T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
81
You can’t base something on the nature or essence of what it means to be human and then claim it is a mind-independent feature of the world.
What constitutes the flourishing of a rational human animal based on our ends or telos is a subjective judgement based on human needs and desires*.*
note: I got this one wrong, but leaving it in for consistency with other posts.
That is false. Morality can be subjective and still produce an agreed upon morality because we share the same subjective senses when it comes to morality.
That’s a belief, not an objective fact. This can’t be the basis of an objective morality.
What is inconsistent with objective moral law is that you can’t produce one. Everything you say about morality is based on religious belief and human nature which is inherently subjective.
I will need to reread it and make sure I am not implying the opposite.
If morality is objective and discoverable, then both atheists and Christians (theists) should be able to –in principle–agree on what constitutes moral facts. This does not mean they will agree on everything, but just that as atheists and Christians can both engage in quality science in the lab, they should also be able to work out quality ethical systems. I believe everything ultimately depends on God and theists can provide a more complete picture of reality, but nothing prevents us from dialoging with atheists to work out proximate ethics.
I do not think I did. The sense I intended to convey was that without invoking God, if morality is objective, then just like atheists and Christians can work together and produce quality science work, they should in theory be able to do the same with ethics.
We disagree. A sustaining prime mover is an objective fact.
God is the source of everything but nowhere do I invoke God in making an argument for natural moral law. That was the whole point of that section.
I’d say in some cases it might be but in others it is not. Do you really think it’s subjective that not eating or drinking ever again will lead to a specific human flourishing? It is an objective fact that someone killing themselves does not lead to their flourishing. But this is part 7 of the article… and the most difficult one to write to be honest. Im there now. I’ll dump 4, 5 and 6 incrementally.
Still waiting for you to find me a “two” in the woods. Or maybe you think you can do science without math or logic. Science doesn’t own the word “objective” despite what materialists who only believe in efficient and material causes might otherwise think.
Vinnie
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T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
85
It’s a belief, not an objective fact. There’s a prime mover because you say so. That’s not how objective facts are established.
“Christians in the Aristotle-Thomist (A-T) tradition view God as upholding all material things at all times.”
You even describe it as a view. You describe the Aristotle-Thomist view as a tradition. Nowhere do you demonstrate the existence of prime mover in an objective sense.
Is it moral to prevent someone from starving themselves to death? Could we view someone who starves themselves to death in protest of a moral wrong as a martyr, as someone to honor as being moral themselves?
To be honest, that’s hardly relevant. Following in Jesus’ footsteps brings out the very best that humanity can offer—provided that one genuinely strives to imitate Him. This is something that can be observed in practice: when someone truly seeks to imitate Jesus, striving to act as He would have acted and to do what He would have done in any given situation, they become a far better person. There is simply no comparison between Him and the prophet of what I consider a Christian heresy (as I believe Islam has been from the very beginning), who—again, I will say—was married to a six-year-old. Unless one wishes to argue that even such an action can be morally justified—which would not surprise me at all—because once objective morality is rejected, literally anything can become permissible under the right circumstances.
Following Jesus makes a person better—of that, there is no doubt. His disciples were willing to die in order to testify to His Resurrection. They claimed to have seen, heard, and touched the risen Jesus, and they were in a position to know whether they were telling the truth. In purely human terms, they had everything to lose by bearing witness to the Gospel. They had nothing to gain and everything—literally everything—to lose. * And most importantly they were in the position of knowing whether they were saying the truth or not.
*1 Corinthians 4,9-13: “For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like those condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to human beings. We are fools for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong!You are honored, we are dishonored! To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless.We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted,we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. We have become the scum of the earth, the garbage of the world—right up to this moment.”
This is what they gained, humanly, by bearing witness to the Gospel.
I don’t say so. The cosmological argument says so. Aristotle, Aquinas and thousands of other philosophers of religion say so beached on logic and argumentation. The premises are true and the conclusions follow. Thus, the prime mover is an objective part of reality based on metaphysical logic. That would be my argument. But establishing that was not the point. Only showing that even though God is not needed for proximate ethics, as. a Christian I still believe God is needed in an ultimate sense as the sustaining cause of everything. You assert things as if your scientific reductionism is a factual posture everyone else must argue against. How about trying to actual defend your worldview? You are deluded into thinking that people disagreeing on something means it can’t be objective true. I’ve exposed that logical fallacy already and article 3 was devoted entirely to it. Please drop the faulty logic.
None of that precludes it from being objectively true as well. It’s okay to neutrally describe your own views on other issues in a paper that is not something directly being defended. You need to read more charitably. I was laying out the Thomist position that lead to what I ended with: " If the natural moral law is truly natural, and moral facts are discoverable, even though they ultimately depend on God in a hierarchical sense, basic ethical principles should be discoverable by everyone just as we can engage in science and discover efficient causes without direct reference to God." In no sense am I expressing any view that thinks God is not the ground of all reality or cannot be demonstrated to exist. It was reassurance the opposite is true.
Why? So I can confuse physical instances of something with the immaterial concept itself? I wouldn’t be pointing at “two” as a concept.
You claim that only scientific evidence is objectively true. Whether you admit it or not this is what you do over and over again on here. But guess what? This claim itself is not open to scientific evaluation and is entirely self-defeating. It also dumps logic and math from being objective truths which further undercuts science’s ability to do anything.
Red herring. That is an issue with more complexity. I know what I believe but I already said our moral views will always be a mix of subjective and objective components. You who think everything is subjective need to answer the question I posed:
I’d say in some cases it might be but in others it is not. Do you really think it’s subjective that not eating or drinking ever again will lead to a specific human flourishing? It is an objective fact that someone killing themselves does not lead to their flourishing.
Don’t pivot and try to raise whataboutisms. That is a low level tactic.
The views of Aristotle-Thomist tradition Christians are clearly not objective facts, their views clearly include more than just a sustaining prime mover, and having a productive discussion with some-one who moves goalposts with such speed and finality is clearly impossible.
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia”