it doesn't make sense on your world view why you should perceive a duty when there is no duty giver.
A sense of duty may be nature's way of getting us to do certain things.
Now you give the counter example of a reflex response but you aren't exactly responding to moral intuitions by reflex are you Holo.
I think maybe we do. We react so fast and seemingly on instinct when we see perceived injustice.
I don't think your intellectual faculties told you that the world was flat. I think someone told you that. You don't have an intuition that there is an earth, just that there is land that you know.
Sure, to be precise I believed in the little land I could see.
I remember when someone told me the Earth is round and that there are people on the other side. I thought they must be joking because they'd obviously fall off.
The problem in mutual untrustworthiness our our faculties is that you are condemning one faculty via another faculty from the same source. That is self defeating.
I'm not condemning it or dismissing it, I just realize that our faculties may not spit out the correct answer if we don't have the required info or the faculty is limited. That doesn't mean any proposition is as likely as any other.
I tagged you in a new thread.
Determining the value of something is different than an individual setting the value by particular right. The difference is one is agreed upon, the other is set by it's right. In the case of God, the value of moral action is permanently set in eternal consequence.
I guess we have different conceptions of what it would actually mean for it to be objective. In my view, that would mean that it simply is right, regardless of consequence. In other words, that if God for some reason wanted to punish you for giving to the poor, it would still be the right thing to do. I don't agree that being the greatest entity in existence makes that entity's traits, demands etc truly objective.
Khan's success wasn't unusual on evolution, the lack of Khans are unusual on evolution. We still aren't in the stone age, so it still doesn't matter as an example, even if it holds, which is dubious and speculative to begin with. The facts are you are more likely to be related to him than any random person, so he factually is a success.
Some people can move their ears because we still have those vestigal muscles there. So apparently those genes were a success too, even if we have no use for them at all.
And while you might find logical reason to be a soccer family, it fails to be a superior evolutionary model. You are merely setting the evolutionary goal posts where you find humanity.
I think there are very good reasons to believe evolution does in fact happen, so of course I assume that what we see in nature is probably a result of that. And in this case too, though I'm of course a layperson, it seems very reasonable to me that in the environment humans evolved in, tight groups were much more likely to survive than single rapists. No, we're not in the stone age, but evolution happens
extremely slowly, so it's not to be expected that natural selection has caught up between then and now, like it could during the billions of years of our formation.
You object that it does not appear like we are created by God because we aren't happy and healthy. I see no reason, in our present condition, why being happy and healthy would be a universal good. It is the case that many only turn to God when their mortality comes into view, and as the history of Israel shows happiness does not keep one in saving faith.
Of course pain and even suffering can be conducive to some greater goal. And it may be God has a plan in which everything will turn out fine for us all, say, in an afterlife. But I don't feel warranted in assuming that. It could be God has a good reason for not showing us the truth now. But I think it's just as likely that he's just not that good.
I don't think there is any reason to believe that there are no interactions from outside in the deist sense. Craig Keener has written a 1248 page book documenting divine intervention. I see absolutely no reason why that claim is true or even supported. You might doubt every claim of intervention, but that still leaves you with no grounds to believe it hasn't.
I'm not familiar with that book, but I am familiar with the tendency to, let's say, help God manifest himself by giving him credit for things that can just as easily be coincidence, or worse, wishful thinking. I've been guilty of that myself, a lot. Along with God's seeming inability or unwillingness to heal amputees, for example, and seeing how both Christians and people of all other kinds of faith still claim to see proof that their religion is true, I'm very very skeptical, like I am to people who claim to have been communicating with ghosts.
You asked me how you determine a purpose, that is why I said - "To determine a purpose you have to postulate a mind. Minds are the only things which have purpose." I'm not sure why you are objecting to my answering of your question.
I'm asking, since you apparently believe in a "higher purpose," how do you figure out what that purpose is?
By caught I mean changing your intentions to suit a present challenge.
To be honest I don't know what you're referring to. You'll have to allow me some time to dig back in this long and messy thread.
To philosophically make your claim of contradiction on genocide you must define genocide. It's a very variable definition, in some cases it is simply to destroy a large group of people, which makes every war genocide, and all death penalties genocide. In any case it does not matter what people are saying. Even if you make a contradiction, it does nothing if it's not from scripture.
To keep it simple, by genocide I here mean killing large or entire populations, like "do not leave alive anything that breathes" in Deut 20.
Is there light in you? You haven't said.
I see lots of light.
On my world view there is light, and my faculties were designed to point toward it, so no it's not "just like for me". Your world view merely entails that you have the sensation that there is light in you, not that there is Holo.
True, I don't think the "light" in me exists in an objective sense.
As you would say on your world view, you should neither be depressed or happy about the knowledge that your self perceptions are delusion.
Should I be emotionless?
You seem a bit angry that I'm saying you have no light as if you value the delusion that you do. But that is just a delusion Holo, you abandoned that as a reality for both you and your family when you left the faith. You are their safe guard, they look to you for what is best for them, and yet you play around with this world view to deny Christ for yourself, when they are also in need of the truth. In a thread about what one loses without Christ you have lost the objective value of your children, free will, the actual ability to make rational decisions, the actual ability to live both sanely and morally and you have possibly lost that for your children because, as you say, they will likely believe what their parents believe. This discussion isn't just about you Holo. Those in your care are on the line for how you respond, whether you are being faithful to truth, or faithful to your world view.
"Playing around with this world view" has given, and still gives, me a sense of wonder and awe. You don't have to worry about my kids. They haven't lost any value because like all of us they never had any objective value because that's an oxymoron. In any case they're doing more than fine, they are loved and loving and upstanding, safe and well behaved and quite smart and gentle little people.
And like I shared earlier, I didn't lose faith because I was looking for a way to deny Christ. I lost faith against my own will, and I was in a
real dark place because of that, for a long time. It was probably quite like you'd imagine, come to think of it. Nothing had ultimate/objective/fundamental meaning and so everything seemed pointless and hopeless. But one of the things that turned on the lights for me, so to speak, was when I realized that if God wasn't there, that didn't mean that my sense of purpose wasn't real. It just means that it exists regardless of his existence. A mistake I naturally made, was to think as if God had been alive and then died, instead of thinking as if he was never there to begin with.
But yeah, anyway I and my kids are doing fine (though we're in a tough spot now with serious illness in the family).
How many times are you going to reframe this? We aren't assuming God is good as if Good is an external referent that God meets. Good refers to God's nature.
But (why) is it impossible that God's nature is, say selfish or careless? Why assume that he has someone's best interest in mind?
If you are a brain a vat you can’t make the truth claim that your faculties can probably lead us to some truth.
True. So I'm going from the
assumption that I'm not actually a brain in a vat.
You have a burden of proof for you claims, so if you claim that on theism we should have faculties that would allow us to know the truth about reality to an obvious degree then you should give evidence/reason for that claim. Saying why wouldn’t he doesn’t substantiate that claim. But one reason why is because we are very evil people, and the more we know the more evil we can do.
Saying we're evil doesn't really answer it I think. There are claims of God that I find to make little sense logically (I don't know if, or to what degree, you share them):
- God can do whatever he wants, AND
- God wants people to know the truth
So if people don't know the truth it seems reasonable to say that one of those assertions is probably not true. Of course, respecting free will can be an explanation - if so, exercising free will is more important than salvation to God.
Comparing Christianity to others doesn’t explain why it was likely constructed, or explain the conditions I originally stated. After so many exchanges on this it is clear that this was not a thought through assertion. So there is no point in me asking further.
I can learn about a new religion every day. I think it's reasonable to assume that the next one is as false as the other. But of course it depends on the religion's claims, and I grant Christianity does have some pretty remarkable ones that - to my knowledge - are at the very least very rare in other religions. Depending on how you interpret Paul's letters, salvation by grace only is a pretty radical idea.
The fact is people enslaved other people because they saw it as a benefit to themselves, and they abandoned slavery because they saw it as immoral. They didn’t abandon slavery because they thought they should make someone a baby sitter ok.
True, but again, just like vestigial organs, we don't have to expect people's moral intuitions to be 100% in alignment with what would make sense under evolution. For instance, parents will likely love an adopted child just as if it were their biological - they're "programmed" to. They might even give their life for the child even if that means their genes go out and another set of genes gets to live.
And of course, history isn't driven only by evolution. There's a lot of things that got us to where we are today. Sometimes one person changes the course of the entire world.
Why is being better off and not fighting a particular point of progress for humanism? You listed it as a particular point of humanism, in contrast to other forms as if it’s truly better.
As far as I can tell, humanistic values and principles seem to give a greater net total of health and happiness than other religions or isms. It definitely does better than Islam and Hinduism with their cultural impacts, that's for sure.
The conditions of humanism and nazism are just points on a chart with no top or bottom. It makes no sense to compare them as if one is ahead, and yet you do.
Of course it makes sense. I'm a human being and as such I think some things are better than others. One of those things, which I think I have in common with basically everyone else, is that happiness is good and suffering is bad.
You might try to look for a way to make this a simple individual subjective preference
What would be hard would be to find a way to make it an objective reality.
I think in practice, we can, on my view alone, follow both our moral and our intellectual faculties. On your view you can only follow one at a time, because they fatally contradict each other.
They complement each other. Morality and reason are different domains, so to speak, though both determine how we act. One informs and adjusts the other and they both have their limitations.
It's not like just because an emotion isn't "real" it's insane to act on it. Take falling in love for example, that can surely be called a form of insanity, or at the very least an illusion. When I fell in love with my wife I knew that even though she seemed absolutely flawless to me in the rush of romance, she of course had her shortcomings like everyone else. But falling in love is a natural thing to do and a great way for nature to tie people together and create families. So even if it's a form of insanity, it's still "sane" to act on it (not that there's much of a choice when you're
reeeeeaaaaally into someone
)