Side comments on Euthyphro

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Who says what?

How do you know that? It’s certainly not true for people. Also, by the argument you just presented: “But if God created you and He was evil, you would not know that committing genocide was evil because you would only be evil”, you can’t know if God is evil, because he could create you to think evil is good. How do you know that giving alms to the poor is good, if evil God could be making you think that evil is good?

No, he didn’t tell them it was good not to eat it; he told them they shouldn’t eat it because it would kill them, which turned out to be a lie. Instead of killing them, it taught them how to recognize good and evil, becoming like God in that respect.

Do you doubt God’s goodness? You have seemed quite assured up to this point.

If. The argument is about whether God’s actions are truly good, how we could know if they are, and what the basis of morality really is.

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Who is deciding there’s a big step between various definitions of good and nothing being good?

We’re postulating that God could be evil. Evil is the absence of good.

Evil is the absence of good. So if evil people create good things, they have a creator that’s good and have lost some of their goodness.

Let’s look at the text. Genesis 2

The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, 17 but you must not eat[m] from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.”

Genesis 3

Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?”

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. 3 But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.’”

4 “No! You will not die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “In fact, God knows that when[a] you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God,[b] knowing good and evil.” 6 Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

You’re taking the serpent’s perspective in the text.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze,[c] and they hid themselves from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

Why hide from God if they had done something that was good? Do you think dying is good? What would happen to you if you didn’t die? At what point does your body begin the process of dying?

To make it clear, I interpret the text to be saying that disobeying God’s good commands would begin the process of dying a physical death. Disobedience would make one aware of evil in a real sense because there would be an absence of good. You could call that a spiritual death.

Yes.

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Quran Surah:
91:(5) Consider the sky and its wondrous make,3 (6) and the earth and all its expanse! (7) Consider the human self,4 and how it is formed in accordance with what it is meant to be,5 (8) and how it is imbued with moral failings as well as with consciousness of God!6 (9) To a happy state shall indeed attain he who causes this [self] to grow in purity, (10) and truly lost is he who buries it [in darkness].

3 Lit., “and that which has built it” - i.e., the wondrous qualities which are responsible for the
harmony and coherence of the visible cosmos (which is evidently the meaning of the term sama’ in this context). Similarly, the subsequent reference to the earth, which reads literally, “that which has spread it out”, is apparently an allusion to the qualities responsible for the beauty and variety of its expanse.

4 As in so many other instances, the term nafs, which has a very wide range of meanings (see first sentence of note 1 on 4:1), denotes here the human self or personality as a whole: that is, a being composed of a physical body and that inexplicable life-essence loosely described as “soul”.

5 Lit., “and that which has made [or “formed”] it (sawwaha) in accordance with. . .”, etc. For this particular connotation of the verb sawwa, see note 1 on 87:2, which represents the oldest Qur’anic instance of its use in the above sense. The reference to man and that which constitutes the “human personality”, as well as the implied allusion to the extremely complex phenomenon of a life-entity in which bodily needs and urges, emotions and intellectual activities are so closely intertwined as to be indissoluble, follows organically upon a call to consider the inexplicable grandeur of the universe - so far as it is perceptible and comprehensible to man - as a compelling evidence of God’s creative power.

6 Lit., “and [consider] that which has inspired it with its immoral doings (fujuraha) and its God consciousness (taqwaha)” - i.e., the fact that man is equally liable to rise to great spiritual heights as to fall into utter immorality is an essential characteristic of human nature as such. In its deepest sense, man’s ability to act wrongly is a concomitant to his ability to act rightly: in other words, it is this inherent polarity of tendencies which gives to every “right” choice a value and, thus, endows man with moral free will (cf. in this connection note 16 on 7:24-25).

https://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/12/us/baby-lab-morals-ac360/index.html

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I suppose anyone who thinks about it just a little would do that. If we don’t know everything, therefore we know nothing? If we don’t agree on everything, then you might as well believe anything? None of that follows.

Can’t people contain both good and evil? Why not God?

That doesn’t follow logically. Nor is evil an absence of good, come to think of it.

Turns out the serpent was telling the truth, as you can see from the denoument:

Because they were naked. Didn’t you read the whole thing? And nobody said it was good, just as God didn’t say it was evil. God lied in order to keep Adam from gaining knowledge and becoming as a god. He said as much afterwards.

You can certainly interpret anything as saying anything else, but in fact that isn’t what the text says. Note that it isn’t the tree of knowledge of evil but the tree of knowledge of good and evil, so again you are interpreting the text as meaning something other than what it says. In fact, if it was a tree of evil, and God says that Adam has become “as one of us”, you’re saying that God is evil.

Why do you doubt God’s goodness?

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God is good, so His commands are good. Disobeying God’s command is evil. The tree was a symbol of that reality: Disobeying God meant man would become his own god, made in his own image, deciding what is good based on himself rather than God.

God’s commands are not a lie so that he can keep us from becoming like Him. Adam and Eve already were as much like God as they could be without being God himself, as they were made in His image. They were very good.

The storm. My sin.

29 So He said, “Come.” And when Peter had come down out of the boat, he walked on the water to go to Jesus. 30 But when he saw [e]that the wind was boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink he cried out, saying, “Lord, save me!”

31 And immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and caught him, and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” 32 And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased.

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That’s not what the story says.

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Let’s see if I am understanding your position thru an analogy.

The standard for the measure of a meter used to be a metal bar that was kept in a vault. If we take this as analogous to how God serves as the standard of morality, then there would be no other standard by which we would determine whether this bar was in fact a meter in length. It is the standard. Without it, the very concept of a “meter” has no meaning. It could be any length anyone wanted it to be.

As I understand it, this is how you view God functioning as the standard of morality.

To take it further, the measure of a meter is determined by the nature of this metal bar. It is pointless to as “But what if the bar was twice as long? Or half as long?” The bar is as long as it is by its very nature, and that length is never changing because it has been constructed of material that will be very stable so it will never change in length (in theory) and also is carefully stored so it will never be damaged.

Similarly, it is pointless to ask if morality would be different if God’s nature was different. God’s nature is unchanging, so the standard of morality will never change.

Is that more or less accurate?

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No, it is not pointless to ask because God encourages logic and questions. And it helps to determine his nature by explaining what it is or what it is not.

But otherwise yes, your analogy strikes me as an accurate depiction of an objective standard.

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OK.

So, now: Suppose, when the decision was being made to define the standard length of the meter, in addition to the bar that was eventually chosen there were two other bars being considered. All three are made of exactly the same material, and share the same properties in terms of structural stability.

However, one of the bars is a bit longer than the one what was chosen, and the other is a bit shorter.

On what basis would you have argued that the bar that was chosen was the only possible standard, i.e. that, unlike the other two bars, its “nature” was that of being exactly one meter? Or would you have not argued that?

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You’re bringing back in Euthyphro’s Dilemma, which I proved was not a dilemma. The bar exists eternally of itself.

Thinking…I suppose you could have another eternal bar, but then only the two eternal bars could judge between themselves.

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How so?

No, it doesn’t. The bar was created at a specific time and place.

Are you not able to answer the question as it pertains to the specific example of the bar that served as the standard of a meter? Why not?

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A post was split to a new topic: Pragmatic vs Rational Beliefs

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How so?

This is the dilemma: If you say God/good has to be created, then God is not God/good. The dilemma is fixed by saying God can be eternal. [quote=“Faizal_Ali, post:71, topic:11905, full:true”]

Anytime you bring in the idea that the bar is created, you’re bringing the dilemma back in.

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You don’t seem to understand my argument at all. That the bar was created has no bearing on the point I am trying to make.

If it helps you. we can say that the three bars were not created by anyone but were just found, and no one knows how long they have existed, maybe forever.

On what basis could it be asserted that only one of these bars could serve as the standard for the length of a metre? Just address that question, and don’t worry about how it pertains to the issue of god and morality for the moment.

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Here’s a fun story:

Your father puts a plate in front of you, on which are two cookies. He says, “Feel free to eat the cookie on the left, but don’t eat the cookie on the right: it’s poisoned.” What is your reaction? Then, later, your Uncle Stan tells you he was just kidding, and the cookie on the right isn’t poisoned at all. What is your reaction now?

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The question doesn’t make sense because we wouldn’t know to make the bars a standard for a meter.

If none of the 3 wanted to be known, then we wouldn’t know that they serve as a standard because we wouldn’t find them.

If one or more did want to be known, he or they would make it known to us that he or they were that standard.

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My reaction is - does my father love me? Does he love me more than Uncle Stan? And also there’s an element of doubt, so my best course of action is to not eat the cookie on the right.

This sounds like Genesis 3, so you must be making some point about that.

Don’t you find it interesting John that you and I agree on the rest of the Bible but not the fall into sin? You see God as the evil one in the scenario, and I see Him as a loving father. If that serpent has a special hold on you, he needs to go away right now, because my spirit does not like it.

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But that’s not how it works.

The important concept is length. The meter is just a pragmatic standard to be used for the practical measurement of length. And no, it is no circular. It is arbitrary, which is different from circular.

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Depends…
Using a car to grow plants is wasteful and harmful to the environment. You might own the car, but the metal and other resources used to make it belonged to everyone, in the sense that it’s the resources of this planet.

In short, it might not be illegal to use a working car as a garden… but it would be a criminal waste.

Any allegory will fail if you stretch it. But the point remains, that for human beings morality is closely connected to purpose and purpose comes from the creator.

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If your father loves you, why is he putting a poisoned cookie on the plate?

You have penetrated my subterfuge. Congratulations.

What makes you think we agree on the rest of the bible?

He may be a loving father, but his actions are strange, as would be the actions of your father in giving you a supposedly poisoned cookie and telling you not to eat it. And of course, it turns out that Uncle Stan was right: the cookie isn’t poisoned at all.

Are you trying to exorcise me?

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