Euthypro Dilemna

The question was:

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So why couldn't..

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The command/influence 'hate thy neighbour' (as written in conscience) acts as a balance/counter to the sinful nature of man which commands/influences man to "love thy neighbour'. Influences in both directions (God drawing us in one direction / our natures drawing us in the other) means you now have the set up of choice.

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A nature that influences man to love his neighbour isn't a sinful nature, it's a godly (god-aligned) nature. And the reason man has an ungodly nature arose out of the first man choosing that nature. That's why it couldn't..- I can hone my knowledge .. I'm a believer and have an workshop manual on the subject. You're in a slightly different position but by no means helpless.You appear to be conflating two things: knowing what is the case and proving what is the case (to even yourself). But you don't have to "determine" what good is - what good is, is installed in you and operates in your decision making process. We're calling that knowledge-reporting device conscience in this discussion. I've already described how different viewpoints on 'good' arise from apparently different consciences (the original, God-supplied conscience is the same in all cases but suppression of conscience results in variation of outlook developing - kind of like variation in species developing from a common ancestor ).That there is no way to objectivize what is good is, isn't relevant to anything important that I can think of. Perhaps you could suggest where objective knowledge would be essential in a way that matters to your salvation/damnation (the first critical issue facing you outside of which nothing else much matters)- The point above indicates why I don't agree. We have the knowledge of what is good or not. We just can't objectivize it.- He didn't create them. They created themselves through exercise of their free will. God, as I say, created potential. That potential chose to bring about the rest.There is what God wills and there is what is necessary to bring about his will. Creating the potential for choosing against God is a necessity if it is God's will to create people with the potential to choose for God.- Yes. God delivering up on promised consequences and enabling those consequences to be played out is good. Wrathful expression against evildoing is good. Even we (most of us) agree with that principle.- Then by all means call it like strawberry flavoured ice-cream."They have become like us - knowing good from evil". Man like God isn't man the same as God.- Sure you could approximate strawberries to a good degree. "Like" isn't "same" however.I'm not sure what point that makes though? Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

Hi iano,The following leaves me quite baffled -- or leads me to think you are confused: So, to start with, you do accept the notion that there is some "basic set" of behaviors / attitudes / emotions that humans will generally agree to as "good", regardless of the absence, presence or particular variety of religious beliefs in their various cultural environs (granting that cultures, and individuals within a given culture, can vary from the "norm", for whatever reasons and to whatever extent).Then you say that this basic set comprising goodness has been defined and established in advance by your particular deity (putting aside all the obfuscating details involving the Trinity). It stands to reason that any religious believer of any Abrahamic faith, or any other religion, would hold the view that some deity is the ultimate creator of goodness, if only by virtue of needing to posit a deity in the first place, to fill the role of "creator".But I really don't understand your use of the phrase "one objective summit." To say there is something "objective" about invoking any deity as a creator of anything is to misuse the term "objective". I see no reason to argue with the definition provided by the Wiktionary:

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1. Of or relating to a material object, actual existence or reality.
2. Not influenced by the emotions or prejudices.
3. Based on observed facts.

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So, observing the fact that religions and ethical codes across human cultures tend to share a common set of values for "good" and "bad" things is objective. Observing the fact that many cultures attribute the source of "goodness" to be one or more specific deities (and many also attribute "badness" to specific other deities) is also objective. But these observations in themselves do not convey any sense of objectivity to the deities -- the deities remain immaterial and unobservable in any objective sense (as well as being mutually irreconcilable to any single entity).Given these facts, there seems to be no basis, outside of one's personal decision to adopt your specific religious faith, for accepting your assertion that your God is the one sole and true source of goodness. There's nothing at all objective about your assertion, unless you want the term "objective" to mean the opposite of it's established definition.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Sure.- In so far as the "basic set" matches the set established in advance by God, yes.- Sounds reasonable enough.- The first one seems to fit reasonably well

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1. Of or relating to a material object, actual existence or reality.

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The context of the use of "objective" involves a discussion in which God is presumed to exist for the sake of argument (see the set up of the Eutypro Dilemma: "But if God is good then..." necessitating God's existance for the sake of discussion). And so the assertion is made that mens subjective moralities (which share areas of agreement leading to the basic - though by no means universal - set) are various paths which have devolved (degraded) from a single objective reality, to whit; God.- Hopefully, the above has cleared things up a little. In case not, read what I say again - with my clarifying comment:

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There are various angles to this attribute ' good', various ways in which we can examine it. In this case, the statement "God is good" would be addressing mankind, who understand (and to large degree, agree on what globally constitutes..) the notion of "goodness". This statement tells them that the centrepoint of this general notion - from which the myriad of man-opinionated goodnesses derive .. is God. That all their subjective paths regarding goodness devolve from one objective summit.

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..that's what the message "God is good" intends to convey to man. Which is not to say men will believe that message. Unbelievers, who have no route to God's reality certaintly won't.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

Thanks, iano. Things do seem to be clearing up a bit -- at least in regards to pinpointing where you go wrong in your use of the term "objective". Perhaps you'll say that I'm just being too picky about lexical semantics here, and we'll end up agreeing to disagree on this point -- though I can't help concluding that there would be little or no support for you among competent speakers of English, because yours is still an incorrect usage of the term.When a thing is "presumed to exist for the sake of argument", this does not qualify the thing as a material object, or as having any reality or actual existence. It is simply acknowledged as something that can be talked about; it is accepted as an "operand" in the various syntactic "formulas" of assertions that make up a discussion; it's a mental construct whose attributes can only be established by linguistic expression, never by direct and sharable sensory experience.As something "presumed to exist for the sake of argument", the entity you call God is entirely equivalent to things like "the square root of negative one", "the edge of the universe", "the pillars of the earth", and so on. The possibility that this or that person in a discussion is willing to assert a profound and unshakeable belief that such an entity exists does not make a whit of difference as to the absence of objectivity.But this really is just a minor point after all, and I apologize if it's been a distraction or divergence from the thread topic. I guess I'm just requesting, as clearly as I can, that you not use the word "objective" in reference to God, because the word just doesn't work that way. (You got a problem with that? )Edited by Otto Tellick, : changed "-1" to "negative one"

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with your semantics. When we use the word "objective" we imagine ourselves as looking down on a situation from above, seeing the whole picture free of involvement and resultant bias. That is exactly how he imagines God's viewpoint, and to a much greater extent (ie "perfect") than we can hope for. Arguing that he is wrong in believing this isn't a dictionary call, he is using the word correctly within the constraints of his worldview.He's a nice guy though, he's already tabled the Trinity just to avoid confusing the question with extra entities, so he may comply with your request; in which case I would offer up the word "transcendent" for his use in trying to convey the same idea without getting people-who-think-they-own-words on his case. But I do feel it's kind of shameful for us to sound just like the folks who claim they own the words "fundamentalist" and "Christian" and can exclude others from reasoned use of them.

Have those competant speakers of English had God turn up 'at their door'. And if so, how do they figure to use one of his inventions to deny him a place in his reality? Perhaps you mean that English has become the preserve of that philosophical view which supposes reality limited to the empirically demonstratable (whether in fact or in principle)? In which case, there is no reason to agree to differ - we can simply cite non-aligning worldviews. Neither demonstrable.- Granted. And my use of the word 'objective' found it's place between those parenthesis. Once something is presumed to exist for the sake of argument, it is presumed objective for the sake of argument too. No?Mind that 'presuming for the sake of argument' whilst not qualifying, doesn't disqualify the objectivity of the thing presumed. The position taken is neutral on both sides.- I'm not sure I'd agree. Is it possible that the square root of negative one exists? Is God the same as something that demonstrably doesn't exist (like the pillars of the earth?)- Granted. Hopefully clarified.- I suppose I do. There's no way that I know of whereby I can certify the objectiveness of any of the external-to-me reality I assume is out there: not this screen in front of me, nor that God 'above' me. Objectiveness, like goodness is, ultimately, but a flavour. And God 'tastes' as real to me as this computer screen.Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

None that I know of. Do you know anyone who has had God turn up 'at their door'? Is that something that my neighbors would notice if it happened to me? What would this sort of event look/sound/smell like? What measurable phenomena would it produce (air movement, ionization, visible form and/or shadow, change of temperature, humidity, etc)? I have no clue what "those parenthesis" is supposed to refer to, let alone what was between them. But never mind. No. Objectivity cannot be attained or ascribed by presumption, but only by observation. That's my point. I would grant that when you tell the story of Captain Ahab, then the Great White Whale could be referred to as an objective entity within the context of the story ("for the sake of" that "discussion"). But it's still also entirely imaginary because the story, the contextual frame for that notion of "objectiveness", is a work of fiction. Only as a relationship among arbitrary symbols that have an agreed-upon meaning in the language of mathematics. It has no independent, observable existence as a "real-world" entity. Yes, I'm already aware, from seeing some of your posts over the years, that you tend to fall back on solipsism. Oh well, no need for us to pursue that any further. Not at all -- that's silly. There's certainly no point trying to make English (or any other natural human language) scientifically rigorous in its entirety, if only because things like metaphors, similes, double-entendres and so on are far too valuable to give up, but especially because these languages of ours (whichever ones we use) are the most effective means for communicating our imaginations, which is vitally essential. But their effectiveness depends crucially on some degree of conventional agreement about the meanings of the words.I simply mean that in order to use the term "objective" in its conventional sense, you can't be using it as an attribute of a deity, unless/until there is actually some material, commonly observable manifestation such that anyone, upon witnessing it, would conclude "yep, that's your deity, right there!" Short of that, it's rather like using "brightness" to refer to the absence of light.I can usually grasp and appreciate poetic or other artful usage as well as the next person, but "objective" is not a term that lends itself easily to such usage, and you didn't seem to be trying for a poetic or other artful effect.But I suppose that if your intention matched whatever Iblis tried to explain in his reply, then something of that sort would only make sense as being somehow poetic or artful (and essentially imaginary). If I understood correctly: "assuming that God exists, there is some set of things that exist as 'objective' from His viewpoint" -- which of course we can't possibly perceive objectively ourselves, as we are not God, but if we truly believe in Him, then we can somehow share in the 'objectivity' of His entire system of ethics, etc.That all sounds like it could be profound and richly evocative, I'm sure -- indeed, perhaps Iblis's idea of "transcendent" is darn near on the mark -- but it's only "objective" in a purely imaginative, metaphorical or other "poetic, artful" sense. Okay, fine. Have fun with that.Again, apologies if this has strayed too far from the topic.Edited by Otto Tellick, : minor grammar repair

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Hi DA. If white people were pagans who boiled one another for dinner, barbariously tortured one another by scalping, disemboweling alive, sacrificicing their children and wives in fire to their gods, sold their enemies as slaves etc as pagan Native Americans and African blacks practiced, perhaps they too would have no true god to deliver them from their opressive govenments as was the case with the pilgrims. I said, often this was the case. Some chose to stay with their good masters after the emancipation. Many others were endeared to their masters and their families.Btw, DA. perhaps, if you care to be objective and fair, you would put up on the screen artist's rendition of some of the horrors of cannibalism, disemboweling, and scalping etc, as pagans did to themselves before becoming evangelized to become civilized Christians. This is an obsurd strawman. I'm sure you're aware of that. Nothing I said entertained that position. These artist renditions are NOT objective of the norm relative to treatment of slaves in the US. They would more accurately depict the ongoing treatment of Christians in totalitarian Islamic nations and secularist communist nations where persecution is ongoing. Again, this was not the norm. Why don't you put up some stats on how many whites gave their lives during the Civil War to emancipate the blacks. LOL. Better do some historical research on this, DA, all the way up to the present. Democrats have consistently been on the wrong side relative to integration and advancement of blacks up to the present. This personal attack either depicts your ignorance or implicates you as a liar, DA. Either put up or shut up on that account.ABE: Today I have spent much of the day working with a very black black friend of a number of years under a truck changing a tranny, on my cold driveway. I loaned him over a hundred dollars with no receipt; just his word to pay it back when he can. I also donated to and voted for Allan Keys, a revered very intelligent black when he ran for president of the US a number of years ago. Way back in the early 1950s when in the USAF my a black was my favorite superior officer and another black airman I despised almost as much as I despise the (enemy of the republic) black which we have elected to preside over us. Because of his superiour rank he was very condescending, particularly towards whites under his authority. Over the years I have both helped and befriended many Americans of black descent, some brothers in Christ and some not. I have sent regular donations and clothes via Voice of the Martyrs to African poor for several decades. Yah, DA, ole man buz most certainly must have a history of bigoted racism. NOT!(I've added the above because I must continually set the record straight on this here at EvC, because of folks like you , DA, who lower yourself to attacking the messenger rather than addressing the pertinent point typed. ) Edited by Buzsaw, : add quotesEdited by Buzsaw, : Add comment

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

I take Just to mean more lawful or fair where as benevolent is about being kind and good.Obviously, God isn't always kind, no?But he can be mean to some and still remain Just.I looked them up in the Catholic Encyclopedia and actually didn't even find benevolence in there but for Just they have:

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It is a moral quality or habit which perfects the will and inclines it to render to each and to all what belongs to them.

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So, with the precense of evil, God would be Just in rendering to them what belongs to them, but in doing so he wouldn't really be being kind, or benevolent, anymore.Makes sense?Besides, isn't omnibenevolence logically impossible with omnipotence and the precence of evil?Although, that could be hand-waved away with omnipotence allowing for the two to exist without contradiction

This isn't really a question about anyone of your posts in particular, but about the general trend.Essentially we have that:
Good is that which is aligned with God.
God in his goodness created us and gives us the choice to choose to between God's good path or our own evil one.
If God had just made us predisposed to choosing the good path, then we would be without free will. This would not be good, so God didn't do it.
What we are left with is making the I understand that man cannot be created to choose the good path, since this would make us automatons. However there is an example of a being who has free will and always chooses the good path, God itself.So my question is why didn't God create equals, other omnipotent beings with the capacity for good and free will? That way everybody would be saved. Surely it is within God's power to create another God? Why did he create lesser beings?

FYI, some of your assertions in this post have started a new thread over at Message 1.Do you have the courage to defend your convictions?Find out soon, I imagine.

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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman RushdieThis rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. - the character Rorschach in Watchmen

- Correct Effectively, yes. With the end goal of us deciding whether we want to enter relationship with God and what he represents. Or whether we prefer to reject that.- Minor detail. Adam and Eve were equipped with free will as you suggest.Mankind in general is fallen and hasn't got that kind of will. But this skewed situation of mans evil-tendency is counter-balanced by the effort of God (execised in us by our consciences). And so we are returned to the situation of having the equivilent of a free-will.- I'm tending towards the view that Christ was capable of sinning but didn't. In which case you've essentially the same position for everyone born as the one Christ faced.Note that there is nothing problematic about people being condemned from God's point of view. It is as good that the damned be separated from the life of God and be punished for their evil as it is that those who choose for God spend eternity with him in his love.God is satisfied whichever way we choose.Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

This essentially answers my query. I was wondering at first why wouldn't God want more beings who were saved. As you said however those who are punished are also satisfying God's will, hence it is good.I'm only left with this query and perhaps this is not the place to discuss it, but you say the following: Here we come to one of my major problems with theology.What you have said above would not be what most Christians would say. Most churches believe in our total free will. You however disagree with them on this point.Let us take it as given that God exists.Essentially we have what they are saying and what you are saying. My only difficulty is that there seems to be no way to decide who is correct or not. You are stating the above as if it was certainly the case, however I know several theologians who would disagree with you. There seems to be very little in the way of some agreed upon standard where we can see who is closer to the truth. We can't ask God directly, ultimately you are interpreting the scriptures with no way of knowing if your interpretation is becoming increasingly more accurate.This is in essence the problem, I'm not actually sure what Christianity is. Two different people could give me two totally different answers as to:
(a)The nature of Christ
(b)The nature of sin
(c)The nature of humans and their free willAlmost to the point of them being quite different religions and yet both will say "this is what the Bible says", "this is Christianity" and both will have reasonable arguments for their case.Maybe I have this wrong though, maybe there is some obvious way of telling who is closer to the truth, but I can't see it.To sum up:
Even if God exists, how do I know* that your personal theology isn't just completely wrong. I don't intend this in an insulting way.*By know I mean within reasonable doubt, I don't mean 100% certainty.

Good that this answers your query.I'd merely note that I see God's activity and desire as operating in various tiers (just as ours does). God's primary want is that all get to choose (love demands that we can). His being love wants that all would choose him (this being a secondary want). His being wrath is justified in it's expression that those who choose against also have wilful sin on their account.- Although not a Calvinist (and rather detesting their Predestination doctrine) I am with them when they say that scripture points to the evil, sin-enslaved will of man. A will that by itself, is anything but free. The Reformed church is rather a large section of the total non-Roman church.Their opposite number in the protestant camp, the Arminians, seem to pull a thing called 'prevenient grace' out of the ether in order to make possible a just, fair God (according to the almost universal sense of fairness that mankind shares).In my own experience, the rest of the church seems to assume a freewill for the same reason of supposing a just God without having a clear scriptural reason for supposing so. Or they simply don't consider the question at all.Me? I arrive at a just, fair God (ie: a justness that which would cause men to nod in agreement) by slightly different means. Man's will enslaved and leaning always towards sin - if left to it's own devices. But it not left so. A balance is applied via the God-sustained force of conscience so as to arrive us at a as-good-as free will. Such a will differs not in essence from a commoner-garden freewill other than at a singular point: with a standard, Adamic free will, the credit for a mans salvation rests with himself - he wilfully chose for God. With this post-fall free will, the credit for a mans salvation goes to God - for God is the drawing force (conscience) which results in a man arriving at His shore - if it that he arrives there.It's an important detail (which is vital in all kinds of important ways) but not one that need deflect us too much from the notion of us having a free will. For all intents and purposes, we have.- Let us indeed. I like discussions which progress along those lines - This is true and from my perspective it matters little. I am saved by grace (something which all my protestant brethern are all agreed upon) not by my doctrine. After that, there is the matter of our interest in the way Goddidit.I wouldn't agree with you that a particular theology can't be assessed for accuracy. The way I see it, the theology improves as the number of appeals to mystery/scripturally baseless assumptions approaches zero. To think of an obvious example:Calvinism's famous TULIP tells us that the basis for God applying salvation to a person is Unconditional on anything that person does/wills/says. But they neither tell us what God's criterion for selecting a person actually is. Nor can they exclude all possible conditions a person might possibly meet. And so the U part of TULIP, Unconditional Election, relies on a scripturally-baseless assumption. I can see the problem. It seems to me though that there are only two possibilities.1) God is just in a sense which makes sense - in which case, you don't have to worry about a thing. The mechanism of salvation is his and he will ensure you are exposed to it as fairly and squarely as any other person2) God isn't just in a sense which makes sense. In which case you're in the same boat as everyone else: you're at the mercy of a capricious (should I say Calvinist?) God. There's little to be done about it.Although I'm supposing the first, and would suggest that if interested you follow the path that resolves whatever objections to God you may have - given that arrival at God would naturally result in all objections nullified, I'm not of the opinion an understanding of the correct mechanism of salvation is necessary in order that you be saved. And in this I think my brethern of all shades would agree. I suppose the dissolution of more of your objections than any other theology would be one way in which you might find satisfaction. Not, I repeat, that you are saved or damned by your attaching yourself to this, that or the other theology (according to my theology at least). Might it be that this very last sentence resolves at least one of the objections you might have ("what about the sheepherder up the side of a mountain in Tibet who never heard and will never hear of Jesus Christ")?

Hey iano,Thanks for that post. The brevity of this section of my post is because you have answered my questions clearly enough to require no more. This is basically what I was looking for.The only question I have remaining is the following:
Let us imagine that a Muslim had given me as good an answer to my theological questions about Islam. That is he had convinced me of the internal consistency of what he was discussing.I am now faced with two internally consistent belief systems. How do I go beyond this to the point of actually believing? How do I move beyond this acknowledgment of two sensible "meta-stories" into an acceptance of the truth of one of them?Is this component faith? How do I justify this faith? And how do I know which one I should have faith in?I realise that I may be asking unanswerable questions or asking questions which require you to write a personal theological guide for me. If so, don't worry about it.