WHY God?

Great Debates
81

Sorry, I’ve been off working for a living, and had to drop this thread for a while. But, I hope not too late:

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Lolo *
If you believe in God, generally you have an experience or SOME THING bringing yopu to such a point.

Well, yes. I have “an experience, or SOME THING bringing” me to believe in everything I believe in, including McDonald’s hamburgers.

I still don’t see the point.

You’re collecting conversion stories? Really?

That doesn’t seem to be the way the thread is going…

82

OK, you were taught certain things, so you now practice them. But what are their roots? You say that some people witnessed a killing, did not like how it looked, and decided to change things. Bah! Any proof that this is the case? I think scripture has “laws” for governing behaviour dated prior to any such laws elsewhere. The roots of such teaching are from religious writings, not from a few folks having discussions about the value of life. (At least for the vast majority of the world - there are exceptions, I’m sure.) But again, the idea that you would like to be treated acertain way is not something that just magically appeared. Would you please try to trace where this notion came from? Where did your parents get the idea to teach you this way?

I’m not saying that we do things in the U.S. today because the Bible tells us so. What I am saying is that we have laws governing our interactions, many of which are based on Biblical concepts, created by Religious people. How you feel may be important to your loved ones and friends, but is irrelevent to the world at large.

(Please note: I am not religious, just trying to recognize things for what they are. And I have a similar philosophy about how to treat people).

83

I agree. It also seems an obvious to conclude from that that the existence of the objective morality is irrelevant to “moral philosophy”. You seem to be agreeing that there is no objective way for the two to ever meet, yet you reject this conclusion?

**

This is a very poor analogy, and I doubt most people use immediate and unfettered as criteria for objective belief. (I am at work now. Should I question the existence of my kitchen, since I don’t have immediate and unfettered access to it now?)

I do have access to methods to objectively verify the existence of Madagascar, were I so inclined. I think you have agreed that there is no way to objectively verify god (or the related “objective morality”). For myself, I believe in the objective existence of Madagascar solely because I believe in the objective evidence, even though in my case it is second hand evidence. If people started coming back from vacations saying “My plane was going to land in Madagascar, but it wasn’t there!”, then the matter might be open to debate (and the analogy more apt).

84

Not surprising since there wasn’t much concept of seperation of church and state when those scriptures were written.

Aren’t the roots of those religious writings often “a few folks having discussions…”?

Unless you believe that those religious writings weren’t written by people?

85

Morals have nothing to do at all with God. Attaching one’s morals to a religion is one thing and even then it’s very sketchy, but as is obvious to me and many others (and I think anyone willing to readily admit they have no concept, by definition, of God) any inference to God’s desire(s) is inherently Man’s desire and NOT GOD.

The Judaeo-Christian(sp?) God is an easy God to question, especially since he has no morals. He believes in killing people. Case closed.

I would like to suggest, and hopefully others might agree, that rules and morals exist to maintain society and have no necessary attachment to a God.

Any moral put on the table can readily be shown to promote society and life and God can easily be removed from the equation.

The introduction of God is like a reassurance of reprimand by a grade school teacher. “If you keep this up, you’ll have the principal (i.e. God) on your case!”

Also, on a slightly different note, the timely change of gods correlating to man’s knowledge is particularly interesting. Man keeps changing God. A find it amusing to see so many manipulate the God concept into a placebo, lying just beyond the reach of refutation and hopeless shy of reliability. It’s a give/take, pick and choose, little world believers live in but they’ve the right to do so. It’s just a shame, IMHO, we must entertain so much nonsense when it trips and falls and embarrasses itself so often.

Every man’s tool is of his own design.

86

There are many people, of a variety of religions, who derive their morals from an ethic that is an integral part of their religious beliefs. Mine derive from my understanding of Christianity; there are some highly moral Neopagans hanging out around here who sincerely attempt to implement the Rede in their lives. And we’ve regularly been honored by the presence of practicing Orthodox Jews who keep the Law. I can, however, concede that many people who claim to be “good moral X-ains” are actually practicing a culturally determined set of mores and seeking excuses for it in their religion – examples from both Christianity and Islam are obvious from last month’s headlines. :frowning:

Well, a random sampling of the Old Testament might lead you to this conclusion, as well as certain periods of Church history. However, “your assertion proves not to be the case” [I’ve been told that that’s polite for "you’re full of…] :wink:

Concurred. I think we have no remaining members who are convinced that “atheists are of course immoral.” (At least I hope so.) However, many of us who do believe in a God see the existence of an ethic and the consequent morals as the results of His work, spread throughout a society and including even those who do not acknowledge His existence.

True. The counter would of course be that any reasonable God would prescribe such a moral because of His interest in promoting society and life. (Of course this presupposes something about the moral nature of God, but that’s a hijack we need not get into.)

That all depends. The Divine Weasel – the guy who created in six days and then planted false evidence, who made gay people so that he could damn them, etc. – certainly fits your prescription. The God I believe in does not.

Perhaps the case. I believe in what Newton and Aquinas referred to (interestingly using the same metaphor in their dying days) as the ocean of which they had merely touched the shore. And I concur that everybody’s definition keeps changing with the times. Might it be possible, though, that God and His actions does not change, but rather people’s understanding of Him. I don’t believe Jesus cast out demons any more than you do – but I do believe that whatever He did was understood as that by a bunch of First Century fishermen and would be decribed in quite different terms by a 21st Century psychologist. The fact (assuming the truth of the story) remains that a psychotic became sane through his efforts.

87

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by tourbot *
**

That’s all that I have been suggesting.

**

No. The existence of morality itself is not irrelevant to moral philosophy. The point of moral philosophy – as I understand it – is for us to come to as clear and fully-developed an understanding of morality itself as we possibly can.

**

Because we are flawed and finite creatures, with different frames of reference and different agendas, it is entirely likely that moral philosophy will never reflect morality itself with perfect accuracy, or in the same way in everyone’s judgment. But that doesn’t invalidate the enterprise.

**

I’m not at all convinced that it’s a poor analogy. And it seems to me that you are using something very like immediate and unfettered access as the bar for determining what can or cannot exist objectively.

What you seem to be suggesting is that, because you and I may talk about morality from different perspectives and draw different conclusions about what is or isn’t moral, there cannot possibly be any such thing as objective moral reality. I think you’re equating self-evident knowability with objective existence.

It seems to me that this is precisely the same as suggesting that, if you and I talk about Madagascar – or your kitchen – from different perspectives and draw different conclusions about the essential characteristics of those things, Madagascar – or your kitchen – cannot possibly be conceived of as objectively real.

**

And I’m pretty sure you have allowed in an earlier post that – if there is such a thing as objective moral reality – then you do have access to it, through logical reasoning and scientific inquiry. So, what’s the difference? Granted, we are talking about different modes of existence and different ways of knowing. But both things are – I think we both have agreed – knowable. And – even if they are only knowable subjectively, I think we have both agreed – both things can both still be conceived of as objectively real.

BUT AGAIN: I have always freely admitted that lots of people disagree with me about this stuff. And I will continue to assure you that I sincerely have absolutely no emotional investment whatever in trying to get you to take my position. It is a fact that I presupose the objective existence of morality based upon things that are --obviously – not apparent to you. It’s ok with me if you don’t think objective morality exists.

If there’s some aspect of what I have been saying that you are still curious about, or don’t yet understand, then I’ll try to explain it to you. But we’re just going around and around over territory that I think we’ve already covered. (B: “Objective morality can exist.” T: “No it can’t.” B: “Yes it can.” T: “Even if it could, it doesn’t.”) It’s starting to feel like you are trying to witness me into agnosticism; which is fine, but it feels weird. I’m just telling you that you haven’t made your case to me any more convincingly than I have made mine to you.

So…Now I am certain that I have well and truly run out of words on this particular topic. If there are no further questions, I’ll leave the last word to you, Mr. Tourbot.

Thanks again, all.
–B

88

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Mr. Billy *
**

[QUOTE]
And I’m pretty sure you have allowed in an earlier post that – if there is such a thing as objective moral reality – then you do have access to it, through logical reasoning and scientific inquiry.

This might not have been you, tourbot. It might have been DaveW. Too lazy to look it up. If it wasn’t you, sorry.

–B

89

I’m not sure tourbot, I wasn’t there :wink:

Quite honestly, I’m not convinced that there is a God, but I don’t discount the possibility. People may have written these books, but the result is a Religious work, and I recognize it as such. It stems from a belief in God (a higher power). Not to say that we, as humans, cannot have a sence of what’s right or wrong without God, but that the ideas we have been discussing have their roots in religious teachings as far as I have been taught. I am interested in hearing about anything that counters that, I certainly do not claim to be an expert. If we have historical evidence that people came up with things like “don’t kill each other” and “dont look at his wife that way” please bring it up.

90

Mr. Billy, something over a year ago we got into a long and involved exchange, including an extended witness from a strong fundamentalist, on the subject of Christianity and Love, which was also the name of the three sequential threads on the topic.

One point I found it necessary to draw out at length, in response to the witnesser’s posts, was that while, like you, I believe in an objective morality drawn from God’s work, I see that centered in the two commandments which Jesus picked out as comprising all the Law. By logical inference, these function in a sort of “constitutional” or grundlag framework, where the keeping of all other laws is dependent on to what extent the keeping of them corresponds with the keeping of those two supreme ones. I’d welcome your thoughts on that subject.

91

Polycarp,

I would sincerely like to have thoughts about what you have said above. Unfortunately, I have to confess that don’t understand what you have said.

I mean that not in the “something about what you have said seems fundamentally wrongheaded” sense. But rather in the “I feel like a big stupid doofus right now” sense.

Help me, and I will do the best I can.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: I do not self-identify as a fundamentalist Christian. Conservative and reformed, yes. But not fundamentalist.

92

Thanks for the clarification, Mr. Billy – I could see you were sincere in your beliefs and coming from a conservative, evangelical perspective, but wasn’t sure to what extent you self-identified as “one of them thar fundies” :wink:

I guess what I am saying is that, in any case where “the laws of the church” or some passage in the O.T. or Paul seems to be giving a particular form of command, by Jesus’s own authority we are to test this against the total love of God and of our fellow man which the two commandments He singled out mandate as primary, and to fail to take actions that fall against these commandments.

For example, someone objects to a given form of behavior as sinful, and holds up a quote from II Timothy, Deuteronomy, or Colossians as Scriptural grounds for doing so. Okay so far, but that someone then calls for condemning a third person who practices said behavior, due to the scriptural condemnation of such behavior. At that point Top Law II kicks in, and you argue that that is in no way showing that third person love as commanded by Christ.

It gets quite intricate when you go into details on it. But I feel the principle is valid.

And I usually use the “constitutional law” scenario as a parallel. E.g., it’s perfectly OK for a city council to limit the number of speakers from the public at a meeting. But if they decide that only white speakers may address them, they’ve suddenly gone from a neutral “time, place, and manner” regulation to a violation of the 14th Amendment, and their rule is unconstitutional.

I trust you can see where I’m going with this.

And it furnishes me a great opportunity to use my new .sig

93

You trust me too much, I’m afraid. I lived next door to the woman who is now my wife for nearly a full year before it so much as crossed my mind that we might make a good couple. My learning curve can be remarkably shallow.

However…

I gather that what you are asking about is something along the lines of, “Even if there is such a thing as objective morality, what are we to make of it, given the possibly incomprehensible particularity of human existence?”

This is a very hard question. And I suspect that it is the particularity of human existence that causes a lot of folks to balk at the notion of objective moral reality.

All of what follows assumes a Christian worldview, which – clearly – not everyone accepts. I take it that between you and me, this kind of narrowness will be allowable. :slight_smile: Anyway, a couple of things, in no special order of imortance:

First, we remain answerable to the demands of God’s law (morality itself), no matter how the messiness of moral philosophy and the love of neighbor may cloud our perceptions of God’s law. I say this based upon the primacy that Jesus grants the commandment to love God, and the primacy of the first 5 God-centered commandments in the decalogue, upon which Jesus’ commandment rests. That might be bad hermeneutics, but I’m gonna go with it now, for the sake of the discussion. I think the principle is theologically correct, whatever the value of the hermeneutics.

Second, the demands of the injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves may make it necessary to tolerate – and even tacitly endorse – sinful behavior on the part of others, because, in a pluralistic society, we cannot simply impose a Christian worldview by administrative diktat and still claim to be treating our neighbors in the manner that we ourselves would expect. This dynamic – I think – underscores the pervasiveness of sin in human existence: Not only can I be individually guilty of sin, but I can also be a member of a group that is corporately guilty of sin, even if I do not engage in the sin myself. A great example of this would be the position that I am forced to adopt with regard to abortion, in our other discussion.

(By the way, I have a response to your most recent questions in that thread. beagledave and justinh seem not to have been very pleased with it, but you may find it interesting.)

Am I headed in the direction that you wanted to go? Tell me what you think of those ideas. Or try again to goad me in the direction of the questions you really want to get at. Looking forward to it.

Blessings,
–B

94

(emphasis mine)
I think you are in error about the primacy of the first 5 commandments.

I would say from this that “Love God. Love Everyone.” are the two commandments against which all others must be judged. The primacy of these commandments are again repeated in

But that is my interpretation. YMMV.

95

I forgot to include the source of my quotes

Sorry. Also the random F##s are footnotes from that site that I overlooked.

96

I hereby nominate Mr. Billy for the most honest self appraisal I’ve encountered in some time. :smiley:
(I kinda gagged on that “grundlag” myself.)

97

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Homebrew *
**

No, I’m not.

Below are the 10 commandments from Exodus 20. The first five are generally viewed as pertaining to the relationship of huamnity to God. The second five are generally viewed as pertaining to the relationships that exist among humanity. It’s a shorthand, but it’s not far from the mark.

When Jesus said that the two greatest commandments were to ‘Love God and love man’, he was – essentially – summarizing the 10 commandments.

I take the fact that the Man-God commandments come before the Man-Man commandments as evidence that the Man-God commandments are in some sense primary, in relationship to the Man-Man commandments. Jesus seems to be supporting this interpretation by his words.

Anyway, the 15…(crash)…10 commandments:

1
And God spoke all these words:
2
"I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
3
"You shall have no other gods before[1] me.
4
"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.
5
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,
6
but showing love to a thousand [generations] of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7
"You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
8
"Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.
9
Six days you shall labor and do all your work,
10
but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates.
11
For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
12
"Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
13
"You shall not murder.
14
"You shall not commit adultery.
15
"You shall not steal.
16
"You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
17
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

98

Restating your position that Jesus’ commandments are summaries of the Big Ten is an interesting point.

But I don’t think they are summaries. I think they are the defining principles of Jesus’ message. Any other rule or law from the Talmud or the United Methodist book of doctrines must be judged on whether they conform to these two commandments.

The Big Ten are specific examples contained within the Royal Two.

99

I think Homebrew has stated and adequately documented the thesis I was proposing. As I understand Mr. Billy’s response, he was not so much disagreeing with me (and by implication Homebrew) as suggesting that the Big Ten are actually the concrete means of implementing the Top Two under almost all circumstances. (Did I get that right?)

The grundlag bit, for which I apologize, was an attempt to keep my analogy from being U.S.-specific – since comparative law uses the Swedish term to describe a fundamental, underlying law to which all other laws must adhere, or else be deemed invalid or unenforceable. (Sweden does not have a written constitution per se, but five laws rangng from 1810 to 1972 that are considered that sort of constitution-like law, and the term for them is “ground law” or, in Swedish, grundlag.) Sorry for the confusion.

For whoever suggested that there were 15 or 17, if you look over the Big Ten, you find thirteen or so specific instructions written over some 17 verses. Of the batch, Christians in general look at the initial self-identification of the deity and the command to hold Him as supreme as a single unit, and at the no-graven-images stuff and all the related material on what not to do with idols as a single unit. Finally, the last batch is easily paraphrased as “Thou shalt not covet anything that ain’t thine, including all the following stuff…”

100

It was 10. But in one of the Mel Brooks Hitory of the World movies, it starts out 15, until Moses drops 5 of them and is forced to revise the revelation. I think that the youngsters really dig it when I show them that I’m – you know – hip to their jive. The numbers running through my earlier post from Exodus were just verse numbers.

Anyway…

I think you have it, more or less. Christ did not come to set aside the Law, but to fulfill it. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that his ‘Two Commandments’ should endorse and encompass the Ten Commandments, rather than put forward some radically new ethic. I’d have to read the gospel accounts again, but I suspect that the line of questioning that gave rise to the ‘Two Commandments’ had a great deal to do with the attempt to trap Jesus into saying something doctrinally unorthodox.

Given the enormous weight that Jewish theology has historically placed on ferreting out all of the conceivable readings and tensions inherent within the Law and the Prophets, I would not be surprised to learn that a good deal of Second Temple exegesis had already posited something like Jesus’ ‘Love God. Love Man.’ ethic, as a kind of primer for understanding the content of the Law, generally speaking. In many – but by no means all – respects, Jesus was a pretty typical 1st century Jewish torah teacher. A GREAT book on this is: A Rabbi Talks to Jesus, by Jacob Neusner. Every Christian seriously interested in understanding the similarities and dissimilarities between Christianity and Judaism should read it.

But to come back to the larger discussion for a moment, if Christ’s Two had been radically different from Moses’ Ten, I think it might seriously undercut the claim that the Bible reveals God’s objective moral law. So, for those of us who are Christians, and who do accept the notion that objective morality exists, it seems to me that we need to be constantly aware of the ways in which the NT explicates and clarifies and is continuous with the OT. Ours is a God who has condescended to us by acting within history to reveal himself, but his character – as well as his covenant love for his people – is unchanging.

Of course, there are discontinuities between OT and NT as well. And there is a considerable amount about Christ’s work that is shocking, in light of the OT, on its own terms. But there, we’re getting into Covenant Theology v. Dispensational Theology, which really is probably so far afield in relation to this thread’s original direction as to require a totally new thread. Also, I don’t know if anyone but us Christians would find it particularly interesting.

The grundlag bit is definitely getting filed away for future use.

–B