RE: Moral Argument for God's Existence
October 20, 2013 at 8:37 am
(This post was last modified: October 20, 2013 at 8:43 am by bennyboy.)
Another good post, and I agree with all of it.
Okay, so we are left with the third and final option: absolute morality was never created by a subjective entity (i.e. God didn't sit around and think "Hmmmm how should my creations act?"). Instead, morality would be the behavioral expression of God's nature, or of human nature, or of something else. We can imagine an archetypal Moral Man, who would always choose the action which most accurately represented that underlying quanity X.
We should also examine the idea of a singular "morality," as an entity. Whatever God is/isn't, or mankind is/isn't, the word morality is itself just a word. So given any specific definition of morality, we will have a different Moral Man who behaves optimally. If we choose to define morality as maximizing the pleasure-to-suffering ratio over all organisms over all time, then presumably there is a theoretical "best action" that will achieve that, and Moral Man will do that action consistently. Similarly, if we choose a different definition, that maximal Moral Man will behave differently, but still be a perfect expression of whatever idea we are trying to express. So I would say we don't even GET to the stage of establishing mores before we fall afoul of subjectivity. Most behaviors are probably both moral and immoral, with that status being not an existential reality, but just the outcome of an arbitrary algorithm.
So in what sense COULD morality be called objective? We have to remove the ambiguity that comes from viewing one behavior through multiple definitions. We need a single definition, which humans are never going to be able/willing to arrive at. I think that points again to a God being the only possible source of an objective morality. And since we've already agreed it can't be a MADE morality (because therefore subjective), it must be the expression of God or part of God's nature.
But now we are hopelessly backward, because to be moral, we have to attempt to be manifestations of God or an aspect of God. We're into hippie territory: "God is love. BE God."
Okay, so we are left with the third and final option: absolute morality was never created by a subjective entity (i.e. God didn't sit around and think "Hmmmm how should my creations act?"). Instead, morality would be the behavioral expression of God's nature, or of human nature, or of something else. We can imagine an archetypal Moral Man, who would always choose the action which most accurately represented that underlying quanity X.
We should also examine the idea of a singular "morality," as an entity. Whatever God is/isn't, or mankind is/isn't, the word morality is itself just a word. So given any specific definition of morality, we will have a different Moral Man who behaves optimally. If we choose to define morality as maximizing the pleasure-to-suffering ratio over all organisms over all time, then presumably there is a theoretical "best action" that will achieve that, and Moral Man will do that action consistently. Similarly, if we choose a different definition, that maximal Moral Man will behave differently, but still be a perfect expression of whatever idea we are trying to express. So I would say we don't even GET to the stage of establishing mores before we fall afoul of subjectivity. Most behaviors are probably both moral and immoral, with that status being not an existential reality, but just the outcome of an arbitrary algorithm.
So in what sense COULD morality be called objective? We have to remove the ambiguity that comes from viewing one behavior through multiple definitions. We need a single definition, which humans are never going to be able/willing to arrive at. I think that points again to a God being the only possible source of an objective morality. And since we've already agreed it can't be a MADE morality (because therefore subjective), it must be the expression of God or part of God's nature.
But now we are hopelessly backward, because to be moral, we have to attempt to be manifestations of God or an aspect of God. We're into hippie territory: "God is love. BE God."
