Did God really command violence?

[kapp19]

I don’t have the time to go through the whole first few Questions today and unpack everything. If you’re really that familiar, then this shouldn’t be too difficult of a problem. But you’re missing it… you’re even equivocating on “reward” and “punishment” - as if these aren’t value-laden concepts which have a pre-determined meaning of “good” and “bad.”

As for a two-pronged approach, well, yes and no. We grasp God’s existence in tandem with grasping His goodness on the way - which is why the order Thomas goes in is so important. And we predicate anything of God analogically - not univocally, but not equivocally either. As for God’s own actions, well, they must be good, insofar as God is the very measure for goodness, by being the source for all existing things - the contrary would be utterly unintelligible nonsense. “Goodness did a bad thing.” Nope. Square circle. So if God inflicts pain for doing His Will - as He really does in this life! - then it is clearly a good thing that one is so afflicted. In any case, goodness from our side consists in the apprehension of being by the appetitive powers… Well, what is more in being than God, Who is the same as His Will? Nothing. So, there you go. What apprehends His Will? The reason. What directs the faculties which God designed to reach certain ends which we can know from reason? The will.

If you want to talk about the analogia entis, we can do that, but maybe on another thread, or a PM. I think we’re sufficiently off the rails.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

To those objectors I say: God can give life and can take it away. The only point is that there was/is/will be a valid reason for killing.

I challenge you to give this reason to the mothers of Egypt, whose children were slaughtered on God’s orders for the sins of their king. What reason would you come up with that would console them? What argument would you make that would convince them this was just?

 

[stpurl]

You say “usually thought” meaning that you are assuming that ‘logic is given a pass’. So what you’re doing is making a strawman and asking me to defend/discuss it.

 

[Dan123]

Wasn’t trying to make a strawman, describing what I often see. But to strip out the unneeded commentary I was simply asking for how you feel logic is accounted for, since you were asking others to account for it.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

You say “usually thought” meaning that you are assuming that ‘logic is given a pass’. So what you’re doing is making a strawman and asking me to defend/discuss it.

No, he’s right. If you’re willing to admit that we could have a universe without logic, then illogical explanations for the origins of logic must be perfectly permissible.

The reality is that, philosophically speaking, everyone is standing on a chair with a noose around their necks. The chair is the reliability of logic. If you kick over the chair and say that things can exist without or in contradiction to logic, everyone hangs, not just the person you are debating. It is the philosophical equivalent of flipping the chessboard.

If you want to assert that the universe can exist without logic, then other things can exist without logic too. You might try to argue that it is logically impossible for two gods to exist, but who cares? Logic doesn’t dictate what exists anymore! A second God can exist without logic.

So the universe must be logical to exist; anything else constitutes kicking over the chair.

 

[ProdglArchitect]

What reason would you come up with that would console them?

The fact that an answer is not consoling does not make it a false answer. The point of the Truth is not to make us feel better, it is to allow us to conform with reality. The Truth of the matter is that God has the right to take our lives whenever He see fits. We don’t like that because we falsely consider our lives our possessions. (Despite the absurdity of that statement, as we neither intended nor created them.) That Truth isn’t going to make someone feel better in the face of death, but it still remains the Truth.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

God’s own actions, well, they must be good, insofar as God is the very measure for goodness, by being the source for all existing things - the contrary would be utterly unintelligible nonsense.

If you take the Euthyphro dodge: God does not create goodness , goodness is defined as God. Until you know more you can’t rule out scenarios like

It is in God’s nature to create universes completely at random, and with random properties. Creating random universes is good because it is in God’s nature to do so. Those universe’s all reflect God’s goodness because they have random properties.

There is no nonsense here, it is a perfectly coherent possibility. Our universe might be created as a product of this divine random world generator, so the “common sense” definitions of justice or order we come up with are in no way reflective of God’s nature with respect to those concepts.

which is why the order Thomas goes in is so important.

The reason the order is important is that it is a slight of hand.

you’re even equivocating on “reward” and “punishment” - as if these aren’t value-laden concepts which have a pre-determined meaning of “good” and “bad.”

I thought the concept was perfectly intelligible, but I can be more precise with my language if you like:

Define: Heaven is objectively an infinite good for people. (Where goodness is defined in terms of God’s nature)
Define: Hell is objectively infinitely bad for people. (Where badness is defined in terms of not-goodness)

Thought experiment: God places people who obeyed his commands into Hell, and places people who disobeyed into Heaven.

 

[EloyCraft]

There is a complexity there involving the Israelites’ “hard hearts” and even resistance to revelation that God allowed for some greater good,

Had they put the idolatrous people’s to the ban as God intended there would be no enemy population among them to enslave. God freed them from slavery He didn’t want them to enslave others.

 

[kapp19]

If you take the Euthyphro dodge: God does not create goodness , goodness is defined as God. Until you know more

Except how can we know more, if…

Our universe might be created as a product of this divine random world generator, so the “common sense” definitions of justice or order we come up with are in no way reflective of God’s nature with respect to those concepts.

You are trying to pull a kind of ultimate Kantian meta-category. Well, okay, then there’s no response. You got me. If we are admitting that everything we think we know could be a chaotic phenomenon somehow perceived, well, fine. Who cares then? There’s no more knowledge really, at least not a posteriori.

The reason the order is important is that it is a slight of hand.

If you say so. I say it’s a resolution to the questions you are asking. Goodness is the appetitive apprehension of being - except for the source of Being… Who must necessarily contain perfect goodness. He orders His creatures to certain ends, with hierarchies in them, and His Wisdom works through His Providence in governing them.

I thought the concept was perfectly intelligible, but I can be more precise with my language if you like

Well, you’ve thrown out intelligibility. So who cares about your definitions? They don’t have any grounding anymore, even in your hypothetical scenario.

It comes down to the fact that we learn about God’s justice - the rendering of what is due - from creation’s order itself. We CAN actually learn what goes on inside God’s mind to a degree by looking at what He has made, as Romans 1 explains. On top of this, its been revealed that what you propose is not the case.

So, your “thought experiment” is not only contrary to the fittingness which we identify from natural observation about teleology and justice, nor is it only built on a paradigm of unintelligibility about goodness “in se” as if we can only equivocally predicate attributes of God, but it is also contrary to revelation.

I don’t know what else to say. Feel free to counter, but I think it’s not going anywhere. I’ve said what I can. Maybe start a new thread on the analogia entis as it bears on virtue ethics. I’d be down for that, but on another day. I just don’t have the time for now.

Peace…
-K

 

[JapaneseKappa]

. We don’t like that because we falsely consider our lives our possession (despite the absurdity of that statement, as we neither intended nor created them)

I suspect you are going down the road that ends with “Because God created all the raw materials in the universe, we cannot possess anything, since anything we do intend or create must be made from God’s materials.” But lets see if that ends up being the case.

I neither intended nor created my house, but I do possess it. If you have some special philosophical definition of possess, lets hear it.

The fact that an answer is not consoling does not make it a false answer. The point of the Truth is not to make us feel better, it is to allow us to conform with reality. The Truth of the matter is that God has the right to take our lives whenever He see fits

It is a common assertion, in christian philosophy, that laws require law-givers. Do rights require rights-givers? If so, who gave God that right?

The truth of the matter is that God has the ability to take our lives whenever he sees fit.

Suppose I create some puppies by breeding dogs. Do I have the right to kill them whenever I see fit (e.g. if someone paid me $20 to make a puppy-killing movie?) Of course not. So what are the possible differences between usuppies and God:us?

• God created “from scratch”
  • I don’t feel like this is a meaningful distinction. If it weren’t for our actions, the puppies would not exist, and if it weren’t for God’s actions, we wouldn’t exist.
• The raw materials we made puppies out of belong to God
  • This is a stronger objection, God could have say in what happens to the puppies insofar as we made them out of his “stuff.”
  • I think the counter-argument would be to say that God gave us dominion, which is the right to do what we want with the raw materials.
  • The counter-counter-argument of “to have a right is not the same as being right” equally applies to God
• God isn’t beholden to a higher power, but we are
  • This is straight up “might makes right”

 

[JapaneseKappa]

You are trying to pull a kind of ultimate Kantian meta-category. Well, okay, then there’s no response. You got me. If we are admitting that everything we think we know could be a chaotic phenomenon somehow perceived, well, fine. Who cares then? There’s no more knowledge really, at least not a posteriori.

There are “pure skeptic” arguments designed to attack our ability to know anything about objective reality (e.g. last-thursdayism, brain in a vat, etc.). Mine is not one of them. I am pointing out the very real problem in asserting that God’s nature defines goodness.

When you do that you must immediately admit you know nothing more about goodness beyond what you know about God’s nature. To make assumptions about God’s nature by conflating goodness-qua-god’s-nature and goodness-qua-our-expectations is the slight of hand. In past debates, when someone makes this argument, I’ve started demanding they call goodness-defined-by-God’s-nature by a different name (e.g. oogeyness) to make sure that we don’t accidentally let our conceptions of goodness leak into our understanding of God.

If you say so. I say it’s a resolution to the questions you are asking

We can even see the slight of hand in things like the ontological argument for God’s existence. Anselm asks us to consider “a being than which no (greater) can be conceived.”

• We’ve asserted that goodness is literally God’s nature.
• Greater of course means “more good” and God’s nature defines how good something is.

So it is clear, If we take the Euthyphro dodge, Anselm begged the question in step 0 of his argument. His argument literally begins with “a being than which no (more like the God that exists) can be conceived” then says that the being would be (more like the God that exists) if it existed, so it must exist!

Later philosophers just shunted the question begging into different terms of the “proof” (e.g. Godel replaced greater with more perfect)

Well, you’ve thrown out intelligibility. So who cares about your definitions? They don’t have any grounding anymore, even in your hypothetical scenario.

Who gave up intelligibility? Nothing in this scenario prevents our world from being intelligible. Nothing prevents God from being intelligible in this scenario. Intelligibility isn’t the problem, the problem is that I’ve broken your little bridge between our understanding of goodness and oogyness goodness-qua-God’s nature. It was my entire point to say that the bridge should never have been built in the first place.

If you don’t like “randomness” we can just imagine a scenario where God makes every possible universe. Some have life some don’t, some have concepts of beauty and justice, some have those concepts, but in forms completely reversed and alien. Some are intelligible to us and some aren’t, some have this really neat property of squizzleness that we can’t even imagine. We just happen to live on this one with our particular concepts of beauty and justice and goodness, but no squizzleness.

 

[ProdglArchitect]

I suspect you are going down the road that ends with “Because God created all the raw materials in the universe, we cannot possess anything , since anything we do intend or create must be made from God’s materials.” But lets see if that ends up being the case.

In one snese that is true, we cannot truly possess anything wholly of our own volition since we are incapable of the primary act of creation. However, that was not my point. My point was that the source of our life is God and He has the right to call on that life.

If so, who gave God that right?

God did, by virtue of His status as God. All that is flows from God. All goods, all rights. There must be an essential source for all such things, else there is an unending chain of right-givers, all whom received their rights from another without any source.

God isn’t beholden to a higher power, but we are

• This is straight up “might makes righ

I wouldn’t present either of the first two points. God did create from scratch, but that is not the source of His right over life.

The fact is that God isn’t beholden to a higher power. The source of right and good is God Himself. God is rightness itself. What you’re asking is like asking why 2+2 is allowed to be 4. It is simply because that is the ontological reality of its existence. God has a right to our life purely because He is the source of it. Whether that creation was from scratch or not is irrelevant. I am not the source of life for those puppies, I am only the caregiver of that life. God is the source, and as the source it is His right to do with it what He will simply by virtue of being the source.

You’re never going to accept this answer, I recognize that. It is not my job to convince you, only to relate the Truth.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

God is the source , and as the source it is His right to do with it what He will simply by virtue of being the source.

I guess I am a little more pro-life than that.

 

[Neithan]

I like your interpretation better, but it doesn’t seem consistent with Al-Ash’ari. We cannot put any limits on God. It is not (in the Asharite view) that he is actually capricious in nature but that he is so utterly transcendent that it would seem so to us.

So rather than literally “as Islam does” it’s “as the dominant Sunni school of Islam does” accept such theology.

 

[ProdglArchitect]

I guess I am a little more pro-life than that.

That’s a side step, and a bad one at that. Being pro life means you seek to prevent those who have no right to a life from taking that life. God has the right to all lives, so there is nothing wrong with Him choosing to put an end to a life.

Again, I recognize that you’re not going to accept this, but don’t try to dismiss our position with some BS nonsense like saying it’s anti-life. That’s a textbook avoidance tactic.

 

[Neithan]

Who said they did?

I would hope they did not; but whether or not they actually did, we have to deal with what is written in inspired scripture.

a) God knew what Moses would command, even if other’s hearts were hardened Moses was a prophet; and b) it would then call into question everything God instructed people to do through Moses and other prophets.

And yet we know that the revelation to Moses and the prophets was not complete, and Moses was not a perfect man, let alone prophet; otherwise there would be no need for Christ. So yes, the Old Testament law and prophets was an incomplete revelation, imperfectly understood. That’s already an implicit teaching in the very reason for Christianity.

So does that mean that those are not God’s actual commands, but Moses’ interpretation of God’s will?

Those are God’s actual commands to slaughter the worshippers of other gods for grave sins they committed, I am not disputing that. And any interpretation Moses had was allowed by God, though that does not mean that God positively willed and commanded them to kill innocents, and that would be a result of Moses’ imperfect or overzealous interpretation. God allowed that interpretation, thus the distinction between his positive and permissive will.

I agree with Dr. Matthew Ramage, who wrote Dark Passages of the Bible based on Pope Benedict XVI’s exhortation. We have to distinguish inspiration from revelation and not confuse the two, because the former was inerrant while the latter was incomplete and met with “hard hearts” — human resistance. What the inspired authors wrote is true in their intent and free from error in part or in whole: the Old Testament is the word of God, the law and the wisdom of the prophets. The Mosaic Law and the prophetic writings were not the fullness of revelation, as Fr. Barron describes in the above video based on the ancient patristic and medieval exegetes.

 

[ForeverLearn]

If something violates natural or moral law, then we can immediately conclude that the passage should not be read in that manner

From what authority are natural and moral law derived from if not from the book that is inspired by God, which is essentially directly quoting God?

 

[Neithan]

From natural reason. See Natural law - Wikipedia

But it requires some kind of absolute supernatural ground, which is why the practical atheists of the Enlightenment who embraced it compromised with “deism.”

 

[ForeverLearn]

God did, by virtue of His status as God. All that is flows from God. All goods, all rights. There must be an essential source for all such things, else there is an unending chain of right-givers, all whom received their rights from another without any source.

In my opinion, that seems to indicate God can do something that is contrary to his nature. Creation is different than ownership.

 

[ForeverLearn]

From natural reason. See Natural law - Wikipedia

But it requires some kind of absolute supernatural ground, which is why the practical atheists of the Enlightenment who embraced it compromised with “deism.”

So, this seems to essentially indicate that humanity’s ability of reason is more likely to be “correct” than the text in God’s book.

The absolute supernatural ground seems to be the issue. When it is said that you take the Bible to be literal when it makes sense to humanity, but when it doesn’t then it must be allegorical? Who is to say that the passages that speak of homosexuality aren’t supposed to be taken as allegorical? What about the others that appear that Jesus is speaking about Hell?