifting your argument from popular opinion about God you have just moved your argument into a different fallacy.

Evolutionary intellect
Evolution makes sense of very little of what we observe. It speaks only of our physical attributes, it has no viable explanation for the emergence of consciousness which is responsible for the behavior evolution relies upon. It explains very little in fact, even less when you demand attribution to be based on expectation rather than ad hoc confirmatory narratives. I am not even asking you all that, I am just asking you to provide warrant for your intellectual claims. But you can't do that, all you can do is claim that it could, but that doesn't make it likely that you have a true belief. Why demand evidence from me when you can't even warrant your ability to have true belief about that evidence. Don't you think you should have that first? Why should I waste my time on providing evidence if you can't confirm the ability to process that information into a true belief?

Religion.
I asked you to explain how it makes sense that Christianity was constructed.
You claim you wouldn't support a religion that promotes slavery because you think it's wrong, but you also claim that your moral faculties come from evolution and is expected on evolution. Slavery is expected on evolution and so your moral intuitions are not in line with evolutionary expectations. So there appears to be no reason to attribute your moral intuitions on evolution is there?

Morality
What do you mean mankind has progressed. Where exactly do you suggest we are going on your world view? As far as I can see there is no where to progress to on your world view. Again your language perpetually contradicts your claims.

If God didn't exist I might think child sacrifice could be a good thing. Again morality would be whatever my moral faculties point to.

We don't need to point to some abstract object floating out there to refer to objective rights. Rights come from an authority who can maintain them, which by definition denies abstract objects because they don't stand in causal relations. It is the action in violation of those rights that sets those rights as real.

Evolution
You now claim that we can't really expect anything on evolution, and further that we probably don't know enough about how evolution and nature as a whole work enough to make predictions. In your attempt to mitigate your claim you have undermined it's foundation of evolution as entirely ad hoc, unfalsifiable, and unscientific because science makes predictions and confirms them. You have just set your ability to appeal to evolution on fire.

Humanism/Secularism
Don't lump in democracy with secularism. I suppose you aren't thinking of Pol Pot and Stalin when you consider secularism...oh that's why you are padding this with democracy...got it... And why present this as if health and happiness were something we should strive to obtain. You deny shoulds.

Corrigibility
You don't seem to be open to changing your world view. You very much want to confirm how satisfied you are with it. Satisfaction and happiness has nothing to do with the truth of a proposition. What I see here is that you are willing to examine my view intellectually, but you avoid the same reciprocal scrutiny for your own. You can be justified in believing that you hold true beliefs when you can provide warrant for that ability. Right now the justification you are providing for that ability, evolution, makes it unlikely that you presently hold a true belief.

Hunh?
I quoted your statement, if you don't know what you are talking about I can't help you sort that out.

Claims
I have never met a Christian who believes that God committed Genocide. So you will need to substantiate that claim with something. A present you appear to be so willing to 'call out self-contradictory claims about God from Christians' that you will call them out even when no ones making them. In any case it's a strawman.

Why is it logically impossible for moral values to be objective?

Misc.
The only source I know of that could warrant reliable true belief is God. I will accept another source if you can provide it, but all you have provided is that evolution could, not that it is likely that it has.
Again, I am making an abductive claim that if my intellectual faculties are true God is the best explanation for them. You are yet again trying to reframe my statement into a circular one. As I stated, I am not appealing to an evil creator, I am appealing to God. An evil creator would not warrant much true belief. If your, or my claims, are to hold truth value, they must be derived from a source that makes that likely. Evolution does not make that likely, and evil creator does not make that likely, God does.

If I asked you why you believed when you believed, you would not say that it was because you grew up in a Christian family. That is an ad hoc attribution with 0 truth value. The only honest answer is what you would have replied when you believed. It's the same as when a child steals a cookie. All children who steal cookies and get caught explain their reason was hunger. That is no different here. If the reason you would have stated back then was that your parents were Christian then you were never a Christian. For certain something you are saying is untrue because you cannot claim you were a Christian if your testimony is that your parent believed. You either need to drop the claim of being a former Christian, or the testimony you held as a Christian, because they are mutually exclusive. You can't reasonably expect me to just accept your word for it when your story doesn't add up.

Consciousness.
It's meaningless to speak of axioms without a warrant for those axioms being a true belief. Without reliable intellectual faculties false belief is just as likely as being an axiom as true belief. So now you have moved from pantheism gap arguments, to ignorance, and now to solipsism. Neither of these positions are reasons to believe anything, they are reasons to believe nothing. Life comes from life, we observe this sequence.

You said "Life comes from life" is kind of like saying "human comes from human." That is a reframing of my position. You change my position, to a new position, and then reject that position by saying "but if you go way way way back you will eventually find an ancestor of yours that wasn't actually human". You are making objections to the reframed statement of mine, that is a strawman.

 

[holo]

That in one world view our moral duties can be overcome while in the other they are not is very much why the duty for under one is objective and the duty under the other is not. Further it's not a duty at all under your world view.

If by overcome you mean "will be subject to punishment/reward," then it's really only about obedience and fear, not duty in a true sense of the word.

I'm not saying you deny your moral faculties, I am saying you deny that they point to anything real. They point to something, but they are not pointing toward where our faculties would have us believe they are pointing, IE objective morality. We both agree you have moral faculties, we both agree they point somewhere, we both agree they don't point to anything objective.

OK, then I've misunderstood your position completely on that. I was under the impression that you meant our moral intuitions pointed to objective morality, or was even a proof that such a thing exists.

That isn't at issue, what is at issue is that you are using your intellect to determine what your moral faculties are actually pointing too, however your intellectual faculties come from the same source as your moral faculties. Further, you hold and claim the belief that your moral faculties are not pointing toward an objective ought, and yet your behavior follows the very thing you deny. And you claim as much here, that you act according to your morality. So why should I believe your world view is true when you admit that your actions don't follow what you claim is true, but rather what you deny is true. That is a problem.

I still don't see why that's a problem. I couldn't escape my moral intuitions even if I tried, that's just the way it is. In any case I don't see why my actions, whatever they might be, can be a confirmation or a denial of whether or not any particular worldview is true or not. I don't claim that I should or even could act according to what I believe is strictly true. We all know we're going to die, yet we hardly ever act like it, right? Doesn't mean it's somehow wrong to say that death is a fact.

Your question about music is equivocating between subjective experience and action in regards to duty.

That's because they are both matters of personal value. Both exist in our minds and nowhere else. Why does it mean one thing if we "act" on our musical taste, and something else if we act on our moral values?

Going back to the rapist vs the soccer family.

You state that a bunch of soccer families will out compete a rapist, but you are comparing several families to a single rapist just to out compete him. That simply confirms that rapist is a more advanced evolutionary trait, that 1 rapist is comparable to several non rapist soccer families.

I don't think it's that simple. A caring family can raise a lot of strong children, the rapist will leave kids here and there. But since I believe evolution to be a fact to begin with, of course I will assume that the way things are, are precisely because of that. The only alternative I can think of, is God, and I just don't see convincing arguments for his existence, especially not the kind of God claimed by Christianity.

Penguins are an example of how harsh environments require more support for children. No one is living on Antarctica. It is the situation that warrants this behavior, but that situation is not a part of what we are discussing.

In mankind's early history, they were certainly trying to survive in harsh environments. Early humans probably lived in quite small groups, hunting and foraging, which fits pretty good with a lot of the human traits we still see today. Someone like Genghis Khan wouldn't be able to do as much damage and spread his genes as far and wide as he could when people had settled into cities and nations. Plundering the group, killing the men and impregnating the women would hardly be the best way to pass your genes on. (Today too, children of rapists and single mothers generally are less likely to survive and thrive.)

What about you, do you think God created the world just as it is, with all the different species already formed, etc?

You have stated that I have a burden of proof when I say that our moral faculties point toward objective reality. You're right I do. And consequently so do you when you claim your intellectual faculties point toward objective reality.

I think they probably do, to some degree.

All my faculties came from the same source, logically speaking I don't get to pick which ones I believe lead to true belief. That would be cherry picking. The only way I can confirm my moral intuitions, is to confirm my intellectual intuitions.

What do you mean by confirming your moral intuitions? Do you mean how we know if they are true/right?

The only way to warrant my intellectual intuitions is the attribute them to God

I'm sorry but I still don't see how adding God to the mix makes anything better. It depends entirely on who or what God is.

Further, I cannot act morally and sanely unless my moral intuitions refer to a moral reality.

If morality doesn't truly exist, then yes, nobody can act truly morally in that sense.

I told you early on that I don't believe the Bible spoke of Genocide, and you acknowledge that, so why should I believe that you expected me to believe something in which I stated I did not.

I know you don't believe that, that's why I said IF someone claims God is both A and B, and A and B seem to be mutually exclusive, I'll call them out. I'm glad you don't interpret the bible that way.

When you agree with me that you were 'determining what righteous means from your own faculties' you are confirming that you were not condemning God by His own standard, but by your own standard of righteousness determined by your own moral faculties. That blatantly contradicts your prior reattribution that you were simply using what other people say about God.

OK. I take back everything I said about that.

Let me say this instead: if someone claims that God is good, genocide is wrong, and that God commits or orders genocide, then they have an explanation problem. Not according to MY moral standards, but their own.

You ask me that if killing innocent babies can be righteous, then the term righteousness is completely meaningless. It already is completely meaningless on your world view Holo.

No, of course it's not meaningless. You can find someone who disagrees with the definition of anything, but things like slaughtering babies for fun is pretty universally agreed on to be wrong. But if things like that can fit into someone's idea of righteousness, then we're not speaking the same language. It can mean whatever.

Why protest as if there is a dying of the light? There is no light on your world view.

There's lots of it even if you personally can't see it. There's a lot of meaning in my life, it just doesn't come from something or someone outside.

I told you at the beginning that on my position good refers to God's nature.

I have a hard time believing that people actually believe this. I think they believe it because they have this sense of what is good, and they have a sense (or faith) that God is also good. If God should turn out to be a sadistical madman, I think they'd change their definition of good to something completely different than "God's nature."

Evolution makes sense of very little of what we observe. It speaks only of our physical attributes, it has no viable explanation for the emergence of consciousness which is responsible for the behavior evolution relies upon.

True, the theory of evolution as it currently stands offers no explanation for conscience. But conscience is probably not the thing that dictates our behaviour. In fact a strong argument against conscience being a (necessary) product of the brain is that there seems to be no reason why any being should be aware of what it's doing. Most of what the brain does has nothing to do with consciousness anyway. We could behave exactly like we do without being aware of anything. Consciousness isn't necessary to make choices. So it's more likely that we become conscious of our choices, rather than using our consciousness to make them. Like I said earlier, one theory is that consciousness is basically just a byproduct of advanced computing. Another is that consciousness is fundamental, which if true will have unfathomable consequences for our understanding of reality.

But in any case, there are lots of examples of evolution "steering" our traits, for example living at high altitudes seems to select for genes that prevent altitude sickness.

I am not even asking you all that, I am just asking you to provide warrant for your intellectual claims. But you can't do that, all you can do is claim that it could, but that doesn't make it likely that you have a true belief.

OK, but again, how does God make it any better? If true, you must assume not only his existence, but his character as well. My worldview may not be able to say anything truly trustworthy about the universe. But can yours say something truly trustworthy about God?

I asked you to explain how it makes sense that Christianity was constructed.
You claim you wouldn't support a religion that promotes slavery because you think it's wrong, but you also claim that your moral faculties come from evolution and is expected on evolution. Slavery is expected on evolution and so your moral intuitions are not in line with evolutionary expectations. So there appears to be no reason to attribute your moral intuitions on evolution is there?

I'm not saying anything is good or bad because it came by evolution, i.e. if evolution drives me to beat you up then it must be the right thing to do. My morality could drive me to give my life, or even the life of my children, for some cause I perceive to be greater. That doesn't mean morality can't be a product of evolution. We can probably find some sort of irrational (evolutionarily speaking) behaviour in any species.

What do you mean mankind has progressed. Where exactly do you suggest we are going on your world view? As far as I can see there is no where to progress to on your world view. Again your language perpetually contradicts your claims.

I have no idea where exactly we are going, but when I look at history, it seems we're moving to a more and more connected way of living and that humanism, democracy and secularism are on the rise (with some exceptions of course). Since I think less suffering is A Good Thing, that's good news to me. It's what I'd call progress.

If God didn't exist I might think child sacrifice could be a good thing. Again morality would be whatever my moral faculties point to.

To be precise: if you had stopped believing in God, do you think you could come to believe child sacrifice is good?

You now claim that we can't really expect anything on evolution, and further that we probably don't know enough about how evolution and nature as a whole work enough to make predictions. In your attempt to mitigate your claim you have undermined it's foundation of evolution as entirely ad hoc, unfalsifiable, and unscientific because science makes predictions and confirms them. You have just set your ability to appeal to evolution on fire.

Just because we can't make completely accurate predictions doesn't falsify the theory. Like other scientific theories it will be tested, developed, possibly disproved some day, but it's by far the best theory we have for the time being.

Don't lump in democracy with secularism. I suppose you aren't thinking of Pol Pot and Stalin when you consider secularism...oh that's why you are padding this with democracy...got it... And why present this as if health and happiness were something we should strive to obtain. You deny shoulds.

Again: I'm not denying shoulds, I'm denying that they are objective. I think health and happiness is great stuff.

You don't seem to be open to changing your world view.

I admit I'm not very open to believing there is a God, at least not in the Christian sense. I don't think I can ever go back to that kind of faith. Perhaps a different one.

 

[holo]

Hunh?
I quoted your statement, if you don't know what you are talking about I can't help you sort that out.

OK.

I have never met a Christian who believes that God committed Genocide. So you will need to substantiate that claim with something.

I heard that all the time growing up. The bible was presented as the word of God and literally true, and there were rarely an attempt to "explain away" genocides etc in the OT. I saw some of that when I went to bible school and seminary, but in the lutheran/pentecostal/conservative environments I was in, it was just accepted as fact. I'll bring it up from time to time when I discuss religion with Christians, and more often than not, their answer is basically "I can't explain that." Very few of them offer some sort of explanation like the translation is inaccurate, God's rules have changed, God can somehow be both good and do things like that at the same time, and so forth. But yeah, I've heard it a lot. Maybe it's particular to my country, the different churches I attended, or the time I grew up.

In case it's unclear, when I say God committing genocide I mean when he ordered it or something like it (killing all the firstborns in Egypt etc), not that he personally stepped down and slaughtered people. And of course it also applies to what appear to be God's commandments to stone people etc.

Why is it logically impossible for moral values to be objective?

The very concept of value is that it's subjective. I don't see how value can exist outside of a mind. And yes, God may have a mind, but as far as I can understand, whatever he may value would still be subjective to him.

The only source I know of that could warrant reliable true belief is God. I will accept another source if you can provide it, but all you have provided is that evolution could, not that it is likely that it has.
Again, I am making an abductive claim that if my intellectual faculties are true God is the best explanation for them.

It seems to me you have more confidence in our faculties than I do.

You are yet again trying to reframe my statement into a circular one. As I stated, I am not appealing to an evil creator, I am appealing to God. An evil creator would not warrant much true belief. If your, or my claims, are to hold truth value, they must be derived from a source that makes that likely. Evolution does not make that likely, and evil creator does not make that likely, God does.

If I'm getting you right:
Our faculties are trustworthy and the best explanation for that is God.

This seems to presuppose a pretty high level of confidence in our faculties - not only can they be assumed to be (largely? mostly?) correct, but they can even tell us at least some truth about God. But is that really more likely than an evil or indifferent God?

If evolution is true, any really true grasp we have of reality will be basically by chance - the brain that allowed us to develop language and empathy and so forth also happens to allow us to travel to the Moon and debate philosophical riddles. For what it's worth, the more we learn about the true nature of things, the more we find things that we're simply not really able to grasp, like quantum fields, black holes, multiple dimensions etc. So when I look at both the religions and the science of the world, I don't get the sense that we're "supposed" or "designed" to understand neither God nor the universe. Instead, it seems we're "made" to survive and thrive in a stone age world.

If the reason you would have stated back then was that your parents were Christian then you were never a Christian. For certain something you are saying is untrue because you cannot claim you were a Christian if your testimony is that your parent believed. You either need to drop the claim of being a former Christian, or the testimony you held as a Christian, because they are mutually exclusive. You can't reasonably expect me to just accept your word for it when your story doesn't add up.

I used to believe, I was absolutely convinced. And I saw all sorts of reasons to believe - first and foremost I thought I believed because God had touched me in some way. Looking back, I now think I was mistaken about that. Now I think that the REAL reason I believed was because I was brought up to. I was a Christian, but the testimony I held I no longer believe to be true.

You know, just like I used to believe in Santa. I used to think he was real, and the proof was the presents, right? But then I realized that the real reason I believed in him was because some adult had told me.

It's meaningless to speak of axioms without a warrant for those axioms being a true belief. Without reliable intellectual faculties false belief is just as likely as being an axiom as true belief.

Would you say that "other people besides me are conscious" is a warranted axiom? If so, why?

You said "Life comes from life" is kind of like saying "human comes from human." That is a reframing of my position. You change my position, to a new position, and then reject that position by saying "but if you go way way way back you will eventually find an ancestor of yours that wasn't actually human". You are making objections to the reframed statement of mine, that is a strawman.

OK. What I thought you meant was that since life apparently can only come from previous life, we can conclude that life itself can't possibly have come from something that wasn't itself alive in the exact same way. Would you care to elaborate on what you actually mean?

 

[Sanoy]

OK.

I heard that all the time growing up. The bible was presented as the word of God and literally true, and there were rarely an attempt to "explain away" genocides etc in the OT. I saw some of that when I went to bible school and seminary, but in the lutheran/pentecostal/conservative environments I was in, it was just accepted as fact. I'll bring it up from time to time when I discuss religion with Christians, and more often than not, their answer is basically "I can't explain that." Very few of them offer some sort of explanation like the translation is inaccurate, God's rules have changed, God can somehow be both good and do things like that at the same time, and so forth. But yeah, I've heard it a lot. Maybe it's particular to my country, the different churches I attended, or the time I grew up.

Ought.
I don't get your objection to duty. What do you think defines duty? How do you have a duty without a consequence?

According to my world view our faculties point to objective moral reality. That is not what I believe is the case on your world view. On your world view I agree that you have moral faculties, we both agree they point somewhere, we both agree they don't point to anything objective. We have to speak on each persons world view otherwise we equivocate because things don't mean the same for each of us.

You can't escape your moral intuitions Holo, but that says nothing about your actions. You can't escape having an intuition, but you can escape acting on those intuitions. If you lack free will, you lack rationality. So if you want to go the route of claiming you have no choice but to act on your intuitions you will lose the ability to make rational claims. If told you that water is poison and I drank water all day you'd probably doubt the truth of that claim because your actions don't follow your claim. Comparing actions with claims is how we most commonly assess a persons claims, that doesn't change just because you can't fulfil the claims or your own world view.
I was not talking about actions in general, but actions in regards to duties. You have no duty to musical taste. So again, that is equivocation from what I am referring too.

Evolutionary morality.
The more children a caring family raises the less support they have for each. You didn't compare the rapist to one family, but a bunch of families. Pick any family, the chances you are related to that family compared to the chances you are related to Genghis Khan are abysmal. Full stop. End of comparison.
Are we in early history? We are not, so why bring it up? Going from penguins to anachronism is no more helpful.

Creation
I believe that species emerged rather than appeared as they are.

Moral faith
You told me I had a burden of proof about objective reality, to which I replied, so do you. But you didn't actually pick that burden up, you just stated "they probably do...to some degree". When are you going to apply the same epistemic standards to yourself as you do me?

Ultimately confirming our intuitions requires confirming the faculties they derive from. So confirming here is that our faculties are reliably capable of leading to true belief.

Which is better at displaying mathematical truths. A calculator designed to display mathematical truths, or something that looks just like a calculator but was assembled randomly? Teleology makes true belief more likely than non teleological sources.

On your world view, morality is whatever our moral faculties point toward. So I don't understand why you say no one can act truly morally. What ever an individual does in accordance with their moral faculties is truly moral on your world view because that is all moral refers to on your world view.

Genocide
In your last reply you said - "IF you say God is good AND that he's a mass murderer, then it seems to me you are internally inconsistent, self-refuting." and in this reply you say it's simply "If someone claims". No. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Stop changing your statements. You didn't say someone, you said YOU

You don't get to "take back everything you just said" which confirms everything I have said about you. No, you get to live with your mistakes, not slither out of them through endless "oh but I mean" changes. Stand by your statements, if they are wrong change your beliefs rather than the past because that is dishonest.

According to your statement righteousness is meaningful because it is nearly universally agreed to be wrong. But it's not nearly universally agreed to be wrong, only wrong for your own kind. Righteousness has not objective meaning, because it has several defined meanings that are equally valid.

It matters not what meaning you have inside Holo, there is no light inside you or outside you. There is no dying of the light because there is no light. You act as if you have some treasure inside, but it's simply trash that you are forced to see as treasure. It is utterly meaningless apart from a lump of tissue in your head that makes you think that way.
I believe that Good refers to God's nature, and several others do as well. You are talking to me so you are going to have to deal with what I said, not reframe things into what you imagine would be easier to reply too.

Evolutionary intellect.
Every time you try to object you dig yourself into a hole. You say that consciousness doesn't likely drive our behavior. Well consciousness is where our rational choices and beliefs are, so if you aren't being driven by your consciousness then it is now doubly unlikely that you hold true beleifs, because your beliefs were not derived rationally. You are basically confirming my own argument that evolution does not lead to true belief.

My claim is abductive. I don't need to assume God's existence, I merely need to assume my faculties, which you stated you assume as an axiom. If the premise is true that our faculties are reliable in coming to true belief then God is logically the best explanation for that premise. IE abductive. You need to stop reframing things and actually deal with what I said. If you can't do that properly you should consider that you are mistaken.

I will assume that you are abandoning your claim that Christianity was constructed since you have twice avoided an explanation. Again you reframe what I said. I said that "Slavery is expected on evolution and so your moral intuitions are not in line with evolutionary expectations." So I'm not claiming you are saying anything is good or bad here, I am stating that you contradict your belief that evolution explains what we observe when you state that you wouldn't support a religion that promotes slavery.

Morality.
You state that mankind has progressed, but you don't know where we are going? Then how do you know we progressed? Progress means forward or onward movement toward a destination. You literally have to know a destination to state that we are progressing. So you stated that we have progressed, when I call you out on it you both deny a destination and claim it is human connectivity. Well why is human connectivity externally noteworthy for humanism? It's fine that you think it's better, but you bring it up as a point, not an admission, so don't retreat your statements to pure subjectivity.

If I stopped believing in God I could believe child sacrifice was efficiently good for a host of reasons up to a certain age depending on how I decide to define when life begins. This allowance is already in place. I would neither think it morally good or evil because I would follow my intellect. Of course there is always a chance I would go insane instead from no ground and sky to orient what actions I should perform or not perform.

Evolution.
We aren't talking about completely accurate predictions though. That's not what I stated, or what you stated. You claimed that we can't really expect anything on evolution, so we can't test if it's propositions are true. Meaning everything you state about evolution is an assertion. Reframing what just happened doesn't put the fire out.

Forms of rule.
You stated that the whole concept of "should" is basically meaningless, further that there is no point in talking about how things should be, because they just are. So I think my statement that you deny shoulds is accurate. So I will restate - And why present health and happiness as if it were something we should strive to obtain.

Recidivism.
Maybe you can't go back to a Christian because you never were one. Maybe it was the"kind of faith" you were exposed to that cognitively biases you against it.

Genocide.
I don't believe that you grew up in a church where Christians stated that God committed Genocide. You stated to me earlier that you expected me to be against Genocide due to my Christian faith, so it makes no sense that you would have the expectation for me to be against genocide because of my Christian faith while claiming that Christians told you that God committed Genocide "all the time" growing up. Once again, part of you story doesn't add up.

Objective values.
Objective isn't just mind independent, it is true regardless of belief. That is it's truth does not depend on mind. If my world view is true it is inescapably the case that the price of moral response, regardless of ones belief, is life or death. So morality has objective value.

Intellectual faith
I think we have roughly the same faith in our intellect, I just have a reason to confirm it, and you have a reason to both confirm and deny it simultaneously. You appeal to evidence, science, logic, and observation just as I do, so you have faith in it, you are just unable to state it and hold your belief at the same time.

I don't think my abductive case presupposes any greater level of faculties than the proposition our faculties come from evolution which you claim to be the case. That level is explained on God, but not on evolution. In fact that degree of faculty is far less than the degree of faculty to confirm evolution which is a highly studied field. In my case it is apriori, in yours it is a posteriori.

If evolution is true it is only by chance that we should come to have the faculties to grasp what we do know of quantum fields, black holes, multiple dimensions, and space travel...which is a brobdingnagian feat compared to what all other species have acquired. By nature the faculties we observe are unlikely on evolution. That is an insurmountable problem without teleology, but if you add teleology you create another problem for secularism.

Prior belief.
Now that is an honest response of why you believed. You believed because you knew it to be true at the time. The problem with your scenario and it's metaphor with santa is that you had reason, or evidence as it came to be for me when I found a receipt in the box, that santa wasn't true. You don't have evidence or a reason to believe your prior beliefs aren't true. You have a belief that your epistemology was not adequate, however your present epistemology denies your present belief as well.

Other minds.
In my view there is warrant to believe in other minds, in your view there is not, actually, warrant. You no doubt have reasons, but I assure you they are circular. The same abductive case I made earlier warrants my faculties and their intuitions of other minds. As always, I have carried my burden, but will you do the same?

Consciousness.
You didn't reframe my statement because you thought I meant human comes from human. You said my statement is like Human comes from human, and you strawmanned what you reframed. You need to bear your burden of belief that life came from non life. I have stated why I believe it came from life, because we observe that all life comes from prior life, and have never observed life to come form non life.

 

[FireDragon76]

Intersubjectivity doesn't fit this subjective/objective dichotomy that many Christian apologists like to present. That's because they are operating from within outdated early modern philosophical assumptions.