How to easily defeat any argument for God

[Acrobat]

So the way your question comes across, is like asking me why is my wife's dress objectively yellow?

You can’t think of a reason or explanation for the yellow color of your wife’s dress, lol?

That's good.

Your question here is asking how my wife's dress came to acquire it's yellowness. From that I could provide a casual chain of actions, like in the manufacturing and design of the dress, that led to it's creation.

The difference here is that I do not see goodness as something created, or caused, but as uncaused. There's no question of who created good, or who made it good, etc... Because good is not something made or created, but something that has always existed.

[The Grand Nudger]

No, lol, she’s asking you what makes your wife’s dress yellow, not how yellow dye is made, lol.

Anywho, to strangle this fun new god assertion in its crib, let’s refer again to possible worlds. Two worlds equal in all respects save for one.

In one possible world there is a god, and people apprehend goodness.

In the other possible world, there is no god, and people apprehend goodness.

God’s existence is unnecessary to the apprehension of goodness. Further, if goodness is uncaused or uncreated, then “god” does not account for all of creation or existence. I wonder what else god doesn’t account for, besides moral objectivity and goodness?

[GrandizerII]

In mere reality, the set of our moral positions is a mix between non cognitive, subjective, objective, and just plain false propositions.  Each broad category of meta ethical theory has something valid to contribute to that set.

Yep, that's how I'm seeing it as well. And I think that ultimately we seem to employ more than one type of morality for varying circumstances. It's not one clear cut system, even if the axioms may nevertheless be as simple as harm is bad help is good.

[The Grand Nudger]

As we should. Consider the power of non cognitivist states to manifest themselves as subjective justification against an objectively good thing.

Vaccination is an objectively good thing, but fear of vaccinations leads people to posit subjectivists objections which, if overruled too sharply or too forcefully, actually become an objective description for when or how vaccination may be wrong. A Bad Thing™.

Vaccination at literal or metaphoric gunpoint.

[Acrobat]

All words are defined axiomatically.  The only reason that “cat” means “cat”, is that we’ve decided to use that term in reference to them.

Some of us (an argument could be made that all of us) have axiomatically decided that when we speak of good and bad we are referring to help and harm.

It's not about the word good, but about the nature of what the word good is referring to. What the nature of the cat, the word cat refers to? What the nature of good, the word good refers to.


Being helpful is good. 
Being harmful or cruel is bad.
Being kind is good.
Being honest is good, being dishonest is bad. 
To be loving is good, being hateful is bad.


There's a commonality on the meaning of good in all these examples.

You might thing the referent is something about helpfulness and harm, when it referent is actually something about being.

[The Grand Nudger]

Helpful, harmful, kind, honest, dishonest, loving, and hateful are all properties of acts, not a god.

They’re natural properties, even.

You actually used the two criteria of helpful and harmful....but do we really need to explore how the other five are alternatively helpful and harmful?

This is a non-objection whose sole purpose is to put distance between yourself and your posted inability ( or unwillingness) to account for your standard of goodness or to present a coherent set of comments on the nature of morality.

How many pages of this do you plan on doing before abandoning the thread and starting anew in another?

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Matter of fact, let’s get some confirmation that you’ve been listening to anyone, at all, shall we?

Are you satisfied now in the knowledge that your belief in the subjectivity of atheists moral propositions was a misapprehension on your part? That, contrary to your demands in every thread you’ve been in, atheists commonly think that their moral propositions are meaningfully objective?

Can we get some affirmation from you that we won’t have to continually dispel this notion of yours, going forward?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Being helpful is good. 
Being harmful or cruel is bad.
Being kind is good.
Being honest is good, being dishonest is bad. 
To be loving is good, being hateful is bad.

This comes across as highly problematic.

  Stealing a wallet filled with cash is dishonest and is therefore bad.  But suppose the original owner of the cash intended to use it to finance a murder or arrange to have sex with a child, or some other despicable act.  The theft of the wallet thus prevents crime and is therefore good.  How, in this instance, is dishonesty bad?

If being helpful is good, then all German citizens who were accessories to the Holocaust were being good, as they were 'helpful' to the Party in (among other things), rounding up Jews.

And so on.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

Moral calculus and desert. We entertain the notion that a lesser bad in service to a greater good can be a final good, in analysis. Or, abandoning that, that some bad acts do not entail desert of full consequence if the outcome is good.

Conversely, we understand that s great evil can be accomplished by exploiting people’s desire to be good. That, in this instance, they do not deserve the consequences of the bad act in isolation of context with their intentions.

This can be plotted on a two axis graph, with valleys and peaks broadly conforming to ( and predicting) societal and individual attitudes.

This is the central thesis of Kagans geometry of Desert, which attempts to show an underlying logic or pattern in moral attitudes, specifically in situations with a complex set of actualizing and canceling variables, or in situations described as a field of exclusively suboptimal decisions.

It doesn’t pose an issue for realists, since no fact of any matter exists in a vacuum. It’s a problem for absolutists. So I guess we can add that to the pile.

Acros morality is one of arbitrary and subjective absolutism. He simply -calls- it “objective”.....

........because he intuitively imagines it to be True™.

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To simplify the above ( for the peanut gallery), morality is not a suicide pact.

Using the German populace as an example ( and simplifying fur brevity) their options were to keep the trains that carried the dissidents running, or be on those trains themselves. Exclusively suboptimal. In that they chose to keep the trains running....they are responsible.

We can use a relational inference to say that there were decisions better-than the one they made, so it wasn’t particularly virtuous, but it’s s hell of a stretch to say that choosing not to die is bad, or evil.

In this, the German pop are clearly not heroes, but they’re not quite villains either.

[tackattack]

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. "-Einstein

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Moral calculus and desert.  We entertain the notion that a lesser bad in service to a greater good can be a final good, in analysis.  Or, abandoning that, that some bad acts do not entail desert of full consequence if the outcome is good.

Conversely, we understand that s great evil can be accomplished by exploiting people’s desire to be good.  That, in this instance, they do not deserve the consequences of the bad act in isolation of context with their intentions.

This can be plotted on a two axis graph, with valleys and peaks broadly conforming to ( and predicting) societal and individual attitudes.

This is the central thesis of Kagans geometry of Desert, which attempts to show an underlying logic or pattern in moral attitudes, specifically in situations with a complex set of actualizing and canceling variables, or in situations described as a field of exclusively suboptimal decisions.

It doesn’t pose an issue for realists, since no fact of any matter exists in a vacuum.  It’s a problem for absolutists.  So I guess we can add that to the pile.

Acros morality is one of arbitrary and subjective absolutism.  He simply -calls- it “objective”.....

........because he intuitively imagines it to be True™.

---

To simplify the above ( for the peanut gallery), morality is not a suicide pact.  

Using the German populace as an example ( and simplifying fur brevity) their options were to keep the trains that carried the dissidents running, or be on those trains themselves.  Exclusively suboptimal.  In that they chose to keep the trains running....they are responsible.

We can use a relational inference to say that there were decisions better-than the one they made, so it wasn’t particularly virtuous, but it’s s hell of a stretch to say that choosing not to die is bad, or evil.

In this, the German pop are clearly not heroes, but they’re not quite villains either.

Which is why no act can be said to be ultimately good or ultimately bad - we cannot know all of the possible outcomes of any actions.  If God is either the source or the arbiter of God, then God would need to be comprehensible to human beings.

'Try to be less of a dick than the people around you' seems a sufficient moral guide.

Boru