Does anyone have a strong argument against God?

[BluePriest]

This got me agitated enough to post in this topic.

1) Euthyphro Dilemma (Either god determines what is moral and thus is not objectively good or god does not determine what is moral.) The Euthyphro dilemma comes from the theist Socrates' dialogue on piety.

   
Old Trees, I sugggest you reading this topic right here. (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,16968.msg232771#msg232771)


ya know... where you and me already covered this topic? Im sorta dissapointed that a subject that was already covered, you choose to bring up. However, if you feel unsatisfied by the responses given, then I am no longer disapointed, and we can start back at the beginning to see if we come to a different conclusion

 

[Daxx]

Actually, no. What happens is my brain processes large amounts of qualia in the form of stimuli presented to it as electrical signals, the processing of which takes the form of (largely) chemical reactions with a known outcome. If you had a sufficient knowledge of the initial state of the system and the processes used, you could infer the answer (or determine the probability function if quantum effects are involved).

It's complicated, yes, but that doesn't mean it is free will.

Whatever happens in your brain or my brain, I know that I have freewill. I make my own descisions no matter what my brain directs me towards.

So you don't actually have any proof that free will exists other than your personal perception of your own actions? This doesn't constitute proof as it is just anecdotal evidence (and unreliable evidence at that).

After all, if you're willing to put so much stock on your own experience, how do you know that what you experience is representative of the world around you? One only needs to drink a cup of coffee, go to a dance club, or take LSD to know that your experiences and mood are heavily influenced by your environment. The brain is a fantastically buggy piece of equipment.

Imagine a society where 80% of the population genuinely believed that Santa Claus was real. And not only that, but they subjected you to social pressure, discrimination and abuse because you didn't believe in Him. Wouldn't you be reactionary to such a ridiculous claim and the attendant discrimination?

Okay, I understand what you mean. Society is becoming more and more welcoming to atheists and probably America will move from a "Judeo-Christian" nation to an Atheist one soon.

There's certainly an encouraging trend towards secularisation¹, though fundamentalism is currently in a revival. If one day you guys have a candidate for public office who can openly admit that they aren't a Christian without committing political suicide I would be happier.

Is that an admission that you can't substantiate it?

Nope. To put it quite bluntly, I think you are lying or not a human if you say you do not have a conscience. Sorry, I imagine you don't like being accussed of lying but I and every person I know has a conscience.

I'm not stating that I do not have a conscience (though I suspect you and I would disagree on what exactly "conscience" is), merely that you haven't actually made any claims which would support the idea of morality being objective². You've just claimed that it is and then thrown up your hands in horror when I rejected an unsubstantiated claim.

1. Or possibly there isn't; a substantial amount of the founding fathers were deists rather than Christians. "...the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion," - John Adams, Treaty of Tripoli. This is of course a completely seperate discussion better suited to another thread.
2. As an aside, people's consciences differ on the moral weight of different actions, so personal feelings are not actually evidence of anything, except perhaps an indication that morality is anthropogenic in nature and relative rather than absolute.

[OldTrees]

This got me agitated enough to post in this topic.

1) Euthyphro Dilemma (Either god determines what is moral and thus is not objectively good or god does not determine what is moral.) The Euthyphro dilemma comes from the theist Socrates' dialogue on piety.

2) You might want to look up all the myriad valid alternative philosophy to divine command theory. Some include Kantian Ethics and Utilitarianism. However a moral philosophy course is needed to cover a sizable portion of these alternative moral theories

I don't have time to spend hours researching moral philosophy and I'm not old enough to go to college and take a moral philosophy class either (yet).

So you object to what and why exactly?

Sorry, I overestimated your age.

1)
Divine Command Theory is the theory that god commands something if and only if it is moral. You should recognize this even if not by its name. In the Dialogue Euthyphro (a very good read) Socrates discusses Piety. His same argument about piety can be applied to morality.

If "god commands something if and only if it is moral", then either "something is moral because god commands it" or "god commands something because it is moral". In the first case saying "god is good" becomes meaningless (see next paragraph), in the second case Divine Command theory fails to describe what makes some acts moral and other immoral.

Under the first interpretation "something is moral because god commands it" we would describe a person as good if they only did actions that god commanded.
"Bob is good because he only did actions God commanded"
As applied to God:
"God is good because he only did actions God commanded"
Replacing the word God with Joe which maintains the logical structure but shows something interesting
"Joe is good because he only did actions Joe commanded"
It becomes obvious that Joe cannot do other then what Joe want/commands himself to do therefore this application of the word good is meaningless.

The above is a brief summary of the Euthyphro Dilemma.

2)
Philosophers have moral theories (too many even to list for you). Divine Command Theory is just one of many.

Rights based ethics is the most plausible to me.
Very brief summary is that
Humans have innate rights. (may theories about why including but not limited to sapience, sentience, or life)
Rights describe what ought not what can be done to the one with the right.

This got me agitated enough to post in this topic.

1) Euthyphro Dilemma (Either god determines what is moral and thus is not objectively good or god does not determine what is moral.) The Euthyphro dilemma comes from the theist Socrates' dialogue on piety.

   
Old Trees, I sugggest you reading this topic right here. (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,16968.msg232771#msg232771)


ya know... where you and me already covered this topic? Im sorta dissapointed that a subject that was already covered, you choose to bring up. However, if you feel unsatisfied by the responses given, then I am no longer disapointed, and we can start back at the beginning to see if we come to a different conclusion

 

You misunderstood my intentions here.
I was trying to provoke him to read relevant literature that would give him a theist that did not believe in Divine Command Theory. This would allow him to conclude that god is not the source of morality (as even you agreed) but rather may be able to change the nature of the source.
2) I kinda lost the link to the posts so I thought this would be sufficient for you to post it.

On whether it was convincing to me:
I asked my Philosophy professor about it and he could not differentiate it from the "something is moral because god commands it" which I explained the argument against a little better this time for your chance to dissect it.

[Kuu]

Sorry, I overestimated your age.

That could be taken as a compliment, a criticism, or a mere fact; but I think I'll choose to take it as a compliment.

In the Dialogue Euthyphro (a very good read)

Read it.



I'll get back to you on the other philosophies but I have to go somewhere now so for now I will only say that I am not concerned with what some philosphers think, I am concerned with truth (therefore if their philosophies include truth then I am concerned with them). You may argue their points if you like.

Rights based ethics is the most plausible to me.
Very brief summary is that
Humans have innate rights. (may theories about why including but not limited to sapience, sentience, or life)
Rights describe what ought not what can be done to the one with the right.

Why do people have innate rights? What rights do I owe them?

[OldTrees]

Sorry, I overestimated your age.

That could be taken as a compliment, a criticism, or a mere fact; but I think I'll choose to take it as a compliment.

Rights based ethics is the most plausible to me.
Very brief summary is that
Humans have innate rights. (may theories about why including but not limited to sapience, sentience, or life)
Rights describe what ought not what can be done to the one with the right.

Why do people have innate rights? What rights do I owe them?

It was a compliment.

Possible answers given to "Why do people have innate rights?":
They are sapient
They have the capacity to feel pain
They are alive
...

Possible answers given to "What rights do you/I owe them?":
Depends on which Rights based philosophy you ask a common one is the "Right from being Murdered".

[Kuu]

Okay, I'm back. But I have some work to do that I need to get done fast so if I post here in the next 2 hours feel free to tell me to get out of here.

I'm not stating that I do not have a conscience (though I suspect you and I would disagree on what exactly "conscience" is), merely that you haven't actually made any claims which would support the idea of morality being objective2. You've just claimed that it is and then thrown up your hands in horror when I rejected an unsubstantiated claim.

Sorry about that other post from me about the lying nonsense (I was just stunned for a moment and didn't know what to say). For substantiating objective morality I will give you  Lewis quote (one I did before but perhaps you have not read it).

"Everyone has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"-"That's my seat, I was there first"-"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"- "Why should you shove in first?"-"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"-"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football."

Sorry for another long quote, but that should explain it. If there was no agreed objective morality, no one would have anything to quarrel about.

[Daxx]

Sorry for another long quote, but that should explain it. If there was no agreed objective morality, no one would have anything to quarrel about.

However, the "standard" that the quote is describing can as easily be explained by invoking memetic methods of societal cohesion. For example, this suggests that we agree to an approximate common morality for much the same reasons that we all drive on the same side of the road - the benefits of the common standard are pretty high; it therefore becomes ingrained in cultural values that are programmed into all/most members of society, because societies which do this are more likely to succeed.

An example of this is murder: societies where homicide is commonplace are less likely to succeed because widespread homicide has a large negative effect on society. It makes sense therefore that more successful societies often have a prohibition on murder.

An example of different societies having different values is easy to find: cannibalism. The common standard of morality ingrained in western culture says that cannibalism is wrong. However, in other societies cannibalism is not only acceptable but in fact laudable behaviour which is enouraged by those societies. This demonstrates that societal morality is probably not necessarily related to some consistent objective truth, because "cannibalism is bad" and "cannibalism is good" are mutually exclusive concepts.

[XxDevilxX]

Saying God created all things... what exactly did he create? I don't know about you, but biology class and chemistry is meant to teach you what makes up matter and how everything came into being, and evolution is one of those things that is totally obvious, denying it is like saying Abraham Lincoln killed himself, just like OJ Simpsons wife! (anyone get the reference?). This "God" fellow had nothing to do with anything. Did he create the constitution? No. The big bang had to be created in some way of course, and as a theory it was a huge mass of crap that was too pressurized, so it exploded into every fragment in the universe. And to explain how any organism came to live with DNA and having such different features... that happened from evolution. If i was god i wouldn't waste my time creating an infinite amount of combinations for species and DNA sequences, I'd spend the time making some godly hookers in my magical heaven. God can do whatever he wants, and he would not let evil happen no matter what, if he was real of course, and he didn't give up.


If 1/100 people die in a plane crash, that's because it's the law of averages. Christians call it a miracle, and that "god" saved them. What if that person that lived had lost all of their family members and loved ones in that crash? Miracle for sure.

You get stranded on an island with no one there. You are well learned in survival techniques and learn to live off of the land and make a shelter to survive deadly storms. Finally, you are rescued by a ship that happens to come by, a year later. "god" MUST have helped that guy survive, there's no way he could have done it himself. What if that person made a mistake and ended up slipping off of a cliff and fell to his death, later to be found. Some would say that "god" wanted him to go, so he probably sent a little tickle to make him lose his footing right?

This picture is meant to lighten up the mood, even though it may not apply to all

[BluePriest]

It is equally fallacized (is that a word?) to blame the whole for the part.

Look up the fallacy of composition. By the way, that fallacy is the whole reason why this topic is irrelevant.

The word you're looking for is "fallacious".

You are correct to say that it's not always appropriate to associate the actions of a member of a group with a group as a whole, which is why I was pushing for the acknowledgement that you can't appropriate good acts by a person on the behalf of religion as a whole.

The real criticism of religion's danger lies not with the crimes that have been committed in its name, but in its strength as a tool for social control. Any system which allows people to exploit others and excuse away deplorable acts is in some small measure a problem if people are allowed to abuse it unchecked (most systems of representative governance and organised religion are the two major examples, each of which has benefits to counterbalance the problems that they cause).

 

Actually... they DO believe in dinosaurs.

[XxDevilxX]

Actually... they DO believe in dinosaurs.

Yes, I said it doesn't apply to all christians.

[Kuu]

Saying God created all things... what exactly did he create? I don't know about you, but biology class and chemistry is meant to teach you what makes up matter and how everything came into being, and evolution is one of those things that is totally obvious, denying it is like saying Abraham Lincoln killed himself, just like OJ Simpsons wife! (anyone get the reference?). This "God" fellow had nothing to do with anything. Did he create the constitution? No. The big bang had to be created in some way of course, and as a theory it was a huge mass of crap that was too pressurized, so it exploded into every fragment in the universe. And to explain how any organism came to live with DNA and having such different features... that happened from evolution. If i was god i wouldn't waste my time creating an infinite amount of combinations for species and DNA sequences, I'd spend the time making some godly hookers in my magical heaven. God can do whatever he wants, and he would not let evil happen no matter what, if he was real of course, and he didn't give up.


If 1/100 people die in a plane crash, that's because it's the law of averages. Christians call it a miracle, and that "god" saved them. What if that person that lived had lost all of their family members and loved ones in that crash? Miracle for sure.

You get stranded on an island with no one there. You are well learned in survival techniques and learn to live off of the land and make a shelter to survive deadly storms. Finally, you are rescued by a ship that happens to come by, a year later. "god" MUST have helped that guy survive, there's no way he could have done it himself. What if that person made a mistake and ended up slipping off of a cliff and fell to his death, later to be found. Some would say that "god" wanted him to go, so he probably sent a little tickle to make him lose his footing right?

I appreciate your time but if it is alright I would rather stick with the main argument for now because last time I was trying to answer ten questions every post it became rather overwhelming. And besides, as I said before: if the universe is here by accident as you say the the world is here by accident and if the world is here by accident then the people in it and their ideas are here by accident. If people's ideas are here by accident then scientist's ideas are here by accident and I'm not to fond of the idea of putting trust in an accident.

Yeah, I appreciate the "mood lightening", though I myself do believe in dinosaurs. Things like the picture you posted and the Flying Spaghetti Monster (bless his Noodly Appendage) are actually rather amusing to me (though some people take it too far, the Flying Spaghetti Monster especially)

However, the "standard" that the quote is describing can as easily be explained by invoking memetic methods of societal cohesion. For example, this suggests that we agree to an approximate common morality for much the same reasons that we all drive on the same side of the road - the benefits of the common standard are pretty high; it therefore becomes ingrained in cultural values that are programmed into all/most members of society, because societies which do this are more likely to succeed.

An example of this is murder: societies where homicide is commonplace are less likely to succeed because widespread homicide has a large negative effect on society. It makes sense therefore that more successful societies often have a prohibition on murder.

An example of different societies having different values is easy to find: cannibalism. The common standard of morality ingrained in western culture says that cannibalism is wrong. However, in other societies cannibalism is not only acceptable but in fact laudable behaviour which is enouraged by those societies. This demonstrates that societal morality is probably not necessarily related to some consistent objective truth, because "cannibalism is bad" and "cannibalism is good" are mutually exclusive concepts.

Didn't you see the part of my post talking about the objection that the felt duty is merely social obligation?

[Kuu]

It was a compliment.

Thank you by the way OldTrees. Your own intellegence stands out like a beacon of light among the primitive insults thrown at the intellegence of other theists and I. It is appreciated much.