RichardMorey

Perhaps a theist can answer these questions.

1. God is often said to be absolutely moral, or holy. God's attributes are also said to not contingent on anything. However, morality only make sense in relation to other entities. For instance, if you look at the Ten Commandments, every commandment is in regards to either the relationship between God and the individual or between individuals. If God were the only entity that existed, it would be silly to call Him/it holy or moral. God's holiness DEPENDS on other beings, and thus is contingent. This violates the way the attributes of God are generally viewed.

2. The things which are considered moral or immoral in Christianity and other religions are often contingent on the way this particular universe is structured. For instance, homosexuality is often considered a sin. However, for homosexuality to be possible depends on such things as sexual reproduction. God could have designed the universe in a way that avoided the "problem" of homosexuality. Likewise, stealing would probably not exist in a universe without scarce resources, and lying would not exist in a universe where our thoughts were not hidden from each other. Murder would not exist in a universe where we lived an appointed time and died, without the ability to kill each other.
Morality is thus relative to the universe one finds oneself in and the God which made the rules. One could say, "But God invented those rules to give us the free will to obey him or not." This, however, would be in conflict with God as a moral God; He could not be moral in that case. He would simply be arbitrary.

3. People who know Plato probably see where this is heading. My third question is, "Is an act moral because God says it is moral, or does God say an act is moral because it is moral?" If the former, God is arbitrary. If the latter, God is not the arbiter of morality, but merely a conduit (as any human can be).


Can any theist answer these three questions?

VivaHedone

I can give you spurly's brilliantly well-reasoned answer:

That came up in another thread. You may have been better posting this in general religious discussions - that seems to be where the theists generally hang out.

philechat

Yes, this is the famous Eurythro dilemma. In the passage Socrates asked the theologian Eurythro whether God (the gods in ancient Greece) was the one who determined morality. If God determined morality, then you must follow God's dictate on every action to be good.

Now here is the question: Say you heard a voice (coming from God) telling you that you must hijack a plane going to France (and force the plane to crush on, say, L'Arc de Triompe) because the French people are sinners. If you doubt either God's command or your own sanity, you are making a judgement outside of what God considered as good, and affirming Plato's assertion that morality exists outside of God. If God alone decides what is moral, it is only imperative for you to hijack the plane.

theIPU

Yes, This is a great point and I would love to hear a good anwer for it. Unfortunately, when I asked my religion teacher (I go to a christian school but I'm an atheist) about it he said something along the lines of, "God is good and wouldn't tell anyone to do that." :banghead:

AnthonyAdams45

So only good utterances can be counted on as God's utterances? If so, then their goodness must be clearly separable from their Godliness, since otherwise, their goodness wouldn't be a sign of the utterances coming from God, and we wouldn't be able to recognize that God says good things. So goodness is logically separate from God.

So even if God wouldn't say an evil thing, a thing isn't good because God says it. The goodness proceeds from the thing itself (or something like that).

Amos

Hello Richard, I am not sure if I qualify for theist but here is my personal thoughts on the questions you asked.

1). Holy means whole and has nothing to do with morals. If anything Gods attributes are life giving and love serving without reciprocity. For example, if God is light our ability to transform sunrays into light is free and so are all of our abililties to learn from whatever we are willing to subject ourselves to is free as well.

With regard to the Ten Commandments, they were inspired to convict us of sin which is a concept created to exhaust our dependency on other beings throught the conviction of sin and subsequent restoration of our solitary (non-social) God-like wholeness. Yes this concept includes an other than God-like idenity.

2). God created us male-and-female to become either male or female so our sexuality is a "condition of being" and therefore not part of "the being" as such. Our sexuality belongs to our social component as rational animal that must be exhausted for us to be made whole again. The Ten Commandments, again, are given so we may be able to achieve this. This same is true with the power of gold, the beauty of girls and the aroma of our kitchen.[quote][b]

3). I don't know Plato well enough to see your point but here we may add natural law to determine whether an act is moral or not because God only 'speaks' in nature and our understanding of nature will be the equivalent of understanding the will of God. Until then we must let local state laws be our guide and religion if if we subscribe to it.

Theli

God kills.


Amos...
So, god's plan in creating the concept of sin was to make us anti-social? It seems strange then that social bonds are so crucial to our survival. Does this mean that god is the "bad guy" in this tale?
And the problems still exists though, morality cannot exist if there is nothing to apply it to.
"Killing is wrong" is an irrelavent rule if there is nothing to kill and noone to do the killing. And moral rules requires conterparts to exist, and if there was only god in the begining how could the morality (and thus the good) exist?

And on another note, a binary system of "good" and "evil" is obviously not practical in our world as all actions would be in the grey area, so why did god create that system?
And why did he deliberately make free will and 100% good incompatible. The christian worldview simply doesn't correlate very well to the world we live in.

Amos

Non-social is not the same as anti-social. Social and anti-social are qualities that belong to the social side of humans. The social side itself is opposite to the solitary non-social side of man.

The concept God is created long after the world was populated and the concept sin was created by believers to redeem the non-social identity to eternally preserve it from societal degradation. So it would perplex us because in a world where we are 100%free the concept good and evil canot be conceived to exist. It is for this same reason that determinism (not 100% free) cannot be conceived to exist except in the world of good and evil. So we must either settle for a world view wherein good and evil exist because we are not free to choose, or, we live in a world where we are free and the concept good and evil does not exist.

To enable these two positions we must return to the social human side of man and the non-social-non-human side of man as man.

Theli

I never said that our choices were made on a binary basis, but that they are (by some) judged by it. This is ofcourse including the notion of heaven and hell, the 2 outcomes from this system.
If man and our world was made by a god that judged all actions binary, morality would be MUCH more simple than it is today.
There would be a clear objective morality to follow, but from what I see there is no such thing.


I've had this discussion before, I think it was with Chip (rest his soul).

Amos

Well I am not so sure if natural law is all that grey because I have never seen any body fall 'up.' The grey areas exist only because of our vague concept of the good -- from within the Cave, Plato would have said, and because we only have partial vision we see shadows.

Heaven and hell exist only when we try to leave this Cave and as long as we are willing to remain inside neither heaven nor hell will be part of the system (we remain cold and just die 'from' something other than old age).