Astro Cat wrote: ↑Tue Aug 16, 2022 5:23 am
What about God being God makes it that we ought to value the same things as God?
Many things. For one, He's our Creator, which means that the only reason we actually exist in the first place is because He created us. And He did so with a specific purpose and intention in mind; a creature that fails to actualize that intended purpose is malfunctioning and missing out on its most blessed and happy kind of life, and failing to achieve the best trajectory of life.
Think of somebody trying to use a cell phone as if it were a hammer. It might plausibly work...maybe even suceed at drivng in a nail or two. But it would shatter the phone, and it would never have achieved all the things it can really achieve.
Now, that's just an object, of course; so that tragedy is not great -- and we could all stand to bust our cell phones from time to time.
But the analogy with a human being is tragic. For a person to "use" his life for purposes other than entering into a loving relationship with God is to abuse himself, denying God what is His by right and also denying himself the fulfillment of his own greatest destiny. And if we wonder why so many lives end up broken, shattered and futile, it's not by chance.
I know you have argued that creators of creations can impart oughts on creations, but if that’s the direction you’re taking, what’s the argument?
Call that one "the teleological argument for obeying God." But it's not the only one, of course. I began with a slightly different argument, one we might call "the anthropogenic argument for obeying God," which is that God created us in the first place, and so nothing we have or choose is owed to anyone else, ultimately. We might also have other arguments, like one from gratitude, one from righteousness, one based on power, and so on. There are, in fact, a multitude of reasons why God deserves the primary focus of our attentions, efforts and loyalty, and why departing from His intentions for us personally is ruinous.
But let us now reverse the case, as I suggested before: let's ask, "If we posit that God doesn't own us, and doesn't have such rights in relation to us,
who does?" Who has more claim to issue us an 'ought' than God has?
Do you have an answer to that? Or are we now simply going to say, "God being eliminated as the locus of our 'oughts,' they simply become impossible?"
I'm ready to hear whatever you want to answer on that. It's not rhetorical.
If you imply the existence of a “right,” then what is a right?
A "right" is an unalienable, intrinsic property of 'oughtness' with which one has been endowed by God...just as the Declaration of Independence rightly states.
Would a “right” be assigned an objective value without reference to the character and wishes of God?
No. For absent God, there is no rationale the justifies assigning anyone a "right" to anything. Absent God, "rights" are just a human construct, and can be given or removed on a social whim.