Best arguments for or against God's existence

[no one]

Extremely potent hallucinogens.

[Acrobat]

You can be a moral realist without God or religion though. Examine this formal argument and tell me how God is necessary to make it true:

The question isn’t  really whether you can believe in moral realism without subscribing to a religion, or believing in god, but whether moral realism is suggestive of design. My argument is that an external reality, that posses objective rightness and wrongness, is a reality that possess the properties of stories and novels, authored works.

(1) A property P is genuine if it figures ineliminably in a good explanation of observed
phenomena.
(2) Moral properties figure ineliminably in good explanations of observed phenomena.
Therefore
(3) Moral properties are genuine.


The ability of putative moral properties to feature in good explanations is one perennially attractive argument in favour of the metaphysical claims of realism. The initially attractive thought is that moral properties earn their ontological rights in the same way as the metaphysically unproblematic properties of the natural and social sciences, namely by figuring in good explanatory theories. So just as, for example, a physicist may explain why an oil droplet stays suspended in an electro-magnetic field by citing its charge, or a social scientist may explain high levels of mental illness by citing income inequality, a ‘moral scientist’ may explain the growth of political protest movements or social instability by citing injustice. Likewise, just as an observer of the physicist may explain why he believes that the oil droplet is charged by citing the charge itself, and an observer of the sociologist may explain why she believes that income inequality exists by citing the inequality itself, an observer of the ‘moral scientist’ may explain why they believe that a situation is unjust by citing the injustice itself. In such cases, it appears that the instantiation of a moral property – injustice – is causally relevant in producing an effect – a political protest movement or moral judgement.

http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/1930/1/T...prints.pdf

The is and ought.

One tendency I think many atheists defenders of moral realism seem to do, is try and render moral statements, as observational statements, as descriptive, like scientific statements of causes and their effects, pushing the ‘ought’ out of the picture.

X is wrong becomes synonymous with something like x is harmful.  Rather than x is wrong, because i ought not do harmful things, that I ought to do good things. It fails to acknowledge the sort of absolute values, that underpin moral statements, and equates them with statements of relative ones.

Maybe you can see why a transcendent/objective reality that posses absolute values, such as we ought to do good, and ought not do what is bad, resembles a reality akin to a story, or narrative? Possess a telos.

  “If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon.
In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain pre-determined standard.

Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity.


And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it's the right road relative to a certain goal.

Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or deep problems.

But this is not how Ethics uses them.

Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said "Well, you play pretty badly" and suppose I answered "I know, I'm playing badly but I don't want to play any better," all the other man could say would be "Ah then that's all right."

But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said "You're behaving like a beast" and then I were to say "I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any better," could he then say "Ah, then that's all right"?

Certainly not; he would say "Well, you ought to want to behave better."
Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance was one of a relative judgment.

The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this: Every judgment of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a judgment of value: Instead of saying "This is the right way to Granchester," I could equally well have said, "This is the right way you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time"; "This man is a good runner" simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a certain number of minutes, etc.

Now what I wish to contend is that, although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statements of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.” - Wittgenstein

[The Grand Nudger]

The argument from novels, then, not the argument from morality.