You’re most welcome, my friend. You’ve probably already discovered that you can get to the scrolls by clicking the little “C” icons by the verses.
And thus requires sly innuendo’s of devil worship or anti-christian attitudes? So if somebody disagrees with you, the routinely piss in jars, throwing in crucifixes and letting men drown?
And a death is not necessarily a tragedy. (waiting for some super intellectual jibe about me being a devil worshiper or some Nazi mastermind)
Libertarian. Considering that my moral theory, as a general rule, assigns more moral value to humans than chickens, your presumption that when given a choice between eating a newborn human and a chicken, I would choose the chicken since all I have to make my moral determination is “what I see before me”, is patently false. Nor do I make art appreciation the cornerstone of my moral valuations, as Xeno noted; it was simply one instance of the gulf between humans and animals. To claim I did so is highly irritating to me. If the pig indicates that it is sentient, it has the moral value of a person to me, but liking the same art I do or understanding one specific piece of art is not the litmus test for sentience, simply one of many possible manifestations of sentience that humans generally have and pigs do not.
Now: if you come upon a deep water-filled pit, with a pig and a human in it, and you can only save one, what do you do? Should you wish context, I will provide all that I think relevant: Neither the human nor the pig can communicate with you. Neither the human nor the pig appear to be a threat to you or anyone else. Neither the human not the pig appear to be suffering, aside from understandable distress at being trapped in a hypothetical situation with a person who appears unable to make even the most rudimentary of moral choices during such situations. Both the pig and the human appear to want out of the pit. Is this enough information for you to be able to imagine what would be your most likely choice? If you want more I will give it, but keep in mind they are sinking fast and you do not have time to sit them down and quiz them as to the state of their spirit.
Amedeus:
Despite your weird inferences, I think that Gaudere, with her beautiful and loving spirit, is as moral a person as I’ve ever known, though what I think about her in that regard matters about as much as what you think of me. Gaudere is arguing on behalf of materialism as a devil’s advocate, not as the devil. She is not a materialist. And you are not keeping up.
Lib
Yes, I’m familiar with Godel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem, too. Do you mean to tie it specifically to your assertion that no moral distictions can be drawn without an absolute morality dictated from without? I think that leap will be even larger than your first.
I believe I was clear in stating that I considered consistency a necessary requirement for an “acceptable” morality. Do you raise the issue again for a particular reason? Is it your contention that only an absolute authority external to the Universe can be used to determine the consistency of a complex deductive system? If not, it seems irrelevant to the original assertion.
Shall I take this as a retraction of your statement that: Without an absolute, nonarbitrary basis for morality, there can be no moral distinction drawn . . . It’s a simple application of Godel.
If this is true it makes your attempted use of Godel even less reasonable. Not only do you not have a Godel statement, you are asserting a set over which GIT does not hold.
Of course, the assertion is plainly false unless you employ an extremely restrictive definition of moral system. Look out for number one is a pefectly consistent moral system. It doesn’t happen to be one that I find attractive, but it is consistent.
cmkeller
So, you are saying that your God punishes not for the sins of the parents but for the sin of parentage? (It isn’t because your father was a sinner; it’s because he was a Sodomite.)
::bows modestly in Spiritus’ direction::
Um . . .while you’re bowing do you think you could pick up that second post I dropped?
More’s the pity. Just because you know big words does not mean you know how to use them. (I’m kinda glad to see Gaudere’s just as confused as I am; I thought it was just me. Now watch Lib say it’s because we’re atheists that we don’t understand him.)
All I can gather from this is that you’re trying to use mathematics to justify morality. I wonder if Godel himself ever attempted this…?
Gaudere
First things first. What happened to this?
I thought you were arguing as a devil’s advocate. You know, or ought to know, that, inasmuch as I have never expressed anything but adoration and admiration of you, both in public and in private, that I would never knowingly disparage your views in a satirical manner. I thought it a bit odd that you framed my own views in that manner, knowing that I held them, but I never dreamed that turning the same tactic around on views you do not even hold would upset you. Somewhere along the way, you must have shifted over to your own views, and I failed to pick up on that. I apologize and retract my satire.
Instead, I’ll address the views of mine you framed without using the method you used to frame them. You know, or ought to know, that I would not hesitate to help a man out of a ditch in almost any circumstance. But there is nothing in that action from which a moral conclusion may be drawn. The act of saving the man is not, in itself, either moral or immoral. If my motivation is to rescue him so he can be my sex slave, then my action is immoral. If my motivation is to rescue him because I value him as a child of God, then my action is moral. Both of those would be motivations of my spirit. You asked me to morally judge a situation without moral context. I refused. You made fun of me and trivialized what I said with a rompous satire that is redeemed by the joy it brought to you and to the person to whom you offered one of your very rare “me too” posts.
I help the man. But you haven’t given me enough to know whether my decision is a moral one or not. I am making a brain decision based on quick reasoning that the man is a vessel for the Spirit of God. But I do not know, from the information you gave, whether I have accorded or discorded God’s own will, since the will that I exercise is my own.
Spiritus
Actually, Proposition XI is in Godel’s first theorem.
I am tying Proposition XI, which is “If c be a given recursive, consistent class of formulae, then the propositional formula which states that c is consistent is not c-provable; in particular, the consistency of P is unprovable in P, it being assumed that P is consistent (if not, of course, every statement is provable)”, along with Godel’s footnote number 14, to the notion that the consistency of any arbitrary epistemological system is unprovable by its own set of rules. As Braithwaite said in his introduction to the formal proof, Proposition XI implies that “[if] the formal system P is ‘consistent’, its ‘consistency’ is ‘unprovable’ within P.”
Therefore, a morality deduction set applicable to elements of the universe (like actions) drawn from nothing more than the elements of the universe (like brains) is not provably consistent. Yes, either an intuition or and external confirmation is required for consistency. That is practically identical to the inference taken from Godel’s Theorem by Siegfried himself!
No. You shall take that I had a brain fart and read “system” for “statement”. I apologize. The generally accepted view, by Siegfried and others, of Godel’s implications is the one I share, and I make a Godelian statement of morality based on those views. I do not believe that I can make a Godelian system of morality, at least not one that would satisfy me. I expect a system of morality to be consistent. Consistency is offered by a reference frame of absoluteness that is not a superset of the reference frame of relativity.
I hope I cleared that up above, but fearing otherwise, let me state another way that I realize Godel would not hold in a system of morality that is confirmed from outside, that is, from the supernatural. And that’s the whole point. That’s what makes the consistency of such a system of morality not unprovable.
Jab
Does the smaller size of Jesus’ words make the ideas more pallatable to you?
Libertarian: You’re probably thinking of opus. I’m a he. 
Now for my reply to cmkeller.
Sadly, it seems that he’s decided to sling about anti-Christian urban legends in an attempt to defend the morality of God in the OT. Libertarian has already parsed the Hebrew (thank you very much, BTW). Virtually all Christian Bibles are translated from the original Hebrew. Furthermore, cmkeller has failed to explain what ideological slant would cause a Christian to mistranslate a verse so as to defame God, if the proper translation actually exculpates him. Just for the record, here’s an on-line translation from a Hebrew Bible:
As happy as God was to be good to you and increase you, so will He be happy to exile you and destroy you. You will be torn up from the land which you are about to occupy.
(from http://www.bible.ort.org/books/torahd5.asp?ACTION=displayid&id=5669)
Your response to my questions about unsubstantiated Bible claims was really a non-response. Nowhere did I mention prophecy. My question is simple: how could the Israelites possibly have known that the people they were killing were that evil? For example, maybe Moses noticed that the Canaanites were worshipping idols, performing human sacrifices, committing incest, etc. He decides that they are a disgusting and evil society who needs to be wiped out. He orders his men to do so, and they do. Later generations figure out that the unqualified success of the Israelite armies and destroying the Canaanite armies must indicate that God supported such an action, or else they wouldn’t have succeeded. They also figure that God wouldn’t have supported an action unless the Canaanites were completely and totally evil, to the one. This is the story which eventually gets written down, and a semi-evil society with many innocent people in it comes out looking worse that the offspring of Hitler and Stalin.
On evil societies:
True, the Amalekites and the people wiped out by the flood didn’t meet my narrow criterion. But guess what? They’re all still in the Bible! This just reiterates my point: you accept blindly the Bible’s claim that entire societies composed of millions of people were evil to the one, but we have no evidence of any society in history ever being anywhere near that evil, except for those described in the Bible! This makes me very suspicious that these descriptions are less than totally accurate, and were used to justify otherwise unjustifiable acts. For example, the Israelites have an ancient myth of God destroying the whole world in the flood. This raises questions of why an all-good God would kill everyone. People figure that those killed must have deserved it, and that becomes the Bible.
On Josiah and Ezra:
Your interpretation is not the one most scholars take, and is not supported by the evidence. 2 Kg. 23:24 certainly implies that the contents of the discovered scroll were not before known. Ezra’s “discovery” of a law that was previously unknown can be found in Neh. 8:13-15. When we look at the placement of this “discovered” law in Leviticus, it is quite awkward. The list of appointed feasts appears to be wrapping up at Lev. 23:38, then bang!–another festival just stuck in there.
But even if we accept that Ezra really did just discover this law rather than invent it, we’re left with the troubling fact that for hundreds of years, nobody noticed it! Surely a dishonest scribe could have snuck in all kinds of other stuff without anyone noticing, if an important festival from Leviticus could go unnoticed for all those centuries.
Like I said, this is off topic. I just want to demonstrate that the claim that millions of Jews witnessed the giving of the law to Moses is not particularly good evidence. Like I said, I will be happy to debate this in another thread with you if you’re interested. I think this is an important point, as cmkeller has stated that he would not defend any genocide outside of the Bible. If we cast doubt upon the legitimacy of this revelation, then the Israelite genocides become no more defensible than those of other societies throughout history.
The final point I want to touch on, which is what started this whole thread, is of course your defense of God’s evil acts in the OT.
As best as I can see, you differentiate between “punishment” and “consequences.” That is, the children were not being specifically punished for their parents’ sins, but were instead bearing the consequences of them. To take an analogy, if a man commits a bank robbery, it would be inappropriate to throw his son in jail for it. But it would be okay to throw him in jail, even though the loss of a father would cause his son to suffer. Is this right?
The problem I have with this apologetic is manyfold. Firstly, God, unlike a judge, is omnipotent. If a judge had a method to punish a bank robber without causing suffering on the part of his innocent family, I think he would be obligated to do so. God, being omnipotent, undoubtably has the ability to punish evil without causing suffering of the innocent.
Secondly, I have trouble believing that sparing the infants of an evil society would be disasterous in that it would draw the Israelites to the evil committed by the slaughtered people. I realize that I will never convince you of this, but the point of a debate is to convince the audience, not one’s opponent.
Thirdly, I don’t think that other people should be held accountable for the Israelite’s weaknesses. This is known as a “heckler’s veto.” If sparing civilians, women, and children would tempt the Israelites back into sin, then that’s their own problem.
Fourthly, the method of execution was cruel to those slaughtered. Death by sword (or suffocation, in the flood) can be slow and painful. A truly merciful God would have killed people instantly and painlessly. If there was no way to accomplish this in those days, then God should have taken it upon himself to magically zap the sinning parties out of existence.
Fifthly, the method of execution was cruel to the Israelites. Surely some soldiers died in exterminating the enemy. Many more suffered permanent psychological harm from personally running their swords through the brains of crying infants, and the bellies of pregnant women.
In short, the massacres of the surrounding tribes by the Israelites has all the hallmarks of an after-the-fact justification. I suspect that if we were to start off with the question “What’s the best way to deal with an evil and sinful group of people?”, hardly anyone would come up with the solution of having another, innocent group of people take up weapons and slaughter “without mercy” every member of the evil society, including women and children. I know five year olds who can come up with better ideas than that. It is only after such an event is recorded in a holy text do we get apologetics for it, from people already fully committed to the notion that such an act must be justified.
Ok. Popping in for a minute: We both arrive at the same actions but with completely different reasoning. I don’t doubt that you’d help the man, but I’m stunned (not shocked, not appalled, no judgement implied)…stunned that our worldviews are so different.
To me, regardless of the motive, rescuing the man is moral. Period. End of statement.
If one has sexual feelings/fantasies for the rescuee, it’s irrelevant to the action of saving him.
If one does it out of pure goodness and a love for all God’s children, it’s irrelevant to the action of saving him.
If one immediately rapes the rescuee, the rape is a horrible, immoral, evil act, but the rescue itself is still moral to me.
Let me ask one more “drowning man” question, if you don’t mind (two, actually: To whoever started the “ditch question”: Just how deep are the ditches where YOU live? :eek::))
Anyway: A man is drowning. You hear his cries for help. Reflexively and without thinking about it you fling a life preserver out to him, your autonomous nervous system kicking in before your brain realizes what’s going on. (I’ve been in an emergency situation and that actually happened). If I understand you, you’re defining “moral or not” based on the motives of the rescuer. In this case, the motives were reflex and nothing else…Moral or Immoral?
Fenris
Nope. It’s a debate about morality. More specifically, it’s a debate about how both God and Man may determine moral actions. You made the assertion that you would not make blanket statements about actions taken by others in given situations because you feel they “mean nothing without their moral context, which context is not supplied by anthing whatsoever that is offered by the universe.” I felt this was inconsistent with other pronouncements you’ve made in this forum.
Although it’s quite difficult to separate your moral views from your politics (e.g. your extremely limited definition of “coercion”), I’ll try and avoid injecting any politics into the debate. Since you consider my question regarding your apparent inconsistency in declaring wealth redistribution unethical but the eating of a baby merely amoral to be a hijack (and since I definitely do not want to hijack cmkeller’s thread in any way), let’s focus the question in a little better:
At what point does a situation become imbued with moral context such that an observer can make a moral judgement?
I honestly did not think I mischaracterized the exchange we had in this debate. I asked you, hypothetically, whether you would save a man or a pig. You do not answer what you would do. I ask you again. You do not answer what you would do. I ask you again. You do not answer what you would do. I write a skit where man and pig in a hypothetical die because you cannot decide what to do. I am sorry if it offended you, but I was merely expressing my frustration at being utterly unable to get you to answer the most straightforward of moral hypotheticals–an answer you seem to be able to give quite ably right now.
However, I do feel you mischaracterized my views and my statement about the valuing of a being, as I noted above. (Though I am not a “hard” materialist, neither do I believe in a spirit world.) And I just find descriptions of me “pissing” in a jar in the middle of the woods in front of a drowning pig and man kind of icky, even in a hypothetical. Now I have a mental picture of myself squatting over a mason jar, and I really could have done without that particular image.
Well, since you are the one doing the saving, I would hope you would know what your motives are. It is not like I asked you to judge a picture of a man pulling another man out of a pit; I asked you what you, as a moral person, would do.
How do you determine what’s God’s will is? Is it not enough that you acted out of love for the man, using all the resources and intelligence at your disposal to determine that he should be saved, because he did not wish to die and because you wished him to be happy? Why is saving the life of a vessel of the Spirit a good thing and saving the life of a pig is not? After all, the flesh is not “real”, either way.
It is, incidentally, not a “me too” post to acknowledge a compliment.
Nope. Proposition XI is a part of Godel’s landmark paper. That paper introduced several ideas, among them the formal statements which have become known as Godel’s First and Second Incompleteness Theorems. Proposition XI is the Second Theorem: the consistency of a consistent system is undecidable from within that system. I can understand how you might have gotten confused, since both theorems were introduced in the same paper.
that is not what footnote 14 says. I tried to call your attention to this earlier by focusing upon the word antinomy. Unless you can develop an argument that any arbitrary epistemological system must contain antinomies, you cannot use this property to generalize results over the set of all epistemologies (or moralities).
Not quite. A moral deduction set is not provably consistent from within. Brains are capable of constructing much more than moral deduction sets. I tried to call your attention to this, too, when I asked you whether only an absolute authority external to the Universe could be used to demonstrate the consistency of a complex deductive system. Is a Peano algebra consistent? Do we need God to tell us so?
Practically? I don’t think so. A morality (or an algebra) may be demonstrated consistent by other means developed by atoms. This does create a new set which must be undecidably consistent from within. Now, you might point to some arbitrary superset of this process and say, “See, this set can only be demonstrated consistent by God.” And you might be right. That speaks to the reliability of our knowledge that a system is consistent; it says nothing about the consistency itself.
And, just for fun, I might then point to God and say, “how do you know He is a reliable authority?” Appeal to the absolute does not escape the unreliability of epistemology, since our knowledge of the absolute is no more self-dependent than our knowledge of Peano Arithmatics.
Just so I am clear, you are revising your position to: Without an absolute, nonarbitrary basis for morality no moral set can be proven consistent using only the elements of the moral set.
If so, I agree.
Of course, that has no particular consequence to the consistency or “correctness” of any particular moral set.
Hmmm – nope. I am still unclear. Earlier you said, “The only possible consistent morality is that which is predicated on God’s own perfect morality”. But Godel’s theorems hold only for consistent sets. So, if your statement was correct, you would not be justified in applying Godel’s Theorem to nonabsolute moralities.
Now you say, “I realize Godel would not hold in a system of morality [whose consistency] is confirmed from outside.” But this is the only case in which Godel does hold. There are no consistent sets which are self-dependent (to use Siegfried’s phrasing).
So that whole “Free will” thing goes right out the window, huh? Don’t the people have a God-given right to choose what to do and who to follow? God’s influence over His followers is so weak that the influence of mere mortals can over-power it? And even if that’s the case, so what? They knew better and made their choice anyway. Why does God have to interfer?****
****Note: It occurs to me that my tone may be confrontational in nature. I don’t know if it is, but I don’t mean it to be. I’m genuinely curious about this.
Opus
Sorry, sir.
Xeno
The point at which the observer is God.
We make moral decisions, but not judgments, with our spirit. These decisions are not deductions that “I should do this or that because A implies B.” They are decisions that “I will do this or that because that’s the way I AM.” We will do what we will do by virtue of our spirit’s moral nature. All the brain does is rationalize a judgment and carry out an action after the spirit has made its decision. But the brain contributes nothing of a moral nature. A situation itself is nothing but a mis-en-scene. Morality comes by the introduction of a spirit making a moral decision. To judge any morality other than our own, we must play God.
Fenris
Amoral.
Even knowing what little you can about a man’s motive outside his frame of reference, you cannot make a true moral judgment. We can only make moral decisions for ourselves.
Gaudere
I think you began with this:
In every case, you appeared to be asking for moral judgments without giving me the benefit of any data that is significant from the point of view of the Moral Judge.
I maintain (as you’ve always known — it’s been no secret) that an action is neither moral nor immoral in isolation from the motivation of its spirit. What decision has the spirit made? As Jesus taught, good things cannot come from an evil heart. Thus, even though a man pray and pray in front of a thousand people to demonstrate his piety, his action is evil if his spirit has willed him, not to praise God, but to seek adulation of men. A hand that rescues a drowning man, following the orders of its brain, carries no moral implication one way or the other.
I regret that, and have already apologized and retracted. Quite honestly, I could have done without the mental picture that I would stand and watch in existential amusement while a man drowns, particularly since I have watched both my father and my mother drown in their own lung mucous.
What I would do and what I should do might both depend on many many factors, which we’ve covered at some length. Such is the nature of hypotheticals.
You don’t “determine” it as by some process of deduction; you either accept or reject it. His will is absolute and axiomatic.
Well, intelligence is irrelevant. But I assumed you were calling on me to judge the whole morality of the situation. Don’t forget, there is more than one spirit at work in your scenario. There is also the moral implication vis-a-vis the man crying for help. But I cannot know what it is, and you told me nothing about his spirit. You are right that if a spirit is loving, then any and all actions by that spirit’s brain are moral, even if the brain malfunctions — which is something we’ve discussed before. So, a retarded man with a loving heart but who can’t quite figure out what to do, does nothing less moral by watching the man drown than I do by saving him.
Exactly. Saving a life is neither a good nor an evil thing unto itself. Actions aren’t good or evil. Spirits are. A good spirit cannot do an evil act; and an evil spirit cannot do a good act. But we’ve covered all that before, too.
Spiritus
You’re quite right, drawing a line after Proposition VI. I thought you might be talking about Godel’s promised, more generalized, follow-up paper that, as far as I know, was never published. I should have known that you are not like some people who claim familiarity with a work because they have read what other people say about it. When dealing with you, it behooves me to remind myself that I am dealing with an intellect on a level far above my own.
Egads. That is the whole implication that Godel makes. As he himself summarizes: “Throughout this work we have virtually confined ourselves to the system P, and have merely indicated the applications to other systems. The results will be stated and proved in fuller generality in a forthcoming sequel.”
The only epistemological system that cannot contain an antinomy is one with infinitely many axioms.
As you know, a Peano algebra cannot be proved consistent. But that is, at root, because its axiom set is not transfinite. I don’t know how you make the leap from God’s infinite morality axioms to what He might say about Peano. It seems irrelevant to me.
Well, I wish you would say what you mean rather than pretending you’re Plato and I’m Aristotle. Since we’re talking about morality, whatever else a brain does is not relevant. Numbers do more than represent quantities, too. (They are both cardinal and ordinal). But that does not exempt number theory from Godel’s propositions.
I said this: “[The] consistency of any complex deductive system, that is, any system that accepts a modus ponens inference, is neither provable nor disprovable within the system itself. It must rely on intuition or else external confirmation of certain propositions, particularly any that address internal consistency.”
Siegfried said: “Even more interesting, the reality of Platonic ‘forms’ - ideals contemplated by the human intellect - is questioned by some simple corollaries to Gödel’s Theorem. His Propostion XI states that the consistency of any formal deductive system (if it is consistent) is neither provable nor disprovable within the system. A quick leap of logic interprets this corollary as such: ‘Any sufficiently complex, consistent logical framework cannot be self-dependent’ - i.e., it must rely on intuition, or some external confirmation of certain propositions (specifically, one that proves internal consistency).”
And most everybody who (correctly) summarizes Godel’s theorem as applicable to general epistemologies phrases things the same general way.
Again, I would like to rely on a consistent morality whose judgments never contradict. Wouldn’t you?
It is not necessary that I understand God’s absoluteness any more than it is necessary that I understand why the supreme court told the PGA it must accomodate Martin. It is reliable because it is absolute. God’s axiom set is transfinite and therefore reliable.
Nothing is revised. What I said originally was: “Without an absolute, nonarbitrary basis for morality, there can be no moral distinction drawn from the very set that presupposes itself to contain not only its own elements, but its own rules.” By its very nature, morality must be consistent and reliable, else it is immoral. You cannot punish an innocent man — ever, not even once — and be perfectly moral.
[fainting…]
Any moral set with a finite number of axioms is not provably void of any antinomy. A contradictory moral set is useless to a perfect moral Being.
Good point. My phrasing was wishy-washy. God’s morality is perfect because it is infinitely axiomatic. Godel concerned himself with sets that had a finite number of axioms.
Spiritus
Note that in the offline composition of my response to you, I misplaced various portions. Do you need me to repost so you don’t have to play connect the dots?
Not to hi jack or anything but…
SOme people beleive where the Bible says that God appoints rulers and deposes them (guess He works for the CIA)
So He allowed Hitler to come to power.
I’ve heard read where this means that God allowed Hitler to kill lots of His people simply as a punsihment, whioch makes Him sounds really harsh to say the least.