Throughout the history of humanity the term God has been tossed around very carelessly. Even today we do not have an accurate ontology for the thing that is called God. All the major religions have only succeeded in describing attributes of what their God would have. But, in philosophy it is useless to try to argue that something exists if you can’t even properly describe what it is. Some theists believe that it is beyond our human comprehension to understand such a being. In that case, it is not logical to try to reason its existence.
For example, God in the Abrahamic religions is considered to be all-powerful. But, how could you be ever sure that a being is all-powerful? At the most you could only know that a being is very powerful, but not all-powerful. Furthermore, some theists claim that God exists in a plane of existence that transcends our own time and space. But, it just might be that there is another plane of existence that transcends the one that God exists in. You could never be able to reason that the plane of existence that God exists in is the ultimate plane of existence.
This point is clearly demonstrated in the short story Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott. In it, a 3-dimensional sphere takes a square out of his usual 2-D environment into the one that transcends it, the 3-D world that we all know and love. The square who before was only aware of his 2-D world became aware of the possibility of multiple dimensions each transcending the one before it.
So, in any case theists are still free to argue that their God exists, but from the examples I have shown I believe that it is impossible to have real knowledge of the existence of an infinite and all-powerful God.
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God is the Creator of the universe from which moral values come from. Since He created the laws we abide by, He would have ultimate authority over them and thus be all powerful. Regardless, if you want to hold to the argument that He isn’t all powerful, He would still be very powerful and your Creator.
Morality does not derive from God, because simply obeying commands does not amount to morality. Also, God has not been shown to be the creator of the universe. The universe just is the way it is. And if your holy text says that God is all-powerful and the thing you have been worshipping was only very powerful then you would have been worshipping a false god.
On morality, I am not claiming morality by obedience. I am just saying you cannot say something is “wrong” if the world was not created, because who sets the standard?
If you are saying that a creator is needed to set standards, then following those standards is obedience.
But furthermore, have you heard of the moral zeitgeist? The society of the time sets the standards. It is also different from society to society. For example, slavery wasn’t immoral until very recently in the timeline of human history. And it had nothing to do with any creator who set a standard. Today, we can say that slavery is wrong because we have embraced human rights.
You miss the point. Moral standards would exist (because of a Creator) even if nobody ever followed them. If I murdered you tonight in your sleep, that would be wrong. it doesn’t matter if I personally say it is right in my own mind. “Society” is just a collective of individual people. We say what the nazis did was wrong, even if they believed within their society that is was wrong. You may say that most people thought it was wrong, but that then is just rearranging and regrouping “society” so that what you feel is wrong is considered the standard. If nothing was the cause of everything, there is no objective standard of wrong. Using society to collect the opinion of individuals doesn’t solve the problem.
What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of life? One of the pages on my blog discusses this. Please take a moment to read it.
Moving comment down here for readability. arechairantichrist said: “You are merely making an appeal to consequences. So, what if morality is not objective enough for you? It doesn’t change a damn thing. And inserting a deity doesn’t make anything all better.”
Wikipeida says: “In logic, appeal to consequences refers only to arguments which assert a premise’s truth value (true or false) based on the consequences; appeal to consequences does not refer to arguments that address a premise’s desirability (good or bad, or right or wrong) instead of its truth value. Therefore, an argument based on appeal to consequences is valid in ethics, and in fact such arguments are the cornerstones of many moral theories,”
Since you cannot have any objective morals which would lead to everyone setting their own standard, my system of belief is more desirable. Furthermore, I would say it is true – not because of the consequences, but because a Creator does exist.
Reality is not subject to how we feel about the consequences of something.”
That is a blatant misuse of the wikipedia quote and a mischaracterization of my position. Yes, individual moral statements need an appeal to consequences. For example, we would not like to live in a world in which murder was allowed and not punished because it would make it more rampant. But, morality as a whole cannot be judged to require a creator using an appeal to consequences.
I never said that everybody could just set their own moral standard. We set it as a collective and with the rationality of the era in which we inhabit in mind.
Furthermore, you can only explain something we don’t know with things we do know. You don’t know what God is and cannot know. Inserting God solves nothing because God is an unknown. You might as well insert any mystical deity that has been thought of by man. But, it is equivalent to saying nothing at all.
The collective is just… well… a collection of individual minds. The collective nazis ok’d what they did, but it was still wrong. I can say that because there is an objective morality.
Using the Nazis as an example has never served anybody well. I would agree with you if the Nazi ideology was an emergent phenomena from the people of Germany, but it wasn’t. It was commanded by a totalitarian authority figure.
This demonstrates my point. If you are able to set the boudries of the “collective”, which is just a collection of individual minds, then you set the morality.
[...] is Not Objective I have already established in a previous post titled What is God that theists don’t have an accurate and positive ontology of God. But do theists even mean [...]
You are merely making an appeal to consequences. So, what if morality is not objective enough for you? It doesn’t change a damn thing. And inserting a deity doesn’t make anything all better.
I also have a post about the meaning of life on my blog too. And the key point to it is that there is an end point to life. Permanent death is essential to life having meaning.
Reality is not subject to how we feel about the consequences of something.
I am able to set the boundaries because I have rational mental faculties. And anybody who was brought up in the same liberal climate of the western world will also come up with the same or similar ideas about morality. There is no need to insert a God and inserting a God doesn’t help anyways. Morality can be objective without being absolutely objective.