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From: tim@unc.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Absolute Systems of Morality and the Existence of God
Message-ID: <5427@unc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 22-Jun-83 16:02:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: unc.5427
Posted: Wed Jun 22 16:02:52 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 24-Jun-83 20:06:52 EDT
References: ucbvax.314
Lines: 159


    Lorenzo Sadun has posted a variant on the moral argument for the
existence of God.  I feel this to be a very flawed argument, and this
article is an attempt to explain why.  His article was long, so I
won't reprint all of it here; I hope that I do not do the arguments
injustice by my extraction.

            If a (large) group of people believe that mass
        murder and sadistic torture are the height of virtue
        (with generosity and kindness presumably being
        unspeakable vices), and if they acted on their
        beliefs, would we not all react with a sense of moral
        outrage?  This sense of outrage is clear evidence that
        deep down none of us believes that morality is quite
        THAT relative....

            If morality isn't completely relative, then there
        must be some basic, fundamental moral ideas that are
        absolute.  Pain and suffering are bad.  Joy is good.
        Death is at least usually bad ...  The list of
	more-or-less basic values goes on.

            I claim that accepting that such a list exists is
        almost tantamount to belief in in [sic] God.  For one,
        accepting ANY absolute standards leads to the question
        "who or what sets the standards?", and we are back to
        the absolutist dilemma of page 1.

    Why does this require any such belief?  Why can it not be humans
who create the standards, based on our behavior and desire patterns,
which originated in evolutionary processes?  The fact that I see the
color "yellow" does not in any way imply that there has to be a God
who created "yellow".  The phenomenon can be totally explained in
evolutionary terms.  To apply this argument to morality, postulate
a "moral sense" which discourages killing and so on.  Obviously any
tribe of proto-humans which did not have this would have an
evolutionary disadvantage over a tribe which did, since fewer of its
members would survive to breed.  As Kepler said when asked why there was
no mention of God in his model of the Solar System, "I have no need of
that hypothesis."

            Moreover, there is the folowing problem, which led
        me, a few years back, to firmly believe in God's
        existence.

            Take an ordinary, garden variety stone.  Smash it
        into bits, and ask yourself if I could pin any moral
        blame on you....  There is no overwhelming moral
        principle that all must accept which protects rocks.

            Now take an ordinary, garden variety person.
        Smash him to bits, and ask yourself if now I could pin
        any moral blame on you.  If you accepted our minimal
        list of rights and wrongs then you have to accept that
        murder is wrong....

            What gives the human this protected status?  If a
        human were a purely physical being (i.e. an incredibly
        complicated rock), then there should be no such
        distinction.  For a human death to carry moral value,
        a human life must be more that [sic] a peculiar
        configuration of electrons.  Man must have some
        supernatural nature, which is what I define a soul to
        be.  Either that, or there is some higher being who
        has decreed that human life is to be protected (i.e.
        there is a God).

    Whoa there!  That's a pretty big leap to make.  Your argument
boils down to, first, "Since we perceive humans differently from all
else in our universe, there must be a unique quality to humans." I
move that the difference comes about from the fact that we, the
observers, are humans, not from any intrinsic quality of the human
race.  Is that clear?  What I am saying is that, given evolution, it
would be incredible if members of a particular species did NOT
perceive other members of the same species in a special way.  What
gives the human the protected status FROM OUR POINT OF VIEW is the
fact that we are the same species as each other.  And except from our
point of view, there is no difference.  Humans are subject to exactly
the same physical laws as any other object.

    Second, even if I did grant you the uniqueness of humans, the jump
from there to a soul or God is completely unjustified.  I will not
prove this, since it is prima facie obvious; instead, I challenge you
to justify this jump.

            From accepting that souls exist to accepting that
        God exists is then a small step only.  We have
        accepted the supernatural, and we have accepted some
        sort of absolute morality, and we need only look for
        the source and call that God.  End of problem.

    Speak for yourself, Lorenzo.  I accept nothing of the sort.  Even
granting your soul assumption, which I do not, that's still a doozy of
a leap.  Again, I challenge you to justify this.  In particular, why
do you assume that there is A THING which can be considered the
source?  The use of the word "God" shows me that you believe certain
things about the nature of this God, or you would have no reason to
use the word "God".  You would refer to it as "the source" or some
such if all you meant was "the source of morality."

            Of course, the souls and God that we have defined
        need not have the properties that we usually associate
        with souls and God.  The souls need not be immortal.
        God need not be omniscient nor need He be omnipotent.
        God need not perform miracles.  In fact, God need not
        physically interfere in human affairs at all!

    Once again, you undermine yourself.  You call God a "He", which
implies at least singleness and sentience, even if we strip away the
gender.  Where do you get the belief that God is sentient instead of
just an abstract force, or singular instead of plural?  It sure
doesn't follow from your argument!  You just pull it out of thin air.

    As far as I can tell, your argument exists solely to justify your
prejudices about the existence and nature of what you call God;
otherwise, where did all this other stuff come from?  Why would you
call it God, if not to support a religion?  Why do you assume
singleness and sentience, if not to support monotheism?  Nowhere have
you supported these beliefs in your argument, so I am forced to the
conclusion their source is elsewhere.

        ... The gods of the ancients, who existed to explain
        the lightning and the rain, are gone.  In my scheme,
        such beings would be merely super-powerful humans who
        provide no help whatsoever in answering "whence comes
        morality".  We have progressed, in the last 3000
        years, to the point where we do not need gods to
        explain the physical world around us.  Indeed, we do
        not need gods to explain things.  We need a God to
        JUSTIFY the moral structure of our world.

    Say what?  Do you really think there is some meaning in this
doubletalk?  The last two sentences in particular?  What do you
mean by "justify" in this context?

    Finally, about God as lawgiver.  Here I will quote from Bertrand
Russell when he dealt with the moral argument for the existence of God
in his lecture "Why I Am Not a Christian":

            "...if you are quite sure that there is a
        difference between right and wrong, you are then in
        this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat
        or is it not?  If it is due to God's fiat, then for
        God himself there is no difference between right and
        wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to
        say that God is good.  If you are going to say, as
        thelogians do, that God is good, you must then say
        that right and wrong have some meaning which is
        independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are
        good and not bad independently of the mere fact that
        he made them."

    Are you willing to throw away the idea of divine benevolence for
the sake of your rather weak argument, Lorenzo?  I suspect not; but
that means that the argument must go.  This is of course just frosting
on the cake.  Your argument is so foolish that it needs no more
objection before crumbling of its own accord.

    Tim Maroney