Is God's nature good because God declares it to be so, or does God declare it good because it adheres to a standard of goodness that is independent of God?
Often, when the likes of Christian people and apologetics like WLC (overated IMO) get asked about the Euthyphro Dilemma which starts about moral goodness the response is often met with arguments such as above about the nature of God. However, this doesn't solve the issue. This is basically circular reasoning and yet we are back to the same issue. Whichever way this question gets answered there are also several issues. I therefore challenge anyone to see if they can solve this issue without resorting to circular reasoning or a whole plethora of other leaps of logic.
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Well, you failed.
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Circular reasoning immediatley lol. This guy makes WLC look like a genius.
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I have to point out how both of you are hypocrites on this matter. The foundation of morality for the Christian comes from God, but atheists have no foundation. Your feet are firmly planted in mid-air. As Thomas Merton put it
You hypocrites need to answer that question. The only thing an atheist can do is steal a morality based on God, for it can't have one on its own that has any objectivity or compelling authority..
I don't what made me laugh harder, the fact you thought this was a dilemma or that it actually highlights the deficiency of atheism! LOL
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You lost - bigly. Reflect on why you lost.
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The equivalent of your erroneous argument would be to say a bachelor has to be married because he can't have the attribute of being unmarried. However, the very definition of a bachelor is that he is unmarried. As WLC would note that God to be worshipped would have to have the characteristic of being good or he would not be worthy of worship. Because goodness is intrinsic to God and an attribute of His, it is not circular - to appeal to a law external to himself is what would be circular - God bases his laws (what is good) on an external law unto himself. (what is good) - that would be circular and mean there is an ultimate authority outside of God. The dilemma was avoided and is not circular.
Again, I noticed your cowardice in how you have failed to answer my challenge. How is morality in atheism based on any objective source? Are you going to continue running from me, like...
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For a definition to mean something, it has to be attached to something objective, something verifiable by other conscious beings. If I call the stove "hot", I mean something that another person can verify by touching it with his finger. It is not just something that does not exist anywhere outside of my mind - it is an observable part of reality.
Similarly, "good" must mean something that any conscious being without any outside intervention can verify for themselves, and that requires it to be connected to something that is observable directly in the nature. Otherwise it is just a placeholder that can be replaced with any random sequence of letters. "Good" is about as meaningful as "2389hg4jkhnjkng9243gh8943n3g3498g34okg43". Is god the ultimate authority on what is "2389hg4jkhnjkng9243gh8943n3g3498g34okg43" and what is not?
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Well I reckon that if someone has to go to a God or a book about God to get there morals it doesn’t say very much about that person does it?
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Nope. You're wrong. When you say: There is no Law over God. that's not inherent knowledge, that's you believing what your book tells you. Fail.
Now you are moving the goal posts. If there is a creator then He gets to make the laws. Again, the 'dilemma' you mentioned does not exist as I explained. However, the issue that Atheism has with no source of an objective moral source does exist. Atheism has no objective foundation for morals.
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And if humans, despite sharing in the attribute of goodness, are capable of doing evil things, then so is god. I see no way out of this identity without doing away with the idea that humans and god are related - and if they are not, then one of the most fundamental assumptions of the Bible falls apart.
As for the impossibility for an atheist to have objective source of morality, I have always found this claim to be extremely bizarre. It is like saying that anyone who does not believe in astrology cannot draw any information from the stars. Morality is something that humans learn over time, and their moral views change with experience.
This is a very US-specific argument and I have not heard it from anyone else in Europe or the Middle East. Nor have I ever met a man who would not know to not murder everyone on sight without the Bible telling him so. Have you?
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This is a debate site; not a church. There are places for us offline if we wish to seek religious or spirtual guidance. We don't need it from you! As you have arrogantly taken it upon yourself as the religious authority for what you follow then perhaps create a church of your own and preach there.
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Exactly. I also wonder at times if some people confuse moral absolutism with moral objectivism. Perhaps a deity is needed for absolute morality? By 'objective,' I mean a basis for what follows, albeit morality is still subjective in its experience and application. Regardless of all these philosophical distinctions and the varied subjective experiences of morality, it seems that, ultimately, we are all striving toward the same moral destination. @MayCaesar
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It seems there have been a shift in focus from the central issue at hand: 'Is God's nature inherently good because God declares it to be so, or does God declare something good because it aligns with a standard of goodness that exists independently of God?'
Your response aligns with a commonly proposed solution to the initial aspect of the Euthyphro Dilemma. Yet, the follow-up question (Shown in the title and OP) remains unaddressed.You suggest that the dilemma itself is not valid or significant. You then resort to making comments about credibility or intelligence about those who might find it perplexing or inquire about it. How about we get back to refocusing on the actual content of the argument than the preconcieved notions of the person behind it?
Furthermore, I'm puzzled by the approach of evaluating the efficiency, or any characteristic for that matter, of concepts or entities that do not exist. @just_sayin
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Buddhists know this very well so that is at the cornerstone of the idea of "enlightenment". The process goes as follows: initially the ignorant monk believes that "enlightenment" is that incredible state achieving which is all the life is about and tells everyone about how great he is that he strives towards achieving it. Then he realizes that it is not something you ever achieve, but something you constantly move towards. And finally he gets it: the very journey he has taken is what life truly is about, and learning this lesson humbles him and makes him realize that he is no better or wiser than anyone else - and nor should he be. We all have our own paths full of obstacles and deviations.
Not endorsing any of these ideas, but, of all these religions have to offer, these are not the worst ones to take seriously for their followers.
This is a great point. I think it can be compared to the relationship between physics and the real world. The real world is absolute, it is just there, it is observable and interactable. Our models of this world, however, are not absolute, and one can model the same world in an infinite number of different ways - however, they are objective in that they capture the properties of reality that are measurable and testable independently of the particular observer. Our search for those models, in turn, is subjective: we build them based on our intuition, experience and knowledge, and two different scientists can look at the same data and model it differently.
Subjectivity comes from the fact that each of us searches for morals individually, and objectivity comes from the fact that moral choices have real consequences, and adopting a particular system of models has serious implications on one's life independent of their opinion of the morals. There can, I suppose, be "absolute morals" in the sense that, if this world is designed by another sentient being, that being may have had a particular behavior of its inhabitants in mind - and deviations from this behavior are a consequence of errors in the design. It would be strange to blame the inhabitants themselves for it though, given how they were not the ones who made those errors. It would be like writing a computer program, making a mistake, and blaming the computer for not producing the result one wants.
In any case, your last sentence is spot on: while we all use different tools and approaches to develop and polish our moral systems, the ideal is the same. Everyone wants to be happy, fulfilled, have great relationship with other humans and solid grounding in their own values. What actions get us there is something we all try our best to figure out.
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In regards to " It would be like writing a computer program, making a mistake, and blaming the computer for not producing the result one wants." What if that was an AI that became self-aware? @MayCaesar?
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However, if we are talking about a creature that is omniscient and, therefore, has the capacity to predict the outcome of any design, then this excuse no longer applies. Not that it applies to engineers' either: "I did not know what my program would do" implies "I knew that my program could do this".
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NOW FOR THE 7TH TIME IN THIS THREAD - i have pointed out that atheist's feet are firmly planted in mid-air and that they do not have any objective foundation for moral values. I have to assume that you atheists recognize your morals have no objective foundation and are just your own personal preferences generated, since none have been man enough to provide an objective source of their moral claims. It is atheists, not Christians who have a deficient moral system.
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I say both sides of the dilemma alludes to the realization the gods can not possibly exist therefore all standards and concepts of morality are subject to human definitions.
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We just discussed the question of objectivity of morals exactly. You have this habit of ignoring parts of the conversation that do not make it easier for you to make your argument and either pretending that they have never taken place, or that they were not what they were.
I am not sure what you mean by "objective source". "Source" in what way? The world is complex and features countless causal chains, and many of them can never be traced to their origin. Feynman explained it extremely well here:
https://youtu.be/36GT2zI8lVA
The confusion may be coming from the fact that you are not comfortable with the idea of not being able to trace something back to the "primal cause", and if such a cause cannot be determined, you see the whole construct as hanging in the air. The Bible makes a specific claim about the "primal cause", and that claim satisfies you, despite your inability to prove its correctness.
Different atheists have different views, and not all of their views are logical. But it is worth noting that neither is the theist explanation: it is a cop-out. "God is the source" is a meaningless statement; it is like saying "23h89tn2348fyn5234789nyg59783bis the source". What exactly does that mean? You just tautologically determined the source with a fancy word, but you have not discerned anything about its nature.
Personally, I think about human brain as a tool that does two things simultaneously: projects the available data into the future in order to make the predictions - and into the past in order to find the causes. There is no limit to the level of technological advancement I can push the civilization towards, and there is no limit to the depth of backtracking that I can do in order to learn more about the past of this world. We exist in the present and have a very limited amount of data available to us, so it is natural that the further either into the future or into the past we move from the present moment, the larger the error bars become, and the fuzzier our understanding gets. There is no "primal source" to be found any more than there is "the last moment" to be found. You can look into the future as far as you can and there will still be an infinite amount of time left after it - and you can look into the past as deeply as you can and still be arbitrarily far away from much deeper levels.
This does not bother me at all. I do not feel "suspended in mid-air". I think that it is better to stand on a shaky ground, but a ground that you can study and improve your positioning on it (and do so objectively) - than to stand on imaginary ground.
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I invite you to join me in respecting this process, rather than jumping at simple conclusions based on one book. I have read hundreds of books and probably thousands of papers over my lifetime, and I continue to be humbled by the depth of my ignorance. Your claims at understanding such things as origin of the brain because one fantasy book talks about them are cute, but, frankly, quite ridiculous.
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I have one family member like this. She precludes almost every disagreement with, "I am older than you, so listen carefully and learn". Such people simply stop evolving intellectually at some point - and in life not evolving implies degrading: it is impossible for a living organism to be static. There is a saying in business: "If you are not expanding, you are contracting" - and it certainly applies to living beings as well.
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YOUR QUOTE TO THE BIBLE ATHEIST FOOL FACTFINDER: " You lied. The dilemma is not real and I explained it to you. You couldn't explain to me why what I said was wrong - either because you don't understand what Euthyphro's dilemma was or why it is a false choice. I also noticed that you couldn't give a defense for atheistic morality having an objective source - because you know I'm right - it can't have an objective source."
YES, I had the same problem with this BIBLE INEPT FACTFINDER, where he had to RUN AWAY from discussion with me by coming up with a myriad of lame excuses to NOT continue our discussion as shown in this embarrassing link relating to him: https://www.debateisland.com/discussion/comment/175263/#Comment_175263
SUBJECTIVELY, FACTFINDER IS A WASTE OF TIME IN DISCUSSING ANYTHING WITH THIS BIBLE FOOL IN THIS RELIGION FORUM!
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