The Moral Argument for God

[athrock]

First, can you describe how it it possible to have objective moral values without a god?

Snipty, the Objective Moral Values Raccoon. He's a raccoon, and he has the power to make objective moral values.

I'll continue going through your lengthy response, but first I need to point out that all you've done is the same thing another poster has done: you've offered Snipty as a candidate for the office of God.

What objections can you bring against Snipty that wouldn't also apply to god under the same premises?

None. And that only makes sense because if Snipty is the source of all OBJECTIVE (and that's the key word) moral values, then Snipty is a legitimate contender for the title. Any being that is the source of objective moral values must be a SUPREME BEING - regardless of whether it's a god or a raccoon.

There's no evidence for Snipty?

If there's no evidence for Snipty why did you propose him/her as a possible source for OMV's? I'm just poking the bear...the real problem with your argument follows next.

Well, there's no evidence for god either; if there was you wouldn't need to resort to logical arguments, you'd just point to the positive evidence. Only people who can't prove their claims do exist need to fall back on proving that their claims must exist.

Arguments such as the Moral Argument ARE the evidence for god or Snipty. If I can show that the existence of OMV's require the existence of Snipty and that OMV's do, in fact, exist, then I have proven the existence of Snipty. That goes for some of the other classic arguments, too, btw. Cosmological, Teleological, etc.

However, YOU are hung up on your need for empirical evidence. I'm not sure what you would expect...giant letters written in the sky? Or the classic demand for the healing of an amputee complete with video tape and the sworn testimony of the entire staff of Johns Hopkins?

It seems to me that you fail to appreciate the power of philosophical arguments.

Moreover, the fact that god can be switched out with Snipty in the argument, without significantly changing the formulation of the argument nor appearing any more or less connected to objective moral values than god is a huge red flag: if I can insert a magic raccoon into your argument without changing a single other thing, then your argument probably doesn't demonstrate that god exists any more than it does that Snipty exists. At the very least, you now have an argument that, if we assume the premises to be true, now has two equally sufficient conclusions, and no justification within the argument itself for selecting one over the other. Therefore, the argument as it stands cannot be used to justify god over Snipty, and thus the logic of the argument is false.

This is simply more of the same, so I'll just repeat my point stated earlier: Snipty is (according to you) possibly god. Like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Seriously, I don't really care what you call it: Yahweh, Allah, FSM, Snipty...these are just cultural designations. If a being exists which is the source and measure of all OMV's, then that being has met at least one reasonable threshold for being considered SUPREME.

 The challenge for the non-believing crowd, as I understand it, is that without a fixed reference point, there is no way to establish the "objective" aspect of morality; everything becomes subjective. Have a go at that (and thanks in advance, btw).

I'm a little torn on how I should answer this, since there's a clear problem with the formulation, yet my actual position on the matter is different from the one that objection raises. So first of all, this point you're making is based on an equivocation that theists use regarding the term subjective, which is that subjective only means "completely up for individual determination in every respect," which is false, but it helps them set up their false dichotomy of "magically objective," versus "no morals beyond opinion at all," so they're happy to not think about it anyway. But we routinely function via a sort of group subjectivity every day, which is one of many types of subjectivity that has upper and lower bounds of intelligibility: the way we diagnose mental illness, for example, is by comparing the subjective experience of the patient versus the commonly held subjective experiences of everyone else and finding inconsistencies between the two. Both are subjective experiences, but we still understand that there are limits to that, because we understand that our subjective experiences correspond with an objectively real world that we're all forced to inhabit together by necessity. People don't just go around allowing mentally ill people to do whatever because mental health is subjective and thus limitless, and our moral principles have similar physical consequences, why wouldn't we treat them the same, subjective or not? To do otherwise is to deny the objective world we share, which is just solipsism.

I'm with you so far, I think. Which is to say, I understand, but I don't think we're any closer to understanding how we establish OMV's without a fixed reference.

Also, I do have to point out that there is an objective reality, which I would suggest is a perfectly adequate objective source for morality, no god required. We are physical beings, inhabiting a physical reality, and there are objective facts that can be known about us: what's good for us, what's bad for us, these things are objectively demonstrable, and they are a sufficient basis for the formulation of an objective moral system. Stabbing a person objectively goes against their welfare, after all, and if morality doesn't concern itself with the welfare of thinking beings then it's effectively useless. This is my position on morality: reality serves as a perfectly adequate objective moral basis from which to build a moral system, no god required.

Ah, shades of Sam Harris. So, you're defining morality as that which produces a positive, pragmatic benefit for a sentient being. Is that what it means to be morally good?

But I also object to your framing this as a "challenge," because what it really is is an argument from consequences fallacy. "If there is no objective morality then everything is subjective, therefore you have to account for that," isn't a valid form anyway, but it also isn't a challenge that needs resolving because "If X then something bad will happen, therefore Not X," is not a true statement. What if morality is just subjective in my estimation? That doesn't make the claim of objective morality any more true just because you'd find it uncomfortable, and thus it poses no challenge.

Interesting. So, you acknowledge (I think) that OMV's exist, but you object to my asking for an explanation of their source?

And if there are no OBJECTIVE moral values, doesn't that mean that the OMV's which you can imagine are necessarily SUBJECTIVE?

Second, it seems to me that we know that objective moral values do exist because we behave this way every day. Whenever we say, "That's not fair!", we are measuring the action in question against some standard that everyone is somehow expected to know. Even little kids on a playground recognize that when someone cuts in line to go down the slide, an injustice has been done. Where do we get these notions from?

How did you determine that this indicates an objective moral value, rather than just a consistently shared subjective one?

What does your own lived experience tell you of the existence of OMV's? And are you honestly going to argue that if one group of people in one corner of the planet decide that X is acceptable, then it is FOR THEM but not FOR YOU simply because you grew up in a a different country??? Are you going to tell people from that corner who migrate to your country, "Whoops, sorry...that may have been perfectly acceptable where you came from, but now you're bound by my (technically, our) sense of morality since you crossed a line on a map"?

This is the problem: you're not doing any legwork. You're just taking observations and arbitrarily tacking on the label of "objective," just because they're consistent across human cultures, but that's not the hallmark of an objective attribute. All that is is fiat assertion. Something can be held in common by every human being on the planet and still be subjective. What makes a thing objective is that it exists external to any mind apprehending it, and in that sense I don't even know that "objective morals," is a coherent claim to make, because morals are conceptual by nature. They aren't entities, they're judgments rendered based on actions or thoughts, so in what sense could they be objectively real?

Hmmm...sounds like you actually advocate subjective morality.

To be absolutely clear, a moral system handed down to us by a god would not be objective merely by dint of coming from a god, either. God is a subjective mind, his opinions on morality are no more woven into the fabric of the universe just because he holds them than ours are. And if they were, then you'd be able to find that out within reality and report upon that, but thus far I've never so much as heard a clear definition of how a moral precept could exist objectively. Theists just sort of take it as read that if it comes from god then it's objective, but what they really have there is a subjective morality imbued with an absurd amount of authority, and that's just not the same thing.

I think the theist response would be that OMV's exist not because of God's opinions but because of his nature. What is called "good" not because he declares it to be so but because he is so.

Let me try an analogy. Suppose we envision an earthly ruler who has absolute authority over the land and people he governs. Are his opinions about what should and should not be permissable in his country considered "good" merely because he issues orders regarding various behaviors? Hardly. History is littered with the damage caused by evil tyrants. What they decreed was not good because they were not good; they were evil.

But if a god exists, then that god must a good god and not an evil god. And what he commands must be good because he himself is good and not evil. An evil god could not or would not create a universe like ours because the goodness we see and experience would go against his very nature. A supreme being cannot contradict himself.

Now, I could be wrong cause this isn't my thing, but although the definition of "subjective" refers to personal feelings, tastes and opinions, god as theists envision him has none of these. So, he can't be subjective.

Finally, even if, as you say, it's possible "to have a god that doesn't provide objective moral values", this fact doesn't really aid the freethinker, does it? I mean, he might argue, "I don't believe in objective moral values" but you'd counter that a god might still exist. If you're right, then the atheist can no longer use the argument that "there are no objective moral values" as justification for denying the existence of a god. Meanwhile, the believer might lose the use of this one argument but not the belief in his god. 

Who has gotten the better of that exchange?

But we're not talking about the existence of god, we're talking about the argument from morality. The complete lack of positive evidence for god is all I need to be an atheist and "win" the epistemological debate, and the fact that that is the state of affairs is why we only get these scrabbling, desperate logical arguments from theists in the hopes that we'll mistake them for positive evidence if repeated enough times.

As I pointed out above, this is a demand for empirical evidence. The Moral Argument is a philosophical argument, and I find it unconvincing.

You'd said that the logic of the argument from morality was sound, which is why I had to point out that a god can exist without providing objective morality, because that shows that the logic is not sound: obviously if an "if P then Q," proposition in reality could equally be "if P then not Q," or in reverse, either "if Q then P," or "if Q then not P," then that first proposition is effectively saying nothing. The moral argument relies upon the premise that if there's P, then Q will be the state of things, but I've already demonstrated how P does not entail Q, or at least that it entails Q or Not Q equally, and that Q in no way entails P.

That falsifies the claim that the logic of the argument is sound.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that on this point you are in error.

If P then Q is logically equivalent to If not Q, then not P.

You can look this up on Google. I did.

So, the Moral Argument says that if God does not exist, then OMV's do not exist.

Or

If OMV's exist, then God exists.

Either way.

So, the Moral Argument is that the existence of objective moral values requires the existence of source (called "God"), and since our own experience tells us that OMV's are real, their source must be real, too.

Skeptics offer little in the way of a compelling alternative to that source being a supreme being.