We reach an impasse.
You see what you see in Scripture and it is not what I see, perhaps it is due to a different approach and understanding. Yiu read words and verses, I read chapters and books. You look for minutia and specifics I look for understanding and the big picture. You accept the virews of the human writers, I see what god is trying to tell them.
What I see is there, but i cannot cite verse and worse.
It is a shame. Your way is much easier than mine.
Richard
Are you sure, or do you just project your assumptions on me?
Trying to understand what is written is not just about some words or sentences. It is (or should be) digging deep beneath what are the words. Setting what is said into the contexts, both within the scriptures and in the external conditions where those words were used, in the historical and cultural context. I often try to add to that what I have learned about the hopes, fears and acts of humans in life.
It is comparing what one section of scripture seems to be telling to what the other parts of the scriptures tell, with the intention to understand what is the general teaching and will of God underlying these separate teachings.
Sometimes it is like trying to understand deeply how and why the teachings in the sermon on the mount differed from the other teachings about the commandments. Sometimes it feels much more challenging.
If your way is much more difficult than mine, I feel sympathy for you as you wander with your burden.
No, I am sure.
You just do as you are told and believe what is written.
Oh, I do not doubt the study and discernment, but it is about translation and comparison.
Its no burden at all. It is just harder to explain or, at least, prove.
It is a way of thinking. I would not make a good soldier. I question too much.
I do not make a good biblical Christian for the same reason.
Richard
Edit
Of course I was overlooking the effort of making and wearing your straight jacket, not to mention making and forcing others into theirs.
I am not sure how we go from, “the ends set for us by our nature . . . there are certain things that are good or bad for us absolutely, which even God could not change” to the interpretation: “morality is subjective as it is based on the subjective needs and wants of humans.” I think your understanding of human nature is very different from a Thomist might view it.
If morality is objective there is a right and wrong that does not necessarily correspond to what specific people believe is right or wrong. A slaver may think what they are doing is moral but that doesn’t make it moral. A flat earther may think the evidence supports a flat earth and their belief but that doesn’t makes it correct. If morality is objective, there are actual correct and incorrect beliefs. A guy flying a bomb into a building thinks he is acting morally. The people in the building disagree. If morality is subjective, neither is right or oddly enough, both may be right. If morality is objective I think one of them is right. The degree of accountability for such actions may differ based on how people grew up, where and so on, but that is another issue and for God to judge.
Feser addresses this issue in more detail here. Interestingly enough, he has this to say about atheism and morality:
All the same, since to a large extent the grounds and content of morality can be known from a study of human nature alone, it follows that to a large extent morality would be what it is even if human beings existed and God did not. For, again, morality is not based in arbitrary divine commands any more than scientific laws are expressions of some arbitrary divine whim. From the A-T point of view, “divine command theory” (or at least the crude version of divine command theory that takes the grounds and content of morality to rest on sheer divine fiat) is, I would say, comparable to occasionalism, and similarly objectionable. (Cf. my recent post on Ockham.)
As I say, then, atheism per se is not a direct threat to the very possibility of morality. Someone who denied the existence of God but accepted Aristotelian essentialism could have grounds for accepting at least part of the natural law. So too could someone who endorsed an atheistic form of Platonism (if there could be such a thing). But to opt for a completely anti-essentialist and anti-teleological view of the world – one which holds that the natural order is entirely mechanistic and that there is nothing beyond that order – is, the A-T philosopher would argue, to undermine the possibility of any sort of morality at all. For it entirely removes from the world essences and final causes, and thus the possibility of making sense of the good as an objective feature of reality. (See The Last Superstition for details.) And since modern atheism tends to define itself in terms of such a radically anti-teleological or mechanistic view of the world, it too is to that extent incompatible with any possible morality.
My comments about “atheism” here are almost always exclusively about materialism (which I see as mechanistic and anti-teleological).
Vinnie
That is very presumptuous.
If morality is based on human nature then it is subjective, by definition.
If we gather all of the claimed objective moral systems and compare them we will inevitably find contradictions between them.
I see no reason why morality is impossible if you don’t believe the universe has intrinsic meaning or purpose. All you need is desire for the world to be a certain way and for humans to treat each other in a certain way. I don’t see why wanting to see human beings happy and fulfilled in their lives requires a belief in teleology and the rest.
That is what biblical Christianity is.
If it loos like a duck, and quacks like a duck it is a duck.
Richard
‘If we gather all of the claimed objective moral systems and compare them we will inevitably find contradictions between them.”
True, but that only means that not all of them are entirely correct. There are also a number of similarities. Are the similarities or differences more important? That’s not readily answered objectively. Some of the differences are in details; some are more fundamental. We might be suspicious of standards that make excuses for the insiders relative to everyone else, whether or not they claim to be objective. Is that criterion an objective standard? It has potential to be applied impartially across various systems, though deciding exactly what counts as making excuses can get challenging even if we don’t allow Freudian-style hypocrisy of claiming that everyone else is just rationalizing but I am arguing logically.
Some atheistic systems, such as Marxism, claim to provide objective standards, though how objective they are in reality is highly questionable. The range of possible viewpoints is rather complex.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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