fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3035 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3035 ⌋

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1): I think trying to link morality to God is maddeningly circular. Something is good because God supports it, and God supports it because it's good. I think any meaningful ethics needs to have some attempt at a reason why something is good or bad.

Some would argue this is rather the central reason that God is important philosophically and ethically.

The central question of ethics may be said to be: What is the good life, or the good generally, or the right thing to do? This naturally involves a further question, which is, How do we know what is the good life or the good generally? Now, there is a religious answer to this question which is that we cannot know the good, that the good can only be revealed to us through the action of the divine and we must take this on faith. And this is a possibility which must be refuted - in particular, if you think that it is true that the good can be known via reason, then it follows that it must be possible to refute this possibility. It is one of the fundamental alternatives regarding the question of whether ethics is knowable through human reason.

In other words: God matters because it could be that, if God is real, it would necessarily follow that all morals depend only on God's will and that human reasoning and moral philosophy is pointless. God matters - or rather the argument concerning the existence of God and our knowledge of it matters - because it impinges on the basic question of whether there can be a meaningful ethics in the terms you've set. Like, you can say that you have no interest in debating the true meaning of know - but that's kind of a centrally important topic for ethics generally.

Surely this requires accepting a very particular vision of the nature of God, in which it's necessary for us humans to care what God's Will or opinion is?

This is something I've never understood about religion. Even if it were proven that God created us - so what? Scientists create microbes in laboratories all the time, it doesn't mean they give a damn if they live or die beyond the confines of the experimental data, let alone love them.

IDK. IDGI.

No, that's true.

But I don't think that makes the argument any less relevant. Because we're talking about the possibility of making certain arguments - so instead of "What if God were real" it's "What if God were real in this specific understanding of God".

The people who actually believe in this scare the fuck out of me. They will justify anything by claiming it's God's will. Rachel Held Evans has written some great responses to these people.

I'd be interesting in seeing those questions!

But, I mean, yes, they will justify anything by claiming it's God's will. But the question, to me, is: can you demonstrate that there are things that can't be justified in that way?

Demonstrating ethics is a problem thousands of years old, and you expect me to solve it in an Internet comment?

At the very least, I think there's some value in a "you're being ridiculous" reaction. Just as we'd look skeptically at a survey claiming the average high school student is 40 years old, we can look skeptically at a statement that God can massacre whoever he wants: http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/scandal-evangelical-heart

Personally, the way I'd respond is that morality is about the person you act upon. You don't treat people and animals exactly the same because people and animals have different needs. From that perspective, God can only teach us how to treat a god.

Nah, no worries, I'm not expecting you to sort it all out. But I'm also not sure you necessarily see the challenge that I think is present here and that I'm trying to put across.

The problem is how you justify the "you're being ridiculous" reaction. Whether we can know that such-and-such a monstrous thing is wrong, and what the source of that knowledge is. The problem is, not pointing out the emotional monstrousness of the conclusions, but refuting them. Or on what grounds you ultimately justify the notion of morality as action appropriate to the target of that action. If you're talking to someone who's really convinced of that point of view, what reply are you able to give to them?

In other words, I suppose you could say that it's not God that's challenging, so much as the existence of people who believe in God and believe that morality can be justified only through God.

I feel like I'n being challenged to explain gravity to a hypothetical person who thinks the Earth is flat. They think in terms of up and down, and I try to explain that "down" only exists near a massive object with a gravitational pull, and I wind up banging my head on the table.

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