Re: Review of the 36 Arguments for the Existence of God #16. THE ARGUMENT FROM MORAL TRUTH
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Pastor Jennifer v2
Feb 23, 2012, 11:27:44 AM2/23/12
to Evidence For God
16. THE ARGUMENT FROM MORAL TRUTH
1. There exist objective moral truths.(Slavery and torture and
genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)
2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world
is but, rather, in the way the world ought to be. (Consider: should
white supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all
who don’t meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their
ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, in this
hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way that
they have made it.)
3. The world itself—the way it is, the laws of science that explain
why it is that way—cannot account for the way the world ought to be.
4. The only way to account for morality is that God established
morality (from 2 and 3).
5. God exists.
FLAW 1:
The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument
that Plato made famous in the Euthyphro. Reference to God does not
help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The
question is, why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a
reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is
good, whereas genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he
didn’t. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide
the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant.
And if he didn’t have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he
could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and
genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices
seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, The Argument
from Moral Truth is another example of the Fallacy of Passing the
Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality
in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my
own interests’ mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am
me and you are not.
FLAW 2:
Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the
God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the
Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be
morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep
slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and
commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which
aspects of biblical morality to take seriously has grown more
sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often
metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some
standards of morality that do not come from God in order to judge
which aspects of God’s word to take literally and which aspects to
ignore.
COMMENT:
Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a
flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by
our lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold
dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective
values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent
with those values are objectively true in the same way that
mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is
fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.
R Goldstein
1. There exist objective moral truths.(Slavery and torture and
genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)
2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world
is but, rather, in the way the world ought to be. (Consider: should
white supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all
who don’t meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their
ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, in this
hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way that
they have made it.)
3. The world itself—the way it is, the laws of science that explain
why it is that way—cannot account for the way the world ought to be.
4. The only way to account for morality is that God established
morality (from 2 and 3).
5. God exists.
FLAW 1:
The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument
that Plato made famous in the Euthyphro. Reference to God does not
help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The
question is, why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a
reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is
good, whereas genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he
didn’t. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide
the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant.
And if he didn’t have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he
could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and
genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices
seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, The Argument
from Moral Truth is another example of the Fallacy of Passing the
Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality
in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my
own interests’ mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am
me and you are not.
FLAW 2:
Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the
God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the
Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be
morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep
slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and
commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which
aspects of biblical morality to take seriously has grown more
sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often
metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some
standards of morality that do not come from God in order to judge
which aspects of God’s word to take literally and which aspects to
ignore.
COMMENT:
Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a
flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by
our lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold
dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective
values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent
with those values are objectively true in the same way that
mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is
fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.
R Goldstein
Brock
Feb 23, 2012, 6:19:05 PM2/23/12
to Evidence For God
On Feb 23, 11:27 am, Pastor Jennifer v2
<jennifer.s.jo...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 16. THE ARGUMENT FROM MORAL TRUTH
>
> 1. There exist objective moral truths.(Slavery and torture and
> genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)
> 2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world
> is but, rather, in the way the world ought to be. (Consider: should
> white supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all
> who don’t meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their
> ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, in this
> hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way that
> they have made it.)
> 3. The world itself—the way it is, the laws of science that explain
> why it is that way—cannot account for the way the world ought to be.
> 4. The only way to account for morality is that God established
> morality (from 2 and 3).
> 5. God exists.
>
Again, the same limitations apply to this treatment:
> 16. THE ARGUMENT FROM MORAL TRUTH
>
> 1. There exist objective moral truths.(Slavery and torture and
> genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)
> 2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world
> is but, rather, in the way the world ought to be. (Consider: should
> white supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all
> who don’t meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their
> ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, in this
> hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way that
> they have made it.)
> 3. The world itself—the way it is, the laws of science that explain
> why it is that way—cannot account for the way the world ought to be.
> 4. The only way to account for morality is that God established
> morality (from 2 and 3).
> 5. God exists.
>
* there is no one "THE ARGUMENT ...", rather it refers to a general
category of arguments, thus to defeat one specific example is not
adequate to dismiss the category
* the argument, to the degree it is a paraphrase, doesn't adequately
represent (either intentionally or accidentally) the argument as put
forward by a proponent, and faces the danger of being simply a straw-
man
Regards,
Brock
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