Gertie wrote: ↑May 2nd, 2018, 5:55 pm
Fooloso4 wrote: ↑May 2nd, 2018, 1:19 pm
Gertie:
Except that the assumption that God is perfect and all-knowing is not shared by at least some of the authors of the Hebrew Bible. Abraham and Moses have to calm God’s anger in order to keep God from killing large numbers of people. Apparently God forgot the lesson he learned from the Flood. In my earlier post I pointed to where God blessed those who killed or murdered three thousand of their sons and brothers.
The Hebrew God is a willful God. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all believe they are doing the will of God no matter how many they murder in the name of God.
Yes, I was trying to summarise the argument for objective morality necessarily being rooted in a perfect, good god, but you're right, there's plenty of reasons to question that.
How can we determine whether objective morality really exists?
I will use the basketball analogy.
Let's say that there is a rule book for basketball. It describes when a defensive foul is committed, when an offensive foul is committed, when travelling occurs, how many free throws one gets depending on how many fouls have been committed by a team during a quarter and so on.
We might think of that as "objective rules for basketball." But we put a few people in striped shirts, make them basketball referees, we have to accept the fact that these referees won't be capable of applying the rules perfectly. There will be instances when a player travels on the way to a lay up but doesn't get called for travelling. There will be some fouls that don't get called. There will be times when a player gets called for a foul when he didn't really commit a foul.
But then someone says, "Why should there be any such thing as a 3 point shot? Just because you shot a basket from behind this arbitrary line, why award 3 points instead of two?" Someone else says, "Should a player really be disqualified for committing 6 fouls in a game? Why not make it 8 fouls instead?"
The response might be, "Who are you to question the basketball God?" The response to that might be, "Basketball is a human invention. Therefore, there is no basketball God and we can change the rules anytime we want to." Another person chimes in, "Can we objectively say that one set of basketball rules is superior to an alternative set of rules if there is no Basketball God?"
Another person says, "Let's say there is a basketball God. How do we know that the basketball God supports the 24 second shot clock or the 3 point shot?" Yet another person says, "That's not the point. The point is that if there is no basketball God, all of the rules of basketball are just a matter of opinion and can be changed at the will of whomever is participating in a given basketball game. Are you a basketball relativist?"
"Not at all. I think a basketball game where there is a 24 second shot clock and a 3 point shot is objectively superior to a basketball game with a 45 second shot clock and no 3 point shot. The arc of basketball bends toward ever greater excitement. We might decide to change the rules if we discover rules that will make the game even more entertaining than it is now. The game of basketball may never be perfectly entertaining. But there is some set of objective basketball rules that would represent the best rules even if we mortals can never know exactly what those rules are."