Calvin on the Sensus Divinitatis

[Harry Baird]

In a land far, far away, in a time long distant from now, where even the very air has that tang of that something... intangible... to it, a man committed to his own thread once wrote:

Moreover, consider a very simple probabilistic analysis of the Garden scenario. There is some probability, p (recall that probabilities range from 0 to 1), that, within a finite period of time, t, Adam and Eve will disobey God. Now, for one period of time, t, the probability that Adam and Eve will *not* disobey is (1-p). For two periods of time, the probability that Adam and Eve will *not* disobey is (1-p)^2, where ^ represents "to the power of". In general, for n periods of time, the probability that Adam and Eve will *not* disobey during those n periods is (1-p)^n. Now, as n approaches infinity (I'm assuming the garden could potentially have lasted indefinitely), this formula approaches zero, no matter *what* p is - unless p is exactly 0. In other words, probabilistically, Adam and Eve had effectively no chance of avoiding succumbing to temptation *eventually*, unless they were wholly purified from evil to start with. Again, this hardly seems like a "genuine" choice - the odds are stacked horrendously against the original humans.

Hmmmm. [Scratches head, fiddles with pencil, frowns]. I'm betting 'HOC'.

See, this is where those of us with a "logical/mathematical mind" have an advantage: we know that there's nothing wrong with the maths[*]. It's just a matter of whether the maths accurately models the situation. The only possible rejoinder that I can see is: Adam and Eve, having free will, can "beat the odds" by *willing* it to be so.

[*] Consider the case of two successive time periods. Denoting "succumbs to temptation" as T and "does not succumb to temptation" as D, the four possibilities (the result of the first time period followed by the result of the second) are: TT, TD, DT and DD. The only one in which Adam and Eve do *not* succumb to temptation is DD. We calculate this probability as "probability of not disobeying" multiplied by "probability of not disobeying" (the same), in other words, as (1-p)x(1-p), in other words, as (1-p)^2. You can expand the symbols for three time periods (TTT, TTD, TDT, TDD, DTT, DTD, DDT, DDD), and for four, and five, and six, etc, and you will find the same thing: that, in general, the only scenario in which Adam and Eve do not disobey is DDDD...D (where there are n Ds), which translates into a probability of obedience (not disobeying) of (1-p)^n. And, of course, any fraction (more to the point, any number between 0 and 1, exclusive of 1) to a power approaching infinity itself approaches zero...

[Immanuel Can]

Immanuel Can wrote:
For example, it's widely believed that not only was satan cast out of heaven, but that a third of all angels were expelled with him, they apparently started a war with god, and subsequently were banished along with satan to be his demonic assistants. But in other texts concerning heaven, it's promised as being a place free of sin, a harbour of peace and tranquility away from the torments of violence and fear, so how can these two accounts describe the same place. In one heaven is imagined as an eternal paradise close to god, and in the other it is actually the domain in which sin was first nurtured.

Whoops: mistaken attribution. Immanuel Can did NOT write this, just for the record. Someone else did (was it James?), but somehow it ended up being attributed to me in the last posting.

Response to come; time is short for me at the moment. I'm not losing interest, just sufficient time to formulate messages.

[Harry Baird]

Argh, I hate it when a proofreading error slips through. Sorry about that, IC - I've corrected it, and yes, it was James's quote.

[Immanuel Can]

No harm done, Harry. I'm sure I'll foul up something sooner or later.

[Immanuel Can]

It seems to me that you have two responses to this line of reasoning open to you:

Yes, that's the typical way the Euthryphro Dilemma is presented. However, as I've suggested, the either-or it posits is what we call a "false dichotomy." A third alternative not considered by Plato is available: i.e. "both." God is both good and God.

At first I was perplexed by your slowness to detect the category error involved, Harry...but then I read this...

Either way, we seem to lack an objective basis for morality on your view.

This made me puzzle over what you could mean by "objective." For all sides -- Theists and skeptics alike -- usually concede that *if* God exists, then morality is potentially "objective." The vexed question between them is over His very existence, not the implications of His existence for morality per se after God's existence is already conceded.

To make that some sort of problem, you would have to have more faith in the existence of morality than of God. How could one get that level of confidence in morality, such that it would be an ontologically-stable item existing prior to any authority or agency capable of affirming it? I've never heard an Atheist, even one of the most fanatical stripe, suggest they have such ontological confidence; but hey, feel free to try to show how it's possible, if you think it is.

Then I began to wonder if what you mean by "objective" is something like "ontologically independent; not grounded in the character or existence of another being." That's how I could best make sense of your statement there. If I'm misreading your real implication then feel free to clear it up for me.

But if I'm reading correctly, of course, to such a thing I would happily agree: there is no conception of objective "good" outside of the objective fact of the existence of God. But so what? Then the situation looks exactly as a Theist says it is.

Maybe this shift in vocabulary also accounts for your difficulty in detecting the flaw in the Euthyphro Hypotheses, since it would suggest you believe "good" must be a God-independent property of some kind, and are likely to feel disappointed with my answers until I suggest a way to get to this thing you are anticipating I must get to. But as a Theist, I have no such need, since "good" is securely grounded in the character of the Supreme Being. Nothing could be more "objective" than that.

In point of fact, the impossibility of grounding a conception of "good" (or, for that matter, any rational account of "evil") outside of reference to God (i.e. what you call "objectively"?) may well be a massive headache for Atheists, but no problem at all for a Theist.

To be continued...

[Immanuel Can]

I'm not sure how you avoid a scalar moral landscape on your own view: surely a person, action, character, inclination or impulse might conform more or less to the character of God, and might distract, detract or diminish the supreme value in the universe -- relatedness to God -- more or less?

Well, this is a common misunderstanding of the Christian position, at least. Christians do not claim that there is any action-based way to achieve relationship with God. Christians do not claim to be "good" people; in fact, they insist they are actually quite bad, and in some cases, no better than the lowest run of humanity. But they claim they have abandoned hope of every achieving such relationship, and in desperate self-abandonment have called out to God to do for them what they are powerless to do for themselves.

The Christian understanding of the prerequisite to relationship to God is called "holiness," a condition of total "setting apart" to sacred use of the self. That requires perfection, and perfection is a property simply unattainable to human beings. It takes the salvific (i.e. saving) work of God Himself.

Consequently, there is no "scalar" view: there are only those who have accepted the salvation that God provides, and those who continue to look to their own efforts to ingratiate themselves to the Creator. So the view is indeed binary -- there are the saved and the lost...no others.

Or is your view binary - either an act is good or it is evil, and nothing more can be said about it? I would find this view to be very peculiar; it would seem to be very strange to characterise a brutal, premeditated, fully conscious rape and torture of a small child as *not* vastly more evil than a "white lie" to avoid your wife finding out about the surprise birthday party you'd planned for her (assuming you'd consider that to be evil too; if not, I'm sure you can think of a similarly "minor" evil with which to replace it).

Oh, of course there are levels of evil. The Bible is quite clear on that. Jesus Himself spoke of those who would have "greater condemnation" than others. But there are no "white" sins, only shades of black. We humans tend to give ourselves a "pass" on what you call "minor evils," but there are no such passes ultimately.

As Shakespeare puts it,

In the corrupted currents of this world
Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law. But ’tis not so above.
There is no shuffling. There the action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence.

Ultimately, we cannot gloss over evils, either by "buying them out" with good deeds or "shuffling" them into a position to make them look acceptable. Christians are quite clear on the view that, whatever else one can say, injustice is not a characteristic of God. He's very thorough.

[Immanuel Can]

'Do you think [your reaction to my role] might be, "Oh, it's OK, Harry, I absolve you of responsibility - after all, you didn't predestine your android, and it had genuine free will"? Or do you think it might be a little more like, "Harry, how could you, you perverse man!? You *knew* what you were unleashing, and you unleashed it anyway, and now I have lost my daughter because of it, even as you knew that that was exactly what was going to happen!"?'

I'm just suggesting this, Harry: that whatever God is weighing up that makes granting human beings a freedom God knows they will abuse, it must be a very, very great good.

Yet your example has no countervailing good included in it, but rather an unremitting account of evil, finalized in the horrendous death of an innocent, followed naturally by despair. And if this were indeed the end of the story, that might indeed by my reaction.

But if a good God allows evil to exist, even temporarily and corrigibly (for presumably a "supreme" Being can make up for *any* loss or injustice) it must, as I say, be for the reason of a very, very great countervailing good. No doubt, the gift is costly, if it entails any period of suffering; yet who is to say it is not worth it? Is the bounty of a Supreme Being limited? And who has paid more of a Price than He has?

I'm suggesting that at least part of that "good" might be the concept "freedom," particularly in the context of the potential for "free relationship" in a condition of eternal happiness and good. Yet I'm also sure I do not know all of the "goods" God has prepared for us; and I suppose that this is likely to be more a reflection of the defectiveness of the mortal imagination than of the poverty of the proposed "good" in question.

But, of course, I am a Theist. I do not suppose this is a consolation I can offer to you. You will thus have to struggle with the evils you have faced, or do face, as best you may; though I would wish you had the hope I have of a final restoration of justice and a balancing of the scales.

How does an Atheist (not you, Harry: I know you're not precisely that...my question is rhetorical here) face the horrible prospect of such evils happening diurnally, and no prospect of any justice or restoration on the horizon?

[Immanuel Can]

...this formula approaches zero, no matter *what* p is - unless p is exactly 0. In other words, probabilistically, Adam and Eve had effectively no chance of avoiding succumbing to temptation *eventually*, unless they were wholly purified from evil to start with. Again, this hardly seems like a "genuine" choice - the odds are stacked horrendously against the original humans.

I shall be brief on this, Harry, not because I see it as much of a problem but because it is a purely speculative scenario, and so even if I "win" I cannot win much by solving it for you.

The fact is that we don't know a great deal about what conditions pertain to the original moral situation -- how "free will" was actualized in the original situation, so we are required to make a great many assumptions we have not the ability to test in order to speak meaningfully about it at all.

Likewise, the "Heaven" about which you have been speaking is no place I recognize either from personal experience or from the Bibilcal record, so even if I thought it existed, I would be totally at a loss as to what premises to employ to defend conclusions regarding it. The fact is that the Biblical accounts are very sparse on that topic, except to say that the rules, principles and objectives through which it operates are rather different from those we currently experience: "...eyes have not seen them, nor has the ear heard..."

For the sake of being practical and of having premises drawn from knowledge rather than speculation, I would rather deal with what we actually do know, where data can set us on a better footing for hypothesizing.

Be that as it may, I would suggest to you that probability calculus is for inert objects. It works somewhat well for scenarios like, "What are the chances (all things being equal, of course) that this boulder poised on a cliff-edge will be here in seven years," but very poorly for questions involving decision-making agents, like "What will be the hot stock for traders at this time next year" (in which nothing is ever "equal" in that sense). It requires a rather deterministic view of the situation to think probabilities can be invoked at all, in reference to human decisions.

And this is a curious feature of the cases and objections you keep bringing up: they all seem to have a determinist flavour, even when you protest they are not intended in that way. I cannot help but speculate (without resorting to probability calculus, of course ) that perhaps your background in some way has conditioned you to see problems through the determinist lens rather than the libertarian ("free-willian") one.

But the chances of my being right about that are p(n-1), I suppose.

[James Markham]

Harry, so concerning the probability of any event, you would say given an infinite amount of time, I, or you, would get round to committing every atrocious act imaginable? So for instance, given an eternal period, I, or you, would eventually get round to forcing our amorous attentions on to our own mothers, fathers, dogs, even our own mothers dogs? This seems a bit much, surely there must be some way around such a conclusion, I would suggest that when dealing with a system that is subject to the laws of probability, then your mathematics may hold, but when dealing with a subject whose fate is determined by its own inclination, then your maths becomes redundant.

Going back to your question about why certain fundamental principles allow for a benevolent god, it again comes down to what degree god has the power to determine our reality. I don't personally believe life, or consciousness, is a phenomena created by god. If we assume god exists, then we must also assume he exists by virtue of some means other than his own existence. So if this is the case for god, and his existence was not a creation, but is a principle of validation, meaning consciousness exists as the registration of events, then I have no reason to assume my own awareness is not simply an example of the same phenomena.

The role I believe god has, is in the structuring of reality in a way most beneficial to the maintenance of sanity. And to these ends are his powers directed, as I tried to explain in my previous post, I believe god is like a light that guides us to a more positive existence, through the means of perspective.

[Harry Baird]

1. The goodness of God based on his basic nature.

Yes, that's the typical way the Euthryphro Dilemma is presented. However, as I've suggested, the either-or it posits is what we call a "false dichotomy." A third alternative not considered by Plato is available: i.e. "both." God is both good and God.

You seem confused: that's not really an alternative: both of the options I listed already assume that God is both good and God. What I questioned through the two options is the *relationship* between goodness and God: which is contingent upon the other - is God's being/nature contingent upon goodness, or is goodness contingent upon God's nature/being? Working on these terms, I think that what you *might* be trying to say is: actually, there is a third option in which both are contingent upon one another.

Until speaking with a friend about this, I had been prepared to be charitable towards you, and describe this scenario as "mutual interdependence", but she convinced me that a better term for it is "circular". What is God's nature? Goodness? What is goodness? God's nature. You haven't told us anything about what goodness actually *is*, merely dropped it into a little merry-go-round. This is why, I think, you have not described an objective morality. How can that which is circular be described as "objective"?

At first I was perplexed by your slowness to detect the category error involved, Harry...but then I read this...

Either way, we seem to lack an objective basis for morality on your view.

This made me puzzle over what you could mean by "objective." For all sides -- Theists and skeptics alike -- usually concede that *if* God exists, then morality is potentially "objective."

I will be a little bold and suggest that "all sides" are, as you seem to be, confused. Surely, "objective" connotes "non-arbitrary". Too, we must distinguish between morality-as-a-system-of-rules, and the justification(s) for that system of moral rules. If, as you seem to be arguing, goodness can only be defined circularly (as God's nature, which is good, which is God's nature, which is good, etc etc, round and round in circles), then we must admit that it is, in fact, arbitrary: there is nothing to ground it. Too, we might suggest that being based in God's nature, which is the "ground" of reality, the system of moral rules which God prescribes is "objective" in *some* sense (but in which sense, and is it meaningful? We could debate this too, but for now I won't go there), but this does nothing to *justify* those rules. All we have as justification is "They are justified because they come from the ground of reality", but why would we be satisfied with that as justification? Why would we accept that the ground of reality is moral in the first place? Is it moral simply because you define it to be? Surely there needs to be better justification for an "objective" moral system than mere definition!

How could one get that level of confidence in morality, such that it would be an ontologically-stable item existing prior to any authority or agency capable of affirming it?

Oh boy, are you asking me to repeat myself *yet again*!? And after you have done nothing to disqualify my justification for objective morality other than to retort, "Well, it isn't self-evident to me". OK, but nor is it self-evident to a certain man's girlfriend why, travelling at 90 miles per hour, it would take an hour to travel 90 miles. Surely, there is nothing more self-evident than "We ought not to cause unnecessary suffering"? Why would you even think to deny that this is self-evident?

I've never heard an Atheist, even one of the most fanatical stripe, suggest they have such ontological confidence; but hey, feel free to try to show how it's possible, if you think it is.

I have done so multiple times in this thread already. And I am not even an atheist.

Then I began to wonder if what you mean by "objective" is something like "ontologically independent; not grounded in the character or existence of another being." That's how I could best make sense of your statement there. If I'm misreading your real implication then feel free to clear it up for me.

Like I said, we need to distinguish between the system of moral rules and the justification for that system of rules. I can see how a system of rules could be grounded in the character or existence of a being, but how might its *justification* be so grounded?

But if I'm reading correctly, of course, to such a thing I would happily agree: there is no conception of objective "good" outside of the objective fact of the existence of God. But so what? Then the situation looks exactly as a Theist says it is.

The "so what" is that, in the absence of a (non-circular) justification for good, your concept of good is (because circular and thus ungrounded) arbitrary.

2. The question and nature of evil.

Consequently, there is no "scalar" view: there are only those who have accepted the salvation that God provides, and those who continue to look to their own efforts to ingratiate themselves to the Creator. So the view is indeed binary -- there are the saved and the lost...no others.

OK, but we weren't quite talking about salvation, we were talking about *morality*. And *there*, you admit that:

Oh, of course there are levels of evil.

So wouldn't this result in a scalar view after all? Presumably, there are levels of good as well as levels of evil - surely it would be morally better to die on a cross for strangers than to tip a waiter an extra dollar, for example. And if there are greater and lesser goods, and greater and lesser evils, then does this not suggest a "neutral" in between, where we have both the *least good whilst not being evil* as well as the *least evil whilst not being good* - exactly as I originally suggested?

3. Freedom.

No doubt, the gift [of a countervailing good to make up for evil and suffering --HB] is costly, if it entails any period of suffering; yet who is to say it is not worth it?

Well, you haven't given me a good reason why the gift ought to be predicated on the existence of evil and suffering in the first place. And here we are going to be going around and around in circles, because I've put all of this to you before, but it seems to me that your argument is basically, "We need to be free to commit evil because freedom to commit evil is 'genuine' freedom". But why should anyone care for this freedom, other than because you've defined it to be "genuine"? This seems to me to be more like a marketing ploy than anything else: "Here, take some 'genuine' freedom - you might even get to go to hell with it! Isn't that a consoling thought?... What's that? What benefit do you get for the possibility of going to hell? Well... umm... well... you get the benefit that it's 'genuine' freedom - homespun, God-given, genuine, American freedom! Now ain't that something? GENUINE! The real deal! Hell's bells!".

Be that as it may, I would suggest to you that probability calculus is for inert objects. It works somewhat well for scenarios like, "What are the chances (all things being equal, of course) that this boulder poised on a cliff-edge will be here in seven years," but very poorly for questions involving decision-making agents, like "What will be the hot stock for traders at this time next year" (in which nothing is ever "equal" in that sense). It requires a rather deterministic view of the situation to think probabilities can be invoked at all, in reference to human decisions.

Not so. Probabilities are, in fact, far more applicable to *non*-deterministic scenarios than to deterministic ones - just ask the quantum physicists. In principle, we can predict deterministic scenarios, such that the probability of a given event occurring (or not) is 1. The same is not true for non-deterministic scenarios - unless, of course, we are an omniscient God, in which case, don't try to lay bets against us.

In fact, libertarian free will *requires* that there is a non-zero probability of any decision going any way - otherwise, what genuine choice is there? Or would you disagree with that formulation? If so, why?

But the chances of my being right about that are p(n-1), I suppose.

Oh dear. Is my disagreeability getting to you? Alas, I am sorry. But you did choose right from the start to focus on our points of disagreement rather than agreement, choosing only for our points of agreement to affirm, "Yay, Harry". I'm quite happy to return to our points of agreement and discuss those if you'd prefer to avoid the conflict.

Harry, so concerning the probability of any event, you would say given an infinite amount of time, I, or you, would get round to committing every atrocious act imaginable? So for instance, given an eternal period, I, or you, would eventually get round to forcing our amorous attentions on to our own mothers, fathers, dogs, even our own mothers dogs? This seems a bit much, surely there must be some way around such a conclusion, I would suggest that when dealing with a system that is subject to the laws of probability, then your mathematics may hold, but when dealing with a subject whose fate is determined by its own inclination, then your maths becomes redundant.

Well, it seems to me that we have two choices to avoid that conclusion (that we would get round to committing every atrocious act imaginable): (1) that the possibility of us performing those acts is zero in the first place, and (2) that human free will gives us the possibility to "beat the odds", as I suggested one might argue in an earlier post, and as you seem to be arguing above. But, in fact, (2) seems to me to reduce to (1): if our will is so strong that we can reliably, with a guarantee, "beat the odds" every time, then, effectively, the odds are zero (that our will might be defeated). Otherwise, as I suggested to IC above, libertarian free will would seem to require that there is a non-zero probability of us making *any* decision - for what else might we mean by having libertarian free will than that we are free (with some probability) to make any choice? And so, I would suggest that unless you could show that there is an absolute zero probability of us ever committing such an act, then, yes, over an infinity, we *would* get around to committing every atrocious act imaginable. An infinity never ends. There's a lot of time to make a lot of bad mistakes.

But here's the qualifier: I would also suggest that our choices do not occur in a vacuum. The circumstances in which we find ourselves greatly affect what we choose. So, potentially, we might be placed in circumstances which effectively reduce the probability of us making a bad choice to zero, or, on the other hand, into circumstances which greatly enhance the probability of us making a bad choice, effectively to one. Nevertheless, "effectively" is not 100%, and there is still room for error - unless, for whatever reason, we can determine that there simply is no chance of us making an error. But how would we determine that?

As far as your views on God go, they seem very similar to mine - that God's role is "the structuring of reality in a way most beneficial to the maintenance of sanity", and that God "is like a light that guides us to a more positive existence". I also believe that God is opposed by a counterpart whose role is the exact opposite - the structuring of reality in a way most conducive to *in*sanity, and a darkness that tries to subvert us into wickedness. You might or might not see eye to eye with me there too, who knows?

[Immanuel Can]

You haven't told us anything about what goodness actually *is*,

That's because the question makes no sense from a Theistic perspective, Harry. How can "good," which is inherently an adjectival property, be described in the absolute absence of reference to any primary thing that bears that quality? We have to use some grounds of reference. But from whence comes our referent for the quality "goodness"?

Unless I misunderstand, you appear to derive it from some conception human beings have. For how else could we, so to speak, drag the Supreme Being before the bar of our concept "goodness" for evaluation? But if so, it would raise the question, "From whence do humans derive it?" Not so, of course, with the eternal Source of Being, who would necessarily be the "original" from which all right-thinking elements in our human conception of "goodness" would be derived.

"Objective" goodness, then, would be that which is in step with the character of God, and God would also be rightly described as "good." It's not circular: it's just that by speaking of "ultimate goodness" and "the character of God," we're speaking of precisely the same item, just using different words.

However, perhaps we've squeezed this topic long enough: so long as we remain committed to different ontological views of the situation it is unlikely that either a) you can recognize the explanation as legitimate, or b) I can find a way to explain it in terms of the ontological commitments upon which you insist.

I'm not suggesting you're being unreasonable, but rather that we are being "differently-reasonable," granted our starting suppositions -- and that's hard to overcome. So I suppose we'll just have to leave it there. Yet I appreciate the questions: they push me farther in terms of my thinking, and I hope they've been salutary for you as well.

Surely, "objective" connotes "non-arbitrary".

Well, of course I agree that "non-arbitrary" is indeed an implication of "objective," but it is usually taken to mean, more broadly, "real in a non-perspectival way"; or to put it differently, "true for you and true for me, whether either of us chooses to recognize it or not." A morality derived from the eternal character of a Supreme Being would nicely cover all of this territory, and thus would be fully "objective," since it would mean "grounded in the very nature of reality itself."

What you and I are really having difficulty establishing is "what it the nature of reality itself?" and especially, "does it include the Supreme Being or not?"

Surely, there is nothing more self-evident than "We ought not to cause unnecessary suffering"? Why would you even think to deny that this is self-evident?

Not because *I* do, Harry, but because people have powerful arguments against it that really need to be answered. Another powerful way of telling the "story" of human beings is that they are simply the accidental products of random processes at work in the universe, evolved to their present state by strict conformity to the principle of survival of the fittest. If so, "survival" is the closest thing to "right" that we know; although, as Hume showed, we cannot even establish that "survival" is a moral imperative.

Now, if people believe this, and if (as is the case) many of them determine our public policies and distributions of resources, should we not be concerned if we have no clear rationale to defend our view? I just think our critics in this regard deserve a better answer than "Well, harm is just bad," plus the addendum "everybody knows" or "it's self-evident." I don't think such a defense will stand for much with them (and admittedly, perhaps it shouldn't, since it is not backed with a rationale they should find reason to believe). I would just encourage that we think about retrenching to a more defensible position. But I, like you, of course I don't want to see people harmed. Maybe this is precisely the kind of issue in which we actually *are* on the same side, as I'm sure you also have an interest in seeing the "no-harm" principle be adequately defended.

I can see how a system of rules could be grounded in the character or existence of a being, but how might its *justification* be so grounded?

I understand the question from your suppositional perspective. However, if we posit the existence of a Supreme Being, what could we mean by that except the very grounds of "being" itself, both the physical "stuff" and the adjectival properties we attribute to them, as well as the very consciousness and "self" we employ in arriving at such justifications? I would say "supreme" means ultimately, "the buck stops here." To look beyond that, we would have to posit the contingency of the supposedly "supreme" Being, and thus have a Gnostic "god."

But we've been down this road before. Perhaps we can't get more out of it without, as I suggest, some suppositional movement on one side or the other.

OK, but we weren't quite talking about salvation, we were talking about *morality*. And *there*, you admit that:


Immanuel Can wrote:
Oh, of course there are levels of evil.


So wouldn't this result in a scalar view after all? Presumably, there are levels of good as well as levels of evil - surely it would be morally better to die on a cross for strangers than to tip a waiter an extra dollar, for example. And if there are greater and lesser goods, and greater and lesser evils, then does this not suggest a "neutral" in between, where we have both the *least good whilst not being evil* as well as the *least evil whilst not being good* - exactly as I originally suggested?

The presence of greater and lesser goods and evils does not rationally suggest a neutral in between, Harry. Plenty of things are genuinely binary. What's between "on" and "off" in a light switch, or what's between "exist" and "not exist" in ontology, or what's between "pregnant" and "not pregnant," or between "true" and "false"?

Some things are just truly binary by their nature. There's nothing unusual about that. Aristotle said the same thing a very cogently a very long time ago. What Christianity insists is that there is no "neutral" moral human position, since the crucial question is not "how good-bad are you being," but "do you or do you not stand in a relationship of mutuality with the Creator?" The "good-bad" behavior is likely a *reflection* of the answer to that question, but it is not determinative of it. A person who is behaving very laudably may actually have no interest in the Creator, and a person who has failed in life in many ways may yet be forgiven and embraced by the Creator. The only question is, "are you connnected or disconnected from the Source of Goodness?" That's both the scandal and the wonder of the Christian message: it's "not by works that we have done in righteousness, but according to His [God's] mercy that He saved us," to quote directly.

Finally, "freedom." Well, we might be stuck on that. I think that until we get some earlier suppositions worked through, we are, as you say, likely just to keep going around in circles. But I do think it worth noting that our difference with regard to the concept remain, just so we don't think either of us is "throwing in the towel" yet.

Oh dear. Is my disagreeability getting to you? Alas, I am sorry. But you did choose right from the start to focus on our points of disagreement rather than agreement, choosing only for our points of agreement to affirm, "Yay, Harry". I'm quite happy to return to our points of agreement and discuss those if you'd prefer to avoid the conflict.

Whoops. Sorry, Harry: my bad. (I told you I'd make a mistake sooner or later. ) I was trying to be a little jocular, but not ascerbic. However, email is so terribly atonal, perhaps I should have foregone humour. No, I find you intelligibly different from me, but far from disagreeable. And I'm conscious of the compliment implied by the amount of attention we've given our mutual discussion, so I would certainly be appreciative of that.

No, I don't need to avoid conflicts; that's how we make progress, right? At least, so long as we stay reasonable with each other, which I hope we will. That being said, I also don't mind refocusing on agreements, if you find that more pleasant. When I started the "Three Issues" part of the thread all I wanted to do was to draw out our three main points of difference, not to pick a fight but to see if we could resolve them so we could do some additional work on areas of mutual interest that might follow from them.

But maybe we've discovered we have basic ontological, suppositional differences that may make that difficult if not impossible in some areas. If so, that's okay: no hard feelings about that, Harry. We just disagree. But we can do so agreeably, I am sure.

[Arising_uk]

True. But one has to wonder why. When one sees something of immense and intricate interdependent complexity, it is very hard to resist the obvious implication...that one is dealing with a designed product of some kind. Even Dawkins admits this (see his first chapter opener in "The Blind Watchmaker"); but though he sees it, he claims that "nevertheless we must resist the impulse to see design." Well? Why "must" we, if it's the obvious conclusion?

Because the obvious solution is not necessarily true. If it was then the world would be flat and the Sun goes around the Earth. For myself, it's exactly the immense complexity that points towards something other than a 'designer' at work.

Only, I think, because if we don't we're going to undermine our own atheism.

Not really, as the atheism you talk about is the one that says there is no 'God' in the sense of an interacting one. There may well be a transcendent cause, the theist just can't say anything coherent about such a thing but apparently think they can.

I became a Christian at about age 22, at university, while studying the great atheists. My biggest signpost to God was the agnostic writer, Thomas Hardy. I can very well conceive of not believing in God; I just don't do it anymore.

Fine by me, a belief is just that, no connection to reality.

What kind of atheist were you? Were you like me, a rarity, i.e. never had a belief or been taught 'God' as an explanation for anything? Or were you raised with such thoughts, lost them and then came back?

Are you a skeptic with regard to "consciousness"? If you are, it's a funny thing that you're debating. Who can believe you without consciousness? ...

I'm a skeptic with regard to a disembodied consciousness. No problem with embodied ones.

Don't make the causal fallacy of assuming that if physical events and mental events happen contemporaneously, that must logically mean one is the cause of the other. It does not follow. The one can "cause" the other, the other can "cause" the one, or there can be a third thing that is the "cause" of both. ...

Don't make the assumption that mental and physical events are disconnected and then contemporaneously is not an issue.

... She thinks she has located the cause because of contemporaneity; the truth is there is a third cause.

Depends what you mean by 'truth'. You show me this third cause, i.e. show me the spoon, and I'll take this truth more seriously.

So causality is not so easy to establish. What is easy to establish is that "consciousness" is not itself a property of material objects. There are plenty of material objects that, so far as we can detect, have absolutely none of it. That makes it a rather spooky "supervenient" property, and one that materialism itself does not explicate. ...

Yes it does. It's that you don't like the answers. Of course consciousness is not a property of all material objects, its a property of a subset of living objects.

It doesn't matter. Materialism has none of it, whatever you want to call it.

How so? Whats immoral is what opposes human life, whats moral is what supports it. Theism can have no morality as under this despotic 'God's' will the theist has none.

Ah, but Rand mistook an "is" for an "ought." She thought that just because something exists and "has" values (as humans do) that those values are somehow justified. That's an obvious fallacy. David Hume would run roughshod over her for that. "Exist" does not mean "are warranted."

Rand thinks this opinion one of the great failures of moral philosophers and she does not go from 'is to ought' but from 'ought to do'. I agree that she thinks only humans have moral values but she does not think that the having is what justifies them, its what the values are that justifies them. The nice thing about her system is that it does not need some fanciful external agency to support it.

You've got me wrong there again. I'm not arguing for circularity at all.

Not saying you're arguing for it, just that you appear to be it.

No, what I think we've got is a different concept of "nuance." I see now you suppose it means some insidious quality, whereas I only meant it to mean "complex and worthy of careful, subtle thought." A simple miscommunication, I think.

Still amazed that a 'God' needs to be subtly thought about?

That's a misunderstanding of the word "God." We're not claiming a *caused* god -- anyone who does is misunderstanding his own Theism, and has lapsed into Gnosticism or some other such religion. Analytically, the word "God" refers to precisely the Uncaused Cause. Uncaused means "uncaused." So there's no question of "Who made God?" but rather only the question, "Can the idea of an Uncaused Cause be made coherent?"

My point. As if you can do this then the materialist scientist can just as easily do so. Hence they say, there is no talking about 'before' the 'Big bang' as the BB is the creation of SpaceTime and hence causality, et al, so no possibility of talking about 'before' in any meaningful terms.

And Atheism had better hope it can, because Naturalism and Materialism depend on there being some uncaused cause at the beginning of time. Science has no precept it holds dearer than the idea that *contingent events must have a cause.* But without the possibility of an infinite regress (i.e. an eternal universe), they cannot get such a thing without also positing an uncaused cause of some kind. They just insist that that "cause" is something other than God. What they think it is, I cannot say; for I do not find their view rational, and so I cannot defend it for them.

No more irrational than the theists uncaused 'God'. For myself it's just an error that some scientists make when they involve themselves in philosophy and metaphysics. The only approach they should have is, 'can't talk about it' or 'meaningless to try'. Also, on the whole they don't have this problem as they can just say its a cause they can't explain, no biggy for materialism as, unlike the theists, no-one claims to have all the answers just yet.

Nope. You just misunderstood me again. I was saying this is a problem for Big Bang theorists. It's not a problem for Theists, since they just say "God," the ultimate Uncaused Cause. But Atheism cannot do that, so what is it to do? It both needs, and cannot allow, an uncaused cause.

Nope, it can just say, 'We don't know' and from our perspective it's meaningless to talk about it.

It's an atheists problem, not a Theists one. The Theist has his complications begin with describing the nature of the Uncaused Cause. But in positing one, he has no problem, because he is not previously committed to avoiding the whole idea of uncaused causation -- at least in the unique case of God.

And what the theist appears not to understand is that they are saying something meaningless. As the phrase 'uncaused cause' is a contradiction in terms.

I can't, because it's an Atheist idea, not a Theistic one. A pure "nothing" would have to be something completely devoid of properties or materials of any kind. Then out of that total absence, and for absolutely no reason (or cause), the universe would have to suddenly spring, with all its physical laws in place, and produce intelligent life. That's the bizarre kind of description the Naturalist or Materialist is obliged to make in order to retain his Naturalism all the way back to the first cause. I can't defend it, because I don't believe it. Like you, I find it too weird and arbitrary to be plausible.

Nope, as nowhere does the materialist posit 'nothing', just that this 'nothing' is nothing because its impossible to talk about 'it' from the world of thing.

Sorry. It appears I am also capable of ambiguity. I meant "discussing sympathetically," of course.

Fair enough.

[Immanuel Can]

Holy Hand Grenades of Antioch, ArisingUK: you're back! Nice to hear from you again. We haven't chatted for a bit, so this will be good.

One problem, though: neither you nor Harry is particularly brief (and I realize that I'm the pot calling the kettle "black" about that ), and there are only so many hours in a day. How am I going to do any kind of justice to the erudite cogitations of both you and Harry at the same time?

Well, that's my problem, though, isn't it? It's not really yours.

I'll see what I can do to balance things. But between the two of you I can see about a dozen "leads" I'd love to explore.

Give me a bit.

[Harry Baird]

Just let us know where you'd like to go from here, IC. Would you like me to respond to your last post to me? Or would you prefer to explore new directions?

[James Markham]

Harry, when I say I don't believe we was created by god, I think that's because I don't believe there is any element of us which isn't also god. In my mind we are all existent within god, as narrowed perspectives, where god is the whole perspective which encompasses and contains all others.

But critically, I don't believe god created his own ability to perceive, so it follows that because we are parts of that perception which he isn't responsible for creating, our ability to perceive was not created by him either by virtue of the fact they are aspects of the same phenomena.

So as I said before, if there exists the ability to contemplate, then necessarily there must be that which has the quality which enables it to be perceived, and I believe that which has the ability to be perceived is just potential information about the condition of existence, once it becomes subject to an interpretation, it becomes actual information, and the event we recognise as consciousness is the product, or it's that product which we call conscious reality. So there is that which perceives, and that which is perceived.

So within this context, it would be possible to imagine an infinite amount of scenarios, but these conscious events have as their cause, a class of information we can describe as actual facts, as kind of an epicentre from which they radiate, where the closer they are to to the fundamental facts at the analogous centre, the more implicit they are in the stable structure of our reality.

So if for a possible example, we take two facts, firstly that a consciousness awareness exists, and secondly that it's a permanent quality that is the basis for all or any reality. And if we now say that any contemplation of these two facts, is perception of what is actual, and fundamentally true, but that certain conceptual ideas that are implied by these facts, such as quantity and position, exist only conceptually, we could say that mathematics and geometry are part of a conceptual reality that is derived from actual reality, and closely related to that which is true, and so occur as a stable platform on which our perceived reality is built.

At the extreme reaches of contemplation we have that which is far removed from actual reality, such as green fairies on mars, which exists only as an imaginative event, far from the factual reality, and consequently of little value in an ontological sense.

On the matter of what we might term satan, we have the same opinion, I believe it's an idea that is for the most part ignored by the theist, and metaphysicians, but it seems obvious to me that if we have in god an epitome of all that is positive, then in satan we have the opposite. As I've said, I believe the driving force behind both extremes is the correct interpretation of reality, and what is fundamentally correct. In the positive perspective of god, truth is correctly perceived and accepted as a governing principle, in the case of his opposite, truth is corrupted and allows for false hope concerning the realisation of his desires. What these desires are I can only speculate, but it seems to me, that if it was in fact the truth that at a fundamental level, existence is a permanent and singular phenomena, meaning that at some level it can be experienced as such, then this could be interpreted as either a positive fact, inducing a positive perspective, and a contented acceptance, or a negative fact inducing denial, rebellion and desire for oblivion. If there are in fact two extremes, and as the embodiment of which they are able to exert influence, then possibly any experience of a perspective that exists within the two extremes can be drawn either way.

So as I said, I don't believe we have to view god as anything less than a purely benevolent force, as long as we accept the fact that he can only maintain control of our destiny when we exist as innocent perspectives, as soon as we seek insight into the fundamental conditions of reality, we are effectively on our own. I don't think that means that the only path is down, as I believe we can become enlightened to truth and acceptance and thereby occupy a perspective close to god, or alternatively be drawn towards the opposite end of the scale, such as is described by the stories concerning angels and demons.