(January 1, 2011 at 2:09 pm)Stempy Wrote: Option 4: Moral terms are grounded in the nature of God. They are grounded in the sense that goodness is one of God's properties, in exactly the same way that charge and mass are properties of fundamental particles. If fundamental particles do not exist, there is no such thing as charge and mass. In the same way (on this view), if God does not exist, there is no such thing as goodness.
A few problems here...
Your analogy is flawed in that DAT (Divine attitude theory) requires a God who is necessarily good where as an elementary particle does not necessarily have mass and/or charge (such as some flavors of neutrino) they are both optional properties.
It may still be true that charge and mass could not exist without elementary particles, but just because a particle exists does not necessitate either.
Charge and mass are likely not even properties of the particles themselves, they may be the effects of interactions between particles and forces (that may or may not in turn be carried by particles).
I would argue that like mass and charge being properties of interactions and not the objects themselves, goodness only exists in the interaction between beings and not as some independent thing. God was not "good" before there were other beings to consider (unless you would argue that God's knowledge of the effect of his actions was present from t0 and thus he can be good from t0).
In any case, Good cannot be one of gods fundamental properties if goodness is contingent upon interaction, it makes goodness an emergent and contingent property.
You would also have to show that god is necessarily good, I've never seen a single theist do this.
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