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anEvilAtheist
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I disagree. If you want more of a response, you’ll have to tell me why you think it is.
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tonyrey
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You can’t get blood out of a stone neither can you get value out of a spark in the dark!
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jochoa
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I would like to take a shot at this step-by-step logical outline:
- Objective Purpose of Societies - Absolute Peace, Happiness, and Energy for All Beings of the Society.
- Objective Morality to Fulfill this Purpose - Each Being must Always be Patient and Kind and Motivated with All the Being towards others and the self.
a. Perfect Patience generates Unbreakable Peace.
b. Perfect Kindness generates Unbreakable Happiness.
c. Perfect Motivation generates Unstoppable Energy.
c1. The Motivation must be Inexhaustible.
c2. The Motivation must be Immaterial.
c3. The Motivation must be Omnipresent.
c4. The Motivation must be Eternal.
c5. The Motivation must be Personal. - Alignment of Objective Morality with Jesus - Jesus declared the Greatest Commandments - “Always be Patient and Kind and Motivated for God with All Your Being towards Others and Yourself.”
a. We cannot understand nor practice this fully, without the leadership of Jesus.
b. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." - Alignment of Objective Morality and The Father - The Father is Perfect Love towards Others and Himself.
a. Love is Absolute Patience and Kindness. - Alignment of God’s Plan and Objective Purpose of Societies - The Father wants others to Freely Love as to experience and share the Greatest Peace, Happiness, Energy, and Wisdom.
- Alignment of Objective Purpose of Man and the Holy Spirit - A Human (body, mind, will, and soul) must learn and follow from the Son and the Father and Achieve Oneness in the Essence of Love while being Alive on Earth
- Recognition of the Holy Trinity - In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, We Will do God’s Will on Earth as It is Done in Heaven!
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Perplexity
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Argument from evil to God:
(1) If God doesn’t exist, then objective morality doesn’t exist. [Premise]
(2) If evil exists, then objective morality exists. [Premise]
(3) Evil exists. [Premise]
(4) Objective morality exists. (2), (3), M.P.]
(5) Therefore, God exists. (1), (4), M.T.]
Nobody denies (3). Few deny (2): we want to say the things we believe are evil shouldn’t be done by others in relevantly similar situations. (4)-(5) are just derivations. So, I think everything hinges on (1).
(1) isn’t saying atheists can’t build ethical theories / metaethical theories involving objective morality. (1) isn’t saying atheists are necessarily subjectivists etc.
(1) is only saying that theism can ground objective morality while atheists cannot. That is, if an atheist is going to believe in objective morality, she must accept it as a brute fact, atheism affords her no grounds for such a morality. But for many reasons such a position is incredibly improbable.
So, we can say that theism is the best available explanation for objective morality, or using bayes’ theorem say its posterior, given objective morality, is much higher than atheism’s.
(1) If God doesn’t exist, then objective morality doesn’t exist. [Premise]
(2) If evil exists, then objective morality exists. [Premise]
(3) Evil exists. [Premise]
(4) Objective morality exists. (2), (3), M.P.]
(5) Therefore, God exists. (1), (4), M.T.]
Nobody denies (3). Few deny (2): we want to say the things we believe are evil shouldn’t be done by others in relevantly similar situations. (4)-(5) are just derivations. So, I think everything hinges on (1).
(1) isn’t saying atheists can’t build ethical theories / metaethical theories involving objective morality. (1) isn’t saying atheists are necessarily subjectivists etc.
(1) is only saying that theism can ground objective morality while atheists cannot. That is, if an atheist is going to believe in objective morality, she must accept it as a brute fact, atheism affords her no grounds for such a morality. But for many reasons such a position is incredibly improbable.
So, we can say that theism is the best available explanation for objective morality, or using bayes’ theorem say its posterior, given objective morality, is much higher than atheism’s.
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tonyrey
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Theism is indeed the best available explanation for objective morality if the nature of God is clarified.
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anEvilAtheist
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What do you mean by a brute fact and why is it a problem? What if I said that morality was in some respects like the population center of the United States- contingent on a lot of real world facts, not directly decided by an all-powerful agent, yet objective in the sense that it is where it is regardless of our opinions of it. Would you argue that without a God to “ground” the center, there could be no center?
If you want me to fully flush out my moral theory, I could do so. I’ve discussed it on this site many times before. But my criticism do not hinge on my view of morality being correct. I am merely saying that arguments from evil typically appeal to ignorance but never present a tight argument for why morality is impossible or improbably without God.
Wait, even if I granted, which I don’t, that objective morality is unlikely if God exists, in order for this to constitute evidence for God’s existence, you’d still have to show that objective morality is more likely to exist if God does exist. If objective morality is unlikely to exist regardless of whether God exists, then it does not constitute evidence for God.
William Lane Craig defines objective as “independent of people’s opinions.” Regardless of my opinion of it, slavery does a lot of harm.
But one question that rarely gets asked is whether objective morality is possible WITH God. If what is moral is grounded in what a personal God thinks is moral, then morality is not independent of people’s opinions. A morality based on God’s opinions seems just as subjective as a morality based on the opinions of some space alien that visits earth.
This gets to the biggest problem with theistic morality: the Euthyphro dilemma. It asks whether God commands things because they are good, or whether they are good merely because they are commanded by God. If things are only good because they are commanded by God, then morality is subjective. It also makes it meaningless to say that God is good, because he could have made love evil and rape good. Whatever God happened to choose, he could have made us think that those things are good or evil. If morality is nothing more than what God wills, then we can’t even say that we’re lucky that God ended up favoring good things, because there’s nothing good about them other than that God happened to will them. If good is whatever God wants, then God being good means nothing more than that God does whatever he wants.
The other option is that God commands things because they are good. This seems much more reasonable, though believers who think that God is the creator of everything might have a problem with it. If God commands things because they are good, then theists still have to explain what the source of morality really is. However, if they are Christian, then they have the added problem of reconciling this view of morality with the God of the Old Testament. According to 1 Samuel 15, God commanded: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” At least when God commanded genocide in Numbers 31, he said that the virginal girls should be kept alive for the use of the soldiers, which I guess is slightly better than death. I don’t see how it could be moral to promote genocide. Maybe Christians can come up with their own theory of morality apart from God under which God’s actions in the Old Testament happen to be morally perfect, but that seems absurdly unlikely.
The most common response to the Euthyphro dilemma is to say that morality is grounded in God’s perfectly good nature. But this only pushes the problem back a step. You can then ask whether God is good because his nature has the properties of moral goodness, or whether those properties are good merely because God has them (See this excellent article by Christian philosopher Wes Morriston for a more detailed explanation of the problem). You still either have to either come up with a theory of morality apart from God and explain how promoting genocide and permitting the Holocaust are consistent with that theory, or accept that morality is somewhat arbitrary and that it is meaningless to call God good.
You haven’t provided any good reasons why objective morality is unlikely if God does not exist or reasons to think it is likely if God does exist. But if you can think of such reasons, I’d be interested in hearing them.
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You
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Do you think human freedom confirms objective morality. You prefer good things to evil things. Though you are always free to chose other than what you prefer.
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Perplexity
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A brute fact is a proposition that is inexplicably true. Let’s call the proposition that morality is objective, O.
Morality consists of values and duties. Suppose a cop pulls me over and tells me I’ve broken the law: I was driving a car that was too green. I ask, “is it true that I have a duty to not drive a car painted this shade of green?” He says yes and I ask why. He replies “No reason, there’s no reason for why you have this duty, but you do.”
I can give numerous examples illustrating the same problem: it’s hard to believe that we have a duty if there’s no reason to think we do. The same thing can be done with moral values. However, this is what the atheist is asking us to believe.
Perhaps this is due to what I think morality is, but I don’t understand this analogy at all.
I’ve never said objective morality is unlikely if God exists, quite the opposite. You seem to be saying that if P(E|K) << 1, then E cannot probablify theism. I don’t think this makes sense though since there are other probabilities needed before we can calculate theism’s posterior, like P(H|K) and P(E|H & K), both of which I’d rate very high. We want P(E|K) to be low btw, that would amplify H’s posterior.
This seems to suggest that God’s moral beliefs could be different; but, I’m not sure theists (even divine command theorists) would ever grant that God’s moral beliefs are arbitrary. Given that God exists necessarily and possesses certain attributes (include perfect goodness) essentially, the theist will be content to say God holds his moral beliefs necessarily.
This assumes that God’s moral beliefs aren’t held by God in every possible world, no theist will give you this.
Above I’ve provided reason to think objective morality on atheism is improbable. Given that atheism entails or implies O being inexplicably true, and O being inexplicably true given our background knowledge is astonishingly improbable, we have good reason to think atheism is improbable given O.
I’d say God grounds moral values much like platonic forms ground their instantiations, and God grounds moral duties much like competent authorities in our everyday lives ground other duties (legal, familial, monetary etc.). So, the probability of O given God’s existence is 1.
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anEvilAtheist
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Perplexity, thanks for your thoughtful responses. I will reply as soon as I have time to give them the careful consideration they deserve.
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You
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What is that word? ‘Selfish’. Is it good or evil?
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You
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Ah, selfishness is something that results in harm, I see. So it is not a good for others. But it is the means of procuring something good for the selfish person. I don’t think anyone persus selfishness itself as an object. So I think I might say the selfish person is persuing good things.
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Equites_Christi
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I’ll tell you right now that that is a fascinating question but I, personally, don’t have an answer for it. Very interesting however. I can imagine some answers others would give, but it would be, as you said, pushing the question back a step. From my theistic perspective, the idea of God having ‘opinions’ does not sit very well. It’s not how we’d term it and it’s not what we believe. God is what is good, and what is good God is. Whether the chicken or the egg came first, though, I can’t say.
I disagree with others that because objective morality exists that God (at least our God) must exist. What the existence of objective morality demands is that there be an authoritative arbiter of morality. However, I cannot see this arbiter as being anything other than something above humans, since humans have conflicting ideas about morality. Therefore for us Catholics, this arbiter can be no one other than God.
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anEvilAtheist
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You
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Do not understand your point about Hitler. Laptop good; moral good higher good.
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Trevor_Stamm
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Godwin’s law! Just kiddin’, but seriously it’s funny how we all, theists and atheists alike, condemn what he did because all he was doing was following an atheistic outline designed by Marx and Sir Francis Galton notion of eugenics. An idea adopted from the communists, which is funny being that he directed part of his efforts against the communists. But I think that was based on Marx’s ideal that the Slavic race was quote “a savage race, not fit for the future”, funny how those same people embraced his doctrines, guess they never bothered reading
But I’d like to hear a reason why these atheists were/are wrong from other atheists on the premise of objective morality. What justifies your reasoning over theirs? They believe they will better serve humanity but ridding it of “undesirable” elements, left up to an elite few “fit” to judge who is worthy to live and who is not. We all might recall the Twilight Zone episode, “The Obsolete Man” which identifies the absurdity of the Marxist agenda.
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You
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Freedom offers the choice between good and evil. It is not instinctual. It creates the debate. An objective morality solves the debate.
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anEvilAtheist
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It sounds like you’re defining freedom as the ability to choose between good and bad rather than defining it as the ability to choose between multiple options. Obviously then it would lead to the conclusion that morality exists, but then you’re just smuggling it into the definition of freedom. I don’t see why anyone would accept the former definition of freedom rather than the latter unless they had some other reason to believe that morality exists. In that case, that reason is the reason they have for believing in morality. Freedom itself is not.
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