Argument from Absoluteness

[MindForgedManacle]

Kind of on the spot, and sort of inspired by another argument I made a little while back, namely this one:

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1) God is the omnipotent, omniscient paradigm of moral goodness itself. [From typical apologist response to the Euthyphro Dilemma]


2) The existence of moral evil in the world is the necessary result for God to actualize the best of all possible worlds: a world with creatures possessing free will in the libertarian sense and thus the only possible world with moral goodness. [From the Free Will Defense]

3) Either #1 is true or #2 is true.


4) If #1 is true, then the existence of moral evil in the world cannot be explained by an appeal to the intent to actualize the only possible world with moral good (#2), because the thing which can properly be called 'morally good' is God himself. [Necessary consequence of the Platonic answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma]


5) If #2 is true, then God cannot properly be called the paradigm of moral goodness because then true moral goodness is then possible by agents whom are not God.


C) Therefore, if God exists either #4 is true or #5 is true, but both cannot be.

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So basically, the inspired argument goes something like this:

P1) To be absolute is to not exist in relation to anything else.

P2) If God exists, he exists in relation to his creation. [Both in terms of the properties he possesses (i.e his omnipotence vs. our impotence) and in terms of his wanting us to have a personal relationship with him]

C) Therefore, if God exists he cannot be absolute.

Might be a crap argument, but it came to mind as vaguely interesting.

[bennyboy]

I think you're subtly equivocating on slightly different meanings of "absolute." If you include relational properties as a possession of an entity, then nothing in a dynamic universe can be absolute. But I'd argue if the NATURE of the relational properties is always the same, you can still call it absolute. For example, if God is a philosophical quantity, anything could flow from it, so long as the nature of things is that things equally flow back to it.

As for personal relationships-- that's just Santa Claus with a different name. The idea that God is watching teenagers rub on out in the shower and saying "Tsk! Tsk!" is really no definition of God at all, in my opinion, since God, being eternal, should not be capable of changing emotions.

[MindForgedManacle]

The problem is that God is pretty much never theologically described as being dynamic. After all, he's labelled 'unchanging' and 'timeless', with a truckload of 'justifying' Biblical passages in tow.

[Angrboda]

It occurs to me that if you consider all of space-time as a 4 dimensional manifold, it has many of the same tensions between the relative and the absolute.

I think Benny is right, though it's less equivocation than conceptual confusion, with a possible side of UME.

[bennyboy]

It occurs to me that if you consider all of space-time as a 4 dimensional manifold, it has many of the same tensions between the relative and the absolute.

I think Benny is right, though it's less equivocation than conceptual confusion, with a possible side of UME.

I don't know what a manifold is, but if the 4th dimension is really a dimension, then that would support an absolute view of God, since you'd need a kind of meta-time in order for anything to be dynamic from God's perspective.

[MindForgedManacle]

The 4-dimensional manifold bit essentially describes time as being static, and not dynamic. In other words, on that view there is no absolute simultaneity of events, but a relative one as per Einstein.

@Rasetsu What's UME?

[Angrboda]

UME == use/mention error.

[bennyboy]

The 4-dimensional manifold bit essentially describes time as being static, and not dynamic. In other words, on that view there is no absolute simultaneity of events, but a relative one as per Einstein.

@Rasetsu What's UME?

Right. If, from God's point of view, time is like an extra physical dimension, along which objects are oriented, then God is timeless and absolute, and absolutely unable to change or to judge anything.

The Christian mess is in trying to reconcile an unchanging God with the capacity to have emotions and to take actions.

[Angrboda]

The 4-dimensional manifold bit essentially describes time as being static, and not dynamic. In other words, on that view there is no absolute simultaneity of events, but a relative one as per Einstein.

Right. If, from God's point of view, time is like an extra physical dimension, along which objects are oriented, then God is timeless and absolute, and absolutely unable to change or to judge anything.

That wasn't my point. As beings that are temporal processes, from our point of view, time is a relationship between independent moments, each distinct from the next. All references to time from our perspective are relative, stated using indexicals ('now', 'yesterday', 'next year'). However, if time is just another spatio-temporal dimension, then essentially everything that will happen has, in a sense, already happened; so globablly, time would be a static, absolute, unchanging dimension. So you have a perspectivist illusion; from one perspective, time is relational; from another viewpoint, it's absolute.

[MindForgedManacle]

Right. If, from God's point of view, time is like an extra physical dimension, along which objects are oriented, then God is timeless and absolute, and absolutely unable to change or to judge anything.

The Christian mess is in trying to reconcile an unchanging God with the capacity to have emotions and to take actions.

Well, the problem is that Christian apologists will rarely, if ever, accept this view of time which is called th B-theory. Accepting the B-theory (which is supported by the usual interpretation of Relativity) entails that there is no priviledged frame of reference. Now, apologists can't have that, because among other things it means that the universe can't have, even in principle, begun its existence, because on this view there is no "temporal-becoming", to use the retarded jargon.