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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34908 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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What is the difference between tengri's "good" will and your god's will?

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.

All right then, keep your secrets. Good luck with euthyphro.

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")

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.

Sorry, just doesn’t make any sense to me. I tried to wrap my head around it. I can easily understand the horns and of course, doing away with the god hypothesis altogether, and various criticisms of those positions, but your answer just sounds like a flat denial of the obvious by a motivated party. But anyway, I appreciate the attempt.

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.

Flat denial, I say. 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.

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.

Do you want to eat your cake and therefore not have it? No. Do you want to keep it and therefore not eat it? No. False dilemma, I want both. My cake is special, by definition.

If goodness means in alignment with god’s nature, god is not good, he’s just In alignment with his own nature. And if god’s nature is not arbitrary, goodness is external.

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