Where did God come from?

Is it? How about this from the Old Testament, Genesis 22:1-2: Now, Abraham never carried out this command, but he was fully prepared to, as we read in Genesis 22:9-11: Abraham was fully prepared to carry out God's command, and only because he had faith that commands from God could only be righteous. It was the strength of this faith that God was testing in Abraham. Abraham believed that killing his own son was morally right, and so we see that murdering your child as a moral wrong is not an absolute truth when under the command of God.One can imagine other circumstances, of course. You're commanded by desperate criminals to torture a son to death, otherwise they'll kill all your other children and him, too.There's a movie named Sophie's Choice starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. It takes place in WWII Europe where when entering a concentration camp Sophie is forced to make a choice between her son and daughter - if she makes no choice she loses both. Which is the morally right course, and is there really an absolute truth involved?--Percy

Sure. The way this works is that you state your moral absolute, and then we place it in different contexts to see if it remains unchanged no matter what the situation. If it never changes under any circumstances, then we *perhaps* have a moral absolute. We can't be certain because there are an infinite number of contexts, and we can't consider all of them. Just as theory is tentative for the same reason, so must be any claim to absolute truth.Though we didn't start this way, let me describe the way we *could* have started. You could have taken the statement, "Killing another human being is morally wrong," and claimed it to be an absolute truth. So we place this truth in other contexts, and we find a large number of exceptions, like self-defense, war, euthenasia, etc.So you move to claiming the statement, "Killing your child is morally wrong," is an absolute truth, and we place this in a variety of contexts and find that it, too, has exceptions, such as commandments from God, threats from desperados, moral quandries in concentration camps, and so forth.So you move on to yet another statement, making the murder even more heinous and unjustifiable, and we would undertake the same exercise and place the statement in a variety of contexts to see if we could find any where the it didn't hold up. Maybe we could find some, maybe we couldn't. But even if we can think of no situations where the statement doesn't hold true, we can still, as I earlier explained, only make a tentative claim to absolute truth, because it isn't possible in finite time to consider an infinite variety of situations.And this ties in nicely with the philosophical point that I think Rhain and others have made, where the certainty you think exists is simply an illusion. It is certainly appropriate to a universe where the position of any particle is never absolute but only a probability wave in space/time.--Percy

Hi Grace!In the methodology I described it is inherent that you do not go from 25% of an absolute truth and through successive refinements to 50% to 75% and finally to 100%. Rather you go from 90% to 99% to 99.9% to 99.99% to 99.999% and so on. Removing all the tentativity from the assertion is not possible. An infinity of contexts makes no other conclusion possible. If the claim is being made by imperfect creatures such as ourselves, no. And I state that absolutely tentatively! --Percy