Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!wivax!decvax!harpo!floyd!vax135!ariel!hou5f!orion!houca!hogpc!houxm!hocda!spanky!burl!duke!unc!tim 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