olin posted:

No, only all eternally existing beings are God. If it is true that protons and electrons are eternal and never decay I guess I would include them as God, and therefore all matter as God. To the best of my knowledge, science doesn't know if electrons are eternal.

olin posted:

I'm saying that eternally existing truths, or you could just say truth, are/is God. I do not mean that as an equivocation. God is the collection of all eternally existent being.

quote:

I believe that a moral law is infused into us at creation by God. I have provided no evidence for my belief that morals come from God. I also believe Him to be an uncaused, personal, creator of the universe, who sans the universe, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful. But I haven't explained why. I wasn't really looking for a debate about the existence of God. I just wanted to know how people arrived at morals without eternally existing being.

If you'd like to we can talk about that. I like the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the existence of God. if we're going to talk about that it'd be better if you read the argument first if you are unfamiliar with it. I'd rather not type out the whole argument here as it is explained well many places online.

olin posted:

Your first question is explained by the second part of what you quoted me saying. I believe that truth is God and God is truth but that's not the only thing I believe about God.

quote:

Why are you asking the second question?

olin posted:

*That argument is simple. This present moment depends on for it's existence the completion of the entire past. As it would have taken an eternal amount of time to arrive at this present moment were past time infinite, the past must be finite. Therefore a beginning--> A creator.

olin posted:

olin posted:

I explained this above. I believe in a personal, changeless, unbelievably powerful absolute being who was the creator of the universe. Admittedly, I probably miswrote the OP and shouldn't have been intentionally vague. My obfuscation has just provided confusion. It just that I was not trying to start a "does God exist?" DD thread as we all know how well receive that poo poo is on this forum.

I wanted to know about non-theistic morality as I've never seen such a system like that that I found particularly persuasive.

olin posted:

I find the lack of objectivity in non-theistic moral systems to make them unfeasible. To murder a random person is wrong. That is not merely an opinion but a fact. I couldn't ascribe to an ethical system that just says "Well, I don't want to murder a person because it would make me feel bad therefore I don't do it."

olin posted:

A very close friend of mine is an atheist and doesn't believe objective "right or wrong". I asked him what about if he could steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from his parents in an untraceable way and absolutely get away with it with no suspicion would he do it? I asked wouldn't that be objectively wrong. He said nothing is objectively wrong. He said that no he wouldn't do it because he loves his family and wouldn't want to hurt them. Then I asked if he would steal the money from a large corporation under the same circumstances with total assurance of never getting caught. He said "gently caress yea he would. They have insurance so I'm not really hurting anyone except some minor lose at an insurance bureau."

That type of ethics bothers me although he is being totally logically consistent.

olin posted:

Hypothetical questions are used to draw out the underlining principles. They are not meant to describe actually existing situations. And also you just admitted that under certain circumstances it is morally correct to torture an innocent child to death. Your ethical system is bankrupt.

olin posted:

Rejecting hypotheticals and thought experiments because "they can't happen in real life" is antithetical to doing philosophy. Also, lets say ISIS captured you and a bunch of other prisoners. The terms of release for all the prisoners were for you to kill the child prisoner. Otherwise they would behead you all in one week.

Is that real world enough for you?

olin posted:

That would be a great act of self sacrifice on that childs part.

quote:

What if you were able to answer hypothetical questions in a philosophy thread?

Juffo-Wup posted:

No, I think the conclusion of the argument is supposed to be that an infinite chain of dependent entities is inconceivable/impossible, and therefore that there must be a non-dependent entity to ground the chain. Call that entity 'God' and you're like halfway there I guess.

olin posted:

No. If I jump in front of a bullet, just before the killer fires at Mary, I have done a heroic act in sacrificing my life for Mary

If some 2nd party pushes me in front of the bullet in order to save Mary, he has participated in my murder.


It's a very simple distinction between voluntarily offering oneself vs actually playing an active role in the unjust murder.

olin posted:

He pretty convincingly argues that If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who is changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful. Those qualities would meet most definitions of divinity.

olin posted:

That's an interesting question.

[derail]
I was at a friends apartment many years ago when I was 17 and the guys in the apartment next door sold drugs. They were really nice guys, we'd smoke bud with them occasionally. One night, we heard 4 masked men burst into the apartment, beat them, and steal all their money and drugs. After a few minutes of listening to the neighbors scream I grabbed a butcher knife and tried to go help them. My friends physically restrained me from going over. Then they called the police.

Found out later that the four masked men all had guns. Had my friends let me go over with the butcher knife I'd probably have gotten shot/be dead now.

[/derail]

olin posted:

I guess it would be moral for you to stop me from jumping in front of Mary, but i'm really not sure.

It certainly wouldn't be a seriously immoral act.

olin posted:

That is not a good representation of his argument. From an Atheist site I got this:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.

olin posted:

olin posted:

2.11. An actual infinite cannot exist.

Juffo-Wup posted:

I think you might be (wrongly) conflating 'infinite' and 'eternal.'

olin posted:

An actual infinite cannot exist here in the universe. The creator is not material or existing inside the physical universe. He can be eternal.

olin posted:

The hotel argument points out the absurdity of infinite material things. If the hotel has infinite rooms and they are all occupied and then a new customer comes the manger can still except new guests. He has infinite rooms. Everytime a new customer comes and can give them a room and move tenet in room 1 to room 2 an room 2 to room 3 etc. Even though every room is occupied he can always except new customers. And even though new customers are checking in he always has the same number of customers. Infinite. 1000 more check in, still the same number of customers. Even if an infinite amount of new customers can he could still accommodate all of them. and he would still have the same number of customers.

Now everyone in rooms with even numbers checks out. Guess what he still has the same exact number of customers; infinite.

The argument goes on and on but you get the point. An actually existing material thing is full of absurdities. It cannot exist.

These absurdities with the infinite do not exist with spiritual beings.

olin posted:

Thats what I'm trying to research now.

olin posted:

Demonstrate an example like the hotel argument about eternal spiritual being.

The Belgian posted:

Why can't the universe be weird? There's nothing inconsistent here.

Looking things up, I found that Craig also uses the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem as an argument for the finiteness of the universe. Which shows he doesn't understand the theorem as it implies no such thing and makes me worry about his understanding of such arguments in general.

AARO posted:

I don't believe that to be the case. If that were true then people may as well do whatever they want whenever they want to whomever they want except watch anime I guess. I kind of like that God; could you please sign me up? I believe in an objective moral law but I'm not sure about the arguments which try to prove such a thing philosophically. We're at least dipping our toe in the pool of Theology once you start exploring that subject.

Zaradis posted:

Which was the argument I was making throughout most of this thread.

Zaradis posted:

But to find meaning requires knowledge, neither of which can (in my opinion) be satisfactorily discovered. Yet, we want both meaning and knowledge. So we pretend that we have both.

AARO posted:

The Hilbert Hotel argument is used to demonstrate the absurdity of an actual infinite.

Then, because of the absurdities inherent in an actual infinite, Craig says they cannot exist. I think the argument is just as strong if you say it proves that an actual material infinite cannot exist. If you leave out the material part, people will object because of actual infinites in math. However, the Intuitionalist believe an actual infinite cannot exist in mathematics. The mathematician Gauss also didn't believe in actual infinities. "I protest against the use of infinite magnitude as something completed, which is never permissible in mathematics. Infinity is merely a way of speaking, the true meaning being a limit which certain ratios approach indefinitely close, while others are permitted to increase without restriction"

But it appears there is an agreement that an actual material infinite cannot exist, I suppose because of it's absurdities. I'd like to here more arguments for and against this. Do intrinsic absurdities of a thing prove the impossibility of existence of a thing? This is the only part of the Kalam argument I'm not 100% convinced by.


Here is a simpler explanation of the hotel argument.

Zaradis posted:

I agree, but that it is imposed means that it is subjective and that it is subjective means any claims that others also ought to find meaning in the things you do are no better than saying "People should like what I like because I like what I like."

Juffo-Wup posted:

That the cause is a thing with a mind, i.e., a person.

Zaradis posted:

I'd say that clinical psychopaths only value their own subjective opinions and claims. So they put no value in the subjective opinions or claims of others. If another person claims that the psychopath ought to value others opinions then there is simply a disagreement, since both claimants' opinions are grounded in subjectivity, and neither is grounded on any stronger ground than the other. And the important point for your argument is that, according to you, for the psychopath to be wrong just requires more subjective opinions in agreement against his own.

Zaradis posted:

It seemed to me that what you were saying is that because most people care about and value subjective opinions and claims then that makes subjective opinions and claims valuable; but that would be a vicious circle.

quote:

I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that you meant that because most people generally agree about which subjective opinions and values are valuable that this somehow grants some moral power for those subjective opinions to condemn or reward opinions that agree or disagree with them.

quote:

Regardless of what you mean, the point that people care about and value subjective opinions and claims says nothing of the moral authority of those opinions and claims. I see no reason why the fact that an individual, a nation, or every being in the universe value certain opinions and claims would give those opinions and claims moral authority over anyone in disagreement.

AARO posted:

It does seem to be self evident that all things which begin have a cause. Can you name one thing that began that did not have a cause?

AARO posted:

Yeah, except for of course if you read the argument.

Zaradis posted:

Correct, I never claimed otherwise. What I said was that your condemnations and condoning have no moral authority over those being judged other than in your own mind. If I am stealing from you and you condemn me for it, so what? That's just you trying to impose your subjective morality onto me. It is no better or worse, no more right or wrong, than my imposing of my subjective morality that it is good for me to steal from you. To try to enforce that condemnation physically is no different in a moral sense than my act of stealing from you. If you want to condemn me within your own moral realm (i.e. your mind), then you certainly can. But this wholly defeats the purpose of morality, which is to reward and punish people for their actions in one way or another.

Zaradis posted:

The point of morality is to have some ground from which one can claim that themselves and others ought to commit or not commit certain types of actions and to determine which of those actions deserve praise and which deserve condemnation.

If morality is subjectively imposed on the world, a premise with which I do not disagree, then there is no such ground. That the morality you impose might conflict with mine is simply a fact of the matter. If there is no higher level of morality by which to judge which one of our subjective moralities is right or wrong then it's merely your word against mine. It's opinion versus opinion. Unless you want to claim that certain subjective moral beliefs have more moral worth than others then you have no basis from which to claim that others ought to act a certain moral way or to give praise or condemnation of moral action. And if you do want to claim that then you would have to make an argument that I cannot imagine without reference to a non-subjective morality.

Therefore, if morality is subjectively imposed on the world, then to make moral claims necessitates that the person making the claim either actively deny, actively ignore, or be cognitively dissonant about the subjective origin of morality.

Zaradis posted:

You seem to like to change your own interpretation of the question rather than addressing my responses. In my opinion, I have answered your question satisfactorily. If you disagree, then you must have a problem with the content of my answer or how I answered it and you should address the problem you have rather than simply claiming that I have not answered it. I'm responding to facilitate an interesting philosophical discussion, not to try to satisfy sophistry.

Who What Now posted:

Before I address this more in depth, are you also saying that morality's only purpose is to reward or to punish? And do you believe that only morality can be or should be the basis of rewarding or punishing actions?

quote:

The point of morality is to have some ground from which one can claim that themselves and others ought to commit or not commit certain types of actions and to determine which of those actions deserve praise and which deserve condemnation.