What would you lose if Christianity were not true?

[InterestedAtheist]

From the biblical point of view, Good is a descriptor of God Himself; thereby, it is also a descriptor of the original nature of what He Created --- the Heavens and the Earth and all that is in them.

But from the point of view of Plato's Socrates, there's more complexity (and complication) involved in the ontology of the axiological dilemma than what a Christian Theology has to assume, one that is an apt descriptor of the more ancient alternative religions and cosmogonies that surrounded ancient Israel. We just need to completely read and study the Euthyphro to wake up to this fact. Furthermore, I'd say it's high time more people did so.

As for you, stop being ignorant!

Goodnight, Philo.

 

[mama2one]

.

 

[FireDragon76]

Everybody wants to assert their heroes or idols are good. Saying God is good is really no more to me than saying William Shatner is good. All its really saying is "I like X". I'm sure many, many Nazi's thought Hitler was good. too. But it tells us nothing about what goodness actually is.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Goodnight, Philo.

Goodnight, IA! And despite my evaluation of your lack of engagement with Euthyphro, I really do wish you a good nights sleep!

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Everybody wants to assert their heroes or idols are good. Saying God is good is really no more to me than saying William Shatner is good. All its really saying is "I like X". I'm sure many, many Nazi's thought Hitler was good. too. But it tells us nothing about what goodness actually is.

You're not far off from Wittegenstein on that point. We're all playing games here: Mine is a form of the Christian game, while yours is one derived from Siddhartha. But who knows which will actually bear out as we go into the future? We'll see, won't we?

 

[FireDragon76]

You're not far off from Wittegenstein on that point. We're all playing games here: Mine is a form of the Christian game, while yours is one derived from Siddhartha. But who knows which will actually bear out as we go into the future? We'll see, won't we?

Does it have to be a zero-sum game? What if that isn't how it works out at all?

 

[Silmarien]

I am always baffled by people that think life is unlivable without the God-concept. As the Dalai Lama once pointed out, suicide is only common in a culture that lacks self-compassion. Belief in God will tend to merely displace that inner rage onto some other- the enemies of God, for instance.

Most of the "existential issues" apologists present are manufactured by Christianity. The argument from morality is one such example, but of course there are others.

Some of us experience those existential issues despite having no contact whatsoever with Christian apologists. If you find that baffling, so be it, but you shouldn't try to erase it or claim that people like Maritain are displacing their inner rage on the enemies of God unless you can provide evidence that any such thing occurred.

People rarely jettison all their attitudes and orientations, even when they convert. Religious conversion is a surface phenomenon of the ego, the conscious mind.

As a convert, I would deny that religious conversion is merely a surface phenomenon, especially when it involves engaging with pre-modern thought.

How will a return to medieval Catholicism help address climate change? Last time I checked, the folks most into Thomism, the Rad-Trads, were supporting the climate change denialists politically.

I'm not sure why you think I'm advocating a return to medieval Catholicism, seeing as how I'm neither Catholic nor a Thomist. What I'm taking issue with is your claim that empiricism is a superior approach to moral questions than Thomism. Empiricism and science are completely morally neutral--weapons of mass destruction are as much a result of scientific progress as modern medicine is.

Thomism is... complicated, to say the least. I'm suspicious of the way it's often invoked to serve modern conservative interests, but the most interesting and compelling critique of capitalism I've ever seen also came from a major Thomistic philosopher (Alasdair MacIntyre), so I'm holding off judgment on the legitimacy of Aristotelian natural law for the moment.

 

[holo]

We just need to completely read and study the Euthyphro to wake up to this fact.

Maybe it's misleading at best to label this question the Euthyphro problem if was put forward in a certain context (like Pascal's Wager, which is a bit more complex than I thought and I'm a bit wiser now thanks to you).

But the question itself makes sense to ask of the Jewish/Christian concept of God, too, doesn't it? Like @InterestedAtheist it looks to me that the attempts to solve it merely pushes it back one notch.

 

[holo]

God led us to adopt a child & we were not "programmed" to love her
we did parenting classes, read parenting books, did workshops & prepared to be parents for years during the wait....no one programmed us to do that

Maybe I should clarify what I mean, but first, adopting a child is about the most wonderful thing a person can do to make the world a better place, so huge respect to you for undertaking that. You may well have saved a life.

When I say we're "programmed," I mean that we seem to have an instinct that make us give ourselves for children in our care. My kids have a special place in my heart, but I'm sure that if we were to adopt a baby, it wouldn't take long before we would feel and act as though she were truly our own flesh and blood. As for being a good and wise parent, it certainly helps reading parenting books and so forth, especially when adopting! But the most fundamental thing - actually feeling love for the child, tends to come by itself (and in any case I'm not sure it could be "learned").

 

[mama2one]

But the most fundamental thing - actually feeling love for the child, tends to come by itself (and in any case I'm not sure it could be "learned").

having been on adoption forums for several years, know that adoptive parents can suffer from post adoption depression & a parent might not connect with their child

love might not come naturally with birth parents, either
worked with a women who admitted she couldn't connect with one of her birth kids

but love isn't a feeling- we choose to love
choose to be kind, patient, etc as in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

 

[holo]

having been on adoption forums for several years, know that adoptive parents can suffer from post adoption depression & a parent might not connect with their child

love might not come naturally with birth parents, either
worked with a women who admitted she couldn't connect with one of her birth kids

but love isn't a feeling- we choose to love
choose to be kind, patient, etc as in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

True, there are exceptions and it's important we acknowledge that and don't put an additional burden on the parents who don't feel that rush of love as soon as they see their baby. Thankfully, I knew that sometimes it can take a while, when I didn't immediately fall in love with my second child the moment I saw him, as opposed to our firstborn. Now, I don't see how I could possibly love either of them more than I do

But under normal circumstances, to the degree such a thing exists, parents will instinctively connect with their child emotionally. And though I'm not a believer, I must say thank God there are people like you out there for those children who for whatever reason can't be cared for by their biological parents.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Does it have to be a zero-sum game? What if that isn't how it works out at all?

.Thrones of Game of episode another was discourse our thought I said never I, besides ?Work to it for like you would how

 

[Sanoy]

A sense of duty may be nature's way of getting us to do certain things.

I think maybe we do. We react so fast and seemingly on instinct when we see perceived injustice.

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.

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.

Theistic expectations.
Nature isn’t trying to get us to do things. A reflex response is .25 seconds, danger responses are innate, moral responses are not. Are you seriously going to try to tell me that peoples moral response is an unconscious reflex? This is getting ridiculous Holo.

You are rejecting your moral faculties conclusion of objective moral values and duties. You can call it condemn, or reject, the term doesn’t matter. Because your intellectual faculties come from the same cause it impugns your intellectual faculties.

Free Will
I’m not challenging your belief that you don’t have free will. I am challenging the rationality of all your claims in consequence. Why should I believe that any of your statements have any truth value when they were chemically derived? Are you going to bear the burden for all these claims you keep making or not?

Objective Value
So now you have gone back to the Euthyphro right? God has the unique ability to set the value of moral action in a way in which that value is unchanged for all time. It is objectively true on my world view that the value of life is set, for all time. That is objective, it is true now and forever, it is never not true.

Genghis Parents.
How does wiggling your ears make your statement true and mine wrong? So we have gone from examples in Antarctica, to the stone age, to ear wiggling, none of which are relevant to the fact that you are overwhelmingly more likely to be related to Khan than any soccer family. Are you going to hear what I’m saying or just keep making up any excuse you can imagine?

I was mistaken, you aren’t just setting the goal posts of evolution on where you find humanity, no you are setting it only on the parts of humanity that you want to be attributed to evolution. Khan wasn’t a single rapist either; he was very much in a tight group, much tighter than a stone age group. Tight groups go both ways here. All this objection does is suggest that if you do rape you should do so with support.

Burden of Proof
In objection to the agreed axiom of our intellectual faculties you originally stated that it seems “Extremely unlikely” that we were created by a God who is good. Now, in order to deal with my objection, you have changed your statement to stating that it is just as likely that He is good, as not Good. You are changing your statements yet again. However, in changing your statement you have made it indifferent as an objection, and so no longer an objection to my abductive case.

Whether or not you believe Craig’s book, or anyone, here is the thing. You have a belief that God doesn’t care particularly about us, you should have a reason for that belief, and you don’t. Do you have any evidence that God doesn’t heal amputees? You have nothing to support your own claims, you are quick to attribute poor motives and skepticism to any counter evidence, but you lack any of that for your own beliefs. Craig Keeners book includes the healing of amputees and your own cognitive bias already seeks to diminish it. I can personally testify as an eye witness to miraculous healing, supernatural exorcism/deliverance, and angelic beings. I have reason for my belief that He does care, and does interact, you do not. Further, He sent His son to die for all of us while we were sinners. Theologically, the claim that God does not care is absurd given the sacrifice of Christ made for you.

I answered your question on how to figure out purposes, but you objected to my answering of your own question. And now you are just asking the original question again.

Genocide.
Okay, so genocide, according to your definition is as minimal as the killing of a large population. Basically any war, even the war against Nazi Germany was genocide. By that definition sure, God committed genocide, but now comes the hard part for you, now you have to show how He is morally guilty.

Is there light in Holo?
I didn’t ask if you see a light in you Holo. I asked you if there is any light in you. The light you see doesn’t exist in any sense, only your perception of it. That perception is no different in nature than the light a mass murderer sees in themselves. Both are aggrandizing self delusions.

How can you objectively state that your Children have no objective value without confirming your own world view? That claim depends on your world view being true, but you can’t give me any reason why your world view is true, or why your claim has any truth value. Oddly, and a bit sickly, it is more important to you to confirm the non objective value of your children, than the warrant for the claim that your children have no objective value. Think hard about that. Further, there is nothing oxymoronic about objective value, you have merely reverted to thinking back toward your human example of monetary value. That is not applicable here.

A more correct statement is this, If God wasn’t there your sense of purpose is real but it doesn’t correspond to anything real. Your ‘sense of purpose’ in your world view is nothing great, it is merely what you want to do, whether that be to love your family or set someone else’s family on fire. All you did was exactly what Eve did, ‘I don’t need God, I’ll take authority for myself and rule myself’. That you pair this self-seeking conclusion with the narrative of not wanting to lose your belief in Christ is truly demeaning to that narrative.

Euthyphro Questions
The question you are asking about God doesn’t make sense, it’s like asking why is an object with 4 equal sides a square rather than a triangle. The term square, refers to that thing which is so described.

Theistic expectations
God can’t do whatever He wants, only what is logically possible. And He will only act according to His nature, greater revelation can do harm (Matthew 11:21-22), so there are benevolent reasons to withhold it.

Claims
The falsity of other religions is not a logical reason to believe Christianity is false, or constructed. You know this, why should I need to remind you that this is logically fallacious.

Slavery and Evolutionary Morality.
You object that we don’t have to expect 100% alignment with moral intuitions and evolutionary expectation. Why bring up 100% Holo? It isn’t even close to what we would expect on evolution. 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. You are mistaken. Full stop.

Progress
You have described what Humanism has done, in your opinion, not why it is a point of progress for humanism in contrast to other forms. You continually try to paint humanism as if it is a should we should adopt. Your appeal to subjectivity in regards to the conditions of humanism vs Nazism doesn’t change the fact that either are truly points on a chart with no top or bottom. Nazism and humanism are equal, you with your light preferred one, Hitler, while perceiving a light in himself, preferred the other. I do not know why you continually present a progressive contrast as if your subjective light has any bearing on progress.

Self defeating denial our our faculties.
Our two faculties complement each other on your world view, the problem for you is that they complement the doubt. You have two witnesses, your intellectual faculties, and your moral faculties. Each claim an objective realm, so you have no second witness for your intellectual claim of doubt, and that doubt cast’s doubt on the very faculties making the claim because they are derived from the same manufacturer. Think of it this way. A computer science major (evolution) makes two algorithms (think moral and intellectual faculties) that he claims can determine the truth. Each algorithm reports itself as true, and working. If one of those algorithms is false then what reason is there to believe the other is true? And if one reports that the other is false then you have something similar to a liars paradox. The utter insanity of this is avoided with God, and it explains why our moral faculties seem to point to objective truth. On your world view you simply deny that it does, and put out of sight and out of mind the actual logical consequences and self defeating nature of that world view.

Further, you continually make objective claims against the objectivity of your moral faculties with 0 warrant despite me asking continually for it. You want to make claims but you haven’t the ability to do so with truth value. The only way to begin having a truth value here is by giving up on many of your present claims.

Evolution and self-defeat.
I don’t disagree with the outcome of evolution, I just think the proposed cause is enormously farfetched and admittedly unlikely. Further, if evolution is responsible for my intellectual faculties it is unlikely that my belief in evolution would be a true belief. So even if I believed it, the proposition could have no epistemic truth value. That is a pretty big deal.

Prior belief.
If I asked you for your testimony would be when you were a Christian. That is the only answer that matters in regards to why you believed. Your reattribution is not why you believed, but why you were presumably mistaken. You say you found more likely explanations for phenomena. But that is an unwarranted paradigm. There is 0 likelihood that an apple let go 2 feet off the floor will fall to the floor. The probability is mathematically high, but there is no tendency for it to do so. You are unconsciously accepting a theistic paradigm of tendency in the natural order. Natural law describes the behavior of a thing, not its obligations. There is no reason to trust any part of nature to remain the same at any point in time. Further, the probability that something occurred due to X rather than Y provides no reason that the cause was X rather than Y. It simply means that if you are going to gamble you have greater blind odds on X. So it’s odd that you would tell me how much you didn’t want to lose Christ, while accepting blind odds to cast Jesus away.

Genocide
In all of these exchanges where you are supposed to tell me that you were told God committed Genocide you manage to avoid ever stating that anyone stated that God committed Genocide. Why do you think that is Holo?

Losing track of the conversation.
This is why I don’t make line by line reactionary posts. It isn’t a worthwhile method for one, and It causes people to react to sentences out of context, and not maintain what is being discussed, or even what one has already said.

Consciousness.
There is nothing to follow in a tautology. If it is improbable that X will occur, it is improbable that x has occurred. X being the cause of consciousness. Saying that it’s unlikely that your consciousness is the cause of your claim, undermines again, every claim you are making. Intentionality, and the ability to ration is the ability of ones consciousness. So by stating that it is improbable that your behavior, IE your claims, are derived by your consciousness is the same as saying that your claims lack rational thinking. This conversation has been a saga of self defeat.

The mereological argument you use regarding replacing parts until we replace a whole is conflating in a categorical error.

1. I can live without a finger
2. A finger is a part
3. A heart is a part
4. I can live without a heart​

Trustworthy behavior.
I wasn’t, and am not talking about quantum fields. This is a red herring Holo. You have recently developed a tactic of picking distant exaggerated examples rather than the reality of what is being discussed. Someone’s behavior isn’t evidence that a proposition is true, it is evidence that the person is honest, and actually believes their own claim.

 

[InterestedAtheist]

So...where have we got to?

The Euthyphro dilemma:
Does God command something because it is good, or is it good because God commands it?

It seems unanswerable, and leaves the Christian with no means of saying how they know what good actually means - if they insist on saying that only God is the source of morality.

Various apologists claim to have refuted the dilemma, merely by pushing it backwards a step without actually addressing it.

@2PhiloVoid won't deign to address it.

@Redac says it can be answered, and I would like to see how.

@Sanoy seems to have a view somewhere between them, and I'm not sure what it is.

Hmmm.

 

[holo]

Nature isn’t trying to get us to do things.

Nature has selected for certain behaviours.

Are you seriously going to try to tell me that peoples moral response is an unconscious reflex?

I should have specified that reflex isn't the right term. But what I mean is that it seems to happen immediately and unconsciously, unlike solving a mathematical riddle or something like that. Not that we always know exactly how we feel morally about something, but the moral reaction itself doesn't seem to be something we can "control."

Because your intellectual faculties come from the same cause it impugns your intellectual faculties.

I still don't agree that it must be the case that all or none of my faculties are trustworthy.

I am challenging the rationality of all your claims in consequence. Why should I believe that any of your statements have any truth value when they were chemically derived?

I don't know where else my rationality would "happen" or originate, other than in my brain. It seems to be what the brain is for. And I don't see how the existence of a soul or anything like it would be necessary for rationality and certainly not some sort of proof that my thoughts would be rational.

So now you have gone back to the Euthyphro right? God has the unique ability to set the value of moral action in a way in which that value is unchanged for all time. It is objectively true on my world view that the value of life is set, for all time. That is objective, it is true now and forever, it is never not true.

Sure, but again that's not objectivity in the true sense, which would be something that is true whether or not God exists/commands it. Like you say, God can't do the logically impossible, so that's apparently a principle that does in fact exist regardless of God's existence.

But in any case, your view presupposes that God exists (and probably that there aren't other gods as well, and that he's not distant and so forth).

ow does wiggling your ears make your statement true and mine wrong?

It doesn't. It's an example of genes being "successful" even though they're not beneficial to us. In fact, we may have been a little better off not using resources to form those vestigial muscles at all. They're along for the ride.

So we have gone from examples in Antarctica, to the stone age, to ear wiggling, none of which are relevant to the fact that you are overwhelmingly more likely to be related to Khan than any soccer family.

Again, the fact I may be related to him doesn't prove that rape "should" be selected for through billions of years of hominid evolution. Our biological traits are basically whatever worked best for us in the stone age.

Khan wasn’t a single rapist either; he was very much in a tight group, much tighter than a stone age group. Tight groups go both ways here. All this objection does is suggest that if you do rape you should do so with support.

Even today, "rape groups" like ISIS seem to have less success passing their genes on than families and groups who live in relative peace. Yes, you may win some by violence, but when you do you also place yourself in the line of danger.

In objection to the agreed axiom of our intellectual faculties you originally stated that it seems “Extremely unlikely” that we were created by a God who is good. Now, in order to deal with my objection, you have changed your statement to stating that it is just as likely that He is good, as not Good.

I'm trying to meet you on the halfway, and I admit my idea of what God is probably like can shift. Looking at the world, I see no convincing evidence of a (good) God. But I grant that there's a possibility that it only seems that way because he has a good reason to keep things hidden from us. IF he exists, I don't see why I should assume that he cares. But yeah, God's nature could be anything. There could be more than one. How would I know? How do you know?

Whether or not you believe Craig’s book, or anyone, here is the thing. You have a belief that God doesn’t care particularly about us, you should have a reason for that belief, and you don’t. Do you have any evidence that God doesn’t heal amputees?

No, and I have no evidence that some Hindu god didn't do whatever either. The reason I don't believe the claim that God cares is because I see no apparent evidence for it. A freak incident far away isn't enough to persuade me, especially considering how people will claim to talk to ghost etc. It's just assertation as far as I can tell.

You have nothing to support your own claims, you are quick to attribute poor motives and skepticism to any counter evidence, but you lack any of that for your own beliefs. Craig Keeners book includes the healing of amputees and your own cognitive bias already seeks to diminish it. I can personally testify as an eye witness to miraculous healing, supernatural exorcism/deliverance, and angelic beings.

I used to testify about miraculous things too, but then I changed my mind about what had actually happened. I have seen too many examples of people crediting God for things that were obviously not miraculous to find personal testimonies trustworthy off the bat. A lot of people think they have experienced confirmation that astrology is true too.

Further, He sent His son to die for all of us while we were sinners. Theologically, the claim that God does not care is absurd given the sacrifice of Christ made for you.

Assuming the bible is true and this interpretation is correct.

I answered your question on how to figure out purposes, but you objected to my answering of your own question. And now you are just asking the original question again.

I guess I must've scrolled past it inadvertently, I can't recall seeing you answering how you figure out what God's purpose is. If it's something like "reading the bible and praying" that's ok but not much to discuss I guess.

Okay, so genocide, according to your definition is as minimal as the killing of a large population. Basically any war, even the war against Nazi Germany was genocide. By that definition sure, God committed genocide, but now comes the hard part for you, now you have to show how He is morally guilty.

OK, let me qualify it further. As I think is the most common understanding of the term, let's say it's the indiscriminate slaughter of large populations who aren't soldiers. Examples of what I mean: the holocaust, Srebrenica in 1995. It seems something along those lines is described in the OT.

My argument here isn't that God is morally guilty according to me, but if one says that 1) genocide is evil, and 2) God is good, it seems one has some explaining to do. Like I mentioned earlier, it's of course possible that suffering is a necessary evil and the net outcome will be good, but as far as I can tell the bible seems to give conflicting versions of what it means to act morally.

I didn’t ask if you see a light in you Holo. I asked you if there is any light in you. The light you see doesn’t exist in any sense, only your perception of it.

Of course. Everything I perceive is, well, a perception. I couldn't demonstrate meaning to someone else as if it were a physical object. If you won't take my word for it, there's nothing I can do.

That perception is no different in nature than the light a mass murderer sees in themselves.

True. A mass murderer probably believes he's doing the right thing.

How can you objectively state that your Children have no objective value without confirming your own world view? That claim depends on your world view being true, but you can’t give me any reason why your world view is true, or why your claim has any truth value.

Excluding axioms, if you assert that something exists, the burden is on you.

Oddly, and a bit sickly, it is more important to you to confirm the non objective value of your children, than the warrant for the claim that your children have no objective value. Think hard about that. Further, there is nothing oxymoronic about objective value, you have merely reverted to thinking back toward your human example of monetary value. That is not applicable here.

It's hard to prove a negative. I still hold that objective value is a contradiction in terms. Valuing money and valuing people is fundamentally the same concept at work. It may or may not be true that there's a greater being that myself that values my kids, but what difference does that make apart from that being having the power to reward or punish me? In any case, I'm sure my kids appreciate "you are the most valuable thing to me" more than "you are the most valuable thing to God."

A more correct statement is this, If God wasn’t there your sense of purpose is real but it doesn’t correspond to anything real.

Yes, that's more precise. Thanks.

Your ‘sense of purpose’ in your world view is nothing great, it is merely what you want to do, whether that be to love your family or set someone else’s family on fire.

Excluding things like destroyed frontal lobes, I think pretty much everybody who got to experience both these things would agree that the former was what they really wanted.

All you did was exactly what Eve did, ‘I don’t need God, I’ll take authority for myself and rule myself’.

No.

The question you are asking about God doesn’t make sense, it’s like asking why is an object with 4 equal sides a square rather than a triangle. The term square, refers to that thing which is so described.

But "God=good" doesn't really tell me anything. Why assume that his nature conforms to our perceptions of good and bad?

God can’t do whatever He wants, only what is logically possible. And He will only act according to His nature, greater revelation can do harm (Matthew 11:21-22), so there are benevolent reasons to withhold it.

What would be a good reason for him not to create us with the ability to make use of more revelation?

The falsity of other religions is not a logical reason to believe Christianity is false, or constructed. You know this, why should I need to remind you that this is logically fallacious.

Why should I believe Christianity is true as opposed to every other religion?

People enslaved other people because they saw it as a benefit to themselves, and they abandoned slavery because they saw it as immoral.

And the morality that made them think that way is adequately explained by evolution. The very fact that moral values themselves change over time, is an indication that it doesn't in fact point to something objective.

You have described what Humanism has done, in your opinion, not why it is a point of progress for humanism in contrast to other forms. You continually try to paint humanism as if it is a should we should adopt.

It looks to me to be our best shot so far.

Your appeal to subjectivity in regards to the conditions of humanism vs Nazism doesn’t change the fact that either are truly points on a chart with no top or bottom. Nazism and humanism are equal, you with your light preferred one, Hitler, while perceiving a light in himself, preferred the other.

Yes again, Hitler may have thought he was doing us a favour. As for me, and I think this is the case for the vast majority of us, I prefer peace and coexistence. I can't claim that you should do this or that because if you don't God will punish or reward you.

A computer science major (evolution) makes two algorithms (think moral and intellectual faculties) that he claims can determine the truth. Each algorithm reports itself as true, and working. If one of those algorithms is false then what reason is there to believe the other is true?

If morality and reason are two algorithms, one makes predictions that are testable to some degree, and the other predicts there are things that both can't be tested/proven and also seem to be self-contradictory. One could offer an explanation for why the other is probably false.

The utter insanity of this is avoided with God, and it explains why our moral faculties seem to point to objective truth. On your world view you simply deny that it does

To assume God is part of the equation, I would first need to believe he exists. I don't find it reasonable to insert God as an explanation for why we have moral faculties when evolution already offers a (to me at least) plausible explanation.

 

[holo]

I don’t disagree with the outcome of evolution, I just think the proposed cause is enormously farfetched and admittedly unlikely. Further, if evolution is responsible for my intellectual faculties it is unlikely that my belief in evolution would be a true belief.

Everything rests on the assumption that we can know some things to be real, we can't escape that. But within this framework we're stuck with, we can still use reason and logic for what it's worth.

But yes, it's possible that reality is in fact unimaginably different to whatever we perceive. Our conception of reality may be no more "true" than that of a worm. Like we're about as able to know the true nature of the universe as the worm is able to grasp nuclear physics. But we're advanced enough to employ things like experiments and metacognition, and knowing that we don't know, so at least we can probably figure out a little bit more than the worm.

So even if I believed it, the proposition could have no epistemic truth value. That is a pretty big deal.

But is this conundrum really solved by assuming God exists? Why should we assume God is presenting reality to us as it really is?

If I asked you for your testimony would be when you were a Christian. That is the only answer that matters in regards to why you believed. Your reattribution is not why you believed, but why you were presumably mistaken. You say you found more likely explanations for phenomena. But that is an unwarranted paradigm.

I'm not following you. Are you saying there's no reason to think I could've been wrong in the past?

There is no reason to trust any part of nature to remain the same at any point in time.

If it falls a million times it's reasonable to assume that it will the next time too.

Further, the probability that something occurred due to X rather than Y provides no reason that the cause was X rather than Y. It simply means that if you are going to gamble you have greater blind odds on X. So it’s odd that you would tell me how much you didn’t want to lose Christ, while accepting blind odds to cast Jesus away.

Not sure I follow you here either, sorry. In any case I wasn't "casting Jesus away," I just wasn't convinced of his existence any longer. It happens to a lot of religious people (and sometimes the other way around when people become convinced of some religion). I don't know what you mean by blind odds.

In all of these exchanges where you are supposed to tell me that you were told God committed Genocide you manage to avoid ever stating that anyone stated that God committed Genocide. Why do you think that is Holo?

Wait, is your point that no preacher used the exact words "God committed genocide"? If so, you're correct, but I assumed we were talking about God committing genocide in the same sense a military commander would, i.e. by ordering it, not physically performing the act themselves.

This is why I don’t make line by line reactionary posts. It isn’t a worthwhile method for one, and It causes people to react to sentences out of context, and not maintain what is being discussed, or even what one has already said.

I see. I think it's very useful because you get to see exactly what's been replied to, and you can click on the little arrow to get to the quoted post.

Saying that it’s unlikely that your consciousness is the cause of your claim, undermines again, every claim you are making.

How so?

Intentionality, and the ability to ration is the ability of ones consciousness.

I think that's probably an illusion. Consciousness is our awareness of what's happening, not what causes things to happen. As far as I can tell, my consciousness isn't where my thoughts are produced, just the space in which they appear.

The mereological argument you use regarding replacing parts until we replace a whole is conflating in a categorical error.

1. I can live without a finger
2. A finger is a part
3. A heart is a part
4. I can live without a heart​

That doesn't represent what I'm saying at all. I'm not talking about losing parts of the body, but replacing them with artificial ones, and what would happen if we did that with the brain. I'm saying that in theory, the brain can be replaced by non-living tissue and I'm wondering if that would "kill" us or if there's something "magical" about the biological matter. It may be that there's a sort of soul connected to the matter, but the matter itself can presumably act exactly the same whether it's biological or artificial.

Someone’s behavior isn’t evidence that a proposition is true, it is evidence that the person is honest, and actually believes their own claim.

OK. How is my behaviour contradicting my claims?​

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Maybe it's misleading at best to label this question the Euthyphro problem if was put forward in a certain context (like Pascal's Wager, which is a bit more complex than I thought and I'm a bit wiser now thanks to you).

... at least someone was listening.

[But the question itself makes sense to ask of the Jewish/Christian concept of God, too, doesn't it? Like @InterestedAtheist it looks to me that the attempts to solve it merely pushes it back one notch.

Up to a point. But we need to stop thinking of Plato as the "tool box guy" from whom we can just pull out a tool on a whim and start unscrewing or hammering some other set of ideas that are not native to the cultural scenario in which Plato (Socrates?) lived.

Not every analysis is simply "transferable" because we think we see some parallel between one set of ideas with another. This is especially the case for how we decide to use the Euthyphro dilemma. To proceed in applying this dilemma to the Christian concept of God is to essentially ignore out of hand both the ontological structures of Plato's (Socrates?) theological scenario and that of Christian Theology, run roughshod over the latter in order to force the former, like a screwdriver, into a crevice where it doesn't belong.

Of course, we can still ask the perennial axiological question, "What is the Good?" However, we need to realize that in doing so, it is one thing to simply ask this question without reference to theology or within the bounds of a materialist ontology; and it is quite another to do so in connection to either Theology A or Theology B.

 

[FireDragon76]

... at least someone was listening.

Up to a point. But we need to stop thinking of Plato as the "tool box guy" from whom we can just pull out a tool on a whim and start unscrewing or hammering some other set of ideas that are not native to the cultural scenario in which Plato (Socrates?) lived.

Not every analysis is simply "transferable" because we think we see some parallel between one set of ideas with another. This is especially the case for how we decide to use the Euthyphro dilemma. To proceed in applying this dilemma to the Christian concept of God is to essentially ignore out of hand both the ontological structures of Plato's (Socrates?) theological scenario and that of Christian Theology, run roughshod over the latter in order to force the former, like a screwdriver, into a crevice where it doesn't belong.

Of course, we can still ask the perennial axiological question, "What is the Good?" However, we need to realize that in doing so, it is one thing to simply ask this question without reference to theology or within the bounds of a materialist ontology; and it is quite another to do so in connection to either Theology A or Theology B.

I agree that applying Euthyphro to the question of God's existence or credibility is reading Euthyphro out of context, but I still think that it deals a mortal blow to divine command theory. Whether we are talking about Zeus or YHWH makes no difference in this matter.

 

[Tinker Grey]

I agree that applying Euthyphro to the question of God's existence or credibility is reading Euthyphro out of context, but I still think that it deals a mortal blow to divine command theory. Whether we are talking about Zeus or YHWH makes no difference in this matter.

Indeed. The original forumation was polytheistic (Euthyphro Dilemma { Philosophy Index }):

The Euthyphro Dilemma asks: do the gods love good action because it is good, or is good action good because it is loved by the gods?​

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

What is the difference between YHWH and all other gods ?