What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[Mister Agenda]

Or perhaps, by extension, how does god know what is good?

By godly fiat or because things are intrinsically good?

Hello JHC.

Are you asking me why I believe God knows what is good? I believe things are intrinsically good because God made them that way. I believe God, being master of the universe,  is the one who establishes goodness and morality. But the point of this thread was not for me to sit here and preach and tell you guys what I believe. My purpose for creating this thread was to hear *your* views and discuss them with you.

So, ya got anything?

Are you sure you're asking us? We get so many people trying to tell us in the guise of asking us that our abillity to trust such claims has been severely eroded.

However, hope springs eternal.

Normallly functioning humans, like other closely-related primates, have instinctive senses of reciprocity, fairness, and empathy. These are the emotional basis for morality. They're why we care about right and wrong. Over centuries of cultural experience and years of personal experience, we gain experience in interacting with othter people and life forms, and learn that some ways of interacting are more beneficial than others; that is, more likely to lead to good outcomes for more people. We are also able to use our reason to work out moral issues. This is what makes moral progress, however halting and mistake-ridden it may be, possible. We can learn that it's wrong to own people. We can learn that it's wrong to torture people. We can learn that it's wrong to rape. And we can reach these conclusions with very little help from Iron Age scriptures. Banning torture reduces our risk of being tortured, and understanding that there are better ways to elicit desired information from a prisoner helps us understand that we don't have to do it to protect ourselves.

There are centuries of writing on moral philosophy that don't revolve around God.