And if our sense of justice does come from God, why does it develop over time? Modern people who read the whole Bible are usually struck by how unjust the God therein is.
Is justice absolute or (culturally) relative? The Nazis† thought they were doing good: were they not? Were they "wrong" just because they lost WW2? If they had won, would they have written down that they were "right" and have history remember that 'fact'?
If they were morally wrong, regardless of winning or losing, where did that 'objective' moral fact come from?
You can certainly be an atheist and me moral and act justly. But where do you pin your morality to? If someone is an atheist, and probably a materialism (i.e., the only thing that exists is matter), where is justice in the scientific realm? What does a molecule of morality look like?
† Let's just invoke Godwin's Law and go for the extreme case.
And yes, there is a universe in which the Nazis won and it's taken for granted that they were right all along.
So now what?
Aristotle would disagree:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-backgrou...
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.h...
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-l...
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-...
> The only absolute laws are the laws of physics.
Then you're left with explaining the laws of physics and why they exist. Those laws are contingent after all. See Aquinas's "argument from contingency" (though not the general cosmological argument or Kalām variant, which are not very good) as well as Leibniz:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument#Argument...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason
For a fuller treatment see Feser:
* https://www.amazon.com/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/dp...
Meaning is still here.
For one, it assumes that "God" should, by necessity, be on the side of "good". That's groundless. The world could certainly just as much have been created by a mean being, as a way to entertain himself, like a lonely kid would raise ants for the pleasure of crushing them.
More importantly, it's a tautology. It's based on the premise that what one considers just IS just. But why? Morals is only an opinion that varies with time and place. There used to be many justifications of people oppressing people, just as there are today many justifications of people oppressing animals. The idea of right and wrong is historic. It changes.
And finally, the big problem with trying to demonstrate the necessity of God is that it makes revelation unnecessary. God announced himself to creation because creation cannot infer his existence from the observable evidence, or by thinking about it. If God can be proved then he doesn't need to speak, which then results in a contradiction (since he (supposedly) did).
Completely incorrect conjecture. Let's take for instance the Flaxinrlent. Now, I've just made up this concept, but I can still define it. Let's say it is a 4th dimensional creature that takes up negative space made up entirely of marshmallows from 20,000 years ago. This concept, the Flaxinrlent, is now something we can roughly agree upon, we can devote our lives to searching for it, we can say that Flaxinrlent is what makes life worth living. But if we search long and hard enough we would probably start to realize that Flaxinrlent doesn't exist and probably couldn't exist knowing what we know about reality. Would it still be appropriate to state "If the whole universe has no Flaxinrlent, we should never have found out that it has no meaning"???
The universe as a whole is probably meaningless / a simulation that doesn't care. We can still find meaning in a local level.
The fact that these localized ideas do not generalize as we would like does not sound like an argument in favor of God, just that the societies that have evolved are by definition the stronger, more enduring ones. These societies have ideas about meaning and justice that are propagated by inhabitants of the society. Justice looks vastly different in different cultures.
Yes, most of us have been atheist 15 year olds, we know the arguments...
>God, the one in Quran or Bible, doesn't exist. It's as simple as that. The same with morality; as dark as that thought is. We are just too weak to face the truth.
So, do you act morally when you're sure you're not gonna get caught? Do you try to do the right thing for others? For your kids? Why, since "morality doesn't exist"?
The truth is that we've built morality and so it exists. The universe might not care, but we do.
Yes. Because I have free will and chose to. In my experience, one's religious beliefs have no bearing on whether they act morally or not.
Second, this "free will" choice is either random (so could go either way), or determined on some previous shaping of your character. In other words on a morality (didn't have to happen through specifical moral education, e.g. church lessons, could just be through example by your parent behavior etc. But it's still a morality).
For fun basically. The game of life seems really easy to cheat at and so I self-impose some rules to make the game more interesting, just like I avoid using cheat codes in video games.
Also, slightly more seriously, no one is a perfect actor and to not act morally in private will absolutely spill out into one's public persona.
We did but it is a concept not a physical thing. It's also relative from person to person and from a culture to another. It is not a truth.
Which is neither here, nor there.
For one, concepts are also physical things (e.g. the correspond to chemical changes and neuron synapses in the brains on those knowing about them).
Second, even if abstract, concepts still affect the physical world by influencing actions.
Besides, nobody argued morality is a physical thing.
>It's also relative from person to person and from a culture to another. It is not a truth.
Physical things are also perceived differently rom person to person and from a culture to another. A dish might be great for one, but disgusting for another, for example.
Something being relative is opposed to it being absolute, not opposed to it being true.
E.g. if I say I love X, that is relative and personal. But my love can be true.
We actually don't know this. People have qualia, which is an unexplained physical phenomenon. It could be that the universe comes with some universal signal that twists the thought processes of all beings with qualia, so as to shape their feelings about moral questions, to align them with true universal morality.
Obviously, I just made this up, and even if it were true, maybe you'd call the signal false universal morality, but it could be a physical thing.
> We’re all very sure we’re right, and the other people are wrong, conveniently forgetting that we made up those things too.
Science is a systematic, evidence/reasoning based method of discovering the truths and eliminating the wrongs.
It boils down to whether or not you believe in an objective reality.
And yet, that's not logically possible, as it's circular reasoning.
You basically take a principle of faith (e.g. regarding induction), and you combine it with an empirical method.
If you define "right" and "wrong" as "true" and "false" then you can understand them via science.
There's nothing "true" and "false" about not defauding you/killing you/treating you like shit you if I'm to benefit from it.
Scientifically speaking it's just a cost/benefit calculation (e.g. whether I'd get caught or not).
Many people go for just that. We call them sociopaths. If we all started doing just that (and ignored moral principles), society would be chaos.
Science can't replace morallity, except in trivial cases.
Even if science says "it is true that society would be better if everybody did X" (e.g. didn't do X bad thing) that's still not enough of a basis for a morality.
Because for science it is also true individually that "If you can do X and know you wont have any negative backslash on you particularly, you can benefit from it".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
* https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/01/25/the-problem-with-scien...
I'm not. But I'm not sure why is anyone advocating for a particular God. I think he should speak for himself. If you are advocating for religion as a way to structure and control society, I can see sense in that.
There is no scientific basis for Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem either. That doesn't mean it it false.
> God, the one in Quran or Bible, doesn't exist. It's as simple as that.
Aristotle would disagree:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-backgrou...
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.h...
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-l...
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-...
See also Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz, not of whom make reference to the any kind of Sacred Scripture
* https://www.amazon.com/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/dp...
You just have to let go of religious distortions of the concept. Take a step back and look at it more from an evolutionary biology perspective.
To me it has to do with aligning your goals with the goals of others. It is a very important concept for a social animal, especially one with high degree of cognitive sophistication such as humans, to have.
That is fine but you have already put it relative to what you think. If everybody does that, then morality will differ from a person to another; and thus it becomes meaningless.
But the words aren't meaningless just because we might disagree on some edge or corner cases.
The thing is, lots of people use words all the time without getting analytical about it. My daughter is 5 and knows what right vs. wrong is, but I doubt she could explain it to anyone without it just being circular.
When people use the words "right" and "wrong" (and all the related words such as good and bad and moral and immoral), most of the time they all pretty much agree with what it is. Stealing is wrong, cheating is wrong, killing is wrong. Helping someone who is hurt is right.
You can come up with scenarios where there are ambiguities, sure, just like with up and down, but most people agree on the basic ones.
C.S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, the second() most famous fantasy literature ever written in English as well as a number of other famous books. He is as much a classic as Dickens and a damn sight more accessible than Bill Shakespeare.
I'm an athiest and don't agree with his assertions but he's definitely worth reading if you haven't already.
()Okay, perhaps Beowulf gets this spot.
Hmm. C.S. Lewis is perhaps the most influential Christian thinker of the last century. If not, he's second to Francis Schaeffer. You wouldn't think much of a Christian who didn't know who Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris were.
> but anyone advocating for a God or a religion is a person with an agenda
Perhaps so. So is a person advocating for atheism a person with an agenda. So where does that leave you?
As C.S. Lewis said in reply to a different atheist: "That is why the motive game is so uninteresting. I decline the game and continue the conversation."
So: You claim that God - any God - does not exist. What is your basis for claiming this? It sounds like your basis is science. Is that correct?
This passage from CS Lewis's Mere Christianity seems appropriate:
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: A fish would not feel wet.
Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense.
Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: Just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.