Yes I can, if the “dilemma” posed by T_aquaticus was about one God v the whole human race. If universal morality is held up as a problem, it has to be a problem for the God actually believed in, not some Aunt Sally fitting your proposed paradox.
This idea has been held together for the past 3,000 years or so, by some of the greatest minds on the planet. So I have no need to apologise for the concept of sin.
Much as it is with the soul, everyone has a some concept of “sin” too, including atheists.
It’s a problem if the God actually believed in is an incoherent concept. You can’t define your way out of a paradox. If God essence is rectitude, how do you know that? If it’s just by definition, i.e. if rectitude is defined by what God is, then you can’t say that rectitude doesn’t involve (or won’t involve tomorrow) massacring babies. If, on the other hand, you can recognize God’s rectitude, you must have some external standard by which to recognize it. Your declaration doesn’t save you from Euthyphro.
Appeal to authority, eh? Not the best tactic.
Well, I could cite 3,000 years of arguments, but this is merely a blog and life is too short.
The question, then, is by what external standard God is to be judged, other than his self-declaration. A bit like asking how you know your reference standard for a metre is actually correct - by a tape measure, perhaps - or like asking for evidence for your axioms.
If they are mutually inconsistent they are logically inconsistent. By “not discounting” I do not mean that I hold every set of axioms that are logically inconsistent. I cannot hold that I am both Catholic and atheist. But I cannot discount atheism in this sense: I cannot say that my Catholicism is logically superior to atheism.
Again, this already assumes a logic system!
There is no logical necessity to minimize the number of axioms in mathematics. There is a practical necessity: we want that our axioms be finite, or the result of an effective procedure, otherwise it becomes impossible to do mathematics (though the resulting system would still be logically consistent!). If one allows an infinite number of axioms, it becomes trivial to sidestep Godel’s incompleteness theorems.
Once a logic system(s) is chosen, it actually is difficult to do this. For example, it is inconsistent for someone who axiomatically hold that the scientific method can discover truth about the physical world, and someone who believes in the literal interpretation of Genesis.
C’est la vie, this is how it is.
I thought I made it clear that as our senses use physics, and physics can only detect physical things, and that soul is metaphysical, it is impossible to know whether or not one has a soul. In Christian metaphysics, it is the part of ourselves that is immaterial and persists after death - this is its “role” if it could be called such.
This would take us down the “it is moral because God commands it” path of the Euthyphro’s Dilemma. It does away with morality and replaces it with obedience to God’s command. Even if what God commands goes against everything we consider to be moral it is still to be considered moral.
There is a rather large fallacy in your reasoning. Being a creator does not make you moral.
On top of that, you have not even demonstrated that any moral command actually comes from God. What we have is people claiming to speak for God, which is questionable. It is all too easy to turn a “I think it is moral . . .” into a “God thinks it is moral . . .”.
Given the fact that different religions have contradictory moral codes, all of which are supposedly given by a creator, then it creates a lot of doubt as to the actual source of these moral codes.
It is a false dilemma. Maybe God is good and created us to be good and seemed good righteous at the same time? That sounds conherent, without contradiction.
It seems also that the context is being missed in the Scriptural claim that “God is righteous.” This isn’t usually a self declaration of God that he is good by definition. Rather it is a claim by a finite being, on of us, that she or came to see from the larger picture that God is good and in the right.
I would go so far as to say that when we all have the full picture, we will all agree that God was in the right, because God is righteous and He is good.
When I look at Jesus too, I don’t see a declaration by fiat that he is good. Rather I see a demonstration He is good. That is the difference here. Yes God declares it good, but so do I, not because I must or because God answers to me. Rather that is my natural created response to a fundamental fact of reality.
This paradox only arises in a narrow metaphysical context, burdened with many assumption that are by no means sensible. There is no reason to think these are the only options or that they are in conflict.
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If God is good because we humans judge him to be so then we are also the source of morality. When we look at how humans judge morality we find that it is based on the subjective wants and needs of humans which makes it subjective.
A good middle ground, IMHO, is that God shaped the morality he gave to humans in order to conform to our subjective wants and needs.
The source is that God created us the ability to see goodness. Note that Greek thought doesnt seem to have this recourse.
However God is not good because we judge him to be good. He is good even if we don’t see it. Yet I believe that we see are attuned to see His Goodness, even if we can reason to it. It is an issue of perspective and knowledge more than judment. When we see everything, we will all agree he is good.
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So God could actually be evil, but he made us so that we see evil as goodness.
That still seems to have the problem of just asserting that God is good, and that whatever God does or commands is good by fiat.
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You’re still failing to see the implication of the fact that we are talking about God, not about “a divinity.” In all your argument, you’re postulating a “view from nowhere”, a potential “place” from which whether God is good or evil could be objectively arbitrated.
That’s as futile as looking for a place in Einstein’s universe where all is at rest and one can measure absolute velocities or positions. There is no such place, because apart from God, and what derives from God, there is not only nothing, but no possibility of anything.
So you suggest that maybe God is evil, and only deemed “good” by fiat. Joshua is quite right to point out that those he has created cannot possibly be an independent judge of that, any more than an algorithm can compute what has not been fed into it in its design and inputs.
But the question itself is altogether meaningless: given his existence, there has never been, never will be and cannot in principle be anything beyond the classical God by which to account him evil. The only “view from nowhere” is God’s own view.
And on the question that started this conversation, that would mean a universal view of what is right which is as foundational to existence as existence itself. Suppose I were to say, “Perhaps the universe is not the only possible way for things to exist - there could be some other way of existing that even God hasn’t thought of.”
Given the existence of the God as the eternal Cause of all things, that’s just crazy talk. There is nobody else to invent this imaginary new “way of existing”, so it will not, and cannot , be real. There is no Being to give it being. Likewise with what is right - evil has no meaning other than what is not in accord with God.
In this post I’ve been careful to distinguish “right” from “moral.” Morality has to do with what God deems right for created humanity, which (since we are in his image) reflects his own character. But it does not define his character, any more than water defines a fountain.
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Most atheists reject the concept of sin because sin is mostly defined as thought crimes against a God that we don’t believe exists. However, we do not reject that there is evil, crimes, immoralities, injustices, unethical behavior and just plain old nastiness toward other people.
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So what we are left with is our subjective judgments of morality. We can’t know if what God commands is moral in an objective sense because we lack access to an objective moral code. Even more, even if we had access to an objective moral code would we even want to follow it if it runs counter to our own needs and wants? If God commands us to commit genocide would we be compelled to follow the command? Is obedience preferred over morality?
Getting back to topic, what do we make of this Bible verse?
It says that we know of good and evil like God does. At least to me that means we are moral agents in and of ourselves. We can determine for ourselves what is moral. Is this something that is passed on genetically? That is certainly an interesting question.
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Despite my theological education, I was unaware that “sin is mostly defined as thought crimes.”
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@patrick this just means you reject one conception of sin. You still have other conception. You might use a different word.
It is also likely you are reacting against a cartoon version that is not even what we affirm.
You’ve conveniently omitted the narrative that leads to this and explains it (presumably for rhetorical effect, since I doubt you believe the account anyway - but at least I can remedy the misunderstanding).
God had forbidden Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which is probably a merism for “wisdom” - Eve saw that it was desirable “to make one wise”). It surely wasn’t because he didn’t want them to be capable of moral judgement, or even to be wise - he had, after all, commissioned them to run the world. And the Bible is full both of moral demands and the advocacy of wisdom over folly and ignorance.
No - the solution comes from a recurrent phrase elsewhere in the Bible: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” They would have become morally competent if they had taken the first step of doing things God’s way. Then they could have learned from the source of wisdom and morality. What instead happened was the acquisition of a warped sense of morality, of being wise in their own eyes… of subjective, and variable, moral judgement.
And that is why the very next story is that of their son Cain, who decides that being less successful than your brother is a legitimate reason to get him out of the way. At the time, it can scarcely be that Cain thought, “I know - I’ll do something evil.” He no doubt saw the murder of Abel as the righting of a wrong - one that God, who warned him of the danger of sinning, had (in Cain’s eyes) failed to deal with justly.
Nevertheless Cain’s morality turned out to be faulty, and God’s prevailed… and is still available to us as an example of God’s objective morality you say is unavailble, though you quoted the book to me.
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Forbidden or not, they did eat from the tree of knowledge. After doing so, God said that they now knew of good and evil like God does. This leads me to believe that the Bible is saying we have at least a nascent ability to discern between good and evil.
I would argue that we can determine for ourselves if God’s commands and ways are wise, and we do so based on our human wants and needs which are subjective. It would seem unwise to not base morality on the subjective needs and wants of humans.
Do people have to read the Bible in order to understand that killing your brother out of jealousy is immoral?
What I mean by “thought crimes” are thoughts that you have in your head but don’t act on them. For example, lust. Purely a thought crime but not a crime at all if you don’t act on those thoughts. The first 3 commandments are “thought crimes” and are unconstitutional. In this country you have free of thought, so you are free to believe in God(s) or no God. And you have freedom of expression.
I’m not saying we have the same view of sin. Rather I’m saying we all have a conception of sin.
Also, despite what you have heard, our rule is the example and teachings of Jesus, not the 10 commandments. Adjudication of sin is not a government matter either. So “crime” is an anachronism.
I my view, Scripture is most closely aligned with virtue ethics, which is confusing in our end justifies the means utilitarian world. In virtue ethics it is not enough to do good or refrain from wrong, but one must also be good. There is connection to because thought often leads to action. Governments adjudicate action, but only God has sufficient view to adjudicate virtue.