Moral Argument for God

The Bible seems to support the idea that there is a universal underpinning of good as a substance. In Genesis 1 the phrase "and God saw that it was GOOD", appears several times, but the Bible doesn't make any attempt at that time to establish why it was good. The Bible just describes the action of God in objective fashion, and then labels it as good.The only other time that I know of that the Bible attempts to quantify the term Good, is when in the New Testament someone refers to Jesus as "Good Master". Jesus responds to the person with a question "Why do you call me good? Only one is good and that is God himself". I believe that he is actually trying to make the connection for the person tha he (Jesus) is refering to himself in the third person when he talks about God as good.If there is no supreme being or grand design then the concept of good and evil make no sense. Hitler was no different than Mother Theresa. Both consumed food and water, converted it to energy, and stayed in motion via what their own accidental dna coding dictated to them.Just like having two comets whose random trajectories place one in an orbit that every 80 years delights humans in the evening sky while the other slams into the Earth and ends all human life. Neither one is good or evil, just acting via the random forces that each has applied to it. No design. No purpose. No consequence.

Are there evil planets? Are there evil stars? Is there evil dark matter? Are there evil galaxies? Are the 4 fundamental forces of gravity, magnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces evil?They are neither good nor evil. They are just there as a hap- hazzard result of an accident called the big bang. If you look at it from the perspective of the universe as a whole, there is no good or evil. Everything just is.The planet Mars is a big chunck of real estate from my perspective, but from the perspective of a universe that has 600 billion, billion stars and who knows how many orbiting planets, Mars is insignificant. Compared to the size of Mars, I am insignificant, and even amoung my own kind, Mars plays a bigger role in human society than I do. So to look at the universe and everything in it including humans from any other perspective other than that of the universe as a whole is illogical since it itself is an accident and we are just minute accident portions of the greater accident.Morality, happiness, intellegence, self awareness and everything else are just phenomena of the electro chemical activity generated by the 4 forces over billions of years after the big bang. Nothing more. Just phenomena. Not universal truths.To look at the universe from a human persepctive is the same as looking at it from an asteroid's perspective. Both are of equal insignificance.Finally, to look at it from any other perspective involves a supreme being or creator/designer. Gods perspective lends to purpose, organization, fundamental rules and truths, a plan, utility and reason. When looked at from God's perspective, the order of the creation lends itself to discover that humans are not insignificant but instead that they are special and unique. And therefore, universal morality and good and evil make sense because they came from the designer and were built into the design of the human. They were not randomly occuring due to electro-chemical interactions with enviorment and survival.The difference between fundamental morality and good and evil from the grand design verses big bang chance perspective is like driving a vehicle.When you get into a vehicle and drive to work, there is order, purpose, a plan, a goal, rules, and a desired forseen outcome. This is like grand design, so things like stop signs, speed limits, maps and highway lines mean something.The chance evolution perspective for universal morality is like a bumper car ride at an amusement park. There are no rules, speed limits, goals, winners, scores, a plan or order. Just random bumping and at the end, the cars are just as mixed up, so stop signs, speed limits, maps and road lines would mean nothing.

If you look at at the formation of the universe as the baseline starting point, there was no reason for it to happen. No purpose, no design, no guiding. It just happened. So to imply that in a universe with no reason or purpose for it's existance, an almost infintesimally small insignificant portion of it can have reason and morality and consiciounce, is not logical.What we are is just a sputtering micro second jumbling of a combination of the 4 forces as they have mixed themselves randomly. To imply that there is a cerebral reality that can be deduced outside of the randomness of what is, is implying that there is purpose and design to us. This is impossible without grand design and a designer, so we cannot take ourselves serious enough to believe that reason is actually a real concept. It's just anouther very very temporary phenomena created by energy, time and chance.

Let's look at these two from the perspective of European Rabbits. Because of Hitler, 60 million humans were killed which freed up that much more water, food and land for the other animals. It ment that less heating fuels would be used over the next 30 years for home heating because of a decreased population, which reduced personal polution. Many of the soldiers that were killed were hunters which means that there are less humans trying to kill the rabbits. Much infrastructure was destroyed so hunting clubs took a back seat to rebuilding roads.Mother Thereasa on the other hand has done much to help the humans which has ment that many are still alive today because of her, using up natural resources and polluting the Earth. So from the rabbit's perspective, Hitler was good and Mother Thereasa was evil.Also, within the ranks of humans, good and evil are all over the board. Good to one guy is luring a married woman into bed and having sex with her but the same act to her husband would be considered evil. And since I work with a guy who does this, he justifies it as good because he gives the women the pleasure and excitement that they deserve. But the extreme pain and anquish because of the aftermath are not good to those involved, except it is very good to the lawyers who profit from it.So from an atheist perspective, universal good and evil are useless concepts. Instead, it is better to tag behavior as specimen specific beneficial or specimen specific detrimental and then further catagorize via long or short term consequence.The only way to have a universal right and wrong for even a part of the universe, it must originate from outside the boundries of the universe. Random energy and chaos cannot produce reason and order. The only way for something like that to appear from outside the boundreis of our universe is if it comes from the designer.

Yes, universal morality disappears if there is no God. And if there is no God then subjective morality disappears everytime a human dies because they take their own specific morality with them when they leave.Without a God, any type of exhibited morality is just another behaviour tool that is employed by humans to aid in survival. It's just another playground rule that pops up to make the game better for most of the players, but it is not a fundamental fact that must be present for the game to be played.Some of you take offense to this because it reduces your concept of humans but I don't see how you can look at yourself as a meaningless accident of fundamental forces of energy, and then apply significance and meaning to yourself because you experience the phenomena of self awareness.The only thing that I see is apparent or universal about humans from the aethistic perspective is that we are very very temporary, we are only here by accident and chance, we have no universal purpose except to run the course that the energy in us pushes us. Once the essence of the human/energy configuration runs dry, there will be no memory or difference in the sum of the universe because of us.

I would answer that as No. Since from the Aethistic perspective we are all very small slices of energy originating from the big bang, seeing these small parts of energy mitigate to other parts of the same energy mass is nothing special. Just the random dispersion of energy that has undergone numerous transfiguarations over the millenia, unwinding it's potential surplus until the culmination of the big crunch.From the Creationist perspective I see it as extremely grand in that special created beings put the unique talent and intellegence given to them, to maximum usage in order to accomplish a very challenging task. To be given a universe by a designer that poses a challenge to be studied and explored. Then create a perfect planet for a special created being to flourish on and eventually utilize all of their god given potential to go out and explore this vast universe and in the process learn much about the designer.Finally, to have written on their hearts by the designer, a moral code (in the DNA) that causes every one of the special created beings to view right and wrong in the same perspective that the designer does, while allowing them the freedom to choose their own course of behaviour with respect to or despite of the knowledge of this truth.

The fact of mine that you are supporting or recognizing is that we ARE having very real experiences in this world. The world is filled with purpose, order and experience. What I'm saying is that all of this reality, purpose and order did not result out of random energy currents from a distant big bang.Reason, logic, self awareness and universal morality also cannot result from random energy currents from a distant big bang. My point is that relying on a massive explosion to get us to this point does not equate. If one big explosion can produce intellegent humans, then a smaller controlled one should produce some money for me but I doubt if you would stand around while I blow up some wood and see if I get dollars as a result. The human being exhibits qualities that reflect an infusion of intellegence in order to demonstrate all of the qualities that we are debating.To say that complex concepts such as right and wrong can be derived from an explosion requires more than faith in my opinion than observing the obvious that we are the handy work of a designer from outside of the boundries of our physical universe.WE do not make our own purpose. We have the ability and freedom to choose what our course will be, but just like a ship cannot build itself, we did not build ourselves. Our design reflects that our creation was for a purpose. The purpose came BEFORE the the creation.The Bible claims that the purpose of humans was to have communion with the creator and to rule and subdue the Earth. For this second purpose it is obvious that we are supremely created. There is no way that we can re-create our purpose to be anything else but to subdue the Earth, whether in engineering, music, technology, medicine, philosophy, bussiness or anything else.If you want to change your purpose to be the same as the Musk Oxen's purpose on this planet, go ahead and try but you will not be able to rival the Ox, because you were created as a human and you will subdue the Oxen or expire trying. Your purpose was created for you before you were.

If humans are a result of the big bang, then so is their consciousness. You are saying that once humans were created from the big bang, a whole new game started and these complex thoughts just came into being.I say that this is false. It's like saying that once the microprocessor was created "by chance", some power was applies to it and it began to display powerful bussiness applications on the screen. You need the software to make anything happen on even the most complex cpu. The software always has an author.You are saying that once the cpu finally evolved, it created it's own software to run on itself, all by chance, repetition and time. And the software developed itself from "Find Food, Take Food, Eat Food" to "Morality and self awareness".I say that you need a designer to run the computer with power, build a station for it to operate, design the cpu, and write the software.

I disagree. Admittedly, human brains are infinetly more complex than the best CPU's. The human brain has the same connectivity or synapses as the number of leaves in the entire United States if each acre of land had 20 trees and each tree had 10,000 leaves.I am familiar with the vast amount of intellegent design that went into the development of the modern CPU's. It is impossible to then look at the human brain and say that no intelligent design went into it. Just green slime and time. That is tremendous complexity out of hot gas.

So when complexity reaches a certain level, it is unattainable by intellegence and can only come about by random chance and acidental mutation which prove beneficial to the unit?So is mutation and chance superior to intellegence? How can something that is running on cause and effect be hyper creative?

That's right. Engineeers (designers) are turning to a superior designed model for inspiration to create something in a new dirrection. But there still is a designer in the middle of it.Why don't I see hyper-creativity in action today with the living species. The best arguement that I have heard is that for Autistic children actually being the beginning of a new species of humanoid. The way that I have heard it, they are a transitional species to a new totally separate new species.

I don't read any biology journals. If it doesn't make the main stream media's science section or the Science Channel, I wouldn't be aware of it.I would think though that if hyper creativity would in fact exist and seeing where evolution is today, evidence of superior creations superceeding our own would be popping up at an interval that would be very apperant to anyone with life in them. Not just people like yourself who are well plugged in to that particular disipline.The Autistic child arguement still sounds almost viable to me the way I had it presented, but admittedly it is not all that good of an arguement to someone like yourself who is involved with these children.Being involved in military technology, the only other place where I witness any type of hyper creativity in naure is in biological warefare. Some of the strains of weapons that are out there are marvelous examples of this creativity. But again, they have had an infussion of intellegence in order for them to have been created and they are all counter productive to promoting evolution of advanced species. Most of these are the biological equivelent of a T3 Terminator which would cauterize any branch of evolution right in it's tracks.

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

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.