How to beat a presupp at their own game

[The Architect Of Fate]

You are making a strawman here. It's clear that a maximally great deity won't sanction raping babies. You say : " Let's presume that something that you've accepted as moral actually isn't moral" , isn't moral according to whom, again? what's more probable, that your own moral assessment is wrong, or that an all knowing deity made a moral mistake...........?

It's better to think of it in a bottom-up fashion. We establish God's existence first, as a maximally great being, then we follow God's moral recommendations. What you're doing here is the exact opposite : you think moral recommendations are arbitrary because you're not convinced that any maximally great being exists in the first place, and I don't blame you, actually, you cannot accept the conclusion (God is absolute morality) because you don't accept the simplest premise of it (God exists as a maximally great being).... well, duh..

No, that's not correct and it's not a strawman.  You say it's clear that any maximally great deity wouldn't sanction baby-raping, yet you don't actually show how you would determine that your god was sanctioning something similarly immoral.  You skipped the question which asked that very thing.  Until you can show how you would determine that your god's morals are wrong, you can't conclude that they are right. The question of who it's immoral to is irrelevant as long as there is objective morality.  If morals are an objective real feature of reality, it doesn't need a who.  And no, my conclusions about your god's morality have nothing to do with my not thinking he exists.  They are based upon what your religion tells us about Allah, namely that he answers to no one and anything he says goes.  If that's your justification, that same justification can be used to declare ANY god moral, including the baby-raping god.  The people in that alternate reality are saying all the same things about their god that you are saying about your god, so obviously the things you are saying don't in any sense pick out a moral god from a pantheon of possible other gods with different morals.  Here, let's make it plain.  Let's say that I am a traveler from that alternate universe, and I've told you how shameful I think it is that your god forbids baby raping.  How would you go about convincing me that I was the one who was worshipping an immoral god?  You've already said that it's clear that he is, to which, as a believer in the baby raping god I reply, "Nonsense.  It's clear that baby-raping is moral and that your god is immoral for not allowing it.  It's obvious!  All laws and morality come from my god and my god has a morally perfect nature and so he couldn't sanction baby-raping if it were immoral.  So, obviously, baby-raping is moral!"  What's your response?

Btw, there's a serious problem with your counter-argument.  You can't determine that something is maximally great without examining all its properties for maximal greatness.  Since maximal greatness morally isn't a product of any other property or attribute, you can't determine it from some other characteristic, so you have to evaluate Allah's morality on its own terms just as we have been doing regardless of anything else you can determine.  You can't conclude that Allah is maximally great without first concluding that he is maximally moral.  You've got the cart before the horse.  This is probably because you've never actually determined that Allah is maximally great, you've just swallowed the assertion whole as just another piece of dogma that you accept uncritically.  But feel free to show that Allah is maximally great without showing that he is maximally moral.


"There has certainly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent pattern for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the Last Day and remembers Allah often."
Surah 33:21

Mohammed says, "Grab 'em by the pussy while they're still young!"

So he's whipped out the whole "maximally great" nonsense, has he? One would think after a decade of that being lampooned they would drop it.