Moral Argument for God

I didn't claim that Christians were morally bankrupt. What I claim is that the Christians in this thread by focussing solely on negative arguments against other concepts of morality are arguing against morality. (i.e. I am speaking solely of their arguments in this thread).To make the argument work it is necessary to present a concept of morality that:a) is clearly validandb) requires the existence of God.For some reason the Christians here seem reluctant to attempt that, even though it is precisely what they should be doing. So long as they prefer to attack rival views instead they have no argument FROM morality, only arguments AGAINST morality.

It seems to me that the christian argument boils down to: My answer is, SO WHAT!We see this in society from the beginnings of recorded history. Moralty has a broad spectrum over vastly different societies.Look at the Aztec, Roman, and Hebrew moral codes and compare them. By todays standards most of those we would consider abominable. Why? Do we need higher authority to make that judgement? NO!They are abominable because the pain and suffering that was caused to others under those moral systems was based on ignorant belifes. We can empathize with those who suffered because we are human and desire the least suffering as possible.As knowledge increases and we understand our world more and more, our moral code evolves to incorporate what we learn. The goal is to establish the least suffering and most 'fairness'. This is why our society, on the whole, is likely much happier than that of an ancient Aztec.Here is a quick quandry to blow your moral code, devinely given, junk right out of the water.What about Intelectual property law as applied to digital data? Is trading Mp3's stealing? Is backing up software a crime? Is pirated software really wrong? Should sourcecode patents be used?Show me where God lays out plain as day moral codes that apply to these modern ethical quandries! Those are living proof that morals evolve, are adjusted, and created as society matures and learns more and more.This message has been edited by Yaro, 07-26-2005 01:24 PM

Thanks for your reply. ...on ALL points. Assuming no God. "Only the Sith believe in absolutes!" - Starwars Revenge of the SithWhile I disagree that it is evil to believe in absolutes, MANY people do think this way... as evidenced by this attitude coming out even in this quote from Star Wars as well as in political rhetoric aimed at Bush's belief in absolutes and the philosophical worldviews of college professers and other world leaders.With no foundation of God to base your world view upon, NOTHING can be absolutely wrong or right. There is only better and worse; pleasure and pain; going with or against the grain of society. Believing in Good and Evil as REAL things IS halfway to believing in God. I had a long discussion with my atheist friend about this, and we discovered that she could not believe in God because she did not first believe in Good or Evil. She believes these things are merely human labels. WHAT is there to justify? We can only say that these "atrocities" are undesireable to more people than find them desireable. Calling them absolutely wrong or evil is appealing to a higher level of reality that atheists say does not exist.Many atheists have speculated that "God" may be the product of evolution, conditioning, and sentience trying to make sense and order out of the world around it. Certainly an atheist considers "God" to be irrelevant and unneccessary because this explanation for the origins of the concept of "God" does not require "God" to actually exist.By the exact same logic, if the mindless processes of conditioning and evolution are solely and completely responsible for concepts of right and wrong... then right and wrong are, like God, unnecessary and arbitrarily created by humans. Right and Wrong really do not exist, but we keep them around anyway for practical purposes. This is appealing to emotion and not a logical argument.

God does not have to write out anything in a law to tell us what is right and wrong. Moses wrote the "Law" for those who did wrong, to convict them of it, not to establish what wrong actually was. Sure, that is true, but this does not prove that right and wrong are wholly subjective concepts. It could just as easily be said that right and wrong are objective areas of reality that we subjectively percieve and discover.

Accidental double post. - SorryThis message has been edited by Lizard Breath, 07-26-2005 04:06 PM

Why in archeology does everything involve digging down through layers of earth to get to something. I do not discount the method, but what I've never understood is if everything above ground is basically air, where does all of this material come from that can bury past civilizations in heaps of dirt.Also, since the layers are not uniform in thicknes or linear vs. time, how do archeologists know what date to tag a particular level without making at least some assumptions or conjectures?Finally, you have stated that the human brain is far to complex a machine to have arrisin from intellegent design. NASA's engineer's today said that our space technology is in it's very early infancy and primitive after the launch of Columbia. Would the developement of something like NCC-1704, the Star Trek Enterprise be more possible via nature from random chance and hyper creativity or is that still infinitly simple compared to the human brain? In other words, is the brain more complex as a machine than something like a science fiction space ship to where intellegence might be able to get us to the NCC-1704, but brain design is of at least several magnitudes higher in complexity to where that design feat is clearly impossible.This message has been edited by Lizard Breath, 07-26-2005 04:05 PM

I would agree, they are subjective in so far as their cosmic signifcance, that is outside of the human experience.i.e. The sun, the dogs, or the bunnys, don't give a crap about the Holocaust. If I murder and rape, the sun dosn't care, nor do wild horses.But, to us, as humans, there are things that are Objectively Wrong, and Objectively Right.For instance:It is objectively wrong to rape, because it causes pain, disrupts society, and it is not condusive to a healthy human experience.My ability to empathize tells me this is wrong.My ability to look ahead and see that such behavior is detrimental not only to the individuals involved but to society as a whole gives me an objective basis to establish that rape is indeed wrong.Not only that, as of now I see no evidence for a 'good' form of rape, since I can't imagine a case where 'rape' does not cause harm, I can objectively state that 'rape', in all cases I can think of, is wrong. They are such, as I stated above. Morality applies to us alone. And within that human construct there are objective standards.Just cuz the bunnys don't care if I go around killin and raping dosn't mean it isn't wrong.This message has been edited by Yaro, 07-26-2005 01:52 PM

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So... (feeling I should get back on topic) if you believe that something is absolutely wrong or absolutely right... then you practically believe in God already.

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So, the Capuchin monkeys who believe that doing the same work for a less tasty kind of food is unfair "practically believe in God"?

Well, let me ask you this. People who live in cities generally do their best to keep them from being buried in the dirt. So if you find a buried city, one of two things is generally true:1) The city was buried so fast that nobody had time to do anything about it, for instance by vulcanism (Pompeii, etc);2) The city was buried slowly because everybody had already left. You find a lot of desert cities this way, and they get buried because wind is always blowing the sand around.Plenty of ancient cities that people abandoned, like Machu Pichu, were never buried at all, because they're in the tops of mountains or whatever where there is no dirt blowing around to bury them. They ask geologists. While it's true that the layers are not uniform all over the Earth, they are fairly uniform, or at least predictable (for instance the sediment bed of an ancient lake will be thicker in the middle than around the edges, like lakes are), on a regional basis. This is true for both thickness and composition.Any igneous layer gives a reliable radiometric date, and sedimentary layers have their own rules for deposition based on their composition and size, and so we can infer the dating pretty reliably. Moreover when referring to discoveries of human artifacts the artifacts themselves will suggest their time period.Finally another reason archeologists find so much buried stuff is because humans bury a lot of stuff (garbage, treasures, corpses) and stuff that isn't buried doesn't stick around for very long. As an experiment place two identical cans of Coke out front of your house, one on the sidewalk and one buried ten feet below the ground, and then see which is still there in 100 years.Archeologists find what's there for them to find. That tends to be buried stuff because stuff that isn't buried is lost much sooner. I guarantee you that, if we ever have spacefaring vessels in the vein of Star Trek, genetic algorythms employing the principles of mutation and selection will be responsible for much of their design. We're already employing those principles in the design of air- and spacecraft. I have absolutely no idea how to quantify complexity in a way relevant to this question, so I don't know how to answer.

It still doesn't have any teeth to it. If there is no eternal consequence to the immorale behavior, then it really isn't immorale. It's just different. Sure there is pain and hurt, and your empathy shows that you don't want it done to you. But it's still just natural behavior. Weighted differently depending on your perspective, but still, only different.To be morally wrong means that you must have a standard by which to measure the behavior against. Humans cannot produce this measuring rod for the standard because they are all seeing the behavior from their own unique perspectives. That's why behaviors through the ages have shifted from unaccpetable to acceptable and vice verse. Abortion and homosexuality were abominations years ago but are perfectly acceptable today. Slavery and child labor were accepted years ago but are abominations today.To have a moral standard, you need a moral law. To get a moral law you need a law giver. To get a law giver who can write a universal code, they must be from outside of our physical reality. The same as when you have officials in a football game. The players cannot make the calls themselves because they are in the reality of the playing field. They may know that an infraction was commited, but it is only the referee and the instant playback camera that can call the infraction, and extract the penalty. They are outside the physical arena of the reality. They are both present with the players and outside the field as the cameras, and they can travel freely through time via instant playback.

Many things cuase the gradual burial of marerial. In the case of underwater fossils, it's simple to explain. Stand in the mud in a river. Your feet sink, and gradually the current will carry more grains of sand to cover them completely. Now imagine this continues for millions of years instead of a few minutes. As more and more material piles up, the pressure and chemical impurities in the water (some of which is the decayed substance of what is buried) turn the mud into limestone, sandstone, and other sedimentary rock depending on the specific conditions. Age can be determined in several ways, including carbon dating the fossils dug up, as well as calculating the approximate length of time to form the observed depth and thickness of the stone.On land, varous other factors gradually re-bury the surface. Volcanic eruptions are an excellent example - they spew tons and tons of ash into the air that covers wide stretches of land. Then there is the lava itself, covering large areas in new solid rock. Forests provide another example. Plant life dies and falls to the ground. This builds up layer upon layer of decaying and decayed plant matter, burying anything more solid like stone, bones, etc. Tornadoes and duststorms sweep debris and material up and cover anything in their paths.Yeah, all that's above the ground is "air," but over the course of a few billion years the Earth changes quite a bit.An example of where this doesn't happen is the Moon. The moon has no atmosphere or active volcanism. It's literally a dead rock. When you look up and see the cratered surface, you are seeing meteor impacts that happened millions of years ago that weren't buried becuase the Moon lacks the geological and atmosheric systems the Earth has. Complexity in this example is non-linear. Complexity is not the equivalence of advancement. The human brain is complex in that it is a wildly random and chaotic growth of interdependant neurons that connect to each other given certain conditions. There are millions upon millions of neural pathways in your head - but not one of them was "designed." They are a result of certain behaviors of the neurons in the midst of the chaos. Pathways that produce positive results are strengthened, where pathways that result in negative responses are degraded. It's how we learn.There are, by the way, various researchers attempting to create an artificial brain modeled after the brain of humans. They use random neural connections and positive feedback loops to attempt to duplicate the functions of a human brain. There are no blueprints, no plans. No design, in the way that you are speaking. Just chaos and selection.

Well I see somethinh approaching an attempt to describe ideas of morality. Even if it is intended mainly as another negative argument.

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To have a moral standard, you need a moral law.

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Why ? Shouldn't it be the other way around ? How can you make a moral law without a moral standard ? And the rest of it is about enforcing laws. Are you saying that morality is nothing but following laws which themselves have no moral basis ? How does that make sense ?

Morality defined on the basis of punishment is not morality. It's fear. Judaism doesn't believe in Hell. Are they all immoral? And Christians apparently have no "eternal consequence" either, as long as they believe in Jesus. According to Christian dogma, a Christian can murder and rape 1000 people and still get into Heaven, becuase he is saved by Grace. Some points of morality do shift. Typically they shift as people realize, "wait, they're just like me, and I wouldn't want that to happen to me, so I won't do it to them." A "law giver" can be human. And it's irrelevant. Each individual person can determine right and wrong simply by considering the consequences of their actions and empathyzing. No God required. Your own example disproves you. The referees are right there on the field with the players. They are also human, just like the players. Enforcing the rules is simply their job. This doesn't work. Any human can "travel through time" in the same way as in your example. Even the officials not physically on the field are still inside the same reality as the players.

Sure there is! Want to be ostracised from scoiety? Spend years of your life in prison? Be alianated from your peeres and the ones you love?i.e. Do you want to live a miserable life or a happy one? What more teeth could there be than the fact that we only have one life, and therefore only one chance to make it right (or screw it all up). That's got plenty of teeth for me. No, it is imoral, because I caused undue pain unto others, I may have even caused undue pain unto myself. I played a role detremental to society. So yes, it was imoral. Again, precisely because life is finite.If I murder someone, I am destroying a very finite life, destroying (if not seriously affecting) the lives connected to the one I took. I am effectivly filling peoples finite time on earth with undue pain and anguish. That is imoral. Again, so what? Because it's natural does not make it any less imoral. I am affecting others in a negative way. No, right and wrong. Ideals do not require the actual Ideal to exist. Have you ever seen a perfect circle? No, no one has. How can you tell one someone has drawn an Imperfect circle. Wrong, we do and have created the standard because only we have the perspective that allows us to make rules that are right for us. Morals are social rules, based on empathy and reason. Exactly, that's the point. If we were still following the ridiculously ridget hebrew laws we would be stoning gay folks in the streats.As time goes on and societies advance, we begin to realize what is moraly usefull and what isn't. Hurray for the evolution and refinement of morality! False. All you need is a necessity for survival in a social group. The presures of society and the demands of the environment will dictate the morals. Prove this by a) Show a universal code, b) show something outside of reality.Last time I checked God was contingent on reality. And sometimes it is to close to call. And if a football beens them in the head they are out for the count. I haven't seen god in a courtroom lately.

Let's explore this further.Are you saying that, without the threat of Hell or even promise of Heaven that Christians would rape, steal, and kill? Perhaps some of them would - they would be called "phsychopaths."If you were a parent (don't know if you are), would you rather you child be a moral person becuase he's afraid of punishment, or becuase it's the right thing to do?How is God's punishment necessary for the existance of morality?