The Objective Moral Values Argument AGAINST The Existence Of God

[RoadRunner79]

Sorry Hammy, been having computer issues. I think the more frugal version is better. I can see where it is sound, although I think there is a lot wrong with it as I mentioned before. There is a lot to support there. Sorry for the short response, having computer issues, and difficult to give a more comprehensive , formatted response.

[The Grand Nudger]

Moving along, moral realism not only lacks any divine contingency..the likelihood of moral realism being true is completely unaffected by the existence of a god.  It's not more or less likely that moral realism is true in the case of an existent god or a nonexistent one.

Not true at all. As explained in my argument it's more likely to be true without a God simply because of the principle of parsimony. It's more likely to be true because of a basic law of probability. Like I said to Rob what's more likely something as absurd as an invisible unicorn exists or the absurdity of both an invisible unicorn AND a flying spaghetti monster exists?

It's neither true because of a parsimony or true because of a basic law of probability.  It's not true at all.  The distribution of possible states for the two propositions is 50/50 with respect to their own and each others existence.  Even within the distribution of states in which moral realism is true..it's still 50/50 on the issue of god.  Parsimony tells us not to multiply entities beyond necessity.  It tells us that there is no need to refer to a god in the case of moral realism being true, but it tells us nothing about the probability of there being a god -from- moral realism being true.  Put simply, moral realism doesn't have anything to do with god at all.

Ask yourself this..if moral realism being true lacks the required relationship with the divine in order to demonstrate or suggest the likelihood of the divine in the positive..why would you imagine it had the same ability in the reverse?

[henryp]

Premise 2 of the Theist argument, contradicts your premise 1 above.

Uh.... duh. It's a counter argument. Of course it contradicts theirs.

But that's the end.  Once you show one of their premises isn't true, it's over.  That's how logic works. 

If I say All cats are white.  And you show me a brown cat.  Ta da!  My logic is shit.  You win the day.

When theists say "If Objective Morals Exist, then God Exists."  And you go "Objective morals can exist without God."  If that's true, you don't need to say anything more.  The only thing left to 'argue' is whether or not your statement is true or not.

They're saying 

If Not B then Not A. 
(which equals)
If A then B.

If no God then no Objective Morals 
If Objective Morals then God.

No... they're saying:

A
If not B then not A  If A then B is the exact same as If not B then not A.  You can say it either way.  If A then B just goes better with how you wrote your first (new version) premise.
Therefore B

Or

Objective morals exist
If objective morals do not exist then God does not exist
Therefore God exists

You're asserting
A (objective morals exist) = True  AND B (god exists) = False is possible.

Yes that's the first premise of the argument [the reformulation of it I did for RoadRunner, I mean. It seems that you're addressing that one here. In the original argument I simply said that objective moral values exist in one of the premises. In that cases it's one of the premises but not the first premise].

Right.  I was talking about the RR one which was much clearer.  

If you can show an example where A is True and B is false (which is what you're claiming with Premise 1), you've shown their argument to be unsound. 

I don't have to show an example. As already said there is simply no reason to believe that a God is required for objective moral values. It's their job to show that a God is required for it. Hence why one of my premises is that objective moral values can exist with or without God.

Demonstrating that a premise is false is typically how it works.  It's hard to do here, so It's fine to just say "DISAGREE!"  But they will say "I DISAGREE WITH YOUR DISAGREEMENT!"  And nobody has shown anything.  You've just changed the argument from us "God exists True?" to: is "If Objective Morals then God true?"

But again.  That's the end.  If you say "Objective morals can get exist without God", your work is done.  You don't need to say anything else.  That statement does the trick.

End of story. But that should be the conclusion you are working towards.  Your premises 2, 3, 4 and conclusion are unnecessary.  If you show your Premise 1 can be true, you've finished.

You don't seem to understand how arguments work. I don't need to demonstrate the premises within the argument itself... the whole point of premises is those are the things that are already assumed to be true... and the conclusion just has to follow.

If I wanted to demonstrate the premises I'd make each one a conclusion for a separate argument.

Usually, logical arguments are used to prove an opposing premise is false.  

I say 'if it has wings, it can fly.'    You can certainly say "Some things with wings can't fly."  Everything I've learned about this sort of thing says that "Some things with wings can't fly" is what you'd want to conclude to prove logically I am wrong.  So you'd say Penguins have wings.  Penguins can't fly.  Therefore Some things with wings can't fly is true which proves  "If it has wings, it can fly" is false.  And that's logic.


With
Objective Morals exist
If Objective Morals Exist then God Exists
Therefore God Exists.

If you're fine with just stating a premise, you can also just say "Objective morals don't exist."  That does the trick.  You can say "Objective morals can exist without God."  That works.  You can say "God doesn't exist."  If you think you just stating something true is enough, you could do any of those 3.  

But if you're just going to state the opposite, there's no reason to bring logic into it.  They present an argument that concludes God exists.  You can always just say "God doesn't exist."  It's not particularly compelling, but if true, it breaks their logic.

And nothing personal on not addressing 90% of what you say. But you are not a concise thinker or writer.  So unless I want each post to turn into 1000 page manuscripts addressing the entirety of every tangent brought up, I've got to try and steer the conversation towards what I'm trying to talk about.

Yes I am not  concise but I am thorough and logical and you are neither. I am working on the conciseness as maybe it will both help you and Khem learn a thing or two about logic (or stop pretending to now know a thing or two about it)... and it will also stop me wasting my energy when you're going to miss the point anyway.

I know you don't believe me.  It'd be a real eye opener for you if you found some sort of 'logic' forum, and presented this to them and asked if what you're doing makes any sense.  It's pretty bad.  It's like someone impersonating what they think logical arguments are based on reading Mystic Knight posts.  

You've said in the past you don't have any symbolic logic background.  Consider for a moment that maybe you're doing something wrong.

[The Grand Nudger]

When theists say "If Objective Morals Exist, then God Exists."  And you go "Objective morals can exist without God."  If that's true, you don't need to say anything more.  The only thing left to 'argue' is whether or not your statement is true or not.

The rest, as far as a counterargument to divine contingency in moral realism is concerned, is multiplying propositions beyond necessity. I heard somewhere...from a real smart guy who's never wrong, that's a Bad Thing™.

[henryp]

https://app.shoreline.edu/doldham/101/ht...%20c-a.htm

Ahh...I get it now.  This isn't a counter argument in the sense you've seen their argument, and now you're going to counter it using logic to show that it's false.  It's a "You've created an argument filled with premises I don't believe?  Well, I got my own argument filled with premises you don't believe that says the opposite!"  

From the text: 
What makes a good counter-argument?
Some counter-arguments are better than others. You want to use ones that are actually somewhat persuasive. There’s nothing to be gained by rebutting a counter-argument that nobody believes. 

The shortcoming of your 'counter argument' is it's got a bunch of premises that are false, so the conclusion is going to be false (in the logical sense).


EDIT: Maybe this will help clarify things. What is the purpose of your argument? Who is it for?

[robvalue]

@Hammy: I agree, adding "and God" on the end makes the proposition less likely, especially since it has nothing to do with it. Religious people sometimes however define morality just in terms of god's scorecard, see below. In such a case, the scorer is then required. I was pointing out that they're trying to defend something that makes no sense in the first place, so yeah, adding a huge bum splat of a God and all the nonsense that brings along with it just makes it worse.

@Whoever: The idea that there are any sort of "moral truths" out there still makes no sense to me. Morality is so utterly poorly defined that not even the goals of it are agreed on. You'd have to first narrow it down to some particular subset of morality, or else saying true things about it is just impossible.

3) Morality is a rule governing how reality functions, like the (apparent) laws of nature.

If this is the case, then there should be some way of demonstrating what exactly this law does. As it stands, it doesn't appear to do anything.

I don't think there's an objective morality, but I'd guess this is the one religious folks are thinking of.  And the idea is that it 'does something' on the other plane of existence where spirits and Gods and heaven and all that jazz exist.

Another angle, is that it's like the 'game of existence.'  And somebody wrote the rules how to play.  If you're playing monopoly, and your little dog token is on Boardwalk, and you roll a 3, you can't eat a treasure chest card.  You can, I suppose, but it's objectively wrong in the context of monopoly.  Or at least it can be inferred to be against the rules if not specifically stated.

God creates existence.  Makes the rules for existence.  We're existing in the context of existence.  

That's how I'd pitch the idea anyways.

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. God could be using it as a system in his scoring card. Then god does stuff to you after you die based on your score. Even then, the rule itself isn't doing anything, and has no impact whatsoever until you die.

Maybe there is an actual law of morality in heaven that physically stops people doing bad things to each other.

[Edwardo Piet]

It's neither true because of a parsimony or true because of a basic law of probability.  It's not true at all.  The distribution of possible states for the two propositions is 50/50 with respect to their own and each others existence. 

Er... you're misinterpreting what I'm actually saying once again.

I'm saying that X crazy thing + Y crazy thing is less likely to be true than X or Y taken separately.

Even within the distribution of states in which moral realism is true..it's still 50/50 on the issue of god. 

Er, we're talking about my argument and you're taking it out of context. One of the premises of my argument is that there is no other rational reason to believe in God besides objective moral values. So, since objective moral values without belief in God is more parsimonious than objective moral values with belief in God, then it's more rational to believe in objective moral values without belief in God.

Parsimony tells us not to multiply entities beyond necessity.

Yes. Because all other things being equal it is more probable that an explanation that postulates less entities is true.

  It tells us that there is no need to refer to a god in the case of moral realism being true, but it tells us nothing about the probability of there being a god -from- moral realism being true. 

Again, you're taking my argument out of context.

 Put simply, moral realism doesn't have anything to do with god at all.

Again, you're taking my argument out of context. Yes, it has nothing to do with God at all, like I said, I don't even believe in the existence of objective moral values with or without God. That is not the point of the argument. The point of the argument is that if objective moral values exist they're more likely to exist without God. (Surely you can accept that simply due to the fact that in all likelihood this universe wasn't made by God?).

Ask yourself this..if moral realism being true lacks the required relationship with the divine in order to demonstrate or suggest the likelihood of the divine in the positive..why would you imagine it had the same ability in the reverse?

I think you need to rephrase this question as it's not clear to me.

Allow me to paraphrase it however to try and show you how I make sense of it:

I take it that you are asking... if moral realism being true says nothing about the fact that God is likely to exist then why should moral realism being true say anything about the fact that God is unlikely to exist?

I think I perhaps got it right, but I'm just checking, as your question seems a bit confusing, the way you phrased it, to me.

Okay anyways, to answer that question: It's not objective morality itself that demonstrates it. I don't have to demonstrate it. One of the actual premises of my argument is that there can be no other rational reason to believe God exists besides the belief that objective moral values exist. I don't think that the existence of objective moral values are an indication of God existing or not existing. I don't think it says anything either way. You keep misrepresenting me as saying that. I am playing devil's advocate, as I have already said, and starting with the premise, that I myself don't accept, that there can be no other reason to rationally believe in God besides the existence of objective moral values. I don't accept that. I don't think there is any reason at all to rationally believe in God. My point is if objective moral values are the only rational reason to believe in God, it's still more rational to not believe in God because of the principle of parsimony.

Did you actually read my argument? You seem to have trouble grasping the fact that I'm only saying my conclusion follows if all the premises are accepted.

[henryp]

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. God could be using it as a system in his scoring card. Then god does stuff to you after you die based on your score. Even then, the rule itself isn't doing anything, and has no impact whatsoever until you die. 

Maybe there is an actual law of morality in heaven that physically stops people doing bad things to each other.

Yeah, it's weird thinking of a 'law' with no effect.  Although maybe, there is an effect.  I think tossing God aside, we think 'immoral' behavior has personal consequences.  And I don't mean physical.  Changes to who you are on a more basic level.  I'd use people who fight in wars who are haunted for the rest of their lives over some of the things that happen.  This is the first time I've put those ideas together in this context, so I'm just going to go wander off and think about it now.

[robvalue]

Come to think of it, some people do talk as if morality has some actual effect. A god botherer says, "If there's no God [and thus no morality] what's stopping me killing people?"

Nothing is stopping you doing it even with god and morality. Saying god will punish you is no different to saying other humans will punish you. It would make more sense to say, "If there were no other humans around, what would stop me running round naked and shitting on trees?" Well, nothing would. Maybe a vigilant squirrel.

[Edwardo Piet]

@henryp... I am not going to reply to that until you actually respond to me using the quote feature correctly. Quoting my entire response and inserting your own comments inside my quoteboxes in bold is not how to use the quote feature. I am not interested in clearing up your mess when I already said I think that you and Khem are only worth minimum effort as neither of you seem to be able to grasp the most basic of points and both have you have repeatedly ignored the exact same question before... one about the distinction between noumena and phenomena, which leads me to believe that you're both too dishonest to ask about something you don't understand... or even tell me why you don't think it's relevant. You just ignore it altogether... which is pathetic (I guess if you said you don't think it's relevant then you wouldn't be able to explain why if you don't even understand it).