(June 2, 2024 at 10:02 am)Lucian Wrote:(June 2, 2024 at 9:53 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: It's been my experience that christians don't tend to argue for an objective morality, at least not on the internet. They argue for a subjective morality and call it objective since it's a gods. The way I respond to "christian objective morality" is to argue for a genuinely objective morality.I agree with that analysis of what is happening in most cases. I think that Swinburne would be a counter-example as I believe he argues that a moral fact would obtain in all possible worlds, even those that did not contain a god?
I've never read any Swinburne, so I can't comment on his ideas. And if Christians we talk to on the Internet don't have any good arguments beyond the subjective, that just means that we aren't hanging out with the right people. There are plenty of Christians in the world who can argue intelligently, beyond, "this is what I like, therefore it's God's will."
Quote:Have you read much on the modified euthythro dilemma? Roughly it departs from the argument about are gods commands good because he wills them, or is his will good because the commands are good (probably butchering that). The modified version says that even if they ground goodness in his nature, the argument still applies. Is his nature good because of his desires, or are his desires good because of his nature. See this paper by koons https://www.researchgate.net/publication..._Euthyphro
Have you looked into the more Greek-based, Neoplatonic type Christianity, or the Aristotelian/Thomist versions? The Euthyphro thing seems not to be relevant to the claims made by such traditions at all.
In a too-simple nutshell, for these types of theologians, God simply IS the Good. If we say he "wants" something, this is simply a manner of speaking -- he "wants" nothing in the same way I want a glass of wine. To say God wants X, in this context, means that if you do X you are moving more towards the Good. And the Good is never arbitrary. It is the Good of human flourishing, based on the type of animals we are.
Granted, this is not the kind of theology one hears on Internet chat rooms, but it is what Dante wrote about, and I think he was a smart guy.