RE: Christians, Prove Your God Is Good
March 6, 2015 at 8:39 am
(This post was last modified: March 6, 2015 at 8:42 am by Ignorant.)
(March 5, 2015 at 2:12 pm)robvalue Wrote: Can anyone explain to me what ignorant's actual point is? I mean... I just don't know. I see stuff like this all over the place from theists, and I can't understand the motivation . . . Sure, this philosophical stuff is interesting, morality and all that. Good and bad. Of course nothing is clear cut. But . . . What's the actual point?
Well hopefully Ignorant can explain what Ignorant's point is! =) Only, I don't think you will be very satisfied by it.
The title of the thread is "Christians, Prove Your God is Good"
The title presumes a common understanding of the common terms for the "proover" and the "provee". E.g. terms like "God" and "Good" and "prove". I think our discussion has shown, if nothing else, that not all of us agree on the meaning signified by the term "good". Seeing that "good" is the actual predicate under investigation, you would think that people would want to make sure we all mean the same thing by it, AT LEAST for the sake of any proposed "proof". The fact that we don't have a common understanding yet is problematic for the challenge issued in this thread's title.
My point, if I have any at all, is to make sure that those terms really ARE commonly held for the sake of any such proof. Can you imagine (and I am sure you can draw from previous experiences) how very frustrating it would be to watch a Christian attempt a proof that God is good, only to find that he uses the word "good" in a very different sense than you do?
Sadly, most of what I have seen here is that "good" is being used with the meaning of "moral". God is "good" is understood as God is "moral", which is swiftly rejected by pointing to various aspects of the Christian Bible. God is just an immoral and capricious actor among the many in the Bible. This is problematic for any proposed proof because there are implicit presuppositions about goodness that are never spoken of. I want to speak about them. What is the framework by which an act is judged to be "moral"? What is the framework by which the proposition "God is good" can be judged true or false? Do we even care? I do.
It seems that The Reality Salesman also cares:
(March 5, 2015 at 3:21 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: I'm really trying to figure out what he's trying to get at too . . . He's said that "good" could have meaning even if there were no such thing as bad.
Can you help me out here? I don't remember ever having said this, and I don't think I did. If I did, can you show me where?
There is such a thing as "bad", but it is not a "positive" reality. Light exists when photons (and any other light particles I am not aware of) are present. Darkness exists when photons are absent. Analogously, good exists when "some thing able to satisfy" is present. Bad exists when "some thing able to satisfy" is absent. This is what I said on pg. 23, #222
Evil/bad exists just as surely as darkness exists, but the words signify a real lacking/absence rather than a real "anti-light" or "anti-good" thing. Do you at least agree that darkness exists as the word we use to describe the experience of light's absence? I think that has a great deal to do with the confusion as well.
(March 5, 2015 at 3:21 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: The very use of the word [good] describes an aspect of something in relation to something else.
Well, ya, I have said that. Good describes an aspect of a thing in relation to its ability to satisfy a desire (the desire being the "something else"). Things are "good for" something else.
"Goodness is the aspect under which we judge things to be more or less able to fulfill our human desires or appetites. As such, calling something good implicitly includes the understanding "good FOR"
-Me, pg. 9, #85
(March 5, 2015 at 2:01 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: Agreed, and would you also agree that in the absence of any agent capable of abstracting judgment, the thing does could not possess any intrinsic quality other than its existence. For example, if a rock exists, and there is no other object that exists, the rock does not possess any quality other than existence
No, I would not agree to that, and I don't think you really do either. Do you really think it is necessary to begin discussing metaphysics? All things in the universe exist as some thing, and any one of them, if they were the only thing existing, would continue existing as that thing even when other different things began "popping" up.
Quote:The rock can only be. And it is, or it isn't, and nothing more can be abstracted about the nature of this rock in addition to it being true that it "is" or "is not" a thing. The word "rock" would not even be required. Does that make sense?
Yes and no. Absent any mind capable of abstracting things, of course nothing more can be abstracted about the rock. So what? Do I agree that a rational agent is a required aspect of speaking about judgments? uh, yup. Do I agree that those judgments are ultimately arbitrary and meaningless projections of meaning onto merely existing things? No, and I didn't think that you did either.
Quote:I'm trying to address why it is that those ideas mean anything at all.
I am now truly confused. I thought that we agreed that, even though our experience of things are inherently subjective, there is a truth about things as they exist in reality toward which our subjective experience and judgments ought to be moving:
"I just wanted to make sure that we nailed that down. Sometimes it seems like people believe that if something is subjective then there is nothing objective to be extracted from it. We're making tracks here, making tracks!...lets nail some more of this down."
-You, pg. 27, #261
Those ideas have meaning insofar as they signify the subjective experience of an objective reality. The closer the subjective experience "matches" what takes place in reality, the truer the judgment is.
(March 5, 2015 at 2:01 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: My point is, why does this judgment a coherent concept to us? And can you imagine what it would take to render it incoherent?
I don't understand the question as it is stated.
Quote:Because it is in my nature to eat, I can have this desire. And because I have the experience of being exposed to more than one option, there is a possibility that I will form a preference. I think I agree so far.
As an aside, what do you mean by "my nature"?
Quote:If this is the single exposure to the stimulation, whatever it is that you decide to label it isn't really relevant yet. It is the only thing you know. It is what it is, and it is not, whatever it is not. In retrospect, you can begin to analyze the chain of events that lead to your current state of mind and identify a causal chain in the course of events that lead to it. But is it at all relevant or useful? Can it be reliably applied to future experiences? The next time you experience the same desire, what use does this idea of the thing you've decided to call "good" have when faced with your second experience? Say you do the exact same thing and the second time, you get the exact same experience, and it too is "good". Now, in your experience, all things are good, no? You could include that the nature of experience is "good" and by doing so, you've renamed experiences with the name "good". If the results were not desirable on both occasions, the opposite would be true. If the first thing you ate lead to food poisoning that lasted 3 days and all you did was vomit and shit yourself, that would not be good, but it would be your first experience with eating. You couldn't say it was bad, could you? You could probably say that you certainly didn't enjoy it and as you say, it isn't desirable, but at this point, you don't know that any experience could be any different, the very word "different" has no meaning to you yet. So, the second time you eat something you get a worse case of food poisoning, and this time it lasts a 5 days and is equally lacking in pleasure. Now that you have more than one experience, the existence of difference between the two has given rise to the meaning of "better" or "worse" and it is only in retrospect upon having the second experience. You could conclude that of all experiences you've had, being sick for 3 days is "better" than 5 days. And if these are the only two samples of experience, does the word "good" have any coherent application?
Ha, YES it has a coherent application! The fact that you could just coherently describe an agent making those judgments combined with the fact that I could coherently follow your description must mean that it has coherence. Here is why:
In the sicknesses, the REASON that person could conceivably conclude that the 3 day sickness was "better" than the 5 day sickness was because the agent recognized the presence of some satisfying aspect of the 3 day sickness that was absent in the 5 day. According to that difference in the satisfying aspects, a comparative judgment could be coherently and consistently made.
Quote:But without a reference point, whatever word you use does not describe the nature of the thing you have described because our experience of reality is wholly dependent on the existence of independent objects that are set apart by the characteristics of their distinct nature.
1) Now things have natures? I thought that the solitary rock had nothing but "existence"? Now the rock has a "distinct nature"? Well that makes things easier I suppose, but also confusing. Talk about using words!
2) I agree that "good" as far as I have been using it, only implicitly describes things as objects. "Good" inherently connects a thing with "how that thing relates to my desires". But does that say NOTHING about the "nature" of a thing when we say, "that satisfies <insert a human desire>"?
3) Things relate to my desires in BOTH an objective and a subjective way. For example, I can claim that dirt is good to eat for nourishment and growth because after I eat it, I am no longer hungry (the dirt having stretched my stomach). I am right in that I am no longer hungry, and I am WRONG about my irrational connection between the sating of my hunger and the ability to nourish attributed to the thing which sated that hunger.
Quote: Each word used to describe anything, describes the nature of "x" in relation to "y". If all that exists is "x", then "x" is whatever it is, and it is not whatever it is not. It exists, or it doesn't, and a description of "x" is only coherent in relation to some other thing.
In relation to what, according to you, does the word "Rock" describe a rock?
