luvluv

Dr. Retard:

Yes, I agree with your first post. I am not claiming that God's belief MAKES rape bad, as I tried to clarify. I believe that the fact that God believes rape to be wrong is a way of proving that rape is factually and objectively wrong.

As I tried to specify earlier (with a little help from Pomp), I take morals to be functions of values. No, we do not need God to know that if we value human life that we should therefore not kill. But what we do not and cannot know is whether we "should" value human life. Whether valuing human life, from some objective standpoint, is something we ought to do. I think people can differ from one another on this point, as they have, and they have certainly differed as to whether ALL human life should be valued.

My question is, what logical support can be given for valuing a human life, or for any values? How can one know that one possesses the correct values?

My contention is, indeed, that this cannot be done by purely human means. It is not a function of logic or empirical observation, it is a decision humans make. However humans often disagree on the subject, and if there is no God there is no appeal. My argument is not simply that without God we cannot know if our values are correct (which I would agree with) but that without God there are no correct values.

A person whose morality proceeds from the value statement "humans have no intrinsic value" is logically on the same ground as a person whose morality proceeds from the value statement "humans have intrinsic value". There is no logical support for either position.

However, if God were to know that, in fact, humans do have intrinsic value, then such value would then be proven to exist.

There is, as far as I know, no way for values to be verified in atheism. There is no way to know whether nazi values are correct, and non aryans have no value, or whether secualr humanism is correct, and all human beings have value. They are both naked pressupositions which do not have sound argumentative support at all.

In closing, I do agree that I need more support for the position that (i) It is impossible for humans to know morality without God. I hope I have done that here. I hold that it is impossible for humans to know that the values they hold are the correct ones, or that correct ones even exist, without God.

I do not see how I need to show that learning morality from God should be easy. That was never my point. This thread contends that theists cannot justify their morality any more than the atheist, and my contention was that this was not true. A theist has a way of knowing whether or not his value system is the true one. I think this merely needs to be possible to prove that atheism and theism are on different grounds with this question. I don't see that it needs to be easy.

Primal:

Primal, that is not what I said, and you know it.

Again, I do not know how God came to know morality. I do not need to know that to know that his knowledge of morality is true. If you want to start a thread entitled "How did God come to know what was good?" then that is your right, but that is not what this thread asked me to address. I don't know how God came to know what is good and what isn't. But if He knows an act to be morally good or morally bad, that knowledge proves that those acts are indeed as He believes them to be.

That's just terribly innacurate. I don't even BELIEVE in the hell that most Christians do, and you'll find that a very, VERY large percentage of Christians do not. No offense meant, and I'm not trying to put you down, but you need to do some research into this area. It is terribly, terribly innacurate to state that most Christians are Christians out of fear. It certainly is not true in my case.

Actually, that's not the question. The question, if you look at the top of this thread, is "Can Theists Have Morals?"... which jlowder fleshed out to mean "Can Theists justify their moral code any more than the atheist can?" My answer was yes, they can JUSTIFY their morality. If you want to ask where good and bad come from, I don't know. No matter how many times you ask me, I still probably won't.

You don't have to, but if you did't you would be OBJECTIVELY wrong, not just morally and ethically wrong. You would be wrong in the sense that 2+2=5 is wrong. You would be acting out of factually innacurate propositions. If an Omniscient Person takes a position, and you disagree, guess who's wrong?

That really wouldn't help. God's knowledge that something is wrong is not equivalent to God's knowledge that "if you do this thing I will punish you." The ability to punish someone for committing an action would not translate into that action being morally wrong. If God knows an act to be wrong, He may take actions accordingly to rectify that action, but it possesses the quality of "moral wrongness" all by itself, independant of any punitive action on God's part. God's power might be YOUR motive for doing right, but it has not been established that simple power is the means by which an act becomes morally right.

Again, God would not even have to be omnipotent for the argument to work. The truth of a claim could theoretically be established through ANY omniscient entity, even if that entity were no more powerful than your average middle-aged man. If such an Omniscient Mortal knew an action to be wrong, it would be wrong. So, power is not at all necessary to the argument.

Primal

The question is how in the thesit scheme are morals ultimately founded/developed?

To say "We just don't know but God does" is no answer. That's like an atheist saying "evolution just does but we don't know how". To whoch you would rant ceaselessly about how much of a cop-out this answer was.

Dr. Retard

Luvluv:

OK, so your conclusions are these:

C1: If God does not exist, we cannot know what values are correct, or whether any at all are correct.
C2: If God does not exist, there are no correct values.

Your supporting discussion appeals to these claims:

1. Using logic alone, it is impossible to know what values are correct.
2. Using logic and empirical observation alone, it is impossible to know what values are correct.

Now, claim 1 doesn't support either conclusion. Logic is not the end-all, be-all of knowledge. Using logic alone, you cannot determine whether the sun exists. That implies nothing about the state of our knowledge regarding, or the factual character of, the sun's existence. Claim 1 is true, but it is such a trivial claim that nothing interesting follows from it.

Claim 2 needs to be proven. Many moral realists (e.g., Nicholas Sturgeon) will claim that empirical observation does help us know what values are correct. They claim that, for any test you can come up with, for whether empirical observation helps us arrive at the truth in some domain, moral observations pass with flying colors.

But, let's assume that claim 2 is true. Then C1 follows only if this is true: if God does not exist, the only possible way to know what values are correct is by use of logic and empirical observation. But some deny this claim. Some allege that we have a special moral faculty that is in an epistemological class by itself. Others allege that we have other ways of knowing things besides logic and empirical observation -- perhaps some knowledge has been hard-wired into us by nature, knowledge that we could otherwise never arrive at.

We're still assuming claim 2's truth. C2 doesn't follow at all. Certain values might still be correct, even if we have no way of knowing the fact. It would be rash to infer that, just because we have no way of knowing some proposition, that it is false.

I conclude that C2 is completely with support, and that C1 is supported only with the assumption of tendentious theses.

But let's charitably assume that C1 is true. Then atheism's truth rules out moral knowledge. But this is only an interesting result if theism's truth allows for moral knowledge. It's only interesting if we can claim the following:

C1': If God does exist, we can know what values are correct, or whether any at all are correct.

But how? Presumably, in a God-world, logic and empirical observation don't somehow gain the ability to confer moral knowledge upon us. So how, if not logic and empirical observation, are we supposed to gain moral knowledge in a God-world? In this scenario, does God just tell us what values are correct? But why should we believe what he says? Because he's morally perfect and morally perfect beings never lie? But, ex hypothesi, we cannot know that, since we don't yet know that lying is morally wrong. So this can't be how God does it. Has he engineered us with a special receptivity to moral truth? But such a set-up seems possible in a godless world as well. So what is it about a God-world that renders us capable of knowing what values are correct, or indeed, that any at all are correct?

Jagged

[wd]

[ November 16, 2002: Message edited by: Jagged Little Pill ]</p>

KnightWhoSaysNi

In the abortion debate, those who come on opposite sides of the issue argue from two vantage points: the rights of the unborn fetus/embryo vs. the right of the women to control their own bodies and reproductive system. However, what the two sides both have in common is the goal of producing a better society. How will flipping through a holy book solve the problem? Whose interpretation of scripture should we go with? Yours?

Why can't the atheist/humanist place objective reality as their foundation for morals? For example, it is an objective fact that if you drink water, it will be beneficial, and if you drink toxic waste, it will be harmful. There's no need to appeal to the supernatural to know this. Why can't objective morality be based on this observable objective property of what causes harm or benefit to the survival of the human beings? Though nontheists may disagree, just like the example of the two Christians I gave, there's still that common good to strive for (i.e. what's beneficial for human survival).

Let's take an example from your bible that I can apply here. In hot, desert environments, handling pigs can be messy because they roll in the mud and their own feces to keep cool. You're not as likely going to have a healthy meal. But you don't really have this problem in cooler temperate environments and that's why some liberal Jews today are okay with eating pork. The Israelites probably figured it out for themselves that pork diets were harmful to the survival of their society, so they established laws and used their religion to back it up more forcefully.

To me, this explanation makes FAR more sense than all powerful deity coming down and saying, "don't eat pork!"

Now that you've changed your position somewhat and that you claim you're not a biblical literalist, perhaps I might use a different "Hank" analogy. I think Dr. Retard articulated the critique of your position far better than I could, but just so I understand your position correctly, how do you define "good"?

My point was that it seemed odd that ordinary humans can up with moral values far more enlightening and beneficial to humanity than stuff dictated by a supposedly omnibenevolent deity. However, if I had know that's you're not a biblical literalist, I wouldn't have used the example.

[ November 16, 2002: Message edited by: Nightshade ]</p>

luvluv

Good stuff Dr. Retard:

Well, do any of these faculties really equate to knowledge? That pie is roughly 3.14 is something that we know. That the earth takes about 365 days to revolve around the sun is something we know. Do we really know that abortion is wrong? Do we really know that abortion is right?

Well, one of the reasons my argument wasn't formalized (besides the fact that I am not very good at it) was that it was more comparative in nature. My contention is that there is no way for an atheist to verify his values, and for theists there is at least a theoretical way which could be rationally justified. I am not contending that becuase we have no way of knowing some proposition, that it is false. I am saying that if we have no way of knowing some proposition, then we are not rationally justified in saying that it is true or false. Therefore, the rationalist/empiricist atheist cannot say of any moral proposition it is true or it is false.

Did you mean C2 is completely without support?

Does "how" matter for the argument? Would you agree for the theist it is theoretically possible, through revelation, and for the atheist it is theoretically impossible?

What would be wrong with an omniscient God saying: "I am omniscient. I hold the belief that I never lie. I hold the belief that lying is wrong."

Wouldn't that cover it?

luvluv

Nightshade:

It should be remembered that we are discussing epistemological possibilities in a purely logical sense. We are not judging the real world applicablity of theism or atheism. What is asked is, given the that either atheism or theism is TRUE, is it possible within those systems to ascertain whether an action is morally correct or morally incorrect. Within theism, it is possible to come to the knowledge that God holds the belief that abortion is wrong (or right). Within atheism, there is no way to conclusively decide the issue one way or another.

Interpretations of the bible one way or another have little to do with the epistemogical potential of the positions of atheism and theism vis a vis morality.

And why, exactly, should they believe that the common good is the best good? Why should they care about the survival or benefit of human beings?

I don't define it, God does. That's kind of the point. Are you asking me what my opinion of God's opinion of good is?

[ November 16, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

luvluv

Primal:

That is not how I understood it. As I said before, I thought the question was what is the basis of our morality. The basis of the Christian morality is indeed the mind of God.

As for how God's mind got to be the way it is, as I said, I do not know. If that is what your main concern in this debate is, I am afraid I cannot help you.

No, I would answer (once) that evolution just tells us what is, not what ought to be. One could not conclude that misogyny was morally right simply because people evolved habits of misogyny. I would not say this was a cop-out I would say it was incorrect. Evolution also probably brought us murder, selfishness, lying, cheating, and over-all self-interest. None of these things could be said to agree with our common notion of morality.

SRB

Luvluv has been trying without much luck to derive some interesting consequences from the following truth of logic:

(P) If God exists, it follows that God knows what is morally right.

One consequence is this:

(Q) People who know that God exists and know what God wants can easily come to know what is morally right.

The "people" mentioned in (Q) might be contrasted with atheists, who have no uncontroversial means of arriving at moral knowledge. One problem, however, is that it is doubtful that there are any such people. That is, there is no reason to believe that anyone knows that God exists and knows which actions God says are morally right. The issue is itself highly controversial.

Christians might appeal to the Bible, for example. But there is no good reason to think that the Bible is accurate. Furthermore, the Bible contradicts itself on many moral issues and can be interpreted in many different ways. So even if there is some reason to think God exists, and some reason to think God inspired the Bible, there is no reason to think anyone has used the Bible to arrive at moral knowledge.

SRB

luvluv

SRB:

Not only did I not say that it was easy, I explicitly said that the ease with which it is possible to know God's heart on moral issues is totally irrelavent to the argument.

A) Prove it.

B) Totally irrelavent.