morality == religion? Sez who?

[Ben Kenobi]

If "good" and "evil" can only be used in absolute terms, then they're worthless

One needs a plumb line. When you say that Hitler has some redeeming features, you must first have some idea of the good in order to compare Hitler up to this standard. The same is with everybody else. Rather than being useless, good and evil are only meaningful in the absolute sense.

I'm wondering why you follow God's moral code instead of Satan's moral code if both of these moral codes are completely arbitrary.

First of all, I don't believe they are arbitrary, that the evil must come from the good. The evil exists in rebellion from the good, and not independent thereof.

Secondly, I believe that God is eternal, and has a good nature, than it makes sense that I ought to follow him.

However, you are right. How do I know that it is God who is asking certain things? Well, I haven't been commanded directly by God to do anything other than what I have seen in Scriptures.

But supposing I did, I would have to compare what I was told with everything else I already know about God.

[Ben Kenobi]

So He can do evil, He just perpetually chooses not to?

Yes. That's the only way to reconcile his omnipotence with everything else.

Yes, because even with perfect foresight, and even with perfect knowledge of good and evil, the perfectly raised child would still encounter moral dilemmas that had no perfect solution.

Ah, not quite that far.

First of all, we cannot have a perfect knowledge of good and evil. This is the point I was trying to make. Even if you have a perfect upbringing, you would still feel guilty because you would have fallen short at some point. It is more than just the environment, we cannot make things the way we know that they ought to be.

Secondly, just because we cannot achieve a perfect solution to a moral problem, does not mean that one does not exist. Nor just because we cannot see a perfect solution, means that there is not one that exists.

However, you are right, that we are in some cases prevented from the perfect solution because of the fallen world in which we live.

[Aeson]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
So given a perfect upbringing, one would not feel guilty?

Depends on what you mean by perfect upbringing. Also, whether you include being perfectly healthy, as biological makeup was part of my statement and certainly is part of the equation.

The point you missed though is that what your upbringing was doesn't matter. Guilt comes from doing or thinking things which you have been taught are wrong. Doesn't matter if the source of those values is your parents, beliefs, experiences, or whatever.

Which comes from suffering. Just because there can be guilt improperly placed, that does not come from God, does not rule out the existence of guilt that comes from God.

I wasn't making any such statement. If there is a God, he certainly could be giving us values. Whether He exists or not is entirely irrellevent to the question I was answering though.

The question was how to describe guilt without using God, and I gave an answer along with an example of guilt that I knew (most) believers wouldn't attribute to God.

[Aeson]

Originally posted by Shi Huangdi
Through theism, we can say that humans fundamentally have value because it is imbued in them by God. Establishing human value without God is a bit harder.

Any belief system will do. Having God as a basis for human value is no more or less efficient than having any other imaginable basis. All that matters is that by believing in the basis for human worth, you believe in human worth.

Even just believing in the inherent value of life works fine.

[Az]

I agree with loinburger.

Alas, I have ****loads of work to do so I won't continue this.

[Agathon]

There are various reasons why people think that the supernatural is required to ground morality.

Some people think that the only possibility for morality to be universally binding on everyone is for there to exist "moral facts" which are part of the world in the same way that physical properties and objects are part of the world. Given that these purported moral facts do not seem to be detectable by empirical means, one must posit some supernatural cause of value in the world.

Of course the existence of values can be explained in physical terms; they just cannot be justified. For example, we could explain the existence of altruism among human beings by means of evolutionary psychology, but that does not give anyone a reason to behave altruistically. One could just as easily level this accusation at the God theory, but the proponents of the God theory would reply that God is omnipotent and can just make it so that values are binding on all people.

What these people are afraid of is that if God does not exist, then "everything is permitted". This translates to: "if there are no objective moral facts, then there is no reason other than prudence (which doesn't really work) for people to behave morally.

I don't think you have to buy into this distinction because the assumption that underlies it is dubious. This is that everything that is not an objective fact, independent of the human mind, is subjective and/or relative and cannot provide a binding reason to anyone. But why do we have to believe that moral language is descriptive of the world or has to be, in order to be binding on everyone? The later Wittgenstein argued that there are many "language games" which are not descriptive of the world, but which have definite rules that are binding on all creatures that participate in them. There's nothing weird about this – language has a similar status and nobody worries about that. Mathematics is probably the same too, and yet no one denies that there can be right and wrong in the mathematical sciences.

Of course one might reply that there can be no reason external to the game that can be given to anyone in order to make them accept the rules of the game or start playing it. But this ignores the fact that everyone apart from some of the mentally ill and very young children already play the morality language game. There is broad agreement among participants about what the rules are and quibbling only where the rules seem to break down. One might as well ask what grounds we have for making subject/predicate assertions, or what grounds we have for believing in logic. The answer is that we can't help it and people that pretend that they don't understand the game are simply liars.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

There's one point that I'm convinced the dogmatologists have arse-backwards- namely the notion that standards of good or evil in humam behaviour are derived from religious examples.

I'm not convinced by that. I think it more likely that religious entities were established as examples of already-established human behaviour.

[Agathon]

Yes, Laz, but their conviction is that grounding morality in human attitudes isn't sufficient to make it binding on everyone – in the sense that everyone has to accept moral reasons.

But our evolutionary history is such that we just do accept moral reasons for much the same reasons we feel pain – although the two are not equivalent. Human beings that live in communities possessed altruistic adaptations that allowed them to flourish. It can be proved that radical selfishness is not an evolutionary stable strategy. On the other hand, it is also a fact that absolute altruism doesn't work very well either. Add to this the immense cultural structures such as religions, that are built over our natural endowment and we have the present situation.

Of course it is possible to try to live completely selfishly, but this is in practice very hard to do. Even mobsters have a code of loyalty, although it is to each other rather than society. Nietzsche is right that someone who could overcome his natural endowment and completely disown his moral beliefs and feelings would not be a human being, but a member of some new species. Even the most despicable tyrants construct some sort of moral justification for what they are doing – the Nazis are a prime example. By doing so, these people are implicitly engaging in the moral language game.

But how do we refute them? Well, we do what we always do: we give them moral reasons to change their mind. Sometimes these don't work, but that makes them no different from all sorts of other reasons we give people – such failures do not, as some think, invalidate the practice of reason giving, or necessarily impugn its objectivity. The idea of completely self-validating reasons that no person could ever deny goes back to Plato and is one of his reasons for positing the Forms, since he conceives of these as entities, which if cognized, remove all possibility of doubt.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Can you rephrase that post in a way that makes it interesting?

[Berzerker]

Ben -

1. Is it possible to have evil without a concept of a moral absolute?

Nope.

2. Suppose we do accept the presupposition that there is an absolute concept of good and evil. Then we get to the second half of Speer's claim, that given a moral absolute, is it possible to do so without religion?

Yup, you exist, therefore you belong to yourself. The person who would murder you is taking what does not belong to him, he is taking what belongs to you.

Anything that is good has to come from outside of ourselves, in fact, it cannot exist in nature. Everything here is flawed to some extent.

Then that which created nature is flawed so some other standard is needed.

So if it doesn't come from nature, and it does not come from ourselves, then what else is left to be the origin of the good?

It does come from us, the intelligence to arrive at moral judgements.

It would have to be something that does not change, since morality would not change, and would have to be universal, since this morality would also be universal.

Agreed, a standard is required. But what standard should be used? There is only one that passes the test - ~universal desires or sentiments. We can conclude that murder is immoral because we agree it is immoral. But based on what? Property, you own yourself. The problem is many people will base morality on their personal tastes and will only cite the will of the majority when the majority agrees with them. But is the majority good enough to define morality? Nope, there are plenty of examples of majorities engaging in blatantly immoral behavior. The standard must be more stringent... How about a large majority, ~%75 of the people? No, still not good enough. The standard requires ~universality, we must ~all agree.

That puts you in a tight bind. What could exist outside of nature, yet is both eternal, and universal?

Certainly not religion, just look at the diversity and the evil committed by the religious. How about "God"? How does one know what God wants? A book? Hardly, not without some serious proof this God inspired or authored the entire text. And then how do we know if this God is good to begin with? Logic must be used, compare what this God wants with the universal standard mentioned above.

I think to answer this question, religion gives you the best answer.

Show us a religion that embraces universal desires and you will have only shown 2 paths to the same destination, one religious, the other not...

Suppose that God cannot command that which is evil, because good is an essential part of his nature. This claim has two fronts. First of all, this means that God is the origin of the good. The good is not arbitrary, nor does it change, since God is both unchanging and fixed. Secondly, this means that God cannot act outside of his nature, and thus, will not command things that are evil.

And yet evil exists within creation.

This is a rather deep point, the origin of evil, so I'll try my best. First of all, you are right. If God is the origin of all things, and he is omnipotent, then you are left with the question of how to reconcile the good in his nature with the fact that evil exists in the world.

You are right that God cannot create that which is evil, but rather, the explanation is that evil emerges from the world. In giving us free will, he allows us the freedom to love, as well as to reject God. In rejecting God, we seek that which is evil in itself, since we must find something to replace God. This takes a variety of forms, all of which we would label evil, or destructive.

What would be the alternative? I don't think having a free will can be separated from the possibility of evil. In fact, the evil we see can be said as proof that we have free will, that we can turn away from God if we choose.

First, I reject the notion that free will allows evil. If we have free will, then behavior that violates the free will of a victim violates what "God" gave us. That's like saying God gave us life, therefore murder is allowed. But if what you say is true, then how can God be good? It's a cop-out to blame evil on the created and not on the creator. If your brand new car keeps breaking down, we don't blame the car, we blame the manufacturer...

[Bosh]

Ben: What I don't think that you've addressed it wether morality is independent of God or dependent to god. If morality is independent of God (ie "don't kill people" is intrinsically a good thing) then you have a reified concept of good that is independent of god and that god follows. If morality is dependent on God, on the other hand then "don't kill people" is ONLY good because god said so and if god said "go kill people" would be equally god if god said that was good. Also if morality is dependent on god then the idea that part of god's intrinsic nature is to do good doesn't make any sense since all it would me is that gods intrinsic nature is to do what he commands, which doesn't mean much of anything.

Which is it? How can you make god the font of morality without having what is moral be arbitrary?

Personally, I do good (or at least try to do good) because I'm happier when I act in a moral matter then when I'm not (which makes sense when you view morality from a quasi-Taoist viewpoint in which morality is balance rather than one extreme on a continuum). But then, I'd die in order to prevent all my family from being killed which wouldn't make me happier (because I'd be dead). So I guess that morality is rooted in evolutionary-mandated instincts (since a group of animals that treated each other nicely would tend to do better than a group of animals that back-stabbed each other) and we all make up BS philosophical justifications for the instincts that are hard-wired into our heads.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp
Can you rephrase that post in a way that makes it interesting?

But then it would be twice as long and more confusing.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
Suppose that God cannot command that which is evil, because good is an essential part of his nature. This claim has two fronts. First of all, this means that God is the origin of the good. The good is not arbitrary, nor does it change, since God is both unchanging and fixed. Secondly, this means that God cannot act outside of his nature, and thus, will not command things that are evil.

There are some major problems with this.

First of all, if God is both unchanging and fixed, he cannot be omnipotent. Likewise, if God cannot act outside of his "nature", God is not omnipotent. In fact, if God has a fixed nature, God cannot be infinite.

Another point is, if Evil did not originate with God, it must be just as eternal and powerful as God. Since supposedly nothing came before God and all was His creation. Thus, for Evil to be uncreated, it would have to exist alongside with God. Furthermore, since God is good but He could not have destroyed Evil, Evil have to be just as powerful as He is. IOW, omnipotent.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
This comes right back to the source of the revelations provided. Consider Islam. Mohammed wrote the Q'uran, yet he does not consider himself God. You are one step removed from God. The same is with Israel and the prophets. None of the prophets are God.

However, Christianity claims something different, that God came down to Earth as a man, and that he died on a cross, and then rose from the dead.

The problem here is Mohammed also said that Jesus was not the son of God, just the greatest prophet ever lived.

So, who lied?

[Urban Ranger]

Food for thought

"If it were proved to you that there is no God, which atrocity would you commit first, and why?" -- Jack the Bodiless