RE: How to easily defeat any argument for God
August 10, 2019 at 2:47 am
(This post was last modified: August 10, 2019 at 3:21 am by The Grand Nudger.)
That god isn’t required for the criticism you’re attempting to deflect with its invocation.
The trouble of moral value being derived from god expresses itself regardless of whether a god says anything or not. Refer to the possible worlds example.
That trouble, like that god, is deeply embedded in Christian theology , even if the people in the church on the corner don’t know it.
If “the good” is synonymous with a gods nature, no matter how nebulous and impersonal we make the god, a change in its nature is s change in what is good. If a gods nature were what we recognize as evil, then evil would be good, as good is synonymous with god.
Good is therefore arbitrary in this account. Thankfully or luckily we rolled the good god, rather than the bastard god. This is all that stands between us and the holocaust being a moral imperative of a “good” god.
The “absence of good” semantics fail for this same reason, as we can posit a possible world in which the character or nature of the god is what we would recognize as a complete and utter “absence of good”, with god and good still being synonymous.
If, otoh, we accept that realism can only be asserted in reference to a god by positing that a god is good insomuch as it conforms to a standard of goodness apart from itself and objectively true, we realize that even in a possible world -with- a god, who happens to be good, it’s knowledge of the standard to which this god is subject that allows us to state or infer moral facts which would be true in all possible worlds no matter what changes we make to gods nature.
The trouble of moral value being derived from god expresses itself regardless of whether a god says anything or not. Refer to the possible worlds example.
That trouble, like that god, is deeply embedded in Christian theology , even if the people in the church on the corner don’t know it.
If “the good” is synonymous with a gods nature, no matter how nebulous and impersonal we make the god, a change in its nature is s change in what is good. If a gods nature were what we recognize as evil, then evil would be good, as good is synonymous with god.
Good is therefore arbitrary in this account. Thankfully or luckily we rolled the good god, rather than the bastard god. This is all that stands between us and the holocaust being a moral imperative of a “good” god.
The “absence of good” semantics fail for this same reason, as we can posit a possible world in which the character or nature of the god is what we would recognize as a complete and utter “absence of good”, with god and good still being synonymous.
If, otoh, we accept that realism can only be asserted in reference to a god by positing that a god is good insomuch as it conforms to a standard of goodness apart from itself and objectively true, we realize that even in a possible world -with- a god, who happens to be good, it’s knowledge of the standard to which this god is subject that allows us to state or infer moral facts which would be true in all possible worlds no matter what changes we make to gods nature.
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