Post by moritz on Nov 15, 2010 10:34:21 GMT -8
The active part God plays is in creating a universe in which there are real moral values.
“real moral values”…again, that’s nothing but words. Please explain the demonstrable differences between “real” moral and other moral values.
What I was saying here is that God didn't show up and dictate the rules. Humans did. And even if they assumed God's existence, the entire thing would have worked just the same if God didn't exist.
Of course we can debate whether such decisions are the best solution to complex moral dilemmas, but the very fact that the state is attempting to say "this is wrong" and "this isn't" is an appeal to the existence of an absolute standard we are trying our best to approximate.
No it isn’t. The state is trying to organize societal coexistence. By saying this is right and this isn’t it is merely setting up functional rules. Please note that a possible appeal to higher spheres of truth comes in handy in order legitimate the selected rules.
It seems like you think I hold to the Divine Command Theory of moral law where God arbitrarily comes up with laws and has to then externally communicate them to people. But that's not a Biblical understanding. The biblical understanding is that God created a universe fully endowed with moral laws (part of our confusion in conversation might have to do with the fact that when I talk about laws I'm not talking about arbitrary decrees but about fundamental principles more akin to gravity than to traffic regulations).
Here might lay a capital error in your argumentation. If God didn’t create moral arbitrarily he must have had some reasons for deciding what is right and what is wrong. If there are objective reasons, God himself becomes dispensable because we can use the same reasons to explain our vision of morals. I borrowed this one from Plato.
Our human concepts of good and evil don’t matter at all to the universe and if one day this little gap in time and space that allows life on this planet to exist closes, the show is over.
The logical conclusion of this way of thinking is that in the end all the moral debates over the Holocaust, for instance, are meaningless. It would have done you no more good ultimately to resist it than to go along with it.
That depends on what level you look at it, Josh. From the perspective of the Andromeda Galaxy, the events on planet earth are entirely meaningless, yes. But meaning does exist in the here and now: I like to be alive. Even if all life on planet earth will one day expire, I’m happy I was lucky enough to be part of the show. And I take it that most other people are happy to be alive as well. That makes life valuable for me. So live and let live. Life has a meaning for those who live and as long as they live. Everything that affects our lives has a meaning, even if this meaning is limited to our own brains. That’s fair enough for me. I don’t care about “ultimate meaning”.
Before you protest, read on.
The entire thing works without him, factually and philosophically
Does it?
Let's say Moritz is stuck on a deserted island with a stranger named Joe and his beautiful wife Marlene. Moritz learns that Joe is a real jerk and Marlene hates him. Moritz concludes that life would be tremendously better on the island without Joe and Marlene agrees, so they murder Joe.
Was it wrong?
The scenario you are offering is irrelevant in every way. It doesn’t give us any clue regarding the existence of universal morality and doesn’t rebut the philosophy I offered. I’m not concerned with answering the questions of right and wrong. I’m only interested in the lowdown. Neither a case of murder on an uninhabited island, nor the holocaust, nor any other event has stopped this planet from turning or the universe from expanding, etc.. Some people kill in certain situations, some people don’t kill in the same situations. Some people feel bad about it, some don’t. The decisive question is not whether it is ultimately right or wrong to kill someone, but why do some people kill and others don’t.
As I pointed out in the other thread, we are social beings. This is an evolutionary survival strategy. Social structures only work with social behaviour and the biological disposition of such behaviour is part of our evolutionary legacy – even when we are removed from society. Already when we are born, we are totally dependent on the cooperation and empathy (read: care) of our fellow specimen. This is where social bonding start. And empathy is a pragmatic conditio sine qua non.
Now, a biological disposition doesn’t guarantee anything. One may genetically be predestined for social behaviour and still become a violent person because environmental influences (in a systems theoretical sense, not merely in an ecological sense) are the key. But a biological disposition makes it easier to foster some traits than others. Hence it doesn’t come as a surprise, that the killing of the own species is almost always deviant behaviour in all kinds of social groups, including gregarious animals. It happens all the time of course (after all, the story of evolution is a story of competition, not just cooperation), but always to a limited extent: Despite all the wars, all the murders and other kinds of killings, humans haven’t annihilated themselves, on the contrary, we are still increasing in numbers. If any species erased itself through reciprocal aggression, we have a case of natural selection.
So if we put the pieces of the puzzle together, your point seems to be that if there is no bigger authority and meaning behind morality, hell will break lose because everybody can do what comes to their minds. Well, they actually can and always could and did, regardless of whether God exists or not. That’s what I meant, when I said that “it works without God”. God doesn’t show up to stop a murderer on his way. According to your own theology, he let’s us decide for ourselves (yes I know, you don’t hold on to the divine command theory). Knowing that God exists didn’t stop Cain from murdering Abel. I doubt that fear of God ever stopped a significant number of murderers*. If we look at the criminal records, I’m sure the number of believers and unbelievers resembles more or less the proportion of believers and unbelievers in the general society.
I believe that for the reasons I have stated in this and the other thread, the desire to murder someone simply isn’t normal social behavior. It’s an exception. I don’t believe in God or in ultimate meaning but I don’t even think of killing other people, why would I? I have been raised in an intact social structure. I’ve received love and care and I learned to be empathetic (!), to cooperate, to trust and to play by the rules. If I had ever thought: “Ooh, I would kill that guy if only it wasn’t for the risk of being caught and punished…”, maybe I could relate to your argument. But I haven’t and so I can’t.
* I’m not denying the effect faith can have on the behaviour of people (for better or worse) but there’s a problem here as well: much of the morality the Bible displays is hideous by modern western standards. I'm bold enough to say we have outdistanced much of God's archaic morality. If God’s morality is universal, people will have a hard time explaining why they intuitively reject plenty of the Biblical rules God himself sanctioned and the behavior he displayed.
So, the state is the ultimate authority when it comes to guaranteeing and enforcing human rights on a macro-level. Who or what else would do it? God? Give me a break!
I never challenged the statement that the state is the ultimate authority when it comes to guaranteeing and enforcing rights. I challenged the statement that a government has the authority to create the rights in the first place. A government is (hopefully) the elucidator of pre-existent rights that it then attempts to enforce.
The rights we are now taking for granted didn’t exist in the caves of the Stone Age. Some rules are old, some rules are comparatively new. In any event, as history demonstrates, governments create rules all the time and enforce them. Hence, they do have the authority. Whether such rules will persist depends on their practicability and other factors.
Your attempt to lead agnostic, atheist or fallibilist philosophy ad absurdum is clumsy at best
What's really awkward is the fact that at the end of the day the only real difference between Mother Teresa and Saddam Hussein, according to your philosophy, is a matter of preference.
Keep it coming Mo!
Josh, I respect you and I love exchanging thoughts with you. But this last comment is polemic garbage. I don’t feel like I have to rebut this because you are putting something in my mouth I never said. But I don’t want to make this look like I’m avoiding your point. So I’ll just say that according to “my philosophy” preferences aren’t necessarily random choices one puts on and off as one pleases. Mother Theresa and Saddam Hussein have been socialized in two utterly different backgrounds (culturally, politically, historically, socially, biologically etc.). It doesn’t come as a surprise that they have become utterly different personalities. I think this example rather makes my point than yours, for their actions didn’t really display much evidence for universal morals, did they?
As a sidenote: even if this was merely about random and loose preferences, you're offering no relevant rebutal. Simply because you don't like something, it doesn't mean its not true. That's the fallacy of wishful thinking.
