God certainly created the conditions under which sentient beings can choose “evil”, He created the pain-receptors & brain-synapses by which we can feel pain & suffering & loss, and He created the physical processes by which
natural disasters & disease can occur.
However, He did not create the choices to do evil. And Biblically, the physical
universe is regarded to be knocked off its original course by human fallenness.
We do not know if our first ancestors had decided to trust God in their first moral tests how we might have been enabled to avoid physical & emotional pain & natural disasters.
Wouldn’t that be inconsistent with the characteristic “all-good”? How is creating disaster and disease good?
Then who did?
But did God not create humanity? If I build a car with no brakes, and it crashes into a tree, how am I not responsible? And is God not all-knowing, and thus aware that humans would fall when he created them?
Whaddya mean, “valid”? I think we’re talking past each other, here.
Are you asking how I can convince somebody to follow my particular ethical system above the lightswitch one? A few answers:
Theists have the same problem, even if they convince someone that their specific God exists; in order to judge whether this omnipotent being is a good being, we still need a way to figure out what constitutes “good.”
The golden rule, which is at the base of my system, is strongly supported by rational egoism, a moral system based on self-interest; I can therefore appeal to folks’ self-interest in asking them to support my ethical system.
Most importantly, my system has a great explicative power when applied to our intuitive moral judgments, which your “light bulb” system lacks. More on this below.
When we get away from ivory-tower arguments like this one, we’ll find that most people, even from other cultures, agree on moral obligations in many situations: telling the truth to your friends and your peers, not hurting people who have done you no harm, and giving to charity, for example, are all seen by most people as good acts, whereas their opposites are, if not evil, certainly nongood. These are intuitive principles, I’d say: most of us believe them, no matter what our conscious (if any) reasons for thinking they’re the case. The question becomes, why do we believe them?
A good moral system answers this question; it answers them consistently; it corresponds to most (if not all) of our intuitive conclusions; it requires a minimum of leaps of faith; and it does so without contradicting observable fact.
Therefore, if someone accepts many of the same intuitive moral judgments as myself–and most people do–then we’ve got some common ground which we may use to discuss morality.
If someone genuinely does not accept the same intuitive judgments as I do, AND if they do not possess sufficient self-interest to adopt a rational egoist perspective, then you’re right: I cannot persuade them to adopt my view. However, this is hardly remarkable: very often there are areas of debate which may not be debated with someone who does not accept some basic ideas.
Your lightbulb missionary, for example, may also believe that the world we live in is illusory, and may therefore be entirely unreceptive to my ideas about the natural sciences.
His skepticism of physics in no way impugns Einstein.
I believe all true morals are based upon a sense of empathy which is innate in human beings. We have an ability to mentally put ourselves in the other guy’s shoes, and a nagging sense that we shouldn’t do something to someone else which we wouldn’t want done to ourselves.
Why do we have this? Well, humans are social animals. An innate sense of empathy helps humans navigate a social environment. Those with poorly developed empathetic responses tend to wind up dead or in prison.
This innate emppathy manifests itself in religion as The Golden Rule. The Golden Rule shows up in every major religion. Why? Because we all (Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew or Buddhist) have this innate sense of empathy.
Morals based upon the Golden Rule tend to be widely acknowledged across cultures. Show me a “moral” not based upon the Golden Rule (i.e. not based upon empathy), and I believe you will have found something more aptly described as a custom or a mos.
It is a misstatement of my argument to infer that I think morality is meaningless. I didn’t say that, I said it was a product of human thought. How is morality less meaningful if it is a human invention than if it is a divine one?
Human morality is subjective, granted. So is beauty. Just because (I think) we can agree that that beauty is a human concept and wildly variable in ihow it is perceived that does not mean we cannot have individual opinions as to what is beautiful and use the word meaningfully.
I have opinions of right and wrong, very strong opinions, even. I just don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re anything other than opinions.
Furthermore, as i said before, even if God exists we still have to guess at what God thinks is moral. Morality is no less subjective or arbitrary because you believe in God.
I think we need to all go back and re-read the OP.
It’s an argument against theism/atheism. Theism and atheism can be argued against independent of the existance of gods… because there are theists and atheists whether gods exist or not.
I’m going to have to go with:
“Well, I could rape and kill anyone I wanted.”
This is the best argument against both atheism and theism.
On the one hand, it illustrates that atheism provides no moral code. Sure, sure, most atheist have some form of systemic morality (relative absolutes and all that) and are well equipped to make moral choices unfettered by the arbitrary whims of an imagined god… but this is not an inherent feature of atheism. This is something else, and this something else cannot be conflated with atheism for its defense.
On the other hand, it illustrates that theism provides no rational basis for making moral decisions. Right and wrong are determined, again, by the arbitrary whims of an imagined god. Remove that god from the picture, and it seems many a theist is incapable of finding any fault with the rape and murder of their fellow humans. If the only thing keeping theists in line is the threat of eternal damnation, I’d like them to keep their big scary sky daddy, thank you. Of course, gods can tell someone that good is evil, and so, with a clear conscience and much righteousness, the theist does great evil in the world, in the name of good.
In the cases where a religion has provided some moral basis outside of the godhead, it’s ultimately a appeal to the systemic morality used by atheists for choosing right from wrong… so, again, something external to theism, something that cannot be conflated with theism for its defense.
You ignored the rest of my post- that Christian thought regards the natural world as being knocked off course by human fallenness, and that if humanity had not fallen, there may well have been some way of controlling such natural ‘evils’.
Those who choose to act in ‘evil’ ways.
God creates humans WITH brakes. Humans choose not to use them. Before Creation, God knew that His children may well choose to turn from Him- I don’t know if He knew they would (I don’t know if that’s the sort of thing which could be known as it was just a potential, not a reality). Anyway, I never said God was not responsible, I just say God is not guilty. God taking responsiblity for Evil is the essence of Christianity. He subjects Himself to it & lets it do its worse to Him.
If only there was a movie about that! A passionate one!
My Favorite (or best): Ontological Argument. The argument does make me want to believe in God one iota, but it is one heck of a fine argument in a philosophical sense. St. Anselm fails, in many respects, to prove that God exists from the definition or idea of God, as reputed by Gaunilo.
Now, just because the existence of God can’t be proved by Ontological Argument, some theists may respond, this does not mean that the existence of God is disproved. Although, I think, non-existence could never be verified expect by the failure to prove existence.
True enough, but some argument, or empirical evidence, must be put forth that proves the existence of God. Cosmological Argument, Teleological Argument, and Argument from Divine Encounters all fail to prove conclusively the existence of God.
All the failed, or not proven, arguments, cumulatively, have a weight in favor of non-existence, I think.
If God doesn’t exist, then proof can’t be found showing that God exists. Only things that exist can be proven to exist. If all arguments fail to prove God exists, there are two possibilities:
A) God does not exist.
B) God exists, but the proof has not been discovered yet.
Okay, what we have here is a case where the existence of God has not been proved. So how long do the Theists get to prove their case? Indefinitely? If God’s existence were to be proven, I think it would be proved by now.
It could be that certain emotions are REFLECTED in biochemical phenomena and identifiable neurochemistry, but that does not prove those measurable events are the CAUSE of the emotions. The red nose and foul breath do not cause the drunkenness.
Most arguments I’ve seen for atheism run along the lines of “You can’t prove there IS a God, and the burden of proof is on those who say there is one. So it’s sufficient to believe there ISN’T one.” The “best” argument, though, that I’ve seen for atheism is that “God” appears to demonstrate not one whit of interest in or caring about the horrors and suffering that make up the daily lives of the vast majority of human beings who live now and who have ever lived. They yearn with all their heart and soul for Him to care about them, but He just doesn’t. Most people live in stark, abject poverty, riven with disease and pestilence and hunger. Gee thanks, Almighty Loving God. Many thousands of true believers have knelt in fervent and earnest prayer to God in the hours and minutes prior to their homes and lives being shredded by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, cyclones, tidal waves, murderous rampages, war, and every form of disaster one can contemplate. He didn’t listen to their prayers, or didn’t hear them; and worse, if He did, the Ruthless Bastard ripped them limb from limb anyway, or allowed them to be. Which is worse, that He’s deaf as a post, or that He Who is all powerful and could have stopped it clearly heard their anguished prayerful cries and yet chose to sit idly by and watch babies being stabbed to death in their cribs or wombs, a church full of worshipers getting leveled by a storm on a Sunday morning, an innocent man gruesomely beheaded on video in His name, or airplanes packed with screaming, terrified victims being used as firebombs to slaughter thousands of innocents and wreak mass destruction on a scale never before imagined–again, IN HIS NAME?
That’s the argument that speaks the loudest to my mind–the idea of, Why bother creating us and then leaving us to wallow in pain and suffering so much of the time, with absolutely no way to counter it? For example, I have a good life and everything, and I’m grateful. Still, just last year my aunt died, my brother nearly died of encephalitis, both my wife and I lost our jobs, my uncle had a heart attack, my father had a heart attack and cancer, and my mother died. Gee thanks, O loving, kind, merciful, caring personal God. Like I need this? It’s the observation that there is obviously no PERSONAL God who loves and cares about each of His six billion human creations as wonderful, unique fantastic versions of Himself that convinces so many people to turn away from any sort of theism at all.
I can live with just not being equipped to KNOW why the Creator is impersonal, since I observe the creation obeying fantastically simple and elegant laws of mathematics and physics and also observe that nothing creates itself, so somehow it must have been created by someone. My science training has taught me to opt for the most likely interpretation of data as the most sensible one; the odds against life suddenly springing into existence from inorganic matter magically aligning itself into proteins are so infinitesimal as to approach zero and thus be indistinguishable from a miracle, making (to my mind) the existence of an intelligent Designer of life far more likely. I more or less align with Einstein’s well-known musing that we are in the position of a small child entering a vast library. The child knows someone wrote the books and put them there, and can perceive a definite order of the books on the shelves. But he cannot begin to perceive how or why they got there, or what they all mean, or who put them there or who created them, or why they’re in that order. It isn’t made available to his brain with his finite intellectual capacities. This, observed Einstein, is the approach of the most intelligent person to religion. I like his suggested calm, rational acceptance of the unknowability of some things, that whoever or whatever created our minds for the purpose of thinking did not endow them with the capacity to perceive everything about the universe or His existence or any number of other things,…and that’s OK. We don’t have the right to assume everything is knowable or that if we can’t prove something, then it doesn’t exist. The movements of the cosmos and subatomic particles and everything in between that we ARE able to perceive is sufficient to occupy and stretch our finite brains for the rest of time, until our species is extinct.
Here is an argument about how the burden of proof lies on the side of theists. The main idea of the article is the best argument against theists. It basically says that god can be disproved based on his characteristics. Like the God portrayed by the bible is disproved because of most the fairy tales within the bible have been disproved.
This would lead to my conclusion that theists simply make up a god that can not be disproved, using no method other than their belief that god must exist. Changing the specific god that does exist does not mater, as long as some supreme being is in existence. I can create a whole breed of things that can not be disproved, and I would be judged insane by people who believe in god.
Maybe if each person gave their characteristics of god then I, or someone more intelligent, can disprove god one by one. Then probably the only believers left would be the ones that believe in a god that created the universe and left, or some other god that fits into the holes of what can not be disproved.
If God CREATED man and if God knows all, then how could human ‘fallenness’(sic) be due to anything other than God’s will? If God created man, then He must have created whatever mechanism it is that causes man to make choices, right?
Hmmm…obviously we don’t agree on what “create the choices to do evil” means. Apparently, it just means “acting in evil ways”, so I don’t understand why you worded it in such a strange way.
So are you saying that God created man, and then man surprised God by creating evil? How can you surprise one who is all-knowing?
I don’t understand what distinction you are trying to make. “Guilty” refers to being in violation of a law. I don’t see how God could potentially be guilty or not-guilty, unless you are contending that there are laws above God.
Shodan, you are throwing in the dialectic towel and fleeing the arena. Reason and logic themselves are arbitrary epistemologies, like maths, ethics or falsifiability.
If your “it’s all arbitrary” is a valid argument, then the consequence is that we might as well not even speak to each other, or converse in gibberish since a mutually understood language is an arbitrary choice.
There is nothing logically inconsistent about proposing an atheistic morality based on minimisation of suffering, which can be supported (but not proven) by appeal to physiological stress indicators which almost all humans explicitly and clearly express a desire to be absent from their brains.
As Priceguy has asked you repeatedly: how is basing morality on God any more reasonable or justified? Atheists here are not attacking such a morality, merely providing their own.
If it’s all just “arbitrary”, why do you bother posting in a forum called Great Debates?
No, I am pointing out that for atheists, the emperor has no clothes. The fact that morality is arbitrary, and cannot be validated, means that it is a meaningless construct.
Morality for atheists cannot be established. There is no argument for choosing any basis that shows that basis to be better or more valid than any other basis.
For atheists, this is nearly correct. All moral statements are unfounded and meaningless.
But it is not exactly the arbitrariness of the choice of how we express “morality”. It is valid to use arbitrary symbols to refer to something, if that something has been established to exist. Whether I say “two” or “2” or “zwei” or “dos”, I am referring to something that we agree exists - the number 2.
But when atheists refer to something being “morally right”, they aren’t referring to anything in particular. There is no way to establish that human happiness is a valid or rational choice for morality, and suicide and torture are not. Because there is no rational reason to pick the one over the other - all bases are equally valid or invalid.
If you assert that your morality is based on human happiness, a legitimate question is, “Why is human happiness a valid basis for morality?” You then have two choices. One is to do what atheists often accuse theists of doing - respond “It just is” and be unable to offer any valid reason for making the assertion. Another is to do what Left Hand of Dorkness has done - try to justify the choice based on some other principle - the majority of humanity wants this, or enlightened self-interest, or something similar. Fine. I then ask the same question - why is majority rules, or enlightened self-interest, a valid basis for morality? ISTM that the answer is, “Because it will make people happy”. Which, as has been pointed out, is circular reasoning.
That is neither proof nor support. It is description. To prove or support such a system, you need to offer the reasons why it is valid. There are none.
Yes, there are physiological indicators of pain. What is the basis for thinking (as I said before) that electro-chemical patterns in one area of space are “moral”, but in a slightly different area a few centimeters down and to the left are “immoral”?
Or we can try the spoke- argument, and say that this is moral because that is how we evolved. And again with the unanswerable question - why is “doing what we evolved to do” any more or less moral than not doing it?
They are providing it, but trying (as far as I can tell) to avoid admitting that their morality is just as meaningless as any other.
The reason I have not responded to the question is that it is a distraction. The atheists have not presented any valid or justifiable reason to conclude that there is any such thing as morality. They certainly assert it, but they have not demonstrated it, at least to date. And, having run out of ideas, they would like to change the subject.
If you and Priceguy will reread the thread, you will notice that I have not asserted here that my morality is more valid than yours. This is by design. We have not progressed so far as to establish that there is any such thing as a validly-based morality. Unless and until we can get to that, I would like to admit (for the purposes of the discussion) the notion that there is no God, and then see if there is any valid way to establish a morality.
So far, no soap. The atheists here have been doing pretty much what they accuse theists of doing as regards the existence of God - asserting a proposition, and producing no reason to accept it as valid, other than “that’s just how I, or a lot of people, feel”. I thought the atheists were arguing that “how people feel” does not establish a proposition.
Again: what do you mean by “valid”? You’re using unclear terms and refusing to define them; when we don’t meet the criteria of your undefined terms, you claim we’ve lost the argument. That’s just so much semantical bullshit.
If you want to present atheists with this challenge, you need to be clear on what you’re talking about. Naturally, the best way to be clear on this would be to present us with an example–a moral system that you DO believe meets your criteria for “valid”–but you refuse to do that.
Define your terms if you want to present a challenge to non-theistic morality. Otherwise, I think you’re blowing hot air.
Shodan, I am at a loss how one as otherwise intellectually capable as yourself somehow missed being taught that fleeing the arena is a useless rhetorical tool.
Yes, EVERYTHING is arbitrary, from our choice of non-gibberish to our rules of rhetorical engagement, for BOTH theists AND atheists. Every argument, from politics to polynomials, begins with an arbitrary agreement as to which epistemological basis should act as a starting point. To demonstrate this, I will rebut your point thus:
Shodan: There is no argument for choosing any basis that shows that basis to be better or more valid than any other basis. SentientMeat: Please demonstrate that this reasoning is sound using an epistemology which is not arbitrary.
Everything could therefore be said to be a “meaningless construct”, agreed? What cannot?
How, then, can morality be established for theists, or indeed at all? Surely an appeal to God is no more arbitrary than an appeal to suffering?
Again, please demonstrate this.
As a physicalist I’m not sure it really does, but this is for another time.
Agreed, so long as you agree that theism cannot establish a ‘valid’ morality either.
And would, presumably, keep asking “why?” after my further answer like an annoying three year-old. I dislike pain. Why? Ask a neurologist. I seek to minimise it since I sympathise with the pain of others and because I might otherwise suffer it in future. You agree that one could use such a childish rhetorical tool against a theist as well?
You cannot prove a system. Please off the reasons why another system is valid.
We can provide an explanation for every entity associated with the word “morality”. That is all that is available to falsifiability. Do you understand?
This is because one of us has funny ideas about what can be “proved” and what can’t. Sure, we could both act like three year-olds, but that would waste yet more bandwidth.
Do you find torture undesirable?
Do your arguments not apply equally to theists? Please explain how. (I won’t demand that you “prove” or “demonstrate the validity” of your explanation because, you see, I know how to avoid rhetorical fallacies.)
Nowhere in this thread has an atheist asserted that this is more valid than a God-based morality. We are providing a meaning for the word “evil”, and explaining how it can exist, if there is no God. This is all we can do.
It seems you cannot even demolish the straw men you build, let alone the real arguments.
Sentientmeat, assuming for the moment that Shodan isn’t just tweaking us for his own amusement, maybe you and I should stipulate that an atheistic morality can’t achieve the type of validity that Shodan considers so vital? Maybe then we can “progress . . . so far as to establish that there is any such thing as a validly-based morality”?
Turn the fellow’s tactic around on him. Shodan, assuming that there’s no such thing as a valid atheistic moral system, so what? How is that possibly an argument for theism?
Fair enough, Dan. ‘Validity’ is not a word which can be applied to ethical systems, whether or not they appeal to the divine.
Given this, why does he continue to use the phrase “for atheists”? Surely he should be arguing with everyone that morality cannot be established at all?
There have been many who felt that ethics/morality could be and, verily, should be an objective study. Non-theistic arguments ran in two stripes that I found, though there may be more:
“good”, as such, is an irreducible primary quality that cannot be completely understood as a synonym. As such, good exists. GE Moore’s tactic in Principia Ethica. Interesting.
Man, as an entity, has particular qualities. These qualities demand various things if man is to survive. Good, then, generally (not specifically), is acting towards survival in a way that exemplifies man. Most recently, Rand’s tactic, though she certainly hasn’t been unique. Also interesting.
Some people here, or who were here (like the once-TVAA) latched on to the second via routes like game theory or evolutionary psychology.
The problem with analytical approaches in general is that foundationalism lends itself wide open to skeptical arguments. One either satisfies one’s self with accepting the arbitrary or by suggesting that such starting points are axiomatic and irrefutable, such that their negation would be a contradiction (leaving open, of course, the obvious follow-up question, “So we accept the law of non-contradiction axiomatically?”). Personally, I’ve not found either satisfactory. YMMV.
