(April 18, 2012 at 2:34 am)FallentoReason Wrote: God gave rise to the Bible. Using the Bible we can actually verify God. That is not circular, because the first statement does not form a part of the second. Clearly circular reasoning.
That wasn't very well-put, was it?
Let's put it this way. You don't need to know that your reasoning faculty came from evolutionary processes to know that it can be used to verify what is true and what is not. This is our correct starting point here and it can be demonstrated in many other ways, none of which would have anything to do with evolutionary processes. In fact, we've been using our reasoning faculty to do that since before
The same is not applicable to the bible. In order to establish that the bible can be used as a standard of truth, you must first establish that it is the word of god. That is what I meant by the first being a part of the second. You need to assume that bible is the word of god in order to use it to use it to verify anything that may be given by it. But you do not need to assume or even know whether or not evolutionary processes gave rise to reasoning faculty in order know that you can use them to verify the truth. Its by missing that dependency that my argument avoids circularity.
(April 18, 2012 at 2:34 am)FallentoReason Wrote: Yeah, ideally that's what we want, but what happened to the alternative, which also happens to be the alternative to the Euthyphro Dilemma? God commands something because it's good?
That is what we've established here. We see that objective moral values must be independent of god and therefore, god is irrelevant to objective standards of morality. The good and bad can be determined without any reference to god and therefore, Craig's statement that you cannot have objective moral values without god is wrong.
