Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
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User ID: 2188
Refusal to answer an uncomfortable question does not render it invalid.
Even if I were to grant that something by nature perfect exists, I don't see how that is a god, much less your god in particular.
These are two completely different (and sort of contradictory) complaints.
Let me put it this way:
Atheist: We evolved from lower apes.
Fundie: So you say. But did the apes turn into us, in which case there should be no more apes? Or did we evolve from something other than apes, in which case why are we so similar to apes rather than the other thing?
Atheist: ...Some of the apes evolved into humans while others did not.
Fundie: Aha! You are refusing to answer with one of the horns of my lemma. Why even talk to you if you won't answer?
Now,
You: Is it A or B?
Me: Neither, it is C.
You: Aha! You refuse to answer an uncomfortable question!
So that's the first complaint down.
As to the second (where you note that I did in fact answer), I fail to see what your ability to understand the argument has to do with its validity.
And you are definitely misunderstanding, since I'm not arguing that "if something by nature perfect exists it is a god and mine in particular."
My argument is: According to Christian understanding, God's nature is the standard of goodness itself.
To elaborate: God could not be other than what God is, so it's not arbitrary. And there is no other reference frame from which something like 'good' could be evaluated, so it's not external.
Now, you can say that doesn't make sense to you, or you can say that it's a silly thing to believe. That's fine. The point -- the only point here -- is that neither horn of Euthyphro's dilemma is applicable to Christianity in the first place. So expecting me to tell you which of two inapplicable concepts is applicable (let alone correct) is... not productive.
Well it's simple:
Is there a higher power to which God is beholden? No. So it's not that.
Is something made good by God arbitrarily saying so? No. So it can't be that either.
Indeed, in Christian thought God cannot even be arbitrary, but is always, by nature, perfect. So anything He says must be in alignment with His perfect nature. So if He calls something good, He's doing so not arbitrarily, but because it is in alignment with His nature.
Therefore, 'goodness' is something like equivalent to 'in alignment with [God's] nature'. And God's nature is not arbitrary, but necessary. It simply is what it is, and could not be anything else.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Another comment because I was just talking this over with some better-educated friends and if you're up on the subject you might appreciate what they had to say to me:
Also I think the position you’re saying supersedes Plato’s in the Euthyphro is Plato’s actual position, which Socrates cannot state in the debate because he’s condescending to Euthyphro and playing with him despite E being in a position of power over him (priest outside his trial for impiety)
The dialogue is as you describe it, roughly, but in other dialogues Socrates lays out exactly the position you describe
So there must be a reason he doesn’t enlighten Euthyphro, and that’s because, like Meno, Euthyphro can’t be enlightened, Socrates can only use him as a foil to point out the inadequacy of conventional Athenian belief
The wider point though that I think you could have made clearer is that you’re arguing for Christianity’s status as a special religion, the heir of Athens and Jerusalem which does actually solve those problems. Genghis being a pagan is exactly what we should expect, and we should expect atheists to regress towards paganism worshipping tribal Gods-in-all-but-name, such as “Black Lives”
So you’ve also solved the New Atheism/Atheism+ problem
(Though I think his "tribal Gods" should be "tribal gods")
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Well that I can talk about! It's a basic misunderstanding because Plato correctly perceived the gods but did not know about God, so his ability to reason about this was limited. I.e. The Euthyphro dilemma is only coherent in the context of paganism.
But I should take the question in the spirit in which it was intended and apply it to God rather than the gods (again, entirely different categories). So it's like this:
Is something good because God says it is good? Or does God say a thing is good because there is some higher standard to which God must conform?
Answer: No.
Goodness is rooted in the intrinsic and unchanging nature of God. It is neither arbitrary (God does not choose what is good) nor is it imposed externally (there is no higher authority to which God submits).
In other words, false dilemma, and always has been, and this has been addressed probably thousands if not millions of times in the last two thousand years, so it's confusing to me that people keep bringing it up. It's not like they weren't talking about this in AD 300 and giving the same answer that I am now.
N.b. I definitely phrased that poorly and I know it seems to imply that you're dumb or something, which is definitely not how I feel. I was an atheist for something like seven years and found it convincing too. Just, it turns out that, like almost any group, most Christians are not so bright and aren't very capable of understanding let alone defending their position, and especially in the West they've also lost touch with huge portions of their tradition that would shed light on the rest, so they're not even playing with a full deck as it were. This is a reflection on that sad situation, not any commentary on your competence. Thanks for the conversation.
That is a fantastic question. I'm actually writing a book somewhat along those lines. It's a really good challenge to try to figure out how to compress the answer.
The problem I'm running up against is that any angle I want to take would lean heavily on concepts that I don't think we have in common.
First I think I'd have to explain why pagan polytheism is real and true, which would take a lot of time. In the book I'm doing this by going back to the first cell in the ancient ocean and tracking evolution forward to establish how our minds work and what the gods are, and how they interrelate, and then establish that Christ is a real, observable force in the world (even from a ~secular perspective), and then get into what the Christian message actually is, which is unfortunately mostly unintelligible to people who don't first grasp the validity and veracity of both brutal selection processes (especially genetic) and (poly)theism.
Put another way: In the classical world people understood a lot of basic truths that have mostly been lost now, and the Christian message is mostly unintelligible outside of those. (Oh, and this is not an accident, but enemy action.)
I'm leaning pretty hard toward "I can't answer that for you right now and I'm sorry."
Let me float: There are gods, and then there is God, and these are... supremely different categories that play out in very different ways. The attempts I'm making to get more specific keep running me up against walls that I can't see how to overcome within the scope of this conversation. And I could nitpick and complain and get traction on any number of tangents here but they're ultimately nowhere close to central to the question.
Maybe I just need to suggest that Christianity is so much weirder than you know.
So, my apologies, and feel free to take this as an admission of at least momentary forfeit.
Have a good one man.
EDIT: Oh, but do feel free to ask more questions if you want.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
You're the only one here talking about 'religion' like it's a useful or applicable category.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I'm a white Christian from the Midwest US, so Ramy and his family are about as outgroup as it gets.
This would be fargroup.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I'm not claiming that most Jews would disagree -- only that the ones who do have undergone much more cross-pollination with Christian thought than those who don't.
Something like: The less Christianized the Jew, the more likely the Jew is to believe that Jews matter more than non-Jews. But now I'm saying something that is true of all people. Such Jews are unique in some of the particulars but the overall picture is common to man.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
If anyone has suggestions for other things worth doing or being, or that satisfy that "check my phone while waiting in the line to pickup the kids" nudge that avoids my new no-nos, I'm all ears.
Pray.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Gonna press x to doubt on this one. What is the protocol when another tribe has nothing at all to offer one's own besides their land, accumulated wealth (if any), and expendable labor?
We don't have to ask; history is replete with examples of how this plays out in the absence of an otherwise-unaccountable conviction that those people somehow matter as much as ours do.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
We might more generally define "morality" as "actions in accordance with one's telos", which moves the problem back a step.
But it does leave us in more or less the same position, because now we need a telos, and that is not something we can give ourselves! Maybe 'survival' but that's a losing game at both the micro and macro scales, and we all know it. Also moloch, etc.
For most of Western history "morality" has meant precisely "actions in accordance with the will of our Creator," and a "good person" is one who acts accordingly.
In the pre-Christian West, a "good man" looked a lot more like Genghis Khan. He was the one who brought benefit to his people, typically at the horrific expense of others. Mercy, compassion, and so on were considered weaknesses, even to the point that the Roman goddess of such wasn't really. Clementia -- clemency -- is not the same thing. It's more like, the ability to overlook another's shortcomings to work together more effectively, as is beneficial for bringing temporal benefit to the people. A man who organized others to sail down the coast and rape, kill, loot, etc. was among the best of men.
Christianity changed a lot. All of a sudden it was considered wrong to, idk, kill inconvenient children, slaves, etc. All of a sudden there was this notion that the powerful had an obligation to the weak. And much, much more.
Now, an atheist can say something like, "Of course I can be moral! I can also perform common-sense game theoretical calculations with the aim of maximizing utilons!" But this is really not the same thing at all, and also I call BS on consequentialism because we are at best capable of tracking consequences to a few degrees out, after which we have no idea what the effects of our actions really are, and also I'm highly skeptical of the idea that "everyone matters" follows naturally.
Societies oriented toward a higher divine will (generally Abrahamic afaict) generated higher moralities. Within this moral ecosystem, defectors (atheists) were able to say, "But I don't need to believe in that telos to act the same as everyone else!" And to a point this is true, but it does suggest a frame within which atheism is a moral parasite. Able to crib, that is, but not to generate. And as a society takes its eyes off the telos, it naturally starts to backslide toward baseline human """morality""", which is not, imo, a good thing. But I can only make such normative statements because I'm still fixed on the telos.
Well, yeah, if you define "morality" specifically to mean "doing the will of the Christian God", then it's definitely true that without the Christian God there can be no morality. But then this isn't a very useful statement.
Sure it is. Just not for you.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Right, my point here is that without reference to God 'morality' is an unintelligible term. We can talk about order, or smooth social functioning, or game theory -- all kinds of things! But those are not what we mean when we talk about morality. Morality is what is right above all those other concerns by dint of our relationship to our creator.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Looks pretty noncommittal to me. More interesting is what we read into it.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
IMO what brings order in society is not any particular ideology but the enforcement, through violence, of the rule of law.
Yes. We're not talking about order. We're talking about morality.
if you went to Japan and started preaching about how you should sail down the coast and rape and enslave, people would think you're insane
Boy of all the examples to pick. Japan was precisely that way within living memory. What changed?
As to Israel, modern Judaism is younger than (and a reaction to) Christianity, and also Israel is heavily populated by Western (somewhat Christianized) Jews, and if you go ask the Jews who are still fairly un-Christianized they'll gladly tell you that non-Jews are only there to serve Jews.
Instead, they suggest that without the fear of god and the set of rules there's simply no other way to create internal drivers for morality.
No -- instead I'll suggest that without the fear of God "morality" is an unintelligible term.
If you think it's somehow 'wrong' to put your unwanted infant on a dung heap to die of starvation or be sold into prostitution; if you think it's 'wrong' to sail down the coast to where the people talk funny and kill the men, rape the women, and enslave the children; if you think that all humans are of equal (and infinite) moral worth; you just might be descended from a Christian culture.
Baseline human 'morality' looks like Genghis Khan, and I don't recognize it as such. It's just game theory.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
It's just weird because from where I'm sitting Protestantism is already hopelessly-progressive Christianity.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
You say that until you get in a fight. Yes, they still happen, and should the current order weaken significantly they'll be happening a lot more. Women are smart to select a man who is physically capable of at least standing up for himself and his family.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I believe this was most lucidly established in the Hulu documentary "The Handmaid's Tale".
Didn't find it especially persuasive, myself, but have no shortage of female friends and relations who whisper about it in hushed tones with many significant glances.
Then again, I could possibly be described as a Christian theocrat.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I'm with AOC on it making fascism look benign
This part really threw me when she said it, and since you seem to agree I'd like to ask: What? How? Is Christianity fascism now?
You're right that there are absolutely people who want the old-school religion with Absolute Truth and Faith Not Works and a God who smites unbelievers, and they will find your wishy-washy Episcopalian and Methodist congregations unsatisfying.
This is true but I think... uncharitable-adjacent?
If one believes that Christ actually is who he says he is, and that he instituted a Church for our benefit, it's enough to want what that is without resorting to vengeful deities. "Faith Not Works" also isn't a particularly central member of this category for several reasons.
Generally, we can note that Christianity has had certain historical understandings and that these have been under constant pressure from outside perspectives to 'modernize'.
It's enough to be cognizant of these forces and broadly against them.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Initially considered recommending Bauer's book, so I guess I'll just second that.
To say that He is good is to say that He is in alignment with His nature, sure, since His nature is the benchmark of goodness.
This would seem to be unsupported.
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