Six Things Atheism Can Teach Us All About Ethics

“Christianity includes the belief that God created all persons in his image, and that we have an innate knowledge of right and wrong because of the way God made us. ”
– As an atheist, I think there is a kernel of truth to this (in the sense that I agree that moral knowledge has an innate source – “comes from within” – where we´d disagree is that I would say that this is the *only* source of moral knowledge).
But I see a problem for Christianity here. We agree that people have an innate knowledge of right and wrong and I further grant for the sake of the argument that the Bible is infallible in its moral teachings. Now, the overwhelming majority of people (probably everyone except for people with genuine antisocial personality disorders) experience at least some burden on their conscience when they do morally wrong things like stealing from someone, or cheating on their spouse etc.
However, this is not true for everything that the Bible teaches to be morally wrong. First example that comes to mind:
Not believing that there is a God (i.e. mere atheism) and hence not worshipping said God for example would be sinful if the Bible is true – so how is it possible that I have zero innate knowledge about this being morally wrong? How can I be a life-long atheist without it ever affecting my conscience in any way whatsoever?

BillT,

There you acknowledge a reality that your worldview doesn’t really support. On what basis can your atheism reconcile the burden of conscience (or the existence of that conscience) you experience.

I don´t see the cognitive faculties relevant for moral reasoning as problematic for my worldview at all. We are social creatures with a conscience and a sense of justice, fairness and empathy – and those attributes are also present in lesser degrees in our close relatives in the animal world (you can, for example, demonstrate that Chimpanzees have a sense of fairness comparable to that of human children). Cooperation is in many situations the best evolutionary strategy, so I don´t find it surprising that we evolved to become social creatures.
In fact, I find the ways our moral reasoning does and does not work to be much more problematic for your worldview than for mine. Two main reasons:
1. The existence of antisocial personality disorders, up to and including genuine psychopathy – their existence is completely unsurprising if our moral reasoning emerges from a physical basis that can be destroyed through accident and disease (developmental disorders and accidents that affect the frontal lobe of your brain are very relevant here). But if they rather emerge from a non-physical and God-given mind, there is no good reason for their existence at all, and certainly no reason to expect that they can be incurable – but many of them are just that.
2. Moral reasoning, like every other reasoning process, is affected by systematic biases (e.g. the ingroup-outgroup bias), those biases can be readily explained as mental heuristics (i.e. shortcuts) that conferred survival advantages for our ancestors, but if your worldview is correct – then why do we have those biases at all? And why does your religion not help you overcome those biases? (if you look at studies about these phenomena, you find that the religious views of the test subjects have precious little to do with whether they are affected by these systematic biases or not – we all are, and we can´t “turn them off”, the best you can do is become aware of them and try to look out for instances where they might have clouded your judgment, Religion or lack thereof has nothing to do with it).

Going back to the question I posed in my first comment – do you have an answer for that?

BillT,

First, if all your moral reasoning is, is some evolutionary strategy then it’s really nothing at all.

That is not what I said. What I said was that cooperation is in many circumstances the best evolutionary strategy and that it is thus not surprising that we evolved to become social creatures.
The difference is:
a) Moral reasoning is based on our nature as social animals – with a conscience and a sense of justice, fairness and empathy – and we have that nature because we are the product of an evolutionary process that favored cooperation. [What I am saying]
b) Our moral reasoning is an evolutionary strategy. [Your misunderstanding of my position]

For morality and moral reasoning depends on shared duties and responsibilities. Those duties and obligations either exist because we are part of a shared creation…

I don´t disagree with that at all. Where we would disagree is that I believe that those moral duties and obligations are grounded within our human nature, not grounded within anything extrinsic to us, and that we indeed “share” a “creation”, but not one that was meddled with by God.

If all this is to you is some evolutionary hard wiring then for what reason would you or anyone else care about them.

For the exact same reason that you care about them. Think about how absurd it would be to say something like “if your eyesight is the result of an evolutionary process instead of being a gift from God, then why would you or anyone care about what you see or about being able to see at all?!” – it is not any less absurd if you substitute “eyesight” by, say, “sense of empathy”.
If I´d change my mind about God´s existence, I wouldn´t appreciate any part of my human nature – be it my eyesight or my moral faculties or anything else – any more or less, and I strongly doubt that it would be any different for your if you´d change your mind about God´s existence.

They are, in that case, no more important than your personal opinion and bind neither you or anyone else to act on or care about them.

Your human nature is not malleable by your opinion of it, if you start believing that you can fly like a bird, it won´t give you wings – your nature objectively exists completely independent of what your opinion of it is.
As to what is “binding” here, what “binds” you is your conscience, and it would be your conscience completely independent of whether God exists or not:
Assuming that I started believing that your God is real and the Bible is true, and further assuming that I had no conscience *at all* – then those beliefs about God and the Bible would obviously be utterly irrelevant for the way I act. I might realize on some intellectual level what is morally wrong and right, but without any conscience to constrain my actions, this knowledge would be purely abstract and uninteresting to me – it wouldn´t “bind” me in any way, shape or form. That´s why the existence or non-existence of a conscience is the *only* factor that makes your moral judgments “binding” for the way you act.

A far as systematic biases, well that and all imperfections in our moral sense is well predicted and understood from a Biblical perspective.

One only wonders then why Christians didn´t predict their existence before they were actually scientifically described. Regarding the “understanding” of it, well, do you have an “explanation” beyond “cause Eve ate that apple, that´s why”?

The answer to the question you posed in your first comment stands as I answered it.

You did not answer it at all, you so far did not even try to do so.

You are either conflicted to the origin of your burden of conscience or you, as you seem to have done above, have turned it into a meaningless fiction.

Even if that were true, which it is not, this would not answer my question in any way and I would still ask it completely unchanged. I actually even granted that the Bible is true in its moral teachings for the sake of the argument when I asked that question, I can extend that to “the Bible is true about everything else”, and would still raise the exact same question.

Moral reasoning is based on our nature as social animals – with a conscience and a sense of justice, fairness and empathy – and we have that nature because we are the product of an evolutionary process that favored cooperation.

And this really sums up the difference in our positions. As I said before, if “moral reasoning is based on our nature as social animals” describes moral reasoning then moral reasoning is a fiction. Evolutionary hard wiring or “our nature as social animals” doesn’t create moral reasoning or moral agency. I explained that above and you haven’t provided any counter to that position.

Where we would disagree is that I believe that those moral duties and obligations are grounded within our human nature, not grounded within anything extrinsic to us, and that we indeed “share” a “creation”, but not one that was meddled with by God.

Same thing again. If morality is “grounded within our human nature” then it is without any binding obligation to or from anyone. And God doesn’t “meddle.” He either created us as moral agents or we owe each other no more moral duty then we owe the ant we unknowingly crushed on our way out the door this morning.

As to what is “binding” here, what “binds” you is your conscience, and it would be your conscience completely independent of whether God exists or not:.

And this “conscience” comes from where exactly? More evolutionary hocus pocus that is something else we can ignore at any whim and that creates no duties or responsibilities to or for anyone. And that’s not to mention that the existence of your conscience isn’t proof “it would be your conscience completely independent of whether God exists or not”. You don’t know that. That’s circular reasoning. That you have a conscience isn’t evidence that you had to have a conscience.

And if this “How can I be a life-long atheist without it ever affecting my conscience in any way whatsoever?” is the question you are referring to it’s pretty disingenuous to say I haven’t addressed it. If it’s not please point out the correct question or explain how I haven’t “even tried” when I wrote my entire first response about it and we’ve been discussing those points ever since.

BillT,

As I said before, if “moral reasoning is based on our nature as social animals” describes moral reasoning then moral reasoning is a fiction.

So you think our nature is fictional? That is a rather weird position to take, and one so obviously false that I find it almost silly to rebut it.
But if you insist – to exist fictionally means to exist in the imagination, humans and their nature are not imaginary, and therefore, humans and human nature don´t exist fictionally.

Evolutionary hard wiring or “our nature as social animals” doesn’t create moral reasoning or moral agency. I explained that above and you haven’t provided any counter to that position.

That is a mere assertion which you don´t even try to support with any evidence or arguments for it. Exactly as persuasive as me saying “God, even if he would exist, cannot create moral agents because I say so.” – read: not persuasive in any way, shape or form.
It is also a self-refuting assertion given your worldview because you *categorically* state that our nature cannot lead to moral agency, but then that would be still true if our nature would be the result of divine creation, so, you cannot consistently believe that humans are moral agents! In other words, it strongly appears that you did not think this through.

Same thing again. If morality is “grounded within our human nature” then it is without any binding obligation to or from anyone.

I already addressed this in my earlier comment:
“As to what is “binding” here, what “binds” you is your conscience, and it would be your conscience completely independent of whether God exists or not:
Assuming that I started believing that your God is real and the Bible is true, and further assuming that I had no conscience *at all* – then those beliefs about God and the Bible would obviously be utterly irrelevant for the way I act. I might realize on some intellectual level what is morally wrong and right, but without any conscience to constrain my actions, this knowledge would be purely abstract and uninteresting to me – it wouldn´t “bind” me in any way, shape or form. That´s why the existence or non-existence of a conscience is the *only* factor that makes your moral judgments “binding” for the way you act.”
– In a nutshell: whether we are the product of evolution or the product of divine creation, either way – what would make our moral judgments “binding” for the way we act would be whether our nature does or does not include a conscience.

And this “conscience” comes from where exactly? More evolutionary hocus pocus that is something else we can ignore at any whim and that creates no duties or responsibilities to or for anyone.

1. You can “ignore your conscience on a whim” in the exact same sense as you can “ignore your breathing reflex on a whim”.
2. What you say here is completely independent of theism vs atheism. I´ll just grant you that we can “ignore our conscience on a whim” and further grant you that my conscience was created by God – and voila, I can now ignore my *God-given* conscience on a whim!
What you say here is an absurdity (#1) spiced up with special pleading (#2).

And that’s not to mention that the existence of your conscience isn’t proof “it would be your conscience completely independent of whether God exists or not”. You don’t know that. That’s circular reasoning. That you have a conscience isn’t evidence that you had to have a conscience.

You misread what I said. I didn´t say that you would *have* a conscience either way, I said that it would be conscience that would *bind* your actions either way. And that is not circular reasoning, that logically follows from what a conscience IS. Again, if I believed that your God exists and your Bible is true, but would have NO conscience – then knowledge of your theistic morality could not possibly constrain my actions in any way because I would have no conscience that would lead me to CARE about whether I´m doing the morally right or morally wrong thing.

And if this “How can I be a life-long atheist without it ever affecting my conscience in any way whatsoever?” is the question you are referring to it’s pretty disingenuous to say I haven’t addressed it.

It´s not disingenuous, it´s stating a matter of fact – you have not answered that question nor did you even try to do so, you´ve rather opened up many strands tangential to the question without ever addressing the question itself.

Tom,

I ask, can our actions as individuals be distinguished from the process that’s creating our descendants?
…
That’s a very serious and important question. Once you’ve worked on it enough to have an answer, then consider the fact that the same process that’s creating our descendants (including our actions as individuals) is the same process that created us.

They can not only be distinguished, they are even necessarily different. “Evolution” is not even *defined* for individuals, individuals don´t “evolve”, populations do. Your wife birthing your children is not “evolution” – what would be “evolution” is the change in allele frequencies in the entire human population over time.
But setting that technicality aside, I´ll just grant you for the sake of the argument that we were created by God. Do you now still believe that our actions as individuals cannot be distinguished from God creating us from clay and ribs? I presume you do not, and if you indeed don´t, I´d recommend to reflect a little more about the differences between “process that created x” and “x itself” (Given what you say further below, it seems to me that you indeed do understand this, but try to introduce a distinction between natural and divine processes that to me seems rather arbitrary).

In reality there is only one process. Evolution is all that got us here, according to the naturalistic story. All. As in, there is no other process that explains who we are.

So…..? That seems to be a rather trivial statement, and it still doesn´t lead to the conclusion that our actions are therefore identical to the process that created us.

The only problem with saying it’s an “evolutionary strategy when we eat and breathe” is that it’s too anthropomorphic. Evolution doesn’t have strategies.

Yes. And atoms do not have “orbitals”, genes are never “selfish”, inflation doesn´t “eat up our profits”, proteins do not “want” to reach a local energy minimum when they fold, genes don´t literally “code” for proteins, heat doesn´t “flow”, and so on and so forth etc.pp.
All metaphors are inaccurate or even positively misleading in at least some senses (else they wouldn´t *be* metaphors) , but many are useful for teaching and understanding unintuitive aspects of reality.

It doesn’t reason strategically any more than it reasons ethically.

It indeed does not. But we do – and that is not a contradiction because, yet again, we are not identical to the process that made us.

I think you’re sky-hooking ethical reasoning into the conversation. Do you see how that’s the case?

Not at all. You seem to be introducing the assumption that x can´t engage in ethical reasoning if x was created by y and y cannot engage in ethical reasoning.
Or, more generally, that object O cannot have attribute A if it was created by process P that doesn´t have attribute A – and that assumption, at least in its general form, is simply false.
Example: H2O at room temperatures has the attribute of being “fluid”, yet it can be created by a process that is neither “fluid” itself nor works with components that are “fluid”.

The analogy doesn’t hold. Theistic creation can separate process from outcome, agent from product, and agent from agent.

??
So this claim:
“The process that creates x is not identical to x.”
would be generally false, but it would for some reason become true if the process involves God? Lets just say that I find that claim to be generally true, and even if it would be generally false (I have no idea how you would even try to demonstrate that…) I would find your exception to be completely arbitrary.

For evolution, it’s all process. There is no “outcome,” and strictly speaking there is no agency except in terms of natural law operating on natural conditions.

So water cannot be the “outcome” of the Knallgas reaction process because chemistry has no agency? Seriously? Well, water unambiguously exists after the Knallgas reaction, and if you don´t want to call that an “outcome” because it didn´t involve agency, then you are using a *highly* idiosyncratic notion of what “outcome” means.

Tom,

The “fiction” to which you refer is not an assumption but a conclusion based on naturalistic premises to which he does not adhere. You got this (strictly speaking) as wrong as you could have gotten it. An assumption is not a conclusion.

I have to repeat my question:
Pray tell, how could you possibly arrive at BillT´s “conclusion”:
“if “moral reasoning is based on our nature as social animals” describes moral reasoning then moral reasoning is a fiction.”
– without believing that our nature is fictional?
Hint: you cannot. His conclusion doesn´t follow from any “naturalistic premises” it follows, and ONLY follows, from the premise that our natures are indeed fictional.

No. He spoke it in a context, and you’re denying that context exists.

You have pulled this accusation out of your nether regions. I´m not denying any context, BillT made that statement and there is nothing in the context what-so-ever that would add any qualifications to that statement.

What do you think, BillT? Time to call it a day? Someone who can’t tell an assumption from a conclusion, or who thinks he can pull a quote out of context and make that no-context quote be the basis for discussion, may not be someone who is going to be willing to learn from this process.

Oh my! It appears that I interrupted your back-patting session with BillT – mea maxima culpa. You guys get right to it and I´ll go to a less circle-jerkish place.

Irenicus,

Sorry for the typos. Not getting an edit option.

And just by the way Irenicus, haven’t you misquoted me above (#16) .

I said and you quoted “if “moral reasoning is based on our nature as social animals” describes moral reasoning then moral reasoning is a fiction.” Then you said ” BillT made the statement that our nature cannot lead to moral agency, period, full stop.” You left out the “as social animals”. In other words, if all we are is social animals then moral reasoning based on that is a fiction. Why? Because our status as simply social animals doesn’t create the duties and obligations that true moral reasoning requires.

BillT,

We both acknowledge that we have a “conscience”.

Indeed we do. And this will become important later.

If it is part of our evolutionary development then it is something we developed to help us procreate more successfully. That’s the basic understanding and purpose of all evolutionary developments.

No. This is wrong on multiple levels. First it is wrong because not all evolutionary change is adaptive, and in species with low effective population sizes (that is essentially every multicellular species except for some marine invertebrates), evolutionary changes that are neutral, nearly neutral, or even noticeably detrimental, do happen. Example: color blindness is a noticeably detrimental trait, but its effect is too small for natural selection to act against it (as a color blind person myself, I do notice some impediments in everyday life, but it has an overall negligible influence on the reproductive success of people like me).
It is also wrong because you are assigning an element of purpose to evolution that the process does not have. You have the cause-effect relationship exactly backwards. It is not the case that evolution had a goal to produce social creatures like us and that this goal caused changes promoting social behaviour to happen and to spread among our ancestors. It is rather the case that changes promoting and impeding social behaviour both happened, but only the former were selected for because they worked better in comparison.
So evolution did not give us anything to “help us”, we just are the way we are because the changes that led to us were comparatively successful – not because there was a plan all along to eventually produce something like us.

If the only thing this conscience is is a procreation tool then why should it bind me or anyone else to obey it’s strictures.

I already extensively addressed this in an earlier comment. The question “why should it bind me” makes no sense whatsoever – it does bind you because it is part of your nature and this is so completely independent of your opinion of it. Your question makes just as much sense as asking “why should I continue breathing just because I have a breathing reflex?” – the question is moot, because you will keep breathing anyway, completely independent of whether you want to or not, it is just the way you are (if you have outstanding willpower, you could hold your breath until you faint, but then your autonomous nervous system would take over and you would keep breathing while being unconscious).
You can´t grow wings by wanting to fly like a bird and for the exact same reason, you can´t turn your conscience off by wanting to no longer be bound by it.
Furthermore, your question amounts to special pleading as I already pointed out. I grant you for the sake of the argument that your God is real and your Bible is true, and I further grant you that I can indeed choose to no longer be bound by my conscience – so congratulations, now I can choose to believe that you morality is true, yet still not be bound by it in any way because I turned my conscience off on a whim.

Let’s look at other quote obvious evolutionary developments and see whether were bound by them in any way. Let’s take a look at numero uno, sex drive. Am I obligated to act on my sex drive. Do I owe a duty to someone to act on my sex drive. Can I choose to ignore it. Am I a bad person if I so choose. No, No, Yes, No.

I don´t see any relevance here. But I´d add a fifth question: “Can I choose to no longer have a sex drive because I don´t want to have one? No.”

How about our instincts as social creatures. Am I obligated to act on my social nature. Do I owe a duty to someone to act on my social nature. Can I choose to ignore it. Am I a bad person if I so choose. No, No, Yes, No.

You have hidden premises here that I would all deny.
You say you wouldn´t be “obligated” to act on your nature – but that would only make sense if you indeed had no conscience, if you do have one, it would constrain your actions, compel you to do certain things and refrain from others (and that is what “obligation” means by the way). So I´d reject your first answer because you have not established that you indeed would have no conscience if theism would be false.
You say that you wouldn´t owe any “duties” to anyone. A “duty” means “something that one is expected or required to do by moral or legal obligation” – and as long as you do have a moral instinct and a conscience, a conscience that requires you to do some things and refrain from others, you consequently also have moral “duties”.
You say that you could “choose to ignore it”. I will believe that you indeed could do that as soon as you *successfully* choose to “turn off” a part of your human nature by willing it – like becoming blind just by willing to no longer have eyesight.
You say you wouldn´t be a bad person if you chose to ignore it. That is downright weird because it amounts to saying “If I choose to do what my moral faculties tell me would be a bad thing, it wouldn´t be bad to do it anyway.” In other words, this answer is based on the assumption that your moral faculties are 0% reliable – if they tell you you shouldn´t do x, this is *never* correct under all circumstances and not even approximately, so you can always do what your moral reasoning tells you is “bad” without this *actually being* bad. You did not try to establish that assumption and I doubt that you could if you wanted to.

So how about our conscience or the morality it creates. If it’s something we developed to aid in successful procreation…

It´s not, see above.

However, if we are part of God’s creation then that changes whether we do owe a duty to follow our conscience.

If you have a conscience, then it would constrain your actions either way – completely independent of how it was made, if it wouldn´t, it could not be called a “conscience” in the first place!
And if you are right and I can just turn my conscience off on a whim, then what you say here is even more irrelevant because then I could just turn my God-given conscience off and say “bye bye duties!”.

If we are part of God’s creation and “made in his image” then we are intrinsically valuable in a was that no creature who is just evolved under metaphysical naturalism.

Here you are implicitly asking me to accept theistic accounts of what “value” is, ontologically – so that “value” cannot exist if God doesn´t exist. I´m not going to grant you that and will point out that it would be an understatement to call this a “minority position” among contemporary moral philosophers.
Btw, I didn´t introduce the concept of metaphysical naturalism and I neither subscribe to it, nor am I interested in defending it – if it makes you happy, I can just grant you that naturalism is false, doesn´t affect my position here in any way.

They have no real link except their shared evolved existence.

Yup, no link at all except for having a shared human nature, with a shared capacity of experiencing pleasure and pain, of having hopes and fears, of having a conscience, a sense of fairness, justice, empathy and a will to live. Well, actually, that “link” that I just mentioned is the only one that matters to me while I honestly could not care less about whether or not all, some or none of us were made by the same deity.
To illustrate this, lets assume for the sake of the argument that I am wrong, and we were indeed created by God, but not all of us as people like William Campbell argued:
“William Campbell, under the pen name “Caucasian”, wrote in Anthropology for the People: A Refutation of the Theory of the Adamic Origin of All Races that the nonwhite peoples were not descendants of Adam and therefore “not brothers in any proper sense of the term, but inferior creations”” (note, I am not saying that this is a reasonable interpretation of Christianity, I´m just using it to illustrate something)
– if this would be true, then I would not value you (I´m just assuming you are white) any more, and I wouldn´t value a black or chinese person any less, because, for the reasons mentioned above, I couldn´t care any less if all, some or none of us were made by the same God, the only thing that I do care about (from a moral perspective) is what we actually *are* now, not how we got to be that way.

And just by the way Irenicus, haven’t you misquoted me above (#16) .

I said and you quoted “if “moral reasoning is based on our nature as social animals” describes moral reasoning then moral reasoning is a fiction.” Then you said ” BillT made the statement that our nature cannot lead to moral agency, period, full stop.” You left out the “as social animals”. In other words, if all we are is social animals then moral reasoning based on that is a fiction. Why? Because our status as simply social animals doesn’t create the duties and obligations that true moral reasoning requires.

If our moral reasoning is based in our human nature, and our human nature is not fictional, then our moral reasoning logically cannot be fictional because it is reasoning based on something that objectively exists independent of whether anyone imagines it. You might subjectively dislike it if our nature would not be the product of divine creation, but your dislike doesn´t turn something that objectively exists into something that is fictional.

In case the link in the last paragraph is off, there is this:

Straw men about reward and punishment within the contours of love also fail to merit a response. Love’s fruition within the corridors of Self/Other finds her true felicity, her final good, there in the ceaseless begetting of love’s unicity amid the singular Us. That such constitutes the irreducibly triune is unavoidable.

scbrownlhrm,

The Non-Theists haven’t shown, by argument, a coherent metaphysical chain of continuity by which Reason herself – given Non-Theism’s elementary properties of reality — perhaps his infamous “singular and seamless continuum of particle (or whatever) in motion” (Debilis) in which all cutting points are necessarily arbitrary rather than ontological — cannot reasonably disagree with him and simply shift his transitory norm’s slice to some other foci, all a matter of definition rather than of ultimate explanatory terminus in one’s own metaphysics.

Wow. “Elementary properties” that are “cutting points” (what are they “cutting”? Cheese?), and those “cutting points” are “necessary arbitrary rather than ontological”.

…no moral fact can stand, exist, in and by the mutable and contingent effervescence of “psychic phosphorescence”

Oh…. your….. God. So we have phosphorescence (seriously, did you even try to look up what this word means?) that is “psychic”(!!!) and that has an effervescence (phosphorescence with effervescence, awesome, kind of like radioactivity that is sleepy or superconductivity that is nervous). And this effervescence is both contingent (because effervescence totally could be necessary rather than contingent, good that you made this clear!) and mutable (because effervescence could be immutable after all!).

No offense but it appears that you combine pretentiousness with a lack of education – and that results in embarrassments like your mess of a comment here. You are contrasting “arbitrary” to “ontological”, which makes literally no semantic sense whatsoever. I strongly suspect that you meant “ontic” instead of “ontological” (the former means “that which is real, that what factually exists”, while the latter means “related to ontology” or “related to being / existence”). But for neither “ontic” nor “ontological” would it make sense to set up a contrast to “arbitrary”, because x being “arbitrary” is perfectly compatible with x being “ontic” or “ontological”. The concepts do not contradict each other in any way at all, so saying that something is “arbitrary rather than ontological” is like saying that something is “grey rather than being a laptop”.
Maybe this semantic mess makes at least a modicum of sense in your mind, but no one can parse this – try to express what you want to say with simpler words, words that you yourself actually understand.

Psychic Phosphorescence:

The question-begging move of trying to wrench out “this slice” of said effervescence but not this “other slice” of said effervescence is, well, question-begging, and, simply, dishonest. Else — teleology emerges. Which becomes, for the Non-Theist, quite painful.

Whereas, the A to Z of the Christian paradigm begins and ends in love’s fruition within the corridors of Self/Other wherein love finds her true felicity, her final good, there in the ceaseless begetting of love’s unicity amid the singular Us. That such constitutes the irreducibly triune is, simply, unavoidable.

I already extensively addressed this in an earlier comment. The question “why should it bind me” makes no sense whatsoever – it does bind you because it is part of your nature and this is so completely independent of your opinion of it.

Irenicus,

No, it’s doesn’t. Do you not have free will? The idea that you have pangs of conscience doesn’t bind you in any way to act on those. You still must make a moral choice. You still must decide whether your pangs of conscience matter to you. If those pangs are just an evolutionary development (no matter whether is positive or neutral or negative procreationally) then on what basis are you bound to act. The answer is none. “They’re part of my nature”? Who cares. You may well act on them but you don’t have any reason not to act on them either.

Even if I believe that my conscience is God given I still have to make a moral choice. I still have to decide whether I care to act on it. However, in the context of the knowledge of my place in God’s creation and with my acceptance of the intrinsic value of each and every person on earth and the duty I owe and the responsibility I have to honor my place in that creation I have a real reason to act in accordance with it. I still have a choice but I also have a reason that truly matters. (And in full disclosure, even with all that I often times don’t act in accordance with it.)

BillT,

No, it’s doesn’t. Do you not have free will? The idea that you have pangs of conscience doesn’t bind you in any way to act on those. You still must make a moral choice. You still must decide whether your pangs of conscience matter to you.

Before we delve into the issue of free will, I first have to point out here that if you believe this to be true, you cannot simultaneously believe that we are “bound” towards any morality in any meaningful way – if you say that you could, by an act of will, do everything that your moral faculties tell you to be abhorrent, then you are not “bound” to any morality in any way. Given your worldview, you might say that you will be ultimately *punished* for the things you have done, but you cannot say that your morals “bind” you in any way.
Regarding free will – even philosophers that defend libertarian free will (I find libertarian free will to be logically incoherent but I also reject compatibilism and the no free will position, I am mostly in agreement with Bob Doyle´s view on free will) do not argue that you are free to do *everything* that you would be physically able to do – if you want to defend such an extreme position, you will have a very hard time.

If those pangs are just an evolutionary development (no matter whether is positive or neutral or negative procreationally) then on what basis are you bound to act.

Well, I´ve addressed this several times now, and I have no idea how to make it any clearer – my response still is that your question is moot because it is based on a false premise, and that even if it wouldn´t be based on a false premise, it would still amount to special pleading because if I could indeed just turn off the conscience that binds my actions on a whim, then I´m not “bound” in this respect period, whether your God exists or not.

Bill T.,

It appears that Irenicus may be moving towards a fallacious “As If” where moral truth is concerned. The link might help etc……. FWIW. Its *briefly* touched on in #41, part [4].

Irenicus,

if you believe this to be true, you cannot simultaneously believe that we are “bound” towards any morality in any meaningful way –

Did you not read my previous post where I said:

Even if I believe that my conscience is God given I still have to make a moral choice. I still have to decide whether I care to act on it.

The question isn’t whether your “conscience” exists. The question is whether it’s grounded in something that’s real. Something that matters. Something that makes it acting or not acting on it truly meaningful. If it’s an evolutionary development, then on what basis does it matter. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist but that it doesn’t really matter that it does.

This is an idea that’s well represented in the atheist community. The noted philosopher and atheist Michael Ruse says:

Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will …In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding… Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position.(Emphasis added)

For those that believe that our “conscience” is merely part of our evolutionary development it is, to use Ruse’s words, illusory (my “fiction”). This stands in stark contrast to the understanding that this is God given as I explained above and in the second paragraph of #38.

BillT,

The question isn’t whether your “conscience” exists. The question is whether it’s grounded in something that’s real. [1] Something that matters. Something that makes it acting or not acting on it truly meaningful. [2] If it’s an evolutionary development, then on what basis does it matter. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist but that it doesn’t really matter that it does. [3]

1. It is grounded in something that is real because humans are real, see my previous comments.
2. What is “truly meaningful” as opposed to “meaningful” supposed to mean?
3. Your assumption here seems to be something like:
a) Something “matters” if and only if God exists and it matters to him.
b) X is an evolutionary development that no planned for.
c) Ergo, X “doesn´t really matter”.
I see no grounds to accept this reasoning because the premise a) seems arbitrary to me.

The noted philosopher and atheist Michael Ruse says:

And how does any of that quote contradict the reasoning in my earlier comments? Ruse says “It is without external grounding… Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference.” – and I completely agree with the “external grounding” part, as I already said, I don´t believe that our moral faculties are grounded in anything outside of our own (objectively existing) nature. And I disagree with him about the “illusory” part because it seems to me that this is not an “illusion” but rather cultural conditioning – it never occured to me that my moral faculties are based on anything that transcends my own nature because I never was a theist, for someone who was raised to have theistic beliefs and became an atheist later, that would likely have been different. But that latter case wouldn´t amount to an “illusion” but rather to a specific cultural conditioning that the person rejected later in his life.

Reason is obligated as truth-finder to find truth — period — and thereby finds no such thing as a morally *un*reasonable goal/want. Morals devoid of reason is “an” option. Reason devoid of moral facts to find is the “valid” option. The Self is the end of the line as far as any valid moral metric is concerned. Human Nature is all there is, and, therein, Hume got it right.

It’s not clear that anyone here actually disagrees with Hume. As such, it’s not clear that anything stated so far provides reason as truth-finder with any possibility of the morally *un*reasonable goal/want. So long as it’s a feeling, so long as it’s a want, it’s morally reasonable. As per Hume.

On Theism alone is it the case that Hume was, when it comes to such a necessary categorical imperative, in fact wrong about Reason:

The question, though, is whether someone who rejects an imperative like Pursue Happiness, or any other purportedly categorical imperative – and continues to reject it no matter how hard we try to talk him out of doing so — really is, necessarily being irrational.

From the A-T point of view, the answer is: “Yes, he is per se irrational.” But from the Humean point of view, the answer is: “No, he’s not necessarily irrational; he’s just different from most other people, that’s all.” As Hume famously wrote:

“’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than for the latter.” (Treatise of Human Nature 2.3.3.6)

Now, if, contra the Aristotelian, there were no such thing as irreducible teleology immanent to the natural order, then it is hard to see how Hume’s position could be avoided. For in that case nothing would be inherently for anything, would not be of its nature directed toward any particular end. Thus practical reason would not be inherently directed toward the good, so that there would nothing per se contrary to reason in refusing to choose the good. And of course, as I have already argued, nothing would in that case really be good in the first place. It would only be “as if” there were goodness. And since as a matter of statistical fact most people tend to want to pursue their happiness and tend to agree at least in a very general way about what is good and bad, it would be “as if” their practical reason were directed at the good. Hence it would be “as if” there were such a thing as morality. But there wouldn’t really be morality, and if everyone knew that it was merely “as if” there were morality – that morality was at best a useful fiction – then even the pretense of morality couldn’t long survive.

On the other hand, if the Aristotelian is right to hold that natural substances, powers, and processes are inherently directed toward certain ends, and in particular that practical reason is inherently or of its nature directed toward the pursuit of the good, then there would be something contrary to reason in choosing against the good, and thus (given that happiness in the sense of eudaimonia is constitutive of the good for us) something contrary to reason in choosing against one’s own happiness. For the Humean, someone who really at the end of the day doesn’t want the good or his own happiness is just statistically unusual, but that’s all. For the Aristotelian, by contrast, such a person is necessarily irrational. And to the extent his irrational desires are so deep-seated that he doesn’t even feel the attraction of the good or of happiness, he is as objectively disordered or defective an instance of the kind rational animal as a dog with three legs is a disordered or defective instance of its kind, or a tree with sickly, weak roots is a disordered and defective instance of its kind, or an eye covered over with cataracts is a defective or disordered instance of its kind.”

and I completely agree with the “external grounding” part, as I already said, I don´t believe that our moral faculties are grounded in anything outside of our own (objectively existing) nature. And I disagree with him about the “illusory” part because it seems to me that this is not an “illusion” but rather cultural conditioning –

Irenicus,

So, then you really don’t agree with Ruse at all. Because , for Ruse (and I) it follows logically and inevitably that without “external grounding” that morality is an illusion whether it’s based on cultural conditioning, evolution or anything else that isn’t God.

a) Something “matters” if and only if God exists and it matters to him.
b) X is an evolutionary development that no planned for.
c) Ergo, X “doesn´t really matter”.
I see no grounds to accept this reasoning because the premise a) seems arbitrary to me.

And I’ve explained, multiple times, that if we are part of the same creation we have real duties, obligations and responsibilities to all other people that are also part of that creation. However, if we are not so connected this leaves us with nothing but an illusion of morality as Ruse explained. That you continue to ignore this, also multiple times, and continue to ignore the obvious difference between those two realities (which Ruse clearly sees) doesn’t make it arbitrary or count as an argument to the contrary.

it never occured to me that my moral faculties are based on anything that transcends my own nature

Obviously.

BillT,

So, then you really don’t agree with Ruse at all.

I wouldn´t say not “at all”.

Because , for Ruse (and I) it follows logically and inevitably that without “external grounding” that morality is an illusion whether it’s based on cultural conditioning, evolution or anything else that isn’t God.

Here I´m almost certain that you are misreading Ruse. He said:
“Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. ”
– So he didn´t say that Ethics is illusory, period, he said that it is illusory *inasmuch* “as it persuades us that it has an objective reference”.
But I´m not interested in debating what exactly Ruse did or did not mean to say here – if he meant to say that our moral faculties are not grounded in something external to ourselves, then I fully and 100% agree with him about that. If he meant to say that our moral faculties are not grounded in something at all, then I 100% disagree with him on that for the reasons I spelled out in detail above.

And I’ve explained, multiple times, that if we are part of the same creation we have real duties, obligations and responsibilities to all other people that are also part of that creation.

You have indeed asserted that but I have seen no argument from you that tries to establish that it is indeed true. As long as you have no argument for that, I can only refer you again to my comment #29 where I explain why this – whether all, some or none of us were created by the same God – is utterly irrelevant for me.

However, if we are not so connected this leaves us with nothing but an illusion of morality as Ruse explained.

I don´t think he meant to say that, see above, and even if he did mean to say that, he would be wrong – because the only morally relevant thing that “connects” us is what we actually ARE, what our natures are and what we have in common, not how we got to be that way (again, see #29 and earlier comments). From a moral perspective, I honestly couldn´t care any less whether or not you and I were created by the same God, it would have literally (yes, literally) nothing to do with how I would value you as a fellow human being.

That you continue to ignore this, also multiple times,

Not only did I address this multiple times, I even addressed it *before* you brought this up, again, see #29 and earlier comments.

and continue to ignore the obvious difference between those two realities (which Ruse clearly sees)

It might be “obvious” to you, but as long as you cannot argue for this, this is just an intuition you have. Wrt what “Ruse clearly sees” – again, I think you are misreading him and even if he would “clearly see that” – show me an *argument* from him that proves me wrong.

Irenicus,

[1] In #57, do mean to say that defining question begging and defining methods of intention in which question begging is found employed is improper?

It was speaking of “….Non-Theists (often, not always)…”, not you, and raised the issue of question begging.

So there is this:

You are begging the question through and through.

I left the 3rd option wide open for you to fulfill.

If you can.

BTW: You can’t.

BTW: There is no promise to avoid addressing logical fallacies nor the reasons for which we employ logical fallacies. They show up all the time — as in your responses here.

I’m asking, not telling:

Are you aware that you are begging the question?

Are you unaware?

Were you just in a rush?

Do you have that extra something to add by which to push it through to coherence?

[2] You seem to be saying that (if God exists) a Man’s reason, that a Man’s Truth-Finder, cannot be defective unless he is aware that it is defective.

If that is what you are implying, you clearly missed the goal posts. Or you’re changing the goal posts.

This is about moral facts and reason’s obligation (as truth-finder) to find truth (to find moral facts if they exist). This is not about intellectual culpability.

They’re not the same you know.

If I have defective eyes…seeing shadows…. what? Light and clarity can’t exist?

Seriously?

“Can’t be broken unless aware it is broken” makes no logical sense. Secondly, it fails to cohere with reality. Thirdly, you need to re-read Feser. Fourthly, if you want to see how far afield you are then read Parsons input as well in response/dialogue in the various links to one another’s essays.

Irenicus,

Let’s try this:

Whatever goal and want I have is morally reasonable to pursue — regardless of what that goal or want is — because my own nature is the end of the line when choosing/deciding what goals and wants are worthy of attention. There is no such thing as a morally *un*reasonable goal.

As per Hume.

You’ve not shown him to be wrong.

Further, if there are moral facts (light) and one’s reason as truth-finder, which is obligated to find truth (moral facts), reasons and in reasoning concludes that (insert horrible x) is morally good, then on point of fact one is *un*reasonable per se (morally speaking). Whereas, if no moral facts exist, then it is factually the case that there is no such thing as a morally unreasonable goal/want for one’s truth-finder finds in one’s own wants/goals the stuff of “moral truth”.

This is why going with one’s wants/goals makes the point of Hume/Feser, whereas you seem to think one must make oneself into something that one is not (based on your reply — *if* I read you right), which misses the point.

Is forced insemination morally reasonable? Well, Hume on Human Nature and Passions informs us:

One’s nature is the end of the line — so all that is required is that one asks one’s Self if one wants said goal. If yes — then it’s morally reasonable. If one dislikes it, then its morally unreasonable.

Irenicus,

Let’s make it easy then:

You’ve not yet shown the following to be wrong:

Whatever goal and want I have is morally reasonable to pursue — regardless of what that goal or want is — because my own nature is the end of the line when choosing/deciding what goals and wants are worthy of attention. There is no such thing as a morally *un*reasonable goal.

This is why going with one’s wants/goals makes the point (Human Nature – Full Stop).

Going against our own natures, wants, and goals *is* morally *un*reasonable because our wants — out nature in fact defines morality on Non-Theism.

Going against our nature is *in*human and *un*reasonable.

Is beating women morally reasonable? Well let’s see:

One’s nature is the end of the line — so all that is required is that one asks one’s Self if one wants said goal. Or some other goal. Perhaps to avoid pain or prison? Well, if, after reasoning it all through, one reasons to the decision that in fact, yes, one wants to beat women — then it’s morally reasonable. If one dislikes it, then its morally unreasonable.

—————————–

Nothing you’ve presented has allowed Non-Theism to climb any higher than that ceiling.

—————————–

Question begging:

I don´t see the cognitive faculties relevant for moral reasoning as problematic for my worldview at all. We are social creatures with a conscience and a sense of justice, fairness and empathy – and those attributes are also present in lesser degrees in our close relatives in the animal world (you can, for example, demonstrate that Chimpanzees have a sense of fairness comparable to that of human children). Cooperation is in many situations the best evolutionary strategy, so I don´t find it surprising that we evolved to become social creatures.

And all the “bad” wants, feelings, goals, acts, passions, and inclinations which evolutionary morality invented, built up, refined, retained, and over eons deeply embedded them in our neurological constitution because they *work*?

Are they “Good” as well?

[A] Yes

[B] No

“A” is not question begging.

“B” is begging the question.

scbrownlhrm,

You’ve not yet shown the following to be wrong:
Whatever goal and want I have is morally reasonable to pursue

Not what Hume pointed out. Not even similar to what Hume pointed out. What Hume did point out was that there are cases where you cannot use reason to decide what your goals ARE – and he is right about that, and he is right about that if there are moral facts and still just as right about that if there are no moral facts.

Going against our own natures, wants, and goals *is* morally *un*reasonable because our wants — out nature in fact defines morality on Non-Theism.

That is 50% true and 50% false. What is true is that our nature indeed defines what is morally right. What is false is that everything we want to do is therefore morally correct – it is not. If your nature is defective (what someone like Feser would prefer to call “disordered”) through accident or disease (e.g. frontal lobe disorders), then these defects prevent you from pursuing what you would pursue if your nature would not have been damaged through accident or disease. And note that even under theism, it still fallacious to say that a person with a disordered mind unreasonably / irrationally chose to have that disordered mind because that person did NOT choose to have this mind anymore than a person who lost a leg in an accident chose to loose his leg. And that´s why Feser is wrong here and Hume is right, and why Feser still would be wrong and Hume right even if Aristotelianism is true.

Question begging:

I don´t see the cognitive faculties relevant for moral reasoning as problematic for my worldview at all. We are social creatures with a conscience and a sense of justice, fairness and empathy – and those attributes are also present in lesser degrees in our close relatives in the animal world (you can, for example, demonstrate that Chimpanzees have a sense of fairness comparable to that of human children). Cooperation is in many situations the best evolutionary strategy, so I don´t find it surprising that we evolved to become social creatures.

And all the “bad” wants, feelings, goals, acts, passions, and inclinations which evolutionary morality invented, built up, refined, retained, and over eons deeply embedded them in our neurological constitution because they *work*?

First of all, I will point out that nothing here involves “begging the question” – look up what the term means.
Second, be *specific*.
What exactly are those “”bad” wants, feelings, goals, acts, passions and inclinations” that a healthy person could pursue without experiencing a burden on his or her conscience (i.e. something I could do without experiencing a moral urge to refrain from it, without feeling bad and guilty if I did it, without either feeling a need to rationalize it away to ease my conscience or feeling a need to repent and make up for it) are you talking about here?

Irenicus,

This is not to *replace* the last part, but rather it is an *addition* to the last part:

Why is the irrationally conditioned Feeling (Act, whatever) X (conscience, hunger, itch, want, goal, whatever) Morally Good? Why is the irrationally conditioned Feeling M Morally Evil?

Tom,

Post deleted by siteowner for being clearly and unequivocally in violation of the agreement commenters make when they participate in discussions here.

To call that “favouritism” would be a colossal understatement. You have apparently warned scbrownlhrm before that he should refrain from the pretentious word salad he likes to engage in but you are perfectly alright with him ignoring your request again and again – the most he can expect is a kind reminder that he should please refrain from doing it yet again, and even that only occasionally (e.g. #57 which he wrote after your last reminder).
And condescending + derogatory comments are apparently perfectly acceptable to you as long as they come from one of your favourites so that scbrownlhrm can “make it easy” for me, call my writings a “mess”, “a total circular failure”, “conflations, question begging, and circularity”, but when I respond by pointing out that this alleged mess only exists in his confused mind, I get censored.
Well, it´s your playground, but I´m not letting myself get bullied around by hypocrites, so I´ll leave this “thinking” place where people like scbrownlhrm “move the debate forward in directions conducive to thinking”.

Irenicus,

Ran out of edit time:

This:

If evolution got it all “right” there would be “moral conflict”.

Think about that and human nature.

Should have been this:

If evolution got it all “correct” then there could be no “moral conflict”.

Think about that and what it says about human nature and evolution. People truly enjoy, want, chase after, things other people consider very immoral, and back the other way too.

If I do Act X and feel bad about it, the presence of regret does not help the evolutionary moralist.

Act A.
Regret for A.

They are both still irrationally conditioned reflexes and so one must still justify good/evil. And other people still disagree and even *feel* that the “regret” you feel is *immoral*.

“100% of Humans feels happy about X.”

Sam Harris tried that in part, and it fails. It’s his “The Moral Landscape”.

I can only refer you again to my comment #29 where I explain why this – whether all, some or none of us were created by the same God – is utterly irrelevant for me.

Irenicus,

Yes, we get that it’s “utterly irrelevant for you (me)”. That, however, doesn’t mean it’s utterly irrelevant. That you continue to refuse to acknowledge or even try to understand that a world with a creator God and a world without that God would necessarily create vastly different connectedness between it’s inhabitants is about as basic an understanding as one might have. And the fact that this connectedness between it’s inhabitants would necessarily create different relationships, duties, obligations and responsibilities between them is similarly easy to comprehend. I’ve posted this same explanation three of four times and your only response is you “have seen no argument from you that tries to establish that it is indeed true.” That this is the argument and and that you can’t see it as one is the problem.

However, you are the one who said:

it never occured to me that my moral faculties are based on anything that transcends my own nature

And from that it pretty inevitably follows that it never occurred to you that any of your faculties are based on anything that transcends your own nature. Correct? Yet, thinkers all over the world, atheist, believing and otherwise have filled libraries with books pondering just this question that somehow “never occurred to you.”

@Irenicus:

“In other words, Feser´s position requires that a person like, say, John Wayne Gacy was not mentally “disordered / defective” due to accident or disease (like the three-legged dog), but that Gacy rather reasoned about what kind of person he wanted to be like, reached the conclusion that the personality of an insane serial killer would be the best choice, and then willed himself into aquiring the necessary mental disorders for that.”

This is simply false, it neither requires nor implies such thing. “Irrational” is a defect in the Intelect, not a defect of the Will, which Feser, like any standard Scholastic is at pains to distinguish.

If your account of irrationality were correct there would be preciously little of it going around, because *your* account — and I stress *your*, not Feser’s — requires conscious knowledge of the Good and yet turning away from it. It would depend on where you want to run with this and the details of human psychology, but since on AT account the will necessarily (not contingently but necessarily) is oriented towards the Good your scenario is even of dubious coherency.

G. Rodrigues,

This is simply false, it neither requires nor implies such thing. “Irrational” is a defect in the Intelect, not a defect of the Will, which Feser, like any standard Scholastic is at pains to distinguish.

I know. And it is precisely what I pointed out – a “defect in the intellect” is not the reason for why people have these mental disorders (or as I put it, they do not have these mental disorders because they made an irrational choice, they didn´t chose to have them at all – there was no “irrationality” involved in them aquiring those disorders), and that´s why Feser is wrong on this matter.

If your account of irrationality were correct there would be preciously little of it going around, because *your* account — and I stress *your*, not Feser’s — requires conscious knowledge of the Good and yet turning away from it.

There is no such thing as “my account” here, I talked about Feser´s account. Specifically about this:
“For the Aristotelian, by contrast, such a person is necessarily irrational. And to the extent his irrational desires are so deep-seated that he doesn’t even feel the attraction of the good or of happiness, he is as objectively disordered or defective an instance of the kind rational animal as a dog with three legs is a disordered or defective instance of its kind…”
And what I criticized there has nothing to do with having “conscious knowledge of the good and yet turning away from it”. What I rather pointed out is that the person Feser talks didn´t irrationally choose to have this disorders anymore than the three-legged dog chose to lose a leg. There was no choice, rational or irrational, involved at all in aquiring those disorders. And that´s why Feser is wrong and Hume right – this isn´t a matter of the intellect.

It would depend on where you want to run with this and the details of human psychology, but since on AT account the will necessarily (not contingently but necessarily) is oriented towards the Good your scenario is even of dubious coherency.

That is just incoherent if you combine it with Feser´s account. Feser specifically talks about:
“…his irrational desires are so deep-seated that he doesn’t even feel the attraction of the good or of happiness, he is as objectively disordered or defective…”
And if what you say – that the will is necessarily(!) oriented towards the good – then the kind of “defective” person that Feser talks about *cannot even exist in the first place*. You cannot say that a will is necessarily(!) oriented towards the good while the owner of said will simultaneously experiences NO attraction towards the good what-so-ever – if you did, the phrase “oriented towards” would become void of all meaning. It would be like saying that if you throw a knife into a furnace, the melted remains of the knife are “oriented towards” cutting.

scbrownlhrm,
I stopped reading your comments because talking to you about philosophy is like playing chess with a pigeon.

G. Rodrigues

And what I pointed out is that “Irrational” is not connoted to the Will — as you keep repeating when you insert expressions like “irrationally choose to have this disorders” or “There was no choice” etc. — but to the Intellect. “Irrational” means “contrary to reason” as is readily apparent from reading say, Hume’s quote. It is contrary to reason, per se irrational, in the AT account, to choose the lesser good, even if the reasons for so preferring are deep-seated, the product of accident or disease or whatever.

1. This is not about choosing the lesser good, it is rather about whether you *want* what is good in the first place. Example: it is not about whether you choose to help a neighbor in need because you think it is the right thing to do, it is rather about whether you desire to do what is “right” in the first place.
2. Yes, “irrational” means “contrary to reason”. But “reason” is not involved here, you do not reason to choose whether you *want* to do what is right or not – either you do, or you do not – it is not something that reason decides. And *that* is what Hume pointed out, reason is not involved here.

I can grant you that Aristotelianism is true and hence grant you that it is irrational to choose the lesser good, and Hume *still would be right* – because Hume didn´t talk about the actions you choose to do but rather about what you *desire* to happen, whether you do have a desire to do what is good for example or whether you do not have this desire, and reason is not involved in determining whether you do have that desire or not.

“Tis not contrary to reason”, or it is not irrational to etc. and etc.

And also not in accord with reason because it does *not involve reason*. Read *any* commentary on Hume´s moral philosophy, this is what he meant.

Which is after all *the point with the post*. Feser and Parsons agree on a broadly Aristotelean account of Morality. Feser’s argument against Parsons is that he cannot consistently do so because an Aristotelean account of Morality requires a “thick” Aristotelean metaphysics, namely, immanent teleology and essentialism. For if there is no immanent teleology, no objective goods, then Hume’s point comes roaring in.

Nope. Hume would rather be correct either way – you misunderstood what Hume pointed out, it´s truth is independent of whether there is such a thing as objective goods or not because it is only about whether you *desire* what is “good” and the exact ontology of what constitutes “goodness” is irrelevant for what he pointed out.

Because Scholastics do not say that. At all. When they say that the Will is necessarily oriented towards the Good they mean that the Will, in choosing something, always and necessarily chooses under the aspect of the Good as the Intellect judges it.

If they do say that, this would just be empirically false. All you need to do to show it to be false is to present one person who intellectually understands perfectly well that his actions were morally wrong, yet still experienced no desire whatsoever to refrain from doing them, i.e. whose will was not attracted towards the “good” in any way, shape or form and who thus easily could do things that he knew to be wrong because he had no desire to do what is good. For a person like that, you cannot say that their “will is necessarily(!) oriented towards to good” at all because their will is evidently utterly indifferent towards the good.
See:
“Psychopaths know right from wrong but don’t care”
http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/1/59.full

Tom,

Whether one becomes irrational or not, in the sense you’ve indicated here, may or may not be a matter of cognitively considered decision-making. Nevertheless it involves the rational faculty because the effect of it is in fact a disordered intellect. Irrationality is irrationality regardless of its etiology.

No, “it” does not involve any rational faculty. That is precisely Hume´s point. But I´m not sure that you correctly understood what the “it” in this context here is.

You missed G. Rodrigues’s words, ” the aspect of the Good as the Intellect judges it.” That’s a crucial phrase.

The person who intentionally chooses wrong does so because of a disordered apprehension of what is good; that is, he sees the good of doing what is right but also sees a conflicting “good” that he chooses over the other good. The conflicting “good” is false, the product of the disordered intellect, but “as the Intellect judges it,” it is a good, so it is perceived and treated as if it were a good. And the person pursues it. This is what Aristotle was saying. And many others since him.

I didn´t miss that. I explicitly addressed it. Saying “he sees the good of doing what is right but also sees a conflicting “good” that he chooses over the other good” is exactly the wrong description of a psychopath for example. They indeed do know what is right, but they do not CARE about what is right – they don´t see “doing right” as a “lesser good”, they don´t see it as a good *at all*. There is no tradeoff for them – they know right but they experience no moral urge to do “right” and refrain from “wrong”. And they didn´t become that way through any irrational choice or through any choice at all – they are broken, defective (or disordered if you prefer) and they didn´t chose it anymore than Feser´s three-legged dog chose to lose his leg.

…because the only morally relevant thing that “connects” us is what we actually ARE, what our natures are and what we have in common, not how we got to be that way .

Since Irenicus, I gather from you other posts that you like dictionary definitions I thought you might like this one:

as·ser·tion (ə-sûr′shən) n.

1. The act of asserting.

2. Something declared or stated positively, often with no support or attempt at proof. (emphasis added)

The above statement by you is a textbook example of an assertion. Notice that you include no proof or support of your claim nor is there reasoning as to why it’s true nor does the one premise follow logically from the other. That it doesn’t matter “how we got to be that way” it only matters “what we actually ARE” may be your personal opinion but that’s all it is. Nothing you wrote shows this to be true.

Now, in contrast my statement (which you labeled an assertion) in a simplified form states “different realities are different”. Now, the kind of realities I was referring to in my statement were the different realities of a world with or without a God. The kind of realities that this describes are metaphysical realities. Further, we were discussing whether the connectedness, duties and responsibilities between people, that is their metaphysical connectedness, would be different if their metaphysical realities were different.

Therefore, my claim is that if the metaphysical realities of the world were different then the metaphysical characteristics of the people in those different worlds, as it relates to their connectedness, duties and responsibilities, etc. would also be different. Notice how the one premise follows logically from the other. This would be a statement that is not an assertion.

@BillT

Now, that there could be two different realities is certainly possible and that those completely different realities would undoubtedly lead to different implications as far as our who we are is not an “assertion” but a reasoned and obvious implication arising from those two alternate realities. In fact, it’s such an obvious implication from those two different realities that I’m am quite sure I’ve never heard or heard of any thinker from any field of theology or philosophy even attempt to deny this. Now, I get that you don’t have a good reply or way to deal with those implications so I will, at least, applaud your effort in trying to opt out of the discussion before this became obvious.

First of all. You seem to think that repeating an assertion ad nauseam at some point makes the assertion magically “obvious” and “reasoned”. It does not.
Second, I replied to this a long time ago. Specifically, I pointed out the following:
“To illustrate this, lets assume for the sake of the argument that I am wrong, and we were indeed created by God, but not all of us as people like William Campbell argued:
“William Campbell, under the pen name “Caucasian”, wrote in Anthropology for the People: A Refutation of the Theory of the Adamic Origin of All Races that the nonwhite peoples were not descendants of Adam and therefore “not brothers in any proper sense of the term, but inferior creations”” (note, I am not saying that this is a reasonable interpretation of Christianity, I´m just using it to illustrate something)
– if this would be true, then I would not value you (I´m just assuming you are white) any more, and I wouldn´t value a black or chinese person any less, because, for the reasons mentioned above, I couldn´t care any less if all, some or none of us were made by the same God, the only thing that I do care about (from a moral perspective) is what we actually *are* now, not how we got to be that way.”
– you would disagree and say that if we lived in that scenario, my moral duties towards white people like you would be different than my moral duties towards black people, because we the former group and the latter group were created differently. So, pray tell, why should I ignore what people are and instead focus on if they share the same “creation process” or not? You had plenty of opportunities to address this, and never did. So by now I´m about to conclude that you simply cannot address it because your claim that it morally totally matters how we came to be the way we are is just hot air.

Which, as I said above, again ignores the fact that “how we got to be that way ” necessarily affects “what we actually ARE, what our natures are and what we have in common”. Even from your own perspective. You claim “what we actually ARE” is a result of our being part of the evolutionary processes. How else, from your perspective, would we have gotten this way. It’s more than a bit self contradictory to claim that what you think we are comes from one reality but try and deny that we could and would be something else if we came from another reality.

For the sake of the argument (and my amusement), lets just assume that you are right here and do the following thought experiment:
God exists and set up a universe where we eventually come into existence as the product of an evolutionary process that worked without God ever intervening in this process in ANY way. Now, God directly creates one human being (lets call it “Bob”) that is completely unrelated to all other humans (because Bob didn´t evolve, he is the product of special creation) but also completely indistinguishable from a human that is the product of an evolutionary process because God chose to create Bob that way.
Now, if you are right, there must be morally significant differences between Bob and every other human being because they came to be the way they are through completely different processes. So, go ahead – explain which morally significant differences there would be between Bob and everyone else as a consequence of their different creation background stories.

@Tom,

I don’t know you all that well, but it seems like you would fimd it more interesting to interact with the thought of a God in whom someone, somewhere, actually believes.

Kindly check:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment

@Tom,
You neither understand what a thought experiment is [1] nor did you understand what my thought experiment tried to demonstrate [2].

1. Whether the thought experiment involves things that actually exist (or could exist) or not is completely irrelevant for its conclusion. If Galileo would have phrased his famous gravity thought experiment with two balls made out of adamantium and xentronium respectively (two made up types of metal that don´t exist in the real world) which are connected by a rope, then his conclusion that Aristotle must have been wrong about gravity would have been just as valid.

2. My thought experiment has literally nothing whatsoever to do with whether there is a God or not and if there is one, what he is like. What it aims to show is rather that, contrary to BillT´s claim, he would not assume that our moral duties towards other people would “obviously” be different if the process that was responsible for making them the way they are now would be different (or maybe he would, that depends on his answer – but if he would, I doubt that he could come up with any justification for it).

BillT,

To start with, as you said this isn’t a “reasonable interpretation of Christianity” so it’s not dependent on me to defend a theory I don’t believe.

And I didn´t ask you to defend it in any way, shape or form – I asked you to address a thought experiment.

Second, it’s not valid as a thought experiment because it isn’t based on nor does it follow the basic contours of the discussion.

Of course it´s based on the discussion. You say that if the processes that made us the way we are were different, this would necessarily change what moral duties we have towards each other – I deny this and present you with a thought experiment where people were created by different processes and challenge you to provide a justification for why that should lead to ANY difference between our duties towards the group created by process A vs our duties towards the group created by process B.
You cannot. You cannot even begin to do so. And that is a checkmate.

And your attempted explanation that followed used the same mistaken pattern of thinking. Your assumption that Bob as a “product of special creation” necessarily means that “there must be morally significant differences between Bob and every other human being because they came to be the way they are through completely different processes.” is an unsupported allegation. If God can create “Bob” who in your own words is “completely indistinguishable from a human that is the product of an evolutionary process ” then he can certainly imbue him with the same metaphysical connectedness. Like above, it’s all still God’s creation.

With the same “metaphysical connectedness” that all the other humans wouldn´t have in the first place because God set up a process that autonomously creates them without him doing anything…
As I said, checkmate. And with that, I rest my case.

If an eternally existing transcendent mind (God) is the ultimate source of our moral obligations then it appears there is no question that we have obligations both to Him and our fellow man. But what is the source of our moral obligations if we are all a byproduct of a blind, mindless dys-teleological natural evolutionary process? At best it is not at all obvious that there is. At worst there really is no good answer. Atheists appear divided on this question, theists are not.

IMO that’s the theists argument as succinctly as it can be stated.

Bill T.,

Some relevant background nuance which overlaps.

Background contextual nuances which may help inform navigations here:

[1] This is an imaginary (even impossible/incoherent) god:

[Being Itself, Who is love, creates a Non-Moral Universe the constitutions of which sum to the Imago Dei and such is the case whether said Non-Moral-Universe is found in the pains of privation or in the unicity of wholeness, and all of which He Himself is metaphysically absent from.]

[2] Necessarily it is the case that origins and causations cannot be metaphysically disconnected. “God Exists” changes the essence of the irreducible bedrock of being itself and it is *impossible* for causation/causations to be paradigmatically separated from “that”. And it is [1] causation and [2] causal closure which forces all ends here, hence any move which – on causal closure – is incoherent ends up inapplicable to reality as such. The God-Universe and the No-God-Universe are irreducibly different on all fronts – to the bitter ends of physicality, temporal becoming, actualization, and so on – ad infinitum.

Irreducible, elemental, immutable.

Such is love within the Christian’s metaphysical geography. Reason as truth-finder, in any Non-Christian metaphysical geography, can in fact chase after *different* ends and employ *different* means to so chase and be, factually, Non-Contrary to said geography — and therein reason is factually reasonable. Whereas, within the contours of the means and ends of the immutable love of the Necessary Being, Reason as truth-finder — should she in fact chase after *different* ends and employ *different* means to so chase — well then reason shall be, factually, the express contradiction of The-Real and therein reason as truth-finder shall be, factually, *un*-reasonable.

[3] From the link:

“Now, you might [mistakenly] think that his reason for saying this has something to do with attributing our remote origin to evolution rather than divine creation……… But now comes Barham’s mistake. He thinks Aristotle’s answer faces the following difficulties. First, Barham thinks that there are alterative candidates for our final cause or natural end that are no less plausible than rationality. His examples are agency, the capacity for morality, and love. Second, he notes that we often act irrationally and suggests that replicants can be no less rational than human beings are — in which case rationality is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a human being. Third, he seems to think that a problem with any proposed characteristic (rationality, moral behavior, love, or whatever) is that there are instances of human beings who don’t exhibit it — so that (Barham seems to conclude) none of them can be the final cause of human beings as such.”

[4] Continuing with another spot in the link:

“First, that we often act irrationally does not entail that we are not rational. Indeed, you cannot act irrationally unless you are rational, in the relevant sense of “rational.” To be irrational is not the same thing as to be non-rational. Rather, to be irrational is to reason badly, or to let one’s emotion cloud one’s reason, or to be impaired somehow (by mental illness or brain damage, say) so that one is prevented from exercising one’s reason — all of which presupposes that one does indeed have reason. Contrast a spider, say, which is not irrational precisely because it does not even rise to the level of reasoning badly. A spider is instead non-rational.

Second, agency, morality, and love are not really in competition with rationality as candidates for our characteristic activity, certainly not on the analysis an Aristotelian like Aquinas would put forward. For these are all themselves just special cases of rationality. Consider Aquinas’s view that will follows upon intellect. Will is “rational appetite,” the tendency to be drawn toward what the intellect sees to be good. To be “rational,” then, is for Aquinas to have a will as well as an intellect. Now, agency, in the sense here in question, is just the capacity to behave in light of reason — that is to say, to have a will. Morality is just a matter of an agent’s pursuing what the intellect perceives to be good for him and avoiding what it perceives to be bad. Loving a thing is just willing what is good for it. So, the Aristotelian can take Barham’s alleged alternatives not to be true alternatives to rationality at all, but indeed to be instances of rationality.” (E. Feser)

[5] This is a Non-Christian descriptive of the making of Man, an imaginary and even incoherent (on Christianity) descriptive of the Adamic:

“…..God set up a process that autonomously creates them without him doing anything…..”

Such reduces The Adamic to the purely material.

Unless, that is, this:

It is possible that God can set up an autonomous process of material which imbues material with that which reduces to the immaterial. But that is impossible. In short that all amounts to this: Man is material, and nothing more, and if we just assume for our thought experiment that God made Man thusly, well then Man comes up the same in Theism as in Materialism.

Truth-Finding:

Irreducible, elemental, immutable.

Such is love within the Christian’s metaphysical geography. Reason as truth-finder, in any Non-Christian metaphysical geography, can in fact chase after *different* ends and employ *different* means to so chase and be, factually, Non-Contrary to said geography — and therein reason is factually reasonable. Whereas, within the contours of the means and ends of the immutable love of the Necessary Being, Reason as truth-finder — should she in fact chase after *different* ends and employ *different* means to so chase — well then reason shall be, factually, the express contradiction of The-Real and therein reason as truth-finder shall be, factually, *un*-reasonable.

scb,

Thanks for the Feser link. He’s always an informative read.

Bill T.,

Agree. The thought experiment is, obviously, of an incoherent and impossible scenario given that it mandates that God (Immutable Love) is metaphysically *absent* from the material based substrate of the created. “Being Itself” in any coherent sense just cannot cash out that way. So we can stop there. Also, if more is needed (it isn’t), it’s simply a Non-Christian set of premises. Lastly, it really comes down to begging the question — to stating that *IF* there should be a purely material based process which *god* were to employ to make “man” *THEN* the Non-Theist Man (material) would house the *same* metaphysical interfaces (material based) of the Man of Theism. It’s sort of like asserting that if we assume that two cars are both made out of metal, and then say, “therefore” the two cars are the same……. it works (fallaciously on “Being Itself”……) but it’s not informing us of anything relevant to what is being discussed.

Perhaps the thing for our Non-Theist friends to remember outside of “Being Itself” (….the immutable love of the Necessary Being…. and so on) having a set of inescapable “interfaces” with every bit of reality is simply the fact that with “Man” or “The Adamic” , it is the case that Man is Dirt (particle cascade), and, then, Man is that but also more.

At the end of the day, the process of Scripture’s a priori of “Dirt-To-Man” is cohesive with any valid process. Rate of change within temporal becoming amid Dirt / Particle where “The Adamic” is concerned is of no relevance to Christianity’s metaphysics.

Thank you, Bill. Actually I wrote that because I was curious if any of our atheist interlocutors, like Irenicus, could state their position that succinctly. It seems that the only way that they know how to argue is to take the argument off into the weeds. Unfortunately, too many Christians take the bait and follow them there. (We ought to be more cautious and smarter.) Of course if that’s the atheist’s strategy it’s a foolish one. They can’t win that way. All they succeed in doing is wasting our time. But maybe that’s all they got.

#109 / February 7, 2016 at 8:06 am was a quote of “DNW” replying to a Non-Theist. As it turns out, there was a follow up comment by DNW which adds some insight into the nature of the problem at hand, copied here:

Quote:

….. [ …. ] …….You replied [to #109], “This feels too all-or-nothing to me …”

You will be glad to know that you need not feel that way, since that is not what I was suggesting.

I was stating outright that given your epistemological bracketing of and placing aside systems of truth in favor of a kind of “pragmatism”, and given your adoption of a Rotarian program of arguing rhetorically, rather than logically and categorically, you should try admitting this upfront, rather than having it squeezed out of you.

It would be an interesting experiment to observe what would happen if you were to say to someone: “Now, what I am saying is not to be taken as universally true, or even true in your case, but I wish you to accede to my request because it makes me feel better and serves my interests even if it does not, yours.”

It would be akin to the Churchlands whom I mentioned earlier, admitting upfront that they had no minds but that they nonetheless – wished insofar as there was a they, that could “wish” – had registered an impulse which caused them to try and modify your brain state and thus affect your behavior. Not that there was as they would be the first to stipulate, that there was any real “purpose” to it.

I am challenging you to give up using traditional moral language in a deceptive and purely rhetorical manner and to adopt a more transparent and less time-wasting mode of interfacing: or, to at least always admit upfront that what you are doing is wheedling, rather than arguing in any traditional sense. I’m challenging you to drop the camouflage as a matter of principle, and not wait for it to be forcibly stripped from you.

I’m challenging you to admit that your “arguments” are not arguments in any reals sense but attempts to produce emotional effects in others, and thereby modify their behaviors in a way which you find reinforcing.

How far do you think you might be able to get in this project in that open manner and without the camouflaging rags of a habit you have long thrown off?

And if you cannot get by in that manner, what does it say regarding your essential life project, and the role of deception in it?

You mention the post-moderns. Perhaps you would like to share some of the broader implications of an explicitly anti-logocentric anthropology.

End quote.

Nevertheless, Dawkins apparently is also a “liberal” who champions democratic freedoms and values which are based on the concept of universal human rights. But how is this even possible based on his world view?

Because talking like an atheist is easy. Living like an atheist is hard.

That which is purely epistemic, and void of the ontic, just won’t do. Not “really”. Sam Harris and that Moral Landscape fail for reasons.

“The West’s [human rights] ideals in a secular/atheist framework are practically mysticism. This idea of a “fundamental human right” in an evolutionary context is, as Bentham stated, “nonsense on stilts.” This is going beyond the otherwise humble claims of the skeptic that morality is just a thing we have built into us, and is good for our evolutionary benefit. That’s fine, I can handle that and say “Ok well, good luck!” But then they go on to appeal to some concept of equality among individuals, which is utterly and perfectly contradictory to the fitness paradigm of the evolutionary future which we are bound to. The question to the skeptic is, how can you assert equality into a future that you anticipate will involve conditions requiring unfitness of certain types of individuals in the species? How can you begin to guess that our current, or ANY, pursuit of happiness is the scientifically verified insurance of survival and fitness for the species in the context of fundamental human rights and equality? I certainly don’t advocate judging the truth of a claim based on its consequences. However, for all the times that I am accused of cognitive dissonance, which I may be guilty of, I cannot imagine living under the volume of cognitive dissonance in saying incidental meat robots called humans have “fundamental human rights” while KNOWING those human rights could cause conditions that would be evolutionarily disastrous.” (by “GM”)

@Melissa

I think what is meant by “contrary to reason” in this context is that it is not in accord with what a correctly functioning intellect would present as good.

I´m also pretty sure that this is what Feser had in mind, but it doesn´t contradict what Hume pointed out at all.

BillT

You asked me to explain, given your and Mr. Campbell’s scenarios, how God could deal with the issues you and he raised…

No, I did not. I didn´t anything even remotely resembling that. What I rather did was present two thought experiments where humans would NOT all be “metaphysically connected” through a common creation story, but rather created in fundamentally different ways, and then challenged you to:
“provide a justification for why that should lead to ANY difference between our duties towards the group created by process A vs our duties towards the group created by process B.”
And you cannot. And this shows that your claim that differences in how we were created necessarily leads to differences in our moral duties towards each other is false.

Your response was to say “that’s wrong because my imaginary god says so.”

Nope, my response was rather that the process that was responsible for our creation evidently doesn´t change our moral duties towards each other.

Remember, the idea “that all the other humans wouldn’t have (the same “metaphysical connectedness”) in the first place because God set up a process that autonomously creates them without him doing anything…” is a fiction you created for your imaginary god.

Yes, so? It seems that you are also incapable of understanding what a thought experiment IS and what it MEANS – seriously, read the wiki article on “thought experiments”.

And moreover, because he’s your imaginary god, what you’re essentially saying is “you’re wrong because I said so.” This is not a checkmate and that’s not how thought experiments work.

*headdesk*
“A thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment (from German) considers some hypothesis, theory,[1] or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences. Given the structure of the experiment, it may or may not be possible to actually perform it, and if it can be performed, there need be no intention of any kind to actually perform the experiment in question.

The common goal of a thought experiment is TO EXPLORE THE POTENTIAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE PRINCIPLES IN QUESTION: “A thought experiment is a device with which one performs an intentional, structured process of intellectual deliberation in order to speculate, within a specifiable problem domain, about potential consequents (or antecedents) for a designated antecedent (or consequent)” (Yeates, 2004, p. 150).” [emphasis added]
– Your claim was that if the creation process that led to our existence would be different, then our moral duties towards each other would be different, and I designed a thought experiment to explore this alleged principle and successfully demonstrated that IF it were the case that some of us would be created by evolution while others were directly created by God, you could not point to any differences in our moral duties towards each other. Ergo, your claim is false. That the God I made up for this thought experiment doesn´t exist is completely and utterly irrelevant because the conclusion has nothing to do with whether this God exists or not. As I already pointed out to Tom, if Galileo would have devised his famous thought experiment with objects that do not actually exist and cannot actually exist (say, two balls made out of a material that doesn´t exist) that are connected by a rope, then his conclusion would STILL HAVE BEEN VALID – the thought experiment would still show that Aristotle must have been wrong about gravity because it is about which consequences follow from which HYPOTHETICAL principle.

Neither did you address the restatement of my central premise at the end of post #92 or my discussion of God’s omnipotence.

Ok, then I just restate my thought experiment with an omnipotent God:
Hypothetically, an omnipotent God creates a universe that is able to function autonomously (i.e., one that can and does persist and change without his input) and that eventually creates beings like you and me through *unguided* evolution. Since this God is omnipotent, he is able to do that by definition – if he cannot create a system with true randomness and true autonomy from himself, there is an obvious deficiency in his powers and he thus could not be all-powerful. And then, this God directly creates some more beings that he designs to be indistinguishable from the ones that were created by the evolutionary process that worked completely autonomously from him. You say that there must be different moral duties for those two groups of beings, and I challenge you again to point out which differences there would be and what the basis for those differences is.
And if you cannot do that, then your claim that “different creation story => different moral duties” is evidently false, the moral duties would rather remain the same either way.

Tom,

That’s because you’ve switched categories. You can’t say the function of the object is no longer bluish-purple, either. Bluish-purple isn’t in the category of functions that can get damaged in a storm, and neither is rationality.

1. It wouldn´t be “rationality” (i.e. your rational faculties) but rather emotions / desires (i.e. your emotional faculties) – the two are intrinsically related and cannot be fully seperated but its still important to make clear again that this is not about rationality.
2. Of course those function can be damaged in a storm (or any other kind of accident, developmental disorders would be more likely in that context for example). If the storm causes you to fall which leads to significant injuries to your frontal lobe for example, then some of cognitive faculties can be irreparably damaged – to the degree that you lose them completely or almost completely.

I designed a thought experiment to explore this alleged principle and successfully demonstrated that IF it were the case that some of us would be created by evolution while others were directly created by God, you could not point to any differences in our moral duties towards each other.

Irenicus,

No you didn’t. You only think you succeeded in doing this. The only way you “succeeded” though was to place restraints on God, and those he created, by saying that “that all the other humans wouldn’t have (the same “metaphysical connectedness”) in the first place because God set up a process that autonomously creates them without him doing anything…”

This God that “set up a process that autonomously creates them without him doing anything” is your fiction that takes what you believe is a thought experiment and turns it into nothing but your opinion. You have both asked the question and provided the answer. If you can do that in your premise then I can simply reply by saying that God didn’t “set up a process that autonomously creates them without him doing anything.”

(I) then challenged you to:
“provide a justification for why that should lead to ANY difference between our duties towards the group created by process A vs our duties towards the group created by process B.”

Which I did. I explained that a metaphysical connectedness would exist among those whose existence depended on the same metaphysical creation. That connectedness would not exist in an evolved, non-metaphysical creation. [To explain further.] You claimed that wasn’t true because “God set up a process that autonomously creates them without him doing anything…” You have no basis (in fact) to impose that condition nor, in a thought experiment, can you constrain my reply by this arbitrary condition. Can’t you see that as I said above, you have both asked the question and provided the answer.

Tom,

Irenicus, you were talking to me at the end of #137.

No. I talked to you in the middle of #137 as indicated by the @Tom, I talked to BillT at the end of #137 as might have been obvious by me responding to his words without any indication that I´m talking to someone else as I did in the middle of #137-

You don’t understand the difference between etiology and ontology.

Wrong, I do understand that very well.

You don’t understand the point of being a bearer of God’s image;

Indeed. And I couldn´t care less about obfuscatory theobabble.

you just brushed off the most crucial question.

No I did not. I made perfectly clear what is different (the process that created them) and what is not (what the beings in question actually are).

You don’t understand the word “process” as it applies to theism: it’s impossible to apply it univocally to God and to material processes (or anything resembling material processes).

Well, I was trying it with english, feel free to mentally substitute “process” by whatever theobabble you prefer.

And you think the problem is that we don’t get what a thought experiment is.

For BillT, that most certainly is the case, as is evident by his complaining about me having no “factual basis” to phrase the thought experiment the way I did.

Irenicus,

Let’s try again. From the article you posted.

The moral implications of the doctrine of Imago Dei are apparent in the fact that, if humans are to love God, then humans must love other humans whom God has created (cf. John 13:35), as each is an expression of God.

This is in line with what I wrote above. Can you explain what or how your thought experiment showed this to be false or an unsupportable position. And if that wasn’t what you were trying to show, can you explain what it was you think your though experiment showed?

Well then my thought experiment demonstrated exactly what it was meant to demonstrate – there would be no difference between the two groups wrt moral duties because the (hypothetical) different ways for how we got to be what we are now do NOT lead to differences wrt our moral duties.

Irenicus,

If you think your thought experiment showed this would ,necessarily be true for any world, I think you need to think about this more carefully. By your own admission:

But I already said that the two groups of beings would not differ in that respect, I explicitly said that they would have the *same* rational, emotional and moral faculties (and so on, and so forth).

Don’t you see that the only thing that makes the two groups “not differ in that respect” is that you “said that the two groups of beings would not differ in that respect”. That’s it. Because you claim they aren’t different in that respect therefore they necessarily are?

So, if we restate your position based on your thought experiment, (and using your words hopefully within your intent) we will “have the *same* rational, emotional and moral faculties (and so on, and so forth)” no matter what were “the (hypothetical) different ways for how we got to be what we are” because you said so. Fair? So, this shows you can make things up and that they’re true for the world you made up. Correct?

If I’m reading this too narrowly, please explain how your thought experiment shows that to be true for any world (or God) not of your own invention.

The non-rational blood clot which damages a slice of the wad of non-rationally conditioned neuronal reflexes (brain) and thereby causes brain damage “ontologically equates to“, per our Non-Theist friends, the “fact” that the patient isn’t actually wrong, mistaken, incorrect, etc., when he attempts to open the refrigerator with his car keys.

That may work if Mind [1] determines, invents, and defines truths external to the Self rather than [2] perceives, discovers, and apprehends said truths. [1] and [2] are, literally, paradigms apart.

Regarding moral facts, car keys, and refrigerator doors:

Wrong.
Mistaken.
Incorrect.

Despite the irrational thought experiments of our Non-Theist friends, the ontological status of Man (literally) cannot exist in some pretend “metaphysical vacuum” wrt inescapable necessities pressing upon Reason as truth-finder amid the contours and essence of irreducible love verses irreducible indifference. And, also, and for all the same reasons, Man cannot exist in any such vacuum wrt Being Itself and therein wrt Goodness Itself verses – yet again – irreducible indifference.

Appealing to nuances of Occasionalism and other Non-Christian fictions cannot successfully fund such Non-Theistic absurdities in such irrational thought experiments. In fact, that our Non-Theist friends must create such anti-intellectual “metaphysical vacuums” just to get some small bit of traction only reveals how hopeless the attempt is.

Hume and Feser have it right: Given the toolbox of Non-Theism or, if it helps, on Non-Theism it is not irrational per se to desire the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of one’s finger given Non-Theism’s stopping point of evolutionary morality vis-à-vis the wad of non-rationally conditioned neuronal reflexes inside our skulls. “-Tis not contrary to reason to prefer….. ” In fact, it is not only that it *isn’t* irrational, but the state of affairs is so committed to its metaphysical terminus of explanation that it is also the case that Non-Theism cannot, even in principle, be irrational inside of that arena.

Factually speaking, on ought and on love’s irreducible – immutable – means and ends there is no such actuality and indeed can be no such actually as reason’s discovery . There is only desire’s invention which is itself begotten by the hands of indifference within those wads of non-rationally conditioned neuronal reflexes inside our skulls.

On Theism alone is it the case that the following statement is in fact factually wrong about Reason as truth-finder:

“-Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. -Tis not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. -Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than for the latter.” (Treatise of Human Nature 2.3.3.6).

BillT,

So, this shows you can make things up and that they’re true for the world you made up. Correct?

No. I made things up to illustrate the consequences of a principle.
I´ll go back to the example of Galileo – Galileo used a very famous thought experiment (I´m sure you´ve heard of it before) to show that Aristotle was wrong about gravity. The thought experiment involved two objects (which are connected by a rope) that are thrown off a tower. Now, it is completely irrelevant what those two objects are made out of – Galileo could have said that one is made out of fairy dust and the other made out of Dragonbone (with the latter being heavier than the former), and that those two materials are fictional is *completely irrelevant* for his conclusion.
You could not say “but Galileo assumed that fairy dust and dragonbone exists, but those materials don´t exist in our world!!” as a valid objection to Galileo´s thought experiment if he had phrased it that way. It doesn´t matter that those materials don´t exist in our world, Galileo´s conclusion would follow either way and would demonstrate that Aristotle was wrong either way. It is only about the underlying principles of the thought experiment and what does (and does not) logically follow from those principles.

Finally.

We have a straight answer.

Ontology doesn’t matter!

So far:

[1] Man is placed inside of unintelligible metaphysical vacuums so that the actual state of affairs remains untouched.

[2] Ontological status has no impact on the actual state of affairs.

Wow.

Irenicus,

The non-rational blood clot which damages a slice of the wad of non-rationally conditioned neuronal reflexes (brain) and thereby causes brain damage “ontologically equates to“, per your magical metaphysical vacuum, the “fact” that the patient isn’t actually wrong, mistaken, incorrect, etc., when he attempts to open the refrigerator with his car keys.

Moral Facts evade you — as final causes evade you — and hence your magic vacuum fails.

Stroke victims have moral feelings.

They may be different than yours.

But in your paradigm that is irrelevant.

We’re still left with this intellectual mess regarding Ought:

[1] Man is placed inside of unintelligible metaphysical vacuums so that the actual state of affairs remains untouched.

[2] Ontological status has no impact on the actual state of affairs.

Irenicus,

The stroke victim is not irrational — does not offend reason as truth finder — to desire the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of one’s finger.

Nor can any other human being, stroke or not, be irrational to so desire — on Non-Theism. In your paradigm there is no such thing as the morally unreasonable. The Self hears only the sound of her own voice — with no contradiction hitting her from the ocean of paradigmatic indifference constituting all motion.

You’ve yet to show otherwise.

Please ontologically locate for us your moral facts.

If you can.

If ontology matters — then please present us with said location.

Irenicus,

We know that metaphysics and ontology do not matter in your thought experiment’s magical vacuum.

But *you* are the one claiming that it *therefore* coheres with *reality* *outside* of said vacuum.

The ontological status does *not* matter in your vacuum.

We get that.

Therefore, *you* are the one claiming that in *reality* ontology and metaphysics don’t matter even *outside* of your magical vacuum.

Or do you mean for us *only* to apply it *inside* of your magical vacuum?

You are not being misquoted *unless* you mean for *reality* *outside* of said vacuum to be off the table / out of the discussion.

Tom asked you if the ontological status matters.

You said no.

In your vacuum.

Yeah. Sure. We get that.

It works in fairy tales.

But does it work *outside* of your magical vacuum *also*? If you say *yes* then you yourself are claiming that ontology wrt Man does *not* matter.

*If* that is the case, then you have this:

Pure epistemology. Zero ontology.

scbrownlhrm,

Tom asked you if the ontological status matters.

You said no.

That is as clear a violation of item #11 of the discussion policy here as any comment could be, and I´m just left to wonder how often you intend to continue to spit on the discussion policies of this place.

scbrownlhrm

For the fifth time:

Finally.

We have a straight answer.

Ontology doesn’t matter!

Where is that “straight answer”, and who gave it?

Also, for the third time, please have a look at the discussion policies of this forum, especially items #8 and #11:
https://www.thinkingchristian.net/posts/2007/12/discussion-policy/

And finally, do you have any intentions to apologize for this lie or do you rather intend to repeat it as often as possible?

Tom asked you if the ontological status matters.

You said no.

scbrownlhrm

For the sixth time:

Finally.

We have a straight answer.

Ontology doesn’t matter!

Where is that “straight answer”, and who gave it?

Also, for the fourth time, please have a look at the discussion policies of this forum, especially items #8 and #11:
https://www.thinkingchristian.net/posts/2007/12/discussion-policy/

And finally, you have now made clear that you don´t want to apologize for this lie here:

Tom asked you if the ontological status matters.

You said no.

– since you seem to identify as a Christian, that might be a good opportunity for you to get up to speed on what the Bible has to say about lying:
http://www.biblestudytools.com/topical-verses/lying-bible-verses/

scbrownlhrm,
scbrownlhrm

For the seventh time:

Finally.

We have a straight answer.

Ontology doesn’t matter!

Where is that “straight answer”, and who gave it? Since I have asked you six times before without you being able to produce this alleged “straight answer” and since you shamelessly repeat the same lie over and over again (see below) – it seems that you have been lying about this alleged “straight answer” as well.

Also, for the fifth time, please have a look at the discussion policies of this forum, especially items #8 and #11:
https://www.thinkingchristian.net/posts/2007/12/discussion-policy/

The lie you keep repeating:

Tom asked you if the ontological status matters.

You said no.

– this is unambiguously a lie.
I responded to “What matters is human’s ontological status. For this the question of origins is still vitally important. ” with “No, it isn´t” – it is impossible to miss that the “it” refers to “questions of origins” and not to “ontological status” because else, I would have a) stopped quoting Tom after “ontological status” before giving that answer and b) would have needed to write “No it DOES not” instead of “No, it IS not”.
Lying about me would be bad enough, not apologizing for the lie would be worse, and not apologizing AND just repeating the lie over and over again is downright despicable.

http://www.biblestudytools.com/topical-verses/lying-bible-verses/

scbrownlhrm

That is exactly the point I made. You are making the bizarre claim that ontology (origins, final causes, lack of teleology, etc….) isn’t relevant to current ontological status.

No, that wasn´t “exactly the point you made”, the “point” you did rather make was a complete lie as has been exhaustively documented above.
And the “point” you are now trying to make that “ontology isn´t relevant to current ontological status” is also something you made up and that doesn´t have anything to do with what I actually said (i.e. you try to substitute your old lie for a new lie). Although for this new lie, one could go with Hanlon’s razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”).

scbrownlhrm

Oh. So you are saying that [ontology], you know, origins, final causes, etc…, actually *DOES* impact current [ontological] status?

Not quite. The ontology of x does not “impact” the “ontological status of x”, it rather IS the ontological status of x – “ontology of x” and “ontological status of x” are perfectly synonymous.

Or are both of those lies?

No, one is a lie and the other was close to being correct but phrased in a very confused way.

Irenicus,

Great.

But it’s nonsense.

Because fundamentally different ontological sets of irreducible causations soaked through every bit of all effects of said causations do not, and cannot, yield identical ontologies. Effects cannot exist in a vacuum. If ontology matters, then you’ve a false identity claim as A = B is irreducibly false.

Tom,

But you are wrong. This was what I was wondering whether you could see:

2. If A and B have different etiologies it’s broadly logically possible that they could have different ontological statuses. Therefore the origins question is still vitally important.

That would also be true if they have the same etiology. The same etiology does not guarantee the same ontological status and different etiology does not guarantee different ontological status.

That humans were created by God in the image of God, and that therefore we are not exactly the same as the rest of the material world.

And if you change the “therefore” but everything else stays equal (i.e. – we are the same beings but the reasons for our existence are different), that would have no consequences for morality, and this is what I kept pointing out.

By the way, this isn’t an argument over evolution. Suppose humans evolved as organisms. They were still chosen specially by God to be carriers of his image: to become ontologically more than animals, to acquire a rational and spiritual nature, free will, moral worth and duties, etc.

And my thought experiment was intended to demonstrate that this is just as true if God would not have *chosen* this (the hypothetical God in my thought experiment did not choose the outcome of the evolutionary process that he set in motion) – all that matters is what we actually are, and not how we got to be that way.

Irenicus,

If you want to exclude fundamentally different causations in the two different paradigms, and thereby exclude the necessarily different effects of those (different) causations, then your A = B works. But if you don’t exclude causations / effects, then you’ve only a false identity claim.

It’s that simple.

Tom,

No, my point wasn’t, “the reasons for our existence are different.” My point was, “the nature of our existence is different because something in our history made it different.” We are of a different nature than the animals. This has consequences for morality.

And what that “something” is that made the “difference” is irrelevant, if you change that “something” but end up with the same “difference”, then there are no consequences for morality at all.

Your position, I think, is that if we all came from the same place/had the same kind of origins, that would have no impact on morality.

No. My position has been that our origins per se (!) are completely irrelevant for morality, all that matters for morality is what we are, not how we got to be that way.

This is a dispute over current ontology.

No, it wasn´t, at least not until now. It was a dispute over whether different origins entail different ontology, esp. differences wrt moral duties.
I claimed that it only matters (for morality) what we are, while how we got to be that way is irrelevant per se. BillT and you disagreed with me on that – and I tried to demonstrate (successfully IMO) that it indeed only matters what we are, while the question of our origins per se is not relevant.

I do know that you’d be a whole lot more interesting interlocutor if you would cut out the repeated accusations of lying (see 179).

scbrownlhrm repeatedly claimed that I said something which I never said, scbrownlhrm was informed that I never said it, was challenged to actually produce a quote of mine that supports his claim, and was unable to do so (despite being challenged many times to provide some support for his claim about what I allegedly said).
And despite that scbrownlhrm repeated the same false claim over and over again. I call this behaviour – repeating a claim that he knew to be false – “lying”. And you object to me calling scbrownlhrm a liar for repeating a claim that he knew to be false but you don´t object to scbrownlhrm´s behaviour. How am I supposed to interpret this other than assuming that lying is ok for you (at least when scbrownlhrm does it) but calling out a lie is not?

scbrownlhrm

If you change all definitions in all paradigms to equate to purely material…

I was about to challenge you to quote something from me where I actually said that, but since you do seem to enjoy Narrenfreiheit here, I´ll just let you continue tilting at windmills.

then A = B

Indeed:
“Because fundamentally different ontological sets of irreducible causations soaked through every bit of all effects of said causations do not, and cannot, yield identical ontologies. ” 😀

scbrownlhrm.

If so, please explain how [A = causations/effects] which are fundamentally (irreducibly) different than [B = causations/effects] gets you to A = B.

I already did. If a yeast cell synthesizes Hexokinase molecules through protein biosynthesis and a chemist synthesizes Hexokinase molecules through native chemical ligation and inserts them into the same yeast cell, then the resulting molecules are ontologically the same – despite being produced through completely different causes.

Tom,

The dispute you refer to arose in the context of a dispute over current ontology. See point 6 in the OP.

And right at the beginning of the ensuing conversation you asked me:
“I ask, can our actions as individuals be distinguished from the process that’s creating our descendants?”
– and the answer is, yes they can.

There is also a dispute over ontology, sure (not just between atheists and theists, there are also plenty of disputes between theists and theists or between atheists and atheists), but that wasn´t what >95% of the comment thread has been about.

Irenicus,

You’re still incoherent on two counts.

[1] / First:

You’re ignoring morality. That is what the thread is about. You offer us Yeast.

Well okay.

Let’s go with that.

It’s *your* analysis.

So far, on morality, Yeast and Man are equal.

[2] / Second:

The molecular structure is not equal in the two paradigms — that is to say — the ontological status of Yeast isn’t the same in the two paradigms *unless* you isolate that current molecular structure and put it in a vacuum free of all which precedes it and all which lay ahead of it and all causations *within* it (final causes in theism vs. indifference in non-theism).

So you are *still* saying that ontological status is *un*affected by ontology (origins, final causes, teleology, indifference, etc….).

Which is fine. If that is all you’ve set out to do.

Because you’ve not gotten any further than [1] and [2] here.

Irenicus,

This of mine:

“Because a make-believe vacuum free of ontology’s causes/effects is nonsense.”

…seems sloppy with “ontology’s causes….”

…..So it may be more proper if it is worded this way:

Because a make-believe vacuum free of ontological causes / effects is nonsense.

Etc….

Tom,

Let me know if this works, as it is my approach here:

It seems that the current ontological status of “X” is defined by three things:

[1] causations/effects leading to its current actualization (current state)

[2] causations/effects within it said X (final causes vs. indifference and so on are, right now, ongoing)

[3] causations/effects which lay up ahead of said X

We can get rid of [1] and [3], but we cannot get rid of [2] as [2] just is the current state of affairs (current ontological status).

Right now, here, this very second, Final Causes (etc.) on the one hand, or, Indifference (etc.) on the other hand, within every bit of “me” (etc.) absolutely and irreducibly impacts definition.

Irenicus,

Yes, and, right now, there is no chain of causation in AT Meta but for the chain. Don’t be fooled by the Final Causes. Note the “Etc.”

Why “Etc.”?

Because vacuums don’t exist.

You wish to slice out one link in the chain and call it quits.

So, again, you are diving into that vacuum.

That God exists as Goodness Himself impacts every link from A to Z.

Do you deny this?

If you do then you’re moving into a Non-Christian arena.

In which case it’s not obvious that you have anything of relevance to say on Christian claims about Ought.

@Irenicus:

You are unteachable.

Then maybe instead of cluttering the combox, do not even try to “teach him”? In fact, if I am not misremembering, didn’t you stated that you would not be responding to him again?

Of course, you are free to do what you want (within the bounds set by Tom), but responding to every one of his comments and at the same time complaining that it is impossible to respond to him, strikes me as a waste of time whose purpose can only be — well, I will leave the psychoanalyzing to more competent minds. But to each his own, I guess.

Irenicus,

And you seem to keep missing the obvious as far as I can tell.

You cannot expect the Christian to just dance to your inventions.

Let’s try again:

A-Meta is not the whole of Christian metaphysics. Did you forget that?

Did you forget about the T in A-T?

Did you also forget about the “God” of Christianity vis-a-vis Being Itself?

You surely do NOT want A and T to be void of “God”/Being Itself…..correct?

[A] Please explain to us your claim that Being Itself has *no*, *nada* perpetually ongoing impact on any and all [Current Ontological Status]’s.

That *is* your claim because you are telling us that A and B are under *identical* “ontic-environments”, as it were.

Please defend THAT.

[B] If [A] is *not* your claim, then please explain how God *is* impacting, right now, this very second, my status as a moral being and every bit of my reality and yet *not* making (thereby) all my interior and exterior interfaces ontologically different than should there be No-God.

It’s either [A] or [B] and you’ve not yet coherently defended *either*.

Natural theology and “pointed-ness” does not (and cannot) exist in a vacuum.

No. I made things up to illustrate the consequences of a principle.

Irenicus,

Just so you know that it’s not lost on me, or anyone else that is paying attention, that this “reply” and your tedious, repetitive and unnecessary explanation of thought experiments, failed to address the any of the substantive questions and clarifications I asked in my post #152.

BillT,

Just so you know that it’s not lost on me, or anyone else that is paying attention, that this “reply” and your tedious, repetitive and unnecessary explanation of thought experiments, failed to address the any of the substantive questions and clarifications I asked in my post #152.

No. My “tedious, repetitive and unnecessary” explanations did address your questions – they already did so before you asked them because I did explain this already before you asked those questions.

Your questions were:

Don’t you see that the only thing that makes the two groups “not differ in that respect” is that you “said that the two groups of beings would not differ in that respect”. That’s it. Because you claim they aren’t different in that respect therefore they necessarily are?

Yes, they necessarily are not different because that´s how they were *defined*. You could say that you don´t believe such a situation to be possible in fact, but that would be beside the point and would not affect the conclusion that follows from the thought experiment – the conclusion does not depend on the situation being possible in the real world.

So, if we restate your position based on your thought experiment, (and using your words hopefully within your intent) we will “have the *same* rational, emotional and moral faculties (and so on, and so forth)” no matter what were “the (hypothetical) different ways for how we got to be what we are” because you said so. Fair? So, this shows you can make things up and that they’re true for the world you made up. Correct?

Yes.

If I’m reading this too narrowly, please explain how your thought experiment shows that to be true for any world (or God) not of your own invention.

It doesn´t show that, it wasn´t intended to show that (and I have said so many, MANY times already…), and that is completely irrelevant for the conclusion that follows from it.

Those questions you asked were completely superfluous, I have made all of that clear before with my “tedious, repetitive and unnecessary” explanations – I have no idea why you don´t get it, but you certainly don´t make any efforts to try to understand them, else you would have addressed one of those explanations and asked for a clarification about them, instead of just repeating the same questions over and over again as if I never addressed them before.

What I am going to say is probably completely out of line, and for that anticipated apologies. But Irenicus has much the same kind of Voice and manerisms that a commenter at Shadow to Light, who named himself “Andy”, have. You can see his, Andy’s that is, performance here, here and here. Whatever faults I personally had in one of the conversations (and I definitely do share in the blame), the fact is that commenter Andy managed to rile up everyone and eventually got himself banned. You can make the judgment for yourselves anyway, if you have the stomach for it. At any rate, this same path seems to be what Irenicus is going down — I for one, for whatever is worth (yeah, I know, not much), have already given up.

Note I am not saying Irenicus is Andy, just that they share a lot of traits, including a rather similar Voice, which lends credibility to the concern that the end will be similar. If memory serves me right, Andy was also banned from this blog, and it strikes as pretty pitiful and pathetic that anyone would return to a blog he has been banned from under another name.

G. Rodrigues

Note I am not saying Irenicus is Andy, just that they share a lot of traits, including a rather similar Voice, which lends credibility to the concern that the end will be similar. If memory serves me right, Andy was also banned from this blog, and it strikes as pretty pitiful and pathetic that anyone would return to a blog he has been banned from under another name.

And how are you not saying here “I´m not saying that Irenicus is Andy, but he is Andy and it strikes me as pitiful that he´d return to a blog that he has been banned from under another name?”

But just out of curiosity I just searched for:
“Andy site:thinkingchristian.net/ ”
– I didn´t immediately find where Andy was banned, but what was immediately apparent is that Andy found scbrownlhrm obnoxious for the exact same reasons that I do.

And just to check if that´s just us or a general pattern, I also searched:
“scbrownlhrm site:thinkingchristian.net/ ”
– and, lo and behold, he seems to irritate pretty much everyone, including theist commenters, the very first hit I found was this gem from BillT:
“The above post is 1,677 words long. It is simply outrageous that after all of the comments by Tom about the style, content and excessive length of your posts that you would post a tome like this. It’s an outright slap in the face to Tom and quite insulting to the rest of us as well.

Are you really so self absorbed and clueless that you can not figure out not only how worthless a post like this is but how utterly disruptive to this blog and the flow of the dialogue here. Yes, scbrownlhrm we are all so privileged to have such a monumental intellectual talent like you here that we are all going to just stop posting and admire your great erudition and ability to post endless nonsense.”
– I couldn´t have said it better (although I´m much less bothered by scbrownlhrm´s excessive verbosity than I am by his insistence on using idiosyncracies that transgress the line to gibberish more often than not)

scbrownlhrm

As noted, your point about “right now, this second, in Man” in evolutionary means arriving “here” is appreciated

You do know the purpose of quotation marks, do you? Hint: I never said the words “right now, this second, in Man” and what you are addressing is not my “point” – you are tilting at windmills.

Interestingly, Non-Theists faithfully affirm the all-encompassing metaphysical landscape of Genesis and they do so both when observing nature’s unmistakable straining along that incline towards E Pluribus Unum from the ground up through eons of Privation (Evil) within Tooth and Claw, and they do so when observing the schizophrenic array of causations within that same Privatized Good through those same eons. Their thoroughness in describing such a painful mess is uncanny as they affirm Christianity’s metaphysical landscape.

I think my favorite part in that word salad is how “Privation (EVIL) within Tooth and Claw” (note the beautiful random capitalization) morphs immediately into “that same Privatized GOOD” – everyone can write gibberish, but writing something that is 80% gibberish and 20% self-refuting takes skill.

G. Rodrigues

Then it means I am indeed misremembering and Andy was not banned.

Not necessarily. I just clicked on the first two links out of many and didn´t read the entire threads (the ones I clicked on were both huge – much larger than this thread right here).

@Irenicus:

and it strikes me as pitiful that he´d return to a blog that he has been banned from under another name?

Since the point was not clear too you, I will quote the whole paragraph again:

Note I am not saying Irenicus is Andy, just that they share a lot of traits, including a rather similar Voice, which lends credibility to the concern that the end will be similar. If memory serves me right, Andy was also banned from this blog, and it strikes as pretty pitiful and pathetic that anyone would return to a blog he has been banned from under another name.

and explain the reason for the insertion:

(1) it is “pretty pitiful and pathetic that anyone would return to a blog he has been banned from under another name.”

(2) Therefore this is not something most persons would do.

(3) Irenicus is a person.

(4) Therefore, and barring some good reason, this is not something one would expect Irenicus to do.

(5) Therefore this is reason to believe Irenicus is not Andy.

Irenicus,

Privation.

It’s well worn territory. Common terms and all that.

What is Privatized? Well, Good of course.

You didn’t know that?

scbrownlhrm

What is Privatized? Well, Good of course.

You didn’t know that?

A privatized “Good” would be a “Good” that is removed from government control and placed it in private control or ownership, because “privatized” is the verb of “privatization” not of “privation”.
And while “privation of the good (i.e. evil)” would make sense, your “privation (evil)” doesn´t, and it makes even less sense to contrast it to a “privatized (sic) good”.
I know that you can communicate in simple english in a manner that is actually grammatically correct, coherent and intelligible, because you have done so in a few comments – so I´ll point out that your pretentious gibberish in recent comments is again something you do on purpose and not due to an inability to communicate.

Irenicus,

When Man rapes, such “motion” houses “causes” of Good and Evil. Evil being a privation of Good. So too in *any* evil, such as in Tooth and Claw (if that is in fact evil, broken, off, messy, etc…).

[Occasionalism isn’t Christianity’s metaphysical geography]

@Irenicus:

Oh, you have given reasons – according to you, I have “much the same kind of Voice and manerisms”, and “Andy managed to rile up everyone and eventually got himself banned” which is “the same path seems to be what Irenicus is going down”.

No I did not, because I never said or implied that that was something I expected *Andy* himself would do — meaning, returning to a blog he has been banned from under a different name. He may have the “faults” (to put it that way) you quote me saying, but it does not thereby mean he is, or would turn out to be, “pitiful and pathetic” in the ways I mentioned.

Neither did I ever said anywhere that you have offended me — you have not, just in case the doubt hovers your mind. What I did say is that “I have little patience for your *misunderstandings* and *inability to read*” (emphasis added), and since “this will be going nowhere”, this being the discussion, “peace and God bless you.” Peace and God bless you.

Tom,

Certainly.

Irenicus,

One:

I raise the issue of the evolutionary schema and Tooth and Claw to bring your point of unguided evolutionary processes (and causation therein) up against yet a another method whereby any such “building Man from the dirt” (notice the use of “…”) schema coheres with Christianity’s metaphysical claims on Man. If Tooth and Claw emerge as housing Evil, well then we have by definition Privation’s pains as both Good and Evil are found “causing” events. Therefore, the current ontological status is, again, found to have causes *within* Man which are fundamentally (and irreducibly) *different* than the No-God status.

So there is that.

Two:

Then there is the problem of an artificial “vacuum” as discussed earlier. Causes INSIDE and causes OUTSIDE the Man constitute a *singular* reality. Final causes here become inescapable.

Three:

Then there is the problem of inherent intentionality (irreducible intention) wrt causation and Mind, which again brings an unavoidably different ontological status *within* Man wrt the No-God paradigm.

A = B seems to fail on many levels. At leat in the real world.

Tom is willing to “grant” that (false) identity claim, though. Even with said grant, objective morality will evade your paradigm’s “means”.

Irenicus,

I use the term Good and Evil and Occasioinalism with respect to causation in their usual sense. Evil in Man, when Man rapes, is not God’s Finger Pushing Man (so to speak). Evil here houses causes as per the deficiency of good (etc.). I thought you would understand the unspoken there. Or do you think Evil is God’s Finger? Or what? Scratch that — I know you know. But your perpetual evasion of actually answering questions is tedious.

Care to address #236?

As for argumentation, if you can prove philosophical naturalism — well then we would be even as far as an X being harder to prove than to employ.

scbrownlhrm,

If Tooth and Claw emerge as housing Evil, well then we have by definition Privation’s pains as both Good and Evil are found “causing” events.

No. If you assume a privation theory of evil, then there is no evil that could cause any event – evil would be a non-entity, an “insubstantial” thing (i.e. something that literally has no substance), it literally wouldn´t exist and the word just signifies only the absence of good, but NOT the presence of evil (because, again, “evil” as a non-entity can´t be “present” in anything).

So, if we restate your position based on your thought experiment, (and using your words hopefully within your intent) we will “have the *same* rational, emotional and moral faculties (and so on, and so forth)” no matter what were “the (hypothetical) different ways for how we got to be what we are” because you said so. Fair? So, this shows you can make things up and that they’re true for the world you made up. Correct?

Yes.

And this, Irenicus, is why what you posted isn’t a thought experiment just like I’ve been saying. All that what you posted shows is that you can make things up and that they’re true for the world you made up. That’s not a thought experiment. A thought experiment challenges your readers to provide an answer to a theoretical/hypothetical position to illustrate a point, not just declare a theoretical/hypothetical position is true because you made it up.

Here’s an example of one for you on the current topic of morality :

If you’re correct and there is no God, can you tell me why it’s wrong for me to torture children for my own personal pleasure?

Tom,

Irenicus, I’m not sure BillT’s criticism of your thought experiment is entirely on track, but I think what he’s getting at is that it goes nowhere in the real world.

I know that this is what he is getting at, but as I pointed out time and again – I´m not even trying to argue that the real world is anything like the world assumed in the thought experiment, it is only about what would (or would not) follow from the assumption that we were or were not created intentionally by God.

Which takes us nowhere.

Not quite. It does show that the question of origins per se is morally irrelevant (and that is something we (BillT and you on the one side vs me on the other) did not agree on originally), what is morally relevant is only what we are and not how we got to be what we are.

We need instead to focus on the present question of whether we are in God’s image or whether we are strictly natural organisms.

That is both a false dichotomy (because atheism doesn´t presuppose naturalism) and also too vague. We talked about what exactly “God´s image” means before and from the exchanges so far, I see no reason to assume that “God´s image” in fact necessarily depends on there actually being a God.
You say “To be image-bearers means we share some of God’s qualities, including rationality and moral knowledge and responsibility” – and I´m not going to grant that rationality and moral knowledge + duties (i.e. “God´s image”) are divine qualities unless you can successfully demonstrate that they indeed are necessarily divine qualities.

And I already explained to you in great detail what I have done instead – but you don´t get it and you have never made any efforts to understand it at all, you never even addressed those explanations…

Irenicus, you’re wrong about that and why your wrong about that is what Tom stated below.

I say that because you insist on them being identical in every way except their origins. So they’re either identical in bearing God’s image or else they’re identical as naturalistic organisms.

Which takes us nowhere.

This has been the point of my responses to your “thought experiment” (And yes, the “” are deserved). Your argument doesn’t take us anywhere. It neither proves or bolsters your point or disproves or challenges ours or even posits something interesting worth further discussion. It, by your own admission:

…shows you can make things up and that they’re true for the world you made up. Correct?

Yes.

Then, in contradiction to the above you claim:

It does show that the question of origins per se is morally irrelevant…., what is morally relevant is only what we are and not how we got to be what we are.

No, it doesn’t. It only shows that to be true, as you admit, for the world you made up. Which as Tom so succinctly put, “takes us nowhere”. Origins matter if origins matter. If they don’t matter then they don’t and you’re right but you’ve done nothing to show that to be true beyond your made up world.

This is no different a conclusion than Tom reaches when he says: “Again, origins play into it importantly, but it’s perfectly possible to bracket that and talk about present realities. Are we just naturalistic? Or are we more than that” Sure, you can “bracket that” in term of a discussion but that doesn’t mean that origins aren’t significant or even a requisite for present realities.

You assert that “I´m not going to grant that rationality and moral knowledge + duties (i.e. “God´s image”) are divine qualities”. This is an unsupported assertion. We can and have explained how our metaphysical connectedness with God and each other can account for those divine qualities. You haven’t explained why that isn’t true or where that explanation lacks logic or consistency or what else could account for it. The ball is still in your court.

[1] No replies to #236 (#241 implied) and the unavoidable differences in current ontological status wrt irreducibly and irreconcilably different causations. Instead there is a sort of pretending that causations cannot be evil (deficient in good) and fussing (#241 etc.) over that bit of semantics “as-if” evil causations cannot exist (Good Minus Some-Thing) and simply staling rather than answering questions of an obvious nature (we’re granting that #241 was (is) known and understood by our Non-Theist friend, hence the descriptions of staling and evading).

[2] No reply to Bill.T’s question as to WHY it is wrong (ought not) to do so and so. Instead: more evasion of more questions which threaten the false identity claim that A’s current ontic-status is identical to B’s current ontic-status.

[3] Making up pretend paradigms out of false identity claims and just foisting that [1] & [2] dissolve thereby when clearly both 1 and 2 cannot even in principle dissolve given the nature of irreconcilably different causations within Man A vs. Man B.

[4] Making up pretend paradigms out of false identity claims and just foisting that inherent intentionality (Intentionality – Full Stop) magically exists parasitically upon non-rational and intention-less causation.

[5] Making the bizarre and unjustified claim that inherent intentionality (Intentionality – Full Stop) is both ontologically present in the pretend paradigm of [4] and **yet said full-stop is contrary to logic.

**There seems to be no way out of self-negation for the Non-Theist. If inherent intentionality (Intentionality – Full Stop) is denied in order to refute the analysis in [5], the whole discussion changes as delusion steadily makes its way out of Pandora’s Box and we discover….. bit by painful bit as we push causation one step back…. …and back…. …and back…. the chiseling away of the rational and mind’s elimination (never mind the entirety of the first person reality). Whereas: If it (Intentionality – Full Stop) is claimed as being ontologically present in the materialist’s project in order to defend the pretend paradigm mentioned in [4], then the bit-by-bit reductio ad absurdum inside of [5] ***stands.

***We need not be surprised given that making up pretend paradigms, not answering questions which demand coherence, evading costly questions, and a lack of lucidity from point A to point B to point C seem to comprise this rather unique method of argumentation.

scbrownlhrm,

I see you have chosen to resort to pretentious word salad yet again.
Well, BillT said it best:
“Are you really so self absorbed and clueless that you can not figure out not only how worthless a post like this is but how utterly disruptive to this blog and the flow of the dialogue here. Yes, scbrownlhrm we are all so privileged to have such a monumental intellectual talent like you here that we are all going to just stop posting and admire your great erudition and ability to post endless nonsense.”

scbrownlhrm

On Christianity, interior causation within us, right now, houses “Inherent Intentionality — Full Stop”, such being the absolute ground of reality itself. On Christianity.

So the absolute ground of reality itself is “Inherent Intentionality” (love the random capitalization by the way) that is “housed” in the “interior causation” within us, on Christianity?
Cute. Could I have some fries with that word salad?

Seriously though, this sounds like what you would get if you´d throw a David Bentley Hart book in a paper shredder, select some random paper strips, and string them together.

Irenicus

*WHY*, on your own terms, is it morally wrong to do this or that Action-X?

Tom,

On the immaterial, on the Imago Dei, we find (at least in the Christian paradigm) along side of Mind, Rationality, Intellect, and Intentionality the same terminus of explanation when it comes to love. Obviously in and by and through Trinity we find love’s necessary interfaces transposing into Man, into the Imago Dei. I only mention this addition as the topic (overall) here is ought/morality, which includes reason as truth-finder, and intellect, and so on, but also necessitates yet one thing more: love. Which is simply to say that “metaphysically coherent” morality necessitates that which is not “metaphysically eliminate-able“, which carries us into the immutable love of the Necessary Being and in particular, even necessarily, into the (inherently) volitional processions within Trinity. There, and nowhere else, can we characterize (properly) the Imago Dei.

BillT

I made my peace with scb a long time ago and admire what he brings here.

1. And how exactly has “what he brings here” between then and now changed?
2. Lets take one of those things you admire:
““And yet love’s interior is constituted of Self/Other is it not? And love’s fruition sums in begetting Unicity does not it? And unicity begotten (which is love’s fruition) constitutes the singularity of Us does it not? Perfect reciprocity. ”
– and now I´d like to ask you to explain in your own words what a “singularity of Us” is, what “love´s fruition” and “unicity begotten” are and how the two relate to each other.
If you cannot do that, would I be justified in concluding that complete gibberish was an aquired taste for you – you didn´t like it before but scbrownlhrm´s endless repetition eventually caused you to like it?

It’s more than a little rude to have you use my words when you don’t even have the courtesy to reply to my posts.

Afaict, I did reply to all of your posts.

Irenicus,

You seem ignorant of the concept of “E Pluribus Unum” when it comes to, not evolutionary morality’s arbitrary movement towards “cooperation”, but to one of the stand-alone beauties of the Triune God which presents the nature of yet one more “metaphysically” irreducible path to a true unicity in the ontology of love.

You quoted this: And yet love’s interior is constituted of Self/Other is it not? And love’s fruition sums in begetting Unicity does not it? And unicity begotten (which is love’s fruition) constitutes the singularity of Us does it not? Perfect reciprocity.

I asked you then, and you didn’t answer. So I’ll ask you again:

On Christianity and even in our own marriages (etc…), as anyone who has loved will speak of,

[1] Is love’s interior constituted of Self/Other? You know, I/You? Or is it all JUST “I”? Or is it all JUST “You”? Are there “actual” personal interfaces within love?

Well?

[2] Does love’s fruition sum to unicity? (Unicity: the fact of being or consisting of one, or of being united as a whole). Is oneness in the Christian paradigm (Vine/Branch, Trinity, Etc.) or not? Is love in our own human experience comprised of any sense of being one with our own child, our own spouse? You can be assured that there are libraries full of tomes testifying of such in the human experience of love.

Well?

[3] Unicity begotten (which is love’s fruition) constitutes the singularity of Us does it not? Does love’s fruition sum to unicity? (Unicity: the fact of being or consisting of one, or of being united as a whole). Is oneness in the Christian paradigm (Vine/Branch, Trinity, Etc.) or not? Is love in our own human experience comprised of any sense of being one with our own child, our own spouse? You can be assured that there are libraries full of tomes testifying of such in the human experience of love.

Well?

[4] Perfect reciprocity. In the Triune God we find all of these interfaces void of imperfection within the timeless and ceaseless reciprocity which we find in the “simplicity” of “singularity” that is Trinity. Do you refute that such is housed in the Christian paradigm? Do you refute that “E Pluribus Unum” in the *human* sense is reaching for, aiming towards, the teleos of literal perfection? Or is just a temporary illusion vis-a-vis evolution’s non-rational and intention-less causations forcing us to chase after a “Goal” which can never be actualized?

Well?

[5] *WHY*, on your own terms, is it wrong to do this or that “Action-X”?

Well?

Irenicus,

Since you are the one claiming that there is no difference in the current ontological status (Tom seems to be “granting” it…?) inside of Man-A (Non-Theism’s paradigm) and inside of Man-B (the Imago Dei….), it may be helpful for us if you tell us what you think love actually is, ontologically speaking. That may give us insight into where you’re going wrong on the ontology of morality (which just is the ontology of love) as it relates to the “current status” of things inside of Man-A and inside of Man-B. Obviously the ontology of love is in addition to the problem of inherent vs. as-if intentionality (#261) although the two do have some degree of overlap. But they are not exactly identical, so bisecting the current ontological status of Man along those two lines is justified.

Also, after you tell us what your paradigm claims love is (ontologically speaking) please tell us *WHY*, on your own terms, it is morally wrong to do this or that “Action-X”.

Irenicus,

Bill T. stated this:

“As part of God’s creation we are all linked together metaphysically, spiritually in a deeply human way. We are cut from the same cloth, part of the same fabric.” (Bill T.)

Now, the “unicity” and “oneness” and (whole) love and etc. and etc. all along here so far includes, in part at least, that critical element which Bill T draws out. There’s more, but, that slice of the pie is inescapably grounded in something and therefore provides, funds, something which the Non-Theistic paradigm can neither provide nor fund.

As one would expect, Bill T. and I are converging as we explore the Non-Theistic paradigm and moral ontology.

And in neither case have you shown where your accounting provides now, or ever, (ontologically) the same current status.

And then, this God directly creates some more beings that he designs to be indistinguishable from the ones that were created by the evolutionary process that worked completely autonomously from him. You say that there must be different moral duties for those two groups of beings, and I challenge you again to point out which differences there would be and what the basis for those differences is.

And if you cannot do that, then your claim that “different creation story => different moral duties” is evidently false, the moral duties would rather remain the same either way.

Irenicus,

You posted this in your #124 and it seems you think I haven’t addressed it or that it shows that “different creation story => different moral duties” is false. But I addressed that in my #99 where I responded to your and Mr. Campbell’s scenieros. You and Mr. Cambell both miss the point that the “evolutionary process that worked completely autonomously from him.” is still part of his creation. You haven’t described two different creation stories. (Which I said in my #99) Beings created by God even in a evolutionary process that worked completely autonomously from him and beings created by special creation or who had some added Adamic status are still part of the same creation process. God’s creation process.

As far as the question of the power of his omnipotence your reasoning is flawed. You say “if he cannot create a system with true randomness and true autonomy from himself, there is an obvious deficiency in his powers and he thus could not be all-powerful.” But it’s the opposite that must be true. God cannot both create and not be part of that creation. If he creates a system it’s his system. Every part of it and every result that comes from it. It would not logically be within the power of an omnipotent God to not be part of that he created. That’s what it means to create. What you are suggesting is that he both create something and then it exist as if he did not create it. That’s not logically possible. It must be one thing, his creation, or the other, not his creation. It can’t be both.

Truly different creation stories are, as I described, ones either with or without God. Those would necessarily create your “different creation story => different moral duties”.

JAD,

Astute observation. It comes through in other ways too. For example, in mentioning causations in evil (evil causations), the obvious un-spoken there is good-minus-some-thing such that Rape *has* causations in it and such are in fact *evil*. Now whether or not one holds to privation such is the case (unless one is a Non-Theist, in which case useful fictions emerge). But the problem you allude to presents (there) as a sort of dance, a sort of work-around and never really getting to the point as it floats in subtle oceans of accusations and/or harping on a non-issue such as the issue of Rape and Causation (in this thread earlier).

Even still (in this thread) no real response about causations has been forthcoming. Of course *that* is not confrontational — it’s just evasion pure and simple.

The proverbial “Kumbaya” is obviously not really the work-flow in blogs expressly intended to hash out disagreement. Being confrontational with respect to ideas and truth claims about Man, God, Nature, and Reality, and Etc., is precisely the point here, whereas, curse-words and dances aren’t the intended goal.

Your points are enjoyable and helpful and I’m careful to read them when I see them show up. Same goes for Bill T BTW 🙂

BilLT,

Only in the same imaginary world where you think your “thought experiment” actually proved something to be true outside of that imaginary world.

You are being deliberately obtuse. It is not very hard to understand what a thought experiment is about – but you do your very best to deliberately misunderstand it.

You haven’t described two different creation stories. (Which I said in my #99) Beings created by God even in a evolutionary process that worked completely autonomously from him and beings created by special creation or who had some added Adamic status are still part of the same creation process. God’s creation process.

In other words: whether we are the product of unguided evolution or not is completely irrelevant – which is precisely what I aimed to demonstrate and did demonstrate.

Non-Theists like to redefine paradigmatic terms and they also like to change necessary and primordial datum, and, then, by doing so, set up an entirely Non-Christian paradigm, call it the Christian paradigm, and then go about establishing premises atop their newly invented and Non-Christian edifice. Then, they like to go about tearing it down and/or drawing conclusions from their newly invented edifice and its premises.

Such is far easier than dealing with Christianity’s actual truth-claims.

scbrownlhrm

I see that you are still trying to impress people with pretentious gibberish.

Non-Theists like to redefine paradigmatic terms and they also like to change necessary and primordial datum…

Hint: it would be either “*a* necessary and primordial datum” or “necessary and primordial datum*s*”.
Hint 2: Using words and phrases that you obviously don´t understand and can´t even use in a grammatically correct way makes you look unbelievably foolish.

scbrownlhrm

Given your nonsensical edifice of late…

A “nonsensical edifice” is close to being an oxymoron because “edifice” suggests complexity, elaboration and internal consistency:
“The meaning of edifice has expanded to include a system of ideas––when it is complicated enough to be considered to have walls and a roof, then it is an edifice. You could say that basic facts of addition and subtraction are the foundation on which the edifice of higher math rests.” (source: vocabulary.com)
A “nonsensical edifice” is thus at best a very poor choice of words and at worst an oxymoron.
As I told you time and again, simple english is your friend.

scbrownlhrm

There is no necessary “inherent internal consistency” there.

The meaning of edifice you have in mind invokes a metaphor – an elaborate and impressive building as a metaphor for a system of ideas. If the belief system is nonsensical, the metaphor falls flat because the “building” wouldn´t have a foundation to stand on.
And that is why a “nonsensical edifice” is at best a very poor choice of words and at worst an oxymoron.

scbrownlhrm,
by all means, continue to make a fool out of yourself.

scbrownlhrm

“Capitalism is inherently coherent.”

That’s a claim one can argue in favor of.

‘Thats’ also a claim one can argue against.

And that´s also a claim that has literally nothing whatsoever to do with why your choice of words “nonsensical edifice” was either a very poor one, or an oxymoron.

[Thats/That’s] is for your peculiar and off-topic agenda.

Your choice to express yourself in an incredibly pretentious, verbose and more often than not flat out garbled way, is pretty much the only topic that one can talk about with you – to talk about something else, you´d first need to start writing something intelligible.

scbrownlhrm,

So you are claiming that the edifice of capitalism is internally and / or inherently coherent?

No. What I rather pointed out is that if capitalism would indeed be “nonsensical”, it would make no sense to call it an “edifice” – that would be either a very poor choice of words (at best) or an oxymoron (at worst).
What is so hard to understand about that for you?

scbrownlhrm,

So you ARE claiming that the edifice of capitalism is, by definition, internally and / or inherently coherent….

No. What I rather pointed out is that if capitalism would indeed be “nonsensical”, it would make no sense to call it an “edifice” – that would be either a very poor choice of words (at best) or an oxymoron (at worst).
What is so hard to understand about that for you?

scwhatever

The complex system of beliefs that is the edifice of Christianity is, then, quite full of sense such that one cannot claim otherwise, such that one cannot employ the word ‘nonsence’ with respect to Christianity.

Of course one can. But one would use a very poor choice of words (at best) or an oxymoron (at worst) by talking about the “nonsensical edifice” of Christianity.
Again, what is so hard to understand about that for you?

scwhatever,

Your move to conflate the term [complex] for the phrase [full of sense] such that the combination of terms [“nonsense/edifice”] is by definition a near oxymoron is a move which…

…I didn´t resort to. I´ve explained to you at length what the actual reason is for why a “nonsensical edifice” is either a very poor choice of words (at best) or an oxymoron (at worst), and you keep ignoring it and instead proceed to burn the same stupid straw man over and over and over and over again. In other words, you are being deliberately obtuse.

scbrownlhrm

If the term “Non-Theism” troubles you, simply change it to something else, like, say, “We are almost certain that God does not exist”.

Random sentence is random.

Your move to conflate the term [complex] for the phrase [full of sense]…

…is still a move I didn´t resort to. I´ve explained to you at length what the actual reason is for why a “nonsensical edifice” is either a very poor choice of words (at best) or an oxymoron (at worst), and you keep ignoring it and instead proceed to burn the same stupid straw man over and over and over and over again. In other words, you are being deliberately obtuse.

scwhatever,

If you prefer other settings and other definitions where word complex must actually mean full of sense…

Still being deliberately obtuse I see.

The topic at hand being, of course, that it’s apparent that your Non-Christian edifice is quite an intricate system of beliefs and, also, it is a system of beliefs that is quite lacking in sense given that it means to draw conclusions (from a Non-Christian X) about what the Christian paradigm does and does not say about a specific topic.

Absolutely. Just like you need to be a Marxist in order to sensibly make any statements about what Marxism says about a specific topic.
You might want to think that through again.

scbrownlhrm

If you want to assert that Non-Christian premises and truth claims sensibly explain what Christian premises and truth claims state about a topic, and thereby equate the two…

And why exactly should I have any interest in trying to equate anything here?

We’re I´m merely…

Fixed it for you.

…pointing out that the substrate (your substrate) which you equate to Christian substrate…

I never did any such thing.

That is why your thought experiment is failing to inform us of anything which Christianity claims…

My thought experiment doesn´t give a rat´s rectum about what Christianity claims, it is about which conclusions do and do not follow from a specific premise, 100% independent of whether any Christian makes that premise or not.

Given that we all experience complex systems of beliefs (edifices) which, over time, perhaps even centuries, turn out to be quite lacking in sense, why do you claim…

Here´s a useful heuristic for you: if you think that someone else claimed x, you can be very sure that said someone never claimed x or anything even remotely resembling x. That heuristic is useful for you because your track record so far has been that whenever you talked about me claiming x, x was invariably not something that I have claimed or even just similar to something I claimed, but rather completely your own fabrication – that´s why you are so busy tilting at windmills.

Irenicus,

My thought experiment doesn´t give a rat´s rectum about what Christianity claims, it is about which conclusions do and do not follow from a specific premise, 100% independent of whether any Christian makes that premise or not.

Well, that seems to bring us around full circle. Everything you’ve built up in your edifice is clearly irrelevant to the topic at hand given that nothing in your edifice has anything to do with Christianity’s claims and premises and therefore your claim of….

Whether we are the product of unguided evolution or not is completely irrelevant – which is precisely what I aimed to demonstrate and did demonstrate…

is entirely vacuous given that we find entirely different conclusions and observations when looked at through the Christian paradigm’s lens versus when looked at through any Non-Theistic (and in particular Non-Christian) paradigm’s lens.

Some lenses give us a far more exhaustive picture of reality than others. Some lenses give us far more observations than others.

Of significance given the topic of moral means and ends:

The Christian paradigm is unique in that it finds — in Trinity — the (borrowing from P. Alawonde) “absolute concept” (Being) to necessarily or irreducibly house “love’s ceaseless reciprocity“. Trinity finds, or reveals, in God interfaces among “Self-Other” in what constitutes love’s “ceaseless reciprocity” and it finds that not in any mutable and contingent status but rather in nothing less than the Necessary Being.

Morality begins and ends in love.

That is a “metaphysical claim” which the Christian genre alone finds implicitly and explicitly in the very ground of all being, ours included.

That The Good is objectively true, non-arbitrary, non-contingent (necessary etc.), and immutable is not a premise which requires Man’s perception to be infallible. Rather, it requires that The Good is reality’s “rock bottom” and that it is that which is discoverable along the way as opposed to invented along the way. It also requires something very different than an infinite regress of mutable and contingent “Perception / Meaning-Maker” interfaces. Rather, it requires an interface with something that is immutable, timeless, ceaseless, and necessary.

Reason, logic, and conveyed meanings all begin to converge here within our world soaked through with Good and Good-Minus-Some-Thing (Good and Evil) in our own discovery of love’s reciprocity amid our own personal interfaces (Self/Other) and also as we discover those same interfaces within Trinity (the Christian’s triune God).

That is why Scripture’s claim that God is love is not a reference to mutable and contingent [feelings / goals / consequences] inside of mutable and contingent creatures (Man) but, rather, such is Scripture’s claim that Ultimate Reality (which is not Man) is love which is Scripture’s claim that Man’s true good, Man’s final felicity, is love — is the Triune God.

scbrownlhrm

[A] You take the phrase “completely independent from God” (where Man’s origins are concerned and/or where evolution is concerned) to mean something which Bill T, myself, and Tom do not mean and in fact cannot mean given the casual paradigm of Christianity (etc.)

Hint: Quotation marks are used for *quotes*, not for your rephrasing of what someone else has said.
And I have already addressed this point. Twice.
Do you believe that all decisions you make are pre-determined by God – yes or no? If you do not believe that, then your conception of “God” actually is perfectly compatible with “unguided evolution” – because there is conceptually no difference between you making a “free” decision in the sense that God does not determine the outcome of your choice, and changes within a population of darwinian replicators happening without God determining which changes will happen. And if neither God, nor any other sentient being, determines which changes happen in evolutionary trajectories – then evolution is “unguided”.
You cannot rationally maintain that God exists and a) we have libertarian free will but b) evolution cannot, not even in principle, be “unguided” – either a AND b are possible in a Universe where God exists, or neither a NOR b are possible.

[2] Humanity experiences complex systems of beliefs (edifices) which, over time, perhaps even centuries, turn out to be quite lacking in sense. Therefore, the phrase “nonsensical edifice” not only has common English on its side, but also large swaths of humanity’s history.

You are still being deliberately obtuse.

[1] Occasionalism is a fallacy where causation and God are concerned.

[2] When it comes to God, causality, and Man’s volition it is important to distinguish (properly) between concurrentism, occasionalism, and conservationism and also between the (different) ontological commitments vis-à-vis Causality, Pantheism, and Deism in order to maintain precision.

[3] The claim or thought experiment which includes the idea that Man is in some sense isolated from, untouched by, un-defined by, ultimately un-defined by, independent from, and so on, that which is the ground of all being — namely immutable love, Trinity, G-O-D, Being Itself, and so on, is a claim or thought experiment which is utterly Atheistic on all fronts. Such amounts to nothing more than claiming that IF there is no God involved in our equations for a path from non-being to being THEN Man and Morality are found to be as they are within the Atheist’s paradigm. That’s true, trivial, and uninteresting.

scbrownlhrm,

[2] When it comes to God, causality, and Man’s volition it is important to distinguish (properly) between concurrentism, occasionalism, and conservationism and also between the (different) ontological commitments vis-à-vis Causality, Pantheism, and Deism in order to maintain precision.

Which has literally nothing to do with what I pointed out:
“You cannot rationally maintain that God exists and a) we have libertarian free will but b) evolution cannot, not even in principle, be “unguided” – either a AND b are possible in a Universe where God exists, or neither a NOR b are possible. ”

[3] The claim or thought experiment which includes the idea that Man is in some sense isolated from, untouched by, un-defined by, ultimately un-defined by, independent from, and so on, that which is the ground of all being — namely immutable love, Trinity, G-O-D, Being Itself, and so on, is a claim or thought experiment which is utterly Atheistic on all fronts.

The “sense” of “independent from God” I am talking about is the *exact* same sense as your free willed choices are “independent from God” (i.e. they are not determined by God) given libertarian free will.
Do you believe that humans have libertarian free will, yes or no?

scbrownlhrm
that comment is again largely word salad. The conclusion remains:
“You cannot rationally maintain that God exists and a) we have libertarian free will but b) evolution cannot, not even in principle, be “unguided” – either a AND b are possible in a Universe where God exists, or neither a NOR b are possible. ”