But how could a moral decision made by non-morally aware beings be binding? The story itself says that Adam and Eve did not understand right and wrong - that was the “benefit” of the fruit they ate. They couldn’t understand the consequences of the act they took, yet they are judged as if they could. And we, in turn, are judged, as if we could have stopped it.
You said “I may or may not be an atheist” - that suggests that being an atheist is a possibility. I am merely pointing out that nothing else you have said leaves that possibility open. I’m simply answering the question for you with a “not”.
Thank you for the answer.
You’ve missed the syllogism. The bolded part isn’t a consequence of the prior arguments, it is a second argument. To formalize:
If absolute morality must come from God, then we petty humans must not be able to judge God.
We petty humans do judge God.
Absolute morality cannot come from God.
Basically what you are saying is that morality comes from God, therefore God defines what is moral. Therefore, God could tell us to sacrifice our firstborn or rape our mothers or kick kittens or whatever and that would be moral, because God told us to. That is certainly a position that can be taken, but it is not particularly comfortable.
Also, if it is only moral because it is God’s will, then why should be praise God for being moral?
Well, from an atheist’s perspective, I have a very compelling reason. My moral intuitions actually exist, whereas this God thing is a load of fiction. But that certainly doesn’t fall within the confines of the argument.
We’re stuck with the moral abilities we have. If morality is something with which we are supposed to reason, and thus be able to make informed and sensible judgements, then it must be based upon reason, not whimsy. Ergo, it must be, at least theoretically, explainable. “Because I said so” is the exact opposite of a rational basis. If God is the source of absolute morality, then our sense of morality becomes a hindrance to our actually being moral.
Okay, fair enough.
I understand that is an assumption of Christian theology. However, there’s no evidence that we are fallen. There’s no evidence there was ever a perfection that we were removed from, by the will of our ancestors or otherwise. All we have to go on is this allegory. So either that allegory is there to tell us something, or it is useless. If it is there to tell us something, then we can look at what it tells us and evaluate it.
And yet it doesn’t. It just replaces one inexplicable contradiction with another.
That is a falsehood. Certainly, there is a large percentage of atheists here, but there are also a fair number of Christians, Jews, and a reasonable assortment of other believers. Call it an exaggeration.
My take from Cecil’s column(s) is that he is merely classifying existential causation of which is an undefined or unknown phenomena as “God”. That’s not to say this phenomena has any collective sentience, as he even admits that defining it as a “being” would be granting too much, but for the sake of argument (which was purpose of the columns and this thread to begin with) let’s assume that it is indeed a being. One that we’ll refer to as “God” to keep the same frame of reference as the topic at hand.
Now, for those who posit that this being must be responsible for the “evils” of this world, there are some basic assumptions that must be made for such a claim to be true. Mainly, that being must have limitless benevolence, omnipotence, AND omniscience to be truly accountable for all that occurs in this world, which include the aforementioned evils of disease, death, suffering, etc.
If such a being does not have ALL THREE of those attributes, then that being surely can not be responsible for all events as they transpire. In other words, said being must have limitless knowledge, power, and kindness for it to have “allowed” any evil things to occur.
If one does not believe such a being to have all three attributes, then that being can not responsible for our world’s evil acts (relatively speaking). Such thinking may lead one to assume that the being has the power and kindness to prevent such acts, but not knowledge of all of them as they occur. Likewise, they may assume that the being has the knowledge and kindness, but not the power to prevent them, or conversely, it has the knowledge and power, but not kindness.
Being ignorant of the details of the many religions and commonly held beliefs of the world, I can not say whether most of those beliefs characterize all three to a being usually referred to as “God.” Perhaps those who are more knowledgeable on the subject can elaborate.
Then your reading skills need improvement. I suspect, though, that you understand
well enough you are getting the worst of this argument, and your claim to be confused
is evasive.
Such as?
Such as?
Such as?
Your only link was a video. You know reading text takes a fraction of the time
that listening to it takes, right? I am not going to take the time to watch a video
of commentary, which, if it is worthwhile, must be available in writing.
Such as?
Here are both sides of that part of our dialogue, yours and mine:
(post9)
(post12)
It should not take too much effort to glean that “Key” = “most fundamental”
=”metaphysical”. Thus I was suggesting that Einstein and Spinoza’s metaphysical
view of an unthreatening God might be an attractive second choice to many atheists.
I could then have asked you to explain why you thought this metaphysical view
was deficient, but I expected you to do so without being cued, and I certainly did
not expect you to affect bafflement.
Nonsense. There is a theological dichotomy between original sin and actual sin,
and the sins proscribed by the Ten commandments are actual ones.
Oh, here we go with “context”— a word hardly ever used in debate, except by those
who are getting the worst of it, as an evasive tactic and a sort of defensive incantation.
Here is the full text of the Second Commandment:
“You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand [generations] of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
Go ahead and try to explain how reference to God’s prejudice against unborn children is taken out of context.
Observation that prejudice against unborn children is an evil requires no supporting argument.
It up to God’s advocates to explain why His prejudice is an exception, however…
…however, there is no coherent explanation, so those apologists can only stipulate
that humans should not question God, thus closing off discussion.
The correct way to express it is that original sin is sin imputed to all people by the
disobedience of Adam and Eve. It is not actual sin resulting from the behavior of a
descendant. The sin proscribed by the 2nd commandment is a specific actual sin,
namely Idolatry.
The “children” of the 2nd Commandment are not a figure of speech referring to all
mankind. They are two different categories of literal children: (1) the descendants
of idolaters and (2) the descendants of the faithful. The 2nd commandment informs
us that God treats these two categories of children differently.
This reply raises all kinds of quesions.
Does the NT contradict the Second Commandment? How about the other Commandments?
Does salvation beckons to those who never obey *any *of them? Never mind idolaters,
are serial killers eligible for salvation?
And in a diffrent vein: how and why could a perfect God could change his mind?
And finally, regardless of the asnwers to any of the above, unless suffering is
a moral necessity it must be gratuitous.
Previously addressed.
I reject the premise that the material world should not be a Garden of Eden.
However, my argument does not depend of the natural world being so; it depends on
the natural world being a source of torment. There would be plenty of challenges in
life without such torment.
Excuse me, but the question I posed was: “How does free will atone for suffering
where will is not a factor, say in the case of 100s million to billions of smallpox victims?”
Your answer was a logically circular paragraph insisting that and concluding with:
“free will comes into play” with no explanation as to how this “play” constitutes
atonement for suffering.
And it occurs to me to point out that since children are not capable of exercising
adult free will, then another explanation must be provided for them.
No, my point was that free will cannot atone for the suffering caused by the natural
world where atone means to correct, to compensate, to make right, and suffering
is the sensation caused by physical and/or emotional injury.
Will and intellect can often “overcome” physical danger as in human endeavor ranging
from medical science to taking shelter during a storm. However, will and intellect
are still unable to overcome (i.e. cure) many diseases, and not everyone can find
a strong enough shelter during every storm.
Suffering is gratuitous unless necessary for the attainment of spiritual health, and it
does not matter if spiritual health is preeminent, or that spiritual health an outcome
of the exercise of free will.
So 100s of millions of child smallpox victims are an appropriate response to “the fall”?
You are injecting cause and effect into a context where time has no meaning. We may no longer have the ability to change events that occurred in the past, but we did at the time. We had free will at that moment; the knowledge of that event (whether by ourselves or by an outside observer) does not invalidate that we had free will over that choice.
Powers &8^]
Going back over this for some more, you repeatedly ask the question
Another problem with transcendent divinity defining morality is the method of transmission. If morality is only what that divinity declares, then we humans have no guide as to how to determine morality, except to refer to a list as recorded by somebody else in the past, who may or may not have got it all straight. We’re not allowed to use our own moral sense, because you are explicitly telling us that it may be incomplete or inaccurate, and that the divinity knows better. But if that divinity does not express it directly to me in an unambiguous manner, I am relying on the method of transmission to be as accurate as the source. Ergo, whoever heard it in the first place, wrote it down, interpreted it, translated it, etc. Each step in the process is a chance for someone to mangle the original. And I have no acceptable way to evaluate most of those steps. I have to trust that there wasn’t any errors in that process, ever. Internal inconsistencies, changes over time, conflicts between written instructions and moral teachings, etc are all things I must ignore, because my moral sense is more questionable than words on paper.
Attempting to be fair to you, I tried to reevaluate this. Let me try this differently. Let us assume that the story of Adam and Eve is a fiction intended to convey a sense of our place. We are left with some concepts and word choices that do not have a very good definition. In that context, what does it mean for humans to be “fallen”? What is “original sin”, and why does it apply to us? It seems to me if you are going to discount the Genesis story as an allegory, then you are going to have to spend a lot more effort in justifying the underlying premise of Christianity that you are using as your assumptions.
Mankind and fallen? How? When? In what manner? What does that mean? The whole concept is gibberish.
Greeting Legault and welcome to the Straight Dope!
I’m afraid I can’t follow your argument. Here’s my understanding:
Cecil sez that Thomas Aquinas, a noted theologian, posited a prime mover.
Cecil interprets the First Cause in a scientific, possibly contemporaneous context.
You say that theologians place God outside of time.
Cecil’s God and the other One
But #3 is irrelevant. Cecil is just saying that a first cause exists, therefore God[C] exists. And that this proof establishes a very narrow version of God. Now you say, “God[2] chooses to constrain himself within a rational mode of being, understandable in large part by man… he is also transcendent of material reality”. Fine. But what’s the evidence that this second version of God exists? He may. But that’s a separate argument about whether God[C] exists.
Personally I figure that if a logical proof of God[2] existed, we would have worked it out already. But I accept the existence of God[C] and am agnostic on God[2], pending a better understanding of consciousness and mathematical ontology.
I always enjoy it when someone proposes the fall to resolve theodicy and in the same breath adopts the teleological argument…
I’ve had almost exactly the same argument before: God exists out of time, observing all time within an instant, so God has no effect on our own choices any more than our observations of our past violate or free will. John W. Kennedy hit on the rejoinder above, which is that God observes all temporal events as someone in our universe observes a storyboard: however apparent the choices to the characters on the storyboard, the panels never change.
It also brings to mind a tangential paradox to do with time being a property of the universe: if I wait an infinite amount of time to give you an apple, will you ever receive an apple? I forget the name of the paradox, if it has an official one.
I suspect that time has to be a property of the universe. But why is your paradox a paradox, and how does it illuminate the issue?
The simple answer to your question is, “At no time will you give me the apple.” You stated the proposition in a form that isn’t contradictory. If you had said “I wait an inifinite amount of time and then give you an apple,” that would have been contradictory.
Not that infinite series of events can’t happen! Zeno’s paradox is the obvious example: the hare catches up with where the tortoise was, an infinite number of times, and THEN passes it. Even if space is continuous rather than quantized, this isn’t impossible because the rate of events increases to infinity at the moment the hare catches up with the tortoise.
But is there a higher order of time, in which we could exist, where an infinity of time could elapse and THEN something happen? I think that wouldn’t be “time” but would be something else, so the simple answer is the one I gave.
Aha, so the answer is, suffering isn’t evil, and God gets a pass on all that suffering because it just isn’t important. OK, thanks for clearing that up!
Note that the free-will argument also requires that we ignore the suffering of animals. Kant would buy that, but I don’t.
One might even argue, as Sartre does in “The Flies”, that we are forced to choose our own moral code, even if there is a creator. Yes, we risk peril if our choice disagrees with that of the creator, but it’s still our inescapable duty to choose. Your statement here is, “If the Creator posited a moral code, then it’s absolute.” But, what if we disagree? God wins by default? According to whom, God? What if the Creator were actually a rather nasty fellow who enjoyed sufferering? Are we forced to agree with Him?
BTW, note that our “moral sense” could be an artifact of evolution, and shouldn’t be confused with “morality”, which is a code we choose to live by, which may or may not agree with our moral sense. One’s moral sense might lead one to believe it’s OK to kill one’s lover’s lover, but one’s morality might contradict that.
They’ll tell you that they have a mind of their own. Was that your point?
I think we should stipulate free will here, for the purposes of discussion. Even if it does exist, it doesn’t provide Christianity with a get-out-of-jail-free card. IMHO, the free will question is even more complicated than the original one.
But there we are. What on Earth is the use of arguing that God’s foreknowledge is incompatible with human free will, when we know that human authors are in the same position here as God (si parva licet componere magnis)?
Premise God is to Shakespeare as Shakespeare is to The Duke of Gloucester.
Conclusion Therefore human beings possess free will.
Would you think it was funny if I suggested that the Duke of Gloucester might
in reply focus on a different aspect of the ways of God to man?:
As flies to wanton boys are we to God, He kills us for His sport.
Seriously, though, Shakespeare dictated his characters’ every thought, word and
deed, so if, repeat if, the premise above is true then its consequence must be the
opposite of the conclusion above, namely, that human beings do not possess free will.
I am all in favor of free will, and I loathe determinism because of determinism’s
extinguishing effect on human initiative and human responsibility. I just don’t like
the idea of having to depend on obtaining free will from some entity who would seem
to me sure to embody the attributes of Gloucester’s wanton boys.
I mean, free will or no free will, what difference does it make if either way you are
going to get your wings yanked off?
I was a determinist (or nondeterminist, which is the same thing but allowing randomness) until about the time I read Hoffsteader’s Goedel Escher and Bach, which talks about “strange loops”, plus more thought experiments about AI. I think that it just might be possible to actually have free will despite a deterministic (or nondeterminsitic, but still mechanistic) implementation. I think it’s one of those issues where we may be getting the wrong answer because we’re asking the wrong question. But this is beside the topic, and I think that topic is still arguable even if free will is stipulated.
I don’t really care whether I have free will or where I got it, I just prefer to live assuming that I have it. I also hope Glouster is wrong, despite the evidence.
Sorry, the paradox refers to a created universe. I suppose I was a little vague.
As for the free will question, it negates the concept of an intercessory, effable God which can be deduced from their natural effects on the world and manumitted to in order to receive Earthly favours. Forgot to mention that. If God intercedes capriciously, we resort to the trilemma.
That isn’t my argument. I say only that the foreknowledge of God and the free will of Man cannot be simply dismissed as obviously mutually exclusive; it’s not obvious at all.
That’s Earl of Gloucester, and the quotation is:
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.
(I happen to have played the role in two separate productions.) King Lear is set in prehistoric, and therefore pre-Christian times, and, although Shakespeare rarely pays attention to questions of anachronism (a sensitivity that did not arise until the 18th century), he does generally remember the difference between Christians and pagans.
Nice to know you are so expert in Shakespeare’s working methods.
Foreknowledge (as an attribute of determinism) and free will strike me intuitively
as mutually exclusive. However, I am aware of the fact that there is no consensus
on the issue, and I have not pored over the positions of the different philosophical
schools of thought.
I do not agree that analogy between God and dramatists is helpful to the so-called
compatibilist position, but it would probably be going over the thread hijack edge
to get into an involved discussion about that here.
Thank you for the correction.
I know what the quotation is. I altered it to reflect the monotheistic point of view
adopted in this thread.
The passage unmistakably defames “the Gods”. Ever since I first read it I have wondered
if Shakespeare was employing anachronism to disguise feelings the same as mine.
I am not sure what you mean by “working methods”, how they might contradict
my observation above, and how they support your analogy. All fiction is illusion
isn’t it? It seems to me just common sense that no author could possibly view his
creation as real in any sense approaching the flesh-and-blood reality of actual,
living human beings.
What anachronism? As I said before, the story of Lear is set in the 8th century BC, in pagan times. But even aside from that, here we are in, “As Milton said, ‘Evil, be thou my good,’” territory! The closest thing to a sequel to Lear that Shakespeare ever wrote is Cymbeline!
Shakespeare might be using Gloucester’s choice of words (“the gods”), appropriate
for the play’s historical setting, as a substitute for what would the choice (“God”) of
someone wishing to express the same feelings about the Christian deity of a later time.
That sounds like a form of anachronism to me. I would be happy to know it if there
is another, more appropriate literary term for what I mean.
Can you give me some examples with internet citations?
Try googling “characters take on a life of their own” if you’re curious. Here’s one link, but there are many. “The poor novelist constructs his characters, he controls them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them function; he eavesdrops on them even before he knows them. It is only according to what he hears them say that he begins to understand who they are.”
I’ve wondered about whether mathematicians create proofs or discover them. Neither option seems especially satisfying. And when you consider fractiles, which go on pretty much infinitely, the creation hypothesis seems impossible. But discovery implies that mathematics exists independently of the human mind. How can that be?
