(April 18, 2012 at 12:58 am)genkaus Wrote:

(April 18, 2012 at 12:48 am)teaearlgreyhot Wrote: From all my years as a theist, I'd say no. I'm guessing you'd say he's not then all-powerful, and I would respond that he's only all-powerful as is logically possible.

Actually, I was gonna say:

Then his nature is determined by something else then - some even greater standard?

Perhaps his nature nature is necessary, just like his existence is? I'm not sure how a real theist might respond to that, but I see your point.

(April 18, 2012 at 1:04 am)teaearlgreyhot Wrote: Perhaps his nature nature is necessary, just like his existence is? I'm not sure how a real theist might respond to that, but I see your point.

Necessity implies existence of a more basic premise that decrees it.

(April 18, 2012 at 1:36 am)genkaus Wrote:

(April 18, 2012 at 1:04 am)teaearlgreyhot Wrote: Perhaps his nature nature is necessary, just like his existence is? I'm not sure how a real theist might respond to that, but I see your point.

Necessity implies existence of a more basic premise that decrees it.

So, are you saying that everything is contingent and nothing is necessary? I might agree with you, but I can't comprehend the possibility of an infinite number of contingencies.

(April 18, 2012 at 1:42 am)teaearlgreyhot Wrote: So, are you saying that everything is contingent and nothing is necessary? I might agree with you, but I can't comprehend the possibility of an infinite number of contingencies.

No, I'm saying that any statement about contingency or necessity would derive its validity from a prior premise, going back to an axiomatic premise. Clearly, in this case, god is not the axiomatic premise since it is the necessity of his nature that is being discussed. Which means that there would need to be a premise upon which even god's nature would rely upon as basis.

I just read most of the posts and I just think genkaus isn't really giving very satisfactory arguments..

genkaus Wrote:Finally, I think you are trying to indicate circular reasoning here. That's wrong as well. Evolutionary processes gave rise to our reasoning faculty. Using our reasoning faculty, we can actually verify the previous statement. That is not circular, because the first statement does not form a part of the second.

God gave rise to the Bible. Using the Bible we can actually verify God. That is not circular, because the first statement does not form a part of the second. Clearly circular reasoning.

Quote:1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. - This is another way of saying "Objective moral values come from god". I can prove this statement wrong by a simple logical formulation

So this relates to the Euthyphro Dilemma. Ok perfect.

Quote:1. For moral values to be objective, they need to exist independently from any entity's mind.
2. If moral values came from god, they would depend on god's mind.
3. Therefore, if moral values come from god, then they are not objective moral values.
4. Therefore, objective moral values can exist only if god does not exist.

Yeah, ideally that's what we want, but what happened to the alternative, which also happens to be the alternative to the Euthyphro Dilemma? God commands something because it's good?

Don't get me wrong genkaus, I'm on your side, but being a free thinker I can't accept your reasoning because it's heavily flawed/biased.

Maybe this might help:


Understanding Moral Evolution: System of behavioral Adaptation

(April 17, 2012 at 7:16 pm)teaearlgreyhot Wrote:

Quote:Given the truth of naturalism, all our beliefs, not just our moral beliefs, are the result of evolution and social conditioning. Thus, the evolutionary account leads to skepticism about knowledge in general. But this is self-defeating because then we should be skeptical of the evolutionary account itself, since it, too, is the product of evolution and social conditioning! The objection therefore undermines itself (On Guard, 2010, p. 144).

I'm sure this argument has been dealt with elsewhere but I haven't been able to find any refutations as of yet.

In order to reason, we make basic assumptions that are unfalsifiable. I'll warn you now.. this is not going to be a short answer, and I duly credit thunderf00t as a reference for these ideas.

Firstly, we assume reality exists,
Secondly, we assume we can create models on this reality which have predictive effects.

Quite simply we create a model that a rock when thrown will fly through the air and hit the ground. We can further refine this model with physics and mathematics.

So we have the assumptions that must be taken in order to reason on anything. Including God and including Evolution, and including everything in reality.
Some models are more simplistic than others, and the only way to create a model based on reality is to apply boolean operators such as "true" and "false" and to have a model with a predictable outcome that can be tested (thats not to say an outcome cannot be "mostly true" or "slightly false").

What Platinga and Craig propose here is that we must be skeptical about all things, even where we have supporting evidence, because we assume reality is real, and we assume we can build predictive models on reality.

Shocking answer; He's right. We cannot know that Evolution is real, nor can we know that your breakfast was real, or the universe is real, we can't know earth is real, or the animals, or the plants, or you. We should be skeptical about such things, however, being skeptical about the fundamental nature of reality does not allow us to answer questions about what we perceive as reality.

That is the basis of the trickery in the argument. We can easily be skeptical about everything because we make base assumption about reality and what we can predict from that reality.
The trick is equating assumption with faith in this little word game.

Why do we assume things? Because we can test their validity and they are "true enough". We know we exist, although we cannot prove it, we simply have "faith" we actually exist at all.
So the real question is, what is reasonable to have faith in as a basic structure for the universe we are able to reason in?

Atheists propose Assumption 1, and Assumption 2. What Craig and Platinga are trying to sneak in, is that God should be Assumption 3, faith without basis, just like reality and just like the ability to create predictive models.

This defies occams razor, we must take the bare minimum on faith alone, and that only include reality, and prediction based on reality. Adding God to this equation is no more sensible than adding faeries.

Evolution allows for prediction based upon the model we have created. We can predict chromosome similarities and disparities, we can predict the genetic similarity between mother and child, we can predict genetic drift, and we can predict what fossils to expect to find for the ancestors of a modern creature.

We can test these predictions based on assumption 2, and call them True, based on assumption 1, Reality.

What Craig proposes is that we should be skeptical about these assumptions, however, the argument only works in favour of "God" if you add in base assumption 3, God.
To do so is fruitless and unnecessary, when the only faith we NEED is in assumption 1 and 2.

(April 18, 2012 at 2:34 am)FallentoReason Wrote: God gave rise to the Bible. Using the Bible we can actually verify God. That is not circular, because the first statement does not form a part of the second. Clearly circular reasoning.

That wasn't very well-put, was it?

Let's put it this way. You don't need to know that your reasoning faculty came from evolutionary processes to know that it can be used to verify what is true and what is not. This is our correct starting point here and it can be demonstrated in many other ways, none of which would have anything to do with evolutionary processes. In fact, we've been using our reasoning faculty to do that since before

The same is not applicable to the bible. In order to establish that the bible can be used as a standard of truth, you must first establish that it is the word of god. That is what I meant by the first being a part of the second. You need to assume that bible is the word of god in order to use it to use it to verify anything that may be given by it. But you do not need to assume or even know whether or not evolutionary processes gave rise to reasoning faculty in order know that you can use them to verify the truth. Its by missing that dependency that my argument avoids circularity.

(April 18, 2012 at 2:34 am)FallentoReason Wrote: Yeah, ideally that's what we want, but what happened to the alternative, which also happens to be the alternative to the Euthyphro Dilemma? God commands something because it's good?

That is what we've established here. We see that objective moral values must be independent of god and therefore, god is irrelevant to objective standards of morality. The good and bad can be determined without any reference to god and therefore, Craig's statement that you cannot have objective moral values without god is wrong.

genkaus Wrote:Let's put it this way. You don't need to know that your reasoning faculty came from evolutionary processes to know that it can be used to verify what is true and what is not. This is our correct starting point here and it can be demonstrated in many other ways, none of which would have anything to do with evolutionary processes. In fact, we've been using our reasoning faculty to do that since before

Darwin himself feared that our cognitive faculties aren't reliable. Here's the beast that we're dealing with that explains why your reasoning is circular reasoning:

http://atheistforums.com/viewtopic.php?f...+cognitive Wrote:The worry can be put as follows. According to orthodox Darwinism, the process of evolution is driven mainly by two mechanisms: random genetic mutation and natural selection. The former is the chief source of genetic variability; by virtue of the latter, a mutation resulting in a heritable, fitness-enhancing trait is likely to spread through that population and be preserved as part of the genome. It is fitness-enhancing behavior and traits that get rewarded by natural selection; what get penalized are maladaptive traits and behaviors. In crafting our cognitive faculties, natural selection will favor cognitive faculties and processes that result in adaptive behavior; it cares not a whit about true belief (as such) or about cognitive faculties that reliably give rise to true belief. As evolutionary psychologist Donald Sloan Wilson puts it, “the well-adapted mind is ultimately an organ of survival and reproduction” (Wilson 2002, 228). What our minds are for (if anything) is not the production of true beliefs, but the production of adaptive behavior: that our species has survived and evolved at most guarantees that our behavior is adaptive; it does not guarantee or even make it likely that our belief-producing processes are for the most part reliable, or that our beliefs are for the most part true. That is because our behavior could perfectly well be adaptive, but our beliefs false as often as true. Darwin himself apparently worried about this question: “With me,” says Darwin,

the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? (Darwin 1887)

We can briefly state Darwin's doubt as follows. Let R be the proposition that our cognitive faculties are reliable, N the proposition that naturalism is true and E the proposition that we and our cognitive faculties have come to be by way of the processes to which contemporary evolutionary theory points us: what is the conditional probability of R on N&E? I.e., what is P(R | N&E)? Darwin fears it may be rather low.

We can state the argument schematically as follows:

1. P(R | N&E) is low.
2. Anyone who accepts N&E and sees that (1) is true has a defeater for R.
3. Anyone who has a defeater for R has a defeater for any other belief she holds, including N&E itself.
Therefore

Anyone who accepts N&E and sees that (1) is true has a defeater for N&E; hence N&E can't be rationally accepted.

Quote:That is what we've established here. We see that objective moral values must be independent of god and therefore, god is irrelevant to objective standards of morality. The good and bad can be determined without any reference to god and therefore, Craig's statement that you cannot have objective moral values without god is wrong.

Agreed. All I was saying was that you went the extra step and made a baseless assertion that God cannot exist if what is good is apart from him. I don't see that as a reasonable conclusion, that is all.

His fears were well-founded, again, this is why we've developed systems to attempt to overcome the limitations of our minds. If the only thing you have going for your truth claims are the thoughts floating around in your head, your truth claims are on shaky ground.