Yes. Thanks.
DTC:
Saying it, doesn’t make it true.
No. Reality reflects God. A supreme being can make a universe where 2 + 2 = 4. It goes with the territory of omnipotence that God could make a universe with an objective morality.
Unless you want to try to redefine omnipotence as not all powerful you surely must concede this point.
Exactly. Saying you can find an objective morality doesn’t make it true. How do you determine objective morality? Answer: You can’t. If you could, then we wouldn’t be having this debate.
Omnipotence has nothing to do with it. God still can’t make morality objective any more than he can make taste in beer objective. God’s personal taste in beer is not the “objective” taste in beer.
It’s a moot point anyway since God has chosen not to make his own morality accessible to humans. If you think you can discern it, please let us know how.
Absolutely! And most of the gods people have worshipped throughout history have basically been like the local despot with superpowers. The Greek pantheon is my favourite
Agreed. But that wasn’t my main point. I was trying to illustrate that for entities evolving in a particular universe, the basis for their “moral code” evolves with them along with opposable thumbs and big brains and stereoscopic vision.
As you pointed out, a Supreme Being would design Her Universe and the entities She was interested in to be consistent with her true Objective Morality. But conversely, the inhabitants of a non-designed Universe with no Supreme Being would still develop morality of some kind. Interaction with the universe results in moral codes, whether it’s a designed universe or not. Mumbo Jumbo’s problem was that he was trying to impose a particular morality inconsistent with the universe he had created.
And of course, by that very logic, since all people do not act in accord with that, there is no supreme being that designed Universe.
(mwahahaha)
There’s an important wrinke you’ve left out here. And that is that morality at some point either has to be via consensus about golden rule values, or else it isn’t particularly relevant in any way to what human beings mean when they say that something is moral or immoral or object to some particular treatment. By that, I mean that at some point, considerations of morality have to tie back to the feelings and values of the beings whose treatment we are considering. If they don’t then speaking about morality almost seems like speaking in incomplete sentences. Without at least SOME person, at the very least a victim, to object to some act, then how are we dealing with morality at all?
That means that at some point, if no one objected to a particular treatment (in your example we’d have to include the objections of the baby as well, which you convientiently left out), then it’s hard to see how it could be described as immoral. Likewise, if EVERYONE objected to some treatment, then it’s hard to see how it could be permissible and yet still even fit within the context of the concept of “morality.”
An important point. If reality always matched what we thought was not distasteful, then there would be no point to morality in the first place.
Here’s the problem. I think we can all agree that morality requires that there are rules which exist indepedent of what any person’s opinions are (though I think constrained by what I noted above: at some point they DO have to tie back to the feelings of the very beings whose treatment is being considered). That idea is nearly inherent to the very idea of moral discussion. I don’t assert that baby eating is distasteful to me personally and therefore I’d like you to stop it. I assert that it is wrong: that you SHOULD stop it, regardless of your opinions or even whether or not I am around to express my opinion on the matter.
And as you probably know, there you’ve lost me and nearly every other philosopher who’s ever considered this issue. What can “derives” from possiby mean? In terms of conveying an idea, it’s gobbledygook (what’s actuallly going on there? What does the process consist of? What does it start with and how does it get to there being a “morality” at the end_. Worse, it seems to START OUT by immediately violating the very principle you yourself set up: that morality isn’t something that is negotiable or depedent. And yet here you have precisely that: even though we have no idea how a morality can be “derived” from anything, the very fact that it is secondary and depedent on anything else robs it of all its force in exactly the same way it would if it was “just” random cultural opinion.
For myself I believe that morality seems absolute, and that we as human beings in society reflexively act like it is. When we engage in moral argument, we really do seem to be tacitly agreeing that there is some right answer. This may or may not mean anything about whether it is absolute. But there are many problems (not least of which is defining what “absolute” really means or demands in terms of justifying it: a task that, for instance, Shodan coyly refuses to address) before we even get that far.
However, we can say this: moral discussion with virtually any feeling being I can imagine seems to have a point: we can have productive arguments about ethics and meta-ethics. This discussion isn’t limited by time or culture. I can go back in time and argue against slavery. I can go even further back and argue against the God of the Bible that bashing the skulls of infants out on the rocks is evil. And in these cases, I can make arguments that while they may seem foriegn to those past peoples, are at least intelligible to them. I can make arguments that appeal to something within them. They too can logically understand my arguments and even argue against me. And the process of doing this, and the ability to imagine doing it with anyone, seems to be a pretty decent clue that by engaging in these sorts of debates, we really ARE working something out that stands at the core of human value. When we argue that former cultures did not value women as being deserving of equal consideration as men, we do so by pointing out FLAWS in their values and thinking, not simply by declaring that they had a different majority rule.
So my response is that I believe there MAY be some sort of ur-morality, some final end to moral arguments. It may well stem from the basic values most human beings have coupled with the obvious logical conclusions you get from trying to respect all of those as consistently as possible in human society.
But the caveat is that the relevance of these arguments is premised on some underlying traits that are NOT universal, and hence not objective. If a being entirely lacks empathy or desire to judge acts as principles rather than simply events, then I don’t think there is any argument that can possibly dissuade them.
To put this in theist terms: even if you believe that a God can somehow “create” a morality, how can even that all powerful deity make a compelling argument that some sociopath should act in a certain way: should not raise and eat babies? I don’t think even a deity can. There’s no place to even begin. Wagging a finger isn’t an argument. Threats of torture aren’y arguments. And any emotional appeal simply will not apply. Nothing I can imagine even an all-powerful being doing or saying even seems RELEVANT. The sociopath can always simply shrug and say “why? I don’t care what you want or think.” And that basically breaks down the very idea of some universal morality that is strictly logical: devoid of ANY rooting in a pre-agreement to count empathy, consistency, and so forth as core values.
Even more problematic is that it’s, on the other hand, VERY easy to imagine myself or you or anyone else disagreeing with the effectively arbitrary moral pronouncements of an all-powerful deity. If it’s moral values are so alien to those of human life, I would feel perfectly justified in arguing against it. My arguments might not find purchase… but that’s in a way just like the sociopath example, with God being the alien sociopath. Now, some theists would undoubtedly find the idea of arguing with God to be egotistic or insane. But the problem for that contention, again, is that they don’t seem to have any rational explanation for WHY it would be so: it’s just a nice way to attack or question the motives of someone with an opposing moral view. And the unaswered question that they are trying to bypass is this: why would the deity have the proper values or be “moral” at all in the first place? Plato realized that even deities cannot both determine good AND be good: that’s simply logically incoherent as claims go. So what cause is there to think that being a deity places a being in any special position other than extreme intelligence when it comes to values?
As Plato also noted, your idea of a perfect being ends up just being a game to conceal your own subjective judgements (perhaps even from yourself!). Your God isn’t like that crazy fundamentalist God (crazy why: because YOU say so!), it’s good. What definition of good? Your definition. In fact, you’ll go as far as to reject, say, Mumbo Jumbo’s values because they don’t seem good TO YOU (and I suspect even if given absolute assurance that Mumjo Jumbo was in fact the true God, and your doubted it simply because you do not fully concieve of what was really going on there, you’d STILL balk at baby-eating!)! In short, your vision of God looks an awful like your own opinion of what is right and wrong, and your philosophizing about a morally perfect God is pretty hard to take seriously: given that you, not God, still seem to be the prime subjective judge of perfection.
Back in slave times, you can bet that slave owners envisioned a perfect God that understood that allowing savages free reign in society was like allowing free sex: a disasterous avalanche of immorality. And those abolitionist Christians? Well, they were fundamentalist nutjobs!
As Plato noted, either there is a discernable, “right” morality or there isn’t (the complicated specifics of the necessary caveats are most of what I discussed above). But whether or not there is a God, and if there is, what it’s opinions on the matter are, seem totally irrelevant to the question. Any attempt to insert them into the picture becomes self-defeating. The only thing God has going is that if there is a “right” morality, then God must be able to discern it. Unfortunately, this is useless to human beings for several reasons. First of all, being beyond human comprehension precludes any sensible (or, ironically, even any MORAL) trust of even a direct communication from God. Second of all, there is no agreement on whether God exists or if so, what it’s actual statements are, if its even chosen to let anyone in on them. Any way you slice it, we ALWAYS end up where we began: we either put up or shut up. We either can make arguments as to why something is wrong… or we can’t. Bringing god/atheism/whatever into it helps nothing, and in most cases simply seems to be an attempt to go out of ones way to smear non-believers.
To give a final example: We can certainly have arguments about whether, say, God is against homosexulity (perhaps by arguing over the Bible or what you interpreted in prayer, etc). But doesn’t that sort of discussion seems sort of, you know, kind of bizarrely tangential? Why shouldn’t we just directly discuss whether it is or it isn’t? Ultimately, referencing and trying to translate a potentially existing God’s potential cryptic transmissions is just an extremely roundabout way of saying that there is some actual meaningful reason why it’s wrong. So why no just discuss the reason and be doen with it? What possible reason is there to drag theological interpretation into the matter given that that subject is even LESS intelligible and helpful?
True. It would be very easy to make a world with an unambiguous objective morality. Make the rewards of moral behaviour immediate and obvious, and the penalties of immoral behaviour likewise. E.g. If you’re nice to people, tasty food drops out of the sky, and if you’re nasty to people, you break out in boils. Easy!
If on the other hand you have a universe where people have to compete for scarce resources, where there are times of plenty so the population goes up, and times of hardship where some of the population has to die, then you’re going to have moral ambiguity built in. The co-operators do well in times of plenty, the xenophobes and thieves and double-crossers do well in times of hardship, and so you evolve drives favouring both.
The Manichaeans decided the world had to have been created by the Evil Supreme Being, Rex Mundi, for this very reason. You can’t make a universe where conditions fluctuate wildly and expect the morality of a time of plenty to be adhered to. Twenty years of drought and you simply have to hoard, steal, and defend your territory to survive. Those individuals with little empathy and high selfishness will do better. And if there are any genetic elements to those behaviours, those genes will be passed on. If you don’t want people to be shits to each other, don’t create conditions where the only way to survive is to be a shit.
No, cosmology is not about mere definitions: like any true science, it examines the observable consequences of the hypotheses it sets forth in order that they be tested. The consequences of the curvature of spacetime are as well tested as the hypothesis “the Earth is curved”.
You will receive enormous academic kudos (and perhaps even a Nobel Prize for physics) for showing how Einstein, Hubble, Guth, Hawking or many other respected cosmologists are being “disingenuous”.
Not if they are orthogonal, and in any case the “multiverses” (or, strictly, other regions of the universe further to “our” 3-D temporal region - I curse Andre Linde for not making that clear in the first place!) are still not nothing. There is still no absence of spacetime even if spacetime has an unfamiliar shape or dimensionality.
WRONG. You might as well ask what you’d see if you shrunk yourself smaller than nothing. The configuration of the universe is time. No smaller configuration = no earlier time. Again, the Big Bang is everywhere: it is not an “event” in the way you intuit with your common sense (which evolved on a 3-D, temporal planet where every space does have a “next to” and every time does have a “before”).
If, as cosmological/thermodynamic evidence suggests, time is difference-in-configuration, then a universe which is as compressed as it can be has no further possible configuration it could attain. The universe “10 minutes before” the Big Bang is exactly the same as the universe at the Big Bang. Your watch stops. Your vehicle slows to a stop. (To say nothing of the fact that the temperature everywhere in the universe is such that particles no longer exist, let alone arrangements of atoms called “humans”, “watches” or “Bill & Ted phone booths”).
Space and time would have to be extended for you to be able to do this. The cosmic microwave background shows that spacetime was not extended near the configuration of the universe called Big Bang. Put simply, your common sense has been experimentally proven incorrect when applied to spacetime. Imagining yourself in a booth with a watch on before space and time is like imagining yourself being smaller than nothing or 2 miles north of the North Pole.
No, it’s true by testing the obervable consequences of such a hypothesis, like any other science.
No. Positing my magical super powers, I could prove the Earth is flat and thus walk off the edge. But experimental evidence shows it isn’t flat, and so my super powers (and your time machine) are mere useless figments of our imagination.
Yes there is. Well, no, there is no “need” for an opinion - but it’s quite possible. For example, you have opinions. Imagine that for one day only, you became omniscient on the subject of the death penalty - you know all of it’s legal ramifications, if there are any objective moral standards as to death, the lives (and lives after) of the terminatees, etc. You are then asked whether or not it should be continued. What would you decide to do? I imagine you would take into account all of this information and knowledge, and then make a decision. For another, perhaps it is in their nature to disregard all knowledge and simply go with their own beliefs. For yet others, it could be somewhere in the middle. My point is, omnipotence does not imply no opinions - more informed opinions, certainly, but certainly not no opinions.
The problem lies in how “valid” these opinions are. I would imagine most theists would see their deities’ opinions as being “perfect” - their thoughts and ideas are in perfect cohesion with the “valid” standard of the universe, because they created it. This is perfectly acceptable - i’m willing to concede that this is a workable state of affaris. However, the problem lies in whether or not there is a “valid” standard of the plane of existence in which that deity resides - in fact, it is logical to claim that, if there is an objective standard in our universe, then in the plane in which God resides, there will also be the possibility for such a standard - or, of course, the possibility of none. God could be the only policy maker in a plane on which there is no objective standard, regardless of whether there is one here (though if God exists, logic says there will be such a thing here). And whether or not there is an objective morality for God, his opinions are still subjective within that plane. Similar to how we have a subjective morality externally to ourselves, but objective morality within ourselves - God’s self just happens to contain our universe.
True. If you know everything, then any beliefs you have are fact. I take back that God has beliefs. My thought was that God may himself believe in higher deities above him - but logically, being omniscient, he’d know!
I don’t really see how that’s a solution. God, as a man, had failings. We can’t, unfortunetly, infer anything from his fallibility when not-a-man - logically, we can’t say one way or the other whether or not he’s infallible based on this.
Why not? I’d agree you’d have to be pretty nuts in order to do such a thing, but how is it you are able to discern what parts of God’s message are real and which are not? You seem to be just taking the parts of the bible, ideas of religious icons and so on that you yourself agree with - have you ever found yourself in the position of having your mind changed from one facet or idea of your religion by others? And what made you change your mind?
I am not sure either. But it is possible that he gives this direction as based on his own opinions. I’m not saying it’s certain (hell, I don’t think the cGod exists) but logically it’s at least possible.
Well, no. Jodi Foster? God has bad taste. If he commanded me to kidnap Eliza Dushku, i’d be there 
.
In the nature of your supreme being. It could be in the nature of a different one.
Oh, you mean like no worshipping graven images, no coveting your neighbour’s ass? That kind of thing? He’s issued edicts before, I see no reason why he wouldn’t again, if he felt it was required.
So we can align ourselves with the objective morality he has created. Not to force us, but to show us what is good and bad. And then to give us the choice between the two. That’s one of the main ideas of your God, right?
Well, he’s issued edicts before - has he stopped us from being able to carve graven images, or covet our neighbours lovely donkey? Nope. Because he wants us to have free will. Thus issuing the moral reversal decree would certainly be in character - he issues what is good, and then gives us the choice as to whether to follow it.
Why? We can’t fathom his mind. We cannot even think to imagine what he knows, other than what he can “dumb down” to share with us. Perhaps his moral reversal policy is for some reason “good” - he’s omniscient, he’d know. We can think whatever we want, but logically if he existed we would be unable to follow his reasoning. So a moral reversal edict is quite possible from a God.
Ah, but i’m agnostic. I don’t disbelieve in all deities - I do disbelieve in the cGod (well, not completely. Nothing can be ruled out completely. But I disbelieve in him more than, say, Zeus.). An arbitrary and incompetent yahoo deity could exist - logically he wouldn’t because the universe doesn’t appear to be arbitrary and incompetently designed in the same way that it doesn’t appear to be structured and masterly designed.
I think maybe your point was more “please stop taking shots against my God”. I am sorry for that - I don’t mean to be rude, but i’ll try harder not to be.
I think that athiests can act in ways very similar to theists - trying to convert others, persecution of non-similar thinkers, looking down on the opposite position. However, i’d still say, for the most part, that they were not religions. The closest that they come to it is the type of atheists that rabidly agree with the thoughts of a famous atheist - or that believe utterly in an athiest essay. I’d still say these aren’t, though, because religion involves a supernatural element, and while they are certainly as rabid as some theists can be, it’s not a religion.