Transcendental argument for God’s existence: your response

Whilst its an interesting approach and a strong argument since you have the bible predicting characteristics of the univers that are arguably unknown at the time of writing it is not the only framework that makes such a prediction. In particular the argument of morality being only linked to God is flawed.

The framework for morality can be entirely explained with evolution. Taking from your comment, you are not going to smash your friends car because its morally wrong, you are not going to smash your friends car because it will make him angry, if he is angry he is less likely to want to cooperate with you, share ressources and might even want to harm you to prevent you from doing that again and so overall you smashing his car will come at a loss for you, it’s not in your interest. The same can be true for stealing your cooperation is more valuable to you than his car. If you start extending it to societies, if you get identified as a smasher/thief/murderer, the people of that societies will not interact with you and may even harm you to prevent further harm. so you are in a situation where it in your interest to be a good person and that is how the framework of morality is built and eventually that framework gets codified into laws.

One of the consequences, is that such morality only works with equals or superiors a.k.a. those that can harm you but not to inferiors who can’t. So since an inanimate object with no owner can’t harm you then it is not immoral to break that inanimate object. If that inanimate object has an owner which is an equal it will become immoral. This leads to situation where a person of higher status will not be punished for harming a person of lower status and this is what we observe. In a lot of societies a slave owner would not be punished for harming his own slaves and a noblemen for harming a peasant and in many cases a parent harming a child.

Now Christian morality does seem to extend to inferiors. After all we are expected to help the crippled when they are more often a burden than a gain. In fact the Greeks thought that It was a moral obligation to abandon the crippled. But I don’t think it counters what previously was presented. First it is hard to evaluate who is an inferior, noblemen had an obligation to care for the people because if they didn’t the people could rebel and they had the numbers. Second once a framework exists it can be fudged be creative and smart people to achieve other goals, that is no longer natural selection but artificial selection. Third it not because we have something that looks like a contradiction that it is, when you have a theory that works well you can’t it away because their a few cases you can’t explain or that seem contradicts a theory, Christian morality might be more advantageous to humanity even if intuitively this not what you would expect.

So the best the transcendental argument can do is assuming God exists you would expect an ordered, logical, rational universe and that is already pretty good. But other starting conditions could lead to the same conclusion so a rational, logical, ordered universe would not necesarily predict God.

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