Nom

Well, if we're going to redefine "objective" and "subjective" to mean something different for God then they do for everything else, I guess we have come to a solution for Euthyphro. I don't think it's a solution that's very satisfying, tho, or one that nontheistic philosophers would accept. Moreover, we seem to be describing a God who doesn't actually *do* anything. How does this omnicient being make a decision? Given your comments on physics and gravity in your reply to Philosoft, we seem to be headed toward a conclusion that everything is God -- in which case I for one am certainly not getting my fair share of fawning worship! But if everything is God, why not simply assume one fewer fantastic thing and stick with, everything is?

Adrian Selby

So why are we accepting God is omniscient?

Furthermore, how does knowing everything equate to being able to ascertain that what God says on a given subject is indeed objectively true? What kinds of thing would God know in order to decide that stealing is wrong? Sure God can see an increase in human unhappiness resulting from commanding man to go about thieving, but this then presumes that human happiness is objectively a sought after goal. Which is a utilitarian view. But how then does God know that human happiness is truely desirable? What knowledge counts towards this? What true propositions could be framed in order to make this an inevitable conclusion? How do we know that there can be such true propositions? What might they be constituted of?

I would assume that God has decided that human happiness is desirable for him, but I would suggest that knowing all there is to know doesn't necessarily inform this view, because its a value judgement, and knowledge seems to relate to states of affairs that have, can or will happen.

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the incorrigible analytics' club

Philosoft

I was thinking similarly, LWF. The God necessitated by your apologetics seems awfully deterministic.

Nom

Well, if we're accepting God, and accepting He/She/It can can be both objective and subjective at the same time, why not a third impossible thing before breakfast?
Well, the God construct Long Winded Fool & I have tossed about needs omnicience so that He never changes His mind. This, per LWF, allows morality to be objective, since it can never change, yet also subjective, since God created it.
My problem is more basic: how can an omnicient God "decide" anything? In a view that equates morality (or physics or gravity or anything/eveyrthing else) with an omnicient God, there can never be a moment of decision. A decision is a choice, made with either few or no facts (i.e. a guess) or after the gathering and weighing of information. This God is capable of neither guessing, since He knows everything, nor gathering facts, since there are none He does not know to be gathered. Decision and creation are not possible in any conventional sense. The most you can say is, stuff just is. And I can posit that on its own, without any God at all.
And a utilitarian view of morality is pretty much what I subscribe to. "Morality" is simply a set of rules assembled for the maintenance of a society. It makes no sense to speak of morality outside of human relations. Is it immoral for a lion to kill a wildebeast? Is a symbiotic relationship between a tree and an ant colony moral? And like any human construct, morality is subjective and can change over time. That some things appear "objectively" immoral, like murder, is simply because those particular rules have been very successful for a long period of time.

Adrian Selby

This isn't ruling out an alternative deontological view, based on duty. Why is God a utilitarian anyway?

Also, isn't omniscience being in the possession of all possible facts? I'm not sure how being in possession of all possible facts has the characteristic, inherently, of utilitarianism being the morally objective guiding principle.

long winded fool

I was thinking this too. If we accept the premise of an "omnimax" God, then he is deterministic. According to the Bible, all humans are absolutely predestined. They can't change their own destiny from God's point of view. I don't think it's much of a stretch to apply this to all non-human things as well. If God's will is responsible for every occurance, then I don't think there can be anything "outside" of God's will, and I think this makes subjectivity and objectivity break down at the divine level.

First off, if we are referring to the God of the Bible, it makes sense to use omnimax as a premise, since this is part of the nature of this god. So then, how can God make a decision if he is omniscient? For that matter, how can he make a decision if the notion of a 'decision' necessarily requires existence in time, and God is not bound to time? From here we get back to the meaningless statement "existing outside space-time." How can God exist if, to exist, one must first be present in both space and time? How can he be outside space if space is a prerequisite for outside? By human standards, God can't exist, just like by programming standards the programmer can't exist to his program. (In order for the program to recognize a thing as existing, it must first be a sequence of ones and zeros. The programmer is neither.) The crux is that human comprehension is inadequate to understand anything with more than three dimensions of space and one of time. Logically, the creator of these dimensions would also be outside of attainable knowledge. Like the programmer communicating with his program with ones and zeros, God could only communicate with the rules of the universe to those dependent upon those rules for perception. Analogously, no matter how hard the program tries, it cannot escape the truth that all things must be ones and zeros before they can exist and the programmer cannot be ones and zeros. The program can extrapolate the existence of its programmer, but his not-binary nature must always present a contradiction.

While this sounds like a cop-out answer, I think it logically follows. Any other apology would not be reasonable. If God is indeed the creator of the very laws that we require for perception, then it is not rational to assume that he is bound by these laws. Sure there is no reason for us to assume that there is a God, but then again, a program has no reason to assume a programmer, (the laws of the program are "just there" as the brute fact of existence) and yet there always is one.

Nom

Beats me, I'm an atheist. But the view that God wants the greatest good (defined as hanging in heaven with Him for eternity) for the greatest number of people is pretty popular, and believers have developed numerous rationales -- like free will -- to explain why the world doesn't appear to conform to that goal.

I'd agree, but God is typically defined as omnibenevolent and omnipotent as well. Wouldn't such a being necessarily actualize a utilitarian world, one with the greatest good for the greatest number of people? And again, according to lots of theologians, He has, it's just that Satan or free will has prevented it from happening, or that there is some Unknown Purpose to things being like they are, or even that this is, in fact, the best of all possible worlds.

First, let me just say that's about as honest an answer that I've ever gotten from a theistic perspective. Great post. And I agree: assuming an omnimax God, determinism follows, at least from God's point of view. On the subject of your program/programmer analogy, one thought occurs to me: all computer programs are designed to process information faster and more efficiently than their creators (us). If we are indeed analagous to a program, doesn't that imply that we are in some fashion superior to the Programmer? I know of no programmer who would deliberately design a program dumber and slower than himself. Maybe the problem isn't that God is so far above us we can't understand Him, maybe it's that we're so far ahead of Him

long winded fool

That's possible. However, from a programming point of view, I was thinking more along the lines of an experiment, or perhaps entertainment. If God is omnipotent, then there wouldn't seem to be any task that he would need humans to do for him. While programs are faster than programmers, the program is not necessarily "ahead of" the programmer. He is still in control and must be in possession of every bit of data before he can assemble it coherently. Especially if we're assuming he is omniscient in regards to his program. And from the analogous point of view, if space-time-energy is the program, then it stands to reason that the universe would be faster, since "God" could not be measured with any kind of time unit.

Maybe this is the point where the analogy fails. As mentioned earlier in the thread, the analogous program exists in space time and so does the programer. Not so if the program itself only represents space time and the programmer represents God and is in some other state not bound by space or time. It is difficult not to attempt to apply the nature of the analogous programmer to God, but logically if we truly are "digital people," so to speak, we cannot do this. I still think the analogy can only rationally result in a "what if?" There could be a "programmer," but any speculation on who or what or how or why must fail by definition. Remember, using words dependent upon time and space to try to understand God are analogous to the digital people speculating on how many ones and zeros their programmer is made up of and in what sequence they occur. Any rational conclusion must result in the programmer's non-existence. "If the programmer is such and such binary code, who encoded him?" They cannot conceive of anything without first assuming ones and zeros, (a place the programmer cannot be) and we cannot conceive of anything without first assuming space and time (a place God cannot be, assuming he created it.)