Moral Argument for God

Just a guess. There's no way to know for sure.

What are you differing with me about? I said I was guessing. Are you saying I am not guessing? How would you know I'm not guessing? It's not a scientific argument. There's no firm evidence one way or the other, but there is a lot of speculation and tentative hypotheses. A creature might be conscious but still might not be capable of moral decisions. An animal's outward behavior does not in inself indicate self-consciousness and certainly not the understanding of a moral syllogism. An animal might do something that we would call unselfish behavior, but if he's doing it by rote it's not a moral action. It's the action of a machine.

What I meant was that what I said was not based on scientific knowledge that I possessed. I am not much of a possessor of scientific knowledge. What I know could go into a heaped-up tablespoon.I did however read an article a while back which put forth an ingenious though unproven idea: The author speculated about the origin of sleep and decided that the likeliest explanation was that sleep was necessary to restore something depleted in the brain due to consciousness. He went on to say that most animals do not sleep (they can measure states of sleep), but some do--mostly the "higher" animals. Form this he deduced that those animals which sleep are those which are conscious when they are awake. Otherwise, there would be no need for them to sleep.Made sense to me.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 07-28-2005 11:28 AM

The introduction of God doesn't help matters. The only way we can conceive of God is as a sort of super-human with the same sort of mind. If that is the case, then God's values are also subjective.If you try to explain God in other terms, then we come up against an unknown X called the Absolute. What does this mean? Nothing. It's meaningless.So what you are saying is that without the mystery X, there can be no objective absolutes.

I don't think that follows from what hangdawg said. What he said was that he would have an inner conflict between his logic and his feelings. His feelings would say, "my moral system tells me to do such and such" and his logic would say, "actually, my moral system is arbitrary." This doesn't mean that he's going to start killing people.My own response to Hangdawg is in response to this question:My answer is that this is the nature of life. What matters is the truth, not how we feel about it.

It doesn't prove it. I just thought it was a plausible idea. It relates to the topic in the sense that if a creature is not conscious, it cannot make a moral choice. Assuming that spiders are unconscious, we can say that if they bite you on no provocation, they have not committed an immoral act. They are incapable of either moral or immoral actions. So in order to decide if an animal is capable of moral choices, you would first have to determine if they are conscious.

That's an understatement. What "consciousness" is is a total mystery.I was just making the obvious point that if an action is robotic and totally unconscious, it could not be moral or immoral. The action would be merely a response to a stimulus, like a bush leaning toward the sunlight.

I thought you had to have a brain to be conscious.

It's not about big men telling you to behave: It's about a knowledge that you must do or not do this and that. It's called "conscience."Conscience is a very problematical phenomenom, but to dismiss it out of hand seems unwise.

Yeah, but no evidence. Just feelings. Not that I don't respect your moral feelings. I do respect them.