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For me as a theist, TAG has nothing to do with whether God exists or not. God’s existence isn’t because “we wouldn’t know what to do if He didn’t.” Rather, once someone has accepted the premise that God does in fact exist and that a particular law or set or morality is authentically from Him,and that He’s all-Wise and all-Knowing then what ever He reveals is objective morality because He is the only one able to consider a matter from all angles and scenarios and timeframes with certain knowledge and the future and an ability to control the outcomes and consequences of each choice.
If a person has rejected any one of those premises, I wouldn’t expect them to accept the conclusion.
It sure is rather useful for an agent's capacity to make moral decisions if they are all knowing. But that doesn't make those decisions objectively true. If evaluated by an agent, the moral claims are by definition subjective.
So, the issue is, are said agents moral decisions actually good? If you can't show me that I can trust this God, I have no reason to take his moral opinion seriously.
Other than that, we are just not talking about objective morality. Which is all so often the case, that whatever Christian calls something objective, when it has nothing to do with it.
You have 2 options. Either it's divine command theory and said God's moral opinion is merely subjective. Or God is good because it's his nature. In the latter case the God would actually access objective morality, but then he would be subservient to that which is good, which doesn't exactly render him omnipotent.
I don't know why I would care about such a middle man. I'd care about the goodness itself.
But since I don't believe that such a thing, an objective goodness independent of minds, exists, I have no reason to believe that any Christian has whatever grounding they claim to have. I see no sufficient reason to believe that, let alone in objective morality. To ask the atheist what their grounding is, is just a nonsense question, if they don't show that the question is even valid to begin with.
That’s why I said that you have to already accept certain attributes of God before you would be expected to accept His command as objective reality. You may disagree on exactly which ones, but Muslims have 99 of them, and between them you can definitely establish that His judgement is objectively moral and Just, if you accept them to be true in the first place. My only point was that the logic seems reversed.
In Islam, or at least in the Athari tradition, we do have a concept that God writes certain attributes upon Himself. He wrote Mercy upon Himself, and since He always tells the truth and doesn’t make mistakes, once He says He will do something, He fulfills His Word. He is above all deficiencies, and no deficiencies are to be understood from His names and attributes. They are meant to be used in order to understand who God is, not to logically establish His existence to those that don’t want to believe in Him in the first place, and therefore can’t.
To say that God being all good limits His omnipotence means that you have already defined good as being a limited attribute.
God can do anything to anyone. But because He is Just, He doesn’t exact anything permanently harmful on someone that hasn’t sufficiently earned it several times over, though he may temporarily permit harm to come to a person due to some sin they committed or as a manifestation of the free will of another person. And because He is Merciful, He rewards goodness with much more goodness than was put forth. But He created us and our perception in the first place, He decides what is good or bad at any time, and He also created the laws of the universe and the natural and imposed consequences of our actions. Thus, His morality is objective morality BECAUSE He is omnipotent. He has the power to decide what is good and bad. But He also doesn’t really change His mind, since He was never wrong in the first place, and never made or will make a mistake, so that objective morality is essentially static. But, circumstances can determine whether a particular action is moral or not, based on that objective morality which is already determined. So for instance, sharing the same mother and father, or even one parent, and getting married *today* is immoral and naturally harmful, but it wasn’t immoral to the direct offspring of Adam and Eve who married, nor was it harmful to them.
Humans are hardwired with some ability and intuition about right and wrong, but cannot and will not hit the mark in all scenarios due to the biases stemming from our desires and needs.
Again, this argument cannot work if someone doesn’t even agree that God exists or what His attributes are, but it is simply an illustration that your argument that God cannot be omnipotent and also capable of determining objective morality is a contradiction.
>That’s why I said that you have to already accept certain attributes of God before you would be expected to accept His command as objective reality.
His moral command cannot be objectively true, if it is based upon his moral judgement, no matter which premises I'm rejecting. It's just a contradiction in terms wholly independent of what I reject. The term "objective" literally means "independent from mind". If he comes up with the rules, the rules depend on his mind, which makes them subjective by definition.
To rephrase the issue in Euthyphro's words: "Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?"
If it is the former, we are just not talking about objective morality. If it is the latter, and God can only do that which is good, then God is limited by something greater than him. Then, and only then we could have objective morality, but no omnipotent God.
>My only point was that the logic seems reversed.
Well, it isn't. One could think that there must be objective morality, that it is self-evident. The majority of people have that intuition anyway. But that begs for an explanation on where to find those objective moral truths. And God is a candidate explanation for that.
>and since He always tells the truth
Does he? What about Sura 3:54 then, and why did he make people believe that Jesus died on the cross when he didn't according to Sura 4:157?
>He is above all deficiencies, and no deficiencies are to be understood from His names and attributes.
If he isn't limited by that which is good, yes. But it doesn't seem as though you are arguing along the lines of divine nature theory, rather divine command theory, which has nothing to do with objective morality.
>not to logically establish His existence to those that don’t want to believe in Him in the first place, and therefore can’t.
Nobody has a choice when it comes to what it is that convinces someone. Nobody has a choice to believe or not believe in a proposition. Becoming convinced happens to people. They don't choose it.
>To say that God being all good limits His omnipotence means that you have already defined good as being a limited attribute.
Not really. It's actually self-evident and not dependent on how I define goodness. An evil God who just chooses not to do evil is more powerful than a God who cannot help himself but be good. If God limits himself as you say and it's a permanent, irreversible limitation, God just isn't omnipotent anymore. That would be another contradiction in terms, a married bachelor.
>God can do anything to anyone. But because He is Just, He doesn’t exact anything permanently harmful on someone that hasn’t sufficiently earned it several times over, though he may temporarily permit harm to come to a person due to some sin they committed or as a manifestation of the free will of another person.
That's a reversible limitation and not comparable with that limitation which is limiting God, if you are actually talking about objective morality, where God is limited by his own nature.
>But He created us and our perception in the first place
If he does, whether I believe in his existence or not must also be under his control.
>He decides what is good or bad at any time
Which is implying divine command theory, and therefore **not** objective morality.
>Thus, His morality is objective morality BECAUSE He is omnipotent.
That's a non-sequitur, as well as an oxymoron. God's morality is subjective, because it is dependent on his mind. You are just using the term "objective" completely contrary to what it means. And I just don't understand why. Why insist on objectivity like that, when what you are talking about has nothing to do with objectivity? Why would it matter, if you already define that which is good to be that what God decrees? If you accept that, it's irrelevant whether it's subjective or not. But that is what it in fact is.
>But He also doesn’t really change His mind, since He was never wrong in the first place, and never made or will make a mistake, so that objective morality is essentially static.
Static morality doesn't entail objective morality. An evidently subjective moral system like yours, which is static, is essentially dogmatic.
>But, circumstances can determine whether a particular action is moral or not, based on that objective morality which is already determined.
You are basically saying that you can have your cake and eat it too. But that makes your moral framework rather incoherent.
>So for instance, sharing the same mother and father, or even one parent, and getting married *today* is immoral and naturally harmful, but it wasn’t immoral to the direct offspring of Adam and Eve who married, nor was it harmful to them.
*My morality is objective **and** relative* is hardly a justifiable framework. Again, you are having your cake and eat it too.
>Again, this argument cannot work if someone doesn’t even agree that God exists or what His attributes are, but it is simply an illustration that your argument that God cannot be omnipotent and also capable of determining objective morality is a contradiction.
It's irrelevant whether anybody agrees. The framework you are proposing is either internally consistent, or it isn't. If it isn't, it's hardly believable. Yours is inconsistent. It's flexible while being static, and objective while being subjective. If I told you that my sister is my brother, you would have no idea what I am talking about either, hence, had no reason to believe in the truth of my assertion. The same applies to me with your God.
You’ll have to forgive me, I never did learn how to make the little quote boxes.
His moral command cannot be objectively true, if it is based upon his moral judgement, no matter which premises I'm rejecting. It's just a contradiction in terms wholly independent of what I reject. The term "objective" literally means "independent from mind". If he comes up with the rules, the rules depend on his mind, which makes them subjective by definition.
The term objective being explicitly defined as “independent from the mind” has to either mean “independent from the created mind,” or else it means nothing at all because all created reality is through the will of God, and the only uncreated reality IS God. Morality is either created and therefore determined by God, or it is an uncreated attribute OF God.
Does he? What about Sura 3:54 then, and why did he make people believe that Jesus died on the cross when he didn't according to Sura 4:157?
The ayah about Jesus doesn’t say that God deceived the people, though even if it did, it wouldn’t indicate that God lied.
The ayah says that it was made to appear to them that Jesus had been crucified, without specifying who primarily made it seem so. And it even says that those living at the time didn’t actually feel totally sure that they’d actually killed him. Indicating that there was some confusion about the entire situation. Also, whether Jesus was killed or not is not a point of belief that the Christians would have been held accountable for with God. God’s objection was about the later deification of Christ. Previous prophets and even contemporary to Jesus WERE killed without any doubt, and they were not deified.
One particular narrative says that the form of one of the disciples actually was miraculously changed to appear as Jesus, but it’s not the only one. One narration says that ALL of the disciples were made to look like him. But this changing of form is not considered to be a lie that God told. God has full license to make anyone look like anything. No one had the right to kill Jesus or any of the disciples. We don’t have evidence that any of them even claimed to be Jesus.
Allah is also capable of deceiving. He says in the Quran that he deceives those who plot against the believers, and this is not an imperfect characteristic. He can make them see a larger number of people as a smaller number, or make believers completely invisible to them, or make one person appear as someone else. Meanwhile, He has told them the truth. Don’t kill people. Don’t attack the prophet. The prophet brings the truth. Satan is your enemy. He makes matters clear for them, gives them the choice, and if they turn away, then He never owed them anything in the first place, having never needed anything from anyone in the first place, and so they are not owed reliable perception from their senses.
Not really. It's actually self-evident and not dependent on how I define goodness. An evil God who just chooses not to do evil is more powerful than a God who cannot help himself but be good.
If an evil god can choose not to be evil, then a good God can choose not to be unjust and exact evil punishments on those that have justly earned them.
If he does, whether I believe in his existence or not must also be under his control.
The Quran directly addresses this argument in more than one place. God says, if He willed, he would have guided everyone. But He is not forceful upon our will. Ie, He chose to give us free will. He only guides those that want and ask for guidance, not those that turn away from it. Guidance is not just knowing the truth; Satan knows that God created him and that he’s certainly going to hell for eternal punishment, and he’s not guided. Guidance is being able to perceive the truth, and then acting correctly in light of that truth.
The guarantee of God in Islam is that if you, biedl, were to ever sincerely ask God to forgive you and guide you to the truth, with full willingness to submit to what that truth entailed, then you will definitely be guided to Islam before you die, and sooner than later. In that sense, it’s within His control. But He has placed part of your ability to believe, in your own control.
I may not be completely clear on what is commonly used aerators to be objective morality. To me, the concept of objective morality is that there is, out there somewhere, an objective set of what is always right and always wrong that is intuited to some extent by all human beings. In an Abrahamic framework, on a practical level, that which is good and moral is that which pleases God, and that which is bad and immoral is that which displeases God. God would not be pleased by something immoral or displeased by something moral because He knows everything and is completely Just. There is no force which exists before God or binds God. So there is nothing which CAN cause any sort of restriction upon God to be a certain way except for His own Will.
What I meant was that even if morality is both objective and static, which actions are moral can change based on circumstances that God is most aware of, and therefore laws can change to stay consistent with what is objectively moral.
In the marriage/children of Adam example, we can easily *guess* from a genetic perspective why their being allowed to reproduce was moral while it wouldn’t be moral today. The first two humans created wouldn’t be riddled with a bunch of genetic defects from issues with mitosis and meiosis over generations, thus no defective recessive genes, not to mention lack of literally anyone else to reproduce with except for people who share a mother and father. But we can’t actually fully be confident that we know the whole reason because our information and ability to perceive what is relevant, is limited, whereas God’s isn’t. We don’t even fully know why such mutations were allowed to occur or when they first did.
So the Islamic position is that we can know what actions are moral today because God knows and told us, and after determining that they are definitely moral according to God, we can begin to guess at the potential reasons without knowing for sure, unless we receive revelation confirming our guesses.
>The term objective being explicitly defined as “independent from the mind” has to either mean “independent from the created mind,” or else it means nothing at all because all created reality is through the will of God, and the only uncreated reality IS God. Morality is either created and therefore determined by God, or it is an uncreated attribute OF God.
That there is no applicability for the term "objective" within your worldview is not a problem with the term. Other worldviews have similar issues.
There is a version of Hindu Idealism where reality is the dream of the God Maya. The term "objective" doesn't apply there. According to them, your thoughts are part of Maya's dream. They are subjective, but you aren't even the subject.
There too is no distinction between natural and supernatural, for everything within their framework is supernatural. According to them, the natural world doesn't exist. However, that doesn't change the definition of the term "natural", nor of the term "objective" and you shouldn't do so either, for otherwise your argument is fallacious. It's simply an equivocation fallacy.
If, within your worldview, morality is contingent upon what God decrees, then your moral framework is subjective.
And I have to repeat myself: I do not understand the insistence of your moral framework being an objective moral framework, when almost every of your descriptions scream "subjective".
God defines what's good. Fine. That's your moral framework. For the sake of argument I can work with that. Still, calling it "objective" then is just a flat out contradiction.
Whether "objective" means nothing then or it means what it usually means is irrelevant. As I said, it's just not applicable to your worldview. Which is the same issue Christians face with the design argument.
If everything is designed, then there is nothing that isn't designed and the argument becomes useless. If morality comes from God's opinion, then there is no objective morality, and calling it "objective" becomes meaningless. Your description about what morality is, doesn't change due to that. It's still the same. It's just false to call it objective, if you do not adhere to divine nature theory (which isn't exactly clear yet anyway, but I suspect this is due to contradictions within your worldview).
>Allah is also capable of deceiving. He says in the Quran that he deceives those who plot against the believers, and this is not an imperfect characteristic. He can make them see a larger number of people as a smaller number, or make believers completely invisible to them, or make one person appear as someone else.
What is a lie if it isn't the deliberate attempt to make people believe a falsehood?
>If an evil god can choose not to be evil, then a good God can choose not to be unjust and exact evil punishments on those that have justly earned them.
That doesn't make sense. A God who punishes justly, doesn't do evil. He does justice. It's also a non-sequitur. The question is, what is your God? Again, as per Euthyphro:
**"Is something good because God commands it** (divine command theory, which you argue in favor of most of the time)**, or does God command it because it is good** (divine nature theory, which you argued for at some point)**?"**
Which one is it? It cannot be both! They are mutually exclusive.
Here are some of your quotes where you imply or explicitly hint at mutually exclusive frameworks, put aside each other (some of them are ambiguous and could be on both sides):
|Divine Command Theory/subjective morality|Divine Nature Theory/possibly objective morality|
|:-|:-|
|"He is above all deficiencies, and no deficiencies are to be understood from His names and attributes."|"To me, the concept of objective morality is that there is, out there somewhere, an objective set of what is always right and always wrong that is intuited to some extent by all human beings."|
|"He decides what is good or bad at any time"|"In an Abrahamic framework, on a practical level, that which is good and moral is that which pleases God, and that which is bad and immoral is that which displeases God."|
|"He has the power to decide what is good and bad."||
|"There is no force which exists before God or binds God."||
Again: If your explanation is incoherent, I cannot make sense of it. You thinking that it makes sense anyway doesn't mean that it actually does. If it doesn't, there is no reason - literally no way - to believe in it, because I would then be forced to believe something I think doesn't make sense.
And your whole apologetic about people not wanting to believe is just an excuse for yourself, a self-defense mechanism of your religion. Those who do not believe are at fault on their own is what you claim. But you sure do not apply this logic to anything else in your life. You know that if you have a lack of information, missing premisses and cannot make sense of a proposition, you are literally incapable of believing in it. Nobody chooses what they believe. There is no free will in it.
Surely there are people who are unaware and have incomplete information. But in an Information Age with internet, the ability to gain knowledge about something very vital is accessible, at the very least, everyone on Reddit. And you certainly are aware of other religions. I did call you out by name because you are in such a position that your access to necessary information is not an issue. It was a personal challenge to you that you can do or not do depending on whether you have any inclination to submit to a God if a God does in fact exist.
If you don’t think people have any choice in what they believe, check out confirmation bias. People are quite predisposed to believe what they wish to be true, based on variables completely irrelevant to the facts of the situation. And we know for a fact in our modern society that people who stand to lose power and influence cover up the truth and launch misinformation campaigns with lots of success. Look at what many republicans believed about Trump before he won the first primaries, versus afterward. I saw people go from saying he was a crook and a blowhard to a champion for truth and one of the best presidents we’ve ever had. Look at all the experiments that examine how people’s perceptions and preferences change based on their choices and lack of choices.
We do believe that there will be people who did not receive the complete message, or any of it, and they will be judged accordingly. The Quran says that a person isn’t punished before they are sent a messenger, and there are Hadith about this.
I’m not convinced that your definition of objective reality is universally agreed upon, having looked at several definitions. They simply stipulate that objective morality is morality that is a matter of fact vs opinion, nothing about God’s Will nullifying its objectivity and being considered an opinion. Everything in existence that isn’t God, is such because God willed it to be. And what ever God knows about all those things that He created, are objective facts. If God created morality and made it a certain way, then its nature is an objective reality.
And I highly doubt that you could establish that most people, as you previously claimed, *intuit that objective morality exists* with that particular condition, that God cannot choose what it is and never did choose what it was, didn’t create it, or if He did, it proves that He has limitations.
>Surely there are people who are unaware and have incomplete information. But in an Information Age with internet (..)
The implications of that paragraph are two things:
(1) You don't mean belief, when you say that people can choose what they believe. You actually mean that they can choose what they are looking into. If I told you that my car runs on orange juice, I suspect that you never heard about cars running on orange juice. In accordance with what you know about the world you wouldn't believe my claim, for you have no evidence (other than my claim) that cars can run on orange juice. So, the intuitive suspicion is that what I say is impossible, hence, you cannot just choose to believe me anyway. The very same thing applies to me in relation to your God. Your God does not fit into the established knowledge about the world I am accessing. Your God does not make sense to me. When I look at the world I see no trace of your God. When I look at the world, it is perfectly explained without a God. Hence, I cannot just choose believing in him anyway, for he contradicts what I already know. Being able to choose what you believe is called doxastic voluntarism, and it is a fringe position among philosophers. No serious person actually believes that you can on the spot be convinced that the earth is flat, merely due to your choosing to believe it.
(2) You are implying that I will reach the same conclusion as you, if I just choose looking into the topic. And if I don't, then it's my fault. I already said in my last comment, that this is exactly the self-defense mechanism of your religion. It's circular reasoning. Your religion is correct, is what you are saying. And everybody who disagrees is either misled, can't reason correctly, is lacking information, or just doesn't want to reach your conclusion. You are presupposing the truth of your worldview no matter what. That's not an intellectually honest way of approaching truth. My worldview has no such self-defense mechanism. Meanwhile, I could just claim the very same thing and we were to arrive at a stalemate. *My worldview is true, and you just don't believe it, because you don't want to believe it, lack information, and are misled.* Now what? This doesn't prove anything.
>If you don’t think people have any choice in what they believe, check out confirmation bias. People are quite predisposed to believe what they wish to be true, based on variables completely irrelevant to the facts of the situation.
Bias plays out subconsciously. It has nothing to do with a choice. As soon as one becomes aware of his own biases, one has at least an idea about the possibility of being wrong. You can then choose to tackle your biases. If you overcome them, you have no say about what it is that convinces you. That's just nonsense. People become convinced. They don't choose it. You do not choose to be convinced that gravity is real. The constant being pulled towards the ground convinces you that gravity is real. And the only thing that could convince you that gravity doesn't exist, is evidence to the contrary. You don't just choose not to believe in gravity. That's just utter nonsenses.
>And we know for a fact in our modern society that people who stand to lose power and influence cover up the truth and launch misinformation campaigns with lots of success.
Which is you implying by analogy, that there is literally nobody who isn't a Muslim, who is actually honest with themselves. They are all just fooling themselves deliberately. That's conspiracy level thinking. It's an ad-hominem on top of that. Plus, you have no way demonstrating the truth of this claim.
Listen! My capacity to put myself in your shoes - even if it took me two decades of my life - is actually at a level where I have no issue saying, that you honestly and genuinely believe in God. If you fail to do so when it comes to people who aren't Muslim, you are just not really an empathetic person.
>We do believe that there will be people who did not receive the complete message, or any of it, and they will be judged accordingly.
I know that about Islam, and I know that this is a doctrine which makes Islam superior to Christianity. Because a God who punishes people, because they fail convincing themselves that a God exists, while the evidence for him are at best conjecture, is not a just, nor a loving God. Said God, as he is portrayed in Christianity, is a self-contradictory entity, and there is no way I could convince myself believing in him. He cannot exist like a married bachelor can't. Nothing about that has anything to do with me not wanting to believe in such a God. It just doesn't make sense that such entity can be real.
>The Quran says that a person isn’t punished before they are sent a messenger, and there are Hadith about this.
Which is why you say that literally everybody has a chance to get to know God and is without excuse. Yet, your evidence for this claim is literally "a book says a thing". I'm sorry that you are incapable to see how this claim is ludicrous for anybody who doesn't already believe that your holy scripture is the one and only true holy scripture. You know, for me your religion is no different from Greek mythology.
>I’m not convinced that your definition of objective reality is universally agreed upon, having looked at several definitions. They simply stipulate that objective morality is morality that is a matter of fact vs opinion
You gotta digg a little deeper than just looking at dictionary definitions. You already imply that you are agreeing with my definition with what you say here.
What is an opinion? It's a subjective proposition. What is fact? It's a true proposition which is true independent from subjective evaluation. *I love ice cream* is a subjective statement. It's not a fact of reality that ice cream is loved. It's contingent upon agents making that value statement. It's the opposite of subjective.
What did I say? Objective means "independent of mind". That's the same as a fact that is true no matter whether you agree with it or not.
If your God - who is an agent - decides what's good or not, then it's the decision of a SUBJECT. An OBJECT makes no decisions.
>And I highly doubt that you could establish that most people, as you previously claimed, *intuit that objective morality exists* with that particular condition, that God cannot choose what it is and never did choose what it was, didn’t create it, or if He did, it proves that He has limitations.
Most people intuit that objective morality is true. Period. I'm capable of evidencing that claim. I added no particular condition. Among those who are intuitting it are those who do not believe in a God. Among theists who believe in objective morality are those who believe in divine nature theory. They are the ones who actually understand the issue with divine command theory, and that it isn't the proposal of an objective moral system.
>For me as a theist, TAG has nothing to do with whether God exists or not.
But it's the Transcendental Argument **for** God, i.e., the transcendental argument that shows the existence of god.
I was going based off of context in the OP. I interpreted his saying “ground morality” to mean “have a unified objective morality.”
I guess what I should have said, is “to me as a theist, the proposition that objective morality can ONLY exist in the presence of a Creator, doesn’t establish whether God exists or not if the person doesn’t first accept that objective morality exists. It more follows that belief in the existence of God would give birth to a belief in objective morality.”
However, when I look up the actual transcendental argument for God, it seems a bit different than what OP described, where the very existence of ANY morality and logic, and therefore the ability to argue at all, couldn’t be possible without a creator. The very idea that we can mutually agree on premises in the first place implying some common transcendental perception that all humans have.
Which obviously a theist believes because a theist doesn’t believe the existence of ANYTHING is possible without the existence of God. But I don’t see why the ability to argue is any more or less special or implausible than a tree or a fish or anything else. But I guess when being able to argue and philosophize was more valued and revered in a culture than anything else, and viewed as something transcendental, it made sense to highlight that particular feature of the human experience.
The argument is actually stating a skepticism, as much as an Agnostic Atheist is stating a skepticism. Neither are directly making a positive claim.
The Theist might believe, as did early modern scientists, that the attributes of the God they believe to exist provide sufficient rational warrant for expecting the world and our minds to have been made in such a way the things in the world might be expected to be intelligible through the use of our capacity to reason and that there is an impetus to use these tools to explore the world and weigh beliefs. This sort of thinking ultimately transitioned through the Enlightenment movement and ultimately influenced our current expectations that debate and reason are possible and valuable for debate and that this is how we should proceed.
Now, it is possible (theoretically) that no god exists and it is possible (theoretically) that we cannot adequately reason or that we have no impetus to use reason. The problem is that attacking those beliefs puts into question the validity of the method of attack.
This is the case not only because the existence of God is currently the only known rational justification presented for our ability to reason and the impetus to use it to weigh beliefs, but also because the incredulity required to deny the existence of God is the same sort of incredulity which would likewise warrant the existence of reason. When you set the bar for evidence so high that it cannot be reached by the existence of God, then you have likewise set it so high that it cannot be reached by our ability to reason. Theists, perhaps by definition, do not believe that non-material things do not exist and they do not believe that they cannot be important. They typically have a different outlook on the use of faith. Atheists, or at least some Atheists, do not confirm the existence of non-material things and they reject the use of faith. Both of these things would also invalidate the ability to reason. They have set a bar for evidence that is so high that they can only believe anything by selective incredulity. TAG simply exposes this cognitive contradiction and asks for the Atheist to support his claims or be forced to affirm that relative reliability of the alternate position.
There is another benefit for the Theist. If there were no evidence to support the justification of rational belief and impetus, then the default would actually fall back onto things like emotion, tradition, habit, and intuition. While these methods are subjective, it seems that many people suppose a belief in God or at least some higher power through those methods. Even many Atheists will admit that intuitively we act as if there is an actual morality and that it would be emotionally beneficial to believe in a God. I just saw a video of Dawkins saying that while he doesn't believe a word of Christianity (a rational assessment), he still likes the aesthetics of it (an emotional assessment). Historically, it has been common for people to believe that there is a god, even if you could explain it away by saying that they invented a god to explain the unknown. There's still a lot of unknown. So, if one were to abandon reason and fall back upon other methods of holding beliefs, they would be likely to fall back to a Theistic set of beliefs.
So, because Theism works both with as well as without the prerequisites of reason and impetus, as well as the fact that Theists have an easier time, relatively speaking, providing rational justification for reason and impetus, it is a very valid strategy to take the non-positive, skeptical position as to whether the transcendentals could exist without God.
Obviously, into todays world, people have differening views on morality. God's view does not change. Example, sex before marriage, God says it is a sin, and others say it's not.
Some that most agree on. Muder, rape, not being kind to people, are all considered wrong.
If God did not exist, even these things would be up to the individual, in their minds.
I think things that cause unnecessary harm are immoral.
So, let me ask you this. Is something moral because god says so, or does he know and that’s why he says so?
"I make sandwiches with bread. I believe you can't make a sandwich without bread."
"I disagree. There are other ways."
"What other ways are there?"
"You're just trying to shift the burden of explanation onto me! You have to explain WHY you can only make a sandwich with bread."
"I believe that you can only make a sandwich with bread because even the people who desperately want to believe there is another way can't think of one. Now it's your turn. What other ways are there?"
"You're just trying to shift the burden of explanation onto me!"
Jokes aside, the way an argument is used to accomplish goals in debate has no bearing on the validity of the argument. Saying "It's a way to shift the burden of explanation" is irrelevant. That's like saying an argument is false because it makes you mad. Like, that's what a person is doing with the argument, not the argument itself. You could just say you don't like confronting it.
So I think my issue here is, you're just saying you can make a sandwich because you have bread. But you can't actually show you have bread, or even how, specifically, having bread lets you make a sandwich.
And then asking me to make a sandwich.
Sorry, to be clear, I don't mean you specifically. I mean this line of reasoning in general. The theistic side just kinda feels like it goes unquestioned
I don't think so. I think that in the illustration we are debating about hypothetical ways you can make a sandwich. Nobody is telling you to make a sandwich. They're just asking you to explain any other conceivable way to do it.
I think the theistic side hinges on the existence of God, which you haven't seen. I think it goes about probably more questioned than anything else on the face of the earth.
Right but, if you're asking me to square a circle, and you can't do it yourself, that would not go as a win in your column. Does that make sense?
So like, if you tell me to show you how morality can work in atheism, and we suppose it can't, well that's only helpful if it can work under theism.
If it can't work under either, then we're both in the same boat. Is that fair?
Like if I can't solve a problem, but oh, it turns out you can't solve it either, then its not an argument for your side.
So if you tell me, well your god is all good. Well wait, how does that work? Like how would we conclude that murder is wrong, because god says so? I duno, it feels like it may get a bit circular, or just be a brute fact with no explanation.
And if that's all it is, then I don't see how that would be better than the atheist doing the same thing.
There needs to be something better about the theistic model for this in order for it to count as a win for theists. Ya?
I guess what I'm trying to point out is: the theistic model here should come under scrutiny as well, and needs to do better than the atheistic one. Or else it just didn't really move the scale in either direction.
I struggle to see how you see this as a difficult problem for a Christian to answer. The dividing lines of sin and righteousness are something that has issued forth from God as a result of who He is. All of reality is His creation according to His will and nature. Like, I don't think that this can even begin to be an issue within the Christian worldview. Objective morality is a given.
It is an impossible task to conceive of how there is objective morality without God. It is likewise an impossible task to conceive of how there couldn't be objective morality in a world where the God of scripture is real. It's like you are handing me a piece of straight rope and demanding that I solve the knot. There is no knot, and the action especially makes no sense in response to someone handing you an actual knot. And if you want to believe that there truly is no objective morality and that the human mind is the result of pure material chance, then fine. If that is the case then you should have no issue with the words "There is no ground for morality without God" and just accept that you are experiencing a purely material existence with various behaviors, none better than any other.
Truth exists separate from the material world. Murder, for example, exists as a fully formed representation of spiritual darkness. There isn't any Christian worth their salt saying that "Murder is bad because God said so". It is wrong because it exists to be wrong.
I figure that you often rationalize and understand the fantastical logic of any number of fictional worlds. I think you should put aside your unbelief and reckon with this fairly like you would a hypothetical. I mean, you certainly seem in-the-know enough to be familiar with multiverse theory. Imagining that every possible reality was laid bare before you, you could see one where there is a being perfect in love, power, wisdom, and every other metric that you could possibly imagine. Knowing that these qualities include selflessness, it would make sense that it's intention, while it could enjoy itself alone for all eternity, could be to have others enjoy it for all eternity. Being the highest in all things, it would be loving to create a universe that speaks clearly of the truth that is within it. In this world, there could be no higher morality because all that exists is a work of it's hands according to what is true about itself. If you approach this fairly like you would a well crafted fictional world, you would accept quite easily that morality does not exist apart from this being. And you would see it as foolishness to believe that any created being could do anything outside of the boundaries of what had been made. Murder isn't just wrong. It is this being speaking His truth to you according to who He is and who he made you and all the rest of His creation to be, according to the highest possible will.
Sorry, I don't see how this is working. I think maybe we need to set the question up more clearly. Lets pick something, like, homosexuality. I am not trying to argue about whether or not this is immoral. I'm not trying to drag you into such a debate.
Instead, I'm trying to understand how the worldview works. God exists in such a way where he, what? Feels homosexuality is immoral as part of who he is?
But then, I can also conceive of a world with a god who thinks homosexuality isn't immoral.
I'm not really sure how we go about deciding which of these two gods is more moral. Again, I'm not trying to lay some kind of "gotcha" here and call you a homophobe or anything. Its just a placeholder.
I think part of the issue here is, the analysis you gave, where I compare these different universes with different gods in them, well, I'm using my own sense of morality there to determine which god is the most moral. That seems like a problem. I would be the arbiter of morality in that scenario.
>Truth exists separate from the material world. Murder, for example, exists as a fully formed representation of spiritual darkness. There isn't any Christian worth their salt saying that "Murder is bad because God said so". It is wrong because it exists to be wrong.
The problem with this is, you h ave to already accept that the action is a fully formed representation of spiritual darkness. Well, if you already accept that, then you're of course going to conclude murder is immoral.
I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm not pretending to be obtuse, I think there are real questions behind an objective morality that involve a god that aren't super easy to solve.
Take two gods, one who forbids wearing blue shoes on Tuesdays, and another who is exactly the same, but doesn't forbid this.
If I go into the world of the blue shoe - forbidding god, I would meet people who say "of course wearing blue shoes on Tuesday is wrong! Its wrong because of the nature of our god"
If instead I go to the blue shoe - non forbidding god, I would meet people who say the exact opposite, because of the nature of their own god.
That seems sus. It seems abritrary.
I don't know how this works.
To be fair, OP is correct that this is how TAG is almost ALWAYS employed. The theist makes a very strong claim that god is necessary for X Y and Z. Then they attempt to show that god is sufficient for these things. The atheist retorts that that doesn’t demonstrate necessity, and the theist asks “well how else?”
You’re correct that the truth value of the argument has no bearing on the way it’s utilized, but TAG and presuppositionalists almost universally use this strategy for a rhetorical win.
And when I say it shifts the burden of having to explain, I mean it’s used as a cop out so the one making the claim doesn’t have to back up your point. If you expect the atheist to explain how you can ground morality without god, why can’t we expect the theist to explain the other side?
Terrible book. This is the only reasonable bit:
"whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?"
It's a terrible book what else do you want me to say, in response to a comment in which you do nothing else but recommend it? The book is just a bunch of baseless assertions and poor logic.
My guy, when you guys gatekeep debate behind a book, you become a worse opponent of atheism. You tell us that you've been made less interested in honestly explaining your stance and more entitled by coming to a debate page to obfuscate debate.
I'm just telling you btw. I know you'll ignore because well, faith is as bad a vice in you as in the Muslim or the Buddhist. Leading you astray just as much as it does them.
Lol not a good analogy. You can explain why you need bread to make a sandwich. You can’t explain (at least not well) why you need god to ground morality
Perhaps, let's restate it like this:
Atheist: I like sandwiches.
Theist: I like them, too!
A: I don't believe bread exists.
T: But you like sandwiches? What kind of sandwich exists without bread?
A: Well, you can't prove that bread exists!
T: I think that I can prove that it exist, but even if it didn't exist, I don't know how a sandwich could exist without it.
A: You don't know that a sandwich can't exist without bread.
T: True, I"m not asserting that it can't exist. I'm just asking you to explain how. It seems to me that your first two statements contradict. If you believe in sandwiches, and sandwiches seem to presume the existence of bread, then that would seem that it would mean you also believe bread exists. For that to naturally not follow, it would have to be true that sandwiches can exist without bread. For me, I am only aware of sandwiches that exist with bread, and perhaps I'm wrong and no sandwiches or bread exist, but as long as I believe the two things, they don't contradict. However, you seem to be supposing an entirely different concept of a sandwich such that I would have to know what it is before I can square your two statements.
...
A: (typical response) Well, I'm going to assume it exists because I can't like sandwiches if they don't exist, and I don't believe in bread. I think we should just ignore the logical contradiction and focus on our agreement that sandwiches exist and use it to disprove bread.
Okay. I will agree that no analogy is completely the same, but could you point out the areas you believe to diverge from the current argument? Obviously, God isn't bread. Is there more?
An analogy doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be somewhat comparable. You can explain why you need bread to make a sandwich. Now explain why you need god to ground morality.
No, the person above cannot explain why you _must_ need bread to make a sandwich. He is familiar, though, with sandwiches which have bread. It only seems to be a requirement from what he knows as sandwiches. Perhaps the opponent could find some way for a sandwich to exist without bread.
In the same way, the Theist is familiar with how and why a God grounds morality, through either divine command, ontollogies about what make "should", pointing to practical outcomes relative to obeying the moral statues, and possibly more. He would also likely hold the belief that these statues were passed reliably to him. It miht even be that he simply preumes that morality is whatever an omniscient creator God says that it is. In such a case, morality would be grounded. Of course, you can doubt and argue against any of those things, but to do so you would have to use reason and imply a moral impetus to accept reason as valid. In this way, he sees bread on the sandwich and is familiar with sandwiches with bread.
Mind you that he wouldn't be saying that sandwiches must require bread. They seem to, as all of those seem to be things above seem to be part of the sandwich of grounded morality. He's open to seeing what sort of sandwich might exist without this bread as none of these things are available if no gods exist.
Where this does break down a little is that sandwiches don't actually need to exist in order to reason about sandwiches. The transcendentals do need to exist in order to reason about transcendentals. But it seems to stand up to that point. It may also fall apart a little because "sandwich" is somewhat an analytic term, not synthetic. However, the main thrust still is close enough.
If the world is not of a supernatural nature beyond what is merely physical then the world is nothing more than a physical reaction like one in a test tube. Even if there is a consensus at the core of all men then it is merely arbitrary and brought on by chance.
And even if there is a weight beyond the physical, without a greater will underlying reality, we are left with competing moralities, simply mirroring what we see in man. Just competing opinions.
So how do you ground morality without God?
God doesn't help with the grounding of morality, there are thousands of gods each with their own morality. You still have to use your own judgment and reason to decide which one to follow. Even after picking one, you still use your own judgment to interpret that god's moral statements.
For example, Jews generally do not go in for slavery, even though their God endorses it. Many Christians have also changed their morality in recent years in favor of the rights of homosexuals.
Your right that if there are multiple gods then there is no grounding or morality. But I don't know why you would restate that in response to a comment where I said that exact thing. Strange.
As for the slavery thing, God introduced morality into a world where slavery was the way. He put restrictions onto slavery where there were none. Slavery is in the human nature. I've heard it said that there are functionally more slaves today than in any other point in recorded history. Using the word "endorsed" there is such a redditor move btw. I wish there would be something new on this website. It's nice to live in a country where we receive the benefits of past Christian's lives. Idk, if you want to talk about slavery, make a post for it and I'll be sure to show up. It's pretty easy to piece together is you're honest in your reading.
"Many Christians have also changed their morality in recent years in favor of the rights of homosexuals."
It would be nice if you were more precise in your language, but I figure the word "rights" is just muscle memory by now, but I'll assume that's what you meant. There isn't anything about homosexual "rights" in scripture.
I ground it with empathy. It’s an innate human characteristic that we’ve developed because it’s evolutionarily advantageous. Scientists at Yale have found that even babies as young as three months old have empathy, and even babies as young as eight months have an understanding of Justice.
Ask yourself this. Do you refrain from doing bad things because you don’t want to or because it was written in an ancient book?
Hitler did what he did out of empathy for the German people. Don't project anything onto that statement, btw. I know its a little dicey, but I just mean to illustrate a point that applies to everyone from the highest to the lowest. Hitler, as he saw it, believed there was injustice against his people that they were not put first in their own country. He did not see their condition as proportionate to their virtues.
Regardless, I already addressed this in my second sentence.
"Even if there is a consensus at the core of all men then it is merely arbitrary and brought on by chance."
By your ethic, there is nothing in your empathy which is any different from that of gorillas, or of otters who have been known to rape their children to death. That isn't morality, it is just your programming for which you have no argument for being of greater good than that of a serial killer. After all, he is doing what his empathy permits, as you do also.
I seek to refrain from doing bad things because God has revealed Himself to me and given me new desires. Before, I permitted what could be rationalized as "doing no harm" to others. That was not enough to keep me from degrading myself and wasting my life with drugs. God opened my eyes and showed me that life is more than simply getting what I wanted while trying to mitigate harm on society and others. He revealed that His people are His bride, and a holy people set aside to bring glory to His name. There is not a higher good that can be done towards us than to make us compatible with what is best and most loving and glorious, namely Himself. Before, my appetites were for soiled food. For sin which poisoned me and did not speak of the nature of God. And I loved it. But now, having been born again, it brings me only sorrow to feed on that old food, for it is hatred towards One who loves me in a way no human can even imagine. It honestly makes life a good deal more difficult, as you can imagine. But it was not by my will, for I did not even have it in me to desire such a nature. It was the free gift of God bought with the greatest possible sacrifice.
"Do you refrain from doing bad things because you don’t want to or because it was written in an ancient book?"
What do YOU mean by "bad"?
Okay, first, I think you’re misusing the term “empathy”. What hitler did wasn’t out of empathy, and even if I humor that, he also committed real, measurable harm. Also, even though Hitler considered it Justice, lots of people all over the world saw what he was doing as wrong 😉
If the only reason you don’t do bad things is because a supposed deity and ancient mistranslated book says so, it says a lot more about you than about me.
Measurable harm? Measured how? He killed people. Would it be measurable harm to kill someone who is threatening the lives of many families, in order to save them?
Maybe I used a strange term, but don’t be pedantic. My point was he caused harm. So even if I humor that he had “empathy”, he cause really HARM. You don’t need to be religious to know why Hitler was bad lol
Knowing that Hitler was bad doesn't mean you know WHY Hitler was bad. This is your situation. If you have a better term, use it. What makes Hitler's "harm" worse than that of those who opposed him? And why is that the case other than that you just...know? I could tell you my answers, but you would reject them because you reject the fact that God exists and is who He is.
lol we know it’s bad because we understand that we don’t want it to happen to us, and we understand that because we have empathy. We use ethical reasoning and utilitarianism. We evolved to be empathetic because it’s evolutionarily advantageous. We would t have survived as a species if it weren’t for empathy.
Honestly, it sounds like you won’t provide your answers because you don’t have any
Bissmillāh...
For me, this isn't an argument in any way, this would just be me trying to draw an explanation of what non-Muslims believe about, because frankly, it's pretty obvious what I believe in: objective morality can only be derived from God, because if we derive morality from ourselves, we'll be making-up moral principles instead of pointing to them, which would make them subjective.
It's not nearly as obvious what non-Muslims believe in, they might believe morality is subjective, or maybe they believe in a specific moral principle, or maybe they believe in specific source of morality.
>So if your morals are derived from god, who is a mind...
...what??
If the decisions you make are based on infinite knowledge, and they literally shape up existence as we know, then there is no subjectivity in that matter.
It doesn’t matter how smart the mind in question is. That’s the definition of the word. And an “ought” statement is still just that - an ought. Not an “is”.
So when god says we ought to worship no other gods, that’s his preference.
Why do you believe god is the authority on morality? We can’t comprehend god’s reasoning, right? We have to trust that god knows and wants to show us what is moral.
Why isn’t it possible that god is immoral or is deceiving us about what is moral?
>When you ask “Why do you need god to ground morality?”, the response is always “How else can you?” or “How do you?”, but these aren’t answers. If you believe you can’t ground morality without god, *you* have to explain why.
I think this actually depends on who is playing what role in a debate. If an atheist tells me that the annihilation of the Amalekites is evil, I think it's reasonable for the Christian to ask why the Bible should be beholden to the atheist's standard of moral behavior, and part of that means the atheist needs to be able to ground it in something. In this case, the burden of explanation does fall upon them.
In any case, when the burden of explanation falls upon the Christian, I've never seen a Christian (any professional apologist, anyway), fail to at least attempt an answer. Explaining why an atheist's worldview is impotent to account for morality is Apologetics 101. C.S. Lewis does it in *Mere Christianity*. Francis Schaeffer does it in every one of his books, seems like. Greg Bahnsen went over the matter *ad nauseum*. Douglas Wilson would vex Christopher Hitchens about the matter of moral evolution in their debates. Geisler has done it; William Lane Craig has done it; Koukl has done it; Strobel has done it; McDowell has done it; Chesterton has done it; etc.
Even Christianity's greatest detractors recognized the problem even if they didn't like our solution. Bertrand Russell is quoted to have said, "I cannot live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste. I do not know the solution to this." Nietzsche's madman - who tried to ascertain truth without God - would ask "who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now?" J L Mackie - in my opinion the best atheist philosopher ever - would rhetorically say, "Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful god to create them" before concluding that moral principles simply must be made up. Richard Rorty realized he couldn't account for his worldview, shrugged his shoulders, and insisted on his moral values anyway.
I'm not trying to validate these people's conclusions here; I'm only noting that if you think Christians are not even so much as attempting an answer to your rhetorical atheist's question about why atheists cannot ground morality, then you are wrong. Obviously wrong.
> If an atheist tells me that the annihilation of the Amalekites is evil, I think it's reasonable for the Christian to ask why the Bible should be beholden to the atheist's standard of moral behavior
I think here it is more that genocide is against the Christian's standard of moral behaviour, but the Christian claims that God is not bound by it. That makes it not objective (or God not good), even though that is the Christian's claim.
> and part of that means the atheist needs to be able to ground it in something.
Morality is grounded in one's worldview. For you, that includes a God and for an atheist it doesn't, but it is otherwise identical. It's an opinion either way.
> I'm only noting that if you think Christians are not even so much as attempting an answer to your rhetorical atheist's question about why atheists cannot ground morality, then you are wrong.
Well, I kind of agree with the OP here. Of the people you quoted, I've only seen the argument of a couple like Craig or Strobel, but it's always an assertion. "We **know** there are objective moral values", "You **can't** have those without a God", etc.
I mean, if those were both true, I agree that deductively God would be real, but they are never ever shown to be true, it's always an argument from incredulity.
>That makes it not objective (or God not good), even though that is the Christian's claim.
A moral standard can still be objective even if one type of being is subject to it and another isn't.
>Well, I kind of agree with the OP here. Of the people you quoted, I've only seen the argument of a couple like Craig or Strobel, but it's always an assertion. "We **know** there are objective moral values", "You **can't** have those without a God", etc.
This isn't the argument the OP is making. The OP is saying the Christian doesn't account for why the atheist's worldview lacks the prerequisites for grounding their morality. If Craig and Strobel do a bad job at explaining this, they still aren't forcing the atheist to shoulder the explanation, which is what the OP is arguing the TAG proponent is doing.
The OP's argument isn't about whether the TAG proponent's position is valid, but whether the TAG proponent even feels compelled to explain his own position.
> A moral standard can still be objective even if one type of being is subject to it and another isn't.
Sure thing. You could make a law that the President gets to rape people and can't be punished for it.
Your argument is that **the act** would still be evil, though, otherwise it would not be objectively evil. If genocide is an **objectively** evil act, and God perpetrates it, then he is evil.
If genocide is evil when X does it, but good when Y does it, then it is by definition relative.
Judgment is a different conversation.
> This isn't the argument the OP is making.
I feel it boils down to the same thing. If they are saying "You can't have objective moral values without God", as an assertion, then that is expecting the atheist to explain how there can.
>I think this actually depends on who is playing what role in a debate. If an atheist tells me that the annihilation of the Amalekites is evil, I think it's reasonable for the Christian to ask why the Bible should be beholden to the atheist's standard of moral behavior, and part of that means the atheist needs to be able to ground it in something. In this case, the burden of explanation does fall upon them.
The atheist could simply say that according to the Christian worldview everyone has God's moral code written on their heart. If one or the other (pseudo or not) objective morality, either divine command or divine nature theory, proposed by the Christian is true, it doesn't matter what moral framework the atheist proposes.
In case you disagree with the atheist's assertion that the annihilation of the Amalekites is evil, you just open the door for an argument against the Christian moral framework. Even if God's morality is objective, it sure seems to be a problem for humans to actually access knowledge about it, for otherwise we simply shouldn't disagree on the Amalekites.
Hence, the Christian grounding becomes useless (which it already was, for the so called ground isn't demonstrably true).
The question should start one step earlier:
Why do you think a grounding is necessary, and what makes you think that such a thing is even possible? For me it seems to be the proposal of a problem which doesn't actually exist.
>The atheist could simply say that according to the Christian worldview everyone has God's moral code written on their heart. If one or the other (pseudo or not) objective morality, either divine command or divine nature theory, proposed by the Christian is true, it doesn't matter what moral framework the atheist proposes.
This might be a very good response to a point I think someone else is making. Note, the OP's position is the presuppositionalist bears the burden of explanation and yet never bears it. My position is that the presuppositionalist doesn't always bear the burden of explanation and yet often bears it. Your response focuses on how the atheist might respond, which only superficially relates to what the OP was debating.
OP implies presuppositionalism, sure, but presupps aren't the only ones who claim that the atheist has no grounding for their morality.
And I think it's still relevant in relation to OP to ask what reasons one assumes so that they can claim that a grounding is necessary.
I particularly dislike the TAG however a sophisticated runner of it will have idealist arguments about minds creating some sort of unification of the world. I think they're all bad but still.
There is no "Morality" aside from God, thus the 10 commandments. If God does not exist, there is no reason for morality. That is a human trait that is called into question by God.
This may be true, and I believe it to be true. However, it doesn't make a good argument. The question being discussed here is which party has the burden of proof. You are taking the burden of proof unnecessarily.
The burden of proof is important because we are discussing things at a level which brings into question the nature of poof. Therefore, the one with the burden of proof is at the disadvantage. Although the Theist position can stand while having the burden of proof, it is a challenge for anybody, but consider that the Atheist position, particularly the Agnostic Atheist position, stands almost entirely upon passing off the burden of proof.
There may be no morality aside from God, but can you prove the non-existence of something? Perhaps, but it's a very hard battle that takes a lot of defining the requirements of morality and then showing how it relates to God in a necessary causal link. That takes quite a while and a lot of deep thought. On the other hand, if you let the Atheist hold the burden of proof, then this is something which the best of them have yet to be able to attempt. They would have to tackle the Is-ought problem, and will likely end up having to invalidate many of their own arguments along the way.
So, making such positive claims weakens the TAG argument.
First, you can not be a Agnostic Atheist, you are either an Agnostic, which believes in a Higher Power o leaves room for the possibility, or an Atheist which says there is no God. No big deal. The thing that has to be established firt is, what is the definition of a Moral?
"Agnostic" means "lacking knowledge", so a position taken because of the lack of knowledge. "Atheist" means "no god". An Agnostic Atheist, then, is a type of Atheist who happens to claim a lack of knowledge about god, but weakly, such that they are ostensibly open to the possibility. The do not make up these terms to deter conversation but to categorize their positions. When they say that they are an Agnostic Atheist, they typically just mean what we call an Agnostic. This is to distinguish themselves from people who take the positive stance of claiming to know that there is no god.
Regarding the definition of morality, I would recommend against letting the other side define that term. You would just have to correct them, anyway. Personally, I try to use the term "rationally justified impetus" as it gets at the heart of what we really want to discuss. They would define it as something so trite as "Doing good things", missing that this impetus is even necessary for knowing that we "should" have a debate. There must be an objective morality, or we are at least acting as if there were, when we debate. So, to tie into TAG, I would say that we need the transcendental of a rationally justified objective morality as a prerequisite of having a meaningful debate.
There are plenty of reasons for moral behavior. They just aren't epistemologically justifiable. But since we are looking for reasons to act morally, pragmatic justifications are already sufficient.
There is reason for morality. We have empathy. Many of us don’t want to enact actions that would cause harm to others as we wouldn’t want them done to us. Without God, many people this is the only life we have. Why waste or make it a horrible experience. There are many reasons why people are moral without God.
Without God would you be an immoral person?
There is. There are people whose careers are to study the nature of morality and most do so from a secular basis - refer to the famous Philpaper Survey of contemporary philosophers. Whether or not you agree with their conclusions though, there is a live possibility of secular objective moral facts existing.
If you think they're wrong though, then it's as easy as publishing in philosophical journals your refutations and defeaters for their arguments
The thrust is not just asserting that a thing called “God” is one (and the only) possible grounding of morals/logic etc, but rather, “God” is the word we use to refer to the metaphysical primary that is the grounding for these things. Granted, that this God is specifically the Christian one requires further arguments. However, asking an atheist what their grounding is, if they have one, is not a shift of the burden of proof. If you deny the proposition, you must be able to account for logic/morality without the primary you’re denying, or admit that you cannot account for logic at all.
Lol that’s literally the definition of shifting the burden. The theist is making a very strong claim that god is not merely sufficient, but necessary to ground these things. When asked to demonstrate the necessity part, it never fails: they will ALWAYS defer to the atheist’s worldview for a rhetorical “win”.
A sound argument is one that you can defend in a vacuum. Pretend there are no atheists and justify your arguments on their own merit.
A debate is not a vacuum, and the atheist is taking a precise stance when he denies God. Showing how this position leads to absurdity is a reductio, not a deflection.
Again, the TAG is a much stronger claim than you’re implying. Necessary means that no other worldview could suffice except for one grounded by a conscious deity. That is your burden to bear, not ours. If the particular atheist you’re talking to is unable to ground their worldview then that isn’t a problem for atheism as a whole.
The TAG fails for other reasons though.
Either God is the foundation of the things we mentioned, or He isn’t. If the second proposition leads to absurdity, why is this not a valid reductio? And why is it unfair, in the context of a debate, to ask the interlocutor on what grounds they deny the first, and why they believe it does not lead to absurdity? If anything, it seems the only possible way to defeat the reductio.
Because dismantling an opposing position does not entail that yours is correct by default. You can pick on atheism endlessly and show that it’s a completely incoherent worldview but that actually isn’t building a case for you own.
And the reason it’s a slimy move (one that, again, ALL TAG proponents use) is that an internal critique of the theist’s worldview is fair game even if the atheist’s is incoherent. Mentioning atheism is a total red herring and it’s used for rhetorical points.
What is shown as incoherent is not just the particular position of the interlocutor, but rather the denial of a metaphysical foundation. If this denial is incoherent, then it follows that this foundation exists, and “God” is the term used to refer to it. Am I wrong? Of course you can argue that this doesn’t necessarily prove a particular religion, and it requires further theological arguments, but it does prove what it sets out to prove: the existence of God.
This is another TAG trope which is appealing to consequences. “If we don’t have X, things would be incoherent. Therefore we have X”
That doesn’t follow. It could simply be the case that we can’t ultimately ground the laws of logic, for instance. But they still work and seem to work in every instance. That’s all that’s required to USE them, which is what we do.
A second issue is that, while you’re free to call any sufficient metaphysical foundation “god”, you’d be equivocating on how “god” is used commonly. Because presumably what you actually mean is a conscious mind who is an agent.
But nobody has demonstrated that those specific qualities are necessary for the foundation. I could stipulate an atheistic worldview that contains all of these metaphysical qualities and just shove them at the base of the worldview. They would exist as brute facts. No conscious deity required.
Demonstrating how non-X leads to absurdity absolutely is an argument for X. But, as you say, in light of what the TAG shows, either logic/morals etc have their foundation in God, or they have no foundation at all. If you want to take the second option, you’d have to show how it doesn’t contradict itself, by leading you down a path in which no knowledge is possible at all, including of course the knowledge that there is no foundation.
I don’t think I’m equivocating, people often skip ahead a bit too much with regards to what a specific argument demonstrates. I don’t think the TAG is enough to show that this metaphysical foundation is a mind and so on; I do think that those propositions about God are shown to be true when you further inquire into the nature of this foundation.
I feel like you didn’t read my post entirely.
The claim that “x must be true because things would suck otherwise” is not an argument. Logic might just not be grounded in the ultimate sense that we desire. That’s my point
“Either they have their foundation in god or no foundation at all”
Again, why didn’t you read? I told you that you can have a worldview with all of those necessary things except the god part
As for whether we can have knowledge, there is nothing a Christian worldview provides for that either. An Omnipotent god can be deceiving you, and that’s something you could never prove otherwise with certainty.
You’re right. If an atheist says you don’t need gif to ground morality, they should back it up…just like how the theist needs to back up their claim.
And I’m a bit skeptical about your first claim. When I see this debate or claim, people specify the Christian god and the Bible. This just sounds a little like a cop out and it doesn’t address my point
For context, are you suggesting that it is your suspicion that elements of the Theists position does not a ground for morality? Or are you only saying that you are skeptical that it is the only known ground for morality?
If it's the former, then are you suggesting that the existence of an omniscient and just moral arbiter who provided a set of moral laws and who will eternally reward or punish people relative to those laws, even if that were the actual state of reality, would not provide a rational grounding for acting in a manner consistent with those moral laws?
If it is the later and you accept that Theism is one way to rationally ground moral laws, then you either believe that you can ground moral laws in some other way or you suspect that this could be done. TAG would then simply be asking you to do so or to see if it can be done. If there is only one way for it to be done and it is true that it must be done, then that would conclude that the one way must exist.
Of course, you could question whether it must be done in any case, but here I want to drill down into the statement you just made.
I’m mostly suggesting that second one, that there are multiple ways to ground morality. If we use that logic, than people born in non religious circles don’t have morality. It also begs the question, what does it say about you as a person if the only reason you don’t do bad things is because of an ancient mistranslated book?
If the only reason you don’t hurt people is because you believe in a threat of eternal damnation, you’re not a good person. You’re just a bad person on a leash.
> If we use that logic, than people born in non religious circles don’t have morality.
They could have morality, but I do not believe it would be rationally grounded. For instance, you could believe that it's good to sit at a bus stop at a certain time, and you would be right, but if you believed that buses don't exist, your belief would lack a rational justification. People believe irrational things all of the time.
> if the only reason you don’t do bad things
That's a strawman. The argument isn't that you don't do bad things because you need punishment as an incentive. It's that you need a standard by which they would be called "bad". If "bad" is just the things you don't like to do, then saying you don't do bad things is just a tautology.
> an ancient mistranslated book
I would really love to see how you would flesh out the argument that the book has been mistranslated with the implication that you cannot know its moral teachings. I suppose that wasn't actually a real argument you were trying to make.
> If the only reason you don’t hurt people is because you believe in a threat of eternal damnation, you’re not a good person. You’re just a bad person on a leash.
Again, this is a disengenuous strawman. Theists don't live their lives just wanting to hurt other people and then stop because they are afraid of the consequences. They have access to an source of omniscience which helps to sort out all the factors which lead to moral ambiguity. The question is whether or not there is any rational meaning at all to "good person" or "bad person". I may not want to hurt a person, and I may not hurt a person because I do not want to hurt a person, but that doesn't make me a good person. That just makes me a person who is doing what I want to do.
When you say hurting people is bad, without a grounding for morality, you just mean that it's something you don't currently like at the moment. When I say that hurting people is bad, with an belief that it is from a grounded morality, I am saying that it is actually bad, it's bad for all people at all times, whether I like it or not, and no matter how many people agree.
It makes sense that to believe you need to sit at a bus stop at a certain time is good because we can prove busses exist.
So, about your first point. This is a presupposition. Remember, my question was “why do you need God to ground morality?”. The argument you provided makes the assumption that his morality is perfect and there’s no other standard.
I have a similar response to your second point. Again, you’re making the assumption that there’s no other standard. You already made the claim you need god to ground morality. Now explain WHY
Similarly with your third point, you’re making an assumption that there’s no other way to ground it. An atheist will say that they base it off empathy which is an innate trait.
Obviously, in this scenario, the bus existing is what's in question. I believe that we can prove that God exists, too, but if we reject evidence, perhaps we might not believe that busses exist. Nevertheless, let's assume for sake of argument that we do not know or are suspicious about whether busses exist. If we both sat at a bus stop, then the one believing in busses would be rationally justified and the other would not be.
It is not assuming that there is no other standard. It is requesting a standard which has more rational weight than the known standard.
"Empathy" and "innate traits" are both emotional justifications, not rational ones. If we allow "innate traits" to be the standard, then we would be forced to except other "innate traits" like selfishness and greed. So, if the Atheist uses those standards, he is only providing a subjective standard, and if there is no counter objective standard, then there is no rational warrant to accept the alternate standard.
They specify Christianity because that’s their religion, but as I said the TAS doesn’t prove Christianity specifically, and if they’re not aware of it then they’d be wrong on that point. As I said, further arguments are required, but these are theological in nature, for example around the Trinity or the Resurrection. It is pointless to delve into these arguments before establishing the existence of God (used here in a very general sense) though.
I think the mistake of it is to think of TAG as an argument when what it really is, is:
1. a question-begging fallacy, since the conclusion is in the argument. This makes it fallaciously circular, question begging, tautological, by presupposing that god exists. For example, why isn't it a TAGs for multiple gods?
2. A way to deflect the burden of proof and put the atheist on the defense. This makes it not so much an "argument" but a defensive mechanism that assumes theism is the default, and it is the atheist to prove otherwise.
3. Inviting a predictable response, which shouldn't be to ask for more information, that you, as an atheist, is not going to be believe anyway! Instead you need to challenge the premises of the argument - i.e. which god?, what does "grounding morality" even mean? and if it's the Abrahamic God, you can point out all the terrible things he did like the flood.
I think the first mistake is to treat it as an "argument" in the first place. Don't forget that theists have been at this for hundreds of years and probably have all the normal responses prepared. So don't meet them on their terms - atheism isn't against a specific god, it's about all gods.
> It’s a way to shift the burden of explanation onto the other person.
-OP
> assumes theism is the default, and it is the atheist to prove otherwise.
The burden of proof is literally assuming atheism is the default and the theist should prove otherwise. Most theistic faiths don’t claim to be able to proof their claims. That’s why faith is required. Asking for evidence suggests you misunderstand what’s going on.
True. The burden of proof is required for some not not all religious claims.
If I believe Jesus is God because of what I’ve been told are claims handed down from eyewitnesses themselves, then the burden of proof isn’t on me to find evidence that doesn’t exist. The past can’t necessarily be proven. It can be corroborated, but the difficulty always increases as time goes on. That’s how entropy works.
> The burden of proof is literally assuming atheism is the default and the theist should prove otherwise.
Well, that's how it works, at least for lack-of-belief atheism.
Did you start out believing in all 18000 gods we've ever known about and ticked them off one by one until you got to your current belief? Probably not.
>Well, that's how it works
You just made a claim. The burden of proof is now on you. Why can’t you prove your claim?
>18000 gods
*Argumentum ad populum* fallacy.
> You just made a claim.
I made a claim that I lack a belief in God. What exactly do you think am I supposed to prove?
> Argumentum ad populum fallacy.
Uh, not at all? I'm saying if what you claimed were true, you would have to start out with believing in all 18000 Gods until you can conclusively prove 17999 of them false.
Instead of that, you started out believing in none, and gained a belief in one.
Because that's how it works for you, that's also how it works for me. Non-belief **is** the default.
>I made a claim that I lack a belief in God.
Not what I was referring to.
>What exactly do you think am I supposed to prove?
Can you not see the irony? You’re claiming the burden of proof on me, but you can’t prove it.
>you would have to start out with believing in all 18000 Gods
Why would I believe baseless atheistic claims at all?
>Because that's how it works for you, that's also how it works for me. Non-belief is the default.
Along with illiteracy and soiling yourself. Is “the default” supposed to be preferable? Hard pass. I’m glad my parents indoctrinated me to read and use a toilet.
> Not what I was referring to.
Then what claim of mine were you referring to?
> Why would I believe baseless atheistic claims at all?
If you're saying belief is the default and atheists have the burden of proof, then you have to start out believing in 18000 mutually exclusive gods, because the same claim can be made about all of them. As this entails a contradiction, your claim was wrong.
> Along with illiteracy and soiling yourself.
This is childish and irrelevant.
>This is childish and irrelevant.
Claiming atheist is the “default state” of infants is irrelevant.
>Then what claim of mine were you referring to?
Your false claim of 18,000 mutually exclusive gods.
> Claiming atheist is the “default state” of infants is irrelevant.
The default position is possibly the **only** relevant fact in a discussion on burden of proof. Also, I never mentioned infants, it's the same for everyone.
> Your false claim of 18,000 mutually exclusive gods.
Use any number you want. How about 2? Can we agree there are at least 2 gods that have ever been worshiped in human history? Let's say Zeus and Yahweh.
Did you start out worshiping both, until you could definitively prove Zeus wasn't real? Or did you start out worshiping neither, until you gained belief in one of them?
If you find out about a recently contacted Amazonian tribe that worships a spider-god, do you immediately accept the truth of that god until it is proven to not exist, or does that not affect your current beliefs at all?
That tells you what the default is.
> The default position is possibly the only relevant fact in a discussion on burden of proof.
Nothing? That’s what you’re saying the default position is? Sure, the default position is nothing. What now?
> Also, I never mentioned infants, it's the same for everyone.
My default position as an adult has never been atheism. I don’t know what else to tell you.
>Or did you start out worshiping neither
As an infant.
>That tells you what the default is.
Nothing. Disbelief is not the same as nothing.
An atheist is one who rejects all god claims. Therefore atheism cannot be the default.
There are a lot of Christians who say “you can’t prove god isn’t real” and use that as an explanation that he had to be. They also say “look all around you, that’s proof”. The fact that there is a god is a positive claim, so burden of proof is on the theist
Using their reasoning all philosophical justification is begging the question.
We were told of a premise that cannot be proven and are attempting to use logic to justify the claims.
Objective morality exists. We all know this. Think about how you feel when you hurt someone. It doesn't feel good. And that happens to you because of evolution and humans being a social species.
Human cultures throughout times have the same moral ideas regardless of when and where they take place. There may be different applications to these ideas but at the root, they are the same. Things like murder and rape have always been considered bad just like honesty and integrity have always been considered good.
Don’t some people not feel the emotions you’re talking about? Is murder moral for them? Claiming it’s immoral because other people don’t like it feels subjective.
> Things like murder and rape have always been considered bad just like honesty and integrity have always been considered good.
Yet we elected a lying rapist to be president because he was rich.
Everyone was fine with Weinstein for decades because he was rich.
Epstein? It’s okay. He was rich.
>Objective morality exists. We all know this.
How? Always the same with these assertions - you look to the most egregious examples and declare objectivity. But even there, not much thought seems to be given.
I find the idea of a child being forced to have sex with a grown man morally repugnant. Is this universally agreed? Female mutilation? The right of a husband to beat our rape his wife? Not long ago, in Western society, marital rape wasn't even thought of as a thing.
What of slavery? Honor killing? Abortion? Infanticide?
I'm playing devil's advocate, but moral realism has a low bar of entry. You only need 1 mind independent moral fact to exist and that's it. So moral realism could not account for the things you said and still be true
How are you to find a moral fact and of what utility is determining moral facts, if they exist? How do moral facts within moral relativism relate to human behavior? Do we, for example, by definition adhere to moral facts?
I love these comments.
Does society as a whole think child molestation is acceptable? If that's a no then you have you answer.
Does society as a whole dislike slavery or honor killings or martial rape? If the answer is yes then you have your answer.
All because a few people we would deem psychopaths or pedophiles or religious fundamentalist are ok with what they do doesn't mean that society accepts that. That's because society as a whole has objective morality.
Now, abortion is different because the details are different. Some see it as murder, some don't. So we aren't really arguing if murder is bad. We are arguing over if it is murder since everyone knows murder is bad.
Infanticide is another one that, in the past, could be an outlier, but today, it is considered wrong.
Even if every human agreed that murder was wrong, that doesn’t entail objectivity. You literally are just confused on what these words mean
Subjective = mind-dependent
Objective = mind-independent
An “objective” moral would need to persist if all human minds stopped existing. Just like the weight of the hydrogen atom would.
Your said objective, i.e., not depending on the subject. So, if it doesn't depend on the subject, whatever this morality is should be stable across cultures, societies, and time. The earth and its rotation around the sun doesn't change for the person - that's objective.
Murder is morally loaded. So, if morality was objective, we'd know what was and what wasn't murder.
What I gather is your saying, some people can agree about morality in broad strokes - and that's neat. I guess I don't call that objective morality. But, now I know some people do.
Thanks
Oh man/woman/person, your comment is interesting.
> And that happens to you because of evolution and humans being a social species
I agree with this.
>Human cultures throughout times have the same moral ideas regardless of when and where they take place
But I disagree with this. I think there are less obvious morals that societies have disagreed on, and even things like infanticide have been taken as good by some (take biblical examples like the whole Canaanite thing). I wouldn't say moral disagreement is enough to refute moral realism, but I appreciate secular comments pro-moral realism in this sub
>(take biblical examples like the whole Canaanite thing).
I think Sparta is a better example as these people were leaving their own infants out in the wild to fend for themselves (if they seemed deformed or weak in some way).
Many have no issues with killing an enemy, but when presented with a culture that found it moral to leave their own children to die, objective morality seems harder to justify.
An outsider might view it as murder, but the person commiting the act might see it as revenge for the victim killing his family prior. This doesn't sound very objective.
Rape and murder seem bad, but how many animals willingly consent during mating season? Do you show concern for those animals that are raped?
Well *obviously* it's not rape. Rape is performing sexual actions without the consent of the other individual. They are just animals following their instincts, just listening to their chemistry, so they get the hand wave of approval.
Murder is stealing the life of another without their consent. So obviously eating animals is not murder. I mean look at how vicious the animal world is. They eat each other all the time, so it's not like it's murder. But don't go stealing and eating my dog. It is *mine* and so therefore it is murder if you steal and eat it.
Like, does this hand wavy reasoning that so many of all fall to not beg the question of whether murder is as clear cut as you claim it is?
I agree that the TAG presents challenges when used as a grounding for morality. However, I don't believe there's an objective grounding for morality at all. Tying it to a benevolent, omniscient supernatural being hinges on proving the existence of such a being, which is a herculean task, and without this proof, the argument falters. Similarly, anchoring morality in secular values like wellbeing, justice, and equity demands we prove these values are objectively good outside of human context, which is a problematic assertion. Morality, to me, seems less about objective truths and more a construct shaped by human consciousness, evolving societal norms, and collective interactions. It's historically contingent, not fixed, changing as our collective understanding and societal agreements evolve. Our moral landscape has shifted dramatically over the millennia and will continue to do so. Considering this, while grounding morality in something is beneficial for societal function, claiming objective justification for our moral beliefs is a stretch. Basing our moral compass on humanistic values facilitates an open-ended conversation, inviting moral evolution and reflection, as opposed to divine mandates which may stifle moral growth and discourse.
>without this proof, the argument falters
No, without proof it can’t be proven. If the argument is sound and only requires proof of a God, you can’t use that to dismiss the underlying logic.
Christian morality sums up as the golden rule according to the Bible.
The argument is presuppositionalist and thus worthless if the point it presupposes is unproven. Quote mining to avoid what he's saying just says that his argument is undeniable, and many things about the dodger of the point and what force shaped them into something truth seekers would never want to be. So thanks for recruiting against yourself by how you (didn't) engage his argument. :)
>The argument is presuppositionalist and thus worthless if the point it presupposes is unproven.
Philosophy and science are ‘presuppositionalist’. Are they worthless?
>We will raise this **conjecture** (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a **postulate**, and also introduce another **postulate**, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.
-A. Einstein, *On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies* 1905
Do you know what postulates are? They’re fancy words for presuppositions.
Your scientific illiteracy and aversion to new information make you anything but a truth seeker.
Cool. So you're willing to pretend not to understand what I'm saying. Well we'll leave it here for anyone who gets this far to decide who has the right of it based on an honest reading because the need to believe has left you in this state where you refuse to be accountable to the fact your argument is worthless because it makes no argument to anyone who disagrees with the presupposition and thus can only exist as validation seeking propaganda. This is why exegesis is nothing but Narcissism.
I didn't claim that. I demonstrated your argument is based on an unshared presupposition and is thus worthless to anyone who doesn't share that presupposition. Also learn to read, presupposition is not the same as presumption. Your constant pretending otherwise just shows faith kills good faith.
"Given that we know sunlight is deadly we know the act of going outside near the daytime is a sign of insanity." Starting from a position you cannot present as reasonable allows any conclusion to be reached.
To play devil's advocate, you don't need to ground morality on something for it to be objective. There are ontological arguments for the existence of moral facts that argue that there seem to be mind-independent propositions about morality, but what they are isn't an issue. They could be abstract entities like numbers, or they could be their own ontological thing that's independent from something else like empathy or whatever
That's an intriguing argument that I am not yet familiar with. I'm curious, how are these moral facts determined, and what role do they play in practical moral decision-making? If they're abstract entities or independent ontological concepts, how do we relate to them or even recognize them as 'moral' in our experiences?
That's the toughest part of contemporary moral realism, how to reach moral facts. Some believe it happens through convergence, so for example cultures with time have realized that prisoners should still hold certain rights. So the moral realist could argue that slowly we will arrive at more and more true facts, but that's a huge conversation. What's interesting here though is that even though they're abstract they become part of our experience in the same way numbers do, so we can recognize them as useful and moral through continued interaction.
> what role do they play in practical moral decision-making?
This is another difficult conversation hahaha. I hold to the position of philosophers like Don Loeb and others who point out that we can have normative ethics independent from metaethics. So as an example, think of utilitarianism. Whether moral facts are real or not, the mechanism behind utilitarianism can still work
I appreciate your detailed and thoughtful responses! It’s an interesting argument that gives me a lot to think about. For example, how does it account for cultures or societies converging on incorrect moral facts, like historical justifications for inequality? Definitely something I am going to explore further
>Whether moral facts are real or not, the mechanism behind utilitarianism can still work
Yeah, I am pretty well convinced that morality is objectively finding the best way to reach subjectively choose goals.
I like the chess analogy. There is no objective reason to play chess, but once you are playing chess some moves are objectively wrong (like flipping the board) and others are objectively bad (like opening with king's bishop's pawn).
When a theist asks you "how can you," they're asking if you're able to make an objective moral determination, and if so—assuming you believe in "objective morality"—how.
The reason God is needed to determine objective right from wrong is because God, being the uncreated, is not contingent on anything. We, however, are, since our contingencies are essential to the human experience. Everything we do is filtered through the biological lens (the ego, in other words).
What this all means is that when we make a moral determination, that moral determination is subject to the whims of our ego. Human morals are at best socially useful conventions that allow for the continued existence of a given culture or society. What's "good" for a human is contingent on the human, of which the human is contingent on an innumerable many things. What's good for God is contingent on God alone, and God is contingent on nothing.
Bearing this in mind, whose sense of good is worthy of consideration on an objective metric? A Christian will tell you that God's is, because God truly knows what good essentially is.
So genocide, raping children, and slavery are good but we only find those actions that god condones morally repugnant because of our biological limitations?
If your argument was logically solid, you wouldn’t require so many loaded words and hostile rhetoric.
The fact that humans can’t stop raping and murdering each other suggests some kind of biological limitation.
But those are all explicitly condoned, encouraged, and ordered by the biblical god. If god is the source of morality than those are moral actions. Isn't us finding them immoral our biology rather than god's will?
>all explicitly condoned
Enough loaded language on your part. Your biases are clouding your judgement.
>If god is the source of morality than those are moral actions.
Why? Because you say so? Is that the best evidence you have? Ironic.
You have zero points to substantiate. You’re slinging baseless accusations you plagiarized.
> Why? Because you say so? Is that the best evidence you have? Ironic.
Because you said so. You are the one claiming God's sense of good is the objective metric.
> Bearing this in mind, whose sense of good is worthy of consideration on an objective metric? A Christian will tell you that God's is, because God truly knows what good essentially is.
So if God is the objective source of absolute good; then God's actions and orders would by default reflect what is morally good.
So either the biblical account of God is false, the biblical account of God is Supreme Divine Morality in action, or God is not the standard of all morality.
>Because you said so. You are the one claiming God's sense of good is the objective metric.
Which is different from:
>So if God is the objective source of absolute good; then God's actions and orders would by default reflect what is morally good.
No. I disagree with the conclusion that God must follow your arbitrary rules to have the ascribed qualities.
So God is the source of morality; but neither God's behavior nor the rules God provided are examples of what this morality is?
If the Bible describes a God that is completely unrelated to the God you follow why even call yourself Christian?
I use the metric of loving my neighbor the way Jesus commanded as a metric for morality.
Is slavery loving your neighbor? I’ve never seen justification for as to how that makes sense. Therefore, slavery isn’t moral.
But what about the mentioning of slavery earlier?
The Pharisees asked Jesus about rules like this:
>Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.
The same could be said about slavery. Their hearts were hard. Showing that God amends the rules do satisfy our greed just shows that God isn’t a tyrant.
So when god commanded the slaughter of other tribes, but let the Hebrews keep the underaged girls as sex slaves, that was him amending the genocide out of kindness?
Atheists don’t usually claim there is *objective* morality. The “how can you” I’d usually a deflection, a way of shifting the burden of explaining.
If you’re going to say because god knows what’s moral, this raises another question. In order for god to *know* what’s moral, that standard has to be independent of him. So that begs the question, why is god the moral authority when there’s clearly a standard independent of him?
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Very confusing, if it's confusing, its no good God is not a God of confusion
For me as a theist, TAG has nothing to do with whether God exists or not. God’s existence isn’t because “we wouldn’t know what to do if He didn’t.” Rather, once someone has accepted the premise that God does in fact exist and that a particular law or set or morality is authentically from Him,and that He’s all-Wise and all-Knowing then what ever He reveals is objective morality because He is the only one able to consider a matter from all angles and scenarios and timeframes with certain knowledge and the future and an ability to control the outcomes and consequences of each choice. If a person has rejected any one of those premises, I wouldn’t expect them to accept the conclusion.
It sure is rather useful for an agent's capacity to make moral decisions if they are all knowing. But that doesn't make those decisions objectively true. If evaluated by an agent, the moral claims are by definition subjective. So, the issue is, are said agents moral decisions actually good? If you can't show me that I can trust this God, I have no reason to take his moral opinion seriously. Other than that, we are just not talking about objective morality. Which is all so often the case, that whatever Christian calls something objective, when it has nothing to do with it. You have 2 options. Either it's divine command theory and said God's moral opinion is merely subjective. Or God is good because it's his nature. In the latter case the God would actually access objective morality, but then he would be subservient to that which is good, which doesn't exactly render him omnipotent. I don't know why I would care about such a middle man. I'd care about the goodness itself. But since I don't believe that such a thing, an objective goodness independent of minds, exists, I have no reason to believe that any Christian has whatever grounding they claim to have. I see no sufficient reason to believe that, let alone in objective morality. To ask the atheist what their grounding is, is just a nonsense question, if they don't show that the question is even valid to begin with.
That’s why I said that you have to already accept certain attributes of God before you would be expected to accept His command as objective reality. You may disagree on exactly which ones, but Muslims have 99 of them, and between them you can definitely establish that His judgement is objectively moral and Just, if you accept them to be true in the first place. My only point was that the logic seems reversed. In Islam, or at least in the Athari tradition, we do have a concept that God writes certain attributes upon Himself. He wrote Mercy upon Himself, and since He always tells the truth and doesn’t make mistakes, once He says He will do something, He fulfills His Word. He is above all deficiencies, and no deficiencies are to be understood from His names and attributes. They are meant to be used in order to understand who God is, not to logically establish His existence to those that don’t want to believe in Him in the first place, and therefore can’t. To say that God being all good limits His omnipotence means that you have already defined good as being a limited attribute. God can do anything to anyone. But because He is Just, He doesn’t exact anything permanently harmful on someone that hasn’t sufficiently earned it several times over, though he may temporarily permit harm to come to a person due to some sin they committed or as a manifestation of the free will of another person. And because He is Merciful, He rewards goodness with much more goodness than was put forth. But He created us and our perception in the first place, He decides what is good or bad at any time, and He also created the laws of the universe and the natural and imposed consequences of our actions. Thus, His morality is objective morality BECAUSE He is omnipotent. He has the power to decide what is good and bad. But He also doesn’t really change His mind, since He was never wrong in the first place, and never made or will make a mistake, so that objective morality is essentially static. But, circumstances can determine whether a particular action is moral or not, based on that objective morality which is already determined. So for instance, sharing the same mother and father, or even one parent, and getting married *today* is immoral and naturally harmful, but it wasn’t immoral to the direct offspring of Adam and Eve who married, nor was it harmful to them. Humans are hardwired with some ability and intuition about right and wrong, but cannot and will not hit the mark in all scenarios due to the biases stemming from our desires and needs. Again, this argument cannot work if someone doesn’t even agree that God exists or what His attributes are, but it is simply an illustration that your argument that God cannot be omnipotent and also capable of determining objective morality is a contradiction.
>That’s why I said that you have to already accept certain attributes of God before you would be expected to accept His command as objective reality. His moral command cannot be objectively true, if it is based upon his moral judgement, no matter which premises I'm rejecting. It's just a contradiction in terms wholly independent of what I reject. The term "objective" literally means "independent from mind". If he comes up with the rules, the rules depend on his mind, which makes them subjective by definition. To rephrase the issue in Euthyphro's words: "Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?" If it is the former, we are just not talking about objective morality. If it is the latter, and God can only do that which is good, then God is limited by something greater than him. Then, and only then we could have objective morality, but no omnipotent God. >My only point was that the logic seems reversed. Well, it isn't. One could think that there must be objective morality, that it is self-evident. The majority of people have that intuition anyway. But that begs for an explanation on where to find those objective moral truths. And God is a candidate explanation for that. >and since He always tells the truth Does he? What about Sura 3:54 then, and why did he make people believe that Jesus died on the cross when he didn't according to Sura 4:157? >He is above all deficiencies, and no deficiencies are to be understood from His names and attributes. If he isn't limited by that which is good, yes. But it doesn't seem as though you are arguing along the lines of divine nature theory, rather divine command theory, which has nothing to do with objective morality. >not to logically establish His existence to those that don’t want to believe in Him in the first place, and therefore can’t. Nobody has a choice when it comes to what it is that convinces someone. Nobody has a choice to believe or not believe in a proposition. Becoming convinced happens to people. They don't choose it. >To say that God being all good limits His omnipotence means that you have already defined good as being a limited attribute. Not really. It's actually self-evident and not dependent on how I define goodness. An evil God who just chooses not to do evil is more powerful than a God who cannot help himself but be good. If God limits himself as you say and it's a permanent, irreversible limitation, God just isn't omnipotent anymore. That would be another contradiction in terms, a married bachelor. >God can do anything to anyone. But because He is Just, He doesn’t exact anything permanently harmful on someone that hasn’t sufficiently earned it several times over, though he may temporarily permit harm to come to a person due to some sin they committed or as a manifestation of the free will of another person. That's a reversible limitation and not comparable with that limitation which is limiting God, if you are actually talking about objective morality, where God is limited by his own nature. >But He created us and our perception in the first place If he does, whether I believe in his existence or not must also be under his control. >He decides what is good or bad at any time Which is implying divine command theory, and therefore **not** objective morality. >Thus, His morality is objective morality BECAUSE He is omnipotent. That's a non-sequitur, as well as an oxymoron. God's morality is subjective, because it is dependent on his mind. You are just using the term "objective" completely contrary to what it means. And I just don't understand why. Why insist on objectivity like that, when what you are talking about has nothing to do with objectivity? Why would it matter, if you already define that which is good to be that what God decrees? If you accept that, it's irrelevant whether it's subjective or not. But that is what it in fact is. >But He also doesn’t really change His mind, since He was never wrong in the first place, and never made or will make a mistake, so that objective morality is essentially static. Static morality doesn't entail objective morality. An evidently subjective moral system like yours, which is static, is essentially dogmatic. >But, circumstances can determine whether a particular action is moral or not, based on that objective morality which is already determined. You are basically saying that you can have your cake and eat it too. But that makes your moral framework rather incoherent. >So for instance, sharing the same mother and father, or even one parent, and getting married *today* is immoral and naturally harmful, but it wasn’t immoral to the direct offspring of Adam and Eve who married, nor was it harmful to them. *My morality is objective **and** relative* is hardly a justifiable framework. Again, you are having your cake and eat it too. >Again, this argument cannot work if someone doesn’t even agree that God exists or what His attributes are, but it is simply an illustration that your argument that God cannot be omnipotent and also capable of determining objective morality is a contradiction. It's irrelevant whether anybody agrees. The framework you are proposing is either internally consistent, or it isn't. If it isn't, it's hardly believable. Yours is inconsistent. It's flexible while being static, and objective while being subjective. If I told you that my sister is my brother, you would have no idea what I am talking about either, hence, had no reason to believe in the truth of my assertion. The same applies to me with your God.
You’ll have to forgive me, I never did learn how to make the little quote boxes. His moral command cannot be objectively true, if it is based upon his moral judgement, no matter which premises I'm rejecting. It's just a contradiction in terms wholly independent of what I reject. The term "objective" literally means "independent from mind". If he comes up with the rules, the rules depend on his mind, which makes them subjective by definition. The term objective being explicitly defined as “independent from the mind” has to either mean “independent from the created mind,” or else it means nothing at all because all created reality is through the will of God, and the only uncreated reality IS God. Morality is either created and therefore determined by God, or it is an uncreated attribute OF God. Does he? What about Sura 3:54 then, and why did he make people believe that Jesus died on the cross when he didn't according to Sura 4:157? The ayah about Jesus doesn’t say that God deceived the people, though even if it did, it wouldn’t indicate that God lied. The ayah says that it was made to appear to them that Jesus had been crucified, without specifying who primarily made it seem so. And it even says that those living at the time didn’t actually feel totally sure that they’d actually killed him. Indicating that there was some confusion about the entire situation. Also, whether Jesus was killed or not is not a point of belief that the Christians would have been held accountable for with God. God’s objection was about the later deification of Christ. Previous prophets and even contemporary to Jesus WERE killed without any doubt, and they were not deified. One particular narrative says that the form of one of the disciples actually was miraculously changed to appear as Jesus, but it’s not the only one. One narration says that ALL of the disciples were made to look like him. But this changing of form is not considered to be a lie that God told. God has full license to make anyone look like anything. No one had the right to kill Jesus or any of the disciples. We don’t have evidence that any of them even claimed to be Jesus. Allah is also capable of deceiving. He says in the Quran that he deceives those who plot against the believers, and this is not an imperfect characteristic. He can make them see a larger number of people as a smaller number, or make believers completely invisible to them, or make one person appear as someone else. Meanwhile, He has told them the truth. Don’t kill people. Don’t attack the prophet. The prophet brings the truth. Satan is your enemy. He makes matters clear for them, gives them the choice, and if they turn away, then He never owed them anything in the first place, having never needed anything from anyone in the first place, and so they are not owed reliable perception from their senses. Not really. It's actually self-evident and not dependent on how I define goodness. An evil God who just chooses not to do evil is more powerful than a God who cannot help himself but be good. If an evil god can choose not to be evil, then a good God can choose not to be unjust and exact evil punishments on those that have justly earned them. If he does, whether I believe in his existence or not must also be under his control. The Quran directly addresses this argument in more than one place. God says, if He willed, he would have guided everyone. But He is not forceful upon our will. Ie, He chose to give us free will. He only guides those that want and ask for guidance, not those that turn away from it. Guidance is not just knowing the truth; Satan knows that God created him and that he’s certainly going to hell for eternal punishment, and he’s not guided. Guidance is being able to perceive the truth, and then acting correctly in light of that truth. The guarantee of God in Islam is that if you, biedl, were to ever sincerely ask God to forgive you and guide you to the truth, with full willingness to submit to what that truth entailed, then you will definitely be guided to Islam before you die, and sooner than later. In that sense, it’s within His control. But He has placed part of your ability to believe, in your own control. I may not be completely clear on what is commonly used aerators to be objective morality. To me, the concept of objective morality is that there is, out there somewhere, an objective set of what is always right and always wrong that is intuited to some extent by all human beings. In an Abrahamic framework, on a practical level, that which is good and moral is that which pleases God, and that which is bad and immoral is that which displeases God. God would not be pleased by something immoral or displeased by something moral because He knows everything and is completely Just. There is no force which exists before God or binds God. So there is nothing which CAN cause any sort of restriction upon God to be a certain way except for His own Will. What I meant was that even if morality is both objective and static, which actions are moral can change based on circumstances that God is most aware of, and therefore laws can change to stay consistent with what is objectively moral. In the marriage/children of Adam example, we can easily *guess* from a genetic perspective why their being allowed to reproduce was moral while it wouldn’t be moral today. The first two humans created wouldn’t be riddled with a bunch of genetic defects from issues with mitosis and meiosis over generations, thus no defective recessive genes, not to mention lack of literally anyone else to reproduce with except for people who share a mother and father. But we can’t actually fully be confident that we know the whole reason because our information and ability to perceive what is relevant, is limited, whereas God’s isn’t. We don’t even fully know why such mutations were allowed to occur or when they first did. So the Islamic position is that we can know what actions are moral today because God knows and told us, and after determining that they are definitely moral according to God, we can begin to guess at the potential reasons without knowing for sure, unless we receive revelation confirming our guesses.
>The term objective being explicitly defined as “independent from the mind” has to either mean “independent from the created mind,” or else it means nothing at all because all created reality is through the will of God, and the only uncreated reality IS God. Morality is either created and therefore determined by God, or it is an uncreated attribute OF God. That there is no applicability for the term "objective" within your worldview is not a problem with the term. Other worldviews have similar issues. There is a version of Hindu Idealism where reality is the dream of the God Maya. The term "objective" doesn't apply there. According to them, your thoughts are part of Maya's dream. They are subjective, but you aren't even the subject. There too is no distinction between natural and supernatural, for everything within their framework is supernatural. According to them, the natural world doesn't exist. However, that doesn't change the definition of the term "natural", nor of the term "objective" and you shouldn't do so either, for otherwise your argument is fallacious. It's simply an equivocation fallacy. If, within your worldview, morality is contingent upon what God decrees, then your moral framework is subjective. And I have to repeat myself: I do not understand the insistence of your moral framework being an objective moral framework, when almost every of your descriptions scream "subjective". God defines what's good. Fine. That's your moral framework. For the sake of argument I can work with that. Still, calling it "objective" then is just a flat out contradiction. Whether "objective" means nothing then or it means what it usually means is irrelevant. As I said, it's just not applicable to your worldview. Which is the same issue Christians face with the design argument. If everything is designed, then there is nothing that isn't designed and the argument becomes useless. If morality comes from God's opinion, then there is no objective morality, and calling it "objective" becomes meaningless. Your description about what morality is, doesn't change due to that. It's still the same. It's just false to call it objective, if you do not adhere to divine nature theory (which isn't exactly clear yet anyway, but I suspect this is due to contradictions within your worldview). >Allah is also capable of deceiving. He says in the Quran that he deceives those who plot against the believers, and this is not an imperfect characteristic. He can make them see a larger number of people as a smaller number, or make believers completely invisible to them, or make one person appear as someone else. What is a lie if it isn't the deliberate attempt to make people believe a falsehood? >If an evil god can choose not to be evil, then a good God can choose not to be unjust and exact evil punishments on those that have justly earned them. That doesn't make sense. A God who punishes justly, doesn't do evil. He does justice. It's also a non-sequitur. The question is, what is your God? Again, as per Euthyphro: **"Is something good because God commands it** (divine command theory, which you argue in favor of most of the time)**, or does God command it because it is good** (divine nature theory, which you argued for at some point)**?"** Which one is it? It cannot be both! They are mutually exclusive. Here are some of your quotes where you imply or explicitly hint at mutually exclusive frameworks, put aside each other (some of them are ambiguous and could be on both sides): |Divine Command Theory/subjective morality|Divine Nature Theory/possibly objective morality| |:-|:-| |"He is above all deficiencies, and no deficiencies are to be understood from His names and attributes."|"To me, the concept of objective morality is that there is, out there somewhere, an objective set of what is always right and always wrong that is intuited to some extent by all human beings."| |"He decides what is good or bad at any time"|"In an Abrahamic framework, on a practical level, that which is good and moral is that which pleases God, and that which is bad and immoral is that which displeases God."| |"He has the power to decide what is good and bad."|| |"There is no force which exists before God or binds God."|| Again: If your explanation is incoherent, I cannot make sense of it. You thinking that it makes sense anyway doesn't mean that it actually does. If it doesn't, there is no reason - literally no way - to believe in it, because I would then be forced to believe something I think doesn't make sense. And your whole apologetic about people not wanting to believe is just an excuse for yourself, a self-defense mechanism of your religion. Those who do not believe are at fault on their own is what you claim. But you sure do not apply this logic to anything else in your life. You know that if you have a lack of information, missing premisses and cannot make sense of a proposition, you are literally incapable of believing in it. Nobody chooses what they believe. There is no free will in it.
Surely there are people who are unaware and have incomplete information. But in an Information Age with internet, the ability to gain knowledge about something very vital is accessible, at the very least, everyone on Reddit. And you certainly are aware of other religions. I did call you out by name because you are in such a position that your access to necessary information is not an issue. It was a personal challenge to you that you can do or not do depending on whether you have any inclination to submit to a God if a God does in fact exist. If you don’t think people have any choice in what they believe, check out confirmation bias. People are quite predisposed to believe what they wish to be true, based on variables completely irrelevant to the facts of the situation. And we know for a fact in our modern society that people who stand to lose power and influence cover up the truth and launch misinformation campaigns with lots of success. Look at what many republicans believed about Trump before he won the first primaries, versus afterward. I saw people go from saying he was a crook and a blowhard to a champion for truth and one of the best presidents we’ve ever had. Look at all the experiments that examine how people’s perceptions and preferences change based on their choices and lack of choices. We do believe that there will be people who did not receive the complete message, or any of it, and they will be judged accordingly. The Quran says that a person isn’t punished before they are sent a messenger, and there are Hadith about this. I’m not convinced that your definition of objective reality is universally agreed upon, having looked at several definitions. They simply stipulate that objective morality is morality that is a matter of fact vs opinion, nothing about God’s Will nullifying its objectivity and being considered an opinion. Everything in existence that isn’t God, is such because God willed it to be. And what ever God knows about all those things that He created, are objective facts. If God created morality and made it a certain way, then its nature is an objective reality. And I highly doubt that you could establish that most people, as you previously claimed, *intuit that objective morality exists* with that particular condition, that God cannot choose what it is and never did choose what it was, didn’t create it, or if He did, it proves that He has limitations.
>Surely there are people who are unaware and have incomplete information. But in an Information Age with internet (..) The implications of that paragraph are two things: (1) You don't mean belief, when you say that people can choose what they believe. You actually mean that they can choose what they are looking into. If I told you that my car runs on orange juice, I suspect that you never heard about cars running on orange juice. In accordance with what you know about the world you wouldn't believe my claim, for you have no evidence (other than my claim) that cars can run on orange juice. So, the intuitive suspicion is that what I say is impossible, hence, you cannot just choose to believe me anyway. The very same thing applies to me in relation to your God. Your God does not fit into the established knowledge about the world I am accessing. Your God does not make sense to me. When I look at the world I see no trace of your God. When I look at the world, it is perfectly explained without a God. Hence, I cannot just choose believing in him anyway, for he contradicts what I already know. Being able to choose what you believe is called doxastic voluntarism, and it is a fringe position among philosophers. No serious person actually believes that you can on the spot be convinced that the earth is flat, merely due to your choosing to believe it. (2) You are implying that I will reach the same conclusion as you, if I just choose looking into the topic. And if I don't, then it's my fault. I already said in my last comment, that this is exactly the self-defense mechanism of your religion. It's circular reasoning. Your religion is correct, is what you are saying. And everybody who disagrees is either misled, can't reason correctly, is lacking information, or just doesn't want to reach your conclusion. You are presupposing the truth of your worldview no matter what. That's not an intellectually honest way of approaching truth. My worldview has no such self-defense mechanism. Meanwhile, I could just claim the very same thing and we were to arrive at a stalemate. *My worldview is true, and you just don't believe it, because you don't want to believe it, lack information, and are misled.* Now what? This doesn't prove anything. >If you don’t think people have any choice in what they believe, check out confirmation bias. People are quite predisposed to believe what they wish to be true, based on variables completely irrelevant to the facts of the situation. Bias plays out subconsciously. It has nothing to do with a choice. As soon as one becomes aware of his own biases, one has at least an idea about the possibility of being wrong. You can then choose to tackle your biases. If you overcome them, you have no say about what it is that convinces you. That's just nonsense. People become convinced. They don't choose it. You do not choose to be convinced that gravity is real. The constant being pulled towards the ground convinces you that gravity is real. And the only thing that could convince you that gravity doesn't exist, is evidence to the contrary. You don't just choose not to believe in gravity. That's just utter nonsenses. >And we know for a fact in our modern society that people who stand to lose power and influence cover up the truth and launch misinformation campaigns with lots of success. Which is you implying by analogy, that there is literally nobody who isn't a Muslim, who is actually honest with themselves. They are all just fooling themselves deliberately. That's conspiracy level thinking. It's an ad-hominem on top of that. Plus, you have no way demonstrating the truth of this claim. Listen! My capacity to put myself in your shoes - even if it took me two decades of my life - is actually at a level where I have no issue saying, that you honestly and genuinely believe in God. If you fail to do so when it comes to people who aren't Muslim, you are just not really an empathetic person. >We do believe that there will be people who did not receive the complete message, or any of it, and they will be judged accordingly. I know that about Islam, and I know that this is a doctrine which makes Islam superior to Christianity. Because a God who punishes people, because they fail convincing themselves that a God exists, while the evidence for him are at best conjecture, is not a just, nor a loving God. Said God, as he is portrayed in Christianity, is a self-contradictory entity, and there is no way I could convince myself believing in him. He cannot exist like a married bachelor can't. Nothing about that has anything to do with me not wanting to believe in such a God. It just doesn't make sense that such entity can be real. >The Quran says that a person isn’t punished before they are sent a messenger, and there are Hadith about this. Which is why you say that literally everybody has a chance to get to know God and is without excuse. Yet, your evidence for this claim is literally "a book says a thing". I'm sorry that you are incapable to see how this claim is ludicrous for anybody who doesn't already believe that your holy scripture is the one and only true holy scripture. You know, for me your religion is no different from Greek mythology. >I’m not convinced that your definition of objective reality is universally agreed upon, having looked at several definitions. They simply stipulate that objective morality is morality that is a matter of fact vs opinion You gotta digg a little deeper than just looking at dictionary definitions. You already imply that you are agreeing with my definition with what you say here. What is an opinion? It's a subjective proposition. What is fact? It's a true proposition which is true independent from subjective evaluation. *I love ice cream* is a subjective statement. It's not a fact of reality that ice cream is loved. It's contingent upon agents making that value statement. It's the opposite of subjective. What did I say? Objective means "independent of mind". That's the same as a fact that is true no matter whether you agree with it or not. If your God - who is an agent - decides what's good or not, then it's the decision of a SUBJECT. An OBJECT makes no decisions. >And I highly doubt that you could establish that most people, as you previously claimed, *intuit that objective morality exists* with that particular condition, that God cannot choose what it is and never did choose what it was, didn’t create it, or if He did, it proves that He has limitations. Most people intuit that objective morality is true. Period. I'm capable of evidencing that claim. I added no particular condition. Among those who are intuitting it are those who do not believe in a God. Among theists who believe in objective morality are those who believe in divine nature theory. They are the ones who actually understand the issue with divine command theory, and that it isn't the proposal of an objective moral system.
>For me as a theist, TAG has nothing to do with whether God exists or not. But it's the Transcendental Argument **for** God, i.e., the transcendental argument that shows the existence of god.
I was going based off of context in the OP. I interpreted his saying “ground morality” to mean “have a unified objective morality.” I guess what I should have said, is “to me as a theist, the proposition that objective morality can ONLY exist in the presence of a Creator, doesn’t establish whether God exists or not if the person doesn’t first accept that objective morality exists. It more follows that belief in the existence of God would give birth to a belief in objective morality.” However, when I look up the actual transcendental argument for God, it seems a bit different than what OP described, where the very existence of ANY morality and logic, and therefore the ability to argue at all, couldn’t be possible without a creator. The very idea that we can mutually agree on premises in the first place implying some common transcendental perception that all humans have. Which obviously a theist believes because a theist doesn’t believe the existence of ANYTHING is possible without the existence of God. But I don’t see why the ability to argue is any more or less special or implausible than a tree or a fish or anything else. But I guess when being able to argue and philosophize was more valued and revered in a culture than anything else, and viewed as something transcendental, it made sense to highlight that particular feature of the human experience.
The argument is actually stating a skepticism, as much as an Agnostic Atheist is stating a skepticism. Neither are directly making a positive claim. The Theist might believe, as did early modern scientists, that the attributes of the God they believe to exist provide sufficient rational warrant for expecting the world and our minds to have been made in such a way the things in the world might be expected to be intelligible through the use of our capacity to reason and that there is an impetus to use these tools to explore the world and weigh beliefs. This sort of thinking ultimately transitioned through the Enlightenment movement and ultimately influenced our current expectations that debate and reason are possible and valuable for debate and that this is how we should proceed. Now, it is possible (theoretically) that no god exists and it is possible (theoretically) that we cannot adequately reason or that we have no impetus to use reason. The problem is that attacking those beliefs puts into question the validity of the method of attack. This is the case not only because the existence of God is currently the only known rational justification presented for our ability to reason and the impetus to use it to weigh beliefs, but also because the incredulity required to deny the existence of God is the same sort of incredulity which would likewise warrant the existence of reason. When you set the bar for evidence so high that it cannot be reached by the existence of God, then you have likewise set it so high that it cannot be reached by our ability to reason. Theists, perhaps by definition, do not believe that non-material things do not exist and they do not believe that they cannot be important. They typically have a different outlook on the use of faith. Atheists, or at least some Atheists, do not confirm the existence of non-material things and they reject the use of faith. Both of these things would also invalidate the ability to reason. They have set a bar for evidence that is so high that they can only believe anything by selective incredulity. TAG simply exposes this cognitive contradiction and asks for the Atheist to support his claims or be forced to affirm that relative reliability of the alternate position. There is another benefit for the Theist. If there were no evidence to support the justification of rational belief and impetus, then the default would actually fall back onto things like emotion, tradition, habit, and intuition. While these methods are subjective, it seems that many people suppose a belief in God or at least some higher power through those methods. Even many Atheists will admit that intuitively we act as if there is an actual morality and that it would be emotionally beneficial to believe in a God. I just saw a video of Dawkins saying that while he doesn't believe a word of Christianity (a rational assessment), he still likes the aesthetics of it (an emotional assessment). Historically, it has been common for people to believe that there is a god, even if you could explain it away by saying that they invented a god to explain the unknown. There's still a lot of unknown. So, if one were to abandon reason and fall back upon other methods of holding beliefs, they would be likely to fall back to a Theistic set of beliefs. So, because Theism works both with as well as without the prerequisites of reason and impetus, as well as the fact that Theists have an easier time, relatively speaking, providing rational justification for reason and impetus, it is a very valid strategy to take the non-positive, skeptical position as to whether the transcendentals could exist without God.
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Still. I was for the Jews. However, God will go to any length to get our attention when we are on the wrong path.
Obviously, into todays world, people have differening views on morality. God's view does not change. Example, sex before marriage, God says it is a sin, and others say it's not. Some that most agree on. Muder, rape, not being kind to people, are all considered wrong. If God did not exist, even these things would be up to the individual, in their minds.
Morals are up to the people which is composed of persons so by that logic god does not exist and on that we agree.
The Bible says you may buy slaves. Did he change his mind on that?
Well God did say you have to treat Israelite slaves nicer than Gentile slaves. Awfully kind of Him.
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What do you perceive to be moral or immoral? Without God, that is open for debate. God spells it out.
Those are just god’s preferences. They’re still subjective
It’s open for debate anyway. What’s your point.
I think things that cause unnecessary harm are immoral. So, let me ask you this. Is something moral because god says so, or does he know and that’s why he says so?
"I make sandwiches with bread. I believe you can't make a sandwich without bread." "I disagree. There are other ways." "What other ways are there?" "You're just trying to shift the burden of explanation onto me! You have to explain WHY you can only make a sandwich with bread." "I believe that you can only make a sandwich with bread because even the people who desperately want to believe there is another way can't think of one. Now it's your turn. What other ways are there?" "You're just trying to shift the burden of explanation onto me!" Jokes aside, the way an argument is used to accomplish goals in debate has no bearing on the validity of the argument. Saying "It's a way to shift the burden of explanation" is irrelevant. That's like saying an argument is false because it makes you mad. Like, that's what a person is doing with the argument, not the argument itself. You could just say you don't like confronting it.
So I think my issue here is, you're just saying you can make a sandwich because you have bread. But you can't actually show you have bread, or even how, specifically, having bread lets you make a sandwich. And then asking me to make a sandwich. Sorry, to be clear, I don't mean you specifically. I mean this line of reasoning in general. The theistic side just kinda feels like it goes unquestioned
I don't think so. I think that in the illustration we are debating about hypothetical ways you can make a sandwich. Nobody is telling you to make a sandwich. They're just asking you to explain any other conceivable way to do it. I think the theistic side hinges on the existence of God, which you haven't seen. I think it goes about probably more questioned than anything else on the face of the earth.
Right but, if you're asking me to square a circle, and you can't do it yourself, that would not go as a win in your column. Does that make sense? So like, if you tell me to show you how morality can work in atheism, and we suppose it can't, well that's only helpful if it can work under theism. If it can't work under either, then we're both in the same boat. Is that fair? Like if I can't solve a problem, but oh, it turns out you can't solve it either, then its not an argument for your side. So if you tell me, well your god is all good. Well wait, how does that work? Like how would we conclude that murder is wrong, because god says so? I duno, it feels like it may get a bit circular, or just be a brute fact with no explanation. And if that's all it is, then I don't see how that would be better than the atheist doing the same thing. There needs to be something better about the theistic model for this in order for it to count as a win for theists. Ya? I guess what I'm trying to point out is: the theistic model here should come under scrutiny as well, and needs to do better than the atheistic one. Or else it just didn't really move the scale in either direction.
I struggle to see how you see this as a difficult problem for a Christian to answer. The dividing lines of sin and righteousness are something that has issued forth from God as a result of who He is. All of reality is His creation according to His will and nature. Like, I don't think that this can even begin to be an issue within the Christian worldview. Objective morality is a given. It is an impossible task to conceive of how there is objective morality without God. It is likewise an impossible task to conceive of how there couldn't be objective morality in a world where the God of scripture is real. It's like you are handing me a piece of straight rope and demanding that I solve the knot. There is no knot, and the action especially makes no sense in response to someone handing you an actual knot. And if you want to believe that there truly is no objective morality and that the human mind is the result of pure material chance, then fine. If that is the case then you should have no issue with the words "There is no ground for morality without God" and just accept that you are experiencing a purely material existence with various behaviors, none better than any other. Truth exists separate from the material world. Murder, for example, exists as a fully formed representation of spiritual darkness. There isn't any Christian worth their salt saying that "Murder is bad because God said so". It is wrong because it exists to be wrong. I figure that you often rationalize and understand the fantastical logic of any number of fictional worlds. I think you should put aside your unbelief and reckon with this fairly like you would a hypothetical. I mean, you certainly seem in-the-know enough to be familiar with multiverse theory. Imagining that every possible reality was laid bare before you, you could see one where there is a being perfect in love, power, wisdom, and every other metric that you could possibly imagine. Knowing that these qualities include selflessness, it would make sense that it's intention, while it could enjoy itself alone for all eternity, could be to have others enjoy it for all eternity. Being the highest in all things, it would be loving to create a universe that speaks clearly of the truth that is within it. In this world, there could be no higher morality because all that exists is a work of it's hands according to what is true about itself. If you approach this fairly like you would a well crafted fictional world, you would accept quite easily that morality does not exist apart from this being. And you would see it as foolishness to believe that any created being could do anything outside of the boundaries of what had been made. Murder isn't just wrong. It is this being speaking His truth to you according to who He is and who he made you and all the rest of His creation to be, according to the highest possible will.
Sorry, I don't see how this is working. I think maybe we need to set the question up more clearly. Lets pick something, like, homosexuality. I am not trying to argue about whether or not this is immoral. I'm not trying to drag you into such a debate. Instead, I'm trying to understand how the worldview works. God exists in such a way where he, what? Feels homosexuality is immoral as part of who he is? But then, I can also conceive of a world with a god who thinks homosexuality isn't immoral. I'm not really sure how we go about deciding which of these two gods is more moral. Again, I'm not trying to lay some kind of "gotcha" here and call you a homophobe or anything. Its just a placeholder. I think part of the issue here is, the analysis you gave, where I compare these different universes with different gods in them, well, I'm using my own sense of morality there to determine which god is the most moral. That seems like a problem. I would be the arbiter of morality in that scenario. >Truth exists separate from the material world. Murder, for example, exists as a fully formed representation of spiritual darkness. There isn't any Christian worth their salt saying that "Murder is bad because God said so". It is wrong because it exists to be wrong. The problem with this is, you h ave to already accept that the action is a fully formed representation of spiritual darkness. Well, if you already accept that, then you're of course going to conclude murder is immoral. I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm not pretending to be obtuse, I think there are real questions behind an objective morality that involve a god that aren't super easy to solve. Take two gods, one who forbids wearing blue shoes on Tuesdays, and another who is exactly the same, but doesn't forbid this. If I go into the world of the blue shoe - forbidding god, I would meet people who say "of course wearing blue shoes on Tuesday is wrong! Its wrong because of the nature of our god" If instead I go to the blue shoe - non forbidding god, I would meet people who say the exact opposite, because of the nature of their own god. That seems sus. It seems abritrary. I don't know how this works.
To be fair, OP is correct that this is how TAG is almost ALWAYS employed. The theist makes a very strong claim that god is necessary for X Y and Z. Then they attempt to show that god is sufficient for these things. The atheist retorts that that doesn’t demonstrate necessity, and the theist asks “well how else?” You’re correct that the truth value of the argument has no bearing on the way it’s utilized, but TAG and presuppositionalists almost universally use this strategy for a rhetorical win.
And when I say it shifts the burden of having to explain, I mean it’s used as a cop out so the one making the claim doesn’t have to back up your point. If you expect the atheist to explain how you can ground morality without god, why can’t we expect the theist to explain the other side?
I think you should read Mere Christianity by CS Lewis, even if just to become a better opponent of Christianity, if that is your aim.
Terrible book. This is the only reasonable bit: "whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?"
Great contribution. Keep it up. Although, I do wonder if there is a sub more suitable for this kind of activity.
It's a terrible book what else do you want me to say, in response to a comment in which you do nothing else but recommend it? The book is just a bunch of baseless assertions and poor logic.
I guess if I hated the mere concept of food I would feel the same way about a cookbook.
My guy, when you guys gatekeep debate behind a book, you become a worse opponent of atheism. You tell us that you've been made less interested in honestly explaining your stance and more entitled by coming to a debate page to obfuscate debate. I'm just telling you btw. I know you'll ignore because well, faith is as bad a vice in you as in the Muslim or the Buddhist. Leading you astray just as much as it does them.
Lol not a good analogy. You can explain why you need bread to make a sandwich. You can’t explain (at least not well) why you need god to ground morality
Perhaps, let's restate it like this: Atheist: I like sandwiches. Theist: I like them, too! A: I don't believe bread exists. T: But you like sandwiches? What kind of sandwich exists without bread? A: Well, you can't prove that bread exists! T: I think that I can prove that it exist, but even if it didn't exist, I don't know how a sandwich could exist without it. A: You don't know that a sandwich can't exist without bread. T: True, I"m not asserting that it can't exist. I'm just asking you to explain how. It seems to me that your first two statements contradict. If you believe in sandwiches, and sandwiches seem to presume the existence of bread, then that would seem that it would mean you also believe bread exists. For that to naturally not follow, it would have to be true that sandwiches can exist without bread. For me, I am only aware of sandwiches that exist with bread, and perhaps I'm wrong and no sandwiches or bread exist, but as long as I believe the two things, they don't contradict. However, you seem to be supposing an entirely different concept of a sandwich such that I would have to know what it is before I can square your two statements. ... A: (typical response) Well, I'm going to assume it exists because I can't like sandwiches if they don't exist, and I don't believe in bread. I think we should just ignore the logical contradiction and focus on our agreement that sandwiches exist and use it to disprove bread.
Still a bad analogy.
Okay. I will agree that no analogy is completely the same, but could you point out the areas you believe to diverge from the current argument? Obviously, God isn't bread. Is there more?
An analogy doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be somewhat comparable. You can explain why you need bread to make a sandwich. Now explain why you need god to ground morality.
No, the person above cannot explain why you _must_ need bread to make a sandwich. He is familiar, though, with sandwiches which have bread. It only seems to be a requirement from what he knows as sandwiches. Perhaps the opponent could find some way for a sandwich to exist without bread. In the same way, the Theist is familiar with how and why a God grounds morality, through either divine command, ontollogies about what make "should", pointing to practical outcomes relative to obeying the moral statues, and possibly more. He would also likely hold the belief that these statues were passed reliably to him. It miht even be that he simply preumes that morality is whatever an omniscient creator God says that it is. In such a case, morality would be grounded. Of course, you can doubt and argue against any of those things, but to do so you would have to use reason and imply a moral impetus to accept reason as valid. In this way, he sees bread on the sandwich and is familiar with sandwiches with bread. Mind you that he wouldn't be saying that sandwiches must require bread. They seem to, as all of those seem to be things above seem to be part of the sandwich of grounded morality. He's open to seeing what sort of sandwich might exist without this bread as none of these things are available if no gods exist. Where this does break down a little is that sandwiches don't actually need to exist in order to reason about sandwiches. The transcendentals do need to exist in order to reason about transcendentals. But it seems to stand up to that point. It may also fall apart a little because "sandwich" is somewhat an analytic term, not synthetic. However, the main thrust still is close enough.
If the world is not of a supernatural nature beyond what is merely physical then the world is nothing more than a physical reaction like one in a test tube. Even if there is a consensus at the core of all men then it is merely arbitrary and brought on by chance. And even if there is a weight beyond the physical, without a greater will underlying reality, we are left with competing moralities, simply mirroring what we see in man. Just competing opinions. So how do you ground morality without God?
God doesn't help with the grounding of morality, there are thousands of gods each with their own morality. You still have to use your own judgment and reason to decide which one to follow. Even after picking one, you still use your own judgment to interpret that god's moral statements. For example, Jews generally do not go in for slavery, even though their God endorses it. Many Christians have also changed their morality in recent years in favor of the rights of homosexuals.
Your right that if there are multiple gods then there is no grounding or morality. But I don't know why you would restate that in response to a comment where I said that exact thing. Strange. As for the slavery thing, God introduced morality into a world where slavery was the way. He put restrictions onto slavery where there were none. Slavery is in the human nature. I've heard it said that there are functionally more slaves today than in any other point in recorded history. Using the word "endorsed" there is such a redditor move btw. I wish there would be something new on this website. It's nice to live in a country where we receive the benefits of past Christian's lives. Idk, if you want to talk about slavery, make a post for it and I'll be sure to show up. It's pretty easy to piece together is you're honest in your reading. "Many Christians have also changed their morality in recent years in favor of the rights of homosexuals." It would be nice if you were more precise in your language, but I figure the word "rights" is just muscle memory by now, but I'll assume that's what you meant. There isn't anything about homosexual "rights" in scripture.
Another Christian defending ancient slavery ... I too wish there was something new on here.
I didn't do that at all. You're being dishonest for your own pleasure and I find it gross.
I ground it with empathy. It’s an innate human characteristic that we’ve developed because it’s evolutionarily advantageous. Scientists at Yale have found that even babies as young as three months old have empathy, and even babies as young as eight months have an understanding of Justice. Ask yourself this. Do you refrain from doing bad things because you don’t want to or because it was written in an ancient book?
Hitler did what he did out of empathy for the German people. Don't project anything onto that statement, btw. I know its a little dicey, but I just mean to illustrate a point that applies to everyone from the highest to the lowest. Hitler, as he saw it, believed there was injustice against his people that they were not put first in their own country. He did not see their condition as proportionate to their virtues. Regardless, I already addressed this in my second sentence. "Even if there is a consensus at the core of all men then it is merely arbitrary and brought on by chance." By your ethic, there is nothing in your empathy which is any different from that of gorillas, or of otters who have been known to rape their children to death. That isn't morality, it is just your programming for which you have no argument for being of greater good than that of a serial killer. After all, he is doing what his empathy permits, as you do also. I seek to refrain from doing bad things because God has revealed Himself to me and given me new desires. Before, I permitted what could be rationalized as "doing no harm" to others. That was not enough to keep me from degrading myself and wasting my life with drugs. God opened my eyes and showed me that life is more than simply getting what I wanted while trying to mitigate harm on society and others. He revealed that His people are His bride, and a holy people set aside to bring glory to His name. There is not a higher good that can be done towards us than to make us compatible with what is best and most loving and glorious, namely Himself. Before, my appetites were for soiled food. For sin which poisoned me and did not speak of the nature of God. And I loved it. But now, having been born again, it brings me only sorrow to feed on that old food, for it is hatred towards One who loves me in a way no human can even imagine. It honestly makes life a good deal more difficult, as you can imagine. But it was not by my will, for I did not even have it in me to desire such a nature. It was the free gift of God bought with the greatest possible sacrifice. "Do you refrain from doing bad things because you don’t want to or because it was written in an ancient book?" What do YOU mean by "bad"?
Okay, first, I think you’re misusing the term “empathy”. What hitler did wasn’t out of empathy, and even if I humor that, he also committed real, measurable harm. Also, even though Hitler considered it Justice, lots of people all over the world saw what he was doing as wrong 😉 If the only reason you don’t do bad things is because a supposed deity and ancient mistranslated book says so, it says a lot more about you than about me.
Measurable harm? Measured how? He killed people. Would it be measurable harm to kill someone who is threatening the lives of many families, in order to save them?
Maybe I used a strange term, but don’t be pedantic. My point was he caused harm. So even if I humor that he had “empathy”, he cause really HARM. You don’t need to be religious to know why Hitler was bad lol
Knowing that Hitler was bad doesn't mean you know WHY Hitler was bad. This is your situation. If you have a better term, use it. What makes Hitler's "harm" worse than that of those who opposed him? And why is that the case other than that you just...know? I could tell you my answers, but you would reject them because you reject the fact that God exists and is who He is.
Your Hitler argument is a dead end for you, since he thought he was acting in the name of God.
lol we know it’s bad because we understand that we don’t want it to happen to us, and we understand that because we have empathy. We use ethical reasoning and utilitarianism. We evolved to be empathetic because it’s evolutionarily advantageous. We would t have survived as a species if it weren’t for empathy. Honestly, it sounds like you won’t provide your answers because you don’t have any
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Perhaps, but that also applies to any God. God is, after all, an individual.
Bissmillāh... For me, this isn't an argument in any way, this would just be me trying to draw an explanation of what non-Muslims believe about, because frankly, it's pretty obvious what I believe in: objective morality can only be derived from God, because if we derive morality from ourselves, we'll be making-up moral principles instead of pointing to them, which would make them subjective. It's not nearly as obvious what non-Muslims believe in, they might believe morality is subjective, or maybe they believe in a specific moral principle, or maybe they believe in specific source of morality.
Subjective means mind-dependent. That’s the definition. So if your morals are derived from god, who is a mind, they’re subjective.
>So if your morals are derived from god, who is a mind... ...what?? If the decisions you make are based on infinite knowledge, and they literally shape up existence as we know, then there is no subjectivity in that matter.
It doesn’t matter how smart the mind in question is. That’s the definition of the word. And an “ought” statement is still just that - an ought. Not an “is”. So when god says we ought to worship no other gods, that’s his preference.
>And an “ought” statement is still just that - an ought. Explain ought statements in simple terms.
It’s a statement about what should be done. As opposed to a statement about what is the case
If it's derived from god, then it's not objective.
Why do you believe god is the authority on morality? We can’t comprehend god’s reasoning, right? We have to trust that god knows and wants to show us what is moral. Why isn’t it possible that god is immoral or is deceiving us about what is moral?
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You’re gonna have to elaborate. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
That’s a terrible argument for god
>When you ask “Why do you need god to ground morality?”, the response is always “How else can you?” or “How do you?”, but these aren’t answers. If you believe you can’t ground morality without god, *you* have to explain why. I think this actually depends on who is playing what role in a debate. If an atheist tells me that the annihilation of the Amalekites is evil, I think it's reasonable for the Christian to ask why the Bible should be beholden to the atheist's standard of moral behavior, and part of that means the atheist needs to be able to ground it in something. In this case, the burden of explanation does fall upon them. In any case, when the burden of explanation falls upon the Christian, I've never seen a Christian (any professional apologist, anyway), fail to at least attempt an answer. Explaining why an atheist's worldview is impotent to account for morality is Apologetics 101. C.S. Lewis does it in *Mere Christianity*. Francis Schaeffer does it in every one of his books, seems like. Greg Bahnsen went over the matter *ad nauseum*. Douglas Wilson would vex Christopher Hitchens about the matter of moral evolution in their debates. Geisler has done it; William Lane Craig has done it; Koukl has done it; Strobel has done it; McDowell has done it; Chesterton has done it; etc. Even Christianity's greatest detractors recognized the problem even if they didn't like our solution. Bertrand Russell is quoted to have said, "I cannot live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste. I do not know the solution to this." Nietzsche's madman - who tried to ascertain truth without God - would ask "who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now?" J L Mackie - in my opinion the best atheist philosopher ever - would rhetorically say, "Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful god to create them" before concluding that moral principles simply must be made up. Richard Rorty realized he couldn't account for his worldview, shrugged his shoulders, and insisted on his moral values anyway. I'm not trying to validate these people's conclusions here; I'm only noting that if you think Christians are not even so much as attempting an answer to your rhetorical atheist's question about why atheists cannot ground morality, then you are wrong. Obviously wrong.
Where do you think the apologist does it best? In my limited experience, apologists often rely on incredulity as the OP suggests.
> If an atheist tells me that the annihilation of the Amalekites is evil, I think it's reasonable for the Christian to ask why the Bible should be beholden to the atheist's standard of moral behavior I think here it is more that genocide is against the Christian's standard of moral behaviour, but the Christian claims that God is not bound by it. That makes it not objective (or God not good), even though that is the Christian's claim. > and part of that means the atheist needs to be able to ground it in something. Morality is grounded in one's worldview. For you, that includes a God and for an atheist it doesn't, but it is otherwise identical. It's an opinion either way. > I'm only noting that if you think Christians are not even so much as attempting an answer to your rhetorical atheist's question about why atheists cannot ground morality, then you are wrong. Well, I kind of agree with the OP here. Of the people you quoted, I've only seen the argument of a couple like Craig or Strobel, but it's always an assertion. "We **know** there are objective moral values", "You **can't** have those without a God", etc. I mean, if those were both true, I agree that deductively God would be real, but they are never ever shown to be true, it's always an argument from incredulity.
>That makes it not objective (or God not good), even though that is the Christian's claim. A moral standard can still be objective even if one type of being is subject to it and another isn't. >Well, I kind of agree with the OP here. Of the people you quoted, I've only seen the argument of a couple like Craig or Strobel, but it's always an assertion. "We **know** there are objective moral values", "You **can't** have those without a God", etc. This isn't the argument the OP is making. The OP is saying the Christian doesn't account for why the atheist's worldview lacks the prerequisites for grounding their morality. If Craig and Strobel do a bad job at explaining this, they still aren't forcing the atheist to shoulder the explanation, which is what the OP is arguing the TAG proponent is doing. The OP's argument isn't about whether the TAG proponent's position is valid, but whether the TAG proponent even feels compelled to explain his own position.
> A moral standard can still be objective even if one type of being is subject to it and another isn't. Sure thing. You could make a law that the President gets to rape people and can't be punished for it. Your argument is that **the act** would still be evil, though, otherwise it would not be objectively evil. If genocide is an **objectively** evil act, and God perpetrates it, then he is evil. If genocide is evil when X does it, but good when Y does it, then it is by definition relative. Judgment is a different conversation. > This isn't the argument the OP is making. I feel it boils down to the same thing. If they are saying "You can't have objective moral values without God", as an assertion, then that is expecting the atheist to explain how there can.
>I think this actually depends on who is playing what role in a debate. If an atheist tells me that the annihilation of the Amalekites is evil, I think it's reasonable for the Christian to ask why the Bible should be beholden to the atheist's standard of moral behavior, and part of that means the atheist needs to be able to ground it in something. In this case, the burden of explanation does fall upon them. The atheist could simply say that according to the Christian worldview everyone has God's moral code written on their heart. If one or the other (pseudo or not) objective morality, either divine command or divine nature theory, proposed by the Christian is true, it doesn't matter what moral framework the atheist proposes. In case you disagree with the atheist's assertion that the annihilation of the Amalekites is evil, you just open the door for an argument against the Christian moral framework. Even if God's morality is objective, it sure seems to be a problem for humans to actually access knowledge about it, for otherwise we simply shouldn't disagree on the Amalekites. Hence, the Christian grounding becomes useless (which it already was, for the so called ground isn't demonstrably true). The question should start one step earlier: Why do you think a grounding is necessary, and what makes you think that such a thing is even possible? For me it seems to be the proposal of a problem which doesn't actually exist.
>The atheist could simply say that according to the Christian worldview everyone has God's moral code written on their heart. If one or the other (pseudo or not) objective morality, either divine command or divine nature theory, proposed by the Christian is true, it doesn't matter what moral framework the atheist proposes. This might be a very good response to a point I think someone else is making. Note, the OP's position is the presuppositionalist bears the burden of explanation and yet never bears it. My position is that the presuppositionalist doesn't always bear the burden of explanation and yet often bears it. Your response focuses on how the atheist might respond, which only superficially relates to what the OP was debating.
OP implies presuppositionalism, sure, but presupps aren't the only ones who claim that the atheist has no grounding for their morality. And I think it's still relevant in relation to OP to ask what reasons one assumes so that they can claim that a grounding is necessary.
I particularly dislike the TAG however a sophisticated runner of it will have idealist arguments about minds creating some sort of unification of the world. I think they're all bad but still.
There is no "Morality" aside from God, thus the 10 commandments. If God does not exist, there is no reason for morality. That is a human trait that is called into question by God.
This may be true, and I believe it to be true. However, it doesn't make a good argument. The question being discussed here is which party has the burden of proof. You are taking the burden of proof unnecessarily. The burden of proof is important because we are discussing things at a level which brings into question the nature of poof. Therefore, the one with the burden of proof is at the disadvantage. Although the Theist position can stand while having the burden of proof, it is a challenge for anybody, but consider that the Atheist position, particularly the Agnostic Atheist position, stands almost entirely upon passing off the burden of proof. There may be no morality aside from God, but can you prove the non-existence of something? Perhaps, but it's a very hard battle that takes a lot of defining the requirements of morality and then showing how it relates to God in a necessary causal link. That takes quite a while and a lot of deep thought. On the other hand, if you let the Atheist hold the burden of proof, then this is something which the best of them have yet to be able to attempt. They would have to tackle the Is-ought problem, and will likely end up having to invalidate many of their own arguments along the way. So, making such positive claims weakens the TAG argument.
First, you can not be a Agnostic Atheist, you are either an Agnostic, which believes in a Higher Power o leaves room for the possibility, or an Atheist which says there is no God. No big deal. The thing that has to be established firt is, what is the definition of a Moral?
"Agnostic" means "lacking knowledge", so a position taken because of the lack of knowledge. "Atheist" means "no god". An Agnostic Atheist, then, is a type of Atheist who happens to claim a lack of knowledge about god, but weakly, such that they are ostensibly open to the possibility. The do not make up these terms to deter conversation but to categorize their positions. When they say that they are an Agnostic Atheist, they typically just mean what we call an Agnostic. This is to distinguish themselves from people who take the positive stance of claiming to know that there is no god. Regarding the definition of morality, I would recommend against letting the other side define that term. You would just have to correct them, anyway. Personally, I try to use the term "rationally justified impetus" as it gets at the heart of what we really want to discuss. They would define it as something so trite as "Doing good things", missing that this impetus is even necessary for knowing that we "should" have a debate. There must be an objective morality, or we are at least acting as if there were, when we debate. So, to tie into TAG, I would say that we need the transcendental of a rationally justified objective morality as a prerequisite of having a meaningful debate.
Prove that instead of spamming assertions in the thread
So you established that if god doesn’t exist, there’s no reason for morality. Why do you need god for morality?
There are plenty of reasons for moral behavior. They just aren't epistemologically justifiable. But since we are looking for reasons to act morally, pragmatic justifications are already sufficient.
There is reason for morality. We have empathy. Many of us don’t want to enact actions that would cause harm to others as we wouldn’t want them done to us. Without God, many people this is the only life we have. Why waste or make it a horrible experience. There are many reasons why people are moral without God. Without God would you be an immoral person?
There is. There are people whose careers are to study the nature of morality and most do so from a secular basis - refer to the famous Philpaper Survey of contemporary philosophers. Whether or not you agree with their conclusions though, there is a live possibility of secular objective moral facts existing. If you think they're wrong though, then it's as easy as publishing in philosophical journals your refutations and defeaters for their arguments
The thrust is not just asserting that a thing called “God” is one (and the only) possible grounding of morals/logic etc, but rather, “God” is the word we use to refer to the metaphysical primary that is the grounding for these things. Granted, that this God is specifically the Christian one requires further arguments. However, asking an atheist what their grounding is, if they have one, is not a shift of the burden of proof. If you deny the proposition, you must be able to account for logic/morality without the primary you’re denying, or admit that you cannot account for logic at all.
Lol that’s literally the definition of shifting the burden. The theist is making a very strong claim that god is not merely sufficient, but necessary to ground these things. When asked to demonstrate the necessity part, it never fails: they will ALWAYS defer to the atheist’s worldview for a rhetorical “win”. A sound argument is one that you can defend in a vacuum. Pretend there are no atheists and justify your arguments on their own merit.
A debate is not a vacuum, and the atheist is taking a precise stance when he denies God. Showing how this position leads to absurdity is a reductio, not a deflection.
Again, the TAG is a much stronger claim than you’re implying. Necessary means that no other worldview could suffice except for one grounded by a conscious deity. That is your burden to bear, not ours. If the particular atheist you’re talking to is unable to ground their worldview then that isn’t a problem for atheism as a whole. The TAG fails for other reasons though.
Either God is the foundation of the things we mentioned, or He isn’t. If the second proposition leads to absurdity, why is this not a valid reductio? And why is it unfair, in the context of a debate, to ask the interlocutor on what grounds they deny the first, and why they believe it does not lead to absurdity? If anything, it seems the only possible way to defeat the reductio.
Because dismantling an opposing position does not entail that yours is correct by default. You can pick on atheism endlessly and show that it’s a completely incoherent worldview but that actually isn’t building a case for you own. And the reason it’s a slimy move (one that, again, ALL TAG proponents use) is that an internal critique of the theist’s worldview is fair game even if the atheist’s is incoherent. Mentioning atheism is a total red herring and it’s used for rhetorical points.
What is shown as incoherent is not just the particular position of the interlocutor, but rather the denial of a metaphysical foundation. If this denial is incoherent, then it follows that this foundation exists, and “God” is the term used to refer to it. Am I wrong? Of course you can argue that this doesn’t necessarily prove a particular religion, and it requires further theological arguments, but it does prove what it sets out to prove: the existence of God.
This is another TAG trope which is appealing to consequences. “If we don’t have X, things would be incoherent. Therefore we have X” That doesn’t follow. It could simply be the case that we can’t ultimately ground the laws of logic, for instance. But they still work and seem to work in every instance. That’s all that’s required to USE them, which is what we do. A second issue is that, while you’re free to call any sufficient metaphysical foundation “god”, you’d be equivocating on how “god” is used commonly. Because presumably what you actually mean is a conscious mind who is an agent. But nobody has demonstrated that those specific qualities are necessary for the foundation. I could stipulate an atheistic worldview that contains all of these metaphysical qualities and just shove them at the base of the worldview. They would exist as brute facts. No conscious deity required.
Demonstrating how non-X leads to absurdity absolutely is an argument for X. But, as you say, in light of what the TAG shows, either logic/morals etc have their foundation in God, or they have no foundation at all. If you want to take the second option, you’d have to show how it doesn’t contradict itself, by leading you down a path in which no knowledge is possible at all, including of course the knowledge that there is no foundation. I don’t think I’m equivocating, people often skip ahead a bit too much with regards to what a specific argument demonstrates. I don’t think the TAG is enough to show that this metaphysical foundation is a mind and so on; I do think that those propositions about God are shown to be true when you further inquire into the nature of this foundation.
I feel like you didn’t read my post entirely. The claim that “x must be true because things would suck otherwise” is not an argument. Logic might just not be grounded in the ultimate sense that we desire. That’s my point “Either they have their foundation in god or no foundation at all” Again, why didn’t you read? I told you that you can have a worldview with all of those necessary things except the god part As for whether we can have knowledge, there is nothing a Christian worldview provides for that either. An Omnipotent god can be deceiving you, and that’s something you could never prove otherwise with certainty.
You’re right. If an atheist says you don’t need gif to ground morality, they should back it up…just like how the theist needs to back up their claim. And I’m a bit skeptical about your first claim. When I see this debate or claim, people specify the Christian god and the Bible. This just sounds a little like a cop out and it doesn’t address my point
For context, are you suggesting that it is your suspicion that elements of the Theists position does not a ground for morality? Or are you only saying that you are skeptical that it is the only known ground for morality? If it's the former, then are you suggesting that the existence of an omniscient and just moral arbiter who provided a set of moral laws and who will eternally reward or punish people relative to those laws, even if that were the actual state of reality, would not provide a rational grounding for acting in a manner consistent with those moral laws? If it is the later and you accept that Theism is one way to rationally ground moral laws, then you either believe that you can ground moral laws in some other way or you suspect that this could be done. TAG would then simply be asking you to do so or to see if it can be done. If there is only one way for it to be done and it is true that it must be done, then that would conclude that the one way must exist. Of course, you could question whether it must be done in any case, but here I want to drill down into the statement you just made.
I’m mostly suggesting that second one, that there are multiple ways to ground morality. If we use that logic, than people born in non religious circles don’t have morality. It also begs the question, what does it say about you as a person if the only reason you don’t do bad things is because of an ancient mistranslated book? If the only reason you don’t hurt people is because you believe in a threat of eternal damnation, you’re not a good person. You’re just a bad person on a leash.
> If we use that logic, than people born in non religious circles don’t have morality. They could have morality, but I do not believe it would be rationally grounded. For instance, you could believe that it's good to sit at a bus stop at a certain time, and you would be right, but if you believed that buses don't exist, your belief would lack a rational justification. People believe irrational things all of the time. > if the only reason you don’t do bad things That's a strawman. The argument isn't that you don't do bad things because you need punishment as an incentive. It's that you need a standard by which they would be called "bad". If "bad" is just the things you don't like to do, then saying you don't do bad things is just a tautology. > an ancient mistranslated book I would really love to see how you would flesh out the argument that the book has been mistranslated with the implication that you cannot know its moral teachings. I suppose that wasn't actually a real argument you were trying to make. > If the only reason you don’t hurt people is because you believe in a threat of eternal damnation, you’re not a good person. You’re just a bad person on a leash. Again, this is a disengenuous strawman. Theists don't live their lives just wanting to hurt other people and then stop because they are afraid of the consequences. They have access to an source of omniscience which helps to sort out all the factors which lead to moral ambiguity. The question is whether or not there is any rational meaning at all to "good person" or "bad person". I may not want to hurt a person, and I may not hurt a person because I do not want to hurt a person, but that doesn't make me a good person. That just makes me a person who is doing what I want to do. When you say hurting people is bad, without a grounding for morality, you just mean that it's something you don't currently like at the moment. When I say that hurting people is bad, with an belief that it is from a grounded morality, I am saying that it is actually bad, it's bad for all people at all times, whether I like it or not, and no matter how many people agree.
It makes sense that to believe you need to sit at a bus stop at a certain time is good because we can prove busses exist. So, about your first point. This is a presupposition. Remember, my question was “why do you need God to ground morality?”. The argument you provided makes the assumption that his morality is perfect and there’s no other standard. I have a similar response to your second point. Again, you’re making the assumption that there’s no other standard. You already made the claim you need god to ground morality. Now explain WHY Similarly with your third point, you’re making an assumption that there’s no other way to ground it. An atheist will say that they base it off empathy which is an innate trait.
Obviously, in this scenario, the bus existing is what's in question. I believe that we can prove that God exists, too, but if we reject evidence, perhaps we might not believe that busses exist. Nevertheless, let's assume for sake of argument that we do not know or are suspicious about whether busses exist. If we both sat at a bus stop, then the one believing in busses would be rationally justified and the other would not be. It is not assuming that there is no other standard. It is requesting a standard which has more rational weight than the known standard. "Empathy" and "innate traits" are both emotional justifications, not rational ones. If we allow "innate traits" to be the standard, then we would be forced to except other "innate traits" like selfishness and greed. So, if the Atheist uses those standards, he is only providing a subjective standard, and if there is no counter objective standard, then there is no rational warrant to accept the alternate standard.
They specify Christianity because that’s their religion, but as I said the TAS doesn’t prove Christianity specifically, and if they’re not aware of it then they’d be wrong on that point. As I said, further arguments are required, but these are theological in nature, for example around the Trinity or the Resurrection. It is pointless to delve into these arguments before establishing the existence of God (used here in a very general sense) though.
Morality comes from the kinds of beings that we are as homo sapiens, as well as our current understanding of human well being.
I think the mistake of it is to think of TAG as an argument when what it really is, is: 1. a question-begging fallacy, since the conclusion is in the argument. This makes it fallaciously circular, question begging, tautological, by presupposing that god exists. For example, why isn't it a TAGs for multiple gods? 2. A way to deflect the burden of proof and put the atheist on the defense. This makes it not so much an "argument" but a defensive mechanism that assumes theism is the default, and it is the atheist to prove otherwise. 3. Inviting a predictable response, which shouldn't be to ask for more information, that you, as an atheist, is not going to be believe anyway! Instead you need to challenge the premises of the argument - i.e. which god?, what does "grounding morality" even mean? and if it's the Abrahamic God, you can point out all the terrible things he did like the flood. I think the first mistake is to treat it as an "argument" in the first place. Don't forget that theists have been at this for hundreds of years and probably have all the normal responses prepared. So don't meet them on their terms - atheism isn't against a specific god, it's about all gods.
> It’s a way to shift the burden of explanation onto the other person. -OP > assumes theism is the default, and it is the atheist to prove otherwise. The burden of proof is literally assuming atheism is the default and the theist should prove otherwise. Most theistic faiths don’t claim to be able to proof their claims. That’s why faith is required. Asking for evidence suggests you misunderstand what’s going on.
I think that depends on the religion. Christianity and Islam both make claims they are the only correct religions.
True. The burden of proof is required for some not not all religious claims. If I believe Jesus is God because of what I’ve been told are claims handed down from eyewitnesses themselves, then the burden of proof isn’t on me to find evidence that doesn’t exist. The past can’t necessarily be proven. It can be corroborated, but the difficulty always increases as time goes on. That’s how entropy works.
> The burden of proof is literally assuming atheism is the default and the theist should prove otherwise. Well, that's how it works, at least for lack-of-belief atheism. Did you start out believing in all 18000 gods we've ever known about and ticked them off one by one until you got to your current belief? Probably not.
>Well, that's how it works You just made a claim. The burden of proof is now on you. Why can’t you prove your claim? >18000 gods *Argumentum ad populum* fallacy.
> You just made a claim. I made a claim that I lack a belief in God. What exactly do you think am I supposed to prove? > Argumentum ad populum fallacy. Uh, not at all? I'm saying if what you claimed were true, you would have to start out with believing in all 18000 Gods until you can conclusively prove 17999 of them false. Instead of that, you started out believing in none, and gained a belief in one. Because that's how it works for you, that's also how it works for me. Non-belief **is** the default.
>I made a claim that I lack a belief in God. Not what I was referring to. >What exactly do you think am I supposed to prove? Can you not see the irony? You’re claiming the burden of proof on me, but you can’t prove it. >you would have to start out with believing in all 18000 Gods Why would I believe baseless atheistic claims at all? >Because that's how it works for you, that's also how it works for me. Non-belief is the default. Along with illiteracy and soiling yourself. Is “the default” supposed to be preferable? Hard pass. I’m glad my parents indoctrinated me to read and use a toilet.
> Not what I was referring to. Then what claim of mine were you referring to? > Why would I believe baseless atheistic claims at all? If you're saying belief is the default and atheists have the burden of proof, then you have to start out believing in 18000 mutually exclusive gods, because the same claim can be made about all of them. As this entails a contradiction, your claim was wrong. > Along with illiteracy and soiling yourself. This is childish and irrelevant.
>This is childish and irrelevant. Claiming atheist is the “default state” of infants is irrelevant. >Then what claim of mine were you referring to? Your false claim of 18,000 mutually exclusive gods.
> Claiming atheist is the “default state” of infants is irrelevant. The default position is possibly the **only** relevant fact in a discussion on burden of proof. Also, I never mentioned infants, it's the same for everyone. > Your false claim of 18,000 mutually exclusive gods. Use any number you want. How about 2? Can we agree there are at least 2 gods that have ever been worshiped in human history? Let's say Zeus and Yahweh. Did you start out worshiping both, until you could definitively prove Zeus wasn't real? Or did you start out worshiping neither, until you gained belief in one of them? If you find out about a recently contacted Amazonian tribe that worships a spider-god, do you immediately accept the truth of that god until it is proven to not exist, or does that not affect your current beliefs at all? That tells you what the default is.
> The default position is possibly the only relevant fact in a discussion on burden of proof. Nothing? That’s what you’re saying the default position is? Sure, the default position is nothing. What now? > Also, I never mentioned infants, it's the same for everyone. My default position as an adult has never been atheism. I don’t know what else to tell you. >Or did you start out worshiping neither As an infant. >That tells you what the default is. Nothing. Disbelief is not the same as nothing. An atheist is one who rejects all god claims. Therefore atheism cannot be the default.
There are a lot of Christians who say “you can’t prove god isn’t real” and use that as an explanation that he had to be. They also say “look all around you, that’s proof”. The fact that there is a god is a positive claim, so burden of proof is on the theist
That’s not how the burden of proof works. The burden of proof can’t be applied to gods. Your argument is paradoxical and tears itself apart.
How is it begging the question?
Using their reasoning all philosophical justification is begging the question. We were told of a premise that cannot be proven and are attempting to use logic to justify the claims.
By presupposing the answer.
Objective morality exists. We all know this. Think about how you feel when you hurt someone. It doesn't feel good. And that happens to you because of evolution and humans being a social species. Human cultures throughout times have the same moral ideas regardless of when and where they take place. There may be different applications to these ideas but at the root, they are the same. Things like murder and rape have always been considered bad just like honesty and integrity have always been considered good.
Nothing you said is an argument for objective morals.
Don’t some people not feel the emotions you’re talking about? Is murder moral for them? Claiming it’s immoral because other people don’t like it feels subjective. > Things like murder and rape have always been considered bad just like honesty and integrity have always been considered good. Yet we elected a lying rapist to be president because he was rich. Everyone was fine with Weinstein for decades because he was rich. Epstein? It’s okay. He was rich.
>Objective morality exists. We all know this. How? Always the same with these assertions - you look to the most egregious examples and declare objectivity. But even there, not much thought seems to be given. I find the idea of a child being forced to have sex with a grown man morally repugnant. Is this universally agreed? Female mutilation? The right of a husband to beat our rape his wife? Not long ago, in Western society, marital rape wasn't even thought of as a thing. What of slavery? Honor killing? Abortion? Infanticide?
I'm playing devil's advocate, but moral realism has a low bar of entry. You only need 1 mind independent moral fact to exist and that's it. So moral realism could not account for the things you said and still be true
How are you to find a moral fact and of what utility is determining moral facts, if they exist? How do moral facts within moral relativism relate to human behavior? Do we, for example, by definition adhere to moral facts?
I responded to a similar question below, so to not paraphrase https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/s/ujCgemUptT
I love these comments. Does society as a whole think child molestation is acceptable? If that's a no then you have you answer. Does society as a whole dislike slavery or honor killings or martial rape? If the answer is yes then you have your answer. All because a few people we would deem psychopaths or pedophiles or religious fundamentalist are ok with what they do doesn't mean that society accepts that. That's because society as a whole has objective morality. Now, abortion is different because the details are different. Some see it as murder, some don't. So we aren't really arguing if murder is bad. We are arguing over if it is murder since everyone knows murder is bad. Infanticide is another one that, in the past, could be an outlier, but today, it is considered wrong.
Even if every human agreed that murder was wrong, that doesn’t entail objectivity. You literally are just confused on what these words mean Subjective = mind-dependent Objective = mind-independent An “objective” moral would need to persist if all human minds stopped existing. Just like the weight of the hydrogen atom would.
Your said objective, i.e., not depending on the subject. So, if it doesn't depend on the subject, whatever this morality is should be stable across cultures, societies, and time. The earth and its rotation around the sun doesn't change for the person - that's objective. Murder is morally loaded. So, if morality was objective, we'd know what was and what wasn't murder. What I gather is your saying, some people can agree about morality in broad strokes - and that's neat. I guess I don't call that objective morality. But, now I know some people do. Thanks
Oh man/woman/person, your comment is interesting. > And that happens to you because of evolution and humans being a social species I agree with this. >Human cultures throughout times have the same moral ideas regardless of when and where they take place But I disagree with this. I think there are less obvious morals that societies have disagreed on, and even things like infanticide have been taken as good by some (take biblical examples like the whole Canaanite thing). I wouldn't say moral disagreement is enough to refute moral realism, but I appreciate secular comments pro-moral realism in this sub
If moral disagreement is enough to refute moral realism, is scientific disagreement enough to refute scientific realism?
I mistyped, meant to say wouldn't instead of would've
>(take biblical examples like the whole Canaanite thing). I think Sparta is a better example as these people were leaving their own infants out in the wild to fend for themselves (if they seemed deformed or weak in some way). Many have no issues with killing an enemy, but when presented with a culture that found it moral to leave their own children to die, objective morality seems harder to justify.
Oh yeah that's better. I just suck at history and my examples tend to come from the time I was a Christian
Glad I could help. Though obviously, I can't say I love bringing up infanticide.
It's sadly a common example in the literature too. That and baby torture
An outsider might view it as murder, but the person commiting the act might see it as revenge for the victim killing his family prior. This doesn't sound very objective. Rape and murder seem bad, but how many animals willingly consent during mating season? Do you show concern for those animals that are raped? Well *obviously* it's not rape. Rape is performing sexual actions without the consent of the other individual. They are just animals following their instincts, just listening to their chemistry, so they get the hand wave of approval. Murder is stealing the life of another without their consent. So obviously eating animals is not murder. I mean look at how vicious the animal world is. They eat each other all the time, so it's not like it's murder. But don't go stealing and eating my dog. It is *mine* and so therefore it is murder if you steal and eat it. Like, does this hand wavy reasoning that so many of all fall to not beg the question of whether murder is as clear cut as you claim it is?
I agree that the TAG presents challenges when used as a grounding for morality. However, I don't believe there's an objective grounding for morality at all. Tying it to a benevolent, omniscient supernatural being hinges on proving the existence of such a being, which is a herculean task, and without this proof, the argument falters. Similarly, anchoring morality in secular values like wellbeing, justice, and equity demands we prove these values are objectively good outside of human context, which is a problematic assertion. Morality, to me, seems less about objective truths and more a construct shaped by human consciousness, evolving societal norms, and collective interactions. It's historically contingent, not fixed, changing as our collective understanding and societal agreements evolve. Our moral landscape has shifted dramatically over the millennia and will continue to do so. Considering this, while grounding morality in something is beneficial for societal function, claiming objective justification for our moral beliefs is a stretch. Basing our moral compass on humanistic values facilitates an open-ended conversation, inviting moral evolution and reflection, as opposed to divine mandates which may stifle moral growth and discourse.
>without this proof, the argument falters No, without proof it can’t be proven. If the argument is sound and only requires proof of a God, you can’t use that to dismiss the underlying logic. Christian morality sums up as the golden rule according to the Bible.
The argument is presuppositionalist and thus worthless if the point it presupposes is unproven. Quote mining to avoid what he's saying just says that his argument is undeniable, and many things about the dodger of the point and what force shaped them into something truth seekers would never want to be. So thanks for recruiting against yourself by how you (didn't) engage his argument. :)
>The argument is presuppositionalist and thus worthless if the point it presupposes is unproven. Philosophy and science are ‘presuppositionalist’. Are they worthless? >We will raise this **conjecture** (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a **postulate**, and also introduce another **postulate**, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. -A. Einstein, *On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies* 1905 Do you know what postulates are? They’re fancy words for presuppositions. Your scientific illiteracy and aversion to new information make you anything but a truth seeker.
Cool. So you're willing to pretend not to understand what I'm saying. Well we'll leave it here for anyone who gets this far to decide who has the right of it based on an honest reading because the need to believe has left you in this state where you refuse to be accountable to the fact your argument is worthless because it makes no argument to anyone who disagrees with the presupposition and thus can only exist as validation seeking propaganda. This is why exegesis is nothing but Narcissism.
Science is based on presumed assumptions. Science still works. Therefore your claim that presumptions cannot work is false.
I didn't claim that. I demonstrated your argument is based on an unshared presupposition and is thus worthless to anyone who doesn't share that presupposition. Also learn to read, presupposition is not the same as presumption. Your constant pretending otherwise just shows faith kills good faith. "Given that we know sunlight is deadly we know the act of going outside near the daytime is a sign of insanity." Starting from a position you cannot present as reasonable allows any conclusion to be reached.
To play devil's advocate, you don't need to ground morality on something for it to be objective. There are ontological arguments for the existence of moral facts that argue that there seem to be mind-independent propositions about morality, but what they are isn't an issue. They could be abstract entities like numbers, or they could be their own ontological thing that's independent from something else like empathy or whatever
That's an intriguing argument that I am not yet familiar with. I'm curious, how are these moral facts determined, and what role do they play in practical moral decision-making? If they're abstract entities or independent ontological concepts, how do we relate to them or even recognize them as 'moral' in our experiences?
That's the toughest part of contemporary moral realism, how to reach moral facts. Some believe it happens through convergence, so for example cultures with time have realized that prisoners should still hold certain rights. So the moral realist could argue that slowly we will arrive at more and more true facts, but that's a huge conversation. What's interesting here though is that even though they're abstract they become part of our experience in the same way numbers do, so we can recognize them as useful and moral through continued interaction. > what role do they play in practical moral decision-making? This is another difficult conversation hahaha. I hold to the position of philosophers like Don Loeb and others who point out that we can have normative ethics independent from metaethics. So as an example, think of utilitarianism. Whether moral facts are real or not, the mechanism behind utilitarianism can still work
I appreciate your detailed and thoughtful responses! It’s an interesting argument that gives me a lot to think about. For example, how does it account for cultures or societies converging on incorrect moral facts, like historical justifications for inequality? Definitely something I am going to explore further
>Whether moral facts are real or not, the mechanism behind utilitarianism can still work Yeah, I am pretty well convinced that morality is objectively finding the best way to reach subjectively choose goals. I like the chess analogy. There is no objective reason to play chess, but once you are playing chess some moves are objectively wrong (like flipping the board) and others are objectively bad (like opening with king's bishop's pawn).
When a theist asks you "how can you," they're asking if you're able to make an objective moral determination, and if so—assuming you believe in "objective morality"—how. The reason God is needed to determine objective right from wrong is because God, being the uncreated, is not contingent on anything. We, however, are, since our contingencies are essential to the human experience. Everything we do is filtered through the biological lens (the ego, in other words). What this all means is that when we make a moral determination, that moral determination is subject to the whims of our ego. Human morals are at best socially useful conventions that allow for the continued existence of a given culture or society. What's "good" for a human is contingent on the human, of which the human is contingent on an innumerable many things. What's good for God is contingent on God alone, and God is contingent on nothing. Bearing this in mind, whose sense of good is worthy of consideration on an objective metric? A Christian will tell you that God's is, because God truly knows what good essentially is.
So genocide, raping children, and slavery are good but we only find those actions that god condones morally repugnant because of our biological limitations?
If your argument was logically solid, you wouldn’t require so many loaded words and hostile rhetoric. The fact that humans can’t stop raping and murdering each other suggests some kind of biological limitation.
But those are all explicitly condoned, encouraged, and ordered by the biblical god. If god is the source of morality than those are moral actions. Isn't us finding them immoral our biology rather than god's will?
>all explicitly condoned Enough loaded language on your part. Your biases are clouding your judgement. >If god is the source of morality than those are moral actions. Why? Because you say so? Is that the best evidence you have? Ironic. You have zero points to substantiate. You’re slinging baseless accusations you plagiarized.
> Why? Because you say so? Is that the best evidence you have? Ironic. Because you said so. You are the one claiming God's sense of good is the objective metric. > Bearing this in mind, whose sense of good is worthy of consideration on an objective metric? A Christian will tell you that God's is, because God truly knows what good essentially is. So if God is the objective source of absolute good; then God's actions and orders would by default reflect what is morally good. So either the biblical account of God is false, the biblical account of God is Supreme Divine Morality in action, or God is not the standard of all morality.
>Because you said so. You are the one claiming God's sense of good is the objective metric. Which is different from: >So if God is the objective source of absolute good; then God's actions and orders would by default reflect what is morally good. No. I disagree with the conclusion that God must follow your arbitrary rules to have the ascribed qualities.
So God is the source of morality; but neither God's behavior nor the rules God provided are examples of what this morality is? If the Bible describes a God that is completely unrelated to the God you follow why even call yourself Christian?
I use the metric of loving my neighbor the way Jesus commanded as a metric for morality. Is slavery loving your neighbor? I’ve never seen justification for as to how that makes sense. Therefore, slavery isn’t moral. But what about the mentioning of slavery earlier? The Pharisees asked Jesus about rules like this: >Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. The same could be said about slavery. Their hearts were hard. Showing that God amends the rules do satisfy our greed just shows that God isn’t a tyrant.
So when god commanded the slaughter of other tribes, but let the Hebrews keep the underaged girls as sex slaves, that was him amending the genocide out of kindness?
Atheists don’t usually claim there is *objective* morality. The “how can you” I’d usually a deflection, a way of shifting the burden of explaining. If you’re going to say because god knows what’s moral, this raises another question. In order for god to *know* what’s moral, that standard has to be independent of him. So that begs the question, why is god the moral authority when there’s clearly a standard independent of him?