Another Christian Being Offered On The PC Alter?

[seer]

So now we're just playing dumb again it seems. I already told you 10 times what my stopping point is. It's in showing what the moral action does and what it's intended to do - that's the only intelligent stopping point. Charity is good because it helps the poor, not because god likes it or commands it. As such of course my stopping point has good-making properties. Yours is "God said so." Which has nothing, not even intelligence.

You don't get it do you. Why is it good to help the poor, hence why is charity good? You will not be able to avoid a circular argument, and according to you circular arguments are not "intelligent." The very objection you laid on us will eventually fall on you.

You keep reiterating this as if it hasn't been refuted over and over again by me and others. Your "morally just being" cannot logically be the foundation for morality, as I've show you with the euthyphro dilemma, which you have not refuted and admitted your basis is totally circular, and nonsensical. Ethical governance has nothing to do with a foundation for morality. Our universe could be ran by Adolph Hitler and you'd get "ethical governance." All you have is either a circular argument, or might makes right. And you have no coherent methodology for knowing who god is and what he wants. It's all based on your opinion on who you think god is and what you think god wants. That's why no theists agree on this. It is every [theist] for himself - it is all reduced to red in tooth and claw.

Then make a non-circular argument for your position - use a deductive syllogism without begging the question. I will be waiting.

[The Thinker]

What you've explained to me is your general criteria for a stopping point. You haven't told me what is your particular stopping point (or one of your stopping points? do you have more than one?).

It's like I'm asking someone "Who is your wife?", and instead of pointing out the particular woman to me and naming her, the guy responds by trying to explain to me the (or his?) definition of "wife".

I know your definition. I want to know your concrete instance.

That all depends on the moral in question. It is not the same of each moral action because the situation and relevant factors and level of complexity will be different. Originally you mentioned repaying debt. I think we both agree this is generally good, assuming the debt was due to an honest agreement. So why is repaying debt good? It is good because it honors an agreement both parties entered into and that conforms to the general principle of goodness, that what is good in the moral sense of the term is generally that which promotes the health, happiness and well-being of sentient beings, and/or minimizes unnecessary pain or suffering. This is the most logical and intelligible to explain goodness and would seem to be the same general principle a good god would use.

But my intent has never been to prove such a claim. This is you shifting again to a different question. Your attempt to change the subject further strengthens my suspicion that you don't actually have any such syllogism for the reasoning you claim.

I didn't say prove the claim, I said you haven't even defended the claim. And if you cannot, I see no reason to assume why it is true given the dilemma you face that you have not refuted. Remember, whoever holds the positive belief bears the burden of proof. You belief objective morality depends on god; I don't. You bear the burden of proof.

I just there agreed that "lovingness exists other places." And pointed out that: "Whether lovingness can exist elsewhere does nothing to explain how something X being independent of God's lovingness implies that X is independent of God completely."
Again you dodge the question.

You sir, dodged the question. I asked you to show that lovingness cannot or does not exist independently of god, or that lovingness is only good because of god.

For your convenience here it is again:
Please complete the syllogism to make it valid:

P) "Loving is good" exists independently of god's moral goodness.
C) "Loving is good" exists independently of god.

If it's so obvious to you and everyone, then it should be easy for you to complete the syllogism. Why don't you?
I honestly have no idea how you or anyone gets C from P. I can't attempt to refute a line of reasoning that I don't even know and have been unable to guess. (And without this, you have no dilemma.)

Remember, my view is in response to an argument - the moral argument. If I can show the moral argument to be invalid, I don't need my own positive argument, because a negation of the moral argument supports my view, which is that morality doesn't depend on god. The moral argument is:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

My view challenges the first premises. The euthyphro dilemma shows that no one can coherently demonstrate the first premise. For the theist it all comes down to 3 possibilities when dealing with the euthyphro dilemma:

(1) God arbitrarily decides morality
(2) Morality exists independently of god
(3) Make a circular argument (i.e., X is good because god has it, and god is good because he has X)

There is absolutely no other way out of this. That's why divine command theory, or any morality based on god, fails. So I don't need to provide a syllogism, because my argument is in response to a syllogism. If you cannot make a coherent argument supporting premise 1 of the moral argument, which you can't, you cannot defend any of the claims you've been making.

No, it's the opposite of what the particularist has to do in order to remain a particularist by definition. Far from needing to strip the particularist standard of its properties, it must have those properties. A meter bar standard does not require us to strip the bar of physical length. On the contrary, the particularist meter bar must have some length, by definition.

What don't you understand about that? And if you can't understand that, then you don't understand Alston's particularism.

If the particularist doesn't strip god of all his good-making properties, then god is good because he has those properties, and that is the view Alston, Craig, and others cannot take, because it admits goodness exists independently of god. Again, I asked you to show that lovingness cannot or does not exist independently of god, or that lovingness is only good because of god. This is crucial to defend the premise 1 of the moral argument. Still waiting for a direct reply to that.

[seer]

If the particularist doesn't strip god of all his good-making properties, then god is good because he has those properties, and that is the view Alston, Craig, and others cannot take, because it admits goodness exists independently of god. Again, I asked you to show that lovingness cannot or does not exist independently of god, or that lovingness is only good because of god. This is crucial to defend the premise 1 of the moral argument. Still waiting for a direct reply to that.

Yes, and so am I: Why is it good to help the poor, hence why is charity good? Make a non-circular argument for your position - use a deductive syllogism without begging the question.

[Joel]

That all depends on the moral in question. It is not the same of each moral action because the situation and relevant factors and level of complexity will be different. Originally you mentioned repaying debt. I think we both agree this is generally good, assuming the debt was due to an honest agreement. So why is repaying debt good? It is good because it honors an agreement both parties entered into and that conforms to the general principle of goodness, that what is good in the moral sense of the term is generally that which promotes the health, happiness and well-being of sentient beings, and/or minimizes unnecessary pain or suffering. This is the most logical and intelligible to explain goodness and would seem to be the same general principle a good god would use.

Okay. In Post #902 you wrote, "The only way to intelligibly describe why something is good or bad is to describe what it does" (emphasis in original).

So, the only way you can intelligibly describe health, happiness, minimizing suffering, etc. as good is to describe what they do. So go ahead; explain why those things are good by describing what those things do (or just pick one of them to explain if you want).

Remember, whoever holds the positive belief bears the burden of proof. You belief objective morality depends on god; I don't. You bear the burden of proof.

You continue to misunderstand my position in this thread. My position is not the claim that morality depends on god. My position is merely that I doubt there is an inescapable logical dilemma. I'm not making a positive claim. You are. (Your claim that there is an inescapable dilemma.)

For your convenience here it is again:
Please complete the syllogism to make it valid:

P) "Loving is good" exists independently of god's moral goodness.
C) "Loving is good" exists independently of god.

If it's so obvious to you and everyone, then it should be easy for you to complete the syllogism. Why don't you?
I honestly have no idea how you or anyone gets C from P. I can't attempt to refute a line of reasoning that I don't even know and have been unable to guess. (And without this, you have no dilemma.)

Remember, my view is in response to an argument - the moral argument. If I can show the moral argument to be invalid, I don't need my own positive argument, because a negation of the moral argument supports my view, which is that morality doesn't depend on god. The moral argument is:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

My view challenges the first premises. The euthyphro dilemma shows that no one can coherently demonstrate the first premise. For the theist it all comes down to 3 possibilities when dealing with the euthyphro dilemma:

(1) God arbitrarily decides morality
(2) Morality exists independently of god
(3) Make a circular argument (i.e., X is good because god has it, and god is good because he has X)

There is absolutely no other way out of this. That's why divine command theory, or any morality based on god, fails. So I don't need to provide a syllogism, because my argument is in response to a syllogism. If you cannot make a coherent argument supporting premise 1 of the moral argument, which you can't, you cannot defend any of the claims you've been making.

First, again, my position is not that of that moral argument. My position is merely doubting/questioning your claim of a dilemma. That is, I'm not positively claiming the first premise of the moral argument. I'm doubting your claim that that premise necessarily runs into your dilemma. Thus I have no need to try to argue/defend that the premise is true, only that it doesn't fall into your claimed dilemma. That's why, for the discussion between you and me, you are the one making the positive claim.

Secondly, none of your three possibilities is true about the theory I suggested nor is any of them true about Alston's particularist position. So it at least seems there are two counter-examples to your claim. (One counter-example is sufficient to refute a claim.)

Thirdly, I notice that your supposed circular argument there is not logically circular. One could hold a non-circular theory in which both "X is good" and "God is good" follow from "God has X." It would be a circular theory only if it, in turn, tried to use "X is good" or "God is good" to then prove that "God has X."

Fourthly, through our discussion, we discovered that the reason you believe that the theory I presented falls into your dilemma (specifically your 2nd possibility), is that you claim that P necessarily implies C:

P) "Loving is good" exists independently of god's moral goodness.
C) "Loving is good" exists independently of god.

Without which, your claim of a dilemma collapses. I see no way to logically get C from P, so unless you can demonstrate it by making it into a valid syllogism, it seems your dilemma is non-existent.

If the particularist doesn't strip god of all his good-making properties, then god is good because he has those properties,

Nonsense, for the same reason that it's nonsense to say, "If the meter-bar particularist doesn't strip the bar of all physical length, then the meter bar is a meter because it has the length of a meter." The fact that the meter bar confers meterness onto whatever length it has, necessarily requires/implies that the meter bar has some physical length.

[The Thinker]

[QUOTE=seer;237662]You don't get it do you. Why is it good to help the poor, hence why is charity good? You will not be able to avoid a circular argument, and according to you circular arguments are not "intelligent." The very objection you laid on us will eventually fall on you.

I do get it. In explaining morality I have an intelligible stopping point, and you don't. It is good to help the poor because it positively benefits them. It is not good "because God said so," or any other such nonsense.

Then make a non-circular argument for your position - use a deductive syllogism without begging the question. I will be waiting.

As I just told Joel, remember, my view is in response to an argument - the moral argument. If I can show the moral argument to be invalid, I don't need my own positive argument, because a negation of the moral argument supports my view, which is that morality doesn't depend on god. The moral argument is:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

My view challenges the first premises. The euthyphro dilemma shows that no one can coherently demonstrate the first premise. For the theist it all comes down to 3 possibilities when dealing with the euthyphro dilemma:

(1) God arbitrarily decides morality
(2) Morality exists independently of god
(3) Make a circular argument (i.e., X is good because god has it, and god is good because he has X)

There is absolutely no other way out of this. That's why divine command theory, or any morality based on god, fails. So I don't need to provide a syllogism, because my argument is in response to a syllogism. If you cannot make a coherent argument supporting premise 1 of the moral argument, which you can't, you cannot defend any of the claims you've been making.

[seer]

I do get it. In explaining morality I have an intelligible stopping point, and you don't. It is good to help the poor because it positively benefits them. It is not good "because God said so," or any other such nonsense.

No, you are not getting it. Why do you prefer positive benefits to negative? What if negative benefits for the poor caused positive benefits for the rich? It will all come back to personal preference - because you say so or you think so. That is all you have or ever could have.

[seer]

As I just told Joel, remember, my view is in response to an argument - the moral argument. If I can show the moral argument to be invalid, I don't need my own positive argument, because a negation of the moral argument supports my view, which is that morality doesn't depend on god.

No Thinker, it is hypocritical at best. You claimed that our argument would be circular (even though Joel's is not). And based on that circularity it was invalid. Yet you can not offer an argument for objective moral facts that would not also end up begging the question. So you are hoisted by your own petard. And as we drill down, ethics, in the end, will be decided by the individual, a society or God. Individuals or societies are flicked, finite in understanding, and of changing moral sensibilities. God on the other hand is all knowing, with an immutable moral character. Which brings certainty. It puts real meat on the bones of our best moral inclinations. We ultimately live in a just and moral universe - or the unjust and amoral universe of the atheist. Really Thinker - you offer nothing...

[The Thinker]

No, you are not getting it. Why do you prefer positive benefits to negative? What if negative benefits for the poor caused positive benefits for the rich? It will all come back to personal preference - because you say so or you think so. That is all you have or ever could have.

Ask yourself this: why does god prefer positive benefits to negative? What would his reasoning be? You would probably claim that they are based off of his immutable good moral character. If that's so, then immutable good character would support the positive benefits and not the negative. And there is nothing about god's character that cannot exist independently of him.

[The Thinker]

No Thinker, it is hypocritical at best. You claimed that our argument would be circular (even though Joel's is not).

Joel's argument is based off an assumption, and his assumption is that there is no dilemma! If you think that's a good logical argument, you have very low rational standards.

And based on that circularity it was invalid. Yet you can not offer an argument for objective moral facts that would not also end up begging the question. So you are hoisted by your own petard. And as we drill down, ethics, in the end, will be decided by the individual, a society or God. Individuals or societies are flicked, finite in understanding, and of changing moral sensibilities. God on the other hand is all knowing, with an immutable moral character. Which brings certainty. It puts real meat on the bones of our best moral inclinations. We ultimately live in a just and moral universe - or the unjust and amoral universe of the atheist. Really Thinker - you offer nothing...

A couple of things. Within our own respective ethical frameworks, your ethical theory ends up being circular and mine does not. Yours ends up being unintelligible and mine does not. Yours cannot even explain why anything is good. Also you pretend as if there is no epistemic problem with your view. If morality is decided by god, which god? And how do we come to know this god objectively and not on faith? No one will agree, and no one has any objective way to communicate with god. It all comes down to the individual or the society's subjective belief in god. You are apparently totally oblivious to these facts. So pretending that morality is based on god to resolve issues with subjectivism, to use your own words, offers nothing.

There is no certainty anywhere with basing your morals on faith in the subjective god you belief in, that's why no theists can agree on tons of issues about god. You cannot even justify to me why the Christian god is "all knowing, with an immutable moral character" or why he's good. Step out of your bubble and justify the things you normally take for granted. He condones slavery, sexism, homophobia, and has commanded genocide. Are you going to tell me that these things are morally good with certainty?

[seer]

Ask yourself this: why does god prefer positive benefits to negative? What would his reasoning be? You would probably claim that they are based off of his immutable good moral character. If that's so, then immutable good character would support the positive benefits and not the negative. And there is nothing about god's character that cannot exist independently of him.

That is not the point Thinker, the point again, is that it all comes back to someone's say so. The individual, the society or God.

[seer]

Joel's argument is based off an assumption, and his assumption is that there is no dilemma! If you think that's a good logical argument, you have very low rational standards.

Oh please...

A couple of things. Within our own respective ethical frameworks, your ethical theory ends up being circular and mine does not.

We are again going to focus here, please prove this. I have asked you a number of times to present a deductive argument showing that your argument does not beg the question or is not circular.

[The Thinker]

Okay. In Post #902 you wrote, "The only way to intelligibly describe why something is good or bad is to describe what it does" (emphasis in original).

So, the only way you can intelligibly describe health, happiness, minimizing suffering, etc. as good is to describe what they do. So go ahead; explain why those things are good by describing what those things do (or just pick one of them to explain if you want).

Why? What would that do? Are you trying to say that it is impossible to do so to show a weakness in my view? I think if you went to a nutritionist because you were concerned with your health and he recommended that you start smoking, you'd be able to determine that this nutritionist was really bad at his job. We use evidence about the consequences of our diet, lifestyle, and actions, all the time in determining whether they are good or bad. You do it all the time. Suddenly when this same thing is used as the basis for intelligibly describing why something is morally good or bad, you suddenly pretend like it makes no sense.

You continue to misunderstand my position in this thread. My position is not the claim that morality depends on god. My position is merely that I doubt there is an inescapable logical dilemma. I'm not making a positive claim. You are. (Your claim that there is an inescapable dilemma.)

And in that case you have not shown a way out of the dilemma. And so you've been wasting my time for weeks making really bad arguments that amount to you basically just assuming there is no dilemma or making an argument that would actually show that morality is independent of god. Great thinking.

First, again, my position is not that of that moral argument. My position is merely doubting/questioning your claim of a dilemma. That is, I'm not positively claiming the first premise of the moral argument. I'm doubting your claim that that premise necessarily runs into your dilemma. Thus I have no need to try to argue/defend that the premise is true, only that it doesn't fall into your claimed dilemma. That's why, for the discussion between you and me, you are the one making the positive claim.

Secondly, none of your three possibilities is true about the theory I suggested nor is any of them true about Alston's particularist position. So it at least seems there are two counter-examples to your claim. (One counter-example is sufficient to refute a claim.)

Thirdly, I notice that your supposed circular argument there is not logically circular. One could hold a non-circular theory in which both "X is good" and "God is good" follow from "God has X." It would be a circular theory only if it, in turn, tried to use "X is good" or "God is good" to then prove that "God has X."

Fourthly, through our discussion, we discovered that the reason you believe that the theory I presented falls into your dilemma (specifically your 2nd possibility), is that you claim that P necessarily implies C:

P) "Loving is good" exists independently of god's moral goodness.
C) "Loving is good" exists independently of god.

Without which, your claim of a dilemma collapses. I see no way to logically get C from P, so unless you can demonstrate it by making it into a valid syllogism, it seems your dilemma is non-existent.

To your second point, there is no logical way out of the dilemma and you have not provided a counter example that avoids the dilemma. You've asserted that morality cannot or does not exist independently of god. You need to justify why. I already gave you an example to show why this is false: fire is hot, pulsars are hot. Hotness can exist independently of fire and of pulsars. Hotness is not dependent on fire, or on pulsars. With morality, you are claiming "X is good" and "God is good" follow from "God has X." If god has X, that in no way implies that other things cannot also have X, and would still have X if god didn't have it, or if he didn't exist. You need to justify why that is not the case to have a point.

To your fourth point, we'd need to bring in other arguments about god's existence or non-existence which is not typically the case with the moral argument. In other words, you're forcing in other arguments for and against god by assuming that nothing will exist without god. This is not routine with debating morality on theism. My view of course is that we don't need god for the universe to exist. So if there were two universes, one with a god, and one without it, and the worlds were exactly the same except those two differences, in the atheistic world, conclusion C would follow from premise P. In the theistic world it wouldn't, because nothing can exist independently of god. So all things being equal, in an atheistic world, goodness would exist independently of god. Now you might protest and claim nothing can exist independently of god, but we're entertaining possible worlds, a "what if". I don't think the traditional concept of god makes any coherent sense, so I too have to assume god to entertain many different possible worlds.

Nonsense, for the same reason that it's nonsense to say, "If the meter-bar particularist doesn't strip the bar of all physical length, then the meter bar is a meter because it has the length of a meter." The fact that the meter bar confers meterness onto whatever length it has, necessarily requires/implies that the meter bar has some physical length.

What you're trying to say is that god has good-making properties, absent his good-making properties. That makes no sense. The meter bar analogy is problematic because we know the meter bar was made to fit the arbitrary length of a meter. On the particularist analogy, it's not that we're saying that we strip the meter bar of all physical length, we're stripping it of meter-ness, or any length that is a meter. You still have the problem of coherently explaining how god is good. If he is good because of his characteristics, then those characteristics are good independently of god. If those characteristics are good because god has them, which is the view a theist must take to maintain god's sovereignty, you force yourself into an unintelligible stopping point for what is good, and you fail to explain why those characteristics wouldn't be good if god didn't have them or didn't exist.

[The Thinker]

Oh please...

Then you can show me how Joel actually avoids the dilemma.

We are again going to focus here, please prove this. I have asked you a number of times to present a deductive argument showing that your argument does not beg the question or is not circular.

Well first you must admit that your ethical framework has an unintelligible stopping point and is circular.

[The Thinker]

That is not the point Thinker, the point again, is that it all comes back to someone's say so. The individual, the society or God.

Once again you totally ignored almost all my points. Please explain to me how someone claiming a moral based on "God's authority" wouldn't just be based on an individual saying so. You've got a dilemma on your hands here. You need to show how basing morality on god isn't really just an individual's opinion.

[seer]

Well first you must admit that your ethical framework has an unintelligible stopping point and is circular.

You are doing it again!!!! You said: Within our own respective ethical frameworks, your ethical theory ends up being circular and mine does not.

You keep making this claim with no rational justification. It is on you to back up this assertion. Stop playing games and put up or retract the assertion.