Christians, Prove Your God Is Good

[Ignorant]

Couldn't it be said that these things that we judge to be good, are entirely dependent upon our recognition that there are less desirable options? I'm not supporting moral relativism on a macro level, but with regard to conscious brain states, there are certainly some that are better than others, and each experience triggers one or another. If they were all the same, we wouldn't need descriptive concepts such as "good" or "bad"...right?

Why must "less desirable options" be available in order to judge that some one thing is desirable under a particular aspect? If you are hungry, you don't need to encounter both an apple AND a rock to judge that the apple is desirable/good. Any judgment, however, which compares the goodness of things OBVIOUSLY requires the presence of different objects.

I'm not sure what you meant when you wrote "if [conscious brain states triggered by particular experiences] were all the same". Is this an expression of Sam Harris's approach in The Moral Landscape? I am just not sure what you mean.

Yes, but I think I would say that all things in the universe that are perceived to be good or bad, require a conscious mind to make them so.

I agree. Goodness is an inherently subjective concept.

And the meaning of anything good can only have meaning by the recognition of something less desirable which we tend to recognize and describe as bad.

Why is that the case? Why does desiring a thing require a comparative judgment of goodness? Things must first be judged individually before they can be compared as more or less desirable than other things.

But the two words seem entirely conceptual and do not seem to have any practical use beyond their descriptive application. A rotten egg and a rose both trigger different neurological responses. And it may be that there are some who prefer the response caused by a rotten egg, but this anomaly would not prevent us from making an accurate predictive model that shows us which one is commonly desired. And through research, we may even discover the cause of the anomaly. The subjective description of what each person experiences while smelling may not be something are useful when paired with the third person understanding of the underlying brain states which give rise to them.

I agree with that first sentence. Aren't we describing practical actions (i.e. human action, and even supposed divine action) as either good or bad?

The neuroscientific investigations don't surprise me either. I am actually encouraged by them. I expect very much that different people desire different things. One person prefers the scent of a rose, another, the scent of a rotten egg. Don't confuse my use of desirability with pleasure (which brain states represent). Desirability (i.e. goodness) according to my use always implies teleology. Things are desired FOR some other reason than the thing itself.

Two people have a desire for pleasure. One sates that desire by smelling roses. Another sates that desire by smelling rotten eggs. So what? Do you think I am trying to say that, objectively, the smell of rotten eggs is bad? I assure you that I am not.

No consider the same two people. The first person directs every action in his or her life toward the one and only pleasure of smelling roses. The second person directs his or her actions towards a "healthy" mix of nourishment, growth, reproduction (maybe), meaningful relationships, and the common good, with an occasional pleasure in the scent of rotten eggs. I think that the first life is a humanly empty one which misses out on a great deal of what it means to live well. The second one, even while it enjoys something which I do not, seems to me a much fuller human life. I also would predict that, if those two people were subject to a neural examination toward the end of their lives, there would be more evidence of "happiness" (if Sam Harris's neural mapping ever comes to fruition) in the rotten egg person than the rosey one.

There seems to be no reason to believe that a similar model of morality cannot be understood in the same way. And while there may not be any single right answer to a moral question, there may be several.

More than several. There would be as many as there are people. However, the common human experience would almost certainly (as it certainly has already) arrive at converging answers to which things and which sorts of actions actually lead to human fulfillment (which would make the accumulated wisdom of tradition important). Why? Because human beings are rational. As such, they can discover true things about reality, and their relationship with it.

And by establishing answers that are good in principle, in comparison, there are several others that we can say are objectively wrong. All of this is entirely dependent whether or not we admit that the objective of our inquiry is to maximize the quality of conscious experience of creatures who are capable of possessing it.

I couldn't agree more (assuming we agree about what "quality of conscious experience of creatures is"). The fullness of a human life is the goal of ethical inquiry. Sam Harris is on to something in that regard. The challenge that he will encounter is in the measurement and quantification of that quality of consicousness. That quality varies a great deal over a human life. How do you quantify and evaluate a continuum of brain states rather than snap shots? Some of the happiest people I have met first endured extremely unhappy times. How will those be evaluated? Things of that sort are a difficulty, but not an impossible one to overcome.

Give me an example of a question regarding good or bad that exists apart fro such beings, and I'll begin considering whether or not this "absolute good" is a coherent question. At the moment, I'm inclined to say that it is not.

Well, and I am not convinced about what follows, there IS another sense in which goodness is understood, and that is its concept as synonymous with "being". According to this sense, rather than considering between a rose and a rotten egg, a person considers between two or more roses or two or more rotten eggs. In such a case, the person is judging subjectively about which rose is more able to satisfy the desire for "olfactory pleasure". The judgment is translatable to a judgment about which rose is more "rose-like" (i.e. which rose is MORE a rose, which rose has more of what being a rose means). As such, it is a judgment about the "goodness" of the thing considered in itself, rather than the goodness of the thing considered as able to fulfill some human desire. The reason why I am not completely convinced by this is because it is based on an Aristotelian physic and metaphysics which desperately needs revision.

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Seriously though I wonder what difference it truly makes to articulate a crisp definition of what are morally good and bad acts. Should we then make it our reason for living to do 'the good' and 'avoid the bad'? Who would call that a 'good' life? To me it all seems too self-conscious and myopically focused. Life is more complex than that.

Have you followed any recent political discussion? Politics is about little more than what is rationally good for people and their society, and the state of our political discussion is everything BUT rational. There are people who don't know what in the world "the common good" actually would be and yet they make laws about it anyway based on very little rational discussion. I don't think they need to sit around acting like Plato and Socrates, but someone should.

I do not expect everyone to go around stopping to contemplate the realm of the forms before they decide if it is wise to spend an extra 30 seconds in the shower. But when people go to an online discussion forum about whether or not God is good, I expected a little more openness to a philosophical discussion about what it means to say something is good. It wouldn't be the first false expectation of my life, and I am sure it won't be the last.

Does that mean I will throw people under a bus to save five minutes ore five dollars? No. But neither do I need to anticipate every possible set of choices and how I could/should respond in advance.

That would be an impossible task. I certainly don't expect that of myself, much less for any of you. However, when there are numerous and quite confident assertions that some thing (e.g. god) is NOT good, you would hope that there is an adequate description of what that means in the minds of those making the assertion. It might indeed be true that the god of the Bible is NOT good, but it would be helpful to know what that even means.

Whatever decision I would reach now, I could reach then and there is something to be said for spontaneity.

I agree. Often our "pre-made" decisions did not consider things that only being "in-the-moment" could reveal. That, however, wouldn't alter what actually happens in those moments, i.e. a judgment about the "best" way to act.

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I doubt your sincerity and don't think I'll be replying to you any more . . . Have a nice day.

Thank you for your consideration and time. I hope yours is nice as well.