(April 17, 2013 at 10:48 am)FallentoReason Wrote: I just wrote up a syllogism for the above dialogue if anyone was interested:
1) It is in God's nature to give these commands as being objectively right
2) These objective morals are what maximize happiness & wellbeing
3) If 1,2 & 3 are true, then God's nature couldn't have been any other way than this way
4) If 4 is true, then it is necessary for God to be this way
5) If 5 is true, then something external to God must have been the condition that made it necessary for God's nature to be this way (i.e. premise 3)
6) If 1-6 is true, then objective morals exist independently of God
7) Objective morals do not exist a priori
C) Since it is in God's nature to reflect objective morals, God doesn't exist.
I think you may have missed a step or two here. Your statements from 3-6 are self-referential, i.e. essentially saying "If this statement is true, then this statement would be true" - making them tautological and therefore conveying no new information. Further, a lot of assumptions here are unjustified, such as it being god's necessary nature to reflect an independent standard of objective morals - something Christians might be more easily sold on than atheists.
As I see it, you argument boils down to
1. If objective morals exist, then it is possible for god - conceived as reflecting those morals through his nature - to exist.
2. Objective morals do not exist.
3. Therefore god does not exist.
The problem here is that it is possible for other conceptions of god to exist - thereby making god independent of objective morality and there is no condition given for the existence of objective morals - thereby making god irrelevant to it.
