Ryft Wrote:Then you misunderstood his point, which is not necessarily his fault and certainly not the fault of his analogy. He defined the property relation in this way: just as charge and mass are properties of fundamental particles, such that without the latter the former is unintelligible, so goodness is a property of God, such that without God goodness is unintelligible. You can push is analogy to extents he never intended with it, but that is your doing and not his. All analogies break down if you push them far enough. But why not contend with the analogy as he presented it, instead of pushing it to extent he did not?
You did a little switcharoo there, from 'fundamental properties of particles' to 'properties of fundamental particles', that changes the meaning significantly, the former is a property that belongs to all particles necessarily, the latter is a property of elementary particles. Even in the case where you switch the position of fundamental in the sentence it still doesn't work, charge and mass are optional.
You would hardly say "Goodness is to god as optional properties are to elementary particles" would you?
And I didn't "push" his analogy at all, I just pointed out that it doesn't work at face value, he has misunderstood the thing to which he was using to illustrate the relationhship between goodness and God.
And if his case was that Goodness is unitnelligable without God then he is more lost than I had initially thought, goodness works perfectly well without any assumption of deity as a property of an interaction between beings where the values of one person are increased by the actions of another or that one individual sacrificed something they value in hope of increasing the values of others.
.
