The Argument for God from Morality Explained
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ค. 2024
- In this video I explain one of the most popular arguments for the existence of God, the Argument from Morality.
Got Questions? I can be reached at thomascahillquestions@gmail.com.
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interesting video
if you tell us about books to read about every argument in the description or at the end of the video that would be wonderful :)
have a good day ^^
Good suggestion, I'll keep it in mind!
No, no, no!
1. Take History of Philosophy.
2. Study the dialogues from Plato-specifically The Euthyphro Dilemma.
3. Note that The Euthyphro Dilemma, which specifically questioned the morality of murder as directed by the gods, shows such a moral foundation / thinking contains a contradiction.
4. Note that The Euthyphro Dilemma has never been solved.
5. Study Philosophy.
6. Wash; Rinse; Repeat…
1. Check.
2. Check.
3. My argument doesn't attempt to ground morality in God's commands but in His very nature, so the Euthyphro Dilemma doesn't apply.
4. Again, it doesn't apply here.
5. Check. I'm a philosophy student.
6. You just described my day.
@@Thomas-Cahill Thanks for the respectful reply Thomas,
You wrote:
“My argument doesn't attempt to ground morality in God's commands but in His very nature, so the Euthyphro Dilemma doesn't apply.”
- If your argument has, at its foundation, a worldview based upon a god, and by extension, this god’s specific nature, then it does. When understood at the university-level this ‘is’ the Euthyphro dilemma.
And you wrote:
“Thanks for your comment. The problem with your argument is that God doesn't have a nature, He is His nature.
- This is a Distinction Without a Difference and understood at the university-level as ‘Pushing the Euthyphro dilemma one step back’ without solving it. (Ref. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
“It's not "happenstance" that ensures God's nature exists as it does, it's His very nature that ensures that He exists as He does.”
- This is just circular reasoning through self-serving unargued-for assertion. This is how there can be countless mutually exclusive assertions about the nature of gods or goddesses wherein what murder ‘is’ is different and/or excused when it needs to be. Again, this was the point of the original dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro.
yYM
Summary of the Argument:
1. Moral Goodness is objective.
2. Anything objective must have an objective standard.
3. Therefore, Moral Goodness has an objective standard.
4. The only thing that could be an objective standard for Moral Goodness is God.
5. Therefore, God must exist.
Thomas,
Your ‘argument’ contains unargued-for premises.
In its basic form, the 2,400 year old Euthyphro dilemma (when understood) demonstrates it’s a non sequitur to move from a god or gods to objective morality or visa versa.
Moving from the subjective perspective of a god or gods to that of the perspective of another thing makes both a category error as well as employing the composition / division fallacy.
Let’s imagine someone argued:
1. Morality is grounded in God’s nature. I.e., God’s nature is the grounding for (the standard for) objective morals and duties.
2. God does not just create objective morals, God’s nature entails said objective morals.
But here is the question exposing a dilemma most miss: What factors contributed to this god’s nature it eternally finds itself in? And, thus, here is the problem most philosophers recognize:
Because of the vary nature / state God has always been in, it is by pure happenstance that God ended up with its nature-as there are no factors that could have preceded and contributed to this state (eternal nature / character). In short, it is due strictly to the reality that God finds himself in; and that is the definition of random.
Now, whether you believe other realities are real, possible, or hypothetical, we can use them to understand why a morality-type cannot be objective. For if another real or hypothetical other reality had another god in the same circumstance, there is no non-random reason that this other god would have the same type of moral nature.
Therefore, any god’s nature is subject to the happenstance eternal changeless reality it has always found itself in. This, then, leads us to the final conclusion: A god’s grounded morality is subjective and impossible to be objective!
yYM
@@yinYangMountain Thanks for your comment. The problem with your argument is that God doesn't have a nature, He is His nature. It's not "happenstance" that ensures God's nature exists as it does, it's His very nature that ensures that He exists as He does.
excellent explanation
Thank you! Glad you liked it.
It is pretty sad that if a stranger broke into your house and started shooting your family while you also had a gun in your hand and knew that the only way to save your family was to murder the guy and your objective morality did not allow you to murder the guy if that was the only way to stop him before he kills your entire family including you says a lot about your objective moral standards.
Thanks for your comment. In that instance, shooting the intruder would not be murder, even if you kill him, since your intention is to stop his attack, not cause his death.
@@Thomas-Cahill Oddly, the 10 commandments only talks about "killing" in the KJV, not murder. Many people disagree on the difference between "killing" another human being or "murdering" someone.
There is a reason why some people are conscientious objectors when it comes to war and killing based on religion or personal morals while the bible has no problem telling folks to kill/butcher men, women, children, and animals in his name, or god actually murdering humans by the sacksful because he deems it to be necessary.
As to your reply, the man with the gun has every intention of murdering the person, not to stop his attack, but to put him down for good.
If I saw someone assailing and starting to kill my family and I had gun, I guarantee you, I would not be going for leg shots to try to just stop him.
"promo sm" 😊
Hi, you said "when I make the statement murder is wrong if you disagree with that I'm going to say no we can know that murder is wrong it's just true that murder's wrong so what you're saying is wrong and if you try to act on that wrong belief that murder is okay then Society is going to stop you by putting you in prison because we recognize that the statement murder is wrong is just as true as the statement 2 plus 2 equal 4".
I would like to understand this better so let's say i said "Murder is okay". According to you that is a false statement, since you also say that "murder is wrong" is on the same level of "2+2=4" (in terms of being objective) i would assume that if i said "2+2=5" you would say that is also wrong. Can you please proof both statements are wrong?
Thanks for your question. I would say that the best way to prove that 2+2=4 is simply to put two things next to another two things and count up how many things we have total. I admit that's a little easier than demonstrating that "murder is wrong," but I meant only to offer "2+2=4" as a relatively uncontroversial example of a true statement about the world/"fact."
I would ground my reasoning for why murder is wrong in human nature. After all, we can do something that puts us above the rest of the material world - we can understand the very natures of things, thinking about the way the world is in a more fundamental way than anything else. This gives us a kind of intrinsic dignity. Murder, or the direct killing of an innocent human being, is a violation of that dignity, and therefore should be avoided.
@@Thomas-Cahill First of all, thanks for answering. Secondly, may i ask you for your opinions on killing (humans) in general? Do you think it's always wrong, objectively? I see that you made the distinction of "killing innocent human being" instead of "killing human being" am i right assuming you think some people aren't innocent and therefore killing them would not be murder so it wouldn't be wrong? Would be very happy for your answer but understand if you don't have time to answer or simply do not want to, wish you a nice day. (Also, because i just remembered, if you do indeed make a distinction on people being innocent or not, what would make a person not innocent? Or maybe you could believe, although I don't think you do, people are born not innocent, in that case, what would make a person innocent?
@@nicollasalmeida4936 your point stands 💯💯 the claim that the christian god is an 'objective standard for Moral Goodness' yet over and over again in the bible has committed immoral acts like murder just proves fundamentalists just pick and choose what they want to assert as proof without an ounce of critical thought or research.
@@godless_sceptic Theists love to cherry pick and disregard their version of the holy book as they wish. I for one don’t think that any deity that promotes misogyny, slavery (not just that but beating your slaves is fine in christianity), human sacrifice, infinite torture for finite wrongs and all kinds of moral dilemmas is the origin of morality.
@@nicollasalmeida4936 It's a good question, and I'm still trying to figure out some of the specifics of what I think about it myself. What I know for sure is that there must be some cases where killing isn't murder; the example that comes to mind immediately is self-defense. The reason for this, I think, is that in cases of self-defense the death of the attacker is more of an unintended side-effect of the defenders action than an intended goal. I'm not really sure at this point if it's possible for someone to "lose" his human dignity in a way that would make it moral to kill him; I'm open to arguments from both sides.
if murder is wrong then why did god send a flood and kill innocent children just to get rid of evil?
also, if god exists, that means heaven exists, so why is murder wrong when the person who was murdered will end up in eternal paradise anyways? if god exists, then death is a good thing yes ? ....yes !
I know more about philosophy than I do theology, and this question is more theological in nature, but I'll answer to the best of my ability.
God, as the cause of all that is, is not obligated to give anything any amount of existence. This means that if He decides to stop giving anything existence, He can do that without any moral contradiction. We, on the other hand, are not the cause of all that is. That means that if we decide to take away a thing's existence, we are violating that thing's being, and thereby acting evil.
The fundamental reason murder is wrong isn't what it does to the murdered, but what it does to the murderer. Murder builds a bad habit in the murderer's soul, a habit that causes him to act against his nature as a social creature and thereby deprives him of happiness, since happiness is found in fulfilling your nature.
@@Thomas-Cahill Reading your responses here and elsewhere, you make several assertions about "God". For example, "God, as the cause of all that, is not obligated ... etc," and "... His very nature,". Before you can make these statements about what "God" IS, you FIRST have to demonstrate its existence. To do otherwise is to put the cart before the horse. What you are doing - and you are by no means alone - is inventing a super-powered superhero and endowing him/her with attributes so that s/he is able to do what you want him/her to be able to do.
I also think it is very important to understand the limitations of the philosophy of religion. Philosophical arguments for the existence of "God" - and discussions about "God" - are the product of the fertile, human imagination; they are narratives, not so very different from the narratives of our ancestors. To put it bluntly, philosophy of religion is making stuff up about stuff that's made up. An argument on its own is not good, credible evidence for the existence of anything.
"An argument is not good, credible evidence for the existence of anything." Really? I highly doubt you believe this, it would undermine almost all knowledge if you did. Take a simple example:
1. I have two chairs and two tables
2. Two plus two equals four
3. Therefore I have two chairs and tables combined
This is an argument - a series of premises which lead with 100% certainty to a conclusion. I'm suggesting that we can form the same kind of thing to arrive at the existence of God - a series of premises which lead us with absolute certainty to the conclusion that "a immaterial, atemporal, unchanging, all-good, all-knowing, all-present, perfectly simple, personal source of all that is" exists.
As for the claim that I have to demonstrate that God exists before I can "make . . . statements about what 'God' is," you have to first have an idea of what a thing is before you say it exists. I can't go about trying to prove that God exists unless we if get down what we mean by "God."
@@Thomas-Cahill You missed a crucial part of what I wrote, even though you actually copied it accurately." An argument is not ... evidence for THE EXISTENCE OF anything."
"... you have to first have an idea of what a thing is ... etc." - You are describing an hypothesis. Sometimes, hypotheses can take the form of wild guesses or intuition, and they can be later shown to be correct. More often that not, they are based in the material and concern the functioning of the material. However they come about, the formulation of the hypothesis alone is not sufficient to demonstrate the phenomenon. At some point, the idea one has in one's head has to be tested in the real, concrete world.
I speculate that, were you to start from a blank sheet, you would not hypothesise an invisible, active agent behind the existence of the Cosmos, but would be more inclined to expect a natural, physical and material cause, since everything we observe about the world we live in is consistent with that. Many millennia of talk of "Gods" has short-circuited this process in the minds of very many people. You may not realise it, but you are probably starting with the idea that "God" exists and working backwards from that conclusion.
However, the "Gods" people typically believe exist are often personal, interventionist and interested in our particular species of ape on our tiny planet floating in the unimaginble vastness of our universe. This is a laughable notion, but can be explained in anthropological/psychological terms. I recommend Thomson's excellent, short work: "Why We Believe in God(s)" as a starting point.
@@Thomas-Cahill I responded to your message, but it is only visible if you sort the comments "newest first". Yt comment sections have become infuriatingly unreliable, apparently because of an over-zealous automatic censor.
I will repost what I wrote in short, numbered sections to see if that helps ...