1. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #163749 by thisisme on April 19, 2008 at 1:07 am

Hi MPhil - thanks for getting back. I still don't think you're understanding my arguments properly, but as you say lets leave it till after the 'reading break' :-) It's been good debating - while I still don't agree with your arguments (for the reasons stated in my previous post - I think you need to come out of your atheist box and have another look at them too :-) you're the most logical thinking atheist I've ever encountered. But for now back to study and dissertation, then Kant et al and then - the world shall hear from me again!
:-)
thisisme

2. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #163366 by thisisme on April 18, 2008 at 8:44 am

irate - seriously, no. Not to you anyway. (While we're on jokes).

"If God's nature is needed to support the laws of logic, then the laws of logic aren't immutable (if they were, there would be no need for support)."
I never said God's nature was needed to support the laws of logic.
Read my post again.

I said that the laws of logic are God's nature, and that's my basis for them.
If you can come up with another justification for logic then do so, that's fine with me.

3. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #163353 by thisisme on April 18, 2008 at 8:26 am

Response to MPhil et al, Post 2188

I read of someone who can play 12 games of chess at the same time with his eyes shut, but that's not my style :-) I must admit I think you're beginning to out-talk me by sheer weight of numbers at least! Though I wasn't very impressed by the attempt by some at false analogy (penguins for instance).

To come to your post though, I will try to keep this fairly short as we do seem to be doing some debating round in circles and it could go on forever this way:

I still don't agree with your argument - your formal logic looks fun (I like the look of that sort of thing :-) but it has no real bearing on the question. Obviously, if God is God there are going to be no properties of God which are not properties of God. I'm sorry that my argument is still not clear - maybe even using the term 'self-defining' is too confusing as it seems to require an action of being defined, as you've pointed out about universals. Self-sufficient might be more appropriate. As for the laws of logic, they don't follow on from God's nature, they are God's nature. God's nature is necessary - this would be a problem if his nature did not also support logic as his nature would be internally inconsistent - as it is it's not. That's my argument. We do seem to have reached some sort of deadlock here though.

A priori - I don't want to argue about terms but basically my point was that the laws of logic *have* to be assumed before we can even start to reason about our empirical observation, so they must precede it.

On to realism - I don't agree that TMA is a refutation of universals as I don't agree with the 'no self-sufficiency' premise as I've said above. I've never found any variety of conceptualism or nominalism which doesn't just postpone the problem - it's no good just asserting there are some, as there's no way I can meet your argument if I don't even know what it is. Occam's razor doesn't apply until you have shown this.

Coming on to Hume - as you point out I'm using 'universal' here as shorthand for 'universal laws', i.e. uniformity - my mistake if that's confusing to you. Hume's deconstruction does not threaten my position - as my position is based on the control of the universe by an unchangeable God with a uniform character over time. Ok, you don't agree with that premise. But it does make sense of uniformity and allows us to make judgements based on this, which atheism does not - until I find a view which doesn't fall foul of the problem of induction I'm justified in keeping my premises by impossibility of the contrary.

What you don't seem to realise is that Hume's deconstruction of induction threatens not only absolute but also conditional and probabilistic knowledge of the future. Probability assumes that there is uniformity - we say that because 50% of the past-future coin tosses we have seen were heads, there's a 50% chance the next will be. But that assumes that future-futures are going to behave the same way as the past ones. You say that 'If we want to have a stable society, we can work out what behaviour is necessary'. Certainly not! Because without any indication that the future will be anything like the past we cannot reason from what has made society stable in the past to what will make it so in the future. And in addition to this you are just shifting the problem one step back, to why we assign value to the stability of society. But that's beside the point. You can't know what will make society stable. So any action is just as 'right' as any other.

Ok, the Bible next. I can enderstand why you don't want to go there again - just please don't expect me to concede your assumptions. I'm quite happy to debate the correctness of the Bible and have done so in the past, but yeah I understand why you don't want to go down it.

Ok, ethics. I've dealt with that above. I see you're saying there are no 'oughts' only 'values'. But what I've said above was about values so that should make sense.

If you want to halt this discussion until after our reading break, that's ok with me. I'm happy to go on but...

I'm tired :-)

4. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #162715 by thisisme on April 17, 2008 at 10:43 am

Response to MPhil, post 1929.

Ok, here goes :-)
I did make several assertions without evidence, and I pointed out that that was what I was doing - giving the gounds of my ethical framework first and then working from that to an impossibility of the contrary. When I'm referring to absolutes I'm talking about necessity and universality and as you point out the question is whether God's nature is necessary. But you don't seem to have understood my point about this - not surprising as I realise I didn't really make it clear. God, as an eternally existant ultimate being must be self defining. The same must be true for all universals that exist. Like the laws of logic, which I believe are self-defined within God's character and a Realist (Platonist) for instance would believe are self-defined elsewhere. I know you don't seem to be very keen on universals (at least for morality) but I'll come to that later. You say I'm not using the term 'a priori' correctly. But when I use a priori I *am* using it to refer to a condition of knowledge - which laws of logic obviously are. That was precisely my point. I was not saying that we have a priori knowledge - how can we? - but that we have an a priori assumption which is only later justified by the results. My presupposition is the existance of God, as revealed in the Bible. I work on this philosophical basis and this provides me with a basis for universals as I have described above. There are briefly 3 basic ways of trying to account for universals of any kind:
Realism (this includes theism, and platonism)
Abstraction (most popular today, more aristotelian)
Nominalism
Realism is the only workable metaphysic for universals, as abstractionism (that the universal is based on how our brains abstract characteristics) and nominalism (it's all in the name) only shift the problem along. We move from having multiple essences to having multiple images in the brain, or multiple instances of a word, and we never reach any oneness. Hume showed in addition to this that we can never infer a universal from the past - to put it simply we can never know that the past is like the future, because we can never see the future. We've seen past futures, but we can't infer anything from them because we don't know anything about future futures. In addition, even to say that there was a univeral at a single instance in time, you would have to be viewing reliably all of the universe simultaniously - thus we *cannot* derive universals for logic or science in a material universe either! Pragmatism too comes down to just a thing of the moment - this law of whatever may have been useful yesterday, but we can't know that it will be so tomorrow. Hume's deconstruction implies too to utilitarian/pragmatic ethics - how can we know that what held society stable in the past will do so in the future? Quite apart from the fact that wanting societal stability is an 'is' not an 'ought' as Dawkins would say.
So when you mention platonist atheism, yes, that is a far more workable possibility - in this particular area of universals. I might criticise it on epistemological grounds etc. - it needs another debate - but here it holds its own fairly well. My original debate was not with platonism but with dawkinsianism (or whatever you call it) - I said that Dawkins had no objective basis for criticising anyone.
Just briefly now on scripture and its position as my philosophical presupposition. I should have said it's the basis for my philosophy. And it needs to make sense. You say that internal consistency is not important in this comparison of worldviews, only conformation to fact. I would disagree. It's important that my worldview makes sense of the world, particularly of logic, morality and science, but it's also important that it's consistent internally. You simply assert that the Bible is neither without any evidence to prove it. If you want to go down that route then you need to provide the evidence. A real internal critique not just 'it doesn't make sense to me'.

Right, so (after all that!) is a universal standard necessary for morals? It depends what you want to be able to do. If you want to be 'a nice person' by your own standards then do it. But if your standards and someone else's disagree, what can you appeal to? Any ethical theory that does not provide a universal standard does not allow criticism of others. This should be obvious. I don't care where the universal standard comes from but it needs to be there if like Dawkins you are going to criticise the behaviour and particularly if you are going to criticise the ethics of others, especially across time/space/society dimensions.

Anyway, I hope some of that makes sense, and starts to clarify the argument. Thanks for getting back and answering - it's been good talking so far. Thanks for the links too - I will certainly try to follow them up, when I have 'time' (I have booked myself a month off in June - should get some reading time out of that :-) Will see if I can get hold of the others you've mentioned too. As you say it's probably best to make sure I've refined my arguments over those works before starting a big forum debate. I'll keep half an eye on this comments section in case you want to get back before then :-)

5. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #162173 by thisisme on April 16, 2008 at 9:12 am

Response to MPhil, post 1825.
Thanks for getting back. Here's my response to your points.


First - Justification of Christian moral objectivity
I believe that God is abolute, thus the values which are part of his character are also absolute. I believe that the laws of God's nature, the laws of logic, the laws of morality, are *defined* by his nature. They don't make his nature necessary, they are necessary because they are his unchanging nature. That is where I believe the laws of morality come from - they merely reflect the nature of God. Because these laws are the character of an absolute God they can and must be absolute. But in a situation where all that exists is matter, where are we going to get any absolute rules from? You can't go out and pick up a Law of Logic (or morality) from the supermarket, or any other part of the universe. But when we criticise the logic or morality of others we are a priori assuming the existance of an ultimate standard by which we can judge them. In an atheist universe where does this come from? Where is the ultimate law of logic that we reference when we say that P AND NOT-P -> TRUE is a logical contradiction? We're sure it is a contradiction, but only because we assume the unchanging laws of logic. Where is the ultimate law of morality that we reference when we say that it's wrong for film-producers to lie? I've never heard a satisfactory atheistic explanation for the existance of universal laws, nor a reasoned attempt to live our lives without assuming them.


Second - justification of moral objectivity
Here we're getting to the heart of the issue. Do we really live as if there's no moral objectivity? If there is no objectivity, why do we criticise others? This is the point I've come back to time and again and not had answered. This was my original point - *if* there is no moral objectivity, why does RD criticise someone for lying? How can we say that anything is wrong for anyone else? How can we say that anything was wrong in the past, or will be in the future, or is wrong in a different society?
This is where I *am* going to bring in scripture. That's the basis of my worldview, my presupposition. We all have different philosophical glasses through which we see the world - I think yours aren't trustworthy, you think mine aren't. The only way to compare them is how well they make sense. I've already said that my worldview is based on God - maybe I should have said 'as revealed in the Bible' otherwise yeah how could we know anything about him? This is the only view I've found that makes sense of the need for moral objectivity, hence by the impossibility of all contrary views proposed I assume its truth.

Third - do we need to believe in objective morality to be moral?
No we certainly don't. I've said already that atheists may be just as moral as theists. The difference is that I can make that judgement. I have a measuring stick which I can line up against Atheist A and Theist B and compare them. Without objective moral values you don't. Unless you want to borrow mine.


In summary objective moral values are needed, and my worldview can account for them. I'm not expecting you to like, agree with or commend anything I've said. Not because I think you're rude, unthinking or unhelpful but because I know you have a different philosophical basis to me. I just don't think your philosophy can provide a basis for making moral judgements.

6. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #162022 by thisisme on April 16, 2008 at 2:23 am

epeeist,
From what I can see on here there seem to be people on both sides who aren't really interested in intelligent discussion (again not you). Formal debate sounds like a good idea. As I've said before I'm not overflowing with free time at present (I'm frantically writing a dissertation the deadline of which is coming up faster than I'd have believed possible) but I should be able to manage at least a-post-a-day sort of thing. The problem with doing that here is when I get back my last post has vanished into the mists of the past. Would be good to go through 'the foundation of ethics' question, maybe some more while we're at it. Can I start a new discussion on there myself? I may have a try...

7. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #161996 by thisisme on April 16, 2008 at 1:46 am

Was out all day yesterday and expected to find a response to my earlier questions on my reappearance today. All I find is a single post which suggests (with no reference to what I've said) that my views are incoherent, that I'm finding it difficult to answer the questions (when I've answered all the ones put to me) and a direction to read several atheist books on the subject. I could point the atheist side to several huge books setting out my views, but in a debate (in my opinion) it's more reasonable to set out one's views simply and in one's own words.
One thing I would agree with though - this discussion is too 'spread out'. Maybe this isn't the best place to hold a debate. If anyone wants to comment on my views, or provide answers to my questions, they're back on page 27 I think! :-)

8. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #160572 by thisisme on April 14, 2008 at 7:54 am

Hang on Geoff - we don't have ethical 'advances' in evolution do we?

A standard needs to be imposed from above, because otherwise there's no way to say which of the multiple standards people follow is right. It's ok while people agree, as far as it goes, but was it Mr X or Ms Y in my previous example who got it right?
I've done my best to answer people's questions now - I don't think anyone has answered most of mine yet. I'm not expecting everyone to have all the answers, but if anyone wants to try, please read all my posts as it's a bit spread out now!
This is certainly a subject that needs a lot more debate, in public really, to really hone down the different points of view.
I'm glad someone above found my small input 'valuable' anyway.

9. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #160549 by thisisme on April 14, 2008 at 7:35 am

Dr Benway, what we need is a standard. Otherwise nothing can be right or wrong so how we feel makes little difference.

10. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #160545 by thisisme on April 14, 2008 at 7:33 am

Yep, absolute morality about sums it up - a non-absolute morality is no morality at all.

11. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #160540 by thisisme on April 14, 2008 at 7:31 am

Dr Benway - that sums up my point, there is no right or wrong for a materialist, just 'is' (survival). There's no point in criticising the person who lies. I think Dawkins should be more consistent.

12. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #160535 by thisisme on April 14, 2008 at 7:28 am

Yep sure. I'm fairly busy so can't commit to a huge debate on here but will do my best to set out what I'm saying in this post... As I think I've indicated, I'm a theist (Christian to be more accurate) and I believe in a God who has set the standards. This doesn't mean that I'm necessarily more moral than any atheist, it just means that I can really say that lying for example, whether it's me or you who's doing it, is wrong - because I have an ultimate standard to compare it to. If there isn't an ultimate standard over us how can there be any ultimate morality? X thinks it's right to lie. Y thinks it's wrong to lie. Neither X or Y has any authority to criticise the other. Who has any right to criticise X? No-one. Because why pick on him and not on Y?
Unless... there's a God who created X, and created Y, and has set standards of how they are to behave to each other.
Furthermore, if all there is is matter, then all that's happening when X lies is that the matter is moving in a slightly different way to how it moves when Y tells the truth. How can we turn round and say the atoms are wrong to move that way? They didn't have much choice.
See my point?

13. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #160483 by thisisme on April 14, 2008 at 6:41 am

Yep, but I don't think we can say that 'evolutionary stability' makes right any more than 'is so' does. It's the same thing anyway isn't it? And what no-one seems to be able to get around, from a materialistic worldview, is - why should we criticise someone for being less evolutionary stable anyway?
All we have is 'is' - as you say there's no real 'ahead' for evolution so what makes one view better than another?

Dr Benway, that doesn't really explain how anything is wrong - say I can lie, exclude people from film viewings, etc, etc, and get away with it, is there any reason why I shouldn't? I don't suppose the police are going to be after me for it. And if I don't think there is any true ethical value to society surviving (after all why should there be? It's just another is/is-not) then I can theoretically just ignore society's norms, and as I've said above, how can anyone criticise me?

14. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #160443 by thisisme on April 14, 2008 at 5:32 am

Geoff - you think that letting Myers into a film preview would give anyone an evolutionary advantage? :-)
But seriously, if it's just evolved with us, then it's an 'is', not an 'ought'. And if someone has evolved to lie rather than tell the truth, well ok, that's another 'is'. What right have we got to criticise them? Maybe they're ahead of us on the evolutionary timeline...???
And if D is right, all his criticisms (and all my criticisms) are, is the equivalent of a lot of bubbling scum, so I don't know why we're bothering really :-)

15. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #160373 by thisisme on April 14, 2008 at 2:13 am

"It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'."
How true. So where on earth does RD think he's deriving all his 'oughts' in this long and derogatory article? If matter is all that exists, where are the moral standards coming from? Perhaps we can all set our own. There doesn't seem to be any reason not too. In which case perhaps Mathis is wrong by the Dawkins Law and Dawkins is wrong by the Mathis Law. Which would seem to remove all basis for any kind of morality.
In short, if there is no God, why is it wrong to lie for him?