Sorry I’ve been AWOL. Lots to deal with.
Uccisore, placing god as the intermediary between myself and the thing I value does not solve the problem of value. It is really just to say that X has value because god values X and I value god, or god’s value judgements. What sort of beyondness can god really give us, if the link between us and god can never be ‘beyond’?
Similarly, a reference to beauty using god as a beyondness leaves the proximate question “why do we find god’s work beautiful?” or “how does god imbue beauty?”
And especially in the case of beauty (though there is a case to be made for many other senses I can envision: value, morality, even freedom), I don’t think ‘we’ do sense that things are beautiful beyond ourselves. ‘Beauty is in the eye of beholder,’ a truism that squares our sense more as an illusion than a divine work. This is true of morals as well: relativists and nihilists exist who would deny that morals overrule us. The use of ‘sense’ may be a case of chicken and the egg.
Not that it’s relevant (since if neither god nor science explain then god still doesn’t explain), but I would like to comment on your characterization of the materialist assertion that every human intuition is an ‘illusion’. I’ve certainly seen that word used to explain it, but I have my problems with its use. I think that compatiblists have it best: Beauty doesn’t exist on the level of atoms, but that is not necessarily the best place to look from. I am a human as much as I am a skin-sack and organs as much as I am a cloud of electrons. So I would respond that materialism doesn’t necessarily detract anything from my appreciation of beauty or the conviction of my morality. It embraces levels that have been long denied without necessarily denying those levels previously embraced.
MRN, does saying “god explains the origins of love because he is the source of love” really explain anything? Of course, whatever the origin of love, that thing will be the source of love. But that’s not saying anything, even if we lump a bunch of the pseudo-explanations together and labell the haphazard mass ‘god’.
Felix, my initial reaction to the proposition that everyting is just blind men and the elephant is rejection. It seems like people can reason incorrectly, can believe incorrectly and found new rationales on those beliefs and for other incorrect beliefs. The subjectivity of them does not make them as true as all other beliefs. Suppose I learn that the date of a holiday is the 2nd. I tell one person immediately, and then I tell another person a few days later, by which time I’ve forgotten, so I tell the 2nd person that the holiday is the 22nd. These are not alternate interpretations of the same data, and they are not equally correct. If these two people discuss their beliefs, one is right and one is wrong, no elephant necessary.
But if you think there is a case, I am interested to see it. I think I see where you’re coming from, but ultimately I think the evidences holds that people can be wrong.
And though you say “neither science nor logic explain to me what subjectivity is or how it is possible,” I am here contending that neither does god. I don’t see the explanatory power in your line of argument. It seems like a sort of teleological argument ("Using a similar inferential method, I understand that there is “a person†behind the universe), but you are not using the premise that when we look at the Mona Lisa we see personality, but rather that if there is personality, then the Mona Lisa is more powerful, more moving, and so you believe in order to give the same power to the universe. But then it’s not an argument that god explains, but instead that god gives us what we want to see in the universe. But if you look at an abstract drawing, say, and are told it was made by a human, when it was actually made my a machine, what does that do for your explanation of the painting? Did you explain it more because you believed that it was made by a person?
Phil, To me that sounds like “ignorance is bliss”.