luvluv

K:

1) God is, by definition, omniscient.

2) It is impossible for an omniscient being to hold any false beliefs.

3) Therefore, what God claims to be valuable is valuable.

Now, if God held the belief "I like humans" then all that would have to be true is that God actually likes humans. But if God holds the belief, humans are valuable, then it would have to be true, objectively, that humans are valuable, but because an omniscient being cannot hold a false belief. Therefore, one would be rationally justified in saying that humans are valuable, so long as it is a belief that God holds. However, your decision to value your own existence, while "true" is not rationally justified. It isn't necessarily true (you could, after all, be suicidal tommorow for all anyone knows). Therefore, your valuing of your own existence is unjustifiable rationally within your belief system, while my belief in the value of human beings is.

If it is true, as I believe, that God exists and he has said that human life and freedom is valuable, then I am rationally justified in believing that it is. However, if you are right and there is no God, you are not rationally justified in valuing your own existence. You may happen to do so, but that's just a historical accident. You just happen to value your own existence, and you couldn't give a rational reason for it.

SRB

luvluv:
you may have mentioned them but I don't remember them being explicitly argued.

SRB
I mentioned moral intuitionism, ideal observer theory and utilitarianism. Here's another objective moral theory compatible with atheism, "Action X is moral if and only if God would approve of X if God had existed."

There is nothing I need to argue. You are the one who has made certain unsubstantiated claims. If I have an argument, it is this:

(a) According to luvluv there is no objective theory of ethics that is compatible with atheism.
(b) But there are lots of objective theories of ethics that nobody has shown to be incompatible with atheism.
(c) Thus, luvluv's view is unsubstantiated [from (a) & (b)].

luvluv
I'm reasonably sure that there is no moral system that can be rationally justified, because at some point you will have to give a premise to support your preference for your own existence or self-interests, and I don't see how that can be done without begging the question.

SRB
As a semantic theory, the truth of an objective theory of ethics is determined by how well it captures what people mean by certain moral terms. One might advocate a theory as the correct (i.e. most semantically adequate) one even if that theory disagrees radically with one's personal preferences. In any case, the issue is not whether I can justify any particular objective moral theory, but whether you can back up your extravagant claim about atheism being incompatible with moral objectivism. You really ought to retract that claim if you are unable to demonstrate any incompatibility.

SRB

K

luvluv:

That doesn't take care of the ultimate value judgement. You claim that if God values something, then it is valuable. But that still leaves the value judgement in valuing something valuable. Why should anyone value what God thinks is valuable - even if He's right?

Not to mention that any morality based on the God of the Bible would seem absolutely immoral to us today. His actions showed that He certainly didn't value human life.

Certainly I can. My ancestors had the significant survival advantage of valuing their own existence. Their contemporaries who lacked this advantage died off without reproducing. Valuing self-existence was passed down genetically to me. That is why I value my own existence - I'm genetically programmed to do so. Why is this irrational?

Pomp

Luvluv,

Pomp I agree with you that values differ from ethics. It is true that humans usually value their own life and their own, as you call it, self-interests, but there is no RATIONAL reason for them to do so. They simply happen to value their self-interests, but it is impossible to come up with a sound argument in favor of self-interest without begging the question.

I don’t have to make a sound argument or, indeed, any argument for self-interest. It is tautologically true that I value the things that I value, whatever those things happen to be. Humans do not “usually” value their self-interest, they always value their self-interest because, whatever they value is, by definition, their self-interest. Further, I have never pretended that anyone has any RATIONAL reason to value X over Y, any more than I have a RATIONAL reason to be six feet tall or a RATIONAL reason to be light complected. A person’s values are an empirical observation about that person, not a theory or a principle in need of justification. They can certainly be explained, but never justified in the sense that you mean.

Therefore, that people tend to favor their own interests is on the same level with the fact that an abnormal percentage of the human race likes the color blue. You could not rationally justify or create a sound argument in support of either belief, which is why simple self-interest is a nice DESCRIPTIVE TERM for morality, but it is not a RATIONAL JUSTIFICATION for it.

Good, you’re catching on. Now, take the next step. You cannot make a rational argument that anyone ought to value the color blue, or their own life, or the love of their family, but you can make rational arguments that people who value those things would be best served by acting in certain ways in order to obtain the things that they value. “I like the color blue” is not a justification for anything, but “I like the color blue, therefore I ought to buy a blue car” is a perfectly rational justification for a particular purchase. “I value the love of my family” is not a justification for anything but “I value the love of my family, therefore, I ought not lie to, cheat, and steal from them, or do anything else that would turn them against me” is a perfectly rational justification for a certain type of behavior.

Briefly, there are a few reasons why God's fiat would make morality have truth to it. First if God is truly omniscient and omnibenevolent (or all-good, as I prefer) then it follows that what Omniscient Omnibenevolence values is rightly valuable, and what Omniscient Omnibenevolence deplores ought rightly to be deplored.

Part of the definition of Omniscience is that it is impossible, for an omniscient being to hold a belief that is false. Therefore if a being were truly omniscient, and he declared certain valuables to be the correct ones, those values would indeed be correct by definition.[/b]

First of all, the concept of “rightly valuable” is, as far as I can tell, incoherent. It presupposes some very bizarre ontology, for starters, and seems to clash with many empirical observations.

Second, and more importantly for this discussion, by choosing the first horn of Euthyphro you’ve just contradicted yourself. If god sees what is “really” valuable and, in his omniscience, understands that it is so, then one could remove god from the picture and the valuable would still be valuable. Thus, from an atheist perspective, the good would still be good and no god is needed. Of course, I disagree with this view, but it is compatible both with atheism and with your particular take on morality.

Plump-DJ

JJL

Yes.. i did note that lack of temporality in your sentance. Perhaps i can put it anthoer way. If God is all good and this is part of God's nature then what justification do you have for seperating this aspect of God's being from the being itself (Since it is part of God's nature) and then suggesting that morality would then be dependant on something else ontologicaly prior to God, even though this something else is a part of God's nature?

This logic does not make any sense to me.

K

Plump-DJ:

I think the argument he's making is that there is no reason to call God "good" unless goodness is defined apart from God. It becomes a meaningless adjective. It takes what would normally be a judgement about the disposition of God and turns it into simply an empty place holder for His attributes. It means that there is no reason to believe that God's actions are any better than anyone or anything else's. It's just that God's have the completely arbitrary label of "good".

Valmorian

</strong>

I'm sorry, I thought it was rather obvious that value is subjective. In fact, I can't see how you can define it otherwise. What use is it to speak of the value of something outside of the context of someone to value it?

Is Gold valuable? Depends whom you ask.




Since "This is rightly valued" is simply fiat, I disagree. I still don't see how you can proclaim that value is anything other than subjective. What 'value' can something be said to have without referring to someone?

[/qb]

But I find it as non-sensical as an omniscient God holding the belief that "Steak is tasty". It's a meaningless statement. It's a statement of relative opinion.

Plump-DJ

.

Hmm... well i gathered that this is where he's going. I still however don't see the problem.

One could argue that God's character is love, which forms the background of the moral universe and that this is totally different than chalking it up to some arbitrary will. That being the case I don't see why that should seperate God from the standard, since both are based upon the motive force of God's character, his feeling in love.

[ November 06, 2002: Message edited by: Plump-DJ ]</p>

K

Plump-DJ:

The difference with this is that you aren't claiming (I don't think) that God's love is somehow different than the love we feel and that it is how we should love even if to us it may feel like hate. If that were the case, God's character being love would be as meaningless as God's character being good. They are just placeholders. They have no meaning to humans.

luvluv

SRB:

Well, a would be incorrect. If I ever did say this, I know I corrected it in my next post to you, and I've repeated this correction to at least one other poster.

I did not say that any moral system was incompatible with atheism, I said that no moral system can be rationally justified within atheism.

To my unlearned ears, it sounds like what you are describing is a metaethical discussion in which someone might be trying to explain what they mean by phrases like utilitarianism or secular humanism. But surely defining what one means by these terms is not the same as giving a rational justification for holding them?

I hereby withdraw my claim (yet again) that moral objectivism is incompatible with atheism and formally restate my claim (yet again) that no moral system can be rationally justified within atheism.

K:

Well, I guess they should simply because He is right. Why should anyone believe in anything that is obviously true? They would be flouting their epistemic duties for not doing so and would be deliberately and obstinantly incorrect. And if people chose to disbelieve that people had value even if God said so, then they would just be being deliberately obtuse. Their objection would simply be insane, but they would be totally free to have that opinion just as a person is totally free to believe the world is flat.

My basic point is that if an omniscient God says something has inherent value, or, perhaps less problematically, if God says there is a certain value that all humans should value, then placing value on that object would no longer be a matter of opinion. If a human were to not possess that value, he would be objectively wrong in not doing so.

Again, this amounts to a descriptive term of the process by which you came to have an instinct for self-preservation, not a rational justification for it. I could give you a description of how I became a UNC fan, but that would not amount to a rational justification, or a sound argument, of my UNC fan-ness (if you will).

Pomp:

And what if they value nothing? And can you give me a reason why this is impossible, or can you just say "we haven't seen it to be otherwise". If the latter is the case, then self interest is not rationally justified, it just is.

I disagree. A person's values are DECISIONS, and your complexion and your height are not. You arrive at values by a process. They are not programmed into your genetic code. People can change their values, I changed mine when I became a commited Christian. People quite often give reasons for the things that they value. My only point is those reasons do not rise to the standards that most people over here demand from the reasons one gives for belief in God; those reasons, in other words, are not sound arguments for their values... yet they still have values.

Pomp understand that I am a good student of yours so I never questioned that any of the above was true. I think we truly can limit our discussion to only values.

Well, jlowder said this as well and I gotta tell you, if I'm reading it right I don't have a problem with it. What you seem to be saying is that if a good God exists then good can exist without God. But if a good God exist then good DOESN'T exist without God, so why should I sweat it?

I mean, if I'm reading it right, then it seems one would have to affirm the actual existence of a good God in order to make the claim that goodness could exist without God, but of course this latter statement, while possible, would actually be false. So, as a theist, why shouldn't I be all over that?