Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”

[Esquilax]

Oh man, I have begun my response for the last 2 hours and it is late. We will continue this tomorrow!

In the mean time, I have a book to recommend to you Esquilax...
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

I haven't read it, but I'm convinced it's the greatest book ever. :p
(I intend to get it here soon though. )

So excited!

Wow, so you can stretch an argument from ignorance out over a whole book. Who knew?

I'm familiar with Nagel, but I don't particularly find his arguments compelling. Mostly, he falls into the same trap that all the woo woo non-materialist snobs do, of imposing a strawman argument onto materialism with a side order of fallacy of composition. What is true of the components is not necessarily true of the whole; a brain can be an evolved, fully material organ that nevertheless allows the mind to arise within. Try not to label the mind an object when you cannot yet demonstrate that it's not a process that occurs in sufficiently advanced organic brains.

Also? "X can't explain Y yet, and therefore it's wrong and Z is right!" is an argument from ignorance: our inability to currently explain consciousness (in the specific pseudo-mystical terms that Nagel seems to want, incidentally) does not mean that our scientific approach is incorrect. It just means we don't know everything yet but, as I've been saying for the last few posts, at least the materialist viewpoint has the benefit of being immediately demonstrable, something that all this "brains are not the mind!" stuff doesn't even seem interested in. We can- and should- only go where the evidence currently leads, after all. Come back when you've got some positive evidence for your position, and not just a bunch of holes to poke in mine.

I'm sorry Esquilax, but I still see no reason for thinking that a stable law giver can't give us a stable law. Your opposition would seem to rest on proposing a God who capriciously changes moral law.

As I'm sure you know, the Euthyphro dilemma starts from a premise from Greek philosophy that virtue and the gods were separate 'things', so either the gods recognised an established virtue, or the gods defined a virtue. The Christian view does not start from that presupposition of separation; we see virtue and God's character as being united, hence John the evangelist can write "God is love". So a God stable in character would produce a stable morality; the only way morality would be unstable is if God's character was unstable and that would take us outside of Judeo-Christian thought ('For I am the Lord, I change not', Malachi 3:6).

So you're going the same route William Lane Craig does, and claiming that god's nature is good, and so the concept of goodness flows outward from that. But this doesn't get you out of the dilemma at all, it just pushes it back one step; is something good because god's nature says so, or does god's nature say so because it is good? To what does god's moral character conform, and if you claim that it is the beginning of morality then you've just defined yourself into the fiat declaration horn of the dilemma.