Without a God, Are we just animals?

[jimmy]

Morality is ultimately a human invention. We have the intellectual capacity to gain new knowledge which leads to discovering new information. We have the emotional capacity of altruism which leads to co-operation and co-operation leads to society, which is built on and progressed by our intellectual capacity to learn.

And you say that there is ‘nothing objective to judge your morality against’. According to you, precisely what constitutes as objective?

Why does it matter what I think is objective if you do not agree? What is objective is simply what applies to all.

Because I assert that no-one has the right to murder. Why? It is against the other persons will. What right does one have of imposition of force be it murder, rape or violence?

Rights have nothing to do with it. Rights are a human invention just as morality is.

You can add that too. So what? Morality is a human invention. I and most humans assert interest in self-preservation, progression and co-operation. To murder is to attack that.

I agree. Still, the murderer is just as just or good as the man who feeds the poor.

Everyone who has developed moral values have been taught them from various sources through upbringing.

I agree.

So you are now defining a difference of perspective as subjective. Now, since virtually everyone has a difference of perspective on morality - then would that not negate your own moral ideology to subjectiveness?

No. I posit that there is a god who has created all that is and all that is goes according to His plan. I do not give my own morality as the ultimate truth. I believe that God is truth, God is justice, God is love. Truth or goodness are not simply ideas of my own mind. I try to learn what has been given to me.

Why does the existence of a God make such a difference to all of the above, exactly?

Because the existence of a god is the only way anyone can say there is truth or good or evil or justice. There is no truth that applies to all men. What is evil is simply your enemy and what is good is your ally.

And as the declaration of independance mentions, God is the foundation of our rights. Without God they are subjective. They are simply human inventions.

 

[joeybaggz]

Without God, we are all merely animals operating according to our pre-programmed natures.

Man has no pre-programmed nature. A pre-programmed nature is called instinct, and man does not possess instinct. (The only possibility might be the ‘instinct’ to suckle as an infant.) But beyond that, mature man lives by recognizing and understanding his environment and his options, and making a conscience choice. The use of reason and will, the image and likeness of his Creator, of God.

 

[Skavau]

jimmy:

Why does it matter what I think is objective if you do not agree? What is objective is simply what applies to all.

This is a two-way discussion? I hear about the problems with Atheism or the consequences of the ‘Atheistic world view’. I am interested in your world view too.

jimmy:

Rights have nothing to do with it. Rights are a human invention just as morality is.

Yes.

jimmy:

I agree. Still, the murderer is just as just or good as the man who feeds the poor.

In what way?

jimmy:

No. I posit that there is a god who has created all that is and all that is goes according to His plan. I do not give my own morality as the ultimate truth. I believe that God is truth, God is justice, God is love. Truth or goodness are not simply ideas of my own mind. I try to learn what has been given to me.

So you assert a benevolent God who embodies all of the qualities of ‘justice’ and 'love. How do you define ‘justice’ or ‘love’ in order to attribute them to God?

jimmy:

Because the existence of a god is the only way anyone can say there is truth or good or evil or justice.

You mean the theistic benevolent rendition of God.

Moreover, how is the existence of a God as described the only way to say there is truth?

 

[drpmjhess]

scientific theories are assumptions. …They are guessing at it, with the minimal amount of evidence they have in order to sound as if they really knew what they were talking about. Such as when they call a formation in the sky a planet, and then several hundred years later changing their minds, realizing that their “fact” was not a fact at all, but an assumption, or theory if you will…

Justinthemartyr, you do not understand the difference between facts and theories. Theories never become facts, because facts are merely what is observed, and stand at a lower epistemological level than theories. Theories are at a higher epistemological level than facts: they offer an explanation for the facts we observe. The theory of gravity explains the observed fact of objects falling. The theory of evolution explains the observed fact of genetic diversity and similarity.

Petrus

 

[jimmy]

This is a two-way discussion? I hear about the problems with Atheism or the consequences of the ‘Atheistic world view’. I am interested in your world view too.

Yes.

In what way?

Because just as rights and morality is a human creation without a god, so is the idea of truth and justice. Justice is no more than an individual or group of people saying that something is against what the group stands for. It does not apply to all accross the board, it only applies to that group.

I don’t think there is anything objective without a god other than maybe mathematics.

So you assert a benevolent God who embodies all of the qualities of ‘justice’ and 'love. How do you define ‘justice’ or ‘love’ in order to attribute them to God?

I don’t assert a god who embodies the qualities of justice and love, I assert a god who is the essence of justice and love. God is love. God is justice. They are equivalent terms. Without God there is no such thing as justice. The ancient Greeks with their pagan gods treated justice and truth as if they were something seperate than the gods. That is not what Christianity is.

You mean the theistic benevolent rendition of God.

Moreover, how is the existence of a God as described the only way to say there is truth?

Because He is the essence of truth. Without a god truth is simply another transcendental term like justice or freedom that humans use to establish a standard across humanity.

 

[Skavau]

jimmy:

Because just as rights and morality is a human creation without a god, so is the idea of truth and justice.

No. What is real is independent of our knowledge or existence, so ‘truth’ is not a human invention.

Justice however, is.

jimmy:

I don’t assert a god who embodies the qualities of justice and love, I assert a god who is the essence of justice and love. God is love. God is justice.

So then God in effect, could be anything and still be ‘just’ and ‘love’.

 

[GregoryPalamas]

This may have been suggested already but if it has let this be a reminder. I encourage all people of reason to read St. Athanasius’ “The Divine Dilemma”. We would indeed be merely animals if God were not part of the human make up. Without God redeeming humanity and with that redemption applied two legged, upright, thumb users would simply be a lower form of animal.

CDL

 

[jimmy]

It might seem that I did not answer the question of how do you know what justice or love is to say that God is just or exemplifies love. First, as I mentioned, God is justice and love. He is the one transcendental thing in the universe. He is the one thing which can be said to be universal and eternal. Truth or justice is not something that is above God which we can make the standard to judge whether God is just or loving. It is not something that God creates either, something that is simply a law. It is equivallent to God.

Second, how do we know what justice and love are? From what I have said, a knowledge of the truth(or justice, love, and etc.) is a knowledge of God and vice versa. I do not believe in a god that is seperated from the world and we can not have any knowledge of Him. In fact, the Christian god is a god who lives within each man and guides him(Christian spirituality can not be seperated from the discussion). God is transcendant but He is also imminent. He is near to us and is there to guide us to the truth. This includes all men to a degree atleast. All men have some guidance from God, even the unbaptized. The atheist can see what is right and wrong in most cases. Through His nearness we can gain knowledge of Him and consequently also truth. So prayer and revelation are an important thing within Christianity. Deism is absolutely unacceptable. It is like saying there is no god if you are to say god is not near.

For someone to say there is no god is to cut the base out from under truth and justice. We can choose to accept or reject revelation and God. It is our choice. But to live without God is to live without truth.

 

[jimmy]

No. What is real is independent of our knowledge or existence, so ‘truth’ is not a human invention.

Justice however, is.

No, not really. As Descarte said, I think therefore I am. All that can trully be said to be real is my existence. My perceptions are only that, perceptions. Just try to understand modern theoretical physics. It will make your head spin and you will see what I am saying.

So then God in effect, could be anything and still be ‘just’ and ‘love’.

God is what He is. “Just” and “love” are simply words to explain that. We can accept Him or reject Him. It is our choice. To understand God from a Christian perspective I would suggest reading two books by Metropolitan John Zizioulas, Being as Communion and Communion and Otherness. They are explanations of Trinitarian theology.

 

[justinthemartyr]

Theories are a lot of facts, and a little bit assumption.

So what do you think about WOLVES? Are they a direct product of creation, or a product of evolution?

What about wolves? Did wolves cease to be wolves at some point in time? were they badgers? were they birds? were they cats? Who knows, and what does it matter? No creature on this earth was anything other than what it is. it may have chagned slightly, but not to be something entirely different than what it began as.

Just as there is not one iota of proof that humans were ever non human.

there is not one but of evidence that humans were once apes or monkeys, none whatsoever.

 

[Valke2]

If God is apprhendable, but not comprehendable, then can we really state what His essence is? Any attributed ascribed to the Ineffable is only an attempt to conceptualize something that is beyond conception.

A moral code is not some kind of natual emanation from a diety. Nor is it simply words spoken by a diety at one time. If it were, we’d have a simple list of do’s and don’ts, and that would be all we’d need.

Whether I believe in God or not, the murder of someone goes against my moral code. If enough people share my view, then murder becomes morally unacceptable.

 

[anthony022071]

The basis of human personhood and human dignity is:
“God created man in his own image”.
That truth clarifies everything as to how we should value and treat human beings.

When people keep that truth always in mind,then they don’t treat others like beasts,or like man-made products,or as just creatures of needs,or value them only so far as they are useful to business and society.

 

[jimmy]

If God is apprhendable, but not comprehendable, then can we really state what His essence is? Any attributed ascribed to the Ineffable is only an attempt to conceptualize something that is beyond conception.

A moral code is not some kind of natual emanation from a diety. Nor is it simply words spoken by a diety at one time. If it were, we’d have a simple list of do’s and don’ts, and that would be all we’d need.

Whether I believe in God or not, the murder of someone goes against my moral code. If enough people share my view, then murder becomes morally unacceptable.

No it doesn’t. Consensus does not change the moral quality of an act. Was slavery once actually morally acceptable and now it is not? No, it was always a moral error even though the majority of people accepted it. If something is wrong then it is wrong. What people think is irrelevant of it.

On a side note, I retract my Descartes line of arguement. It doesn’t deal with the arguement at hand. But the thing is that recognizing that truth is not a human conception does not affect the issue in this discussion. The only sense that truth can be recognized is in a physical sense. You can not recognize a moral sense of truth or a spiritual sense of truth or anything that can not be proven by scientific experiments. So, yes, I will agree that the big bang is a truth or that the laws of newton are truths. But still, the truth of the phsical world is not transcendental. It had a begining and it will have an end. The laws of the universe are not eternal laws. Life had its begining and if there is no god it will have its end and with its end will come the end of any conception of justice or love or any transcendental. So the assertion that the op made, that without God we are nothing more than animals is true. We are animals who have decided to live in a society.

 

[AgnosTheist]

Was slavery once actually morally acceptable and now it is not?

Slavery was once acceptable to the bible God and now it is not?

What then is the point of attacking the non-god morality?

 

[drpmjhess]

Slavery was once acceptable to the bible God and now it is not? What then is the point of attacking the non-god morality?

If slavery is not now acceptable to God it was never acceptable to the “Bible God.” That conception of God was merely an anthropomorphized projection of Hebrew cultural experience (the same God demanded child sacrifice of Abraham). If God exists, She/He/It exists in a sense infinitely greater than any human construction.

The hermeneutical task of theology is to reinterpret the faith for each generation of believers. If human sacrifice was ever wrong it was always wrong, but earlier humans simply did not understand that. As our species evolves, our conception of what we call “God” develops as well, and along with it, our conception of right and wrong. I doubt we’ll ever stop evolving, and our evolution toward a universal ethic will not stop either.

 

[anthony022071]

Slavery was once acceptable to the bible God and now it is not?

What then is the point of attacking the non-god morality?

Morality without God is moveable – because there’s no divine,absolute point of reference,no eternal commandments,no divine judgement.

 

[AgnosTheist]

If slavery is not now acceptable to God it was never acceptable to the “Bible God.” That conception of God was merely an anthropomorphized projection of Hebrew cultural experience (the same God demanded child sacrifice of Abraham). If God exists, She/He/It exists in a sense infinitely greater than any human construction.

oooh excuses excuses

The bible god is merely as fickle as the average human.

The bible god improves as humanity does.

For the bible god is evidently but a reflection of frail human attributes. A product of human superstitious beliefs.

If human sacrifice was ever wrong it was always wrong, but earlier humans simply did not understand that.

You dont understand that primitive human understandings can be immediately corrected. Evidence for this is the fairly quick modernization of primitive pacific islanders beginning in the 19th century. In just 200 years their minds evolved from the dark ages into modernity. The bible had thousands of years, and it still failed to do better.

Dont underestimate the human mind, just for the sake of the backward bible.

 

[drpmjhess]

oooh excuses excuses

I don’t understand what you’re saying. I’m not offering excuses. I’m merely trying to point out that as humans evolve, so do their cultures, their ethical philosophies, their theologies, etc. The fact that these dimensions evolve does not of itself negate the existence of God; rather God’s existence (if real) is independent of human expressions of its significance.

 

[AgnosTheist]

I don’t understand what you’re saying. I’m not offering excuses. I’m merely trying to point out that as humans evolve, so do their cultures, their ethical philosophies, their theologies, etc.

You said “If slavery is not now acceptable to God it was never acceptable to the “Bible God.””

Thats either an excuse, or a product of ignorance. But then you go on blaming anthropomorphism for the slavery-approving-bible-God. As if you agree with me that the leviticus laws and the bible god were all made up through ancient jewish superstitions. Think about it, should a true God follow human culture, or should humans follow God’s culture? Anthropomorphism implies the former. If Americans could make primitive pacific islanders follow their superior moral policies, why cant the bible god? no sense. no sense at all.

 

[drpmjhess]

Thats either an excuse, or a product of ignorance. But then you go on blaming anthropomorphism for the slavery-approving-bible-God. As if you agree with me that the leviticus laws and the bible god were all made up through ancient jewish superstitions. Think about it, should a true God follow human culture, or should humans follow God’s culture? Anthropomorphism implies the former. If Americans could make primitive pacific islanders follow their superior moral policies, why cant the bible god? no sense. no sense at all.

You don’t have to get insulting on these fora – that doesn’t help the discussion along at all, it just antagonizes people.

You don’t seem to see that fundamentally I agree with you. Humans evolve, and their cultures and religious understanding along with it. I agree that the Old Testament – with its sometimes vengeful and petty God, its primitive ethics including now despicable requirements, its male-dominant female-subordinating metaphysic – the Old Testament must be read through new lenses. Do you understand what I mean?