OK I think, after several re-reads, I finally caught on to how we might be talking past each other.
At least one of us appears to be talking, at least in part, about “laws governing human behavior” in the sense of things like the statutory codes of the state of Alabama or the federal laws of the United States of America, THAT kind of “law”.
Did you think that I was at some point, at any point, referring to those?
But what do we consider good and benign? Exactly those things that society calls for, for the most part. Wasn’t it considered good to stone someone violating the Sabbath? I suspect the Aztecs considered sacrifice of their enemies good also.
True, but the development of these laws probably long predated civilization. When people founded cities and learned to write, they didn’t invent a totally different code. It evolved (and I said social, not biological evolution) in the new environment, but it was based on what went before. Certainly laws against killing a fellow citizen came from laws against killing a member of your tribe.
AHunter3–I have to say I agree more with **Voyager **and begbert2. Suppose humans develop a moral system that makes no reference to God. Would it be accurate to say that the universe has created morality? Modern humanity has existed for something like 1/1 millionth of the history of the universe, and occupies 1/1 brazziolonth of the real estate of the universe (too lazy to do the math, but I will point out that we occupy one of roughly 10^22 stars in the universe). To say that the universe has created morality is like attributing the activities of a single blade of grass to the entire solar system. And as **begbert2 **pointed out, even if you do attribute such things to the universe as a whole you cannot merely point out the creative side of the universe–you must point out the amoral destructive side. The same universe that brought you altruism also brought you smallpox, cancer, genocide, and David Hasselhoff. It looks like a wash to me. Less than a wash–on balance, I would say that the universe is at best indifferent, and at worst hostile.
MJB, there are a lot of great replies to your OP,
but I really think that it IS okay for god to exist only in the hearts
and minds of people because… it’s already happened!
For each question pertaining to god in this and other
OPs, I feel this is proven as soon as we hear:
God feels this way.
God loves you.
God is trying to teach us a valuable lesson.
God did this because…
Etcetera.
As soon as humans give a human emotion/reaction/system
of logic to an omnipotent being that can create planets,
this god is suddenly human???
The more human emotions believers give to this
hole-filled story of creation/existence/law from a
being with absolute power, god becomes exactly that:
existing only in hearts and minds of humans.
Or simply, a human god is clearly a creation of a human.
I have another concern, arising out of my thinking yesterday about natural law theory, about placing value in an abstraction. One of my chief complaints about natural law theory is that IMO it places value on abstractions instead of these concepts as they are lived by actual flesh and blood people. For example: in natural law theory, life is a value, and so you may not take an action directed against the good of life. Thus, birth control is immoral, because it is contrary to life. Now, if nobody uses birth control, then the world is overpopulated and we suffer from all the problems present in any overpopulated ecosystem: famine, disease, and fights over scarce resources. So in serving this abstract value of life, we make things worse for actual people. So there is a danger inherent in investing value in any abstraction, as opposed to the real experiences of real people. (I think I know how you (AHunter3) would respond to this, but I won’t try to put words in your mouth.)
The universe, not being a person or sentient entity, can neither be indifferent nor hostile. You wouldn’t say "The Rock of Gibraltar is hostile. " You wouldn’t say "The Crab Nebula is indifferent. "
Anything else is anthropomorphism, almost deism.
That’s fine. The universe doesn’t care because it’s not capable of caring. Although to the extent that we attribute the doings of mankind to the universe (something I argued above that we shouldn’t do), we must admit that the universe is often perversely malignant.
The universe does not care because whatever it is that the universe does “do”, it is an activity of which any “caring” that anything or anyone, anywhere, has ever done, is necessarily a logical subset.
Whatever term is appropriate (and our language may simply be insufficient), it is not that the universe does something “LESS THAN” caring. Rather, “caring” is subsumed within it.
As with begbert2 and the question of human-authored “laws”, I need to clarify that I did not mean to imply that the various moral “systems”, religions, codes, etc that have existed to date amongst us humans is or has always been an accurate reflection of the natural laws that really do govern human interation. Any more than the entire history of our attempts to describe and discuss the physical world have tended, on balance, to be a really good mirror of the actual laws of physical applicable to the physical world. Just as superstitious nonsense has been the bulk of what we have held to be true, so moral bullshit has been pervasively more typical of what we have held to be a good moral code.
But, reciprocally, I need to point out that it is not true that there exists a blank slate, a tabula rasa, onto which we humans randomly write something and call it “science”. We have had bad science (and superstitious rot) and we have had good science, but there are consequences both to individuals and to societies and ultimately to the species as a whole, of hanging on to the bad science and superstitious rot, and other (much nicer) consequences to embracing good science. And I hold that this is true of moral codes and human notions about how best to be humans: given enough time (and as noted earlier, upthread, we ARE still in our infancy as a species), human-authored moral codes are likely to converge with a solid understanding of what the actual underlying principles and laws are, the ones that really do govern the interaction of individually sentient beings in a social environment.
THAT, and not name-dropping the “name of God”, is what constitutes a moral system making an effective reference to God.
Nope; neither of us have been referring to civil law. You have been referring to physical, natural laws, like gravity, and I have been referring to laws of consequence, as they emerge from specific situation.
For example, it is a ‘law’ of society that if members of the society die faster than they are replenished by reproduction or importation, then the society will dwindle and fail. This is not a natural law; this is a direct consequence of the definition of “society” -that it involves a group of people. The universe and its laws of gravity and air pressure constants and the like have exactly nothing to do with this - it’s the society, the definition of society, that defines what’s good and bad for a society.
Morals, of course, have nothing whatsoever to do with the physical laws of the universe. They have everything to do with the laws of society. Societies where too many of the members abandon too many of the standard moral codes are likely to descend first into competetive anarchy and then either dwindle or disperse. The universe doesn’t care about this one way or the other - but becuase this happens to societies without such codes, the more successful societies tend to develop (and often codify into natural or religious law) many of the same rules to preserve themselves, rules we generally accept as a broad moral code. (Which is to say that, yes, it’s an evolutionary process. Survival of the fittest, as it were.)
As has been stated, if there really were “actual laws of physical applicable to the physical world”, they wouldn’t just apply to living things, they’d apply to everything. As that is not the case, your thesis is demonstrably false.
Huh? 
It’s not a man-made law. It’s not an ‘unnatural’ law, is it? What the heck do you mean, it’s not a natural law? It is a built-in aspect of what it fundamentally means to be a social species with individual members who are mortal and have physical needs, yes? In what sense of the word is that NOT a natural law?
Not helping, sorry… I don’t see that it’s a consequence of the definition of ‘society’ any more than the laws of gravity or air pressure are a consequence of the definition of ‘gravity’ or the definition of ‘air pressure’.
Some of the specific content of social culture is ‘accidental’ or ‘arbitrary’ rather than ‘a consequence of natural law’ — the specific phonemes that constitute the English language for example. We can all agree that there’s nothing built-in that caused the English language to be what it is. And that that is true even if there are some natural-law constraints (e.g., that no matter what language DID evolve it would be highly unlikely to consists of sounds produced in the 17-18 kilohertz frequency range). But surely you are not positing that no characteristic whatsoever of human social behavior is anything other than a total accident of historical roulette-wheel chance and circumstance, are you?
Let’s start with the base fact that we are a social species. Do you concur that this is indeed a fact and not a belief about ourselves that we, in our culture, at this specific time, happen to believe about ourselves? That it has reality in the same sense that gravitational attraction has reality?
In the exactly same sense that it’s not a natural law that you have to pay to play World of Warcraft, despite that being a buit in aspect of what it fundamentally means to be an online MMORG with subscribing members.
I suppose that yes, you could say that MMORGs occur within the boundaries of the universe, so that by that approach their rules of use are “natural laws”. But in my opinion when you do that you’re both using the term wrong and stripping it of all usefulness and meaning.
The laws of gravity and air pressure are not a consequence of their definitions; they’re a consequence of the mechanical properties of the universe. In a different universe, with different rules, they’d be different.
But the rules that underly a functioning society would transcend universes; anything anywhere which met the definition of a society with the same sort of sentient mortal beings would qualify. (Not so much when the sort of beings changes, of course - player avatars in WoW are not as inconvenienced by death, so it’s not as strongly opposed there.)
Nope - several aspects are a function of the fact we are looking at members of a coherent society. (Unless that counts as circumstance?) Of course, it’s the society which drives those; what sort of universe the society is in doesn’t matter all that much, otherwise. It’s sort of like how intelligence and sentience is an emergent property of the human brain, but not of the universe as a whole: there are piles of things in the universe that aren’t sentient. Virtually all of it. But all human beings are, because there are different ‘rules’ that come from being a human, that are not rules of the universe.
At this specific time we really are currently a social species. Moreso than we were 10000 years ago, I’m sure. Perhaps moreso than we will be in the future. So what? The universe didn’t make us social due to fundamental laws of itself, or all animal species would be social. And possibly the rocks too.
If God’s all that powerful, can’t he preserve himself?
That would require an instinct for self-preservation.
begbert2, sorry, I have to punt. If someone feels like they have some degree of understanding of both of us, I invite anyone offering two-way translation services. I can’t refute, agree, or kick off in a 3rd direction from anything you’ve written because I simply can’t follow it.
Hm, we could take it in smaller steps. Do you consider it a natural law that you have to pay to play World of Warcraft?
Definitely not. Or that World of Warcraft, per se, would necessarily exist.
Why do you draw a disctinction between the abstract thing “society” (which is clearly no more than a manmade system defined by and describing the interaction of its members) with WoW, which is also clearly no more than a manmade system defined by and describing the interaction of its members (which in that case includes the computers running the game as well as their owners)?
If one manmade system has rules that are entirely self-contained and not ‘natural’ or driven by the universe’s makeup, why not the other?
Huh?
::stares at post and reread it yet again::
Sorry, no.
If you had asked instead “do I consider it to be an outcome of natural law that social critters like outselves will play” — not play World of Warcraft, just play in general — I would have said “most likely, yes”.
It’s part of who we naturally ARE. That may in part be due to stuff that is part of our mammalian heritage (dogs and cats also like to play), or it may be intrinsic to any species where the individuals are individually cognizant & intelligent yet social. I honestly haven’t thought about that in any great detail. But for one reason or the other, I don’t think our playfulness is itself “a manmade system”. The individual GAMES that we play, like World of Warcraft in 21st Century USA versus whatever games were popular in the neolithic era 12,400 years ago — THOSE are “manmade systems”.
In some sense any morality is a consequence of natural law, since our brains operate under natural law, and the actions we take operate under natural law. I think begbert2 will agree since I don’t think he believes our thoughts involve anything supernatural.
On the other hand, there is no law (besides the trivial case of physical ones) that creates morality. My sense is that you are positing some sort of Platonic ideal morality which we are slowly moving towards. I’d argue that all human morality comes from the particularities of our humanity, and practically any moral “law” might not hold for another species with very different characteristics. I’d say that morals are heuristics adopted by intelligent beings to improve their chances of survival and reproduction (happy birthday, Darwin) and simplify their interactions with each other. Heuristics are not guaranteed to be optimal, and may blow up in certain circumstances, but they often work out pretty well.
Society is just a game some species play - not all do by any stretch. And many play it much differently because they don’t have long memories for details or don’t have the brains or environments to create persistent dwelling or whatever.
Remember, you are arguing that the entire universe is pushing the side effects of society (that is, “morals”) onto its occupants. Were that actually true, then all animal species would also run in societies - the universe doesn’t make laws that apply to humans alone. Gravity, for instance, effects non-herding species as well as the ones that do. If the tendency to operate in civilizations were similarly a law of the universe, then that too would effect all species.
Of course, not all species form societies, and (as a result) not all species have morals. Because morals don’t spring from the foundations of the universe. First a species has to invent societies, which not all do. Then, from the foundations of society, the morals spring.