A World without Religion?

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inocente said:
I’ve not looked at the thread for several days so apologies if this has been said before, but this sounds like a version of the Euthyphro dilemma - is an act morally good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is morally good?
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It’s a corollary. If a Christian says something is good, then God must have commanded it. If we do something they think is wrong, then He didn’t.
 
Bradski said:
How about you answer the question?
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I don’t have to unless you admit truth and goodness are not entirely relative.
No one would have anything in common, would they? Everything, including the meaning of words, would be a matter of personal opinion. Not only that. There would be no rational or moral obligation to accept rules of any description. Chaos would reign supreme!
 
Bradski said:
It’s a corollary. If a Christian says something is good, then God must have commanded it. If we do something they think is wrong, then He didn’t.
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How would you articulate this from a believer’s POV, Brad?

I can’t imagine any other way a believer would state things. But if you can offer a different way, I am willing to entertain it.
 
inocente said:
I’ve not looked at the thread for several days so apologies if this has been said before, but this sounds like a version of the Euthyphro dilemma - is an act morally good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is morally good?

*"as Plato emphasized in Euthyphro, one is also left with the difficulty of explaining why God’s commands are authoritative.

One plausible answer might be that God’s perfect knowledge of right and wrong, or God’s own moral perfection, explains why his commands serve legitimately as standards for us. But that answer assumes that standards of morality exist independently of God’s will (either as objects of his knowledge or as standards in light of which He counts as morally perfect), in which case speaking of morality as consisting of God’s commands will not explain the origin or nature of these independently existing standards.

Alternatively, one might eschew an appeal to God’s knowledge or goodness and claim that there is no independent standard for God’s will and nature. But that leaves in place the puzzle concerning the authority of moral principles. If we reject the idea that God’s commands reflect His knowledge of right and wrong, and reject as well the idea that God is all good, it seems reasonable to wonder why his commands have any special authority." - plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/#EutPro*

I think Aquinas rejected the dilemma but don’t know his argument.
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You may want to bone up on why the Euthyphro Dilemma isn’t the devastating problem for theism some think it is.

edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2010/10/god-obligation-and-euthyphro-dilemma.html

Plato intended it as a way of dismantling why superhuman gods ought to be obeyed. When it comes to God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens, the ultimate cause and ground of all there is, where Being and Goodness are identical then things are good because and to the extent that they are, (i.e., exist fully) and they are because God. Full Stop. What God commands is necessarily the “good” because his nature determines all that is and, therefore, the good of it.

The “good” is no more capricious than the essential nature of what is AND God’s commands are no more capricious than Being Itself.
 
Bradski said:
It’s a corollary. If a Christian says something is good, then God must have commanded it. If we do something they think is wrong, then He didn’t.
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The alternative, it seems to me, is far less appealing and infinitely more capricious: “Good” and “bad” are merely what transient fallible human subjects “command” or withhold from commanding themselves to do.

Which would be the determinably better authority and less capricious with regard to defining what is “good?” Limited human subjective moral thought and experience or the omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent Ground of all that exists?

No contest, as far as any reasonable moral agent would be concerned.
 
Bradski said:
It’s a corollary. If a Christian says something is good, then God must have commanded it. If we do something they think is wrong, then He didn’t.
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The Euthyphro dilemma can be turned around, courtesy of C S Lewis: Do you say things are good because they are good, or are they good because you say they are?

If you go with the first then you have to explain where the standard of good comes from if it isn’t God.

Or, if you go with the second then your standards are arbitrary and subjective, and you can’t complain if you think that of Christian standards.

Moral dilemmas are fun. 🙂
 
The bottom line is that subjective morality is all about preferences, as though you might compare opposing moral preferences of any two people with two other people, one of whom prefers vanilla ice cream while the other prefers chocolate. It doesn’t really matter to anyone whether you prefer vanilla or chocolate. It matters to everyone whether you** merely dislike murdering six million Jews, or whether the six million Jews really **dislike being murdered.
 
Peter_Plato said:
Which would be the determinably better authority and less capricious with regard to defining what is “good?” Limited human subjective moral thought and experience or the omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent Ground of all that exists?
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So that would be: we sort out our problems ourselves, using reason or…we go with someone’s interpretation of their particular god’s divine will.

The thing is, if you say that God has decreed that X is wrong, then I am going to want some very good reasons why that is so. If the reasons are valid, then you don’t need God’s imprimatur to agree. If they are not valid, then I would hesitate to say that God is wrong, but at the very least, you have misinterpreted His will.

If you are going to suggest that God can command something that doesn’t sound reasonable, say that we have to follow it regardless and play the ‘Who Can Know The Mind Of God’ card, then thanks for playing, been nice talking, I’m off to the bar to get another beer.
 
tonyrey said:
I don’t have to unless you admit truth and goodness are not entirely relative.
No one would have anything in common, would they? Everything, including the meaning of words, would be a matter of personal opinion. Not only that. There would be no rational or moral obligation to accept rules of any description. Chaos would reign supreme!
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I think you just did.
 
tonyrey said:
I don’t have to unless you admit truth and goodness are not entirely relative.
No one would have anything in common, would they? Everything, including the meaning of words, would be a matter of personal opinion. Not only that. There would be no rational or moral obligation to accept rules of any description. Chaos would reign supreme!
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I think you just did answer it.
 
ThinkingSapien said:
I’m going to guess your goal in presenting such an argument to some one would not be to convince them.
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I didn’t get the impression you would be using the argument to prevent the killing because I don’t expect it to be immediately convincing. Especially to someone who already holds a different god-concept than you (remember that the example of the man killing his daughter was not hypothetical. It was a real example of a pizza shop owner that lived in Clayton County, Georgia, USA).

Have you ever attempted to convince someone to not do something drastic and dangerous to someone else or themselves? Were statements of the form that you presented earlier effective in doing so to both Catholics and non-Catholics? Have such arguments been effective for you when the person’s emotional state is elevated?
 
Charlemagne_III said:
. . . Richard Dawkins . . . says a world without religion would have as a high a moral ground and be better than a world with religion. . .
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:twocents:

What determines a high from a low moral ground?

The fundamental point of our journey in life has to do with getting closer to or further from being loving people.

God is Love.

Religion involves the relationship between mankind and God. Regardless of how an atheist may understand it, this is its reality.

Been there, done that. To try and construct a world without God has been tried and it failed.
Gen 11:1-9 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward,[a] they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
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This is part of the problem we see here - words meaning different things to people as we fail, in our ignorance, to grasp the essential meaning, the Truth that is God Himself.
 
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