Can humans discover what is right and wrong?

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All right. I know that I’ve ground to a halt on entries in the past few months. Know that I am constantly here reading and interacting, but I just haven’t updated in a while. Part of it is the enormous task that looms in front of me: to finish the response to nate’s 10,000,000,000,000 word essay on his particular superstition. (found here: http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=D781466&entry=10003&mode= )

The last entry that I wrote directly responded to a portion of nate’s essay: It was called "The Bible is ignorant on so many topics…"

The basic idea is that the Bible pretends to tell us about all kinds of things.

There are all kinds of subject that the Bible touches on that a well-read high school graduate could tell you far more useful information: science (earth goes round the sun, atoms exist); medicine (wash your hands, germs exist); history (there wasn’t a world-wide flood, North and South America exist); government (democracy); and so forth.

Sure, the Bible is a pathetic excuse for a book if you read it for information about … well ALMOST anything it claims to tell you something useful about. With every kind of knowledge that humans can make discoveries about, we have surpassed what the all-knowing creator of the universe allegedly had to say.

This fact ought to make believers pause. It never does.

Let’s start with the further response to nate’s epic entry.

Nate,

Let’s begin with the absurd: You write "Christians ought to be proud of their Scripture" — in the same paragraph you admonish me for saying Christians ought to be ashamed of their Scripture because "a person who demands that you be ashamed of anything other than your own actions is monstrously unjust…"

Either Christian scripture is the kind of thing that a Christian can be proud/ashamed of or not. If a person who calls for people to be ashamed of anything other than their own actions is monstrously unjust; what is a person who calls for people to be proud of something other than their own actions? Monstrously just?

Your response to animal cruelty was heartbreaking. To hear a person have to come up with a Bible verse to figure out that it is wrong to torture a puppy to death is just sad. Of course, I gave you a dilemma to which there is no good response: either you cannot come up with a Bible verse, in which case the morally revolting torture of Fido resumes, or you come up with a Bible verse and look sad. Perhaps this wasn’t fair on my part, and this constitutes a moral failing on my part. Good thing you wouldn’t hold it against me, considering there is no justifiable way for me to have known better!

Which brings me to the heart of the matter. There are several reasons why many theologians don’t embrace the "divine command" theory of morality. Especially not with your added "we have no innate moral sense" with which to figure them out.

First of all, for a Christian, there is the difficulty that the Bible seems to disagree with you.

Romans 2:14-15 (http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=104548255)

"When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them"

Which sounds like… well, what I’ve been arguing (and to be honest, it is what I hear most frequently from Christians that I talk to). By the way, I think that it is a much better argument to say that we all have an innate moral sense, and that God is the reason for that. It’s still a lame argument, but at least you have a chance).

Second,

When you respond to my criticism of: "Especially when you maintain that you picked without any reason or justification one god from an infinite list of possible gods to base your life around."

By saying things like: "Much better! As I maintain, first principles cannot be rationally arrived at, so I count it as no criticism of mine to say that I have not rationally arrived at them."

And then add criticism to me with: "Ultimately you just have to irrationally assign "good" or "bad" status to individual actions or to classes of actions, but nothing makes one system of assignation better or worse than another."

You’ve got to see what you’re doing. At the very best, you are claiming that everyone, including you, is equally justified in irrationally calling things ‘good’ or ‘bad’. You are arguing, "Don’t you see, we’re idiots! All of us!" Otherwise, you’re doing a very weird semantics game.

You argue that I have no rational basis for calling action X ‘good’ or ‘bad’. You do it differently. Your basis for calling action X ‘good’ or ‘bad’ flows rationally and logically from an entirely irrational FOUNDATION.

It’s as though you say, "murder is wrong. Of course, you can’t just say that, otherwise you are doing something irrational — just proclaiming an obvious moral truth. What you have to do is irrationally believe that a God exists who thinks that ‘murder is wrong’. Once you have done that you have walked into the light of rationality since you are basing what you believe is right and wrong entirely on the irrational basis that your magical god exists who thinks that murder is wrong."

Third,

If we humans do not have a justifiable basis for knowing what is moral and what is immoral, then you apparently believe that God will punish people forever for not acting in a way that they had no justifiable way of knowing that they should have acted differently. This is not a common opinion among Christians throughout the ages.

It would be the same as God coming down and asking you to sort what appears to be a barrel of identical apples into two bins: skeelat and non-skeelat. When you ask God how you should know the difference, he responds: There is no detectable way for you to figure this out with reason or logic. Also, you cannot sense or detect this with an innate sense that I’ve given you. Good luck, an eternity of torture or paradise awaits you depending on if you can correctly complete the task.

Fourth,

It’s worse than that, and one that I’ve tried to get at a number of times. The question of epistemology comes into play in a severe way for you. Let’s add to that situation that an angel comes down and sorts the apples for you into two piles skeelat and non-skeelat but

doesn’t tell you which is which. So all you have to do is correctly assign the 2 piles, not a barrelful of apples. Hooray, your odds of eternal paradise have improved immensely. But it’s still 50 – 50 based on a rather stupid test that God is giving. Now let’s add that 2 pamphlets are left by the angel before he leaves.

The first pamphlet says: The pile on the left is skeelat, the pile on the right is non-skeelat. — Yahweh
The second pamphlet says: The pile on the right is skeelat, the pile on the left is non-skeelat. — Lucifer

Which do you believe? Hell, you can just make a choice, but having Yahweh/Satan’s pamphlets are not helpful in the least. It just moves the 50-50 chance back one more step.

The question ultimately comes down to: "Can humans discover on their own what is right and wrong?"

If you say no, then ask how would we ever discover the moral difference between God and Satan? More importantly, assuming we could discover the moral difference, how could we figure out which one is good and which is evil?

If you asked Yahweh and Lucifer who was good and who was evil, would they each give you the same answer? Or opposite answers?

If they gave you opposite answers, how did you know that Yahweh was good and Lucifer was bad and not vice versa?

Was there some standard that you could compare the actions of each to? If you say, "yes, the standard that Yahweh wrote down"; well, why not what Lucifer wrote down?

Good luck coming up with a valid way of figuring out what is good and what is evil. Perhaps you randomly decide to pick Lucifer to follow and Yahweh to reject, or vice versa. If you admit to randomly choosing one to follow, then you do not have a rational basis for morality, and can no longer meaningfully argue that atheists cannot rationally defend being moral.

If we require God to know what is immoral and what is moral actions, then God cannot say we have a moral failing if we don’t worship Him.

If this life is a moral test, then God cannot punish us for failing it if we have to randomly choose the right morals. It only makes sense to punish a person if he ought to have known he was acting improperly.
 

 

More to follow… eventually.