hypocrite_in_rehab

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the PoE used as an argument for God's non-existence? It's only a valid argument though if we're all assuming the notion that if God were to exist, He would necessarily be good. If we can show the supposed actions of God are not good, than we've shown He doesn't exist. Isn't that the basic argument? If we're starting from the presupposition that if God exists, he could be good or he could be bad - it doesn't particularly matter - then I'm not sure what we're arguing about here.

Fair enough. And so as I've stated I think in a basic definition of a god is included the being of highest value. If I consider myself the highest value in the world, than for all practical terms I consider myself god. So yes, I would fully expect God to value what is most valuable in all the cosmos. If He didn't, I don't think I could call Him good.

It seems to me you might view human life as the highest value, and thus anything that diminishes or snuffs out human life is not good. You see this sort of thing happening all the time under God's watch (and ability to correct it), thus you conclude that God is not good in the way we commonly understand. But of course in making that argument, you've presupposed that human life is that highest value and haven't really argued for it (apart from perhaps common consent). I'm presupposing that if God exists, he is the highest value. We're both presupposing a highest value and then judging our observations per that presupposition.

I realize I'm putting words in your mouth a bit. Perhaps you would think something else the highest value. If so, I'd be curious what that is. Either way though, I think it's still generally the case that we are going to evaluate what is good in relation to what we deem the higher (highest) value (i.e. the squirrel and the pedestrian).

Prof

Essentially: Yes.

Remember that here we have been discussing the nature of morality not necessarily the nature of God. The euthyphro dilemma only points out
that deriving morality from the commands of God possess dilemmas for the nature of morality.

And we'll watch for special pleading or question-begging along the way.


Good place to start, as I have been advocating.



Actually it IS a reason. The proposition "Desires are the only reasons for actions that exist" is one that I find compelling. If there were no desire for X, what possible reason could there be for any action regarding X? (Reason - the faculty - helps us decide what actions will fulfill desires). That happens to be a specific tenet of Desire Utilitarianism that I'm pointing out...but for the moment that's simply a point of interest: I don't need to defend it...I'm just going to watch your argument for consistency.

Now, as I read your response I see that, I suspect unnoticed by you, it is rife through with implicit judgements about what is "good." Basically one can see this underlying standard you are holding in trying to find "good" motivations and reasons for what God is doing. This is what I've been saying: That for apologetic purposes you are wiling to SAY you are choosing the horn of the dilemma in which what is good is made good simply because God commands it. But the sheer arbitrariness that results is simply untenable. You can not even consistently hold to it when trying to argue your way out of the dilemma, as you consistently have an underlying standard for what makes God "good."

I think we can skip down to this part, which is the crux:


Yes, close.

Here's the problem:

On one hand you have chosen the horn of the E-dilemma that says "X is good because God commands it."

You have rejected the horn that says "God commands X because it is good."

You have therefore rejected that what is good depends on the REASONS for it being good (this would restrict what God could morally command, from an outside standard of "reason").

Therefore, attempting to even find reasons for God's commands is a non-sequitur, or useless to the dilemma you face. What is the use of finding reasons, good or bad, for what God commands IF WHAT IS GOOD IS NOT DERIVED FROM THE REASONS IT IS COMMANDED?

You are trying to have it both ways: God doesn't need reasons to make his commands good..."oh, but by the way, God is also rational and here are some reasons why He would make the commands he does..."

The very act of trying to describe ANYONE as rational or reasonable proposes an outside standard which, if they fail to meet it, would contradict the claims made they are reasonable. If the standard is simply "What the being does" then there IS NO STANDARD by which the being could be differentiated from "Irrational" or "Rational." It removes the meaning or use of those very concepts.

So you just can't have it both ways: Either God has good reasons for his moral commands, which make the commands moral, or he doesn't need them and your moral theory says moral commands have no relationship to the reasons given for them. Which means your project of trying to come up with reasons God would make his commands is moot. You have in choosing the horn you have essentially undermined not only morality but rationality - making what is a "good" action or command unconnected to
good reasons. We have no more reason to judge a being like God acting like that as "rational."

There's also some special pleading waiting in your argument about trying to justify what God chooses to do via appealing to God's desires. Taking that route implies a moral theory that what one "ought" to do - morality being what we ought to do - derives from desires. Once you imply that relationship you can't special plead and say "but ONLY in the case of God's desires..." No...if what one ought to do derives from a set of desires, that applies to us and our desires too.

The horn you've chosen is just untenable...unworkable.

Better, in my view, to choose the other one: What is good is established by the reasons for it being good.

Then you can at least say "God being All Knowing would know the reasons for why any X is good, hence, lacking God's omniscient knowledge, we ought to defer to God on moral questions."

Prof.

Prof

What do you mean by "value" let alone "highest value?"

What is your value theory? What is the nature of "value?" How does anything attain "value?"

Prof.

hypocrite_in_rehab

I was interacting with Connick's statements above on the value of humans and squirrels. Within this context, value is something we're attributing to humans and squirrels (in varying degrees) so as to help determine which actions could be considered good.

Prof

That doesn't answer my question at all.

It's pretty much impossible to understand whether your value theory - which posits God as the "highest value" - makes any sense at all without you telling us what "value" means in your theory.

Prof.

hypocrite_in_rehab

I guess I understand value to be a quality that is attributed or bestowed on something by something else. I run over the squirrel because I personally have placed higher value on the human life. I personally consider my action good because I acted in the interests of that which had higher value (to me).

I think I've just repeated myself, so I doubt I've given you what you were looking for. My main interest is simply how we go about determining and judging actions good. So I'd rather not leave the context we were in when the term value came up.

Do you take issue with me for avoiding the squirrel?

connick

Prof has made a point about this in a few different ways, so let me take a stab at it.

We are presented with an act (let's say the crucifiction) and two standards by which to judge it. One standard is that everything God does is good, because he is good by nature. The other standard is that what is good is based on considerations of risk vs. reward, pain vs. pleasure, etc. Naturally, one standard precludes the other. When adhering to the first, one cannot judge an act of God to be evil based on the innocent suffering caused, rather they must simply judge that God is good. In adhering to the second standard we cannot call God good because the suffering of innocents cannot be reasonably justified. I say this not because there is no way to justify it, but because justifications for innocent suffering being a good thing, render the word "good" meaningless in communication. Having a "good" day might mean you were nailed to a cross.

If everything that God does that seems evil is really good, then we have no standard by which to judge anything but God. Life and death, pain and pleasure are equally good. To say that God cannot be judged but good but that humans can subjectively judge one another is special pleading. This is especially true, considering the creator still retains responsibility for his creation.

If everything that God does can be judged by us, then he is evil in the commonly understood use of the term. Life and death, pain and pleasure are judged by our needs and desires to be on opposite ends of the spectrum of good and bad. To say that God alone cannot be judged is again, special pleading. If anything, a wise and powerful and loving god would find himself firmly rooted in the life and pleasure end of the morality meter when judged by us mortals.

In the first case you cannot have your cake (God's acts cannot be judged) and eat it too (acts can be judged).

In the second case you cannot have your cake (acts can be judged) and eat it too (God's acts cannot be judged).

hypocrite_in_rehab

And so what if God says life/pleasure and death/pain are not the actual ends of the spectrum, but rather the dynamic of your relationship with me mark those poles (The Bible insists conscious separation from God is far worse than death)?

Now what do we do? If this were to be true, then our whole measure by which to judge God's actions towards us would be off. Do we disagree with God and say, "you're wrong, the consensus of us humans (your creation) think its life and pleasure?" Do we expect God should conform to our felt desires/needs before what He claims are our truest ones? Could we still call him good or even god at that point?

Am I special pleading here? I don't think so. I'm just suggesting that if we were in fact created, the creator would necessarily know us better than we know ourselves.

I just put my two year old to bed. She wasn't too happy with me because I didn't give her another snack (she'd already had a small pile of Pringles and some M&M's). Per her need/desire for immediate pleasure, she judged my actions as not good. And probably, if she were able to round up all the two-year-olds in the neighborhood, they'd probably agree with her and there would be a consensus opinion that my willful deprivation of her immediate pleasure was not good. Now, I disagree with her assessment that immediate pleasure is the proper criterion for judging me in this instance. But I'd hate to have to resort to special pleading. Am I a not-good being (even in just this instance) because she (along with the consensus of two-year-olds) has judged me so?

Prof

Could be.

Doesn't mean the creator is "good" though. The creator could still be evil.

That is essentially appealing to "God's Mysterious Ways" argument.
"X may look bad to us puny humans, limited as we are, but God may well have a good reason for doing X that we don't know."

It's essentially a non-answer. "I don't know why X is good...but there may be some reason for X..."

God is essentially used as the stand in for the possibility of there being
a good reason. But the addition of God really doesn't solve the problem when, in fact, you don't have the answer to why X is good.

Someone could just as well drop a baby off a house and in his own defense claim "Look, I don't have an answer at hand justifying what I did as a good thing. But after all neither of us is omniscient and we could hardly have explored all the possibilities and justifications that exist...so just because we don't know the reason why my dropping a baby off the roof is good, doesn't mean there isn't one.

If you want to say "But...God GIVES us the answer!" Then I'd ask "On what grounds ought we trust this God? Why should we assume He isn't evil or deceiving us?"

If you answer "Because God is good" then you've just begged the question.
On what grounds do you say "God is good?"

And if it's simply that you have DEFINED God as good, then the whole issue of imagining He has good reasons for X is moot. You've DEFINED that God has good reasons for X.

And, as I've gone over with Elfman, if you simply make "God = Good" axiomatic you end up on the horn of the Euthyphro dilemma called "arbitrary"...which undermines God's wisdom, rationality...yadda, yadda...

I should also add some other things when you appeal to the "We don't have God's perspective" argument. I'm forgetting whether it was Josh McDowell or Lee Strobel who, in one of his popular books pitching Christianity, used the analogy of a bear
being caught by humans and moved for it's own good (say, for instance, it was not going to survive and needed to be moved to another habitat). From the bear's perspective it's being caught in a trap, or shot with a tranquilizer, and being netted and shoved into a truck hardly looks good. It sees itself as being harmed; under attack. But the bear just doesn't have the perspective to know that, in fact, what is being done is being done for it's own good.

The analogy of course (like the one with you and your daughter) is our perspective vs God's perspective. But...what is unmentioned in the analogy is this: That UNLESS the bear knows that what is being done to it is actually for a "good" reason, the bear is JUSTIFIED in believing it is being attacked. Right? You can't BLAME the bear for it's point of view. No more than you can blame your daughter for having the perspective of a 2 year old.

However, in Christianity humans are routinely BLAMED, and punished, for reacting to God as the bear reacts to the hunters. Christians want to say on one hand we can't have the perspective to see that what God might be doing in X situation is actually good...but also want to keep the blame on HUMANS for judging God's action as bad. But it's GOD's fault if he doesn't give the reasons for why X is good. If analogies like the bear are apt, then we can no more be blamed for considering God evil when bad things happen that God does not explain, than the bear can be faulted for assuming the people trapping it are "bad."

And if God is not giving us the reasons for his commands, then God isn't imparting moral understanding. (For which we can not be blamed). And you have substituted mere obedience for moral understanding. (Not that lots of Christians have had a problem with this throughout history...but it's still a shallow approach to morality).


See, you just really can't escape the dilemma of any Divine Command theory of morality. Philosophers have realised this since way before Jesus ever showed up. Aristotle was telling us this in around 400 B.C. And if you take a course in the history of ethics/moral thought, you'll probably be shocked at how little Divine Command theory plays a role and just how much work there has been on various fronts without appealing to Divine Commands. Most moral philosophers and ethicists realised such a theory was a dead end, long ago. But this isn't something they tell you in the pews of course. (The pastors/ministers/priests probably don't even realise it themselves).

Prof.

hypocrite_in_rehab

Prof,

I appreciate your willingness to keep interacting with me here. However, you're plowing over the nuances of the discussions and reiterating the same basic point over and over. Connick mentioned our personal desires/needs as criterion for judging God's actions by us. I was interacting with that particular nuance in the discussion. It's actually the same issue I tried to engage you with way back when I kept trying to bring up the referential aspect of good. But you weren't biting then and still don't seem to be interested. So what it comes down to is despite the fact you assume we all generally agree on what constitutes good actions, we really don't at all. You and I differ quite starkly, I imagine, on how we go about determining whether or not any action (be it by humans or gods) is good or evil. You're pretty certain your procedure is the "common" way among human minds, I'm pretty sure mine is. Either way, common consent makes for a lousy argument (as does "Most moral philosophers and ethicists have realised..."). So I've tried throwing out questions and issues so we could somehow arrive at a shared method for judging good...even before applying the term to God or anyone else (I'm pretty sure I haven't yet called God good...in fact I've most certainly called him not the kind of good it seems you're arguing for). I'm pretty sure all of those questions/issues went unanswered, and in return I got the same statements that appear on page one of this discussion (albeit with different colors and scenarios).

You probably don't think its the case, but really, I do hear what you're saying. I'm not trying to weasel my way around it (nor have I EVER tried to argue the divine command theory by the way - that's not at all where I was going at with Connick). I'm asking questions I would ask in any forum or discussion on the issue of good and evil (whether or not God was part of the discussion). You and I bring different perspectives, presuppositions, etc to the table. Without interacting with those differences, we can't even begin to go at the apparent inconsistencies we see in each other's arguments. We're just left with each saying to the other, your theory is inconsistent, incoherent, etc...without actually probing the roots of the theory to investigate those claims.

And so just to be clear, I have not yet argued for a good God in this discussion (I have suggested that if a god-like-creator thing exists, it is fair to presuppose his being would be of a higher good/value than that of his supposed creation - but I have not argued that He exists). I haven't even begun to lay the case for why I might think anyone can rightly and clearly understand God as good despite the overwhelming presence of evil in His creation. All I've been trying to understand is how it is you or I or anyone else go about judging good or evil to begin with (since as we stated in the beginning good is a subjective value term).