June 20, 2008
MUCH AS WE ADMIRE THE ADMISSION THAT ATHEISM IS JUST ADOLESCENT REACTION...:
Holiday in Hellmouth : God may be dead, but the question of why he permits suffering lives on: a review of Bart D. Ehrman’s God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer (James Wood, June 9, 2008, The New Yorker)
Theologians and philosophers talk about “the problem of evil,” and the hygienic phrase itself bespeaks a certain distance from extreme suffering, the view from a life inside the charmed circle. They mean the classic difficulty of how we justify the existence of suffering and iniquity with belief in a God who created us, who loves us, and who providentially manages the world. The term for this justification is “theodicy,” which nowadays seems a very old-fashioned exercise in turning around and around the stripped screw of theological scholastics. Still, if polls are correct, about eighty per cent of Americans ought to be engaged in such antiquarianism. Union University, in Jackson, Tennessee, might profit from intense classes in theodicy. “God protected this campus,” one of the students there said, because no one was killed in the tornadoes that devastated parts of Tennessee on February 5th. Since ordinary Tennesseans were killed elsewhere that night, the logic of such shamanism is that God either did not or could not protect those unfortunates from something that the state’s governor once likened to “the wrath of God.”Antique and abstract it may be, but thinking about theodicy still has the power to change lives. I know this, because it was how I began to separate myself from the somewhat austere Christian environment I grew up in. I remember the day, in my late teens, when I drew a line down the middle of a piece of paper, on one side of which I wrote my reasons for belief in God, on the other my reasons against. I can’t remember the order of my negatives now, but the inefficacy of prayer was likely at the top. Here was a demonstrable case of promises made (if you have faith, you can move a mountain) but not kept (the mountain not only stays put but suddenly erupts and consumes a few villages). During my teens, two members of my parents’ congregation died of cancer, despite all the prayers offered up on their behalf. When I looked at the congregants kneeling on cushions, their heads bent to touch the wooden pews, it seemed to me as if they were literally butting their heads against a palpable impossibility. And this was years before I discovered Samuel Butler’s image for the inutility of prayer in his novel “The Way of All Flesh”—the bee that has strayed into a drawing room and is buzzing against the wallpaper, trying to extract nectar from one of the painted roses.
Theodicy, or, rather, its failure, was the other major entry on my debit side. I was trapped within the age-old conundrum: the world is full of pain and wickedness; God may be jealous but is also merciful and all-loving (how much more so, if one believes that Christ incarnated him). If he has the power to alleviate this suffering but does not, he is cruel; if he cannot, he is weak. I wasn’t consoled by the standard responses. Suffering is a mystery, I was told, as is God’s absence in the face of suffering. But this was what I was also told when prayers failed to make their mark: the old “incomprehensibility” routine. It seemed to me that the Gospels, central to my family life, made some fairly specific promises and laid on us some fairly specific obligations; yet that specificity could simply go on holiday whenever God himself seemed to have gone on holiday. (“God moves in mysterious ways.”)
God “suffers with us,” I was told; he feels our pain. If Christ was God incarnate, then God suffered on the Cross. He walks with us in our suffering. This has been the great twentieth-century addition to the familiar arguments, which is perhaps unsurprising, amid so much carnage. The Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues, in his book “On Belief,” that when God abandoned Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane he abandoned himself. Christianity, he asserts, returns at this moment to the story of Job, the man abandoned by God: “It is Christ (God) himself who has to occupy the place of Job. . . . Man’s existence is living proof of God’s self-limitation.” A God whose power has been so drastically limited, and who sounds so like us in our abjection, might be loved, but why should he be worshipped? Twenty-five years ago, as I hunched over my piece of paper with its vertical line, I decided that if God existed, which I strongly doubted, then this entity was neither describable nor cherishable but was a vaporous, quite possibly malign force at the horizon of the sayable.
Another attempted consolation is that God intended us to have free will, and free will requires the liberty to do bad as well as good. If we were unable to err, our relation to God would be robotic, meaningless in its hapless obedience. It is regrettable that Hitlers are allowed to exist; but universal freedom is a higher good than the release from local pain. This is still the best available response to the theodicy problem. But even at sixteen I could see an enormous, iridescent flaw in this colorless argument: it is that the Bible is full of divine intervention, full of infringements of free will. God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and brings plagues, and spares the firstborn of the Israelites (while conveniently murdering the Egyptians’), and, if you accept the New Testament, anoints his son as a sacrificial lamb for the sins of the world. We pray to him precisely because we believe in the power of such intervention. But when we actually need his intervention—say, to put a stop to a few concentration camps—he has . . . gone on holiday again, leaving people to drone on about the paramount importance of unmolested “free will.”
They were at it again when the tsunami killed hundreds of thousands in 2004. The Archbishop of Canterbury, a distinguished theologian, wrote an article at the time, reminding his Anglican communion that such tragedies challenge faith. But then he circled around a kind of physicist’s version of the free-will argument when he cautioned that “the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its own. . . . So there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous.” Well, there would be something odd if you had never read the Bible. But one of the repeated indices of God’s power, as invoked in many of the Psalms, is his ability to control the waves—after all, the Psalmist knew that a great flood had consumed the world, at God’s command, and that the Red Sea had been divinely parted. How dangerous would things have to get before divine intervention was justified? To this, the Gospels can reply succinctly: not very. For when the disciples were out on the Sea of Galilee, and things took a stormy turn, Jesus appeared, walked on water, and calmed the storm. Perhaps the disciples just meant more to Jesus than a few hundred thousand Asians.
There is something adolescent about such complaint; I can hear it like a boy’s breaking voice in my own prose. For anti-theodicy is permanent rebellion. It is not quite atheism but wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God it is supposed not to believe in.
...oughn't he grow up at some point?
Yes, his whole problem seems to be that God refuses to act as a wish vending machine. Even when he acknowledges that free will may not be very meaningful without at least the possibility of evil, he still gets hung up upon his inability to merely wish evil away.
I wonder if, at the same time he bemoans the inability to wish the dictator and his concentration camps into oblivion, he has a problem with using an army to accomplish the same goal.
Posted by: BrianOfAtlanta at June 20, 2008 8:58 AMSounds like he skipped over Job.
Posted by: Jorge Curioso at June 20, 2008 10:39 AMHe may sound adolescent, but is he wrong? Where's the quid pro quo for a lifetime of obeying the Bible, when believer and non-believer alike have an equal chance of feast or famine, fortune or ruin, pleasure or bone-crushing pain. Heaven? Where's the evidence of it? Why the very same Bible that promises much and delivers nothing.
Posted by: Pete at June 20, 2008 11:09 AMD'oh.
Posted by: Pete at June 20, 2008 11:15 AMIt's funny comparing the Christian God to various fictional Gods and seeing how they deal with evil.
Pelor- Huh? You want help? Lets see... does five work for you?
Emperor (40K)- Look- I'm busy keeping Choas from eating your soul- stop bothering me! I'll get there when I get there!
Christian God- Wait a minute... got to win a bet with Satan... hey- I want to see if you believe in my goodness even if I screw you over.
Seeing a pattern? God's that actually exist don't need to test people to see if their belief is based on thanks. Why? Because it is evil to expect complete adoration from someone when you are torturing them!
Posted by: Samuel Skinner at June 20, 2008 1:31 PMSo, O Wise Sage, which gods exist and which don't?
Drat, Lou Gots is never around when you need him.
All I can add is that, if you think Pelor is some kind of candy-throwing god who allows his subjects to slack off, you've completely misunderstood his divine ways. Make your saving throw v. fortitude, please.
I don't understand how people who deny God and think of themselves only as meat can talk of Evil. Some molecules did or didn't do something to other molecules. Where does the Moral Judgment enter the equation?
Posted by: Robert Mitchell Jr. at June 20, 2008 3:45 PMHow the Bible fails to answer? The Book of Job is the oldest book in the Bible put to paper, written at least 500 and maybe 1000 years prior to when Moses wrote Genesis. The language is so archaic that translators to this day have difficulty with it.
42 chapters on the topic. It sets the stage for the whole intended relationship between God and Man.
Posted by: Gideon7 at June 20, 2008 5:10 PMQuid pro quo? God is looking to deal.
Posted by: oj at June 20, 2008 6:27 PMWhat's he offering that I can't get out of a decent book on meditation?
Posted by: Pete at June 20, 2008 7:32 PMNothing, Pete. This is all the Bible is offering you:
“A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself.” Proverbs 18:2
“The thought of foolishness is sin: and the scorner is an abomination to men.” Proverbs 24:9
Posted by: Randall Voth at June 20, 2008 9:55 PMRobert Mitchell Jr.:
1. Atheism has no special problem with objective moral truths. After all, you can't make the philosophical problems with moral objectivity go away by bringing in God and his commands: if God made his commands for no reason, then the authority of morality is left unaccounted for, and if God made his commands for a good reason, then there must be a standard of good or bad reasons independent of God and his commands.
2. Even if atheism did have a special problem with objective moral truths, the problem of evil wouldn't simply go away. After all, theists are still committed to acknowledging lots of things as evil, despite thinking that everything is completely under the control of a morally perfect creator. So theists still have some explaining to do, and there's nothing wrong with an atheist who doesn't really believe in evil pressing the theist with this problem. It is, after all, a problem arising from within the theist's own commitments.
Posted by: Dave2 at June 20, 2008 10:57 PMThanks for the reply Dave2. It's more basic then that for me. I don't understand evil except as something offensive in the eyes of God. With God out of the equation, what's Evil? Everyone has reasons for what they do. Where does the moral truth enter into the equation? Is it Evil to hurt people? I don't blame the table if I stub my toe. There's nothing special about people to Atheists, so why would I blame a person for hurting me when I wouldn't blame a table? And as an Atheist must be a Darwinist, hurting people is good for them and makes them stronger. What's Evil about that? The only objection I can see is the harm it might do to the harmer's Soul, but an Atheist knows there is no Soul, and Mind is a byproduct of the Flesh. To be an Atheist seems to me to inescapably connected to being nothing more then Meat, and how can Meat have objective moral truths? I know most Atheists don't live like that, but they are dancing on clouds in my eyes.
Posted by: Robert Mitchell Jr. at June 21, 2008 12:11 AMRobert:
The only answer for the atheist is feelings, woo-woo-woo, feelings (as Bertrand Russell famously declared in his debate with Frederick Copleston).
Of course, defining evil based on feelings is pretty limited. Solomon spoke to that thousands of years ago.
And atheism has all sorts of problems with objective moral truth. Once something is objective, it is of a different type, not contingent on you, or me, or the entire human population, for that matter. An objective truth is something other, and atheism has no response except that of the ostrich.
The issue with suffering and the Bible (with Judaism/Christianity) is not that there is no answer, but that the answer is not acceptable to humanity as a whole. Even religious "figures" like Benny Hinn and Rabbi Kushner reject it.
The author notes the 'suffering' of God, but then mistakenly claims this is a 20th century idea. No - it goes right back to the 1st century, and even further (God does tell Adam and Eve that someone's heel will be bruised for the sake of man).
Suffering drives us to objectivity, because there is no help in ourselves. Surely the greatest evil (and that which pulls people into hell) is the never-ending embrace of subjectivity, the suffocating embrace of the self.
Posted by: jim hamlen at June 21, 2008 12:21 AMThe issue of moral objectivity is completely orthogonal to the issue of God's existence.
The most natural form of objectivism about morality draws a parallel to mathematics. Just as there are objective truths in mathematics completely independent of what anyone thinks, likewise there are objective truths in morality completely independent of what anyone thinks. And this is a view that both theists and atheists can (and often do) accept.
Of course, some theists think that morality depends on God and what he thinks (or what he wills). But this view run into well-known problems going back to the Euthyphro. First, if there is no objective standard external to God's will, then his decisions aren't backed up by anything and are literally arbitrary -- so that, in deciding whether to make rape good or bad, God might as well have flipped a coin. Second, this view leads to the highly implausible conclusion that there's nothing so terrible (not rape, not torture, not cannibalism, ...) that God couldn't simply declare it good, whereupon we'd all be morally required to do it. Third, commands in and of themselves carry no moral authority, not unless they come from a source with legitimate commanding authority. But then there must be some independent standard that explains why God has this authority, otherwise you have to say that God's commands matter simply because God commanded that they matter, which is plainly circular and absurd. Finally, there must be some independent standard that explains why God counts as good, otherwise you have to say that God counts as good simply because God declared himself good, which is a test even Satan could pass.
These are the problems that should lead a friend of moral objectivity to the view that moral truths are as fixed and necessary as 2+2=4, and that not even God can change them (for the same reason that not even God can make 2+2=5). And this is a view that atheists can (and often do) accept.
And two small points for Robert:
First, it's wrong to say that atheists deny that humans are special. I acknowledge that atheists cannot say humans are special because we're made in the image of God. But nevertheless atheists can and do say that humans are special because of their capacities for decision-making and reasoning and language and culture. Just because we're animals, it doesn't mean we're not pretty unique.
Second, it's wrong to think that Darwinism says hurting people is okay because it makes them stronger. All Darwinism says is that living things whose heritable traits give them an advantage (in terms of surviving and having kids) will tend to show up more and more in a population over time, and that this process is the origin of all the different kinds of living things. No Darwinist needs to deny that hurting people sometimes makes them weaker, and of course biology says nothing pro or con about how to treat people.
Posted by: Dave2 at June 21, 2008 2:54 AMI'm confused - if an atheist accepts "objectivity", then who is the observer? Not me. Not you. Not the theist. And not the atheist.
Arguing about (or against) God's "will" is what we do, typically when we suffer. When things are going well, we rarely think about it. When the balances in our lives suddenly change, we see God as capricious, because we feel the shifts so totally. But that is not an accurate assessment. Just like our 'assessments' of evil (and its causes) are usually not accurate.
And, quite apart from judging or understanding evil, do we know how to recognize and understand good? How do we identify a good man? Real goodness is frightening - witness the many reactions to Christ, even from people he had helped.
Yes, 2+2=4. Except when God decides that 2 fish + 5 loaves = 5000 full bellies. Or that metal will float. Or that the earth stops rotating for 12 hours (maybe more). Or that the dead will rise. Or that he will create ex nihilo. The error with 'objectivity' comes in thinking that God is limited to obedience to the objective standards we know (math, physics, music, etc.). He is not, but when he works miracles here, it does not violate his holy character. Atheists wrongly assume that God could just flip the coin, and declare rape 'good'. Not so.
The moral law of God is an extension of his character, and will not change. From our position (that of the guilty), we squirm. Arguing against God's goodness is a favorite move. But it is a foolish one - better to just say nothing.
Likewise with claiming that there must be an "object" beyond God to set the standard. Why take this tack, unless we don't like the standards that are already there (or the legitimate judge that is already there)? It is reminiscent of Clive Staples, when he said (regarding the moral law) that rarely do men simply say "to hell with your standard". No, we squirm.
Posted by: jim hamlen at June 21, 2008 10:18 AMEuthyphro is paradoxical only to those who don't understand the question.
brothersjuddblog.com/archives/2006/07/here_i_staaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnndd_1.html
Posted by: oj at June 21, 2008 1:06 PMjim:
Why would objectivity involve an observer? I mean, a pretty good definition of objectivity is in terms of independence from any observer. Being objective and being dependent on an observer, those are flat-out opposites. If morality is objective, I would have thought that it can't depend on any observer.
Also, you suggest that God could change mathematical and logical truths. But that's a bad idea. First, it's just absurd to think that God could make contradictions true. But also, if there are absolutely no limits on what God can do -- not even the limits of logic -- then there can't be a plausible solution to the problem of evil, because then God could easily make a world with no evil at all, even one with free will and no evil at all, because now God can make anything true, even contradictions. I mean, it's one thing to say that God can perform miracles -- interfering with the physical laws of the universe. It's quite another to say that God can mess with math and logic.
cont'd...
Posted by: Dave2 at June 22, 2008 3:24 AMjim, oj:
Both of you suggest that a way around the Euthyphro dilemma is to have morality depend, not on God's will, but on (the rest of) God's character -- his holy nature. I tend to agree that this marks an improvement over the extreme voluntarist view, where everything depends on God's will. But it does have some disadvantages. First, you have to compromise God's omnipotence. For God's holiness is now setting constraints on what he can and cannot will, so that it's easy to conceive of a being with more power than God -- namely, a being whose power isn't checked by any constraints at all, not even holiness. That's a real disadvantage.
Second (and more importantly), you lose any advantage over the atheist when it comes to moral foundations. After all, you still need an explanation as to why God counts as good instead of evil. Since you're not making God's will the basis of everything, you can't say that God counts as good simply because he declared himself to be good. So it looks like you'll have to say that there's some independent standard that explains why God counts as good. And that's the kind of view an atheist could easily accept. (Of course, you could try to explain God's goodness by saying that God is good simply by definition. But then an atheist could follow suit: e.g., a utilitarian could say that maximizing the balance of pleasure over pain is good simply by definition. If you insist on an explanation for why pleasure-maximizing counts as good, then the atheist can insist on an explanation for why this particular being's nature counts as good. Similarly, if you say it's just a brute fact that God is good, the atheist utilitarian can say it's just a brute fact that pleasure-maximizing is good.)
Posted by: Dave2 at June 22, 2008 3:31 AMYes, God isn't omnipotent. The Bible makes that abundantly clear.
No, we don't. It doesn't matter whether God is good or evil for Him to be the Objective standard of behavior. Your Dad may have been a rotten guy, but he still got to set your curfew.
Even atheists acknowledge the need for The Observer, which is why Einstein disbelieved particle physics.
Posted by: oj at June 22, 2008 9:18 AMOJ strays when he claims God is not omnipotent (and that the Scripture says so). We have argued this before.
There is a little-known theological word which describes one of the 'classical' attributes of God - aseity, or the attribute of self-existence.
In John 5, Jesus says the Father has life in himself, and that he has given this life to the Son as well. Considered carefully, aseity is probably even more 'potent' than the common understanding of omnipotence. It isn't just that God has bigger muscles (or bigger bombs) than anyone else, but rather his existence is not contigent on anything or anyone. He stands apart, and everything is contingent on him.
We can step on a bug and kill it (or spray its nest and kill tens of thousands). We can add chlorine to a pool and kill millions of bacteria. But if we miss one, we might get sick. And eventually, the microbes will win. We die. The 'struggle' is one contingent being against another.
God is not like that. He is spirit, eternal, and self-existent. Unbound by time and space. Never diminished or threatened.
Yet, we fight with him all the time. In our hearts, with our words, and in our selfish actions and anger. Do we ever win? No. Even if he lets us feel that way for a bit. Jacob even wrestled God for a night, and thought he had him, until God crippled him. Was it a fair fight? Yes and no. Jacob was not instantly obliterated, but neither was he going to win and go on to further pride and arrogance.
There are plenty of paradoxes in Christianity. This thread, about good and evil, love and suffering, is one of the big ones. But there are no contradictions. To follow a man who says he is God and yet says he will be murdered, no matter his goodness and love, is a paradox. To 'fight' with God, to be changed, to move closer to him through anguish, is a paradox. To understand why God, omnipotent and holy and good, permitted sin, is a paradox. To understand how God uses sin and consequence to draw us to him, is a paradox. But it happens.
Don't you think it is easier to understand a miracle if you look at as eternity touching the here and now, rather than considering it as 'interference' with the laws of nature? After all, is it a 'law' of nature that someone should be a leper? Or have constant bleeding for 18 years? Or be blind from birth? Some miracles set aside gravity or time, but most involved biology. Why should a healing be a conradiction? And what of the slaughter of 185,000 Assyrians? Is that a contradiction?
It is dangerous for us to try to pigeon-hole God. What he considers good might well horrify us. Surely the reverse is true, as when Jesus said that "what man values highly is an abomination to God".
He is not a tame Lion. And this is where faith comes in - not to 'resolve' a contradiction or to throw our brains out the window, but to trust God, despite his otherness (his power and purity and holiness), because he chooses to love us and whisper to us.
Posted by: jim hamlen at June 22, 2008 11:39 AMWhat does life have to do with omnipotence?
Posted by: oj at June 22, 2008 4:24 PMEternality. You know, death is swallowed up in victory, and all that.
Christ didn't win by using a Desert Eagle, with Satan holding only a .38.
Posted by: jim hamlen at June 22, 2008 7:03 PMOmnivitality isn't omnipotence.
Posted by: oj at June 22, 2008 8:29 PMThe attributes of God aren't possessed in degrees. They are absolutes - he either has them or he doesn't. The pretenders fall by force of gravity.
God created ex nihilo - how is that limited potency?
Posted by: jim hamlen at June 22, 2008 10:17 PMoj,
On the second point, it really seems like a bad idea to give up on God's goodness. On your view, why is it that this being gets to set the standard for morality? Is it just that the being is so powerful? Is it just that the being created everything? My worry is that you might be setting yourself up for the conclusion that if a perfectly evil powerful creator being were responsible for everything, then we'd be morally required to be evil. And that just seems crazy. I mean, the fact that something fits the moral standards of an evil being ought to count against doing it, if anything. Not to mention that this just sounds like subjectivism about morality: 'powerful creator being' subjectivism.
jim,
I would never suggest that miracles are contradictions. They're really unusual and remarkable (pretty much by definition), but they don't violate the laws of logic. Contradictions are statements like "this is both true and false" and "this is true, it entails that, but that isn't true". Those kinds of statements are just contradictory.
Posted by: Dave2 at June 23, 2008 3:36 AMYou're just getting confused about a number of separable issues:
(1) Does an objective observer exist? Nevermind theology, particle physics tells us that someone is needed to collapse the wave functions and Create the Universe.
(2) Is this observer God? This is simply a matter of faith and, more importantly, aesthetics.
(3) How can Man have an objective standard of morality--only by receiving it from an objective source, the Observer.
(4) Is morality good? As a logical matter, this is, of course, a subjective question and not particularly important. The entire point of an objective standard is that you are bound irrespective of your personal quibbles. The value of even human-made universal laws is that irrespective of whether they are "good" or "bad" by binding all they make behavior predictable and if too onerous or malignant tend to be changed because everyone is impacted.
(5) Is God good? This too can only be a subjective question for Man, since we are in no position to judge Him. Nor is His goodness of much importance to our behavior. It suffices that He has authority and has told us how we must behave.
(6) If faith (and aesthetics) are the basis for belief in God, His goodness, and the goodness of morality, is that sufficient? This is where we find the genius of the Anglosphere. Descartes and the continentals made a threshold error by merely asserting, entirely subjectively, that you can know that you exist, but then insisting that every subsequent question must answer to tests of Reason. Hume and his successors, nearly all British and American, demonstrated that there is no rational basis for belief in even the self, that it is, indeed, just a belief and that Reason, therefore, is built upon an irrational foundation.
Now, the fact of the matter is that no one is actually willing to live their life as if their own existence was an open question. Faith suffices. The onus is thus those who despise faith to disprove it. Those who have faith have already disproved Reason.
Posted by: oj at June 23, 2008 6:12 AM
It's limited both because He didn't Create Himself and because He botched Creation.
Remember, the question was whether theism has an advantage over atheism when it comes to moral foundations.
1 and 2 I never discussed, except perhaps obliquely, in a discussion of what moral objectivity is. Jim seemed to think moral objectivity involves dependence on an observer, and I insisted on the contrary that (since 'objective' means roughly 'independent of the mind') moral objectivity involves independence of any observer. I very much doubt that any interpretations of quantum mechanics will serve to settle this issue.
3 I don't quite understand. The question is whether there is an objective standard of morality, not whether Man has one (whatever that means). And whether Man "receives" this standard is independent of whether such a standard exists.
4 I never discussed. Asking whether morality is good seems like a category mistake, like asking whether height is tall.
5 is the important one. Without God's goodness, theism becomes indistinguishable from demon worship. You suggest that God has "authority", but then I want to know what this authority consists in or is explained by. Is it just because God is powerful? Or does God have authority simply because God declared himself to have authority? Is there some external standard that explains why God has this authority? I predict that your answer to such questions will either run into trouble or be the kind of answer that even an atheist can accept.
6 I never came even close to discussing. It looks out of place in this discussion.
Posted by: Dave2 at June 24, 2008 8:48 AMNo, it isn't. A received standard is objective. A man-made one is, by definition, subjective. Only an objective standard can provide a foundation for morality. Thus, morality is entirely dependent on theism (note that's to even the exclusion of polytheism or pantheism, which would have multiple standards).
Here's where the atheist who pretends to goodness is screwed--if you believe morality is important you are forced to believe in God.
Posted by: oj at June 24, 2008 12:39 PMYes, a man-made standard is subjective, but so is a God-made standard. For a standard to be objective, it has to be independent of anyone's preferences, even God's preferences.
And you still haven't addressed the problem of God's goodness or "authority".
Posted by: Dave2 at June 24, 2008 9:55 PMYou write "No, it isn't", but I'm not sure what 'it' refers to.
Yes, a man-made standard is subjective, but so is a God-made standard. For a standard to be objective, it has to be independent of anyone's preferences, even God's preferences.
And you still haven't addressed the problem of God's goodness or "authority".
Posted by: Dave2 at June 24, 2008 10:03 PMNo, we are the subjects of God. God isn't a subject.
Posted by: oj at June 25, 2008 6:41 AMGod's goodness is unimportant to the fact of the impossibility of atheist moral foundations.
Posted by: oj at June 25, 2008 6:42 AMAre you confusing the 'subject' of 'subjective' with the 'subject' of 'subjection'? God's not a political subject, but he's certainly a mind, and if something is dependent on a mind, it's not objective. If morality is just God's preferences, then we've got moral subjectivism writ large.
The question of God's goodness actually is important for the question of atheist moral foundations. Why? Because the answers that one gives for solving the first question arguably carry over to the second question. For example, if you say that God's goodness is just a brute fact, then the atheist can say that the wrongness of rape is just a brute fact. If you say that God counts as good due to some external moral standard, then the atheist can say that rape counts as wrong due to some external moral standard. And so on.
Posted by: Dave2 at June 25, 2008 9:40 AMHe's certainly a mind? Where'd you get that?
God is our Creator. We are the subjects of Creation.
His laws are all of our laws, whether we choose to obey them or not for our own subjective reasons.
the notion that God is just another someone fundamentally misapprehends the nature of Creation, of God, and of personhood.
Quite wrong, you're opposing the external standard (objective) to your own standard (subjective). God may indeed be demonic and his standards evil, but they are objective standards and yours are not, they're just personal preferences.
Posted by: oj at June 25, 2008 11:17 AMOne thing that has emerged, I think, is that you're not really escaping the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma. On the one hand, intellectualists end up with a moral standard prior to God's will, and on the other, voluntarists end up with a completely arbitrary moral standard not backed up by anything. The 'third way' suggested by Koukl (and linked by you) goes with intellectualism and has morality depend, not on God's will, but on the rest of God's nature. But now it looks like you're embracing all the worst 'anything goes' consequences of voluntarism: are you saying that, if God commanded e.g. child rape and animal torture, then child rape and animal torture would thereupon become morally good? Or, to take the classic example, what if God commanded us to hate him? Would it then be right to hate God? Is nothing intrinsically right or wrong?
And if you are willing to embrace radical 'anything goes' voluntarism, dismissing any resistance as the mere squeamishness of subjective preferences, then I would offer that any premises you might enlist in support of radical voluntarism are likely to be much less plausible than the thesis that it is intrinsically wrong to rape children and torture animals.
Oh, and about God being a mind, I'm pretty sure that's a standard view in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. God is, after all, supposed to know things and will things.
Posted by: Dave2 at June 27, 2008 5:10 PMNo. "Remember, the question was whether theism has an advantage over atheism when it comes to moral foundations." We stopped discussing the "Dilemma" some time ago.
As a purely rational matter, yes, if God required us to hate Him we'd be obligated to. Fortunately, God is good, not evil.
Your secondary argument, that it must be wrong to rape children is just an admission of your Faith.
The capacity of God to know does not make Him a mind. You're thinking of a Star Trek episode. None of the major faiths believe that God is merely a mind. You're just anthropomorphizing.
Adolescent? Seems to be more on the level of "God hates me because I didn't get a pony".
Posted by: Chris B at June 20, 2008 7:15 AM