How to easily defeat any argument for God

[Belacqua]

If this is a description of God, then goodness exists independent of God and we don't need God to be good.

Dante would say that when you do something good, you are not acting independently of God, you are reflecting his nature and aiming toward him. Whether you know it or not.

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Which works quite well without any God (in the meaningful sense of the term).

Euthyphro's dilemma yet to be resolved.

I find that people here often have a very specific idea of what the "meaningful" sense of the term is, which is very different from the view of Augustine or Aquinas or Dante.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Dante would say that when you do something good, you are not acting independently of God, you are reflecting his nature and aiming toward him. Whether you know it or not.

All due respect to Signore Dante, but if God is the sum total of all goodness, then goodness exists independently of God.  In other words, I can be good whether God exists or not.  Furthermore, the Irish philosopher Boru maintains that it is impossible to know whether any particular act is good., so the whole thing is largely a wash.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

If god -is- the reason that something is bad, then bad is arbitrary and subjective.  A fact about an individuals nature or predispositions

Good or in particular the absence of good is the reason that something is bad, like Light or in particular the absence of light is the reason why something is dark.

I addressed why this restatement doesn’t alter or effect the objection or rescue you from self contradiction pages ago. All that you’re telling me is that the absence of god makes something bad. No fact about the act, a fact about an individual.

Keep up.

I’m still waiting for you to decide wether you think god and good are synonyms, or there is a standard of goodness apart from god, so that you can declare some god, like holocaust god, “wrong” or “bad” even though it’s suffering from no absence of god-ness.

It takes the latter for good to be metaphysically objective and specific, rather than subjective and arbitrary. You are allowed to believe the former, lol. If that’s how you think morality works then so be it, but there’s no point in calling it anything other than what it is, in that case.

It would also make your constant shitposting about secular morality more than a little bit perplexing. OFC, In mere reality, your shitposts are incoherent either way. Good job on that one.

[LadyForCamus]

“Like someone here might”?  I don’t want you to answer for what you think someone else here thinks. I want you to answer for yourself. We’re going on round five now of the same question. Are you going to keep tap dancing?:

Why is it objectively wrong to torture babies, Acro?

I attempted to answer your question several ways, I don't see myself dancing, I just find myself a bit confused as to what it is you're asking, and perhaps it has something to do with a difference in how you and i use the term objective wrong.

You have, so far, not made any intellectually honest attempt to answer the question. You really can’t think of any reason why torturing babies is wrong then? Lol, okay. Remind me never to ask you to babysit. You said, “torturing babies is wrong.” I asked: “why?” Some five pages later I still don’t have an answer. You started with, “because it’s hateful”, which I explained has everything to do with personal, subjective feelings, and nothing to do with the objective wrongness of the act. Beyond that, you blathered on about definitions, and then told me what you think other people’s answers would be.

When I say x is objectively wrong, I'm saying that wrongness of x is not a description of my internal state, like the prettiness of my wife's dress,  but an external reality like the yellow of my wife's dress.

JFC. And I’m asking you to give me the reason why X is fucking wrong. 

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?

[The Grand Nudger]

There’s an accurate answer buried in there.

There is a difference in how the term “objective” is being employed. He’s misapplying it.

To him, things are “objectively wrong” when they fail to conform to some fact about an individual, his god.

Xenocidal maniac, commander of ethic cleansing and rape, author of stringing up the better man for one’s own innumerable misdeeds. Commander of the forces of apocalypse. Hells landlord.

You know, “goodness itself”. That guy.

[LadyForCamus]

There’s an accurate answer buried in there.

There is a difference in how the term “objective” is being employed.  He’s misapplying it.

To him, things are “objectively wrong” when they fail to conform to some fact about an individual, his god.

Xenocidal maniac, commander of ethic cleansing and rape, author of stringing up the better man for one’s own innumerable misdeeds.  Commander of the forces of apocalypse.  Hells landlord.  

You know, “goodness itself”. That guy.

But, his god didn’t do any of that, remember? He’s not That Kind of Christian. 😏

[The Grand Nudger]

His god must have done at least some of that, or he isn’t a Christian.

Vicarious redemption through Christ is a non negotiable article of the Christian faith.

Anything less is just jesusism, and still won’t rescue his moral stance from its necessarily arbitrary and subjective nature. A god could have nothing -but- good ideas, good acts, and a good nature, and it would still require a standard apart from itself, facts of an act rather than facts of an individual, to be “objectively good”.

His misapplication of moral objectivity is as transparent as his arguments are baseless. He thinks his god is really like that, really good. His objectivity is a statement regarding what he thinks his god really is. A good god, not like that crap holocaust god. Hilarious in that he’s willing to distance himself from anything on his gods acts, commands, character or nature which he deems “not good”. That other god would not be the standard of goodness, whose absence makes bad, in spite of the presence of its god-ness.

As an aside( that might be helpful to the op when dealing with folks like Acro and Bel), the objective immorality of Christ and Christianity is the single best argument against the assumption of the faith. It assumes the existence of the character and the accuracy of the narrative in order to completely shut the door on the religion. There are plenty of horrible things and people and movements which exist. Their mere existence isn’t enough to justify our joining and extolling the virtue of their cause.

[Acrobat]

Goodness and Badness of x, is more like saying the roundness or yellowness of X, or the light or darkness of X, than the disgustingness or prettiness of x, or the taste of x, or the feeling of x.

I'm pondering how to get past the current stuckness of this conversation.....

Maybe we could address some other traditional questions about the Good, and let people hate those instead. 

For example, do a good medicine, a good painting, and a good person, have some quality in common? Is the goodness of each of these something they share, or is each good in its own way? 

I think that Plato and Dante would both say that each of these things "participates" in the Good in its own way, reflecting or embodying some aspect of the entire Good. And pointing us eventually to the highest Good. 

Probably your opponents here will disagree with that. 

I haven't worked on this much, but I think we can make a case that each of those things does share a mutual type of goodness, if we define goodness as that which encourages human thriving. A good medicine obviously makes people healthier, and health is better for thriving. A good painting, in this view, would be one which enriches the lives of those who see it -- challenging, surprising, delighting. The painting's goodness would be less a practical goodness, nearer to autotelic, but is still good because of the affect it has on human life. A good person is good in relation to others -- bonum est diffusivum sui. It would be hard to say that a person who was only good to himself was very good. 

So given all that, I do think that the goodness would be a quality in the object. It would often be perceptible to us. Of course there would be disagreement and mistakes -- a medicine might prove to have unknown side effects, for example. A movie which at first strikes us as good might tend overall to flatter its audience and make people stupider. (A lot of them do.) 

Though your interlocutors here continue to think of God decreeing the Good like laws, theologians would say that God is the sum total of all the good aspects of all the things in the world (plus infinity). This is what Dante says. So you are correct, I think, to say that God couldn't reverse goodness and declare by fiat that the Holocaust was actually good. Because there is no possible world in which genocide encourages human thriving.

I think this view is probably accurate, but I generally reserve and think of the notion of good, when used in a moral sense, but not just contained in the expression that supporting human flourishing or well being is good, but also in the way we say kindness is good, honesty is good. Or when I look at my daughter sweetness, purity, innocence as good. There's some similarity of meaning here, that's hard to define.

But regardless of how it's defined, we recognize Good is a thing of objective truth, it's out there and not just in our head, or an expression of our feelings, of our likes and dislikes.

The objectiveness of Good appears self-evident to me, as self-evident as the sun outside my window. It also was never not self-evident to me, there was no point in which I didn't believe this, and somehow came to believe it.

Some atheists philosophers like Alex Rosenberg, would say this perceptions of moral objectiveness, is just an illusion, much like is said of free will. But no one here seems to be of this opinion.

They seem to recognize it as truly objective, but there's just more reluctant, reticent to confess as such. I find this reluctance interesting, a lacking of confidence, not so much in objectiveness of good being true, but in confessing it. I'm not sure how to explain that, but it's interesting.

In addition the meaning of Good is not described by their particular moral theories or philosophies, but rather it's presupposed, in the overarching elements of these systems. Supporting human well being and flourishing is good, harming or hindering this is bad.

Though good and bad are objective truths, they also appear to remain undefined.
Also while their moral systems primarily use good and bad in regards to actions, there seems to a similarity in meaning of good and bad here, if we used it in regards to motivations, intent, or character. There's a similarity in the meaning of good, when we say someone did something good, and someone is a good person. In fact the latter seems to be a more fundamental sense of good than the former. I want my daughter to be good, more so than do good. Doing good should flow from her being good.

That goodness we all seem to perceive objectively, appears to be about being. Perhaps even being itself. All of us seem to recognize this fundamental reality at some level, even if we do so blindly. It's like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, one feels the leg, and mistakes it for a tree.

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

Others, have decided axiomatically that they are referring to the presence or absence of a god.

The former has, at least, the potential to be specific and objective. The latter does not.

Perhaps what you see as reluctance and lack of confidence is, in fact, a greater understanding of the moral field. Acknowledgement of the weaknesses of human intuition and arguments from pure intuition. Sure, they may think that something is objectively bad, but it’s nit as if human beings haven’t gotten that wrong before. It’s one thing to certify the concept, and another entirely to assert that one has possession of the set of contents.

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.

[GrandizerII]

If this is a description of God, then goodness exists independent of God and we don't need God to be good.

Dante would say that when you do something good, you are not acting independently of God, you are reflecting his nature and aiming toward him. Whether you know it or not.

---

Which works quite well without any God (in the meaningful sense of the term).

Euthyphro's dilemma yet to be resolved.

I find that people here often have a very specific idea of what the "meaningful" sense of the term is, which is very different from the view of Augustine or Aquinas or Dante.

All three of them believed in the Christian God of the Bible, not in this vague nebulous Platonic notion of Good that Acrobat professes belief in and refuses to elaborate on, so much so you have to do the elaboration for him (based on what you think he's saying).

lol at Acrobat's "probably accurate" ...