How to easily defeat any argument for God

[Belacqua]

I generally reserve and think of the notion of good, when used in a moral sense, but not just contained in the expression that supporting  human flourishing or well being is good, but also in the way we say kindness is good, honesty is good. Or when I look at my daughter sweetness, purity, innocence as good. There's some similarity of meaning here, that's hard to define. 

Yes, I can see this. 

Would it be correct to say that you're maintaining a difference between good for something and good in itself? 

I feel this difference, though I'm not sure I can quite justify it. For example, I feel it is good to be kind to people, merely because it is a good way for me to be. When people say that they will only be kind to people who (in their judgment) deserve kindness, I don't understand that. I hope to be kind because it is good for me to be kind, not because I am handing out kindness as a reward. 

So in a sense, I think kindness is good in and of itself. Yet surely, overall, kindness is something that encourages wellbeing, and makes the world a better and richer place for people. So as you say, it's hard to define some absolute difference here. 

But regardless of how it's defined, we recognize Good is a thing of objective truth, it's out there and not just in our head, or an expression of our feelings, of our likes and dislikes. 

Yes, I agree. Maybe some of the trouble comes from inaccuracy of language. We say "good" to mean both "I like this" and "this is a benefit for the world." 

But if something is a benefit for the world, then there must be an objective reality to it. It really does good in the world, regardless of my personal taste. We may disagree over exactly how much good it does, but this is still not a matter of taste. 

The objectiveness of Good appears self-evident to me, as self-evident as the sun outside my window. It also was never not self-evident to me, there was no point in which I didn't believe this, and somehow came to believe it. 

It is for everybody else too, in real life. Show people pictures of a slum and a healthy neighborhood, and ask which one is good to raise kids in, and there will be no ambiguity about what "good" is here. 

Again, not every case will be so clear, but that may well be due to lack of knowledge, or confusion. Plato says that nobody ever purposefully chooses the bad, they just make mistakes about what's good.

They seem to recognize it as truly objective, but there's just more reluctant, reticent to confess as such. I find this reluctance interesting, a lacking of confidence, not so much in objectiveness of good being true, but in confessing it. I'm not sure how to explain that, but it's interesting. 

The whole fight has been frustrating for me, because there's been word confusion and other things. I think people agree that it's objectively bad to do certain things, because it is not a matter of taste. But they insist on the definition of good including reasons. Nothing is good just because it's good, but because it does something or has some result or perhaps avoids something. They're demanding that you define things as good for.... rather than just good in itself. 

But we agreed that the line between these is not clear, or easy to define. 

In addition the meaning of Good is not described by their particular moral theories or philosophies, but rather it's presupposed, in the overarching elements of these systems. Supporting human well being and flourishing is good,  harming or hindering this is bad. 

Yep, I think that's true. 

But I think that's just historically the way moral arguments go. In ethical discussions, "good" just means "supporting human well being and flourishing is good." Naturally there are tangential arguments, like people who argue that animals have rights and that people should die out or something. But in a sense this is just the same argument, extended to more creatures. The wellbeing of giraffes is brought into the argument, rather than wellbeing being discarded as the standard. 

Though good and bad are objective truths, they also appear to remain undefined. 

Frankly I wish we could define the damn words, because frustrating threads like this would go away. But I admit they may be Wittgenstein-type words -- the type he showed we use even without clear definitions. Like "game" or "art" or "love." Maybe it's better to leave it fuzzy. 

I want my daughter to be good, more so than do good. Doing good should flow from her being good.

Absolutely yes. 

There's a moving moment in the Purgatorio, when the pilgrim has had his sins cleaned out, and reaches the top of the mountain. At this point, his guide tells him that he should have no more doubts, that whatever he wants to do will be the right thing. 

For Dante, sin was always just error of judgment, based on misplaced love. When we are right in the head, we do good without hesitation. Simone Weil wrote about crucial moments in life when no thought was required, because doing the right thing appeared as the only possible thing. This is the Christian ideal, I think. 

That goodness we all seem to perceive objectively, appears to be about being. Perhaps even being itself.

This is important, but too difficult for me. Plato, Plotinus, a lot of the big guys, associated being with the good. Non-being is bad. 

For them, God is both existence itself, and the Good itself. And these are not just a random combination, but the only way it could be. 

Sad to say, I haven't worked out why they say that yet. 

But it means that for Christians, God is essential to morality, to the existence of the Good, because God is essential for the existence of everything, because you can't have anything without existence, which is God. And you can't have good at all without God, who is the good.

I'm working on all this. Reading a tough book about Plotinus right now. It is all fascinating, and more difficult than people make it out to be. 

Anyway, please don't take the insults on this forum to heart. They are bad. Nobody knows all of this, and we are all working on it.