Side comments on Euthyphro

I agree; I just don’t think this is relevant to the specific argument at hand. You’re arguing here for why there is a God.

This is an argument about whether it’s possible to have a god at all. Once one agrees it’s possible, then you can argue for why it’s likely.

Except if it’s my car there is nothing immoral about my doing whatever I damn well please with it, so long as I do not harm anyone else in the process. If I want to use it to grow plants, then who’s to say I oughtn’t?

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I’m an atheist, and I consider myself a human capable of judging morality.

But is God’s perspective moral, and how would we know if it is?

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How do we determine if good is what God is? Just by proclamation, decree, or whimsy?

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Why are you making an argument for God doing whatever He wants with his creation? :wink: @John_Harshman will get mad at you because he thinks believing in a God who flooded the earth is inconsistent.

If there is a God, we would be creation and He would be creator. He would be ommiscient so we know He is good because He tells us He is good.

My parents made me, but my parents are still fallible and are capable of immoral things.

You can be omniscient and still lie. Just proclaiming yourself to be moral does not make you moral. That’s not how it works.

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If you’re not claiming your parents or me or you are God, this argument is irrelevant.

I’m not.

But you did accidentally. :wink:

Then you are claiming that we can’t know if something is moral, therefore you can’t claim that God is moral, only that God claims to be moral. This puts us on the “God’s commands are moral because God commands them” prong of the Euthyphro Dilemma.

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No, you are once again not understanding the comments to which you are responding.

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I’m not saying we can’t know if something is moral. I’m saying that God can exist without us knowing whether He is moral or not. He can be good without anyone else (creation) around to judge that He is good.

If we can judge morality for ourselves this means there is a standard outside of God, and we can judge for ourselves whether God’s actions are moral.

God can also be immoral, which would seem to be included as part of being omnipotent.

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Nope. That a god intended something does not make that thing “correct” except in terms of that god’s subjective intentions. Nothing to do with morality.

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Then I have no idea what you mean by intuition. That is how I have always understood the word. A sort of feeling.

Ah, but then we’re admitting God exists. Now we can talk about whether he’s moral or immoral if you want.

Some miscreant committing the moral atrocity of using an object for a purpose other than that intended by its designer:

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Indeed. And that, together with the material that follows, is a splendid illustration of the fact that trying to apply structures of formal reasoning to human-created categories and properties, behaving as though notions like “necessary” and “contingent” are some sort of “res” you can move about like A or B in a logic tree, will lead you into a verbal wilderness that has only the superficial appearance of reason.

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Yes, good is what God is. What do you mean by good?