Consul wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2024 6:15 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2024 3:04 am
Consul wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2024 1:36 amYes (if "good" just means "good at philosophizing"), but I was asking for examples of defenders of
atheistic theological voluntarism, or
atheists who are theological voluntarists.
Atheistic theological voluntarism? It's almost a contradiction in terms.
It's not, according to the SEP entry:
"One does not have to be a theist in order to be a theological voluntarist.…"
Yeah, but you can only be that at the cost of being irrational.
If you want to talk about Atheism as an irrational view, I suppose we can. But if you want to suppose it's rational, then it cannot be theologically-premised. Once you reject the first premise of a syllogism, you can't any longer rationally accept the conclusion implicated.
Let's finish that quotation, and you'll see.
With respect to normative theological voluntarism: one might claim that while it is true that any being that merits the title of ‘God’ merits obedience, we should not believe that there is such a being. This reduces normative theological voluntarism to a belief in something one insists isn't according to the requisite facts to affirm the conclusion.
Likewise,
With respect to metaethical theological voluntarism: one might claim that, for example, the concept of obligation is ineliminably theistic, though there is no God; that God does not exist counts not against metaethical theological voluntarism but rather against the claim that the concept of obligation has application. This reduces metaethical theological voluntarism being something deficient of the genuinely moral; because it implies that the axioms generated by it would be without obligation: you can, and should, ignore anything generated by any such means.
So while it's possible to take these two positions irrationally, it's not possible to take them and get a truthful or obligatory morality out of them; and a morality with neither truth or obligation, I suggest is a great deal less than what any thoughtful person should understand by the word "morality."
So what question or statement did you wish to make about these two irrational kinds of Atheistic moralizing?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2024 3:04 am"Good" is an adjectival thing: it has to attach to a noun. And to most nouns, it can only be relatively attached: a "good" meal, a "good" dog, a "good" story, a "good" deed...and only to one Object can it be attached absolutely, to God Himself. And it is from its reference to God that any concept of the "good" in other things can be derived at all; for it is only in their relation to Him that they have any "good" about them.
There are both moral and non-moral uses of "good". To call a meal, a car, or a tool good is not to call it
morally good.
Yes, that is true: but they are all
adjectival. That's the point. We can dismiss all the example that aren't strictly moral, and it doesn't change that.
And to call a person (morally) good is to commend her/him for her/his character or actions. Likewise, to call God good is to commend him for his character or his actions.
But to construe it this way is to construe it backwards.
You and I both know, I'm sure, that human beings are not eternal. The world existed before they arrived, and uniformitarian reckoning would suggest it will exist long after they're gone. We're contingent beings, all of us. So to start from us, as if we were the prototype of goodness, and then to try to extend exactly the same reasoning to a statement about God would be to mistake antitypes for the prototype. Only God is the completeness of goodness. Man is manifestly not.
We call people "good" (in a moral sense) in a legitimate way only when we mark their relationship to the prototype, God. Inasmuch as they behave in a godly way, they are "good." Inasmuch as they behave in an ungodly way, they are "evil." When man turns his assessment around, and makes a statement such as
"I believe in a good God," he is not predicating nothing, nor exactly predicating in a circular way. Rather, he is reflecting (a thing human beings were made to do) the image of God back into the universe. He is saying, "I affirm my recognition of the association between what I have come to see is goodness and what God essentially is: and I am recognizing the truth of what is revealed in Scripture about God, that
"there is none [ultimately] good, save God alone," and that
"all good gifts come down from the Father or Lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow."
So God is the prototype of all goodness. Man is a palid copy, and is only partially and occasionally possesed of borrowed, reflective goodness. And when he recognizes goodness, and gets it right, what he really recognizes is the nature of God.