Why "mysterious ways" don't matter.

[Mudhammam]

All I see from you, Steve, are ad hoc assertions.

However, the Molinist view is that God not only has knowledge of necessary truths and contingent truths but that God's middle knowledge contains, but is not limited to, His knowledge of counterfactuals. The Molinist believes that God, using his middle knowledge and foreknowledge, surveyed all possible worlds and then actualized a particular one.

Other than your imagination, what basis do you have for taking any of these assertions seriously?

Of course one should be damn sure a command comes from God.

Again, I ask, from what basis are you claiming that any commands have ever originated from any "God"?

The definition of God is "the greatest conceivable being". If there could be a greater being, then that would be God. This definition means that He is morally perfect since it is better to be morally perfect than morally flawed (and therefore wouldn't be the greatest conceivable being).

Did this arise from your imagination again? What in reality can you offer as evidence to confirm that anything you say contains even an iota of truth in it? The things you claim are fantasies and nothing else, made apparent to us by all the other believers of deities and wild conspiracies who also offer a lot of speculation but no evidence. Most of us are actually concerned with 'objective' reality that can be vivisected by carefully specified concepts, methodologies, instruments, and theories, the reality Dawkins was referring to in the quote you took out of context to mean the perspective "we're left with" concerning the worth of life.

[SteveII]

@Esquilax

I am sorry. I missed your earlier post where you carefully responded to my post on Regarding Moral Values...I appreciate the tone. In fact, I only recently became interested in philosophy and am honing my thinking as it relates to these subjects against a pretty tough crowd.

So you believe "morality exists only where there are moral agents capable of dealing in moral acts" and "Our morality is derived from well being because what else is there?". Doesn't this pose a problem when deciding between moral choices? Which perspective will be right? Sometimes the greater good is bad for a few. Can one civilization's set of values be better than another's?

Regarding compatibilism, perhaps you can explain why these sentences describing the view somehow handles the ought/can problem: From Wikipedia...Hume adds that the Compatibilist's free will should not be understood as some kind of ability to have actually chosen differently in an identical situation. The Compatibilist believes that a person always makes the only truly possible decision that they could have. Any talk of alternatives is strictly hypothetical.

Regarding proving there are objective moral standards, I think you would have to decide philosophically if such a set of standards exist (or at least is more plausible than the negation). Of course, if you proved the existence of God, that would be an easy task.

Regarding falling into the Euthyphro Dilemma, well done. I am reading more on Divine Command Morality.

"The greatest conceivable being" definition is not nonsensical. St. Anselm, a philosopher, called the founder of scholasticism, and the Archbishop of Canterbury came up with that definition in the 11th century and it has been discussed by philosophers ever since. You don't think it is objectively better to be morally perfect than morally flawed? I believe it is good argument and serves to at least further the case that God is good.

Unless, I misunderstand and you want concrete examples of good that God does. This however would do nothing to prove or disprove that God's nature is good--because even I do some good things once in a while.

Your point regarding that if God were the greatest...he could shed his nature, is a poor line of reasoning. By definition, one cannot shed one's nature and therefore logically impossible.

[davidMC1982]

If you object to this:

1. If God exists, objective moral values exist
2. Objective moral values exist
3. Therefore God exists.

I know others have already addressed this but this argument bugs me every time I see it.

1. Why? If God exists, why assume he has morals? If he does, why assume they're objective? If he can create the universe surely he's capable of changing his mind? What happens to the objective morals then? Why even assume he's good? Use your imagination and you can come up with so many possibilities that all refute this statement.

2. Why? Everything you know about the world tells you this isn't so. There is no evidence for objective moral values. There are things we have broad agreement on, but even something like "thou shalt not kill" is not an absolute.

3) Doesn't follow from 1 and 2.

Replace "God" with "Howard the Duck" to see why this argument is spurious. Or replace "objective moral values" with "cheese". Arguments like these are what gives philosophy a bad name.

Just think of this for a moment. When we know something to be true, do we ever have to make these types of philosophical arguments to demonstrate it? If I were to say to you that all objects fall to the earth at 9.8ms-2 do I have to make a philosophical argument or do I just describe my experiment and calculations?

How about playing a small game? Take a yellow highlighter pen and mark every passage in the bible that you think we (atheists) might consider immoral. Slavery, genocide, overt lies, rape, inequality etc. Take a pink one and do the same for all the things you think we (atheists) would consider scientifically false or unsubstantiated. Things like virgin births, rising from the dead, water into wine, light before stars etc. Then ask yourself how you justify those things and whether, at any point in your argument you have to assume god exists and assume something about his nature. Finally, ask yourself if you have anything else, apart from God, you hold to be true that you couldn't easily demonstrate to another person.

You'll probably notice that all the things that are hard to demonstrate as being true are things related to inner experience. The same applies to morality.

[The Grand Nudger]

"The greatest conceivable being" definition is not nonsensical. St. Anselm, a philosopher, called the founder of scholasticism, and the Archbishop of Canterbury came up with that definition in the 11th century and it has been discussed by philosophers ever since. You don't think it is objectively better to be morally perfect than morally flawed? I believe it is good argument and serves to at least further the case that God is good.

Again, in case you missed it, "the greatest possible being", which I would propose...claims all attributes and actions of your god for it's own...and accomplishes all of it while being non existent.

Talk about great...amiright? Not nonsensical in the least, eh? -St. Anselm was a moron with a pen.

[Esquilax]

So you believe "morality exists only where there are moral agents capable of dealing in moral acts" and "Our morality is derived from well being because what else is there?". Doesn't this pose a problem when deciding between moral choices? Which perspective will be right? Sometimes the greater good is bad for a few. Can one civilization's set of values be better than another's?

Of course one civilization's set of values can be superior to another's, however, the way to demonstrate that is through argument and evidence, not merely trading opinions. Regardless of where one is, both sides of a moral argument exist within the same universe, and are subject to the same physical laws; the objective facts are the same, no matter where you are. Hence, there exists, for any possible scenario, a moral pinnacle of sorts, a set of actions that results in the best possible outcome for all involved, and that is where we should be aiming. Now, we don't always get there, but that's not a mark against this position, it's simply reality; we aren't perfect, and we have to learn to improve.

The short answer is that morality isn't a matter of perspective, it's a matter of reality. Moral goods favor the well being of conscious beings, not specific groups of conscious beings over others. Any moral action that you might propose that causes harm to a minority to the advantage of the majority ignores that principle by applying an inconsistent standard: one set of behavioral rules for the majority, and another for the minority, with no justification for this besides special pleading. Positions based on logical fallacies simply aren't valid.

Regarding compatibilism, perhaps you can explain why these sentences describing the view somehow handles the ought/can problem: From Wikipedia...Hume adds that the Compatibilist's free will should not be understood as some kind of ability to have actually chosen differently in an identical situation. The Compatibilist believes that a person always makes the only truly possible decision that they could have. Any talk of alternatives is strictly hypothetical.

The simple answer is that it doesn't matter. Whether I possess free will or not, it feels just the same to me experiencing it live, so why should I care?

Regarding proving there are objective moral standards, I think you would have to decide philosophically if such a set of standards exist (or at least is more plausible than the negation). Of course, if you proved the existence of God, that would be an easy task.

Why would proving the existence of god make the existence of objective morals easier to prove? They're two different things: if objective morals did exist they would do so completely independent of god, and if they depended on god to exist then they aren't objective, they're just subjective according to god's will.

"The greatest conceivable being" definition is not nonsensical. St. Anselm, a philosopher, called the founder of scholasticism, and the Archbishop of Canterbury came up with that definition in the 11th century and it has been discussed by philosophers ever since. You don't think it is objectively better to be morally perfect than morally flawed? I believe it is good argument and serves to at least further the case that God is good.

My point about it being nonsensical is that you need to keep god vague and ill-defined to keep it working: the moment you propose an attribute of god beyond "greatest conceivable being," one can easily top that with the claim that god has a slightly better version of that attribute, leading to a new height of "greatest conceivable X" in an infinite regress.

For example, as to your question about whether it's better to be morally perfect than flawed, my immediate answer is that the greatest conceivable being could make a contradiction true, and so could therefore be both. That's why I don't think it's a very useful definition, as "greatest" is subjective, and by necessity must encompass a number of mutually contradictory attributes just due to having to be the greatest possible, and being untethered from logic.

Unless, I misunderstand and you want concrete examples of good that God does. This however would do nothing to prove or disprove that God's nature is good--because even I do some good things once in a while.

What I'm saying is that without some form of evidence all you're really doing is talking in hypotheticals. It's all well and good to say that god's nature is good, but what observation of reality are you using to come to that conclusion? And if you aren't using an observation then what separates your conclusion from a fantasy?

Your point regarding that if God were the greatest...he could shed his nature, is a poor line of reasoning. By definition, one cannot shed one's nature and therefore logically impossible.

Who says god is bound to logic? Wouldn't the greatest conceivable being be able to suspend the laws of logic?

[smax]

I was once a believer. And before I stopped believing in God, I first started to think that he was evil. This happened while I was studying in seminary. I was doing expositional studies of several old testament books, and I was shocked at the lack of regard for human life and basic morality.

God promises his people a land flowing with milk and honey. Later it is revealed that this is someone else's fucking land, and God isn't giving it away at all, he's telling his people to conquer it and slaughter and enslave it's people.

How do you read something like this and still feel good about the morality of god? I couldn't do it, and it only got worse after that.

[Bad Wolf]

To create an example to what esquilax is saying:
If I got a five year old to drink bleach, that would be wrong. Why? Because bleach is harmful if ingested. Simple as that. Don't need a god to tell us that is wrong.

[ThomM]

Since when would the ability to Objectively prove the existence of a god be of USE.

The god of the bible is not the sample of morality and ethics either.

[LostLocke]

1. If Sauron exists, objective moral values exist
2. Objective moral values exist
3. Therefore Sauron exists.

I'm glad to see you've accepted Sauron as your Lord and Savior.

I'm also glad to see you still haven't figured out the formatting for a proper logical argument. Here's a better example:

1. If SteveII keeps making the same baseless assertions he is a troll.
2. SteveII keeps making the same baseless assertions.
3. Therefore, SteveII is a troll.

That's how you format an if-then logical argument.

[Tonus]

I don't believe the mysterious ways speaks to his motivation so much as it suggests that he has a justification for his acts which would be acceptable if known.

That's how I always understood it, that there was some information or knowledge that we lacked. Once we have that knowledge, we would see things differently and understand why god did certain things. It's the believer's version of "we don't know." Perhaps atheists need to throw the "science of the gaps" fallacy at theists who use 'mysterious ways'?

I also think it gets used to try and cover for actions that would otherwise be seen as objectively wrong by a theist, though that gets covered under "god has the right" or "god's morals aren't our morals" or a similar approach.