So just to be clear, if the stories aren’t allegorical you’d still support them as being morally good acts because God ordered them, right?
I generally agree. However, as I see it, there are certainly exceptions. After all, some video links are a GREAT way to explain what I mean when I write: “This Answers in Genesis video claiming that only the Great Flood can explain earth’s geology is hilarious.” No summary I might provide of the arguments of the video could come close to capturing the full audience experience, at least for aficionados like me. (Yeah, I’m probably a bit of a snob when it comes to enjoying a fine Ken Ham whine, properly aged, of course.)
That said, being the interminably lazy and easily bored expired academic that I am, I’ve been getting in the habit of submitting Youtube links to my Gemini Advanced AI subscription engine. The summaries/outlines can be quite handy—and occasionally alert me to some new self-contradiction that I hadn’t heard before.
[Indeed, I’ve started applying this handy tool to White House press releases and presidential proclamations. However, I keep getting flashbacks to that silly Star Trek (TOS) episode where Spock tells the computer to calculate the exact value of Pi [or something like that] and the ship’s computer has some sort of existential crisis and emotional breakdown. I always wondered how such a “100% rational machine” could have a voice-output which seemed to be descending into madness. Perhaps I should ask AI to summarize a clip.]
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God is not a contingent being among the other contingent beings that populate the universe, he is the being that is the source of all reality, the one whose nature is to BE. God being the source of all that exist, God’s pronouncements reflect the structure of existence itself, not just someone’s interpretation of it, making them objective, by definition, since objectivity refers to reality. IOW, God being the source of reality, what God says about it isn’t an opinion but a definition of how things are.
Objectivity has nothing to do with reality reference. Subjective things can reference real or non-real things, just like objective things can. The difference is not in whether they “refer to reality”, but in whether they are contingent upon a subject. Subjective things are. Objective things are not. Something cannot both depend on what God says or thinks and also not depend on what anyone says or thinks.
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Pseudo-philosophical nonsense, as usual. You have no basis at all for saying that your god, or indeed any other being, is not “contingent,” and I doubt you even have a coherent concept of what that is supposed to mean. Nor, of course, would being the source of all that exists have any bearing whatsoever on the “objectivity,” much less the moral quality, of one’s moral opinions.
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It’s not clear what “the structure of existence itself” is supposed to be, much less how it relates to the concept of morality.
The concept of morality usually just refers to a set of rules by which we think we ought to behave.
When theists define God’s nature or commandments as the “standard” for morality, they are saying God’s nature or commandments is a sort of measuring stick up against which we can evaluate human behavior. So the “rules” for how we ought to behave is to try to “measure up” to the standard. To emulate God, or follow his commandments, in our behavior.
It doesn’t matter if God actually created the world, that doesn’t make it an objective fact that we actually ought to behave according to what God has acted to define himself to be. It just doesn’t follow. Even if God is the one doing it, it’s still just a subjective act to define God’s nature, or God’s commandments, to be the standard.
Straightfoward non-sequitur. It doesn’t matter what else you have created, that doesn’t make it true independently of opinion how you ought to behave. It just doesn’t. Nothing connects A to B here.
This is literally the is-ought problem over again. It is the case that God created everything, therefore we ought to follow his commandments? Nope, doesn’t follow.
I being the source of my drawing, my pronouncements reflect the structure of my drawings existence itself, not just anyone else’s interpretation of it, making them objective, by definition, since objectivity refers to reality. And I say my drawing is by definition the greatest drawing that could possibly exist.
Clearly, simply having made something does not transform your statements about or evualuations of that which you have made (even if you state the words “by definition”) into a fact independent of opinion.
No it’s still just an opinion. God saying “by definition…” is a subjective act. Even if God created the universe, if he says that he is “by definition the standard for morality” it’s still just his opinion of himself.
To make matters worse (switching from ontology to epistemology), we don’t even have God to question about his purported rules. What we have are human beings purporting to speak on his behalf. They are the ones giving us these “by definition” statements.
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Historically speaking, there is quite a bit of disagreement about what people think that god (or gods) has said.
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Mais c’est pas vrai, Gilbert. Tu peux rester dans ton espérance mais enfin on rejoint en poussière.
Hi Alan,
Je suis sensible que tu ais pris la peine de m’interpeller dans ma langue maternelle mais ton message n’est pas très clair dans cette langue 
In the end we are all dust, no matter our hopes. I’m neither disturbed nor comforted by that, just accepting of the inevitability.
Though I was prompted to remark by just having heard from my brother who is terminally ill.
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if God is the source of all reality, including the moral law, then God’s pronouncements aren’t opinions—they’re descriptions of reality’s fabric, making them objective by definition.
First, let me reassure you, I understand what a non contingent being means.
Second, you qualify the idea that a non contingent being is the source of all that exist as pseudo-philosophical nonsense. That’s your right, of course, but in doing so, you’re treating some of the greatest philosophical minds (Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquina, Maimonides, Descartes, Leibniz, etc…) as pseudo-philosophers talking nonsense. Sorry to tell you that, but when you are in their team, you are not impressed by your disqualification.
I am sorry to ear this. Take heart.
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Repeating that this is how objectivity is defined does not make your proprietary definition common among users of that term. For now, it is not. Being “descriptions of reality’s fabric” does not, by definition, make something objective, especially not, if you explicitly declare it to be contingent upon a subject, i.e. literally the opposite of objective.
I don’t think Puck was worried that you didn’t. I think the point is that none of you lot are able or willing to coherently articulate it. So for the purposes of constructing an argument, this having of an understanding you are reassuring Puck about can scarcely be distinguished from a non-having of any of that understanding. You could of course make some attempt at demonstrating any sort of understanding of what it is you are talking about – if there even is a ‘what’ to it at all – but you choose righteous indignation instead, referencing authority in place of substance. Needless to say, this is not at all impressive. Having big names doesn’t mean anything. Even the best of us can and do say silly things sometimes, and the claim that your favoured flavour of gibberish has been uttered in similar form by some of them, even if true, in no way gives it meaning.
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No. There is no moral law in “reality’s fabric”. What would that even mean? That there’s a set of laws for how human beings ought to behave written into the equations of physics? That makes no sense whatsoever.
A set of rules for how humans ought to behave is an idea in the mind, not something “out there” in “the fabric of reality”. You can write them on a piece of paper, or consider them in your mind, you can’t put them “into the fabric of reality”. What is “a fabric of reality” even? How would a set of rules for how humans ought to behave be placed in/written on “the fabric of reality”? What does that even mean?
You’re just talking nonsense now.
There’s no amount of God’s writing a set of rules for how humans ought to behave, no matter where or how he writes them, that transforms them into something other than his opinion. You’re really just positing a new place or medium through which God can state his opinion. It doesn’t matter whether he somehow incomprehensibly writes them into spacetime, or the Shröedinger equation, or conjures them into being in some immaterial realm as if a platonic object. It’s still just him stating his opinion somewhere.
God having created the universe, or human souls and minds, doesn’t make his conception of what rules human beings ought to follow, somehow be more than just his opinion.
Try to construct a syllogism. Derive the oughts from the is with logic without simply assuming in some premise what you are trying to prove. Re-discover as so many before you, and realize, that this can’t be done.
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But something doesn’t become reality just by virtue of someone pronouncing it.
To illustrate: If we are looking at a jar full of marbles, there is an objectively correct number of marbles contained. We can only know what that number is by counting them, but the number remains what it is.
Whereas, suppose someone says “The number of marbles in the jar is defined by my nature. I hereby pronounce that there are 176 marbles in the jar.” That makes no difference. If we count the marbles and find there are, in fact, 203 then this person making the pronouncement is objectively wrong.
Of course, it the person making the pronouncement actually put the marbles into the jar, and knows the correct number, then his pronouncement would be objectively correct. But that would still be contingent on the existence of a specific number of actual physical marbles being in an actual physical jar. You have not demonstrated that anything similar exists for moral values.
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You mean the Plato who wrote Euthyphro?
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To elaborate on my previous comment:
Let us now imagine that the guy making the pronouncement on how many marbles are in the jar is supremely powerful, supremely wise and supremely knowledgeable. He decrees that it is immoral to put any number of marbles into a jar other than 176.
I don’t see why any one would be bound to obey that decree. It seems like just a silly, arbitrary rule. And it doesn’t matter how powerful, wise or knowledgeable is the person making the rule.
Do you disagree? If so, explain why.
Yes. Plato’s concept of the Good is the philosophical ancestor to the fully fleshed-out non-contingent God of medieval theology.
No, you don’t understand. Yes, it is possible to create the entirely artificial, and completely useless, concept of a “non contingent being.” But that concept, having no known correspondence to anything in reality, is of no use in addressing questions about the universe in which we live. You have no coherent concept of what that is supposed to mean because nobody really does. Nobody’s ever seen one. Nobody has any idea, outside of pure speculation, what the attributes of any such being would be like. @Gisteron has this exactly right.
But, of course, creating the universe, even if done by some sort of being, would not make that being an arbiter of morality in any sense. It simply doesn’t follow. It’s rather like the nonsense with “codes” demonstrating design: there is a vast, gaping, unbridgeable non sequitur here, which you are trying to paper over with grand, but ultimately meaningless, expressions like “reality’s fabric.” That you must use such expressions is indicative of the fact that you haven’t bothered to actually think about this very much; if you could bridge that non sequitur somehow, it would not be by such means.
Two notes:
(1) Medieval theology doesn’t have a terribly good track record in terms of helping us understand the features of the universe. Empiricism has it lapped a million times over. In fact, it is not clear that medieval theology has left the starting block, though there are probably a few million pages in theological libraries on the question of whether the starting block is contingent or non-contingent.
(2) If it were so that these brave and brilliant medieval scholars had worked out the problem of Euthyphro, you, as a devoted disciple thereof, would probably have had an answer to @John_Harshman on one or more of the many, many times he’s raised it. Instead, you studiously ignore all his references to it.
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The irony, of course, is that you personally have no reluctance to contradict the views of eminent scientists on subjects regarding which you have no expertise. So it goes.
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