Why "mysterious ways" don't matter.

[ShaMan]

Fiction...........


Fact..........

[Esquilax]

Some of you were right to criticize my formation of the moral argument. If should have been formed like this:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Hey, remember how you haven't demonstrated premise two yet? Yeah...

1. If naturalism is true and God does not exist, then our morals are a product of evolution. Evolution cannot provide for us a set of values that are true for all times. With naturalism, at some point in the past, basic survival would be at odds with many of our morals today (killing, harming others, personal freedoms, equality, taking care of the elderly, etc.). So, naturalism gives us relative values.

Yes, values relative to the context in which we find ourselves. Otherwise known as "learning." See, it's the kind of thing that allows us to weigh our morality by the scenario in which we have to apply it, which, to be clear, is exactly what you believe in too. Example! A woman rushes past you in the street and hides around a corner, hissing to you that she's being chased by a man trying to kill her. Moments later that man happens upon you and asks whether you've seen a woman pass by, giving you an exact description of the woman hiding just feet away from you. Under your supposed "objective" moral code, Steve, lying is wrong: would you tell the man the truth and reveal the woman, knowing that it will result in her death? Or would you lie- and why wouldn't you?- and preserve her life?

Those are the two options, don't try to dodge by including a third, let's just hypothetically imagine that those are the two paths you envision at the time; this isn't about getting out of things, this is about me demonstrating a point. Would you tell a lie, knowing that the truth would lead to someone getting hurt or killed?

Chances are, you'll say yes, and hence, context matters. Objective morality? No brother, you're dealing with situational ethics, same as everyone else. You're just pretending you've got something objective.

2. Most of us believe that objective values do exist. It is right/good to take care of one's parents into their old age and realize even 100,000 years ago it would still have been the right thing to do and 100,000 years in the future, it will still be the right thing to do. Killing young children has been and will forever be morally wrong. We all intrinsically know when something is just plain wrong--even if a million people are doing it.

So, you begin with an argument from popularity fallacy, and then end this paragraph by stating why that fallacy is wrong. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Incidentally, there's a reason killing children is wrong. It's not just wrong because god says so, it's not wrong because of some abstract moral thing, it's wrong because it causes demonstrable harm with no benefit to be found. See, that's the thing: you keep going on about how poor our morals must be, but I'm the only one of us who can furnish a reason why killing children is wrong beyond a vague appeal to an abstract force.

Additionally, I can provide situations in which it'd be wrong to take care of your parents into old age, too: what if they're serial killers, and keeping them alive would cause more deaths? What if they're in pain and no longer want to live with it? What if they're bad people who attack you?

3. Since naturalism cannot provide for objective moral values, some other source must exist. God is the most plausible source.

You are assuming objective morals, where you haven't even bothered arguing for them, let alone demonstrated them. That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

I guess the question is: does the word "anything" included logical impossibilities. Is a four-sided triangle a thing that can be actualized? I would argue that a four-sided triangle is not a thing and does not fall into the category of "anything".

So, god can do anything, so long as you define "anything" to mean "not anything." Wow.

Any other words you want to redefine to mean the exact opposite of what they mean, in order to keep your god safe from his own inherent contradictions, borne of the poorly thought out writing in the bible?

[Ravenshire]

So, gawd ordering the genocide (yes, genocide) of the Canaanites for nothing more heinous than presuming to live in the "promised land" before Moses and the rest showed up isn't an "evil event?"

If you let him off for being inscrutable, you must also let Hitler off. After all, he was claiming to be doing gawds work. Who are you to say he wasn't?!?

Mind you, that's just one example.

You are wrong in your reasons God gave to wipe out the Canaanites. It was because their culture had risen to the wickedness to judge them (child sacrifice, temple prostitutes etc. etc.). In fact, God mentioned earlier to Abraham in Genesis 15:

“Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. . . . And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites [one of the Canaanite clans] is not yet complete” (Gen. 15. 13, 16).

That shows that at some point the Canaanites' sins had not risen to the level to receive God's judgement. That tells a little different story that your "nothing more heinous than presuming to live in the "promised land" before Moses and the rest showed up".

So, did your gawd deliver it's message to the Canaanites before he ordered them slaughtered?

[davidMC1982]

Some of you were right to criticize my formation of the moral argument. If should have been formed like this:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

1) Why? Please demonstrate this premise to be true. You haven't demonstrated that one necessarily follows from the other.

If hobbit serial killers do not exist, objective moral values do not exist
Objective moral values do exist
Therefore hobbit serial killers exist

2) As Esquilax keeps pointing out, you haven't demonstrated this to be the case either.

3) For your argument to hold, your premises have to be demonstrably true. Yours are not.

1. If naturalism is true and God does not exist, then our morals are a product of evolution. Evolution cannot provide for us a set of values that are true for all times. With naturalism, at some point in the past, basic survival would be at odds with many of our morals today (killing, harming others, personal freedoms, equality, taking care of the elderly, etc.). So, naturalism gives us relative values.

Why assume we have a set of values that are true at all times when all evidence points to the contrary? You only have to look to nature to see how animals flourish in groups, with or without a concept of morality.

2. Most of us believe that objective values do exist. It is right/good to take care of one's parents into their old age and realize even 100,000 years ago it would still have been the right thing to do and 100,000 years in the future, it will still be the right thing to do. Killing young children has been and will forever be morally wrong. We all intrinsically know when something is just plain wrong--even if a million people are doing it.

Most people believed the sun went round the earth; that's not an argument for the truth of a claim. 5,000 years ago slavery was not seen as immoral; today it is. I could construct a situation whereby, in 5,000 years time the survival of mankind depended on slavery. Would engaging on slavery then be a moral action?

3. Since naturalism cannot provide for objective moral values, some other source must exist. God is the most plausible source.

Ignoring that you haven't demonstrated that objective moral values exist, how do you arrive at "God is the most plausible source." There is no evidence that God exists.

[Esquilax]

Some of you were right to criticize my formation of the moral argument. If should have been formed like this:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Actually, premise one isn't just untrue, it's nonsensical: an objective moral value, by definition, could not disappear in the absence of god's subjective mind. The whole point of objective things is that they don't require subjective experience to exist.

What you really mean to say is that if god does not exist, god's opinions on morality don't exist. You're mistaking the opinion of a divine being as an objective truth, but that's not what "objective" means.

[Mudhammam]

The whole point of objective things is that they don't require subjective experience to exist.

I might point out that we can't really speak of anything that may truly be said to objectively exist because all thoughts, methodologies, instruments, etc. even those which we deem scientific, are more or less consensus reality as perceived by the majority of human beings. Might it quite different, what we consider "objective," if we were bats?

[Neo-Scholastic]

I think when Christians talk about "mysterious ways" it means that they do not presume to know all the factors Divine Providence takes into consideration. As limited beings our lack of knowledge prevents us from fully comprehending how the Lord governs His creation.

[The Grand Nudger]

Trouble is, "mysterious ways" never seems to refer to anything our "lack of understanding" would modify. It's always the same old mundane garbage. Never seems to be much mystery, when it comes to gods.

[Neo-Scholastic]

The whole point of objective things is that they don't require subjective experience to exist.

That's an unprovable philosophical assumption. The distinction between objective and subjective knowledge is a false dichotomy. Knowledge of an object presupposes a knowing subject. A knowing subject requires an object of its knowledge.

[Esquilax]

I think when Christians talk about "mysterious ways" it means that they do not presume to know all the factors Divine Providence takes into consideration. As limited beings our lack of knowledge prevents us from fully comprehending how the Lord governs His creation.

Which leaves us with two problems: the first is the one I started this thread with, which is that if a being accused of a crime refuses to explain himself, we aren't required to suspend judgment, nor are we to blame if that judgment comes down against the person refusing to speak. In fact, our laws are configured in such a way as to punish those who knowingly keep pertinent information from the authorities.

The second is that, properly phrased and taking into account the unspoken portions of any "mysterious ways" argument, the christian is saying this: "You don't know what god's intentions are, so you can't call him evil. I don't know what god's intentions are either, so it's perfectly okay for me to call him good." The same argument they use to prevent us from naming god evil should also, if it's applied consistently, stop anyone not only from calling him good, but also from making any declarative statements about god at all. If god's ways are so vast and complicated that we can't comprehend them and, apparently, the way things look aren't necessarily the way they seem, then the assumption that his good actions really are good can't be made either. Hell, even the assumption that the words in his holy book really mean what they mean, or were written truthfully, isn't a safe one either. A christian who actually believes that god's ways are mysterious has no safe ground to believe anything about him at all.

That's an unprovable philosophical assumption. The distinction between objective and subjective knowledge is a false dichotomy. Knowledge of an object presupposes a knowing subject. A knowing subject requires an object of its knowledge.

The problem is in your last sentence: a knowing subject only ever has belief that he knows something. The level of certainty that the subject possesses about a given object does not affect whether or not that object truly exists. You can know something for absolute certain and still be dead wrong. Which is the point I'm making: if objective moral values collapse without god around, then they were never objectively real, they were merely thoughts in his head, and hence subjective.