Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:14 pm
Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Fri Apr 24, 2020 9:44 am
But the assertion 'Good is God' isn't a predication, ascribing God as a property or attribute to 'good' - here grammatically a noun.
Not "grammatically a noun." It means, "Good is one of the attributes of God," and is thus a predication. It does not mean, "Good is defined as the totality of what God is," in which case it would be a subjective completion. You've simply misunderstood my implication, by presuming the latter rather than the former. The former was the intended.
Intended, but not what you said. And as a subject, 'good' must be nominal - grammatically, a noun. And 'the good' is obviously nominal.
You were wrong to say that 'God is good' / Good is God' has the same equivalence as ''Peter started this thread' / 'This thread was started by Peter' - which, as I remember, was your analogy. But anyway, your claim is: 'God is good' - predicating something of God. And that claim, if it's objective, has a burden of proof.
This is reasonable, because everything we can know, as human beings, about the Good can be summed up in this: it is the thing that is consonant with God's character and wishes. If you want more information about the Good than that, you're out of luck; it's not possible to get "further back" than that definition, and we human beings have no access to such a mythological, Platonic conception of the Good. It's certainly clear that our human consciences don't give us infallible access to such a conception, though they seem to have access to some aspects of the Good, if the conscience in question is operating properly.
So we're back to the claim: If X is consonant with God's character/will/wishes/purposes, then X is good/morally right. And, pari passu with 'If X is contrary to ..., then X is bad/morally wrong'.
If we ask why this is the case, your answer is that God's character, etc, is good by definition. But a definition obviously has no truth-value, so if the claim 'God is good' is a definition, then it isn't a predication with a truth-value - it isn't a factual claim at all. And whose definition is 'God is good' anyway? This argument is completely specious.
However, conscience, like us all, is fallible in this regard, so to what shall we turn for such access?
The claim 'that which is contrary to God's will is morally wrong' doesn't describe God's will.
This is true. Rather, it describes the moral status of certain actions. It does not pretend to be a definition of anything. To describe God's will, one would need a revelation from God, since human judgment is so fallible in these things.
Sophistry. You're defining the morally wrong - or moral wrongness - as being contrary to God's will, etc, which you define as 'good'. So with your fallible human judgement you presume to define your god as good - which is a performative contradiction. 'Absent a revelation from God, we can't describe God's will, etc. But God is good, by definition.' So is that definition the product of revelation, and if so, to whom?
And nor does the claim 'that which conforms to God's will is morally right'.
Likewise.
Progress. You agree that 'being consonant with or contrary to God's will' tells us nothing about God's will.
The claim 'God has purposes and a will that are good' is quite separate, and has a separate analysis and burden of proof.
Specify that: what "burden of proof" do you suppose that claim bears? How would you go about "proving" it, if you could? And if you could not specify any burden of proof, then it cannot lack one. Rather, it would simply be something that exceeds your known tests...but you'd be unable to say, then, whether or not it was true.
The burden of proof is with the claimant. If you're saying the claim incurs no burden of proof, or that it's impossible to meet the burden - to show the claim is true or probably true - then the claim can be dismissed as unjustified speculation. It isn't my or anyone else's job to specify the required proof for your claim. And I dismiss the idea of proof anyway, because it isn't a factual claim capable of proof or disproof. And if the claim is nothing more than a jumped-up definition, it isn't a claim in the first place. Sorry. No way out.
But now, you also have to keep in mind that to refer to any conception of good that is not already grounded in the character of God is to misrepresent the case and to deny subjectivism is true. As a subjectivist, you have absolutely no rational access to any objective conception of good and evil anyway -- at least if you're logically consistent (I suppose you can always pretend to have one, and then try to insist that we all should want to accept your definition, but good luck with that, since you won't have a basis to justify it to anyone). So you'll have to refer to some objective concept of good, to which you're not rationally entitled, to pose the question in the first place.
Ah, back to deflection. You can't show that morality is objective, and appeal to a god to ground moral facts is the very antithesis of moral objectivity - so attack moral subjectivism, as though that provides evidence for moral objectivism. Of course a moral subjectivist can't claim to make objective moral judgements. Der. Only moral objectivists think that's a problem - and they can't show that morality is objective anyway.
As a rational secular humanist, I judge your buybull tribal god to be a wicked, genocidal, misogynist, bigoted, immoral thug, unworthy of worship by any half-decent person. At least, I would if it existed. And I can rationally justify each of those condemnations. Your denial that I can is your problem. And that you probably do feel obliged to reject those charges against your invented god - to do the ancient look-the-other-way tap dance - is, and has always been evidence of the intellectual and moral damage done by your disgusting religion. (Disclaimer: not one objective, factual appeal or assumption was made during the above rant.)
The problem is that you are supposing the predication has some sort of possibility of standing apart from the Entity who created the very concept in the first place, and also created the world full of things it rightly describes. But God is eternal, and Christian Creation is not out of some sort of realm of Platonic forms that pre-existed it, but ex nihilo, from nothing. Thus, there is no prior referent available to us from which we can capture a true conception of good.
The expression 'a true conception of good' is precisely mystical, Platonic nonsense. What we call 'good' isn't a thing of which there can be 'a true conception'.
Exactly so, if we mean the Platonic conception. I do not.
Trouble is, you do by default.
But you have judged God as "immoral" several times now. It must be perfectly obvious to you that you're violating moral subjectivism when you do, unless you confine your implication to something like, "Peter doesn't like his conception of God," which you could do -- but I suspect that was not the force of the claim you wanted when you called God "immoral." I suspect you wanted to invoke a common assent by way of objective standards.
Feel free to tell me if that's not what you meant.
If so, your claim about God was not factual. It was merely your personal taste, which I think we all had a sense of anyway. One wonders what you were trying to say...
Addressed and dismissed as specious, many, many times.
I can do no such thing. 