The first is the classic formulation, which I think has its origins in Roman law: “where there is a right, there is a remedy.” The positivist take is “where there is a remedy, there is a right.”
Let’s try another analogy. Suppose you’re a computer genius and you succeed in building an AI with true consciousness. Do you have the right to destroy that AI any time it suits your purposes? After all, you created it.
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Excellent analogy. But to make it slightly more precise, lets say an AI with the potential to one day have a consciousness at the same level as it’s creator. Here’s my answer:
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I don’t accept a video as an answer. Just tell me what you mean.
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I think a more apt analogy is:
Let’s say you make an AI with true consciousness. However, the computer that the AI runs on depends on you cranking it continually to give it power. Do you have an obligation to keep cranking it forever so that it doesn’t die?
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That’s a shame, its a really cool video. Harold is trying to build an AI for a particular task, but whenever he gets close the AI rejects the task it was created for and tries to escape by various methods, including trying to kill Harold. Nathan observes “It never learned Good from Evil.” Harold scoffs “Good and Evil? Those are human terms.”
So my answer is yes, if I were creating an AI for a task and it started going wrong I would delete it before it achieved my level of consciousness.
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Ooh, good point. But my understanding of theos would still press for a diference in level between the creator and the AI, at least for now.
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I don’t understand the analogy. How is God supposed to be cranking the babies? We were talking about the killing of the firstborn. Is that just God taking his hand off the crank in your estimation?
So your claim is that the Egyptian babies were going wrong and God killed them for his own preservation?
What difference does that make?
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Understandable. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the AI has the same status as a moral subject as a human being. Would your decision be moral?
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One thing I’m noticing here is that the “god is inscrutable/let me tell you what god is like” contradiction exists in other domains, too.
I’ve yet to hear one Christian say that “god is good” and then be confronted by another Christian saying that this is wrong because gods cannot be judged by human standards. But say that god appears to be bad – which, frankly, is not hard to demonstrate if the Bible’s accounts are to be taken as true – and suddenly this strange inscrutability of god’s character comes up.
So, the question: is this particular god’s character for morality observable? It depends. If you say it is the ultimate and perfect good thing, yes, that’s fine. It can be evaluated by humans, and its good character may be affirmed by humans. But if you say this god is bad, the god suddenly retreats. Now, applying our mere human minds to the task of evaluating its goodness is making a category error or some such damned thing, and it’s obvious that no human judgment can bear upon the character of god.
It can’t be both ways. Gods may be inscrutable, in which case, nobody has any reason to care about them at all. Or they may be, to some extent, knowable, and if so, we may draw inferences about them from what we know about them. But they cannot be scrutable when a Christian wants to declare what his god wants, what his god thinks about a particular subject, and what his god had for breakfast, and then suddenly inscrutable when anyone else wishes to have a look. They cannot be scrutable for the purpose of declaring them good, but inscrutable for the purpose of declaring them bad.
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That has the unfortunate consequence of promoting infanticide.
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Apparently, the clay has a claim on other clay. It’s only the potter who’s free to smash the pots as he chooses. The potter tells all the pots to be nice to each other. Do as I say, not as I do.
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Yes, because God sustains the existence of everything, so it is like taking his hand off the crank.
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That would seem anti-biblical. What actually happened is that the angel of death went around, visiting every house that didn’t have lamb’s blood on the door. That isn’t taking the hand off the crank. But never mind. Since cranking, to God, takes no effort (nothing takes effort when you’re omnipotent), stopping the crank would be an act of malice as much as anything else.
Besides, why would you think that God has to constantly prop up everything? A couple of random bible verses? Certainly there’s no evidence for such a thing.
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It would seem he is morally obligated to keep his hand on the crank. Interesting.
The angel of death is a phenomenological description of what happened from the standpoint of human observers. But God isn’t just a super-powered angel, remember. He’s not a character in the story - he’s the author itself.
What does taking effort have to do with anything? It’s the cranker’s power, not the cranked, right? Imagine if you’re hired by Amazon and paid a $8,000 salary every month. That kind of money is nothing for Amazon, but it’s everything for you. Say they lay you off. Do they have an obligation to keep paying you $8,000?
Hebrews 1:3a: “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”
Colossians 1:17: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Acts 17:28: “For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’”
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First, when a Christian says, “God is good”, he is not judging God by human-made standards. He is only re-affirming what is said about God in his revelation. It’s an expression of submission and worship, not judgment. This becomes even more apparent when you read the book of Job.
Second, because God is an utterly different type of being than humans or other creatures, theologians have long recognized that we cannot talk about God like we do about creatures. Thus even when we say that “God is good”, the meaning of “good” is not exactly the same as when we say that “Puck is a good man” or “This knife is good” or “This steak is good.” This is called the doctrine of analogy. In these four examples of using the word “good”, there is some commonality in meaning between them. But they are not exactly the same meaning.
In other words, our language can only crudely approximate God’s true nature. In fact, some traditions take this to the other extreme and say that we can not say anything about what God is, only what God is not, known as apophatic theology.
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Bear in mind that Epimenides was referring to Zeus when he wrote that. I doubt he had in mind the same idea as you.
As I said earlier, this line of argument destroys any faith you can have in a positive (for you) afterlife.
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Yes? And how would you interpret what actually happened (assuming you believe that the story has any basis in fact)?
No, but I don’t understand the relevance.
So, three random bible verses. Can we really base our understanding of God’s role on such scraps?
Another question: how do you know that God is good?
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