RE: What is the point of morality if you're a theist?
October 21, 2013 at 5:52 am
(This post was last modified: October 21, 2013 at 5:53 am by Tonus.)
(October 21, 2013 at 5:31 am)davidMC1982 Wrote: William Lane Craig, the apologists go-to guy, has the only reasonable (from his argument) answer to that question. He says, "yes, if god commanded it, it is moral". His arguments are generally spurious, but at least in this case he's consistent.I think that's the only way to approach it. For example, would it be moral to kill a man for working on the Sabbath? I would expect a Christian to say that no, it is not. But there was a time when it was. God's morals are not absolute. They can change. They can even contradict; god commands the Israelites not to kill, then commands them to kill while the law remains in effect. Presumably the first command is considered to be suspended when a man is caught working on the Sabbath or when a couple is caught committing adultery.
Religious morals have only one basis-- "it's what god wants." Good and bad (or right and wrong) have nothing to do with it for the same reason; what constitutes good or bad depends on what god wants it to be, and that can change.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
