Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”

[Michael]

I see no reason why stable morality can't be the product of a law giver. Indeed I would expect a stable law giver to give a stable law; that makes more sense to me than capriciousness.

If the law is stable and the law giver can't change it, then the law is true independent of the law giver's proclamation on it: it isn't true because the law giver specifically selected it (if this was the case then the law is mutable depending on what the giver selects) but is true and then the law giver tells us this.

Stop examining the law giver and start examining the process by which it assembled the moral laws: if they are simply whatever it selects, then even if they never change, they are merely the opinions of the law giver and moral actions can become immoral actions just as easily as they first became moral ones. If the law giver knew what was moral out of a set of pre-existing moral laws and then handed them down, then it is irrelevant to the process of morality. There is not a third option.

I'm sorry Esquilax, but I still see no reason for thinking that a stable law giver can't give us a stable law. Your opposition would seem to rest on proposing a God who capriciously changes moral law.

As I'm sure you know, the Euthyphro dilemma starts from a premise from Greek philosophy that virtue and the gods were separate 'things', so either the gods recognised an established virtue, or the gods defined a virtue. The Christian view does not start from that presupposition of separation; we see virtue and God's character as being united, hence John the evangelist can write "God is love". So a God stable in character would produce a stable morality; the only way morality would be unstable is if God's character was unstable and that would take us outside of Judeo-Christian thought ('For I am the Lord, I change not', Malachi 3:6).

[naimless]

I don't really believe in evil.

People are just people.

Some people experience stranger shit and it makes them do stranger shit.

[Esquilax]

Oh man, I have begun my response for the last 2 hours and it is late. We will continue this tomorrow!

In the mean time, I have a book to recommend to you Esquilax...
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

I haven't read it, but I'm convinced it's the greatest book ever. :p
(I intend to get it here soon though. )

So excited!

Wow, so you can stretch an argument from ignorance out over a whole book. Who knew?

I'm familiar with Nagel, but I don't particularly find his arguments compelling. Mostly, he falls into the same trap that all the woo woo non-materialist snobs do, of imposing a strawman argument onto materialism with a side order of fallacy of composition. What is true of the components is not necessarily true of the whole; a brain can be an evolved, fully material organ that nevertheless allows the mind to arise within. Try not to label the mind an object when you cannot yet demonstrate that it's not a process that occurs in sufficiently advanced organic brains.

Also? "X can't explain Y yet, and therefore it's wrong and Z is right!" is an argument from ignorance: our inability to currently explain consciousness (in the specific pseudo-mystical terms that Nagel seems to want, incidentally) does not mean that our scientific approach is incorrect. It just means we don't know everything yet but, as I've been saying for the last few posts, at least the materialist viewpoint has the benefit of being immediately demonstrable, something that all this "brains are not the mind!" stuff doesn't even seem interested in. We can- and should- only go where the evidence currently leads, after all. Come back when you've got some positive evidence for your position, and not just a bunch of holes to poke in mine.

I'm sorry Esquilax, but I still see no reason for thinking that a stable law giver can't give us a stable law. Your opposition would seem to rest on proposing a God who capriciously changes moral law.

As I'm sure you know, the Euthyphro dilemma starts from a premise from Greek philosophy that virtue and the gods were separate 'things', so either the gods recognised an established virtue, or the gods defined a virtue. The Christian view does not start from that presupposition of separation; we see virtue and God's character as being united, hence John the evangelist can write "God is love". So a God stable in character would produce a stable morality; the only way morality would be unstable is if God's character was unstable and that would take us outside of Judeo-Christian thought ('For I am the Lord, I change not', Malachi 3:6).

So you're going the same route William Lane Craig does, and claiming that god's nature is good, and so the concept of goodness flows outward from that. But this doesn't get you out of the dilemma at all, it just pushes it back one step; is something good because god's nature says so, or does god's nature say so because it is good? To what does god's moral character conform, and if you claim that it is the beginning of morality then you've just defined yourself into the fiat declaration horn of the dilemma.

[Michael]

I think we'll have to agree to disagree Esquilax. I just don't see the Euthyphro dilemma as a problem for the Judeo-Christian understanding of God and goodness (Godness). I see the problem from the perspective of Euthyphro's presupposition about the separateness of God and virtue, but when it comes to things I find challenging in my Christian faith, this just isn't one.

But I respect your right to still disagree :-)

[Esquilax]

I think we'll have to agree to disagree Esquilax. I just don't see the Euthyphro dilemma as a problem for the Judeo-Christian understanding of God and goodness (Godness). I see the problem from the perspective of Euthyphro's presupposition about the separateness of God and virtue, but when it comes to things I find challenging in my Christian faith, this just isn't one.

But I respect your right to still disagree :-)

That's just the thing though: virtue must be separated from god, else virtue is merely god's subjective opinion and if your god turned out to have a different nature, you would be here extolling very different virtues. If you're defining god's ideas of morality as inherently good, that just means you've embraced one side of the dilemma and are fine with it because of your trust in the authority of that god. But if your god was a different person, if he was a god whose nature holds that murder is morally good, your position could not change: you would still have to sit here and accept that murder is morally good, because god's nature is good and he has said so.

Thus, your moral laws aren't based on the moral content of the action, but the authority of the law giver. Whether they change or not isn't the issue at all, stability was never the problem, the problem is that you're deriving your morals not from the good of the action, but because they were delivered to you by a source you trust, and that is profoundly worrying.

Here's another question for you: how did you decide that god was the good one and satan the evil one?

[Michael]

virtue must be separated from god...

It's certainly a requirement for engagement with the Euthyphro dilemma. But it's not at all required in Christian theology. 'God is love'. But I'm pretty sure we're not going to agree on this one.

Here's another question for you: how did you decide that god was the good one and satan the evil one?

For two reasons. Firstly on a pragmatic level, because if we said 'Satan is good' then that would be very much at odds with 'goodness' as we apply it at a mundane level, to other men. It would require goodness in the supernatural realm to have no, or even an opposite, relationship to what we normally consider good in the Earthly realm. It would be an affront to our conscience. It wouldn't make any sense to me. Secondly I can't see how to make sense of the idea of goodness being something that we get from a creature rather than the creator (not that I am sure that I see Satan as a specific creature, but that's a whole other discussion!).

[Exian]

something you felt was immoral, and concluded from it “there is no God?”

once i downloaded a video from a torrent site with three words of the alphabet,just a innocent tag for some,but as i watched the video a saw the rape of a 1 year old being anally penetred and crying.

to this day i dont understand why i downloaded this video,maybe because it used a name of a innocent game back then.

if god exist he deserve punishment and i will be the first of the line.

I read this maybe 20 minutes ago and I can't get it out of my head. You fucked me up with this. How is this fucker able to upload something like this and not get caught? Shouldn't a file like that be news worthy? Shouldn't there be an investigation? Is the deep web this untouchable?

[Esquilax]

It's certainly a requirement for engagement with the Euthyphro dilemma. But it's not at all required in Christian theology. 'God is love'. But I'm pretty sure we're not going to agree on this one.

Frankly, I think this is a huge dodge. I really hate to say it, but all this is is you putting yourself down one horn of the dilemma and trying your hardest not to say so.

For two reasons. Firstly on a pragmatic level, because if we said 'Satan is good' then that would be very much at odds with 'goodness' as we apply it at a mundane level, to other men. It would require goodness in the supernatural realm to have no, or even an opposite, relationship to what we normally consider good in the Earthly realm. It would be an affront to our conscience. It wouldn't make any sense to me. Secondly I can't see how to make sense of the idea of goodness being something that we get from a creature rather than the creator (not that I am sure that I see Satan as a specific creature, but that's a whole other discussion!).

See, here you're saying two different things, and one of them is directly contradictory to your claim that god's nature defines morality: on the one hand you're arguing for god's authority as a moral law giver, but when pressed on how you came to attribute that authority to god you cite the earthly effects of moral actions first. Either this is a circular argument (I know that god is good because the moral understanding he placed within me tells me that the things he's programmed me to believe are good, feel like they are good to my conscience which he gave me...) or you're saying that you first made a determination yourself that god's moral laws are good, and then opted to follow them, meaning that it's the content of the laws and not the authority of the lawgiver that you follow, and further that if god's commands were not moral as you understand them then you would not find god's nature to be moral.

As regards Satan, your answer there, that he's a creature of creation and not a creator himself, relies upon the presumption that the biblical account of him is accurate and not in any way distorted... which presupposes that god is good and would not lie, which he absolutely would do if Satan was the good one and god was attempting to discredit him.

If I was the evil one of the two and I wanted people to follow me the first thing I would do is spread the claim that I was the good one and that other guy just wants to deceive you for personal gain. Just being the dominant voice in the conversation doesn't imply that the account you're telling is perfectly accurate.

[Michael]

Esquilax

I disagree (what a surprise!). I see myself simply as acknowledging a subjective view of an absolute objective truth. I can only ever engage with the objective subjectively, if you get my drift. What I recognise as good and bad does not define good and bad. I could be wrong. But I have to trust that I'm not, so I trust that a proposal that says everything I consider good (and what the Christian faith says is good) is actually bad just doesn't make sense to me. I would have to abandon and reverse my world view. It's certainly a view that would be contrary, if not the polar opposite, to the Christian faith. Could it be that rape is good? I trust that is not the case, and it's certainly a proposition that I can't make sense of.

On Satan. Yes, I was assuming you meant as the bible describes him (though he's generally the accuser or the tempter, at least outside of John the Revelator's vision with which I really struggle). I certainly assumed we'd both see Satan as part of creation rather than the creator. Sure, if you want to redefine Satan as something different you can, but then your words start to have no clear meaning to me because if you do that, without defining them in advance, you'll be speaking a different, and private, language that I can't translate.

[Esquilax]

Esquilax

I disagree (what a surprise!). I see myself simply as acknowledging a subjective view of an absolute objective truth. I can only ever engage with the objective subjectively, if you get my drift. What I recognise as good and bad does not define good and bad. I could be wrong. But I have to trust that I'm not, so I trust that a proposal that says everything I consider good (and what the Christian faith says is good) is actually bad just doesn't make sense to me. I would have to abandon and reverse my world view. It's certainly a view that would be contrary, if not the polar opposite, to the Christian faith. Could it be that rape is good? I trust that is not the case, and it's certainly a proposition that I can't make sense of.

But this is saying that you made your own moral judgment, and then just attributed any responsibility for it to a law giver. If your god had an expanded view of moral good, so that murder was included as a good act, would you follow that religion? Same god, same book, only now a single moral issue has been inverted; are you still a christian in that scenario?

On Satan. Yes, I was assuming you meant as the bible describes him (though he's generally the accuser or the tempter, at least outside of John the Revelator's vision with which I really struggle). I certainly assumed we'd both see Satan as part of creation rather than the creator. Sure, if you want to redefine Satan as something different you can, but then your words start to have no clear meaning to me because if you do that, without defining them in advance, you'll be speaking a different, and private, language that I can't translate.

Well, I was hoping that you'd judge Satan on his actions, and not just the presupposition that god is the creator of morality. I mean, Satan has a far lower body count than god does, and murder is immoral, so...

Now, a lot of people brush that off the way I'd imagine you would, stating that any seeming violation of moral laws by god is okay, as any action god performs is good by definition, as he has a good nature. But that just demonstrates the unreasonable double-think required of that position.