Is morality objective or subjective?

[Gary Childress]

Are conceptual tools conceptual tools?

Are questions?

What is meant by "conceptual tool"? What is a "conceptual tool"? Are some things not "conceptual tools" or are all things conceptual tools?

[Skepdick]

What is meant by "conceptual tool"? What is a "conceptual tool"? Are some things not "conceptual tools" or are all things conceptual tools?

Not sure what's unclear here.

Tools help you get stuff done. Ideas/concepts help you get stuff done.

Thinking helps you get stuff done.

[Gary Childress]

What is meant by "conceptual tool"? What is a "conceptual tool"? Are some things not "conceptual tools" or are all things conceptual tools?

Not sure what's unclear here.

Tools help you get stuff done. Ideas/concepts help you get stuff done.

Thinking helps you get stuff done.

OK. Is morality a tool or is morality something else entirely?

[Skepdick]

What is meant by "conceptual tool"? What is a "conceptual tool"? Are some things not "conceptual tools" or are all things conceptual tools?

Not sure what's unclear here.

Tools help you get stuff done. Ideas/concepts help you get stuff done.

Thinking helps you get stuff done.

OK. Is morality a tool or is morality something else entirely?

If you are using it - it's a tool.

Do you use morality? I do.

[Gary Childress]

Not sure what's unclear here.

Tools help you get stuff done. Ideas/concepts help you get stuff done.

Thinking helps you get stuff done.

OK. Is morality a tool or is morality something else entirely?

If you are using it - it's a tool.

Do you use morality? I do.

No one, me included, can "use" morality. Morality is what governs how we use tools and what we use them for.

[Skepdick]

Morality is what governs how we use tools and what we use them for.

A governing body sounds like a useful idea...

I imagine that's why theists have Gods; and societies have Governments.

Either way - higher authorities.

[Gary Childress]

Morality is what governs how we use tools and what we use them for.

A governing body sounds like a useful idea...

I imagine that's why theists have Gods; and societies have Governments.

Either way - higher authorities.

Morality is not a specific entity or being to hold a government position. However, morality ought to govern us.

[Skepdick]

Morality is not a specific entity or being to hold a government position. However, morality ought to govern us.

I don't really care what it is or where it is, but It sounds like it performs a useful function...

[Gary Childress]

Morality is not a specific entity or being to hold a government position. However, morality ought to govern us.

I don't really care what it is or where it is, but It sounds like it performs a useful function...

It always performs a useful function even when it isn't "useful".

[Skepdick]

Morality is not a specific entity or being to hold a government position. However, morality ought to govern us.

I don't really care what it is or where it is, but It sounds like it performs a useful function...

It always performs a useful function even when it isn't "useful".

Sounds like uselessness can be useful too...

[Immanuel Can]

Can God make 2+2=5?

Of course not.

And yet he can build a world in which:
God has perfect foreknowledge of every decision you will make + There is nothing you can do to change the decisions God already knows you will make = God gave you freewill.

Well, again, Will, knowledge does not equal making. The equation is actually just that straightforward.

It's a bit of a paradigm shift to 'get' that, if one has already imagined the world as fated or pre-set, because that latter belief is very simple. But simple things are often too simple; and Determism is like that. It creates a simplistic sense of contradiction, one easy to think about; but it ignores the obvious reconcilability of knowledge and making.

So there's no uneven equation there. What you would need, in order to generate a real contradiction, is the claim that God makes everything happen, and man makes things happen. There are some people who believe that...usually called "Calvinists," or "Divine Determinists," and with regard to them, I'd have to agree that there's a logical problem. But not with the word "foreknowledge": even the Calvinists recognize that, and prefer the word "foreordination." Even the Calvinists realize "foreknowledge" is not enough to give them what they want to assert.

But of course, the Atheist does indeed have this contradiction problem. For denying God any role in making things happen (by definition) he must believe that everything is nothing more than a product of time and chance...

I'm not interested in your musings about "the Atheist",

I can understand why. The Atheist problem is very serious, and quite intractable. It is much more consoling to ignore it entirely than to try to solve it from a skeptical perspective.

But if you have a right to question Theism -- which, I insist, you do indeed have -- then what wisdom is there in exempting your own presuppositions from the same terms of scrutiny? Are beliefs taken by accident, or unconsciously, or as a mere matter of negation of what somebody else thinks, usually wise beliefs? Or are they merely another kind of unexamined prejudice, unless we are prepared to open them up to an examination equivalent to that we level at contrary beliefs? There is danger in received beliefs, of course; but is there no danger at all in having no more than an ignorant and cynical skepticism, if, indeed, that's all we have? At the very least, it leaves us nothing to believe in, no positive conviction upon which to make rational and moral decisions...

[Gary Childress]

I don't really care what it is or where it is, but It sounds like it performs a useful function...

It always performs a useful function even when it isn't "useful".

Sounds like uselessness can be useful too...

What is useless is not useful. Morality is not useless.

[Skepdick]

It always performs a useful function even when it isn't "useful".

Sounds like uselessness can be useful too...

What is useless is not useful. Morality is not useless.

Sounds like the distinction between useful/useless is useful...

[Gary Childress]

Sounds like uselessness can be useful too...

What is useless is not useful. Morality is not useless.

Sounds like the distinction between useful/useless is useful...

Yes. A distinction can be useful.

[Immanuel Can]

I don't know. Maybe if God presented himself to me, it might help? \_(*_*)_/

You "don't know"? "Maybe"?

That's not exactly an unequivocal commitment to be open to even the possibility. That being so, there's no wonder you feel you don't "know." There's no way you could know, is there?

What would science have to do in order for you to be open to even the possibility of evolution?

I am open to the possibility. But I remain highly skeptical of at least two things, as well as others: one is the way the theory was generated in the first place, and the second is the massive amounts of fakery (such as the manifestly fraudulent monkey-to-man thing, or the continually-inflating timelines) that have already been summoned by supporters of Evolutionism to bolster their ideology in the face of the facts. I can add to that that I remain skeptical at the inability of Evolutionism to account for certain complex phenomena by providing any stage-or-continuum based explanation at all, such as triadic symbiosis -- the developmental interdependence of three or more complex organisms, which is manifest in certain cases in nature. So I've got quite a few good grounds for remaining skeptical about Evolutionism. And that's all a matter of rationality, not of some special "faith." Any sensible secular skeptic could easily share all those concerns I have.

More importantly, from my perspective, it's not a terribly interesting controversy, except in the case of human beings. For Genesis holds that we are unique in the animal world, a fact which all people tacitly recognize when they do things like science, even if they deny it with their words. So were some kind of actual, inter-species "evolution" eventually to be demonstrated, it would not matter much..it would merely have to do with the question of how long the 'days' in Genesis actually were, or how time operated at the Creation...but theologically, that question carries no real consequence. I can be as open to that as necessary.