Harbal wrote: ↑Sun Oct 01, 2017 3:53 pm
If God exists then, after all the initial creating, he may well have stepped back and taken on the role of impartial observer. He may not be interested in influencing things, he may simply want to see what happens. The concept of God as creator does not necessarily contain anything beyond his existence and the existence of his creation. This being the case, the question seems perfectly coherent to me.
That's Deism, of course. Some people have thought that. Of course, I don't; but let me honour that possibility, since you raise it.
But it really doesn't change the situation for morality. IF we posit a single Creator, one that exists prior to and above the universe, then everything in it --including our conceptions of what "good" and "evil" are, would be products of His creation. He may have lost interest since (Deism) or not (Theism), but it would not change the nature of what morality was at its root...the deliberate arrangement by an all-powerful Creator.
And in that case, we cannot ask the question "Is He good" without needing the concept "good," which we would then have to admit comes from Him. And so the question would make no sense anyway.
"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.
Well I have a conception of right and good yet I do not include God in my outlook.
I have no doubt you do. But whether or not you realize that your conception is derived from God is another question. There's nothing unusual about a person having beliefs the origin of which he has never so far had reason to examine. Many of us in the West, for example, take the view that the rights of women are something that every reasonable person must surely recognize. But go to most of the rest of the world, and you'd find that belief is definitely contested, and many ways of life do not include it.
So to justify the rights of women, we'd need to be able to tell those people where those rights originate, and why they should start to believe in them. That, or we leave their women in subservience or slavery, on the one hand, or put a gun to their heads and say, "Do it because we believe it". Those are our choices.
Likewise, if you have a conception of good and bad, you need to know from whence you are deriving it, if you are going to justify or rationalize it to a doubter. If you just want to believe in it, and don't mind that you have no reason for it, that is, of course, always an option. But if you want to be rational about it, you need to say where you got this idea from, and how you know it reflects some reality.
That's not much to ask. But it's more than Atheism can do for morality.
This means that either I am the source of my ethical views or God has instilled them in me regardless of the fact that I take no account of him. Either way atheism would be no impediment to my morality being of equal status to a Christian's or anyone else's.
True. The only thing it would affect is whether or not your commitment to that morality was rational, or merely arbitrary. But you might be a very nice person by living morally through moral precepts you'd borrowed from somewhere unknown to you, or if you made up your own but just happened, by sheer luck, to hit on the right sort of precepts.
To say that my morality is somehow fake because God is not involved is to assume an insight that, were I to believe in God, I would say only he could have. You can't look inside a person and see what's there.
No. But God can, if He exists. And what He sees when He does is the reason He says, "There is none righteous, not even one."
I wonder what you see when you look into yourself. But I don't know the answer to that, and am not saying I do. I'm just asking, without anticipating you need to answer me.
Rule #1: You shall love the Lord your God. Judaism has it, and so does Christianity. It's the first of the 10 Commandments.
These are not rules of theism. They may be rules of some forms of theism but believing in God does not logically necessitate believing he has any rules.
True. Deism again. But if monotheism is true, He does. And I was merely explaining that there is a very distinct rationale behind the First Great Commandment of Judaism and Christianity. It's really a philosophical and moral statement. It's not just the pole-star of these belief systems; it's the foundation of Judaism and Christianity's
grounded morality.
P.S. -- I should explain. By "grounded," I mean "rationally justifiable by way of our assumptions about what exists." A "grounded" morality may be right or may be wrong; but all of them have this advantage over any "ungrounded" account of morality: that "grounded" morality makes sense in light of the affirmer's basic ontological suppositions, whereas "ungrounded" morality does not. A "grounded" morality has at least the potential to be right, if its ontological suppositions are correct; and "ungrounded" one would only ever get the moral situation right by accident, never by reasons.
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."
This is just something you believe and I do not. You saying that it's true carries no more weight than me saying it isn't.
Well, IF God exists, it's not just that. IF God does not exist, then nothing's true about morality anyway, except that it's a fiction. I didn't expect it to "carry weight" with you, because I know you don't believe God exists. I'm just showing you that with what I believe is true (i.e. that God exists), it makes good sense for me to say that God is good.
Now, if I'm wrong, as you suppose, then again we cannot ask your question. For if there's no God, we cannot ask, "Is God good?" So I think you must want me to answer you according to my own suppositions, no? For if not, then your question becomes like, "Do
unicorns have
tails?" And you wouldn't expect me to answer such a self-refuting question, would you?
So I think that if you want to ask the question, you're going to have to let me answer it according to what I believe to be true. That doesn't mean you have to buy in. I know you don't. But doing that allows you space to inspect my moral beliefs for consistency with my ontological beliefs. If you find inconsistency, you can point it out. If you don't, you can just say, "Very interesting: however, denying your ontological beliefs, I still reject your moral explanations anyway."
And I can grant you the same. For we cannot change each other's minds by force. Nor can I impose my ontological suppositions on you, nor can yours be imposed on me. We believe as we believe, and speak as we speak, from them. But we can both benefit by being rational, by squaring up our ontology with our morality.
Fair enough?
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
There is nothing rational about your "postulate". I could equally say that sense of "the good" comes from within a person and belief in God and his rule book are figments of the human imagination.
Yes, you could. That would be an ontological claim. But can you say that,
given what you know that I believe about ontology, I'm being
logically inconsistent or
irrational to believe what I believe about morality? If you notice such a thing, please point it out. For I am at pains to live consistently in morality with what I believe about ontology. (And I will do the same for you, if you like, assuming you also hope to live morally-consistently with your agnostic ontology.)
Atheism grounds absolutely no moral imperatives at all.
You're doing it again. No one has claimed that atheism grounds any moral imperatives. What is being said is that atheism is not an obstacle to having moral imperatives.
Those are two different questions.
Atheism does
ground no moral imperatives. To see that, it does not imply that Atheism prevents a person
acting good, or even in believing
in an ungrounded way in good precepts. Maybe the Atheist in question just happens to prefer to BE good, not really knowing why, except that maybe it feels good. That could happen. Nobody's saying it doesn't.
What it
does mean is that Atheist ontology denies that there is any basis for preferring one option as "good" and another as "evil." Atheism has no such information. Moreover, if it is true, then there is no such real thing as objective morality, so it really doesn't matter whether or not an Atheist is good or bad. What's the problem, then?
And it's not my belief that warrants any of that: it's the basic laws of logic.
You are a very intelligent man, IC, and I do not believe for an instant that you would apply the type of "logic" you are using here to any other area of your life.
That's perhaps because you weren't seeing what I was actually claiming. I was speaking of Athe
ism's inability to
ground morality, not an Athe
ist's inability to
behave in some morally earnest way. But maybe we've cleared that up now.
Atheism won't help us; for we have seen that it has already surrendered morality and meaning to oblivion.
Who are you speaking for when you say "we have seen"?
You and me. If "we" have not seen, then please tell me what you have seen...tell me,
what is the one (or more) precept that an Atheist is morally obligated to follow? I know of not even one. And other Atheists on this strand insist that this is true too. They claim Atheism has zero moral precepts. What they fail to see (and fail to
want to see) of course, is that it also has zero ability to
ground morality.
Of course, if you go looking for just one Atheist moral precept, and find that there's none, then I would think that that means "we" have seen after all.
