Philosophy Now Forum

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 1:18 pm What interests me is “the desperate manoeuvre”. That point where life, the management of oneself, the management of situations, moves into the Crisis Territory and the trapped man has to (to push the metaphor) reach out to something beyond the material entanglement.

Metaphor is a life-boat of brevity rescuing the relevance that gets tossed overboard to splash about in an ocean of entangled preconceptions. (You may quote me.)

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 2:23 pm So what is your evidence that if there is no God, then morality doesn't exist?

Objectively speaking, it could only be the same as your evidence, but that requires recognizing the truth of the evidence by you the perceiver.

The evidence of the truth of that observation is not appeal to authority, but appeal to intelligence, in which case I'm gonna just trust that you savvy.

There is another interesting off-shoot of the undermining of a specific “Christian morality” and it is not that “secularism” is made problematic, it is that an entire ethical structure that we now live in could well be questionable.

If we were to be honest and direct, Gary seems most to long for, to hope for and believe in what is the ESSENCE of the Christian morality. He advocates for it not through abstractions, but because the unruliness of the world, the dangers of the world, and man’s immorality, directly effect his well-being.

His argument against God is that God does not, will not, or cannot, intervene in the world to make it the “Heaven” that Gary believes it should be, or that he’d been promised.

So, and Gary might be an example, the Christian picture has been punctured because for staring too long at the real world (Nature) that secular man now knows that Christian idealism is essentially false. It is like an addictive drug from which one is now in withdrawal.

Given our present orientation, we only have the real world to stare at, and my how very very far away it is from what a Christian soul could hope for!

The closer one gets to the real world, the farther away one gets from the Ideal World.

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 2:23 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 1:53 pm

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 3:55 am

You're not going to explain your evidence that there is no morality without God until I've agreed that there's no morality without God.

Right. So long as you’re living in the “straw house” of belief that Secularism can answer the question, you’re merely deluding yourself. Interestingly, I’ve pointed out that it’s easy to test, and you just refuse to employ the test. So perhaps one can’t go forward until that’s resolved.

So what is your evidence that if there is no God, then morality doesn't exist?

I’ve given it repeatedly: do the test. If you can defeat it, you win. If you cannot...

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 2:04 pm

Alexiev wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 4:20 am The point was: if, as I suggested, utopia must be an anarchy...

Umm…I’ve never seen a single utopian scheme that aimed at mere “anarchy.” But maybe you can explain why you say utopias “must be” anarchical.

In any case, “utopia” means, literally “no place.” It was a term invented by Thomas More, I believe. It has nothing to do with “heaven,” except that some utopians maybe aspire to some version of what they metaphorically call “heaven on earth”; but none of those that I’m aware of is described as “anarchy.” Many of them are highly structured, rigid, and in fact, totalitarian and suffocating, like the Communist “utopia."

I know the derication of "utopia*. But the dictionary definitoon is "an imagined place wgere everything is perfect."

Laws and "rulers" in such a place would be unnecessary. This is obvious, and you are avoiding the issue. I already explained the contradixtions.

MikeNovack wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 3:02 pm

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 4:06 am IC, you've got it fixated in your brain that there can be no morality without God, and that's all she wrote. No one can reason with you because you repeat the same thing over and over, even after someone explains why a secularist can participate meaningfully in the moral sphere.

Well ....... I think he's actually making a claim he doesn't realize he's making in order to get where he wants to go.

Well, let’s see.

Immanuel, I want you to discuss when are two moral systems the same/equivalent and when are they different. Let's introduce a more formal description. I am going to say a moral system is a FUNCTION which evaluates to either right or wrong.
M(situation, possible choice of action) = moral judgement

I think you’re just describing pragmatics here. And pragmatics and morality are clearly not the same.

Let me clarify, if I may.

When I speak of “pragmatics,” I mean simply “what will work to achieve X.” No more.

When I speak of “morality” I’m referring to “what is ethical, responsible, right, lawful,“ought to be done,” “should be done,” imperative to be done for moral reasons, etc. In other words, all the things normally associated with morality.

Pragmatics gets us results, but never opens up the question of whether or not what the actor wants or has done is moral.

So, speaking pragmatically, if the problem we want to address is overpopulation, say, there are many solutions: ask people to reduce their birth rate, start a war and kill off a bunch of people, withhold grain so people starve, poison or sterilize them, increase our access to resources so we can afford a bigger population, deport people…and so on. Obviously, some of these solutions are what we would instinctively call “more moral” than others. But pragmatically, some of the least moral ones would get the job done quickest.

So you say you have “possible choices of action.” Okay. But all of the above are “possible choices of action.” And we haven’t even cracked the question of which ones are moral. So we need more than pragmatics to get your equation to work.

That M can be a process of application of the rules of the rule set of a moral system.

Here’s the problem: which one?

I’m not asking that to obscure the question. It’s a genuine problem. If we are going to select an M code, it’s going to have to be on the basis of some higher moral code that transcends them all. But which moral code is the higher one that should be used in order to arbitrate our M?

We can’t say “Well, it could be anything.” Jihadis have morals…but not ours, perhaps. Nazis have a very strong sense of morality, and hate “impurity” more than most; but we think their morals are wrong. Communists have “the People’s standpoint” morals, and kill millions using them. The morals of a Grand Inquisitor, are, no doubt passionately felt — but evil, we think. We could go on at great length producing such examples. It simply will not do to leave M to the vagaries of every person’s imagination, no matter how nice, or on the other hand, how selfish, cruel or psychopathic the person may be. We need to choose the right M, on some basis that transcends the set of “possible choices” from which we are selecting.

We are remaining agnostic on the question of an M depending on a UNIQUE set of rules.

This, we simply are unable to do, rationally speaking. For in order to work the equation, we are going to have to plug in some specifics. And the minute we do, we will already be inserting some code of morals we are presuming, but this time, perhaps without even being willing to recognize we’re doing it.

And this is what Westerners routinely do, when they are fooled into imagining that all moral codes, or all religions, are equivalent in essence, even if different in detail. For example, they say, “All religions lead to God,” or “Every person can make up his own morality.” But what they are not conscious of doing, even while they’re doing it, is that they are inserting their own Humanist Relativism into their assessment of the problem, or into their proposed solution: in other words, it’s not that they aren’t employing a super-moral code, it’s that they’re keeping themselves from realizing that they are doing it. They’re assuming that the values of a Western Humanist or Secularist ARE the super-moral system by which all other moral systems can be evaluated. And the one system to which they are exercising complete critical blindness is their own.

So we come to the problem: what is your M? Which moral description is the super-moral arbitrator over all the rest? We can bring awareness of that assumption back to consciousness if we name it. If we cannot name it, then we might simply remain blind to what it is; but it won’t mean we’re not using it.

Now, I can specify my M. Can you?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 4:05 pm If we were to be honest and direct, Gary seems most to long for, to hope for and believe in what is the ESSENCE of the Christian morality. He advocates for it not through abstractions, but because the unruliness of the world, the dangers of the world, and man’s immorality, directly effect his well-being.

This, I think is an accurate analysis. Gary wants a kind of “Christian morality” of sorts, but without God. And he mistakes it, his own moral preferences, for something universal, something that can simply be left to every individual — presumably because he’s assuming all people and cultures are moral and good…or at least that enough of them are that we can pack the rest off to jail, or something.

His argument against God is that God does not, will not, or cannot, intervene in the world to make it the “Heaven” that Gary believes it should be, or that he’d been promised.

That might be more than he’s said. I think it’s pretty simple, really. I think it’s really the old “why would God allow evil?” question.

So, and Gary might be an example, the Christian picture has been punctured because for staring too long at the real world (Nature) that secular man now knows that Christian idealism is essentially false. It is like an addictive drug from which one is now in withdrawal.

Well, what’s true is that Secular man has decided to regard Christian morality as false. Whether it actually is, is quite a different question. But that decision entails certain consequences — one of which is that one needs a new basis of the new morality, to replace the anchoring of Christian morality in God. But Secularism has no moral opinions, and offers no moral content; so the decision to regard objective morality as if it were subjective (i.e. delusory and not obligatory to anybody) has a brutal hit on the backswing. And Gary’s ducking that backswing as hard as he can.

Alexiev wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 4:22 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 2:04 pm

Alexiev wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 4:20 am The point was: if, as I suggested, utopia must be an anarchy...

Umm…I’ve never seen a single utopian scheme that aimed at mere “anarchy.” But maybe you can explain why you say utopias “must be” anarchical.

In any case, “utopia” means, literally “no place.” It was a term invented by Thomas More, I believe. It has nothing to do with “heaven,” except that some utopians maybe aspire to some version of what they metaphorically call “heaven on earth”; but none of those that I’m aware of is described as “anarchy.” Many of them are highly structured, rigid, and in fact, totalitarian and suffocating, like the Communist “utopia."

I know the derication of "utopia*. But the dictionary definitoon is "an imagined place wgere everything is perfect.”

Not a great definition. Not wrong, but so broad and vague it hardly helps us, I think.

I already explained the contradixtions.

I don’t see it. You ask us to assume that utopia is anarchic. But you’ve not yet presented your evidence that it is. And then you mix the idea of utopia, which is always a human concept or belief, with “heaven,” which is a conventional theological concept, but is not a “utopia” in the precise sense of that word. And it seems to me that your point is supposed to be that God can’t rule an anarchical situation — but nothing about what is conventionally called “heaven” is anarchical. So the argument appears — and correct me, if I’m wrong — simply to whistle off in the wrong direction. It doesn’t at all look inescapable; it doesn’t even look clear what the relevant argument is.

You need to help us out here: it’s not clear you’ve got an argument yet. Maybe you do, but we can’t figure out what it is.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 4:41 pm Well, what’s true is that Secular man has decided to regard Christian morality as false. Whether it actually is, is quite a different question. But that decision entails certain consequences — one of which is that one needs a new basis of the new morality, to replace the anchoring of Christian morality in God. But Secularism has no moral opinions, and offers no moral content; so the decision to regard objective morality as if it were subjective (i.e. delusory and not obligatory to anybody) has a brutal hit on the backswing. And Gary’s ducking that backswing as hard as he can.

Secular man —your term is near-sufficient but needs a great deal of specific description — finds it impossible, and impracticable, and even in some sense immoral, to “believe in” a metaphysical abstraction.

As Richard Weaver put it this occurred when Occidentals decided (?) or concluded (?) that Universals did not “truly exist”.

A well-educated secular man could however still believe in the metaphysical essences expressed by the 10 Commandments even if God’s realness, or potency, or accessibility, was in question.

But the real loss (in my view) resulting from the collapse of metaphysical certainty, and awareness of consequences, is for the partially-educated “little man”: that man who does not have the resources, the time, or the interest and capacity, to sort through all these knotty questions.

The man who “loses his horizon” is unmoored from concretized moral restraints. And that man (will often) fall headlong into hedonism, unrestrained pleasure, but also the loss of a guiding idealism.

The problem with you, Immanuel, is I think your acute rigidity. Can you, should you, be blamed for being a fanatic Christian zealot who can see only through one lens? There must be “acute believers” in each religious tradition, no?

One thing I have gathered as a personal reward from association with your acute, fanatical perspective, is quite the opposite of what I assume you desire to achieve: religious conversion.

It is just as I express it: all religious descriptions are pictures and mythologies. They convey and transport ideas that can only be described as metaphysics. One must grasp the metaphysics but one can also avoid “capture” by The Story.

What you do — it is a sight to behold really — is to force the picture and the mythology into the acute and tangible terms of “reality”. Thus your Bible Literalism.

No one can go along with you! Not one person can pull off what you have pulled off! You will make your Story blend with “the world” at any cost to what we normally consider “reason”. (As with the amazing Original Mating Pair manoeuvre: the forced blending of a Biblical story and a science perspective).

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 4:46 pm I don’t see it. You ask us to assume that utopia is anarchic. But you’ve not yet presented your evidence that it is. And then you mix the idea of utopia, which is always a human concept or belief, with “heaven,” which is a conventional theological concept, but is not a “utopia” in the precise sense of that word. And it seems to me that your point is supposed to be that God can’t rule an anarchical situation — but nothing about what is conventionally called “heaven” is anarchical. So the argument appears — and correct me, if I’m wrong — simply to whistle off in the wrong direction. It doesn’t at all look inescapable; it doesn’t even look clear what the relevant argument is.

You need to help us out here: it’s not clear you’ve got an argument yet. Maybe you do, but we can’t figure out what it is.

I made a clear logical argument;
Definition: Utopia is an imaginary, perfect.place.
P1 Laws are enforced by coersive violence.
P2. Coersive violence is morally imperfect.

Conclusion: The rule of law is morally imperfect.

Definition: Anarchy is a societal condition without rulers or laws.

Conclusion: Utopia must be an anarchy.

This isn't hard to understand.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 5:41 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 4:41 pm Well, what’s true is that Secular man has decided to regard Christian morality as false. Whether it actually is, is quite a different question. But that decision entails certain consequences — one of which is that one needs a new basis of the new morality, to replace the anchoring of Christian morality in God. But Secularism has no moral opinions, and offers no moral content; so the decision to regard objective morality as if it were subjective (i.e. delusory and not obligatory to anybody) has a brutal hit on the backswing. And Gary’s ducking that backswing as hard as he can.

Secular man —your term is near-sufficient but needs a great deal of specific description — finds it impossible, and impracticable, and even in some sense immoral, to “believe in” a metaphysical abstraction.

Au contraire: “Secular man” is himself a metaphysical abstraction. Just not a very good one.

As Richard Weaver put it this occurred when Occidentals decided (?) or concluded (?) that Universals did not “truly exist”.

Yes, that’s the right way to put the debated point. But there was no basis for such a conclusion. It was, from the start, just a decision, a disposition, a wish, an assumption. If there had been a necessity, there would have been evidence, logic, or a scientific test. And none of these compel that conclusion.

But the real loss (in my view) resulting from the collapse of metaphysical certainty, and awareness of consequences, is for the partially-educated “little man”: that man who does not have the resources, the time, or the interest and capacity, to sort through all these knotty questions.

There’s more than one cause for that, of course. The very busyness of the modern world saves many Secularists from having to think at all. The “knotty questions” no longer confront them, because there’s another purchase to be had, more work to do, more places to visit, another video game...

The man who “loses his horizon” is unmoored from concretized moral restraints. And that man (will often) fall headlong into hedonism, unrestrained pleasure, but also the loss of a guiding idealism.

Yes to that.

One thing I have gathered as a personal reward from association with your acute, fanatical perspective, is quite the opposite of what I assume you desire to achieve: religious conversion.

My intentions are more modest than you think. My job is only to carve out a space in which the truth of the matter can find opportunity to be considered. What you and others do with that, well, that’s between you and God. My job is done, then.

No one can go along with you!

And yet, more and more people do. Statistically, according even to Secular sources, the world’s never been more “religious,” and there have never been as many Christians alive as there are today.

So for “no one,” I suppose you must mean yourself. And I can accept that. It’s your choice. The last thing I’d do is compel you, even if I could. Your right of choice is sacred. If you are aware and accepting of the consequences, well, that’s as much as one can do.

Alexiev wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 5:43 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 4:46 pm I don’t see it. You ask us to assume that utopia is anarchic. But you’ve not yet presented your evidence that it is. And then you mix the idea of utopia, which is always a human concept or belief, with “heaven,” which is a conventional theological concept, but is not a “utopia” in the precise sense of that word. And it seems to me that your point is supposed to be that God can’t rule an anarchical situation — but nothing about what is conventionally called “heaven” is anarchical. So the argument appears — and correct me, if I’m wrong — simply to whistle off in the wrong direction. It doesn’t at all look inescapable; it doesn’t even look clear what the relevant argument is.

You need to help us out here: it’s not clear you’ve got an argument yet. Maybe you do, but we can’t figure out what it is.

I made a clear logical argument;

Okay, let’s see if I can follow it.

Definition: Utopia is an imaginary, perfect.place.

But secular. You left that bit out.

P1 Laws are enforced by coersive violence.

Laws are human artifacts, unless you mean ultimate moral laws, in which (I think) you don’t believe anyway. As human artifacts, of course power is the only means of their enforcement.

P2. Coersive violence is morally imperfect.

Where did you derive the axiom? Which moral code are you referring to? Islamists think it’s righteous. So do Communists, or Nazis, or other totalitarians, although they wouldn’t maybe use that word. They think it’s “good” or “justified,” maybe. But they certainly use it a lot, and regard it as “in service of the cause."

Conclusion: The rule of law is morally imperfect.

When we decode this, then, we get: “the laws invented and enforced by human beings are imperfect.” Yes, they are. But I still can’t see where you’re going.

Definition: Anarchy is a societal condition without rulers or laws.

Okay.

Conclusion: Utopia must be an anarchy.

Utopians don’t think this is true. They have a variety of powers they think should be in control, but very few of them think anarchy is the solution. But what if they did? Utopians are, by definition, secular.

This isn't hard to understand.

See above. All you’ve done is make a claim about secular persons who seek utopias, and not one, I think, that many of them would agree with.

I’m still not seeing your point.

Belinda wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 11:15 am

Dubious wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 10:30 am

Martin Peter Clarke wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 8:05 am
Because you feed him. And abuse is better than neglect.

You're right up to a point, we collectively have an inborn urge of arguing against the contra-rational or its descent into outright lunacy and because of that he invariably gets the most replies which feeds his ego. Having known that for a long time, there won't be any further responses from me regarding the ever popular and perverse Immanuel Can with whom any discussion of philosophy is a complete dead end, whose only reality begins with Adam and Eve ending with Jesus as the redeeming agent of mankind.

What a loathsome, disgusting, despicable story that is proving its effect on those who literally believe it.

Having said that, it's the counter arguments which both elicit and verifies the near total perversity and abject stupidity with which most theists respond in a manner which makes rationality, history and truth itself sinful.

Immanuel Can and his like is a springboard for discussing the nature of a reasonable faith .

There must be thesis as represented by Can, antithesis represented by consensus here, to generate a reasonable and reasoned synthesis.

What a load of bullshit! In order to discuss reasonable faith, as in good faith, rationality and honest debate is a necessary precondition. If the IC method of debate is reasonable to you, then by all means have at it!

Alexiev wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 5:43 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 4:46 pm I don’t see it. You ask us to assume that utopia is anarchic. But you’ve not yet presented your evidence that it is. And then you mix the idea of utopia, which is always a human concept or belief, with “heaven,” which is a conventional theological concept, but is not a “utopia” in the precise sense of that word. And it seems to me that your point is supposed to be that God can’t rule an anarchical situation — but nothing about what is conventionally called “heaven” is anarchical. So the argument appears — and correct me, if I’m wrong — simply to whistle off in the wrong direction. It doesn’t at all look inescapable; it doesn’t even look clear what the relevant argument is.

You need to help us out here: it’s not clear you’ve got an argument yet. Maybe you do, but we can’t figure out what it is.

I made a clear logical argument;
Definition: Utopia is an imaginary, perfect.place.
P1 Laws are enforced by coersive violence.
P2. Coersive violence is morally imperfect.

Conclusion: The rule of law is morally imperfect.

Definition: Anarchy is a societal condition without rulers or laws.

Conclusion: Utopia must be an anarchy.

This isn't hard to understand.

Heaven is infinite from eternity, like everything else. Everyone, everything that has ever suffered, gets to be fixed. Nobody, nothing, can do any harm to another. And any impulse to, will be therapied, developed, transcended - ironed out. By those who have gone before. From forever. With no violence. Love is infinitely competent.

I'll try once more, same or different. No weaseling out by saying "that's just pragmatic sameness"

Start over (and point out where you are disagreeing)
A moral system is intended to associate a moral judgement (right or wrong) with EVERY choice of action in every situation. That is why I used the usual function notation M(situation, choice of action). We are USING it to make "right" choices of action in some situation. In other words, we find ourselves in a situation and are asking "what is a choice of action such that M(situation, choice of action) = right << well we could also ask about wrong ones >>

At THIS level of description not looking at what are the rules that make up M and where did they come from (n spite of the fact that you are claiming morally relevant) . In other words, just that the function M works. You claim to believe in a divinely sanctioned M that works, so you accept "M can exist". OK, let's label it Mdivine.

I am saying suppose there were an M not divinely sanctioned, call it Msecular. And suppose Mdivine(situation, choice of action) = Msecular(situation, choice of action). In other words, Msecular never gives a different judgement right or wrong. I don't give a damn if you say "but that's only pragmatic sameness". We're not discussing how the come to always give the same result, just whether they do or not.

Now I think what you want to say is IMPOSSIBLE. That there could be no Msecular such that it always gave the same answer as Mdivine. But what are you basing that on? That the rules of Mdivine had divine sanction and the rules of Msecular not? That's no help. Why would that GUARANTEE difference in effect.

Remember ---- the text of rules as coming down to us via divine inspiration is identical to the text of the same length produced by a random text generator (not divinely inspired).