CalvinDude is upset at me for not getting what he, and other presups, have so patiently tried to tell me a million times: that the Problem of Evil is dead! The whole Euthyphro Dilemma doesn't apply! He admits that good isn't contingent upon what God says, so I can't catch him on that horn.
Why can't I just get it?
Things aren't good because God wills them that way, or says they are -- instead, goodness is grounded in God's own nature! I mean, "God's nature" is, somehow, some way, supermagicalistically transcendentally disconnected from this dilemma...how can you not get that? Well, all I can conclude is that CalvinDude possesses more fortitude than I, plus I'm stupid, I guess.
Before I paste my response comment, let me say that I appreciate his attempt to extricate God from the Euthyprho Dilemma and to rescue Divine Command Theory from intellectual bankruptcy. I will not promise, though, to deal with this issue more fully myself in the future. I think enough philosophers have spilled enough ink already to see the major problem -- either morality transcends the question of God's own existence (and thus God's nature as well, and whatever would dictate said nature), or it doesn't and it is contingent upon some aspect of God's existence.
This latter clause is the horn Divine Command Theorists are impaled on, and the former clause destroys the argument that God is necessary for, or ontologically serves as, the "foundation" of morality. It's pretty simple to me -- either / or. Now, here is my comment, and if people want to read more on this (the PoE in general, plus Euthyphro's Dilemma), I will have to just tell you to check out some books from the library, because I am too tired and busy to deal with it any further; I just don't have the fortitude (or the spare time + lack of marriage + lack of social life) of the average presuppositionalist, it appears:
sdanielmorgan Says:I thought this long comment worth sharing. I would add that global, unrelenting skepticism falls on its own sword. You can't know what you can't know. But you know that you exist, you know that logic is valid, that 2+2=4...and you cannot make yourself not believe certain things. Plus, the regress problem is typically approached by looking at epistemology -- coherentism and classical foundationalism.
January 24th, 2007 at 1:58 pmI didn’t respond to your later critiques [of Prof. Witmer's paper] due to other priorities at the end of the semester, not out of dejection.
I still haven’t gotten around to sitting down and dealing with a lot of hardcore philosophical issues, because at the moment I’m in the middle of a hardcore chemistry Ph.D. oral candidacy defense. I have, however, made photocopies of some good stuff from Armstrong on universals, including one article called, “Can a Naturalist Believe in Universals?” I also read a book called, “Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?” That lays out a solid case for ethical objectivism and refutes the sort of God-contingent morality you laid out above.
Armstrong’s case I find quite compelling — he argues that particulars have the causal power to “create” universals. His argument is that universals do not have some sort of causal power to instantiate particulars, but vice versa. This really helped me to conceptualize universals a little better (not necessarily that now, I do so quite well) because what plagued me was in imagining something outside of space and time instantiating anything. What is instantiation? An action? A causal connection? How does it interact? This same problem would bother me if these universals were supposedly inside of God’s mind, or whatever. The argument is “Universals arise from particulars, and not the other way around.” And for whatever reason, this is a pill I can better swallow.
It’s a kind of standard issue for any sort of dualism — how do things of different elemental substances interact? How could they cause or affect one another? And these sorts of open-ended questions exist for the theist and the atheist. Saying that, because morality has an intrinsically non-time-space-matter-contingent character (just as logic and mathematical truths and other abstracta do), that this necessitates a Person to nicely “account” for these things.
First, I will tell you that I do not accept the logical validity of any form of relativism or subjectivism. Either good and evil are real properties, just like red and round, or they are not. Our perception of them does not make them so. Neither does God’s. Either logic and mathematical truths and morality constrain the nature of reality (including God’s own definitions), as well as what and who God can be and is, or those things somehow become a contingency of God’s existence, which is not possible. You seem to try to avoid contingency by making a sort of “parallel” argument, but I don’t have the time to deal with it right now.
I will only comment here to say that I don’t buy into “God’s morality” and “man’s morality”. You almost sound like a relativist with such statements. There is only good and evil — transcending personhood. Either moral properties exist, or they do not. Either moral propositions are true, or they are not. They are not made real/true by God’s existence, and virtual/false by God’s nonexistence. Equivalent to, “2+2=4,” so, “Causing harm for fun is evil,” does not depend on God in any way. It is the nature of reality — it is logically necessary…what evil is, and what good is, not what God makes them or what God is.
As Prof. Witmer said in his interview with Gene Cook — it is the nature of what it is to be evil to cause harm for fun. It is a real property of that state of affairs (causing harm for fun). It is the nature of what it is to be good to alleviate suffering whenever possible. In the same way that 2+2=4, it is foundational, self-evident and incorrigible, and it matters not one iota whether God exists or not to make it true. That’s my situation. I stop there. The regress ends there for me.
To me, the sort of person who requires justification for those propositions is the same as the person who says, “But why is blue darker than yellow?” I cannot bring myself to waste time in trying to justify it.
One reason I stopped arguing much with you guys is that you only have one weapon in your arsenal: the one Sextus Empiricus developed long before the days of Jesus — the regress argument. Presuppositionalists want to use the classical regress arguments to destroy the foundation of anyone’s knowledge; excepting, of course, propositions like “God exists,” and “God is all-good, all-powerful…” as valid foundations. But the sort of skepticism you advocate is colored — to the degree you apply it, it undermines the validity of others’ presuppositions. But, you cannot maintain the same degree of global skepticism without self-refuting; turning that skepticism inward on yourself will leave you in the same boat as me.
I haven’t dealt with epistemology as I plan to — I have had one presuppositionalist recommend the book, “Longing to Know” to me as a good one to start out with as a primer on Christian views on epistemic problems. I take certain beliefs for granted, and I would argue strongly that others do too, for the simple reason that they are justified by my own experience and their intuitive, self-evident quality.
For me, armchair philosophy is a hobby, and I really do enjoy it. But, I lose myself sometimes in it, and neglect other things (like getting my Ph.D. finished). It is very hard to be very good at chemistry and at philosophy. Maybe some people can do it; perhaps they have more brilliance or time, or both, than I do.
Anyway, for me this is a sort of process, not some search for a “magic bullet” argument to convince me about God one way or the other. The problem of evil is the single argument that I think renders theism irrational; I would be agnostic if it weren’t for the PoE. If I could find a real solution to it, I’d drop back to agnosticism, rather than believing that the conception of God as all-good and all-powerful is illogical, given the existence of evil. Anyway, I miss our chats, but I also enjoy my newfound productivity. One day, I’ll really try to get around to your latter responses to Prof. Witmer.
I like the new look of the blog.
Best,
D
I'm tired. Fortitude is developed this way, they tell me.
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