Harbal wrote: ↑Sun Oct 01, 2017 7:15 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Oct 01, 2017 2:28 am
God, the objective Giver or moral truth and Judge of human action.
But how can we know this to be the case, how do you evaluate the truth in it? If you say, yes, I'm sure there is a God and I believe he wishes me to behave according to his morality, what then leads you to believe that morality worthy of following? How do you know it's the right thing to do, the good thing to do?
I understand where your question is coming from, but maybe the problem is in the question itself.
If God exists, then I'm afraid this question is itself not quite coherent. What I mean is that the question itself posits some difference between a) the moral will of God, and b) "the Good." But if they are identical, then the question itself doesn't make sense. It's like asking, "Is this man your father or your mother's husband?" The answer is, of course, "Both." It's two different ways of naming exactly the same reality.
So the question there is faulty, because it requires an untrue assumption to be accepted before it can have its expected response. You can't answer the question about your father and your mother's husband (except in the case of illegitimacy or remarriage, of course); and you can't answer any question that supposes "God" and "the Good" have to be distinct predications one of the other.
As long as we try to think of "the Good" as some independent property that human beings are (perhaps, debatably) equipped to evaluate, and so long as we think of God as merely one of the many objects
within the universe, the question may sound sensible to us. But the minute we realize that the universe is
derivative from God, that He is its Creator and Definer, and all the properties we can (rightly) identify as "good" or "bad" are also derived from their relation or distance from His nature and character, in that same minute we realize that we are not talking sense anymore.
That's why the Euthyphro Dilemma worked for Socrates, the polytheist, but has no bite for any monotheistic system. Polytheistic systems have "gods" that are smaller than the universe. The great monotheistic systems do not posit small "gods," but a comprehensive Supreme Being, with one nature and identity. And that changes everything.
"The right thing to do, the good thing to do" is that which conforms to the character and wishes of the One from whom all "rightness" and "goodness" originates. Indeed, we could have no conception of "right" or "good" at all, were it not from Him.
However, Atheism has no such basis. There is no Judge. There are no rules.
I agree with this but to put it into context we have to compare it with its counterpart, theism. What are the rules of theism?
Rule #1: You shall love the Lord your God. Judaism has it, and so does Christianity. It's the first of the 10 Commandments.
What does this mean? It means that God IS "the Good," and that if you want to know what is either morally good or meaningfully good (that is, what helps you achieve your purpose as a human being) the first thing you've got to do is stand in a right relationship to your Creator, a relationship of exclusive faith and trust. Without that, you know nothing about morality, and cannot find "the Good."
I don't particularly mean your theism, I mean any theism, of which there are many varieties. Theism, in itself, requires nothing more than a belief in the existence of a supernatural being.
Well, monotheism requires more, and then after that, the different monotheistic systems have disagreements among them. And this means that each offers an alternate course for resolving the question of the nature of the (not "supernatural" merely, note, but)
Supreme Being. Where systems disagree on fundamental fact-claims, Aristotle taught us, it is possible for all to be wrong, or for one to be right and the others wrong; but we need not imagine they can all be right, for that it against the Law of Non-Contradiction.
So the question is, "Is any of them right?"
If you are a theist you could be a Christian or a Muslim etc. and draw your beliefs from these systems. If you are an atheist you could be a Humanist or a Buddhist etc. and do the same. Your assertion that there needs to be an ultimate authority figure to whom we are answerable in order for there to be an imperative to act morally is just your belief.
No, I'm not offering it as that.
I'm not saying, "Because I believe it, you ought to too." Rather, I offer it as a rational postulate. And I offer it this way: that if Atheism is true, and there is no Supreme Being, then there is no grounds for "the Good" either. It becomes merely a (mistaken, obviously) figment of the human imagination, whether the personal or the social imagination. And to test that claim, one need not sort out all the theistic alternatives; rather all one has to do is look, like Nietzsche did, at what is bound to be true of Atheism itself. And when we do, we find that Atheism grounds absolutely no moral imperatives at all. it leaves them all as mere social or personal fictions.
Now, on the flip side, IF one or another form of monotheism is true, a couple of other things would also automatically, and for rational reasons, be true. Firstly, whatever we define as "the Good" would, like everything else, have to be oriented to the intentions and work of the Creator (which is another way of saying that nothing real would not be a "created" product, except for the Creator Himself: "the Good" would be a product of Him). Secondly, whatever "the Good" was, it would not matter how many wrong guesses about it mankind had made; it would still only be what it was -- the one truth about morality, and the one way forward for mankind in terms of being in right relationship to the Originator of all things. And those things would follow not out of mere belief, but by way of logic and analytics of the meaning of the term "Supreme Being."
I'm sure there must be many non theistic systems where people feel obliged to follow some moral code or other because of a belief.
Yes. But there's no reason to think they're all right, and every reason to suppose they're not. For as Aristotle pointed out, once you have a
strict contradiction between to predications (concerning God or anything else), then you have only two possibilities: that both of them are wrong (and a third thing is right) or that one of them is right and the other wrong.
And it's not my belief that warrants any of that: it's the basic laws of logic. So what we're left with is the question, "Is Christianity true?" If it is, one set of things follows. If it's not, then it's on to the next system or explanation. But whatever we do, one fact will remain: Atheism won't help us; for we have seen that it has already surrendered morality and meaning to oblivion.
