How to easily defeat any argument for God

[GrandizerII]

And he hit the reply button already ... sigh ...

This sounds like something a philosophical version of Trump would say "I have eliminated all naturalistic explanations here, believe me"

By the way, your argument to be successful should not rely on my agreement with any of your premises (on in this case, your twisting my words into appearing to agree with you). The argument should be able to stand on its own and have sound, well-demonstrated premises.

But of course, rather than make that attempt, you'll just respond promptly to this post and not say much of anything.

My argument relies on people who agree that goodness and badness are objective truths, and it's not reserved for those who reject this. It's reserved for those who accept that statements like the Holocaust is bad, is objectively true, like 1+1 = 2, or the earth is round. 

It's reserved for those who share the recognition, who see the objective badness and goodness of things, as I do.

So your argument is not objectively true then?

[Belacqua]

Doesn't change the fact, though, that humans have learned to help each other out due mainly to the favorability of cooperation for continued survival. And this is good (helping people is a good thing after all). What's also good is that the species has thus a basic foundation upon which to further develop good. 

OK, we evolved to do some things that you believe are good. 

But that doesn't mean that the preferences evolution gave us are necessarily good. That would be the appeal to nature fallacy. 

There is nothing in evolution, or any other science, which can prove that "helping each other out" is good. That is a preference, and one that we probably have (to a very limited extent) thanks to natural selection.

[GrandizerII]

Doesn't change the fact, though, that humans have learned to help each other out due mainly to the favorability of cooperation for continued survival. And this is good (helping people is a good thing after all). What's also good is that the species has thus a basic foundation upon which to further develop good. 

OK, we evolved to do some things that you believe are good. 

But that doesn't mean that the preferences evolution gave us are necessarily good. That would be the appeal to nature fallacy. 

There is nothing in evolution, or any other science, which can prove that "helping each other out" is good. That is a preference, and one that we probably have (to a very limited extent) thanks to natural selection.

There is something about the act itself that does in an axiomatic sense indicate good. Can you make sense of the contrary: that cooperation and promoting others well-being is morally bad? Sometimes it may not be practical, if we have limited resources which we do, but impractical does not mean not morally good.

Evolution doesn't decide what's good or bad. It just so happens that we have evolved in a way that can align with morally good behavior, not perfectly of course, but enough to explain why it is many of us are committed to do good [conditionally at least].

[Belacqua]

In addition to categorising "good" as indefinable, Moore also emphasized that it is a non-natural property. This means that it cannot be empirically or scientifically tested or verified - it is not within the bounds of "natural science"."

-Wikipedia.

I completely agree with Moore here. And I think that the people arguing with you don't understand what's going on. 

Just by chance I found this last night on a philosopher's blog:

“Talk of moral ‘perception’, like talk of mathematical intuition, or of reference and understanding, is not reducible to the language or the world-picture of physics. That does not mean physics is ‘incomplete’. Physics can be ‘complete’–that is, complete for physical purposes. The completeness physics lacks is a completeness all particular theories, pictures, and discourses lack. For no theory or picture is complete for all purposes. If the irreducibility of ethics to physics shows that values are projections, then colors are also projections. So are the natural numbers. So, for that matter, is ‘the physical world’. But being a projection in this sense is not the same thing as being subjective.”

— Hilary Putnam, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard

And in other news, we'd been expecting this typhoon for a week and hearing how dangerous it is, and it passed over last night without even a power outage. All my roof tiles are still intact. It's almost disappointing. 

[GrandizerII]

In addition to categorising "good" as indefinable, Moore also emphasized that it is a non-natural property. This means that it cannot be empirically or scientifically tested or verified - it is not within the bounds of "natural science"."

-Wikipedia.

I completely agree with Moore here. And I think that the people arguing with you don't understand what's going on. 

Just by chance I found this last night on a philosopher's blog:

— Hilary Putnam, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard

And in other news, we'd been expecting this typhoon for a week and hearing how dangerous it is, and it passed over last night without even a power outage. All my roof tiles are still intact. It's almost disappointing. 

Moore doesn't really clarify what he meant by "natural", and there are good counter answers to his open question argument. You're free to look them up online as they're readily available via Google.

Me personally, once you get to something like harm is bad, then there need not be any further questions. Harm is pretty much a bad thing morally. At some point you're going to have to accept that harm is bad, that it's a very fair axiom, that I need not be so stubborn that we need to first really really prove harm is bad. Are you an idealist by any chance? A solipsist?

[Belacqua]

Moore doesn't really clarify what he meant by "natural", and there are good counter answers to his open question argument. You're free to look them up online as they're readily available via Google.

Me personally, once you get to something like harm is bad, then there need not be any further questions. Harm is pretty much a bad thing morally. At some point you're going to have to accept that harm is bad, that it's a very fair axiom, that I need not be so stubborn that we need to first really really prove harm is bad. Are you an idealist by any chance? A solipsist?

The word "harm" contains the meaning "bad." Just as "murder" means "bad killing." There can't be good harm or good murder.

This leaves unanswered the question of why we think it's bad. 

I still think that "cutting the head off a baby will kill it" and "killing it is bad" are different kinds of questions. 

I'm not a solipsist. That's a silly question. 

This has gotten boring, as people are talking past each other.

[GrandizerII]

Moore doesn't really clarify what he meant by "natural", and there are good counter answers to his open question argument. You're free to look them up online as they're readily available via Google.

Me personally, once you get to something like harm is bad, then there need not be any further questions. Harm is pretty much a bad thing morally. At some point you're going to have to accept that harm is bad, that it's a very fair axiom, that I need not be so stubborn that we need to first really really prove harm is bad. Are you an idealist by any chance? A solipsist?

The word "harm" contains the meaning "bad." Just as "murder" means "bad killing." There can't be good harm or good murder.

This leaves unanswered the question of why we think it's bad. 

I still think that "cutting the head off a baby will kill it" and "killing it is bad" are different kinds of questions. 

I'm not a solipsist. That's a silly question. 

This has gotten boring, as people are talking past each other.

The solipsist question is rhetorical. You take for granted that other people have minds, you can't prove that they do, though. And you need not to, unless this is somehow relevant to whatever challenge you're trying to meet.

As an individual act, cutting off a baby's head and thus killing it is harmful to its wellbeing, and as such it is bad. We can accept this as such, or we can continue to be stubborn and argue "but is it really?"

[Belacqua]

we can continue to be stubborn and argue "but is it really?"

I have never asked "but is it really?"

Nor has Acrobat. 

This is getting silly. Over and out.

[GrandizerII]

we can continue to be stubborn and argue "but is it really?"

I have never asked "but is it really?"

Nor has Acrobat. 

This is getting silly. Over and out.

Moore's argument is about that. Did you not mention Moore?

And I just checked your last post. What are you asking about then? You're not asking is killing a baby bad? Your last post contains that question, lol

ETA: I'm not saying you think killing babies is bad is questionable. I know you believe it's bad. I'm saying that your demand for strong proof is unreasonable and your suggestion that there must be something beyond natural about morality is unwarranted.

Furthermore, it just so happens that Moore is not really as non-naturalistic as he purports to be. He still thinks it's all natural in some sense. From what I read, he doesn't believe in some spooky reality that Acrobat does.

[The Grand Nudger]

He used the term non natural to mean not empirical. Like a number, an axiom, or an idea.

The main point of the position is that “bad”, for example, isn’t harm. Harm is bad, sure. But bad Durant reduce to any natural ( or empirical ) property. Non naturalism thinks that naturalism is the wrong explanation in that respect. The supernatural explanation would just be super-wrong.

Instead, we know that things are bad because( or when) they harm because harm is bad-alike. It has a badness. Bad is a term for a concept that we directly apprehend and reason from. It’s not contained to any individual.

We all apprehend bad even if we don’t fill the set with the same contents. It’s strength is that brute force comment of human experience. It’s weakness is that, since it can’t point to the empirical as bad, only as partaking of it typifying the form bad by pure reason, it can’t demonstrate that it’s not simply referring to intersubjectivity.

That, and the loose rational mooring of anything claimed - and claimed to be - non empirical, or non natural.