Moral Argument for God: Philosophy Forums

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Moral Argument for God

apl
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Posted 07/12/07 - 08:26 AM:	#141
Mariner wrote: Your explanation doesn't address the main issue -- where did those values (Christian or atheist, left- or right-wing, it doesn't matter) come from? Yes, Evolution and God are the only possible answers (or at least, they are the only answers which have been proposed). "Culture" must come from somewhere. Either it is a product of evolution, or it isn't. If it isn't a product of evolution (or, to be more encompassing, of naturalism), then it is a result of some metaphysical freedom. Consistent naturalism entails that all culture is in essence a kind of elaborate anthill, produced basically by hormones. I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean by "metaphysical freedom". I'll try answer your post anyway. Culture most certainly isn't a product of evolution - at least not the genetic evolution I assumed you were talking about. Culture has developed (evolved) far too rapidly for that. (Besides, we all know that it doesn't matter too much what your genes are - the cultural values you acquire are mainly a function of your social environment as you make the journey from childhood to adulthood.) Of course, evolution did play an important role in the development of culture and cultural values, but it was a mere catalyst – it got the ball rolling. In the beginning, through the dawn of culture, evolution gave us brains that had the capacity for language and sophisticated reasoning. Being social creatures, we bounced ideas/beliefs (or grunts!) off each other. We demonstrated tricks to one another. We learnt the ideas/tricks of others in our community, combined ideas/tricks to get better ideas/tricks and so on. As our ideas become more advanced, we started to form cultural values. Importantly, we passed our ideas and tricks onto our offspring, not through our genes, but through language and by way of example. So communication between sophisticated brains was the driving force behind the development of culture and culture-based values, not evolution, nor God. Edited by apl on 07/12/07 - 08:34 AM

Mariner
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Posted 07/12/07 - 08:53 AM:	#142
apl, 'Cultural values', 'ideas', 'beliefs', 'communication' -- if you define these concepts, you'll see that in a naturalist worldview, they must be the result of natural causes -- in the last analysis, they must be determined (yes, determined) by gravity, or by the electromagnetic force, or by the nuclear forces. There is no other possible cause, in this naturalistic worldview. Since these forces don't have freedom, their effects can't have freedom either. 'cultural values', 'ideas', and 'beliefs' would basically be a testimony to the randomness of the world, none of them having any claim to be true (much less 'moral'). This entails many contradictions, of course. Most evidently, they would deny the relevance of threads such as this, and of reasonings such as the one embraced by those who believed in this worldview. A word of warning -- I believe in evolution; it is our best explanation of biological features. (I'm a biologist). I know, though, that evolution cannot explain many things -- including, to get back to the subject of the thread, morality. * mric** -- You are still not focusing on the phenomenon of morality itself. You haven't defined morality, yet. I don't know how many mistakes one can make in one post, but I know that 'No' is never a refutation . (For instance, to say that ethical nihilism upholds a transcendental source of morality is quite funny . I'll wait for further comment from you, provided that you define your words in order to avoid this kind of misstep).
"In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't." -- Blaise Pascal "The more I am by myself and alone, the more I have come to love myths" -- Aristotle in his later years

mric
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Posted 07/13/07 - 04:54 AM:	#143
Mariner wrote: mric -- You are still not focusing on the phenomenon of morality itself. You haven't defined morality, yet. I don't know how many mistakes one can make in one post, but I know that 'No' is never a refutation . (For instance, to say that ethical nihilism upholds a transcendental source of morality is quite funny . I'll wait for further comment from you, provided that you define your words in order to avoid this kind of misstep). No, I said that claiming a transcendental source of morality upholds ethical nihilism. Quite different. By placing the source of ethics outside the perceivable world, you lose access to any criteria that allow you to differentiate ethical from unethical behaviour. If personal revelation and scripture are possible sources of partial ethical guidelines, you have no criteria to judge different personal views or different scriptures on an ethical basis. Only God knows - and you have in practice denied human capacity to have a reason to believe our moral judgements are right in any respect. All the answers to this problem beg the question by applying certain 'obvious' moral characteristics to god - however, in this world view 'God is good' ceases to be descriptive, and becomes emptily tautologous.

mric
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Posted 07/13/07 - 06:53 AM:	#144
Boethiusman wrote: To reiterate Mariners point, evolution cannot form the basis of an ethical system. An evolutionary process includes both copies and mutations. Organisms, that mutate into something completely useless to the species, are not actually useless, as there was a chance the mutation would be useful, and so we see that some of the many organism that mutate, mutate into something useful. Being a mutation, even one that is in itself useless to the species, is just as an intrinsic part of evolution as being a copy. Or in this case, following the ethical norms is just as much a part of an evolving system of norms as not following those norms. Simply because the existence of norms can be explained is not a justification for following them. If it is evolution you are trying to take part in, then random actions would still be a contribution to evolution (indeed I don't see how anyone could be contributing more or less). Randomness is intrinsic to evolutionm however random actions form a void ethics. Quite right. Evolution explains why morality exists, and what sort of things constitute morality. It does not answer the question "what makes morality good", any more than it explains "what makes beauty aesthetically pleasing" or any other grammatically well-formed but rather pointless question.

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Posted 07/13/07 - 07:12 AM:	#145
mric wrote: No, I said that claiming a transcendental source of morality upholds ethical nihilism. Quite different. By placing the source of ethics outside the perceivable world, you lose access to any criteria that allow you to differentiate ethical from unethical behaviour. If personal revelation and scripture are possible sources of partial ethical guidelines, you have no criteria to judge different personal views or different scriptures on an ethical basis. Only God knows - and you have in practice denied human capacity to have a reason to believe our moral judgements are right in any respect. All the answers to this problem beg the question by applying certain 'obvious' moral characteristics to god - however, in this world view 'God is good' ceases to be descriptive, and becomes emptily tautologous. I think you are raising a false dilemma here -- either morality is based on the perceivable world, or it is based on revelation and scriptures. I wasn't thinking of revelation and scriptures as the basis of moral knowledge -- to me, it is fairly obvious that they are non-candidates for this role. I think this basis is 'intuition' -- a non-sensorial access to another dimension of reality. (Spelled out, it sounds like something out of Star Wars -- but it is quite correct, in my opinion). Moral intuition is not infallible (just as vision isn't infallible), but it allows us to identify moral tenets as true or false. This intuition is present in all human beings (including psychopaths -- which are merely unable to use it due to 'brain malfunctioning', just as blind people have eyes but can't use them; please note, though, that I'm talking about psychopaths in the strict sense, not about sane people who do evil things). Quite supernatural, of course. But then again, I'm saying that natural explanations simply cannot account for the phenomenon in the first place. And it looks like you agree with this. Do you?
"In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't." -- Blaise Pascal "The more I am by myself and alone, the more I have come to love myths" -- Aristotle in his later years

Boethiusman
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Posted 07/13/07 - 08:02 AM:	#146
Quite right. Evolution explains why morality exists, and what sort of things constitute morality. It does not answer the question "what makes morality good", any more than it explains "what makes beauty aesthetically pleasing" or any other grammatically well-formed but rather pointless question. My question was not "what makes morality good", it was what makes the idea of morality and goodness that society has developed worth conforming to. If the answer is evolution, then it is no answer, as for a system to evolve various members must depart from the norm, even at the harm of the species. Both the normal person and the person that goes around murdering and burning things have equal claim to taking part in evolution (whole species going extinct is still part of evolution; indeed the end of all life in the universe would still be an evolution). That evolution explains why morality exists, I disagree, unless by morality you mean social norms. Social norms are not by definition good, as certain definitions of morality are, and as beauty is by definition aesthetically pleasing. You will have to further elaborate your meaning. Mariner: I completely disagree with the idea of a moral compass. Many things, before I reasoned them to be harmful, I had no feelings about one way or the other. For instance, as a child I drank a lot of pop, and I did not think anything of it. Later I reasoned that this was a harmful habbit and not what I should do. Now, if pop is given to me for free and I succumb to the temptation of drinking it I feel a litle uneasy. The rationalization comes before any feelings, just as in chess one must learn the game fairly deeply before having feelings that can be trusted. All players must appeal to feeling to make the final decision, both in terms of move and time, however the feelings of a novice are usually wrong. In the case of the master, han's feelings represent countless hours of experience, and I would argue specifically countless hours of rationalizing, whereas the feelings of the beginner are simply appealed to as a source of arbitrariness. I would argue it is the same case with ethics. The "feelings" we seem to not be able to escape, seem automatic or innate, I would argue are simply conditioned responses that cannot be accepted at face value, and can infact be changed. For example, two years ago I dropped out of Christmas, at least the commercialized part. To make this decision I had to go against my social conditioning. Even though my decision was clearly the right thing to do, in both my system of ethics and the Judeo Chrstian ethics, still most people I knew, including my familly, were offended. Most people's moral compass tell them that commercialized Christmas is great. I would argue that this is due to social conditioning. Even I at first actually felt bad about dropping out of Christmas, but forced myself to do it. Now, if the existence of social conditioning, which cannot be trusted (which is not to say it is necessarilly wrong in each case), is admitted to, the only way to save the concience theory (without constructing a labrynth of compasses) is by appeal to rationalization. We must sit down and ponder what feelings are from the true moral compass and what feelings are from social conditioning. The only way to distinguish would be by appeal to some feeling independent ethical theory. But if such a theory is appealed to, why appeal to the compass to begin with. There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Edited by Boethiusman on 07/13/07 - 10:44 AM

Mariner
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Posted 07/13/07 - 08:30 AM:	#147
Boethiusman, moral intuition as I see it is an extra-sensory way of gathering input about the world. It is not infallible. It is what enables us to say 'X is good' (goodness is not a natural property, after all). Any discussion about morality presupposes moral intuition, but without the guidance of reason, moral intuition is helpless. It becomes the puppet of external forces, as you describe. No one is born with a full-fledged moral compass. We are born with the ability of identifying good and evil (since nothing in the world could teach this to us). We learn, and build, our own moral compasses as we pass through the world. All in all, I don't think we disagree.
"In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't." -- Blaise Pascal "The more I am by myself and alone, the more I have come to love myths" -- Aristotle in his later years

Boethiusman
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Posted 07/13/07 - 08:39 AM:	#148
My view of most ethical debates is that there is one camp which views certain deeds as so wrong that having any reason behind the wrongness would somehow deminish the wrongness of it. So they make these deeds axiomatically wrong. Since this is such a large camp, this often becomes the terms of debate: are axiomatic maxims justified or not. The axiomatic maxim camp must bring in soft ideas (else the axiomatic status of the maxims is lost), or more often simply no ideas at all and just declare that the maxims are true and this or that is wrong. Those that don't accept the soft ideas or the arbitrary axiomization fall under the illusion that ethical relativism and ethical nihilism are the only alternatives. But ethical relativism and ethical nihilism are unfunctional, they cannot actually be used to decide what to do or they justify all actions, and so horrified by this possibility, the ethical axiomization camp, who also have the illusion that there are only three options, feel they must defend the axiomized maxims that much more rigorously, in an attempt to avoid the occurance of at least the most grotesque actions. At the same time, within the axiomatic maxim camp itself there isn't any real deep ethics, because the motivation for the excercise only exists with respect to the most gross evil, the system breaks down in dealing with the small and the subtle, and a soft foundation leads to a soft house: ethical axiomization is often simply an illusion covering a comfortable (or desire for a comfortable) inexamined life. Edited by Boethiusman on 07/13/07 - 09:08 AM

Boethiusman
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Posted 07/13/07 - 08:49 AM:	#149
All in all, I don't think we disagree. It is possible. My view of my ethical feelings is that they are of the same nature as my feelings about chess, or how much butter I should put on my bread, or when exactly I should set my alarm. Feelings in ths category are simply a tool we have to help us deal with complex systems. If this is the interpretation then I completely agree. However, in chess there is a totally rational system I am trying to enchroach upon, my reliance on feeling is simply due to my lack of an exhaustible ability to rationalize. There is in every chess situation the best move or moves, and they are the best not with respect to any feeling I have. In ethics I am searching for truth, in every situation there is the decision or decisions which will lead me to the most truth. My ethical system is independent from my feelings. It is my attempt to actually live in accordance with my ethics in which feelings enter the picture. Edited by Boethiusman on 07/13/07 - 08:54 AM

mric
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Posted 07/13/07 - 09:35 AM:	#150
Mariner wrote: I think you are raising a false dilemma here -- either morality is based on the perceivable world, or it is based on revelation and scriptures. I wasn't thinking of revelation and scriptures as the basis of moral knowledge -- to me, it is fairly obvious that they are non-candidates for this role. I think this basis is 'intuition' -- a non-sensorial access to another dimension of reality. (Spelled out, it sounds like something out of Star Wars -- but it is quite correct, in my opinion). Moral intuition is not infallible (just as vision isn't infallible), but it allows us to identify moral tenets as true or false. This intuition is present in all human beings (including psychopaths -- which are merely unable to use it due to 'brain malfunctioning', just as blind people have eyes but can't use them; please note, though, that I'm talking about psychopaths in the strict sense, not about sane people who do evil things). Quite supernatural, of course. But then again, I'm saying that natural explanations simply cannot account for the phenomenon in the first place. And it looks like you agree with this. Do you? Why do you think that our moral intuition isn't an evolved moral intuition, but a supernatural characteristic? The analogy with sight is fine - you are not claiming that sight is unevolved are you?

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