The Moral Argument

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

What then would be wrong with the establishment of Islamic hegemony over the world? You could potentially have a sort of unity by conformity so no more wars or in-fighting. You would have men being pleased by harems of women, so they’re happy, and the women could be brainwashed into submission so that they no longer suffer negative stimulus from being oppressed (since oppression is such a morally presumptuous concept in the first place, since it assumes there’s something wrong with conducting things as such).

If the moral landscape theory is correct and the result is a measurable optimum of the figure of moral merit, then why not?

That's my point viole. According to the moral landscape there is no reason why not, and yet if I were to try to implement such a policy you'd oppose it, wouldn't you?

I strongly doubt that this will be a (local) optimal solution if we consider the brainwashing of humans, the fact that not all men like submissive women (do you? ),

I don't know... someone at sometime on some issue would have had to submit some part of some point for me to have a frame of reference. To date, I can't recall that ever happening.

Seriously though, in this example I'd just be killed and that would solve the problem of what I like or don't like.

neither they are ready to replace beer with camel milk and so on; but if it was, then I do not see a problem (assuming that the moral landscape theory of S.Harris was correct).

Yes you do.

Pretending that you wouldn't oppose oppression and delusion if it could be proven to have calming results is at best silly here, my friend. This is the stuff of science fiction with which we're all familiar where the government controls everybodies emotions and actions at the expense of expression and freedom and we all know that we'd rather have choice than numbness, struggle than conformity, etc.

If we're going to play the thought experiment game you really have to engage in the actual consequences and acknowledge what you'd actually accept or reject, and I'm sorry but I know you’re far from stupid and based on the values you've expressed you're not lacking in a rudimentary sense of fairness and self-preservation, so I simply do not believe that you'd accept oppression if it could be pitched to you in a certain light.

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

I don't know any naturalist who says that we are a RANDOM collection of atoms and chemicals; not sure where you heard or read that.

"Random" is all you are left with if there is no Creator

Therefore, the uncreated Creator must be random

Seriously viole, that makes no sense.

Just because something is true of one thing, does not make it so of another with different properties.

It is true that if you get in an airplane you can fly to different countries. If, however, you try to stuff yourself into your purse, even if you succeed in doing so you won't be able to fly.

If an unguided material universe is subject to randomness if there is no over-arching intelligence guiding it, that does nothing to suggest that the immaterial intelligence which could be guiding it would suffer from the same limitations. In fact, since the identity of organized creator and disordering creation are uniquely divided, what's true of one simply cannot be implicitly true of the other.

That argument is just really, really, really bad.

Further than that, you're playing cemantic games with my friend Shiloh. Take 'unguided', if you don't like 'random'.

Given that the inital state of the universe, according to naturalist Dr. Victor Stinger, is total chaos, everything in naturalism came out of randomness, including natural laws. It was simply randomness that brought everything into being.

In physics how many definitions of 'nothing' are there? Isn't it five?

The use of random is comprehensible here, so why not address the germaine point instead of going off on a rabbit trail?

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Btw. Do you know what random means? I can even show you mathematically, if you are interested, that fully random distributions of things and relationships always have ordered substructures. It is not very difficult really. It requires just some basic understanding of graph, probability and information theory.

Ok viole, don't bother playing any little mathmatical tricks. Information theory is clear on entropy and such 'substructures' have to be interpreted by an interface that's capable of making use of them. In time, they're reduced to less and less usable sequences unless the interface is intelligent and can guide and adapt the outcomes, like in algorithms.

You know what I've noticed here after reading over the posts viole?

You're pretending that your position is default but it's simply not the case.

If you see something and you say, "Hey why is this the case" or "How did this get here"? or any other scientific question, if you exclude something at the outset you simply are affirming a priori assumptions. If you rule out intelligence, you're making an a priori assumption that it got there without intelligence.

You're making an affirmative statement and hold the onus of proof, particularly since Hawking believes in an absolute starting point of the universe, and Dawkins states that everything has the appearance of design, so even those rejecting God are conceding that there's the appearance of evidence for His existence. Well, evidence is appearance. That's what makes it evidence.

So you simply do have a priori assumptions and state that they're validated because there is no evidence to the contrary... and then you hop over all the salient points PGA and Luftwaffle made and tunnel-visioned your focus to thought experiments which failed and you failed to address how your point failed.

You then address the quote from Chesterton and said it was not what you experienced about skeptics, but here's the kicker... it's what you're doing here.

You're trying to borrow a hand to slap the face of a deity that you also have to borrow.

You accuse everyone else of making a priori assumptions, but you're the only one who's unaware they are making them.

You claim to follow the evidence but abandon it in favour of hypothetical though experiments... and even then you refuse to acknowledge when the evidence from the thought experiments is that their must be objective morality which totally undermines your point.

The reason Luftwaffle brought up that quote is because it is characteristic of your arguments here, not how you see skepticism staking up against the quote in general.

That you think that you don’t make a priori assumptions, that you follow evidence, and that your arguments are cold rational demonstrates a wide discrepancy between the representation of how you seem to view your position and the reality of your position.

We’re still waiting to here how your points don’t require you borrowing from theism in order to denounce theism, so you’re still asking us to borrow a hand in order to slap the face of the Almightily Creator who you say doesn’t exist.

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Oppression is not defined as holding a belief or making a claim; it is exercizing authority over another person or group in a manner that is cruel and burdensome; so to relegate my position to being a form of relgious oppresion is an intllectually vacuous and absurd claim. And based on your naturalism, you don't get to accuse anyone of being oppressive or cruel, as you have already stripped yourself of any right to pronounce a moral judgment of any kind on any other human being.

As far as being part of the problem it is people who muddy the water about morality, who argue against objective morality and by exention a moral law giver, who embolden despots and tyrants. It is the emptiness of atheisim/naturalism that makes cruelty and peresecution easier and more widespread.

Very well put, Shiloh!

[PGA]

Oppression is not defined as holding a belief or making a claim; it is exercizing authority over another person or group in a manner that is cruel and burdensome; so to relegate my position to being a form of relgious oppresion is an intllectually vacuous and absurd claim. And based on your naturalism, you don't get to accuse anyone of being oppressive or cruel, as you have already stripped yourself of any right to pronounce a moral judgment of any kind on any other human being.

As far as being part of the problem it is people who muddy the water about morality, who argue against objective morality and by exention a moral law giver, who embolden despots and tyrants. It is the emptiness of atheisim/naturalism that makes cruelty and peresecution easier and more widespread.

Very well put, Shiloh!

Amen!

[PGA]

Viole,

Although the Chesterton and Berlinski quotes cover a wide scope of topics, I posted them because of what they have to say applies to the topic of morality. The point specifically is do highlight the inadequacy of materialism to really deal with morality as well as other issues. Materialism isn't capable of penetrating beyond the trivial and superficial, attempting to do so usually results in underming itself.

My intention wasn't to introduce a new topic for discussion, namely whether or not death is necessary or what should be said to a dying person.

If you feel that the topic of morality has been fully covered and would like to move on then, I guess you're welcome, but I won't be available to participate.

I will however leave a short answer, which hopefully, you'll give some thought to and not just reject out of hand.

My answer involves an anecdote, so be warned

Sometimes my wife would ask me, "Why is the milk on the kitchen counter?". What she really wants to know is if there's a purpose for the milk not being in the refrigerator where it belongs. Did I forget it on the counter, or am busy using the milk?

Sometimes, just to be funny, I reply, "Gravity, mostly...It's on the counter because of gravity..."

Usually she's not impressed by this answer.

The point is this: I have given her a perfect reasonable scientific explanation for why the milk is on the counter. The problem is scientific explanations have nothing to say about final causes. The final cause here is a will or a purpose, and that's what she really wanted to know.

This inability of materialism to get to the final cause is demonstrated by Dawkin's response to the question of purpose and meaning in a debate (in Argentina I believe). Having no answer, Dawkins' only retort was that "Why" questions are silly questions.

I believe it was Carl Sagan, whose reponse to why we are here was something to the effect of, "We are here because some complex molecules happened to self-replicate, and because some fish were fortunate enough to grow legs, and because one ape-like common ancestor happened to start walking upright. etc. etc"

Notice how Sagan's answer is similar to my milk bottle remark. Though it may be scientifically acceptible, it's as Berlinski shows remarkably shallow.

Telling a dying man that life is short because otherwise evolution can't happen, is equally shallow. In fact, it doesn't even touch the real question.

Now, you could say, science has no answers because there are no answers, but this merely begs the question and as C.S Lewis pointed out, the human desire to transcend seems to imply its reality.

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist–in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless–I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning" - C.S. Lewis

Another problem with saying that science can't explain these things because there are no explanations, is the inconsistency inherent in that approach on one hand a deferring to future scientific discovery on the other.

One approach says, "What science cannot explain doesn't exist" the other says, "What science cannot explain will be explained in future". It seems then that the materialist has the convenience of using science to explain through deferral to future discovery, any notion that the materialist wants to retain or make non-existant any notion that the materialist wishes to reject.

I'm going away for a few days, so I won't be posting soon, but perhaps OES or PGA will continue this discussion with you.

Cheers

Another great reply LuftWaffle! Clearly stated.

I too am working the entire weekend so will probably not respond until Monday or Tuesday (maybe the sporadic response?

[PGA]

I don't know any naturalist who says that we are a RANDOM collection of atoms and chemicals; not sure where you heard or read that.

"Random" is all you are left with if there is no Creator

Therefore, the uncreated Creator must be random

Unless you beg the question by saying that the uncreated Creator is the only being that does not need to be created without being random.

Btw. Do you know what random means? I can even show you mathematically, if you are interested, that fully random distributions of things and relationships always have ordered substructures. It is not very difficult really. It requires just some basic understanding of graph, probability and information theory.- viole

Viole, I certainly want to get in on this debate on randomness and morality. Please remind me Monday or Tuesday if you don't hear from me until then.

Man-o-man.

[Guest shiloh357]

shiloh357, on 28 October 2011 - 10:13 AM, said:

Quote

I don't know any naturalist who says that we are a RANDOM collection of atoms and chemicals; not sure where you heard or read that.

"Random" is all you are left with if there is no Creator

Therefore, the uncreated Creator must be random

It can be shown that you cannot have a universe without an uncaused cause. There has to be a starting point otherwise you have an unending line of causes, which simply is not possible.

Unless you beg the question by saying that the uncreated Creator is the only being that does not need to be created without being random.

He is eternal and has no beginning. He is the uncaused cause.

I don't wish to be pedantic and I have already been accused of putting too much cold disclaimers in my posts.

Actually,from what I have read, the accusation is that you have put too much irrelevant, meaningless and evasive disclaimers in your posts. Your responses simply demonstrate that you are either unable or unwilling to carry any intellectual burden in this debate.

But if we want to face the issue in a precise way, we need to agree on the definitions. Saying that things like love, feelings, emotions, moral feelings and randomness do not deserve a precise definition is like choosing unilaterally the rules of engagements and keep the discussion very vague, don't you think so? I also feel emotions when I see a beautiful sunset on the sea; that does not mean that my emotions could not be explained physically or that the colors of the sunset should not be explained by low-pass filtering of photons with a uniform spectrum, as if that would not make the effect as beautiful and awe inspiring.

But that is still evading the substance of the debate. The issue is not about how a sunset effects you emotionally. The issue is about how right and wrong can be reduced to chemical processes in the brain on the one hand, but yet still allow you to make moral judgments on the other. The problem as I see it is that you cannot and would not be consistent with what you are trying to posit on these boards if you underwent a real tragedy like a murder, or if your house were broken into or one of your children were harmed. I don't think you would be consoled by the idea that the pain you feel is nothing but a chemical reaction to the event and that nothing wrong has happened. On the contrary, you would seek justice and you would want the perpetrator caught and made to account for what he did to you and your family.

So, your posts make serve you on this board in your attempt to deny the existence of God, but they won't hold you up when reality strikes a crushing blow to your life and well-being.

[Guest]

First of all, I never said that there are no objective moral laws, but as an empiricist, I think they have a different origin and might, themselves, evolve and, as far as we know, apply only to humans. This fact also contradicts your accusation of me criticizing the morality of God; since I believe OUR morality applies probably only to US, that does not exclude that another morality applies to other beings (e.g. God); the problem actually arises if there is an universal and cosmic moral law that applies both to us and all other Beings. In this case (which I do not believe), I see a discrepancy between God's acts and acts that I (my brain/psyche) consider moral.

Sin

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Romans 3:23

Is

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:23

The Problem

Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. John 8:34

And Jesus

If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. John 8:36

Is

And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, Revelation 1:5

The Gift

Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever. 1 Peter 1:23

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You seem to indicate that naturalists/atheists cannot claim human and civil rights. By the same criterium, you should not claim any life saving medicine that has been manufactured using scientific criteria that involve evolution. Maybe health insurers could save a couple of billion bucks if they find out

Medicine And Science

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. Psalms 139:14

Have Nothing To Do

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. Colossians 2:8

With Evolution

Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter's clay: for shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? Isaiah 29:16

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Personally, I consider your claim a form of religious oppression (which you probably disapprove for all religions except yours), therefore it is possible that you are part of the problem and not of the solution. Physician, heal thyself

Religious Oppression

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Genesis 3:1(a-c)

Will Not Stand

And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;

And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:

For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand? Revelation 6:15-17

Against Jesus

And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,

To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men's persons in admiration because of advantage. Jude 1:14-16

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Believe

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. Romans 10:9-11

And Be Blessed Beloved

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16

Love, Joe

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Ok viole, don't bother playing any little mathmatical tricks. Information theory is clear on entropy and such 'substructures' have to be interpreted by an interface that's capable of making use of them. In time, they're reduced to less and less usable sequences unless the interface is intelligent and can guide and adapt the outcomes, like in algorithms.

I am not sure I am following you here. I am not playing mathematical tricks; I just think that words like "random", "chaotic" deserve a precise definitions. How can we otherwise start a meaningful conversation?

Because the point stands regardless of the specifics of the definition so quibbling about definitions simply serves to distract from the point.

It's what's preventing this from being a meaningful conversation.

We could say that without a Creator everything would be slkdkcvbxcks and we have reached the same meaning.

You're being silly. The word random has only so many potential connotations, any of which is fine to establish Shiloh’s point.

The nonsense that string of characters you present means nothing to anyone since no intelligence has coded it to mean anything, and therefore it is unintelligible nonsense, as is anything that comes about as a result of randomness... which is Shiloh's point.

viole, in sticking up for your approach you just undermined the central point of your argument.

It is my experience that when we dig a bit deeply, not many people understand what random or chaotic really mean. Usually I hear "random is like chaotic" (wrong), or "chaotic is like without order", etc. At the end we land with vague or circular reasoning. In nature many things are inherently random: we cannot in principle, for instance, say when an atom will decay; all we can say is that its chances of decay follow a statistical (Poissonian) distribution. Does that mean that the Creator forgot to remove some randomness from His creation?

You're wasting time.

Trying to overcomplicate the issue is simply a red herring, since the point remains regardless of the specifics.

If I say "You and Fred can't go to the grocery store because you'd have to go over the bride and the bridge is closed", you can't get around the implication of the bridge being closed by trying to define what constitutes a grocery store since you'd call it a convenience store, and you may not want to go with Fred but with Sally.

Anyone can try to show off what they know but if your points are invalid it ain't making you look any smarter.

Besides, I already pointed out how your point was disconfirming your argument so delving in really isn't doing you any favours. If we follow this line of reasoning again, I anticipate that you'll just end up ignoring the inescapable conclusions and retreating to another thought experiment because history has a way of repeating itself.

P.S. Christians believe in the fall of creation and entropy so it's not like we don't have explanations for decay rates and elements of randomness therein. We've got'em and they just ain't that complicated.

By the way, saying that without a Creator everything would be random (or unguided) might leave the door open to the existence of random (or unguided) things without the necessity of a Creator.

No, that would only lead to a joke about how nothing exploded an made an organized everything.

Einstein said we always seen order turning to chaos, and yet the naturalist needs it to be the other way around so you fight upstream of reality in order to try to deny the inescapable conclusion that there is a Creator.

If we exclude also this possibility, then we are forced to conclude that all things that exist (since they are created by a Creator) are, necessarily, non-random (or guided), which would make us wonder how can it be that atom's decay is, indeed, a random process.

You're ontology is simply juvenile viole. You can't stand on deductions based on your intuition when your intuition lack key background information, and suppose that it provides any kind of meaningful conclusion.

Nothing forces us to make the above conclusion, at all. An all powerful Creator would be perfectly at liberty to create things totally randomly, totally guided, or according to any shade of grey in between.

Your false dichotomizing is simply groundless, which again is why I was asking if you've actually systematically studied how to analyze something with a cold, rational approach because you continually make fallacious leaps over tall buildings of logical, evidence based cases and dart off in whatever direction you land with fresh false premises.

Before I hit you with this (in a friendly and figurately way, of course), I need to know if I understood this correctly. Do you really think that appearance of something having the X property is sufficient evidence that this something has, indeed, the X property?

O please viole - that red herring is pretty forced.

It's not a matter of appearance that you can't fly away in your purse, it's simply a matter of fact. It's not a matter of appearance that by contrast you can fly in an airplane.

Please let's not get derailed simply for the sake of exploring fallacy.