Special Pleading and the PoE (Part 3)

[Rise]

We die for multiple physical reasons that are related to biology, which is related to chemistry, which is related to physics: for instance, telomere degradation and oxidation leading to aging. Being decapitated is clearly a physical cause of death. Imagine that I can plop a book of coroners' reports on your desk and read through them. It is flatly absurd to say that physics has nothing to do with death.

In order for a person to live forever, their telomeres would either have to not exist or not degrade. Their head would have to be incapable of being separated from their body, blood would have to be guaranteed to carry nutrients to the brain, I don't have to come up with some long list of examples because you likely know exactly what I'm saying. To argue that all of this has nothing to do with the way the physics of the universe are is profoundly missing some explanation or is just profoundly wrong.

None of that refutes what I said. Which is that there is something lacking in this equation without God that results in all these bad things happening.

Like how running a car without oil leads to it's degredation and eventual destruction as a functioning device.

You don't blame the manufacturer for requiring the device to need oil. You blame the driver for not operating the device according to it's design.

You also don't say the owner is "changing the physics of how the car operates" when they add oil to the engine. They are just adding what was always suppose to be there to stop problems from happening.

You mention that when God's hanging out in force that lions could eat straw, but can't you see that this is equivalent to saying God's changing their biology, chemistry, physics?

Who says He would need to?
Little Tyke: The True Story of a Gentle Vegetarian Lion
There probably won't be as much change as you think is needed in the case of the lion.

For all we know these issues could merely be epigenetic in nature and don't require new genetic information or changes. It would just be a matter of flipping the switches for a new situation.

We could also say God's life returning to creation could repair any deficiencies that much such a diet difficult for certain animals, deficiencies created by the fall, if it were not just epigenetic.

Which is even assuming there are true biological limitations and it's not mainly a behavioral or environmental issue (lack of available food otherwise), both of which could be corrected by God's presence returning to creation to remove the effects of the fall.

 

[Rise]

If the argument is that I require a sense I don't have in order to understand indecipherable claims, then I'm not sure what can be done about that: if these concepts can't be explained with reason and language, but only this mystical je ne sais quoi that I don't possess or otherwise don't have access to, isn't that it, then? Isn't my only recourse to simply doubt the claims are meaningful until such time that they're made so?

You are misrepresenting what I said.

I said you are in error for trying to explain spiritual realities with materialistic mechanisms.

It would be like trying to explain electricity without recognizing energy exists as an attribute of reality.

You could think of Spirit as another type of fundamental force, as an analogy, if it helps you to do so.

You can't expect to make sense of reality without recognizing this other attribute of reality (Spirit) exists. That not everything is explained by only the things science recognizes as forces.

I would also point out that you already do know it exists when you affirm the existence of free will, consciousness, your ability to reason, and morality.
These are things you cannot account for materialistically. Some of those reasons I've already gone over in this thread.

So you already affirm your spiritual sensor is there when you have an intuitive sense that you really are free to choose, some things really are wrong, and you really can generally trust your senses and reason to arrive at truthful conclusions about reality.

You might try to rationalize those away with natural excuses but when pressed on they won't hold up.

I don't know what it means for something to "be" love any more than I know what it means for something to "be" length, I don't know what it means for spirits to be in, over, upon, withdrawn from things. I'm not sure how these can be meaningful things if they can't be explained with language.

For instance I can imagine things like magic, I can imagine a spooky cloud entering someone and now that person has the power to shoot fireballs from their hands; even if I wouldn't understand the mechanism of how that would be accomplished. But you're saying things that don't even make sense in that regard: you're saying that things somehow "are" properties (which, by the way, in nearly all of your responses you are understanding what I'm saying about properties wrong; I am not saying God is "composed" of properties that abstractly existed before God, etc., but we'll get to that in later replies -- just letting you know you've understood me wrong). You're saying something like my spooky cloud example but it doesn't make sense for other reasons (such as the death thing, which I've asked more questions about in post 342.

I can understand and form a mental image of magical things. But I can't form an understanding of what it means for a being that is a person to "be" a property like love or life any more than I could understand what purple tastes like.

Your inability to understand that doesn't refute anything I argued.

All it says is that you don't understand it.

The problem with the implication of your post is that you seem to imply you think the idea is at fault just because you don't understand it.
It is arrogant to assume the truth of something is determined by your ability to understand it.

You aren't identifying anything logically wrong with the idea that would make it incoherent. You are just expressing personal inability to grasp it.

But you aren't doing it in a way that is asking for clarification.
Instead, you are doing it in a way that accuses the idea of being wrong simply because you don't understand it.

So, this goes to my post 341 then: as a quick recap, God could have given them enough information and the rationality not to self-deceive; and if God couldn't have done that, then putting the tree out there is like a kind of entrapment if Adam and Eve are capable of irrationally choosing things like radical skepticism (and the odds would converge to one that they would eventually, irrationally, make the wrong choice).

...


If it's not true that it was possible to make things better for themselves, that is a matter of having enough information. This goes back to the "why would someone make a choice with potentially negative consequences" section of post 341.

...

I'm not sure about what you've said here: just giving someone information and rationality such that they don't make a wrong choice because they're ignorant doesn't remove their free will!

Believing God is a liar with no reason to believe so is an irrational form of radical skepticism: if Adam and Eve were created with functioning, rational cognitive faculties, they would not be radical skeptics for no reason whatsoever.

Believing that God is holding out on them and they have something to gain from rebelling is a situation where they are ignorant and can be cured with mere information: God could make it clear that there is nothing to gain and that they have everything they need. Again, doubting this "just because" would be irrational radical skepticism.

You seem to be arguing that the only way Adam and Eve could have free will is that if they could bumble into evil by ignorance (ignorance that God is not a liar, ignorance that they might have something to gain by rebelling, and so on). But ignorance isn't required to have free will. In fact I would argue that making choices while ignorant is less free than making choices while aware! Adding ignorance to the equation is effectively like adding a randomizer, whereas if choices are made with information by rational actors, there is no question as to whether they've chosen right or they've chosen wrong: they have to deliberately choose wrong in order to do wrong in the absence of ignorance!

You say that if Adam and Eve weren't ignorant, then they'd "never choose to rebel because [they'd] never disbelieve what [God] says is true." That doesn't make them not free: they could infinitely, eternally simply freely, rationally, choose not to make the wrong choice!

You seem to be arguing that the only way for free will to be free is if someone does make a wrong choice, not just that the choice is available to them: and I do not think this is correct.

So what is really wrong with a scenario where Adam and Eve have free will, but they are created as rational actors, and they are given enough information that the only way they make a wrong choice is if they deliberately, knowingly, make that wrong choice?

I already refuted those arguments in my latest posts dealing with that.

 

[Rise]

If God is good. The argument is that we have reason to doubt that premise:

You only have reason to doubt the premise if you can show a logical contradiction with the other premises. Or if you can show one of the premises must be false for other reasons.

But you can't.

the existence of suffering; the meta-epistemic argument (it is not reasonable to defend premises in ways that are epistemically invulnerable/can't be counter-evidenced out of);

You can't even begin to assault the premises with your worldview because morality doesn't exist to you. So you have nothing with which to prove the existence of suffering means one of the premises can't be true.

So my position doesn't even need to be invulnerable to counter attack when your position doesn't even allow you to attack it in the first place

You are forced into a position where you can't argue against the PoE premises on the basis of what you believe because you can't first prove what you believe is true (that the existence of suffering is incompatible with God being all good, all powerful, and all knowing)

So you are forced to try to argue against those premises on the basis of what someone else believes. But, as I have shown, based on the premises of what a Bible believing Christian holds, there is no contradiction with those premises.

Therefore, your entire PoE question is nullified on the basis that I have answered how it is consistent with Biblical premises and your own worldview affords you no ability to argue otherwise.

and for instance the principle of indifference in epistemic probability.

That by itself doesn't prove or disprove anything of relevance to the issue in contention.
All that says is that if there's no evidence then you should regard both possibilities as equally possible.

That doesn't change the fact that you can't refute the consistency of the Biblical premises nor can you argue against the idea of God being all good by using your own worldview and premises because you don't even believe morality exists.

You responded to a different set of four possibilities as far as I can see: this set of four was unique to this post you were responding to.

What I was saying is that sometimes we have to make decisions about epistemic systems for which we don't have complete information. It's reasonable for us to do this based on probabilities in an epistemic way: for instance Bayesian epistemology is a whole field in epistemology.

We can epistemically do things like P(A|B) = P(B|A)*P(B)/P(A) (hopefully that was correct because that was from memory, but you get the point).

So the argument I was making was using the principle of indifference: if we know how many possibilities there are but we don't know how likely those possibilities are, the principle of indifference is that it's reasonable to make decisions based on them having equal probabilities of being true. It's among unintuitive epistemic probability issues like the Montey Hall problem (which I recommend checking out also if you're not familiar).

That doesn't refute what I said: Which is that we are not talking about a probability problem but a logic problem.

You don't use probability to solve logic problems when there exists data and premises to solve the problem logically.

The logical premises and data were already provided in the options you gave to weed out which answers could be true from which can't.

There is therefore no reason to rely on statistical probability.

One would only only use pure statistical probability in the absence of any premises about what is true that would allow someone to narrow the field of options down.

So, if we know that there is more than one explanation for the observation of suffering, the lone explanation that leads to the conclusion of omnibenevolence becomes less and less epistemically likely: that would mean it has to be justified in some other way (that suffering is explained benevolently).

There are two problems with your argument:

1. You don't give any justification here for your claim that omnibenevolence is the least likely option.

2. Who says the existence of suffering is incompatible with God's omnibenevolence? Your worldview doesn't allow you to make that claim because morality doesn't even exist.

You have to borrow from my worldview in order to attack it. But then you don't get to specify what my worldview is when you borrow from it in order to try to attack it.

That is why I have been saying the fundamental problem with how you are approaching this issue is that you can't use my worldview to show a contradiction in that worldview - but you can't use your worldview to attack my worldview either.

Your worldview gives you no moral foundation from which to launch any such attack.

You are completely dependent on asking what my moral foundation is and then trying to expose contradictions in that if you want to get anywhere. But you can't do that either.

I tried to establish in one of the last rounds of responses that I was setting out to attack the premises, not to grant them and see where they go. We have a lot of posts going on, though.

The problem with what you are doing then, as I have outlined, is that you have no basis from which to attack my premises because you don't even believe morality exists.

How can you attack the premise that God can't be all good if you don't even think there is a difference between morally good and bad?

You cant claim suffering is even morally bad under your worldview.

That's why I said: Once you stop trying to disprove my premises by using my premises against me, you have ceased to be able to attack my premises with regards to the attributes of God's goodness.

So your entire PoE question becomes nullified, void, and invalid at that point.

I think you're thinking of the so-called "logical PoE," which would attempt what you're talking about (seeing where the premises go). I've been working on attacking the premises, which I believe is called the "evidential PoE."

The problem for you is that you have no basis from which to attack the premise that God is not good based on appealing to the existence of anything in reality - because you don't believe moral good and bad exist.

And since you can't prove your belief about no morality is true, nor can you disprove that objective morality exists and derives from God, you are left with no way to attack my premises about God's attributes unless you try to do so on the basis of showing a logical contradiction between the things I claim are true.

 

[Rise]

That's the intent. You're thinking of the logical PoE as I just mentioned in another response I'm pretty sure. I'm attacking whether premises are true when taken in conjunction with each other and observations, not granting that they're true.

The original post was formulated in a way that tried to show a contradiction with the Biblical premises on the basis of appealing to the fact that you feel bad about children dying. And wondering why you don't feel good about it if god intended that. Which also assumes god intended it (which is not necessarily true Biblically, but your argument doesn't work even if you assumed it were true). And it further assumes god has given you the ability to discern good from evil.

Your argument therefore depends entirely on either Biblical premises or things you believe to be Biblical premises, and trying to show a contradiction with them.

But, as I showed, a more full understanding of the Biblical premises shows why there is no contradiction here. But the apparent contradiction came from you misunderstanding what God's role in suffering is.

The problem here is that your objection is not a purely evidence based attempt to disprove one of the premises. Because your attack upon the premise requires you to first start from the Biblical assumption that God has given you the ability to discern good from evil. If you take away that assumption then your attack doesn't go through anymore.

That is why your argument was formulated on the basis of trying to use Biblical premises against each other to show a contradiction.
It depends entirely on borrowing from the premises of the Biblical worldview in order to try to show a contradiction with it - so when the answer is resolved by appealing to the fullness of Biblical premises you have nothing left to fall back on.

You aren't making a true appeal to evidence in the sense of trying to prove any of the premises wrong based on independent evidence - because your appeals to evidence don't exist independently of borrowing the Biblical worldview.
You don't believe in morality or spiritual sensory ability, so you have no basis upon which to disprove the Biblical premise that an observed reality of "bad stuff" is supposedly incongruent with God's good nature.

You are actually in worse position than those who argue the original PoE because you can't even claim children dying is morally bad according to your worldview. At least those who normally pose the PoE do so on the basis that they think objective morality exists and claim God is violating that standard.

That's the point of the meta-epistemic argument I've been making. By "the meta-epistemic argument," I mean my argument that it's not reasonable to take premises that rely on human non-omniscience

Who says the premises in the Bible rely on humans? You're making an assumption you can't prove.
If they are direct revelation from God, and not the product o human reason, then they don't rely on human non-omniscience.

and lead them to a conclusion that defies all evidence

You can't show that the Biblical premises about God's goodness defy any evidence. Much less all of it.

which we can't refute because we're not omniscient.

You can't refute it for more reasons than just that.
1. You don't believe in morality. So you can't judge God's morality.
2. If the attributes of God as creator are true then you can't challenge his definition of morality.

These kinds of arguments can be made arbitrarily and can't be escaped from, it's not reasonable to make them.


…


This is a trap, and if we are reasonable, we should endeavor not to fall into traps that we can both build arbitrarily and then never be evidenced out of.


This is the meta-epistemic argument: reasonable actors avoid arbitrarily built epistemic traps, so we shouldn't do it.

Who says you have to escape from the conclusion?
You have given no reason why it would not be reasonable.
You merely assert that it is in a circular reasoning fashion because you don’t like the conclusion.
But you not liking the conclusion doesn’t mean it’s a logically flawed conclusion.

The conclusion I have given you is not arbitrary by definition but come logically and by necessity out of the premises that are believed to be true.

If you premise as true that God is the creator of everything then you can logically never be in a position to challenge His determination of what is moral. Because He is the source of defining what is moral and you have no ability to change that. For reasons I outlined in previous posts.

If you premise as true that God is all good and all knowing then you can logically never be in a position to assume that God doesn’t have good reason for what He is doing.

If you are not all knowing, but premise as true that He is, then you can never logically be in a position of questioning the wisdom of God’s decision.

If you don’t believe in morality then you can never judge God’s actions as not good. So you have no basis upon which to object to anything God does.


All of these are not only logical conclusions to make but they are necessarily the only conclusions you can come to.

The fact that you simply don’t want to be forced to draw those conclusions doesn’t change the fact that they are the logically correct conclusions to reach.

It can be boiled down to:

1) God can do things in ways humans can't know since they aren't omniscient

2) God has a property

3) Observations appear to conflict with (2)

C: The observations do not conflict with (2) because (1) makes the apparent conflicts congruent with (2) in some unknown way

You can’t say anything about reality appears to conflict with God’s attributes.

In order to do that you’d have to do one of two things:
1. Show how my premises are not consistent with each other as an explanation for reality.
2. Prove that one or more of my premises can’t be true.

You can’t do #1. And you haven’t done #2 either.

All you have done with regards is complain about how you don’t like the implications of my Biblical premises because they deny you the ability to judge God. But who says you need to be able to judge God? Who says you should have that capability? You clearly don’t have the capacity for judging God as you neither believe in morality and aren’t all knowing. So why would you insist on needing to judge God when you aren't even equipped with the capability to accurately do so?

You haven’t demonstrated a logical need to judge God. Nor have you demonstrated the ability to judge God even if you had a need to.

You assume it is self evident that you need to be able to judge God’s morality for yourself but you have not justified why that would be a logically coherent position to take give the premises we start with about God

But can't you see that we can fill this in with anything we want? Isn't that a problem?


1) Unies can do things in ways humans can't know since they aren't omniscient

2) Unies have (some property)

3) Observations appear to conflict with (2)

C: The observations do not conflict with (2) because (1) makes the apparent conflicts congruent with (2) in some unknown way


We can fill in any actor (as long as they're smarter or more powerful than humans; they don't even have to be omnipotent/omniscient),

You are committing the same error you have with all of your prior analogies about God so far. Which is: All the attributes of God matter and are part of why we draw the conclusions we do.

Once you start removing attributes that are plugged into the logical formula you necessarily alter the conclusion.

You cannot remove God as the creator of everything and come to the same conclusions just because He is all good and all knowing.

You cannot remove the attribute of omnipotence and omniscience from God and then draw the same conclusions about his actions.

Which is why it is impossible to compare God to anything else because nothing else can have all the attributes of God without calling that thing god instead of God.

If you did postulate any alternative being, but simply gave them all the Biblical attributes already ascribed to God, then you would simply be talking about God but by a different label – so your whole argument becomes moot.

and we can fill in any property; and then it doesn't matter what we observe because our observations can never conflict with (2) because of (1)!


…


If (1) and (2) are taken as true, then (3) never matters, no matter what: never.

Your claim is false based on misrepresenting Biblical premises.

I outlined up above several conclusions that we must necessarily draw from the Biblical premises about God.

None of the conclusions I gave you depends on the argument that “God can do things you don’t know therefore there can never be conflict with God’s attributes and the evidence we see in reality”.

So the only way we can avoid the trap is by making it non-arbitrarily. But how do we do that? We have to be aware of the trap and see if we can justify the premises very substantially. Do unies or a God exist? Do unies or God actually have the property in question in (2)?

So in this case, I'm attacking the omnibenevolence property on a couple of fronts: I'm arguing it shouldn't be defended by just assuming it and falling into the trap (because you have to assume it in order to get the trap), this is the meta-epistemic argument side. I'm arguing that there are other possibilities that have to be considered, and we can reasonably decide even with epistemic incompleteness (that's the argument from the principle of indifference). I'm arguing several things to attack whether the premise about the property (in this case, omnibenevolence) is true. The meta-epistemic argument attempts to limit possible responses by pointing out they can be arbitrarily built and can't be escaped from (and are so unreasonable), the argument from the principle of indifference attempts to argue that it's less likely that omnibenevolence is congruent with the observation of suffering than the alternatives where it's not.

There is nothing wrong with assuming the premises as part of an argument formulation if you state up front what your premises are – until such time as the premises can be shown to be false or unsound.

At this point you are trying to do option #2 of the two options I listed above. Instead of trying to show contradiction with my premises you are trying to prove one of the premises is false.

The problem for you is you not only have not down that, but you can’t.
You don’t believe morality exists, but you can’t prove morality doesn’t exist.
Therefore, you have no basis from which to claim God cannot be all good.
Because proving that would require you to do something that is impossible for you:
Either to prove that morality doesn’t exist in which case God is neither good nor bad and by default can’t be all good.
Or prove that God’s actions are immoral in some way.

But you can’t do the later for two reasons.
The first reason is that it would require you to identify a moral standard and then show why God is supposedly violating it. Impossible for your to do as you reject the reality of moral standards.

The second reason is because even if we assume you believe in moral standards, it is logically impossible for you to ever dispute the moral standard God has decreed by virtue of being the creator of everything. You have no other higher or more objective authority to appeal to in order to dispute God’s establishment of the way things are intended to be.

 

[Rise]

So, this is why I was saying I was giving a biological definition of life which is a descriptive list like "body that seeks homeostasis, reacts to stimuli," etc. The laws of physics are both necessary and -- this is key -- sufficient for this definition of life.

Your definition is not sufficient because it presumes materialism.

The Bible says man would be just a lifeless pile of matter if God has not breathed the breath of life into Adam.

This is why earlier I was saying you are very likely going to have to define what you mean by "life" if you weren't satisfied with the biological definition.


...


Now I can try to play ball as best I can and just sort of imagine a spirit, whatever that is. I guess I can imagine spirits as being able to move under their own power, responding to stimuli, some other descriptive list that doesn't include physicality.


But it would still end up being the case that for at least some life (us, here, on Earth) that physics accounts for most of the processes making up the definition and physics is responsible for the deaths that result: from disease, from being trampled, from things like decapitation, so on and so forth.


We call this "death." But this brings up a problem:

I think you are missing the point.

If I recall, earlier you seemed to think my Biblical definition of life did not describe physical material living. My purpose has been to point out that Biblically the definition of life does include physical material living.

But what makes something physically materially living has more to it’s explanation than simply materialism and physics.

Meaning: There is a spiritual component that is necessary for you to be alive physically and not be subject to decay followed by physical death.

And, contrary to what you tried to claim earlier, there is no way God could design you to not decay away with entropy and physically die if you are disconnected from the spiritual thing which is necessary to keep that from happening - And having that spiritual thing requires being in relationship with God because it is part of who He is.

Are spirits dead? Genuine question. If I die, am I dead? If I'm dead, is my spirit form alive? See how this is a little hairy? I think it's obvious that something different is meant by "life" (being alive here, on Earth) and "life" (being a spirit, wherever). N'est-ce pas? Otherwise, post-Earth-life spirits are "dead," right? Since they died on Earth.

Biblically spirits are referred to as "dead" if they are disconnected from relationship with God.

Physical death is not an end of consciousness but the spirit continues existing in a state disconnected from God.

The reason physical death exists is because a disconnect from God too place at some point in the past with mankind.

Biblically, death would be defined as disconnection from God.

But disconnection from God results in what is commonly called physical death.


So its not that the definition of biblical death is different from common definitions of physical death, but the cause of that physical death is identified as different.

But this would only mean what I've been saying the whole time would be true: "you must mean something else by 'life' than we normally mean." Do you see?

As I pointed out above, that is not true.

When I say being disconnected from God results in death - that means everything you normally associate with that word with regards to the physical cessation of the body 's operation.

It includes other things under that definition, but that doesn't mean my definition is different from yours with regards to what it means for the body.

Although Biblically there is a different reason for why death happens than what you believe - that doesn't mean we have different definitions about what the observed effects of physical death are.

So, the physics of the universe was different? Entropy didn't cause telomere degradation? If the wind caused a rock to roll down a hill into one of them, the momentum of the rock and its mass wouldn't hurt them?


This definitely has to be that the physics were different, right?

That's not saying the physics are changed. It's saying there is another aspect to physics you aren't aware of. Which is the aspect of how things behave differently when creation is given that which God originally intended it to have but which man rejected.

This goes back to the car oil analogy from a post above. You don’t say the laws of nature have been changed when you put oil into the car. You say how it behaves has changed, according to the laws that already exist, based on you doing something different.

Entropy is not a nebulous spooky force that does dark and nefarious things: it is a consequence of probability; and a deeply profound necessity of the way the physics of the universe are built.

What you said there doesn’t refute anything I said.
What I said is that entropy starts trying to kill people from before they are born.
Think of it this way: Without the analogous “energy” of God being infused into the system it doesn’t have the ability to maintain order and cohesion eternally. It starts fighting against entropy from the beginning but it always loses.

So how does it work if they're struck by lightning? What prevents them from being hurt, if the laws of physics weren't different?

To continue with the analogous terms that you might relate to more: God’s “energy” can either act as a shield protecting the body from experiencing a state of disharmony or it could act after the fact to repair any damage that has been one (including resurrection from an event that would result in today body operations failure and the spirit leaving the physical body).

It would just be speculation about what actually did happen with Adam and Eve, but I suspect the former is the best conclusion.


Also: There was no lightning in the preflood earth. Definitely not in pre-fall Eden. That came in through the catastrophic geological and atmospheric changes that took place. So the world also wasn’t designed to be as dangerous a place as it currently is.

 

[Rise]

OK, so I can think of some magic that I can make a picture of, like a vampire that turns somebody: now they're a vampire, they have an essence of vampire-ness that causes them to magically stop aging.


I can also imagine a vampire being super-strong and resisting a lightning strike, or a boulder rolling on them, etc.


So I guess I can imagine God making His essence, which is everywhere per an earlier comment, be part of somebody... I guess?


I can see how doing that would make a person not die. But there are other ways to make people not suffer. If God can't be "in" someone because they're not "in tune" with God, God could still shield them from physicall suffering by simply changing physics. The lightning bolt doesn't have to strike them, the boulder doesn't have to keep its momentum when it strikes them. The whole point of all of this was answering the question "why does God allow the world to inflict physical suffering?" and the fact that since God created the world, God is responsible for said possibility of physical suffering.


…

Now of course, it's theodicy from there: but I am still just trying to get agreement that God is responsible for the suffering. You were trying to argue that God can't help but for the suffering to be possible because if people are "out of tune" He can't do anything about that. But He can: with physics.[/

What are you talking about is asking God to be actively intervening on your behalf to protect you from anything that would cause harm.

Sounds like a great plan.
So great, in fact, that it appears to be precisely what God did until Adam and Eve made the choice to rejected God in their life.

So you can’t say there is fault with the way God designed physics or the world. It was designed to operate with the oil of God’s Holy Spirit working in and through mankind.

What you see is the consequence of Adam and Eve’s choice, with God respecting their choice.

The only way to reverse this state of affairs is for mankind to invite God’s presence, his oil of the Holy Spirit, back into their life.

Which is why we do have many accounts of people in a high level of relationship with God who report supernatural protection and healing. It is a taste of what is to ultimately come in it’s fullness with the return of Jesus and the bodily resurrection of those who died.

Continuing with the "God being with you is like being a vampire: filled with magic" train of thought, it seems like physics are necessary and sufficient for you to be alive in the sense of life that we normally mean it where we're alive here on Earth, sustained by physics and killed by physics.

Physics is not sufficient to sustain life because everyone dies physically. Something which did not happen prior to the fall.

And if given enough time we would expect all life to be gone without Gods intervention on behalf of it.

See my comments about "if I die, am I dead or alive?" and whether spirits are alive or dead above: I still think you are talking about "life" in a different way than we normally mean. So what is that way?

As I already addressed: The Biblical definition of life includes in it the same description of physical material life as you understand it. Ie. Material and physics based cause and effect, entropy, etc.

You just don’t have the full understanding of what makes that life work and why beyond the physical effects that have currently been identified.

We have death here on Earth, but you say death is the opposite of life. If I die and become a spirit, if I'm not dead, then you're talking about a different death and a different life.

I am talking about the same physical death you are.

The only difference is I am telling you that the cause of physical death was first experiencing a spiritual death (separation from God).

Or maybe spirits are dead? But then what about the spirits that have union with God or whatever, what does it mean for them to be alive but for your average Joe hit by a mac truck to be dead? What's the difference between these two spirits?

Relationship with God is the difference between an alive and dead spirit. Which is what results in the difference between spending eternity in hell or heaven.

I am not a Platonist, I'm just not an ontological materialist.

If you claim that logic and math can precede the existence of matter and energy, or exist as independent abstract concepts that can mold matter and energy to conform to it, then you are talking about Platonism.

We didn't get into the logic/math issue for space and time concerns, but unless I misunderstood what you were advocating earlier then you would indeed be a platonist on those issues.

Similarly (for the most part), there is nothing out there that exists that "is love." Love is an emotion felt by beings, a particular limitation they experience and instantiate. Things can be loving, but they can't be love: not even God.

Your statement about love is just your opinion and is not a statement of fact. As you cannot prove your statement is true that God cannot be in his essence love and also the source of all love experienced.

Your definition is not consistent with what the Bible says love is.
The Bible says God is love.
To say that God is love is to say that it is His essential nature to do the things which we identify with love; and that beings which perform the actions of love only do so because they have been given that capacity by God to do creating them with the intention that they would choose to line up to be consistent with His nature.

In the same way that God is essentially the definition of Good, or Truth, and the only reason these things are reflected in reality as things we can experience is because they first had their origin in who God is as a person as part of his essential nature.


Biblically, it is also wrong to say that love is only a feeling.
The Bible defines love as being an action of giving to others and self sacrifice for others.

It would also be true to say there is feeling attached to this, and that God has this feeling of strong affection towards mankind, but it would not be true to say it is nothing but feeling. The feeling represents a position of action towards something; a willingness to sacrifice and give unto another. To say it is just a feeling is incomplete as it fails to define what that feeling is suppose to change about yo and your relationship to another.

 

[Rise]

This is wrong on a few accounts: I've already addressed the incorrect Platonism accusation in the last response, so I'll leave that there.

Whether you want the label or not, the fact is you are advocating a platonist position when you say that an abstract concept like logic not only preceded god but has the power to force god to conform to it.

John explicitly refutes this idea to the intended greek audience of his gospel when he opens by saying God is the logos and everything was made through the logos that is God.

This is wrong on the historical account as well: Aquinas himself acknowledged that all-power means all possible power, and pretty much everyone since with the very few oddballs like Descartes. Among modern theologians I can only find one (Earl Conee, in the 90's) that argues otherwise; this is not well received by peers. I have already explained how it is correct by the plain meaning of the word (there is no more "all" than "all possible," you can't get any more "all" than that).

I believe you are missing the point I was making: Which is that limits on God's power is a Biblical concept derived from Biblical premises. Aquinas was a theologian - not a secular philosopher.

And since God is the ultimate source of everything, whatever His power is would be the only definition of what could be all powerful.

There is no secular philosophical justification for the idea that omnipotence can have limits and still be omnipotence. If you identify logical impossibilities with true omnipotence existing then you simply end up concluding that true omnipotence as a concept can't exist.

The point of bringing this up was to highlight that you are borrowing limitations on God from Biblical premises. Which goes against your claim that the PoE is a religiously neutral question that could be posed on a purely philosophical basis.

As I have said, then this is the easiest case to make against the Bible: this is necessarily wrong for being illogical.

You cannot prove it is illogical to say that God made everything that is and nothing was made without God.

You have never directly addressed this point: for God to have a nature, that nature must be limited (after all it must be God's nature, and not the nature of a horse).

You aren't making a point with that statement by itself. To simply say God is different from a horse is not making any point against anything I have said.

God could not have chosen this nature (because it requires having a nature already to choose a nature), and God would have no power over God's primordial nature. God is dependent on having that primordial nature to be God.

Your statement implies something chose god's nature for him.

But your claim is contradictory.

Because you believe logic could exist as an essential nature of reality without anyone or anything deciding to give reality its nature.

You think it just is, always has been, and couldn’t be any other way.

Well, that is the same conclusion people make about the nature of God.

You are not doing anything different – you are just changing what you want to regard as the ultimate stopping point of reality’s essential nature. Instead of stopping at God you want to push it back a step and make God subject to the attributes of a reality that precedes and supercedes him.

So instead of God making reality subject to His essential nature, you want to make god subject to the essential nature of something else which determines what reality is and god just ends up becoming an inhabitant of that reality rather than it’s definer and creator.

This is not only not logically required, it is not Biblically sound.

The reason it is not logically required is because you can’t justify why your preferred stopping point gets to be the right one but God can’t be the stopping point. It’s just your subjective personal philosophical preference.

If you don’t think you have to answer where reality got it’s logic nature from then we don’t need to answer where God got his nature from either. It doesn’t matter what you want your philosophical stopping point to be – you run into the same issue regardless.

You are talking about Platonism at this point. And the problem you run into is you have no philosophically efficient cause to explain how the abstract ideas of logic can impose themselves onto reality, or how anything else could impose it onto reality (if you don’t want to assert that abstract concepts have this power unto themselves), in a way that would make reality impose that onto god’s nature as something that comes after reality.

In contrast, if we start from the point of God having his essential nature, God’s ability to act makes Him an efficient cause for why reality outside of Himself and exist and is imparted with his nature.

What is a nature? It's limitation. God isn't limitation Himself, because God had to be limited to be God. God can't be the source of limitation, again because God had to be limited to be God to be the source of anything in the first place. Arguing otherwise firmly places the cart in front of the horse.

I am not saying that limitation is an abstract thing floating out there Platonically. I'm saying that limitation is exactly what it means to exist: to exist is to exist as something, and not as something else than what it is. But this is the referent for logic: when we "do" logic, we are doing the reference: we are pointing to (referencing) limitation (the referent). But since God is dependent on being limited to be God, and God has no power over His own limitation, and God is not the source of limitation (this follows from the other two), God is not the source of logic, either: because logic is just a description of how limitation is.


So in short, God has limits that aren't internal to God: His very own limitations, what it means for God to even be God or to be said to exist.

I could take issue with your definition of existence and nature – but I don’t think it’s necessary because you still run into the same problems I outlined above that render any point you are trying to make based on those definitions null.

You are presupposing logic exists as a concept prior to God in order to describe and put limts on God’s nature.

Who or what defined reality according to logic?
Who or what defined the limitations of logic to define it as logic?

Any argument you try to use against God being the ultimate source of defining the nature of reality can just be turned back on whatever you try to replace God with as the ultimate source for defining the nature of reality.

So you haven’t advanced any argument against God. All you’ve done is expressed a preference for believing in a different ultimate source that defines reality – with no way to prove yours is right and no way to prove mine is wrong.

But your belief requires you to embrace Platonism and believe that abstract concepts must exist with causative power because otherwise you have no way of explaining how reality is shaped according to certain concepts that otherwise have no concrete representation to act upon reality.

At least with God you have an efficient cause for explaining what would conform reality outside of God to a certain nature, even if you may not be able to answer why God has a certain nature over another.

 

[Rise]

I can, and have. If the Bible thinks that God can do things that aren't possible, that's illogical by definition.

You haven’t proven anything God can do in the Bible is illogical.

Please do attempt to answer this question: could God have chosen God's primordial nature? I will explain what I mean by "primordial" again to avoid confusion. Let's say that God can affect His nature now: after all, incarnating as a mortal man named Jesus seems like a substantial alteration of nature in some respects. So let's say that God has nature A, and God can choose to make His nature to instead be nature B.


Could God have chosen his nature A though? In order to choose nature A, God must have already had a nature: namely, God had to have knowledge of what kinds of natures God wants to instantiate, and God must have had the power to actualize the desired change. Can you see that there is at least one nature that God couldn't have chosen: some "first" nature, some primordial nature? In order to have chosen this primordial nature, God must have already had a nature to do so, which contradicts by putting the cart in front of the horse!


So, could God have chosen His primordial nature? If you say "yes," you have fallen into illogic. If you say "no," you have to concede that there are things God doesn't have power over, which God is not identical to, which don't have their source in God (how could they, it would be the same cart-before-horse problem!) And "those things" would be limitation itself.


Limitation is reality, it's incorrigible, necessary (in all possible worlds), but shouldn't be thought of like a Platonic form; but it definitely doesn't come from God in the sense that it's a "rule" that God doesn't create; God is subject to the rule, because limitation is what it means to exist. If God exists, then God is limited, and God can't help that; and that fact doesn't come from God.


The Platonist would say, "there's this thing out there called limitation that exists, and provides substance to all instantiations of limitation." That is silly and illogical for the same reason other Platonism is (e.g. a Platonic triangle would have to have contradictory properties like being right-sided and isocoles, which is illogical). I'm not saying there's this floaty thing out there called limitation. I'm saying that there are rules to existence that nobody, not even God, makes: because they are necessary and incorrigible; even their absence would entail their presence (so their absence is impossible). Limitation defines what it means to exist.

God doesn’t need to be able to choose His nature in order to refute your claim.

As I pointed out above: Your argument is self refuting in the sense that your argument would apply against whatever philosophical alternative you would try to put in place of God.

So you can’t advance such an argument against God without also refuting anything else you try to replace God with.

Once you accept that God can't be the source of limitation, you'll find it's not so bad: it doesn't harm theism in the least. It does, however, pre-empt illogical theistic concepts. (Note I'm not saying "theistic concepts," just that some -- like this notion that omnipotence can do something more than what's possible to do -- are illogical). If you hinge belief in the Bible on the illogical, that is just bad news. Most theism is totally unharmed by this.

Your claim that it is not impactful on Biblical truth is false.

Your definitions are also off with regards to trying to define logic as limitation.

God’s nature is Truth.
Logic (and it’s laws) is not an expression of limitation but an expression of what Truth is and how it works.
Truth carries with it limitations by it’s nature.
But something is not defined as true in a negative sense of taking away everything it could be and then seeing what you are left with.
Truth is instead defined in the positive sense of looking at what you actually have and defining it thusly..

Everything in creation is bound by the concept of truth (ie logic) because God already was the embodiment of Truth and made creation to reflect that aspect of who He is.

God Himself serves the role as the sole originating source of these core aspects of reality like truth that we cannot do without.

You are trying to say that truth preceded god and bound god to it. But that would make god not god, because He is defined as the definition of Truth and it’s source. So whatever preceded god to bind Him to truth would itself actually be god.

You’re effectively just trying to tear away attributes of God and deify them in God’s place – which is also what Platonism does. They just do it with all the attributes of God instead of only one of them (Truth) as you are doing.

"God is truth" would necessarily mean that God is identical with what we call truth. Not that truth is part of God, but identical with it (this is linguistically what that statement is saying). But truth doesn't have the same property set God has: truth isn't causal, truth isn't a person, truth doesn't have knowledge, etc. Truth is a description of whether references to referents corresponds to reality. God can't be truth any more than God can be purpleness (note this isn't just "God is purple," which could make some sense even if false).


If "God is truth," then there is no need for the word "truth." If I say "there are no married bachelors," you could just say "That is God." Or you could say "Truth is omnipotent and omniscient, and created the universe." But when we say something is "true," we aren't talking about an omnipotent, omniscient, casual thing with personhood: we're talking about a relationship between references and reality. So this would be absolute nonsense.


Similarly, if "God is love" and "God is truth," then transitively, truth is love: I would tell my lover "I'm in truth with you," or "I'm in God with you." But this isn't what we mean when we say "I'm in love with you," is it?


In another post, you said something about keeping the list of terms we use short to avoid confusion. Well, I submit that if you went around saying about true things "Ah yes, that's God" (instead of "that's true") or told your friend "I God you" (instead of "I love you"), you'd be generating a whole lot of confusion: and there's a reason for that (we don't mean God when we say those words).


Linguistically, logically, this is nonsense unless you have some further clarification.

God is singular in nature.
We have different words to describe aspects of God’s nature.
But God’s nature is still singular.
God is not a collection of a list of different attributes stapled together.

It would be accurate to say that if one is acting like God then they are acting both truthful and loving in what they do. You don’t have to choose between one or the other.

It is similar to how the Bible says that to love God is the same as obeying God.
They would indeed be exchangeable as synonyms.

That does not mean the description of God is in error. It just means our language fails to be able to convey the full meaning of what love is because it does not carry with it the necessary implication that one obeys God if they truly love God.

Likewise, to say God is Truth and Love is not an error in the description of God – but merely means our language fails to be able to convey the totality of God’s nature in a single word or concept.

I have shown elsewhere in this post how God can't be logic, or even the source of it.

Your claim has been refuted in this post above.
You can’t say it is impossible for God to be the source of Truth for reality (ie. logic) without invoking a line of logic that would make it impossible for anything else to be the source of Truth/logic for reality.

 

[Rise]

I'm not saying that it's a useful fiction. My comments are a description of how people operate.

Saying you are describing how people appear to operate doesn't do anything to advance your belief that objective morality doesn't exist.

How we observe people operate, and how we observe people believe, is consistent with the idea that objective morality exists and people have an internal ability to sense what it is.

In light of that, how can you insist that objective morality doesn't exist?

Your alternative explanations for this are neither objective nor moral. They are just survival instinct and personal preference.

But that is not consistent with what you truly know to be true in your inner being. And it is no consistent with how you actually behave and how you expect others to behave.

You are wiling to kill people who have a different idea of what is moral than you do (nazis committing genocide). You cannot rationally justify killing people as morally right because they disagree with your morality unless you can appeal to a truly objective standard of right and wrong.

Otherwise it's just might makes right and your preferences between right because you have more guns than the other guy does.

You are morally no different than the nazis who tried to use their guns to enforce their standard of morality on the world.

One thing I've always wondered is this: if some kind of objective morality or moral realism is true, why don't people feel guilty more often?

It seemed to me that if there were moral facts of some kind -- be it because of DCT or moral truths existing -- that no matter how depraved someone was due to their choices, they would feel guilty about it. But there are people that do very unempathetic things, very unaltruistic things, very self-centered things and don't feel a single regret over it. There are sociopaths that walk among people like wolves in sheeps' clothing: even if they aren't the serial killer type, they tend to rise high up in corporate ladders and make others' lives living hell with ruthlessness and they never by definition feel a drop of remorse or wonder how their actions are hurting people. Why is this possible?

Who says they don't?
I am sure you can think of lots of things you could do, but don't, because you would feel guilty afterwards if you did them. So you don't even need to feel guilty because you avoided doing what you knew was wrong in the first place.

Even sociopaths generally have lines they won't cross.
The worst sociopaths who desire to engage in the mass murder of depopulating the world under the pretense of saving it (various elites and academics, one of which is bill gates) still probably feel a moral responsibility and desire to take care of their immediate family. This probably makes them feel like good people while they plot the murder of 95% of the population or the supposed benefit of the remaining 5%.

One of the tricks satan has used throughout history to get people to commit atrocities against each other is to convince them that as long as they treat certain groups ok then other groups are ok to abuse. Some people take it to the extreme by being convinced that as long as they take care of their immediate family then it's ok to abuse anyone else.

The reason this deception works is because no one wants to feel like the bad guy but lots of people want to be able to do harm to others, or take from them, without having to feel like the bad guy. Hitler and Stalin no doubt did not think they were the bad guy in the story of life.


The Bible also gives us an answer to your question: People sear their conscious by ignoring it. What might have made you feel guilty the first time you did it, will likely make you feel less guilty each time you ignore that feeling and do it again anyway. Until eventually you feel nothing.

God is not going to force Himself on you if you make it clear you aren't interested in responding to His gentle leading about what is right. If you want God to lead you to what is right, so you can avoid problems, then you need to invite Him to lead you and be willing to follow.

If objective morality or moral realism is true, why are there moral quandaries like the Trolley Problem? In the same way there is only one truth, there would only be one morality, right: shouldn't there be one answer that is obviously correct to everybody? It doesn't make sense that these are problems to people.

Your argument is not valid because you aren’t describing something that is a genuine moral question.
A moral question implies culpability on the person making the decision for wrongdoing.
But in this case the conductor has no moral culpability as he is presumably not responsible for what is happening.

It’s like you trying to blame the lone firefighter for not being able to get everyone out of the building in time. He is not morally culpable for the fire of for people being in that position. Nor is he morally culpable for being physically unable to rescue everyone before it’s too late.


Now, if you want to ask a different question, such as: Why do there appear to situations in life where there appears to be no perfect solution to a problem. I could provide many answers to that. But we first need to recognize that is an entirely different type of question and does not necessarily have anything to do with the moral culpability of the person forced into that situation.

Now I know that the answer from a Christian worldview is probably something like, "because of the Fall, their moral compasses are damaged, so they don't feel any guilt for causing others suffering."

That would be not relevant to the trolly problem because it presumes no one is responsible for causing it to willfully induce suffering in others (although I suppose it might depend on what version of the problem you want to formulate).

Or for moral quandaries the answer is "because their moral compass is damaging, they get confused." This is a really unsatisfying answer, because if you think about it, it looks exactly the same as if there weren't any objective morality/moral realism at all! Why would that be?

Your answer is incoherent because the trolly problem is not a moral issue with begin with. Therefore, there is nothing to be confused about.

A moral issue requires culpability on the part of the person making the decision.
No matter which decision he made you would not hold him morally culpable because he wasn‘t responsible for being put in the position. As I explained above.

It would only become a moral cupability issue if God communicated to you somehow what you should do. To disobey God’s command, which is a moral duty, would then constitute moral culpability on the part of the one who disobeyed.

But, in the absence of that, we have no reason to assume moral culpability on the part of the conductor for either decision they would make.

 

[Rise]

So I looked into whether objective morality/moral realism made any sense, I needn't bore you with the journey through Kant's categorical imperative and the like (though I picked up interesting things long the way). I just don't think that either of them do make any sense.

I think it describes the world that we see that people have value hierarchies, they construct hypothetical imperatives based on those; and this is why there are moral dilemmas like the Trolley Problem (because hierarchies are complex and some layers are contradictory unless we figure out how they're layered), and this is why there are some people that don't feel remorse for hurting people (they don't value altruism or empathy), and so on.

Your model is insufficient to explain what we intuitively and self evidentially know and experience to be true.

If it were sufficient then most atheists wouldn’t have a problem jettisoning the idea of objective morality as a real thing. But extremely few are willing to do that. There’s a reason for that.

The fact is that people generally have an inner knowing that some things are truly objectively wrong and regardless of what people’s opinions about it are.
Such as the idea that torturing children for fun is objectively wrong to matter what anyone thinks about it.

This is so intuitively known to people and experienced by them that to deny it would be like denying that we have free will or that we exist in a physical reality.

Which is not say that it is just that it is counter to their programmed survival instinct, because that would be subjective and not truly wrong in a moral sense, but that it to say they think it is truly wrong in an objective sense.

Why is this a problem for so many people? Because without objective morality, if you follow your worldview to it’s logical conclusion, then you have no right to use force to stop anyone else from doing anything. And virtually everyone understands this dilemma which is why they refuse to take materialistic atheism to it’s logical conclusion. Only those heavily into philosophy even realize the necessity of what their atheist worldview must conclude - but none of them live consistent with that philosophical worldview.

You don’t live consistent with it either. It’s an unliveable worldview. You think you have the right to use force (up to, and including, murder) to stop others from doing things you disagree with – but upon what basis do you do so?

You cannot justify it logically but can only turn to fallacious logic such as:
1. Might makes right.
2. Appeal to popularity.

The problem with using those fallacies as your basis for justifying your right to use force and execution is that those same reasons can be used by other people to justify doing the exact opposite of what you want to do. So there is no moral truth under your worldview.

We would be forced under your worldview to agree with the nazis that what they wanted to do was morally right if they had both won WW2 (might makes right) and brainwashed the next generation into believing what they wanted to do was right (appeal to popularity).

But that’s not actual morality, right or wrong, which requires an objective standard of how things are intended to be

And you can’t have an intention of how things are suppose to be without God as the creator.

It explains why people that don't believe in gods or magic are generally still people that try their best not to hurt other people, and to help those in need (because they do value empathy and altruism).

You are missing the point: Which is that you can’t justify why it’s wrong to hurt people to no help people under your worldview - it’s just a preference.

And you are no more right to kill an attacker for trying to prevent them from trying to kill another person than the attacker is right for trying to kill that other person.

That is not a liveable worldview. Which is why even people who claim to believe it don’t actually live according to it. Or, the very few who actually do live according to it would be labeled as complete sociopaths who should be locked away for the good of everyone else.

You wring your hands over the possibility of people thinking morality is a "useful fiction," but I submit there's nothing to worry about.

Ideas have consequences. You can’t advocate a worldview that says it’s impossible to justify stopping someone from doing a particular behavior, actually live according to that, and not have sociopathic consequences on society.

The nazis justified what they did to the jews on the evolutionary grounds. They said they were being the good guys be speeding up evolution to kill off the “bad” genes.

It is not just a coincidence that communism, which is explicitly atheistic, routinely results in widespread death and enslavement. Estimates of 100 million in the 20th century alone. They operate on the principle that might makes right and the ends justify the means. They think they are the good guys when they kill everyone that disagrees with them because they have decided what they believe is right so everyone opposed to them is automatically wrong and deserving of whatever comes to them. Which is almost always widespread murder followed by enslavement of the survivors.

How are you going to tell either of them they are wrong? You can’t.
How are you going to justify killing them to stop what they are doing? You can’t.

All you have is a personal preference that you would rather they didn’t do what they want to. But you choosing to murder them because you disagree with their beliefs about what is right to do is no different than the communists who feel entitled to murder everyone who doesn’t agree with what they say is right.

That is precisely why communists are inherently might makes right/ends justify the means types of people. You can’t embrace an ideology that explicitly advocates the forced overthrow of opposing ideas, but which is also explicitly atheist, because then you have no moral foundation for your actions. You force people to become horrendously sociopathic when you get them to be willing to embrace such a severe action against other people (the violent communist overthrow of a country) on atheistic grounds that inherently require believing no morals exist. You train these people to believe that they can do whatever they want and all that matters is whether or not they have the power to do it without retribution against themselves.

It starts with antifia types thinking they are justified in beating up people they disagree with on the streets. But inevitably that kind of behavior, without any moral justification behind it, inevitably will harden them to be willing to do increasingly more extreme behaviors without regard to having any moral justification for it – other than the fact that they want to and they have the power to and don’t think they will get in trouble for doing it.

I've been a moral noncognitivist for a long time and I'm probably further away from ever hurting anybody or failing to help somebody than I was in my 20's. Our values are what they are, they don't have to be propped up with anything.

Your ability to hold onto your values, based on nothing but your own desire to, doesn’t mean anything if they are bad values you are holding on to.

You are missing the point: Which is you can’t justify your values as being right.
What if you didn’t hold good values? Nothing can tell you that you are wrong because you are your own god of deciding what is right and wrong.

By your worldview that question is incoherent because good and bad don’t even exist – it’s just your preference vs someone else’s preference. So we can’t even ask the question of which one is right or wrong.

People that don't hurt people because they're afraid of consequences don't really value empathy and altruism all that much, they're more self-centered. But that is why laws exist in societies, to get as many people on board with altruism as possible; even the ones that have to be coerced a little. I think there are plenty of people that hold these values high on their own accord.

Who says altruism or empathy is right and the opposite is wrong?
Upon what basis do you justify this?
You can’t even begin to because right and wrong don’t exist in your worldview

You presuppose that altruism and empathy are morally right which is in contradiction with your worldview that says right and wrong don’t actually exist and can’t exist.

You cannot possibly presume to justify using force to make people line up with “altruism and empathy” when you can’t even claim they are morally right.

This is a perfect example of how you don’t live consistent with your claimed worldview. You believe and act as though objective morality exists while denying it does.

 

[Rise]

If an objective moral value doesn't have the material implication of having a duty, I'll need you to define what you mean by "objective moral value?"

As I already defined: Moral value is defining what is good vs what is bad.

A moral duty is the requirement to act on particular moral values.

An example would be having a dozen different morally good vocation options in front of you. You aren't obligated by duty to pick a particular one over another, in the absence of God directing you to one. It would be impossible for you to do them all. So it would be illogical to insist that every moral value carries with it moral duty because there's a lot of morally good things you could do but you simply can't because there is only one of you and only so much time.

I've decided I'm just going to use the word obligation instead of duty when speaking from my worldview to you since you object to the word duty (though I stress that this is not a problem in philosophical literature).

I don't object to the word duty. You are simply not understanding that there is a philosophical difference between moral values and moral duties.

The definition of obligation is basically the same as duty - so you don't change anything by using that word.

For what else can I call a value we feel obliged to follow?

You can't by definition call it an obligation or duty without someone to be obligated to.

You cannot by definition be obligated to yourself. That's just called doing what you want.

The fact that you feel a sense of duty or obligation to do something is evidence for an external source of morality to which you are obligated to.

A preference like peanut M&M's over regular M&M's doesn't seem to be accompanied with any obligations: I would pretty much never have to make a choice regarding peanut M&M's that goes against what I want to do.

You can't explain why one preference feels like an obligation to you while another doesn't based on your worldview.

The fact that you experience this sense of obligation to certain behaviors is evidence against your worldview being true.

Because obligations don't exist in your worldview by definition.

At best all you could say is that your biology is tricking you into feeling like you have an obligation to something when you really don't.
But that doesn't mean genuine obligations exist in your worldview.

If you think what you feel is a genuine obligation, and not just a deception, then that is evidence against your worldview being true.

Even most atheists won't admit that objective moral duties don't exist. Even though their worldview demands that conclusion. They cannot escape from the personal experience they have of simply knowing that some things are objectve moral duties.

But with my values relating to empathy and altruism (as two such examples), I feel an obligation that I impose on myself:

I might really want to get a new purse instead of taking money out every two weeks for activism; but I feel obliged not to do that. I might want to punch the annoying guy at the bar that won't take "no" for an answer in the face, but I feel obliged not to do that. I might feel obliged to tell a lie to make things easier for myself, but I feel obliged not to do that. These don't act like food preferences. They carry obligations. Now most philosophers are fine with calling these duties ("agent-relative duties," such as I think Nagel would say). You object, so that is fine (though odd), I shall just call them obligations all the same.

Edit: OK, I looked it up. Nagel actually used the terms "objective duties" and "subjective duties," and I would be talking about the latter. Derek Parfit is the one that re-coined these as agent-neutral and agent-relative duties.

Obligation:
A social, legal, or moral requirement, such as a duty, contract, or promise, that compels one to follow or avoid a particular course of action.

The constraining power of a promise, contract, law, or sense of duty.

The state, fact, or feeling of being indebted to another for a special service or favor received.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/obligation


You cannot by definition be obligated to yourself.
Obligation requires someone or something outside of yourself to be obligated to.

Deciding what you want to do and then just doing it is the opposite of an obligation.

So any obligation you have cannot by definition originate with yourself. The question then is; where do you think it is coming from?

The incorrect Platonism accusation was handled in another response recently, so I'll leave that be.

I deal with that in a previous post; pointing out why your position is actually a form of platonism but you just don't realize it yet.

Something I have found interesting is actually most cosmologists seem to be platonists without even seeming to know enough about philosophy to even realize that is a thing. Let alone enough to understand the philosophical implications of what they advocate.

The reason being: Without a creator you have no where else to logically go but to start asserting that abstract entities like logic, math, and the laws of physics could exist independently of a mind or a reality to describe and then create the universe and conform the universe to itself.

This was the same problem plato ran into and he found himself turning to the same "solution".

I would still need to see Craig's reasoning, as from what I recall from an earlier comment I made based on an overview of his book (which I will still intend on reading), I had made a comment about how he was making a similar mistake of confusing the reference with the referent of things like logic. It doesn't make me terribly hopeful; but I'll still check it out.

If you happen to know his arguments, feel free to present them.

I have not read the book yet but I intend to soon. What I know about his position comes only from listening to several of his lectures and debates that have dealt with the topic of aseity. But I feel like I would need to look at his book to be sure I would accurately and fully communicate his argument. I don't feel like what I have listened to has really full covered his position well enough.

 

[Rise]

@Rise

One more thing. Inspired by the "poof or drown" thread elsewhere here.

Let's say for the sake of argument that I accept this whole "God is life, if you don't have God then you die" thing (I am not granting this, just granting it for right now).

Why does that have to include suffering? In the "poof or drown" thread, someone asked: take it for granted that God is done with humanity and is going to flood the world. Flooding is a horrible way to die. Why not just poof them out of existence instead of this horrible, scary, painful way?

So going back to people dying from lightning bolts and boulders and diseases, if we accept that they're going to die in some finite number of years, why do they have to suffer in the meantime from the physics of the universe, which God could make different? Why not have physics that don't allow for the terrifying, painful, heart wrenching suffering; but people still die when their allotted time is up? (The proverbial poof, as opposed to the drown?)

This goes back to why your PoE formulation was invalid from the start:

Who is to say it's wrong that people suffer under your worldview?
You have no basis from which to accuse God of doing anything wrong.

"well, it just is wrong", you might say.
Says who?
Why is that not just your personal preference?

You see, it is incoherent for you to even pose the PoE question from the standpoint of believing morality doesn't exist.

The PoE question presupposed that objective morality exists.

If it doesn't then you have nothing with which to judge whether or not what God is doing is good for bad.

That is why I was pointing out that your question only makes sense in the context of trying to show why my premises are supposedly in contradiction - because your premises don't allow you to even judge God as morally good or bad because such things don't exist in your worldview and God is free to do whatever he wants without you being able to judge Him.

This may or may not be rhetorical if the answer is just going to be "some unknowable reason because we're not omniscient and God is good and powerful, so must have a reason for torturing people with physics that allow for their bodies to be ravaged" Then I guess we're still stuck back at the meta-epistemic argument, the principle of indifference, and all of that.

I can't help but to feel that answer must not be very satisfying to give. Just imagine the torture people endure on this planet because physics are the way they are, the slow dwindling deaths some diseases ravage people with, children starving in mudholes, and so on: all stuff that doesn't have to exist if God just changes physics (doesn't even have to "put his spirit on them" or whatever, just has to change physics a little).

You are misrepresenting what I have argued.
I addressed your misrepresentations already in the latest previous posts above this.

I also already addressed your misunderstanding about physics and their relation to God.

 

[Rise]

First of all, most theories of justice would not support the notion of punishing descendants for the crimes of ancestors: does yours?

Man created theories of justice have no relevance to the issue of objective morality because justice theorists don't, and can't, create morality.

Justice theory is only relevant with regards to our attempts to discover and understand what that morality is.

But given that your worldview rejects morality as existing, you cannot appeal to justice theories for any help to assail the goodness of God. Because your worldview provide you no basis for judging God because you don't think right and wrong truly exist.

Therefore, you can't even ask the question is God right or wrong to do X instead of Y, because there is no right or wrong by your worldview.

If there was no physical suffering, then either Adam and Eve were created invulnerable to physics, or the physics of the world was different.

1) If Adam and Eve were created invulnerable to physics (and physics was the same then as it is now), then the question is, "can God change physics via omnipotence?" I think prima facie, most would agree that He could. If He can, then He actually could prevent physical suffering even in a "fallen world" with vulnerable humans. This would lead to the conclusion that in fact, physical suffering exists because God wants it to. The theist only has theodicy to turn to from there. If God can't change physics via omnipotence, I think that would be a very idiosyncratic position to hold; and would probably require further explanation.

2) If Adam and Eve didn't suffer because physics was different, then it answers the question of whether God can omnipotently change physics. The question becomes, "did God have a choice regarding how physics changed?" If He didn't, then we're already at the theodicy stage of parsing out whether that's true or makes sense. If He did, then again, God is responsible for physical suffering existing -- deliberately -- and we do theodicy from there.

...
In any case, it still comes down to whether God can omnipotently control physics or not. You seem to suggest God "upholds" physics, which given divine sovereignty, would imply He does have power over physics: so there is no contradiction with God choosing to uphold physics which do not allow for physical suffering. Since physics is outside of human beings, it seems as though it wouldn't matter whether He can have His spirit over/on/in someone or be "in union" with them. This would be like if I can't change the interior of a car, but I was omnipotent, I could still change things around the car so that it doesn't suffer a collision.

I believe I addressed that already in a post above.
Your questions are based on a misunderstanding of God's relationship to physics and man's relationship to decay.

But your question really doesn't even matter at this point for this reason:

Either way it's an important point to establish whether physical suffering exists because God wants it to and intends it to. There are many possible routes that have this outcome.

It's actually not relevant at all to establish the answer to your question if you don't first believe that morality exists.

What God did and why is a complete non-issue if you aren't in a position to judge whether or not what God did qualifies as good - because you don't believe good even exists.

You want to have all the benefits of feeling able to judge the morality of God's actions while at the same time denying all the responsibility on your end that would come from believing morality exists.

It is a logically incoherent position.

Any attempt you make to criticize God instantly falls flat and fails if you don't believe morality exists because then there is no basis upon which to judge the actions of God by an objective standard.

If God has values whereby He wouldn't want people suffer, then He'll feel obligations to act according to those values; it would be what possessing such values even means.

You are confusing objective moral values and duties again, as I outlined in previous posts.
Having a value doesn't obligate you to act on a value.
Obligation requires an external source to require something of you.

This is very convoluted and difficult to understand: before I was told God has to have His spirit on or in or over (or whatever) people for them to have "life"

Still the case.

(but life means something other than we normally mean when we say it...

False.

As I explained in previous posts: Every definition you have for physical life is included in the Biblical definition of life.
But the reasons why you have physical life are different.

You only have physical life because you first have spiritual life. And losing spiritual life leads to a loss of physical life. Which is why they are ultimately the same thing and can be talked about as though they are one.

But for the purposes of making distinctions in a way you can relate to and understand we can talk about them as different concepts.

... who knows what, we have to see what responses to the last round of responses are), but unless people are "in union" with God (whatever that means) He can't put His spirit on/over/in them (and they supposedly do this by their free will, but I don't remember ever having an informed choice on the matter).

But now, God is still there partially anyway to uphold existence?

Which is it: God can't be there or God is there? This is terribly confusing to me, and I'm not trying to be obtuse at all; I'm trying to entertain these concepts in good faith.[/quote]

God continues to uphold existence by His will. But man has elected to reject God's union with them and intervention on their behalf. God honors what they want.

To what extent God is continuing to partially uphold life for people is a fair question as it says God's spirit strives with man (to turn them back to good) but won't do so forever.
It also says God brings rain on both the just and the unjust. Which pictures God still working partially on behalf of people so they don't all die out because he wants to give as many people a chance to repent and turn back to Him as possible.

Or is what we are seeing physically the result of God ceasing to uphold man's life at all but the physical effects of that are just not instant because God still continues to uphold all the other laws of physics that He designed which are not directly related to his relationship to mankind?

You could probably go either way with it as I don't know that the Bible gives us enough information on this topic to state definitively either way.

But ultimately this question doesn't matter in the context of your objetion to God because you aren't in a position to judge whatever God did as eitehr good or bad when you reject that morality exists.

I am trying to take it seriously and reason things out with it, but it's very difficult to do so when it's all so vague with magical concepts and words and things like that. I can't suss out potential issues with a thing that's barely comprehensible.

It is interesting that you don't find it difficult to imagine an analogy involving magic vampires.

I believe the only reason you find fantasy concepts easy to imagine is because you have a lot of repeated exposure to them in various media sources which have helped to form the conceptualizations in your mind.

We could just as easily turn it around and say the average person finds magic vampires easier to conceptualize than the ideas of relativity, cosmology, and quantum mechanics. But that doesn't necessarily mean those ideas are less likely to be true than magic vampire physics just on the basis of what people have an easier time grasping.

Exposure to the concepts is necessary to build up an understanding with most topics.

You take for granted how much of your ability to quickly grasp concepts comes from repeated long term exposure to them. Especially while growing up.

If you had half as much exposure to Biblical concepts as you do to media fantasy concepts or physics concepts, then I believe this wouldn't seem so mysterious and intractable to you.

This doesn't make sense to me either. If I were God, I would understand no concept of effort. If someone was like, "Hey God, you're cool and everything, but I don't really want to hang out with you," I'm not going to give them leukemia.

Who says God gives it to anyone?
That is an assumption you are making without basis.

It would be more accurate to say God does not intervene to remove that which was a natural consequence of the fall.

I would understand that they mean "I don't want to interact with your personality." So I would still uphold the laws of physics that don't allow them to get sick because I don't want people to suffer, and since I don’t have to expend effort, it costs me nothing to just continuing to ensure they don’t suffer.

What you want is a spiritual contradiction. You want to keep having electricity to power your computer but you don't want to plug it in to the outlet source.

Relationship with God is necessary to have the "tree of life". God is the "tree of life". That which gives eternal physical life.

You can't rail against God as your computer slowly dies and demand He do something about it when He already did do something about it - he gave you a plug and an outlet. It's your choice to use it.

If you don't what to use it then there are consequences to that decision.

In this case the plug represents God Himself, so it's impossible for you to have what you want without connecting to God.

And nobody in their right mind is going to be like, "No God, I mean get out of me completely, I'd rather have leukemia."

That is exactly what people do every day.
Hitchens explicitly said while he had cancer that he would refuse to convert to believe in God under any circumstance. He was not seeking God for healing. And he said he would not have a death bed confession to avoid hell and gain heaven.

It wasn't just an issue of not believing. If that were the case then logically he should at least be willing to try and entertain it to see if it works.

It could only be an issue of morality or pride. Ie. He must have thought it would be wrong to try to do such a thing. Or it would undermine what he had spent his life trying to do trying to prevent people from doing just that.

That's someone saying they would rather have cancer than turn to God.

Do you not want God to respect what people want?

 

[Rise]

I also don't understand the whole never getting an informed choice thing for people living today. I don't understand how Adam and Eve making some choice affects everybody:
or if it did, how that could ever be considered just or in line with most of our values.

There are some theological answers,or possible answers to that, but getting into them would be getting ahead of ourselves.

Because you aren't in any position to judge the rightness or wrongness of how God does things when you don't believe morality exists.

So what is the point of trying to assess the values and quality of different ideas about what God has done and why if you don't even believe you have the ability to make value judgements about God's actions?

To me, if a theist said "yeah, God just punishes descendants for the crimes of ancestors," I'd chalk that up to just ceding any premise in which God isn't simply a monster (yes, as judged by my values, yes, you do not need to point out that isn't objective because it's never been claimed to be).

Your "values" are just personal preferences according to your worldview.

Why, therefore, should anyone care if God lines up with your personal preferences?
Your preferences don't determine what is true and right.

If we start from the premise that God is true the He determines what is right and true. And your preferences don't.

And if you start from the premise that God isn't true, then you have no moral tools for claiming that one should not believe in God because you cannot honestly look at any action God is said to have done and find any fault with it.

So the whole question becomes moot and the exercise is pointless if you don't first stat from the premise that morality exists.

The PoE question does not work as a formulation unless you first presume morality exists. Otherwise it's logically incoherent and pointless.

I wouldn't give the PoE anymore at that point because whatever "omnibenevolence" the theist is defending at that point is something too alien for me to even consider subjectively good. Wouldn't be any different from God torturing people and being defended with DCT, there's just no point in giving the PoE at that point.

You can't give the PoE to begin with without first assuming morality exists because to entire formulation depends on the assumption that you can judge God's actions as either good or bad.

But you can't judge God's actions as either good or bad because you don't believe morality exists.

It is also incoherent to even talk about "subjectively good" because it's an oxymoron the same way "subjective morality" is.
To say something is "good" is to put value judgement on what is good vs what is bad. Which requires an objective standard to appeal to in order to determine how something measures up in relation to how it is suppose to be.
Therefore, in the absence of an objective standard nothing can be good or bad, there is only personal preference.

Perhaps I should put it this way: maybe I'm attacking certain intuitions people have about goodness and God.

Attacking intuitions about morality is only relevant if you think morality actually exists.

It is true that the PoE is deigned to work with the intuitions people hav about morality and try to question God's morality in light of that.

But that's also why your position is completely incoherent when you start from the presumption that morality doesn't exist.

You undermine any ability you might have claimed to have to use those intuitions to even make judgements about God's goodness.

I wouldn't aim the PoE at someone that thinks God tortures people, or deliberately gives people leukemia (by making the conditions for it); because I think that person's values are so out of alignment with mine that it's pointless. I'd just consider their God a monster, and move on to some other argument.

Moral monsters don't exist in your worldview because right and wrong don't exist. So you can't make that judgement and be consistent with your worldview.

What does it matter if someone else's values are not in alignment with yours? Your values don't determine what is right according to your worldview. They can't because right and wrong don't actually exist.

So you are not being consistent with your worldview by trying to place value judgements on what others think is right.

The argument I'm giving is for someone that is likely to agree with views like "it is good not to torture people or allow people to be tortured," or "it is not good to punish descendants for the crimes of ancestors," and other intuitions shared by many humans grounded in empathy and altruism.

Your argument is incoherent because you don't think good (ie. morally right) exists as a real concept. There is only your personal preference and it has no more claim to being right than any competing personal preference of anyone else.

Your argument is also incoherent because it assumes empathy and altruism are objective moral values and duties. But your worldview demands rejecting the idea that objective moral values and duties exist.

Either your worldview is wrong and needs to be updated to be consistent with how you actually think and behave; or you need to re-align how you think an act to be consistent with your professed worldview.

For instance if someone said to me, "God can set babies on fire while laughing maniacally and it would be good because (some DCT argument), you might not like it but all you have is a preference whereas God's action is objectively good," that's not a good PoE target: they already believe God does apparently (to our everyday notions) monstrous things so the PoE will be incapable of shocking them out of holding one of their premises. It's time for a different argument in that case. I'd also be wary of that person's value hierarchy because it probably isn't in congruence with mine if they don't also find it monstrous, but that's beside the point.

You are missing the most important point here:
The reason the PoE attack is something most atheists even presume to be able to engage in is because they don't reject the idea that objective morality exists.
They are trying to use the intuitive sense of morality people have in order to attack the Biblical idea of God as being supposedly inconsistent with people's internal sense of objective morality.

You cannot use this line of attack if you reject the idea that morality even exists. You think that intuition is just an illusion.

You can't judge the goodness of an action if goodness doesn't exist.

You can't judge the monstrosity of an action if moral wrongness doesn't exist.

Whether or not someone else's personal preferences line up with yours has no relevance to proving whether or not something is objectively good or bad because you reject the idea that such concepts even exist.

Some of this response sounds snarkier than intended on a readthrough, so I feel like I should be clear that I'm still enjoying the conversation a lot. I think I'm in a mood because of schoolwork.

I still find the conversation enjoyable as well. I hope my bluntness is not coming across as dismissive or coming across as an unwillingness to address the issues you want answers to.

I think as things progress and ideas are fleshed out more I am narrowing in more precisely on how to communicate what my original objections were to your PoE question; which is why I am narrowing in more bluntly on this morality issue as key to undermining the entire premise from which you posed your original question.

We can't talk coherently about putting value judgements on God's actions without addressing first the issue of whether or not morality exists. If it doesn't exist then the question is meaningless and irrelevant. If it does exist then we have something to talk about.

But if you admit that objective morality exists then it necessarily proves God exists because there is no other way objective morality could exist but that there was a creator behind the universe and mankind to assign intention to His creation.

The PoE question is therefore not a question that can be used to prove atheism. Because it presupposes things that go against atheism (objective morality). Because atheism requires presupposing materialism as a philosophy. And objective morality as a true concept cannot exist under materialism. Any belief or feeling of objective morality under materialism would just be a delusion.

At best the only thing you could hope to do with the PoE question is try to use it to assess whether or not someone has the right idea of God's attributes and values - but you do so from the standpoint of first assuming a creator god exists because you assume objective morality exists.

That is why I said the PoE as a question is only relevant for using someone's own premises against themselves to show supposed contradictions. You have to start by presupposing that both God exists and that objective morality exist before you can even posit the question coherently.

If you aren't willing to first grant those presuppositions for the sake of argument then you have nothing with which to attack God because you don't even believe morality exists therefore nothing he does can be good or bad by definition.

 

[Rise]

I think I covered this in the most recent round of responses that you haven't gotten to yet; but I'm not trying to present the logical PoE. If I present the PoE, it's more like I'm trying to get people to second guess their intuitions about God and goodness; to get them to second guess the premise that God is good in alignment with their intuitions and values tell them goodness even is. Yes, I'm using the words from my worldview so you should understand I mean their moral preferences.

This reveals one of the problems with your approach here.

If you are starting from the premise that their intuitions about morality are just personal preferences then you are not accepting the premises of what those people actually believe.

They believe objective morality exists and that it's not just a personal preference.

You are trying to force your premises on to them - at which point you are no longer trying to use their premises against them to show why they are supposedly in contradiction.

You would first have to prove objective morality doesn't exist before you could force them to accept your premise that their idea of objective morality is just a personal preference.

But you can't prove that.

That is why you were wrong to try to argue against my answer to the PoE question by trying to reformulate it to remove morality from the equation. You made the question incoherent and irrelevant by doing that.

As long as objective morality is accepted as part of the premises for my answer to the PoE (and you can't prove I would need to abandon it, therefore it stands as one of the premises) then my answer to the PoE remains valid.

No, it's not fallacious. The argument is given without granting the premises as being true because the point of the argument is to show via epistemic probability that they might not be; it's a justifier for rejecting the premise.

Let's look at your original four options again in light of what I just said:

1) God has some right-making explanation for the existence of suffering (this is the typical theodicy: the suffering exists for a "good reason")
2) God does not have some right-making explanation for the existence of suffering: it just is what it is (meaning we must conclude the premises are wrong, reasonably)
3) God has some wrong-making explanation for the existence of suffering, where the suffering is for some worse reason than we're even aware of
4) God has both a right-making and a wrong-making explanation for the existence of suffering, which is at least still not congruent with "all-good" or "omnibenevolent" or "dislikes suffering," however we want to put it

First off, you are leaving out a 5th option:
5. God is not responsible for suffering, but has a right reason for not putting a forced stop to it all immediately.

Now on to the main point:
Options 2-4 are logically impossible if you start from the premise that objective morality exists. Because God is the only source of objective morality for the universe and therefore cannot by definition be wrong for designing the universe to work a certain way.

And you have to start from the premise that objective morality is real because all four of your options presuppose it must exist otherwise your options are incoherent and meaningless because right and wrong don't actually exist - so you can't even ask or analyze whether or not God has right or wrong reasons for what He does or doesn't do.

So, by using logic we are required to conclude that options 2-4 have 0% chance of being true if objective morality does exist because only God Himself can determine what objective morality is. He cannot be subject to any other standard outside of Himself therefore He cannot be found guilty of wrongdoing.

Which is why I said earlier that it's wrong for you to try to treat all these options as equally possible when we have logical data we can input into the equation which allow us to show that some options are logically impossible.

So now you're left with only options 1 and 5. Which means you're forced to choose between one of them according to your own belief in epistemic indifference that says they each have a 50% chance of being true.
And no matter which choice you choose God is morally right in what He does or does not do.

That's assuming we don't input other logic and evidences into the equation which would allow us to better discern which of those two options (1 or 5) is more likely true. But for the purposes of addressing your PoE question it wouldn't change the ultimate conclusion that God is still morally good in what He does regardless of what the circumstances or reasons are for his actions.

(4) is a logical necessity; the theist already loses if they doubt (4) on illogical grounds.

You can't prove that truth(logic) had to precede God as opposed to the concept that the truth (logic) we see in the universe is there because it reflects God's nature as the source and embodiment of Truth.

You believe the first option is true (which is a for of platonism) but you can't prove it must be true. Nor can you prove the Biblical idea must be fale.
Therefore you can't argue as though your premise must be accepted as truth.
Nor can you demand others abandon the Biblical premise that God is the source and embodiment of Truth.

This aseity issue related to Truth (logic) s not currently even relevant to the fact that you have no basis for trying to judge the morality of God's actions because you don't believe morality exists. And the fact that if we accept the premise that objective morality exists then it's impossible to accuse God of immorality because He is the source of the moral standard.

The aseity issue of God's relationship to Truth only becomes relevant if you were to extend this issue to trying to argue that morality itself is a concept that you think precedes God and makes God subject to it.

But since you aren't trying to argue for moral platonism then the aseity issue isn't yet relevant to the main issue being debated.

(5) has independent arguments supporting it in the post preceding this one, and in a multitude of other posts in recent responses.

You have not disproved the idea that it is possible suffering is what results when God's spirit is removed from mankind, and that there is no way to get around this without violating free will because God's spirit is necessary for there to not be suffering. Therefore, God cannot violate people's freewill choice to embrace suffering in order to meet their desire to reject relationship with God.

My noncognitivism has never been a part of the actual argument: I have only said conversationally that I'm a noncognitivist to answer why I wasn't using certain moral terms. Most theists have intuitions about what "good" means, and the way I presented the argument does render the question irrelevant.

This takes us back to what I already said: Since you do not believe morality exists you must start from what the other person believes about morality and assume it is true for the sake of the PoE argument being coherent and relevant.

But the believer in the Biblical God, or even just a professed believer in the Abrahamic God without being a believer in the Bible specifically as true, is going to be a believer in the premise that objective morality exists adn that God is the creator of all things.

And the PoE isn't relevant to anyone who isn't part of the Abrahamic tradition because no other major religious belief affirms all the three premises of the PoE about the attributes/nature of God.

You can't force those people to reject the premise that objective morality exists and accept your premise that it doesn't exist - because you can't prove it doesn't exist.

Nor can you force them to reject the premise that God is the creator of all things because you can't disprove that. Nor can you prove something else is responsible for the creation of all things.

So if you start from the premise that objective morality exists, and that God is the creator of all things, then you are forced to conclude that you will never be able to accuse God of being wrong for how He has created the world to be because there is no other source of morality outside of what He has created to judge God's intentions/designs by.

There is no way for you to philosophically or logically get around that.

For instance many theists are not DCT proponents but take the other horn of Euthyphro.

There aren't only two horns to the Euthyphro dilemma. That is a fallacy of a false dilemma by falsely assuming there are only two options.

The third option is that something is called good because God is good and that which lines up with who God is is called good. God intended and designed things to line up with who He is, which is goodness.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Rise

I’m behind on school stuff so I haven’t been making any time consuming posts, I’ll hopefully get a breather here soon.

 

[Subduction Zone]

None of that refutes what I said. Which is that there is something lacking in this equation without God that results in all these bad things happening.

Like how running a car without oil leads to it's degredation and eventual destruction as a functioning device.

You don't blame the manufacturer for requiring the device to need oil. You blame the driver for not operating the device according to it's design.

You also don't say the owner is "changing the physics of how the car operates" when they add oil to the engine. They are just adding what was always suppose to be there to stop problems from happening.



Who says He would need to?
Little Tyke: The True Story of a Gentle Vegetarian Lion
There probably won't be as much change as you think is needed in the case of the lion.

For all we know these issues could merely be epigenetic in nature and don't require new genetic information or changes. It would just be a matter of flipping the switches for a new situation.

We could also say God's life returning to creation could repair any deficiencies that much such a diet difficult for certain animals, deficiencies created by the fall, if it were not just epigenetic.

Which is even assuming there are true biological limitations and it's not mainly a behavioral or environmental issue (lack of available food otherwise), both of which could be corrected by God's presence returning to creation to remove the effects of the fall.

I had to look into that story. It appears to be pure BS. I could not find any reliable independent sources that confirmed it. Only rather extreme Christian sources.

Are there any reliable sources for that at all?

 

[Rise]

@Rise

I’m behind on school stuff so I haven’t been making any time consuming posts, I’ll hopefully get a breather here soon.

No rush. I understand how time consuming it can be.
I am still trying to catch up on posts.

 

[Rise]

I had to look into that story. It appears to be pure BS. I could not find any reliable independent sources that confirmed it. Only rather extreme Christian sources.

Are there any reliable sources for that at all?

Logical fallacy, genetic fallacy and/or argument by assertion.

You have no evidence to claim that is is BS.
You have not identified any flaws with the book that was written about it or it's source.
Therefore, you have no basis to claim it appears to be BS.

Simply calling it a Christian source doesn't refute or disprove the truth of the information contained therein.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Logical fallacy, argument by assertion.

You have no evidence to claim that is is BS.
You have not identified any flaws with the book that was written about it or it's source.
Therefore, you have no basis to claim it appears to be BS.

That is just your opinion and not a statement of truth.

No, I used no logical fallacy. Like many people you do not seem to understand how they work. An insufficiently supported claim is of no value in a debate. I did not say that it was false, there is merely no reason to believe it and the sources that you used only makes it look like useless drivel. When I make a positive assertion about a scientific concept I can support it properly. You seem to lack that talent. At least in this instance.

Do you understand that when you fail to support your point that you means that you have not demonstrated reliable evidence for your beliefs. Once again that does not prove you "wrong" it only shows that your case is unsupported.

In layman's terms, you screwed the pooch and now you are trying to shift the burden of proof. You never provided proper evidence for your claim in the first place.