on discussing god and religion

But this depends entirely on how one construes an actual existing God. If, as most insist, He is both omniscient and omnipotent, folks like you and Max Stirner would be to Him as, say, a couple of ants down on the sidewalk might be to us.

But, sure, point taken.

“Can We Be Good without God?”
William Lane Craig from the Reasonable Faith website

This is where moral nihilism can leave some truly shaken. And the fact that one is disturbed by the implcations of living in a world where all things – all things – are permitted in the absence of God, might prompt some to reconsider.

Perhaps, given a new set of experiences, a new set of relationships and access to new ideas, I might be one of them.

I’m just not now.

In fact, there are those who rationalize all of the above behaviors merely by insisting that, from their own point of view, in the absence of God, they feel justified in choosing whatever behaviors [embodied in dasein] bring them satisfaction and fulfillment.

And I have yet to come upon a philsophical argument able to demonstrate that this is – necessarily – an irrational point of view.

After all, nature has certainly equipped us genetically, biologically to choose those behaviors. It just comes down to the trajectory of any particular life predisposing one person behave in a manner that predisoses another to view as a moral abomination.

And then the part where [God or No God] behaviors like abortion are seen to be moral abominations by some and political imperatives by others.

Finally, the behaviors chosen by both the religious and the secular objectivists that, in the name of God or Reason or political ideology, have visited all manner of horrific consequences upon the human species.

A classic example of something becoming true for someone because “in their head” “here and now” they believe it to be true. A “general description” of particular human qualities in which no actual context is explored and then assessed. After all, that might spoil the pristine view concocted out of a world of words.

“Can We Be Good without God?”
William Lane Craig from the Reasonable Faith website

In other words, it’s not just a coincidence that great philosophers of the past – from Plato to Descartes to Kant – spoke of moral obligations on this side of the grave only by invoking a transcendent font on the other side of it.

How, in the absence of an all seeing, all knowing all powerful God, can it be demonstrated that mere mortals are obligated to do one thing rather than another?

Sure, there may be a philosophical argument out there that demonstrates this to be so. But, if so, it has not come to my attention. Or, sure, it has come to my attention but I am not sophisticated enough to grasp it.

Here I can only speculate that if this argument does in fact exist, it would have surfaced such that everyone would be talking about it. After all, what could be more important to a world bursting at the seams with the terrible consequences of conflicting goods, then to know that there is in fact a frame of mind that all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to embody?

Humanists can then line up to clamor for a secular narrative – their own – said to bring all rational men and women together around one or another set of virtuous behaviors.

But, then, as they say, the rest is history.

On the other hand, Taylor’s own set of assumptions doesn’t bring us any closer to an actual existing God. And, of course, the irony embedded in the fact that historically [to date] conflicting beliefs in God have brought about all manner of ghastly human pain and suffering in and of itself. Continuing on into the future as we all know.

“Can We Be Good without God?”
William Lane Craig from the Reasonable Faith website

This makes little practical sense to me. How would one ever be able to demonstrate that, in the absence of God, there can be no moral accountability? And, thus, that those who choose not to believe in God would be literally demoralized?

And while value judgments concocted by mere mortals in order to facilitate human interaction from the cradle to the grave may well be construed as ultimately [essentially] insignificant, that doesn’t alter the fact that their significance is very, very real within particular existing communities given that any aggregation of human beings must establish rules of behavior.

You may as well say that listening to music, or following sports, or attending the theater, is not worth pursuing because in doing so it doesn’t change the universe one way or the other. In fact, why do anything at all if, in fact, everything may well be ultimately insignificant.

Does this sort of belief make food tastes less delicious, or sexual orgasms less intense, or feelings of love less fulfilling?

Yes, in particular contexts, construed from particular points of view, this can seem entirely reasonable. But actual flesh and blood human beings who do not believe in God are often able to construct frames of mind that allow them to sustain lives bursting at the seams with satisfaction and fulfillment.

This is basically to argue that he feels these things in contemplating a world without God, and, so, if others do not feel them, they are out of sync with the one and the only way in which one is obligated to think about moral narratives out in the world with others.

And, indeed, the components of my own moral philosophy have spawned any number of instances that can only be described as deeply cynical. There’s no getting around that for me in a No Good world.

But this sort of argument stands everything on its head for me. It starts by pointing out that no one would want their life to be the embodiment of a caustic cynicism, so there needs to be a God to make that go away.

You believe in God here because, well, what else is there?

This thing:

Gnosticism says that humans are divine souls trapped in the ordinary physical (or material) world. They say that the world was made by an imperfect spirit. The imperfect spirit is thought to be the same as the God of Abraham. … Some Gnostic groups saw Jesus as sent by the supreme being, to bring gnosis to the Earth.

Or, rather, I suspect, one rendition of it.

My own reaction however is always the same. Don’t tell me what you believe is true, show me [experientially] why I might consider believing it myself.

Then the part about what you do believe as a gnostic and how that relates [re this thread] to the behaviors you choose on this side of the grave as that pertains to what you imagine [or want] your fate to be on the other side.

Any gnostics here [or Gnostics that you know] willing to pursue this further?

“Can We Be Good without God?”
William Lane Craig from the Reasonable Faith website

Plausibility here is clearly in the mind of the beholder. It’s just that without an existing [omniscient and omnipotent] God, I am not myself able to come up with an argument that refutes the assumption that objective morality is not in turn in the mind of the beholder of those who posit a No God world.

Many claim to have provided such an argument. Embedded in deontology or political ideology or the correct understanding of nature. But these are seen by me to be either existential or intellectual contraptions rooted in individual daseins confronting conflicted goods.

Same here. Sans God, in my view, all things are permitted. And they are permitted because all behaviors can be rationalized. After all, historically, up to and including genocide, which behaviors haven’t already been rationalized.

And then the reality of the sociopathic minds that merely assume that right and wrong revolve entirely around sustaining their own self-interests. Nothing can’t be rationalized here.

By practical however that can mean this: even if God does not exist we have to live our lives in acting as though He does.

Then he just goes around and around in circles. Like saying God exists because it says so in the Bible. And it says so in the Bible because God exists.

“What Is the Relationship Between Religion and Morality?”
Thomas Swan at the Owlcation website.

Exactly.

After all, there are endless threads in venues such as this in which God is discussed from many different points of view regarding many different facets of religion.

But as far as I am concerned this is by far the most pertinent discussion. If I want a “guaranteed pleasant afterlife” what exactly am I expected to do by God on this side of the grave to earn it?

That is basically the whole aim of this thread. Does God judge your behaviors on this side of the grave? If you believe that He does, how does that impact the behaviors that you choose in relationship to what you imagine the fate of “I” is on the other side of it.

This is another “for all practical purposes” relationship to ponder. Some will make the distinction between legal behavior and moral behavior and behaviors that are merely in sync with any particular “rules and regulations”, however seemingly trivial or insignificant some can seem.

But it ever and always comes down to the biological evolution of life on Earth producing a species able to invent morality [philosophically or otherwise] in the first place. And it was invented because, in presuming some measure of human autonomy, we have many, many wants and needs; and not everyone can have them fulfilled without precipitating any number of conflicts. Rules of behavior are essentially the embodiment of this. Whether you call them customs or folkways or mores or regulations or laws.

And many are “unwilling or unable to theorize how right and wrong could have arisen without divine prescription” because they have been indoctrinated to embrace one or another God, or because no other explanation makes sense to them. No God becomes the equivalent of no objective morality. And, in fact, for those like me, this seems quite reasonable.

“What Is the Relationship Between Religion and Morality?”
Thomas Swan at the Owlcation website.

What this clearly denotes is that morality revolves first and foremost around sustaining the least dysfunctional human interactions. Thus the practicality of sustaining one rather than another set of rules in any given community is of paramount interest. Then it just comes down to what these rules are predicated on: might makes right, right makes might, democracy and the rule of law.

God and religion then become just one possible foundation upon which to actually enforce any particular behaviors.

This is something that I stress over and over again. It is only the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent God that guarantees 1] that no one can act immorally without God’s knowledge and 2] that in acting immorally everyone is guaranteed to be punished by God

To me that is God in a nutshell.

We come into a particular world needing certain things to survive. And, once our needs are met, we find ourselves wanting many, many other things in turn. And this an all but certain recipe for conflict. Endless conflicts embedded in countless contexts.

Only God is [ultimately] able to referee them. He is the religious equivalent of a Supreme Court.

“What Is the Relationship Between Religion and Morality?”
Thomas Swan at the Owlcation website.

In fact, we don’t really grasp at all what the evolution of life on Earth has predisposed us towards genetically in regard to moral behavior. It ranges from hard determinism where morality is argued to be just a psychological illusion that the brain imposes on “I”, to the hard core Libertarians who insist that in the broadest sense each and every individual is wholly responsible for the behaviors that he or she chooses. And in a world in which right and wrong can be grasped equally in a wholly rational manner.

And all that experiments such as these denote are the tendencies that seem able to be captured by any number of “experts” in the soft sciences. Some having one set of tendencies, others an entirely different set. While still others embody a complex intertwining of both. Which I then basically subsume in dasein.

And which others basically subsume in one or another religious narrative.

And the more one acknowledges the complexities embedded in the relationship between the conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind entangled in those parts of the brain responsible for deep seated emotional reactions and instinctual behaviors, the more problematic any one particular conclusion becomes.

To speak of religious belief being intertwined [by way of the unconscious mind] in a clearly cross-culture reality of moral agendas is to suggest what exactly? How does that play out in any particular context? How do we make a proper distinction between “I” the rational assessor and “I” primordial beast?

Which, of course, is the whole point of inventing the Gods. Such distinctions are ultimately up to them. Suffice it to say though that They have given us just enough autonomy to be held accountable on Judgment Day.

“Morality requires a god, whether you’re religious or not”
Gerald K Harrison from The Conversation website

This is interesting. Someone who has no religious convictions but has managed to think himself into believing that among mere mortals God is an essential component of morality.

That’s my own conclusion in turn. Well, “here and now”. No transcending font seems necessarily to suggest that there is no one or no thing mere mortals can turn to when two or more sides pertaining to any particular set of conflicting goods set out to prescribe and proscribe behaviors in any particular community.

Which, of course, most call God. And while others call it something else – reason, ideology, nature etc. – they are all over the moral and political map in regard to what actual behaviors ought to be either rewarded or punished.

And this seems reasonable because no mere mortal in the secular realm appear able to demonstrate that their own moral font is either omniscient or omnipotent.

And that is important to assure that no one who breaks the rules can get away with it. That, in other words, they will ever and always be known to have broken the rules. And thus will ever and always be punished for doing so.

Only God fits the bill here.

So, it comes down then to comparing and contrasting a mere mortal as the agent of moral commands with God.

Right?

“Morality requires a god, whether you’re religious or not”
Gerald K Harrison from The Conversation website

What we become in my view are agents that, with respect to moral commands, are the embodiment of dasein. It’s not that some are in fact actually able to command themselves to assault someone, but in grasping all of the existential variables in their lives that predisposed them to command something of themselves that most others do not.

Which always brings me back to those who are able to think themselves into believing that without God’s command the choices they make can have nothing to do with commands at at all. They have merely become inclined [for whatever reasons embedded in their accumulated experiences] to prefer certain things which fulfill and satisfy them in a way that is beyond actually grasping fully and comprehensively.

Maybe it is rooted in their genes, maybe in their childhood indoctrination, maybe in a particularly profound experience that changed their life forevermore. Who is really able to peel the onion that is “I” back to something that explains everything they think and feel and do?

No, it strikes some – in fact most – as silly because they refuse to construe “I” as anything other than the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”. That’s the part that “here and now” seems lost to me. The idea of “moral commands” is instead just another existential contraption rooted in whatever the actual interaction or genes and memes happened to configure into to fabricate “I” out in this particular world at this particular time.

“Morality requires a god, whether you’re religious or not”
Gerald K Harrison from The Conversation website

This merely assumes that those who do follow the commands of those able to command in any particular community are not acting morally because there are may well be others in the community able to command conflicting behaviors. Only an existing God is able to command behaviors that all in the community are obligated to choose.

Except in the world that we actually live in factions within a community may well be able to command behaviors that “for all practical purposes” are embraced as moral commandments by those who merely believe that this is true.

Sure, bring forth this God able to demonstrate the commands emanating from within the community are false commands and case closed. But: No God brought forth speaks volumes regarding what anyone “suggests” about moral commands in the community.

Thus precipitating assumptions of this sort:

Clearly, if one faction of the community is morally commanding Tim to do “X” while another faction is morally commanding him not to do “X”, the only solution is that transcending font which most call God.

But where is this God? Why should the community as a whole follow only His moral commands? Because one or another scripture claims it is their God?

For others though that’s where the “philosopher-kings” come in. No God? Then it must be Reason that commands a mere mortal morally. Either that or Nature.

You come across this in discussions of God and religion all the time. The part where Scripture is quoted and folks go back and forth regarding what it really means.

Indeed, my point on this thread has always been that with so much at stake, why would any Scripture not be definitive regarding what is expected of the faithful on this side of the grave in order to attain immortality and salvation on the other side of it?

You read of these ultra-orthodox denominations that are very, very explicit regarding hundreds and hundreds of behaviors that are either obligatory or prohibited. And this makes sense to me precisely because so much is at stake. In fact, the closer you get to more ecumenical approaches to God and religion the less serious it seems you can take them. After all, if you can just pick and choose behaviors that suit you in your own personal relationship with God then practically anything can be justified.

Right?

One thing that seems rather clear to me is how very few believers are willing to explore the relationship between the right thing to do here and now and the right place to be there and then. At least on this thread.

As soon as you take your religious values out into the world of actual human interaction, you bump into others [even of your own denomination] that you are in conflict with. Then [for me] it’s back to what is at stake in getting the values right.

On the other hand, someone might prefer a God allowing humans free will that is not omniscient. After all, if He is all-knowing, how can that be realistically reconciled with human autonomy? If He knows everything then He knows everything that we will do. And if He already knows that, how could we not but choose behaviors He is already cognizant of?

And then the part about natural disasters, extinction events, deadly diseases, crippling biological disorders, etc. Having free will doesn’t make calamities of this sort go away.

What then can the source of evil here be if not God?

Then [of course] it is back to God working in mysterious ways.

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

First, of course, there has never been an atheist around able to demonstrate beyond all doubt that God is just a delusion.

Or, rather, none that I have ever come across.

So, sure, there may well be a “benevolent, omnipotent, all-knowing God” able to reconcile the good the bad and the ugly down here in a way that is simply beyond the reach of mere mortals.

There’s just no getting around that. Atheists may fulminate against such “ignorance” but they are in the same boat we are all in: the one that traverses the gap between “I” and “all there is”.

And, after all, God is one possible explanation for, well, everything.

Even among the religionists, narratives are able to be forged in which the emphasis is placed either on God sanctioning winning down here or winning up there. In fact, some are able to insist that the more you win down here the more that indicates God’s blessing. And not all of them are shyster TV evangelists.

The bottom line: one person’s wasted life is still another person’s road to salvation. At least as long as morality on this side of the grave and immortality on the other side is relevant to the “human condition”.

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

Of course reducing this profoundly problematic, existential relationship down to a “logical problem” is to presume that it can be.

The difficulty philosophers have here revolves precisely around the limitations of philosophy [and the tools at its disposal] when grappling with this relationship.

After all…

Is it logical that God should exist? And, if that is so, is it logical that He be your God? And, if that is so, is it logical that mere mortals might grasp the mind of God?

The “will of God” may well by far, far, far beyond the assumptions that Epicurus [and others] make when considering the relationship between I and Thou and ethics.

Until the existence a God, the God, my God is actually established, speculating about how one should think about Him as philosophers on this tiny little rock circling around this hum drum star in this rather typical galaxy in the vastness of all there is, seems to be little more than just one more thought experiment.

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

My own reaction to theodicy focuses in on the extent to which it is often irrelevant regarding any particular individual’s faith in God. Any number of men and women in any number of contexts are able to push it aside in recognizing that in the absence of God there is no transcendental foundation for morality on this of the grave or hope for immortality on the other side of.

After all, No God and the part about evil, the part about human pain and suffering embedded throughout the course of human history, doesn’t go away. And then you die and tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion.

Besides, any number of very, very intelligent men and women have been able to concoct arguments that resurrect God time and again “in their heads”. And if you believe something there how does that not make it true for you?

So, consciously, subconsciously and/or unconsciously, their faith revolves around rationalizations. The most common perhaps being that the mind [and the will] of God works in mysterious ways. Thus the gap between His understanding of everything and our own understanding of almost nothing at all, need be as far as the multitudes go.

The rest is history. And, however the future unfolds, the points I raise here are not likely to go away.

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

You see this over and over again here as the “serious philosophers” encompass “good” and “evil” in one or another world of words. Values as ontological assessments of deontological critiques of utilitarian constructs in which the only consequences revolve around fierce attacks on each other’s definitions.

Imagine the “phenomenological distance” being closed if a college course aimed at examining Kant’s moral philosophy was being conducted in and around a Planned Parenthood clinic. Abortions are being performed inside, protests are unfolding outside and flesh and blood human beings are everywhere with their own individual stories to tell.

Some religious, some not. Some pro-life, some pro-choice.

Imagine then the exchange back and forth between the scholars intent on pinning down the technical meaning of Kant’s deontological assessment of human morality and the folks in and out of the clinic asking how these dense and disciplined definitions are applicable to this abortion or that abortion.

Of course this obscurity simply vanishes into thin air if all one need do is to believe “in their head” that, given an understanding of God’s will, evil is merely a word invented by mere mortals to express the gap between them and God’s will.

And, in some respect, it works the same way with the “academic” approach to evil. The greater the distance between the analyses, the assessments and the arguments concocted in the hallowed halls and the actual existential labyrinths that revolve around conflicting points of view describing conflicting goods embedded out in the real world, the bigger the gap between theory and practice.

After all, out in one or another real world where very real consequences lead to particular behaviors being either prescribed or proscribed in actual communities, boasting of having pinned down the optimal technical definitions of all the words being exchanged back and forth will only take you so far.

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

Or, perhaps, one can just quit the philosophical/theological debate altogether and take a leap of faith to that deemed [subjectively] to be evil “out in the world”. That which you are convinced causes human suffering. That which you decide to do something about.

But this gets all tangled up in the actual options that you have; and in calculating the consequences of doing something rather than nothing. Then the part where the consequences spread out to others. Including those you love. After all, if you take on the behaviors of those that you have convinced yourself bring pain and suffering to the world, they might not take kindly to it. They may choose to fight back. And that brings on the existential risk embedded [potentially] in all sorts of ominous consequences. The part where you are outraged at what some do but in acting on the outrage you bring about the very real possibility of blowback. The rage/fear syndrome as a friend once called it.

Each individual’s set of circumstances here is different. So there will always be an inherent gap in communication.

In particular if you are not able to believe in God. With God, the leap you take is backed up with the promise of immortality and salvation. With No God, you’re on your own.

Thus…

That’s simply how it works. When you are able to think yourself into believing in a God, the God, my God [or if others manage this for you], you are able to subsume any and all discussion of evil in God. Let the intellectuals debate theodicy. God has His reasons. And [in most cases] being a loving, just and merciful God, it will all make perfect sense in the end.

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

Here though the assumption of most is that evil does in fact exist as something able to be demonstrated. Call it logically demonstrable or something else, but one side is said to be right and the other side said to be wrong. That way the most important task for the religionist becomes to [somehow] square secular morality with ecclesiastical Sin. Thus leaving theodicy for the theologians to rationalize. Bottom line: An all-good, omnipotent God can [somehow] be reconciled with the Holocaust. Just don’t expect mere mortals to ever grasp it. At least not on this side of the grave.

What my own findings clash with, however, is objective morality itself. God or No God. To pursue it is at best to embody a particular existential leap at a particular time and place to particular “gut feeling”. At worse it is to feel hopelessly fractured and fragmented.

No, the complexity revolves more around the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here such that what one comes to believe is no more than an existential contraption ever subject to change given new experiences with different people introducing you to new ideas.

And here I tend to focus more on the limitations of reason – philosophical or otherwise. Meaning becomes no less constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed as we carom amongst ourselves weaving in and out of contexts teeming with contingency, chance and change. That in my view is about as “genuine” as these exchanges between us are ever likely to get. We can only appreciate the lives of others up to a point. And even if we overlap in many respects in our own community, there are always going to be others in very, very different communities to challenge us.

God merely becomes one of many convenient shortcuts to consensus.

The part where human interactions revolve around any number of “for all practical purposes” compacts aimed at sustaining the least dysfunctional communities. And, for some, the “best of all possible worlds” here revolves around moderation, negotiation and compromise.

Give or take whatever particular political economy happens to prevail where you are now.