As a direct answer to your question, false, math is a branch of philosophy where you can have true knowledge. A² + B² = C² for all right triangles.
The issue here is how do we know something is true knowledge, or I prefer, a “justified true belief”. This is a branch of philosophy called epistemology. Methods where we can’t verify claims is nothing better than guessing. It is worth noting that the scientific method is an epistemology and faith is another. Science is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge gained about our universe. (Every branch of knowledge is a branch of philosophy, even theology. Every PhD is a doctorate in philosophy.)
The problem here is how does one gather true knowledge, aka epistemology. There are over 4000 religions, and it is easy for them to make up some stuff and say that they don’t understand X about the universe so my specific religion must be true. We are claiming your religion is made up by a human. You, and nobody else for that matter, has never been able to prove that their religion is true. What they do instead is they each have a different epistemology, custom made so they can believe their religion is true. This leaves folks believing their religion because they want to, not because they know it is true. This is the definition of faith, belief without proof.
We are going to ask you how you know something is true, and you are not just believing something somebody else made up. What would you need to have in order for you to change your religion to Islam? Would any of the excuses you gave us convince you?
Paul Benacerraf (1973), is that plausible accounts of mathematical truth and plausible accounts of mathematical knowledge appear to be incompatible with each other. It has received a great deal of attention in the philosophy of mathematics throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Interesting, I like philosophical questions like these. As I mentioned in a different thread, questioning core beliefs is important.
Here was his motivation:
Although Benacerraf presents this tension as a problem, it is worth noting that he does not appear to abandon his commitments to mathematical truth and mathematical knowledge in light of his concerns. Instead, he takes it to be reason for dissatisfaction with existing accounts of mathematical truth and mathematical knowledge. The ultimate intent is to challenge philosophers to develop a better account of mathematical truth and mathematical knowledge—an account that satisfies both constraints. Indeed, Benacerraf writes, “I hope that it is possible ultimately to produce such an account”
That is what happens when you go to a group and start dictating to them what they believe, when it is clear you don’t know shit. You chose this. Again, I suspect you got exactly what you wanted.
PS: you probably aren’t the 50th apologist who has done exactly this here. Come here, try to tell us what we believe, then complain when they get pushback.
I know you are new to apologists. I recommend running as fast as you can away from it. I’ve meet thousands of honest Christians. I have NEVER met an honest apologist, I’m convinced they don’t exist. Flee before that shit turns your brain to mush.
If you had bothered at all with my post, you would have read enough warnings informing you what to expect. Along with numerous issues that you need to address if you are to stand any chance of being able to conduct proper discourse competently.
Without a proper grounding in relevant concepts, you’re going to be as helpless as one of the assorted serfs watching the flying head in Zardoz.
Do you ever answer questions? Lets try again as my patience is wearing thin, and I shall start cutting and pasting from now on.
If as you claimed torturing children is always wrong with no argument, why does your bible depict your deity killing and torturing and encouraging others to kill and torture children all the time?
Since you claimed “we all know” moral absolutes exist, please offer at least one example.
if as you claimed “Every “ought” bears evidence of objective morality.” Does this mean it was objectively moral when the Nazis thought they ought to commit genocide? Or for your biblical deity come to that? NB This is a question, not a claim or belief on my part.
Maybe an answer to this one please?
So we are not governed by moral absolutes then, but have to use reason and subjective judgement?
Sigh, another unevidenced assertion, humans like all animals that have evolved to live in societal groups, have evolved the ability to learn what behaviours are and are not acceptable to those societies. These are not absolutes though, and though undoubtedly empathy for other members of the group have a distinct survival advantage, we have also evolved brains capable of evolving more complex moral judgements. They are nonetheless subjective, they cannot be otherwise. this is true even among theists of course, as I said, and you ignored, do your morals align with those of theists like the Taliban or ISIS? HAd you been born in the middle east there is a pretty good chance you’d be claiming moral absolutes exist, but with a very different set of morals from a very different religion.
So you’re saying that torturing babies, committing genocide on a global scale, endorsing slavery, and ethnic cleansing and sex trafficking prisoners, to name just a few of the behaviours your bible depicts your deity doing is “uncorrupted justice”? I strongly disagree, and all I see in the bible are morals derived largely from bronze age patriarchal Bedouin human societies being passed off as the perfect morality of a perfect deity without even the pretence of any objective evidence to support the claim.
Which again is contradicted by the bible, so your argument apart from being wholly unevidenced, is at odds with the teachings of your own bible.
How I feel about the claim is utterly irrelevant to the fact that those passages, which you believe are true, contradict your claim that torturing children is always immoral with no argument.
Unless you can demonstrate sufficient objective evidence that humans can survive their own death in any meaningful way, then these assertions are meaningless, no different to Vikings believing they will go to Valhalla after they die. I see no relevance at all to your claim for moral absolutes, which you have also failed to evidence, or produce a single example of an absolute moral you emphatically claimed were real?
You’re missing the point, you claimed it was always immoral torture children no argument, and now you are adding an exception, do you not see how this undermines your argument it is a moral absolute? Leaving aside this is unevidenced superstition of course.
The rest of your post is more of the same irrelevant tap dancing around the fact, if it is a moral absolute that it is always immoral (as you claimed) to torture children, and you believe the bible as you purport to do, then the deity in the bible must have been immoral, you can’t tap dance your way out of that contradiction with endless hypothetical speculation.
Can you, or can you not offer even one single example of a moral absolute? If you can’t then why would anyone believe your sweeping unevidenced claim they exist? Especially as you are now suggesting moral choices are nuanced and relative, which undermines your own claim.
Don’t be silly it directly refutes your claim that there is never any argument that torturing children is always wrong, since I gave an example of people (theists by the way, many of them Christians) who obviously tortured children among their many victims.
Oh ffs, the example is evidence that your and my subjective opinions that something is immoral, differ to the subjective moral opinions of Nazis.
They made that point ffs, both before and after the fact, how are you missing this? And anyway, even if every single human that ever lived agreed it was wrong, it would still be a subjective opinion, how could it ever be otherwise? You are wrongly equating a consensus of subjective opinions as objective fact, without evidence to support your claim, all you;re doing is making a bare appeal to numbers, it’s an argumentum ad populum fallacy.
So we all agree, except for those who disagree like the Nazis? Seriously read that back and try not to laugh at such an obvious oxymoron.
Except they didn’t know it did they, their social convention differed, and you picked one assumes what you thought would be a slam dunk of an example. if we all agreed that torturing children was always wrong no argument, then children would never be tortured, and the Nazis are not the only people to do this, even your own bible depicts your own deity doing it, and all you could do was try and excuse it with hypothetical nonsense about what “it might have suffered otherwise”, dear oh dear.
Indeed, but since I didn’t equate them in this generic sweeping way, that’s another straw man fallacy from you and again the dishonesty of you clipping those few words to create that fallacy speaks for itself. Do you accept the fact that the leader of the SS Heinrich Himmler is on record as saying that atheists were not suitable for the SS? Do you accept the fact that the Christians in Germany had some very different subjective moral views to your own? Those are facts that are salient to this discourse, as they demonstrate objective evidence that morality is both relative and subjective.
So fucking what, it’s full of stories of genocide, and ethnic cleansing, almost as if it is a collection of subjective opinions from an epoch of ignorance, supersiton and cruel and barbarism. I need no better argument than that, and you claiming something is absolutely immoral, then citing examples that contradict that claim, and one from your own bible depicting your own deity doing it, to demonstrate your unevidenced claims for moral absolutes is wrong. You can’t even produce a single example of a moral absolute?
That’s a no true Scotsman fallacy, and as well as being irrational, it is yet another example of subjective moral opinions differing. And between theists and Christians at that, with you claiming they are not Christians, and them making the same claim about you. I can only suggest you properly research the links between European Christianity and Nazis antisemitism, and how the various Christian churches behaved, starting with the fact that Nazi Germany was overwhelmingly Christian, I am talking about around 94% of the people identifying as Christian in a census in the late 30’s. Those facts will require a something more substantive and compelling in response than hand waving and a no true Scotsman fallacy.
Again this is a no true Scotsman fallacy. And an easy alternative can be posited that these facts demonstrate Christians are no more moral than non-Christians of course, and that morality is relative and subjective. So your false dichotomy and straw man fallacies are not very compelling arguments. Though you are again missing the larger point of the morality being relative and subjective, even among the innumerable sects and denominations of Christianity of course, both historically and among contemporaries.
Another rather tedious straw man, since I never made any such claim about Christians, you really need to read more carefully. Though of course since atheism has no doctrine or dogma, it no more significant that an atheist is good or bad, than it is that someone who doesn’t believe in mermaids is good or bad, especially since these examples demonstrate that those terms are both relative and subjective, a point you seem determined to miss.
The straw man fallacies you keep creating do seem to be endless yes, since again you are entirely misrepresenting my argument.
How does this indicate moral absolutes then? Or the bible depicting a perfectly moral deity torturing a newborn baby to death, when you said that torturing children is always immoral no argument?
It maybe have seemed a cheap shot, but you waste endless responses that ignore the points made in favour of straw men claims I have not made, and roll past question after question leaving them unanswered.
Based on a false equivalence fallacy, that equated materialism with atheism, and that equated abstract ideas and methods like logic with unevidenced superstitious beliefs in the supernatural. So that argument failed demonstrably in a number of ways. The efficacy of logic can be objectively demonstrated in its results, unevidenced belief in any deity or the supernatural cannot be objectively evidenced, else religious apologists would do so, and we would all believe in that deity.
Well a more accurate assertion is that materialism per se has nothing whatsoever to do with atheism.
Did you, I asked you to quote a single atheist here claiming they were materialists and never got an answer?
No.
No.
They are synonymous, but then so are other methods like logic for example, also philosophy though this has now largely been superseded by science at least in studying the natural physical world.
Are we ever going to see any objective evidence offered to support this claim? I have also offered objective evidence that demonstrates others, and even your own deity depicted in the bible, do not share your moral framework, so how can they be moral absolutes when all you have to support the claim is your subjective opinion?
So absolute morals comes from your god. At the same time, anything your god does that goes against these absolute morals is justified. Even if it leads to a contradiction - everything the god does is good by dfeinition, even though she herself defines it as evil. Which again means that you can pick and choose from a menu the morals you like, and reject what you don’t like. There is a word for this: hypocrisy.
No one’s insisting you reply to everyone. Pick a battle and fight it. May I suggest you take it up with @Sheldon
Edit: I see he’s already giving you a good throttling. Cheerio chap! Don’t feel bad. I’ve been in the same spot numerous times with this fellow. Keep up the good fight He’ll make a non-believer out of you yet, pastor Bull.
If you were to behave like your god did in your book, @christianapologist, you would be imprisoned.
Personally, I find do as I say, not as I do to be the antithesis of leadership.
So much for morals absolutes if you believe your deity gets to make arbitrary decisions on what is moral. Now either we have the ability to judge that deity’s perspective on what is moral, or we don’t. If we do then we must already know what is and is not moral, and would not need divine diktat, if we don’t then blindly following rules laid out in archaic superstition is not morality, one would be a mere moral automaton.
In my experience once one abandons reason in favour of absolutes that is exactly what one becomes, a moral automaton like “good Nazis” unquestioning and disciplined. Ironically that was exactly why Heinrich Himmler said atheists were unsuitable for the SS, because they are undisciplined, they are harder to indoctrinate as of course are all freethinkers. I don’t know about you, but being told that things like murdering defenceless people indiscriminately is just or moral, would never be something I could accept, even it is just my subjective opinion. Yet here we are seeing you do just that…
Even when committing global genocide, torturing a baby to death, encouraging it’s chosen pets to commit acts of ethnic cleansing where it told them to kill every living thing. If that’s your idea of perfect justice then you really need some introspection, seriously. Religion has not given you moral absolutes, it’s just given you a closed mind that is capable of accepting barbarically cruel atrocities as moral.
"Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire…
You are already accepting absurdities, and now we see you defending atrocities, at least in principle when a deity commits them. Food for thought…
Um… Nazis were theists. WTF are you talking about. The Nazi movement was about God’s Chosen Race. You can deny it all you like.
Nazi Germany was an overwhelmingly Christian nation. A census in May 1939, six years into the Nazi era[1] and after the annexation of mostly Catholic Austria and mostly Catholic Czechoslovakia[2] into Germany, indicates[3] that 54% of the population considered itself Protestant, 41% considered itself Catholic, 3.5% self-identified as Gottgläubig[4] (lit. “believing in God”),[5] and 1.5% as “atheist”.[4] Protestants were over-represented in the Nazi Party’s membership and electorate, and Catholics were under-represented.[6][7][8][9][10
The Vatican supported the Nazi movement as they predicted the Nazis would win and they were trying to protect the Church.
In a speech in the early years of his rule, Hitler declared himself “not a Catholic, but a German Christian”.[11][12][13][14][15] The German Christians were a Protestant group that supported Nazi Ideology.[16] Hitler and the Nazi Party also promoted “nondenominational”[17]positive Christianity,[18] a movement which rejected most traditional Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus, as well as Jewish elements such as the Old Testament.[19][20] In one widely quoted remark, he described Jesus as an “Aryan fighter” who struggled against “the power and pretensions of the corrupt Pharisees”[21] and Jewish materialism.[22] Hitler spoke often of Protestantism[23][page needed] and Lutheranism,[24] stating, “Through me the Evangelical Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England”[25] and that the “great reformer” Martin Luther[26] “has the merit of rising against the Pope and the Catholic Church”.[27]
Why were Nazi belts engraved with “God With Us?”
Because the nazi movement was initially a Christian movement/ideology. Adolf Hitler, and all his top henchmen were christians! Hitler himself was a Catholic, all his life, and gave many speeches claiming god was on the nazi’s side.
It was towars the end of the war that he began turning on his Christian roots.
Best advice yet! It’s actionable for me, rather than just blasting my beliefs and attempts to debate them alongside your views of the world/universe/matter/etc. Ok. Thanks. I’m learning from you @rat_spit and accept the advice. @Sheldon , you’re smart and we all know it. You’re also posting a lot. I’m going to pick my “battle” even within picking you to “battle” (although my goal is respectful debate/conversation more than pure battle).
Clarifying my language helps here. I agree that no human should torture young human children. I do not expect you to accept that it is justified for God to “strike the child with illness.” As I said, that offends my moral intuition as a Christian. I do not argue that it should not offend your moral intuition. That’s given. What I am saying, is that if you were to be convinced of Christianity, there is a framework for seeing his acts as just and right based on his being the source of life and sustainer of life and based on an eternity of existence with him to “redeem” (Christian word) human suffering. If Christianity is true (which I’m not currently arguing in point number 1, but would be happy to make a case for in another post), then it has a framework for explaining the morally difficult passage you brought up. It would take a lot of typing to describe how that works for Christians, and I don’t feel it would be very productive with this group since it just get people back to “defend your faith, stopping making unsupported claims.” But my answer here does address your point number 1, I think. What’s your response on that piece of it?
Give an example demonstrating that moral absolutes exist. Ok. Great. I’ll try. We recognize that we “should”/“ought to” be courageous in defending the weak against the strong and harmful. Like the “punching to potential rapist” example brought up earlier. That rapist threatens your own life, but we all recognize it is right to defend his potential victim. We should stand up for her. It’s not because more people benefit. If we sided with the rapist, that’s 2 to 1. If we side with the victim, that’s 2 to 1. So sheer numbers of those “benefited” (yuck to say that in this example) does not tip the scales. But a sense of true right and wrong guides our thinking to say we “should”/“ought” to defend her. Look forward to your response on that one.
My take is that the Nazis chose to suppress morality and stand up an evil “system” of morals, co-opting Christianty to give weight to their movement. They are not actually Christians. They did not “love the Lord your God with all your heart…” and “Love your neighbor as yourself” which Jesus says are the two greatest commandments going all the way back to the time of Moses, and I would say written into our being from the creation of the first humans. An example of someone disobeying moral absolutes is an argument for moral absolutes, in my opinion. You and I can objectively say the Nazi were wrong because that’s absolute and obvious. Their violation of the standard, and your use of them as an example strengthens the case for a standard. If no standard, wouldn’t the argument have to be something along the lines of this: “the greater group of people (non-Nazis) established their social conventions upon the smaller (less powerful) group of people (Nazis)?”
I’m renewed in enjoyment of this conversation with your help @rat_spit , so thanks again for the good advice!
I’m a middling intellect at best, and my formal education is mediocre. There are many posters here better educated and more intellectually equipped to deal with a range of issues. So as always I think it’s best to deal with the argument, and ignore who is making it.
I tend to post in a methodical way, and given my OCD that is perhaps a predictable outcome. I click on the topics menu, and then read them and if I am minded to respond I do so chronologically.
There can be no moral absolutes if a deity exists that can set them aside arbitrarily. It’s a logical contradiction, and you implied not torturing children was a moral absolute, and are now contradicting this by claiming a deity can do it and still be just or moral.
You keep making this vague and unevidenced claim, but I can’t believe it, since you have not attempted to objectively evidence it.
Even were one to accept that a deity exists, it wouldn’t evidence absolute morals, since the existence of moral absolutes is directly contradicted by the idea a deity exists that can set them aside arbitrarily.
If a deity exists and morality rests solely on its whim or opinion, those morals would still be subjective, obviously, and we as humans could only use our reason based and subjective opinions to evaluate them.
No it doesn’t, and this is amply evidenced in your failure to do so here, instead producing only contradictory claims and ideas. You have failed to demonstrate a single example of moral absolutes, or that they are possible, and your claim a deity’s actions can be just or moral, if that deity sets those morals aside when it wants to, contradicts the claim they are moral absolutes, obviously. You are violating the law of non-contradiction.
You think you can invoke faith as an argument, then avoid evidencing why? If your faith in any way evidences the existence of any moral absolutes, then go for it, I will as always keep an open mind. What you can’t do is make a vague unevidenced claim that your faith justifies your position, then not explain and objectively evidence why.
It doesn’t address the contradiction you made, and it simply makes another unevidenced and vague claim that faith excuses this irrationality and your inability to objectively evidence even a single moral absolute, or even offer one example.
No we don’t. some of us do, your own bible is filled with examples of your deity doing the exact opposite, and human history is littered with people who don’t agree, but worse still even were this not the case and we all agreed on this, how would that not just be a subjective opinion we all happen to share?
Nope, if this were true there would be no rape, and rape is a broad term, not everyone would agree on what constitutes rape, so again this is both relative and subjective. Try explaining why you think rape is wrong, and see if that forms the basis of an absolute moral claim.
This is still subjective, and not a moral absolute.
Do I need to read any further, or are you really offering your subjective take on this as evidence of a moral absolute? You keep explaining why you subjectively think their actions were immoral, but this is irrelevant, and doesn’t answer my question. So I think you need to re-read it again. Here it is verbatim:
So the question demonstrates another contradiction you have made, I I have emboldened your claim, and since the Nazis felt they ought to commit genocide, your claim is demonstrably wrong, you are simply saying your subjective view differs from theirs, but this simply demonstrates the subjective morality at play.
I already explained this is a no true Scotsman fallacy, and cited a census that about religiosity in Germany, here it is then:
“A census in May 1939, six years into the Nazi era[1] and after the annexation of mostly Catholic Austria and mostly Catholic Czechoslovakia[2] into Germany, indicates[3] that 54% of the population considered itself Protestant, 41% considered itself Catholic, 3.5% self-identified as Gottgläubig[4] (lit. “believing in God”),[5] and 1.5% as “atheist”.”
So your claim is a) simply wrong, and of course irrational as it invokes a no true Scotsman fallacy. I have linked an explanation of that fallacy.
No we can’t, I am starting to think you don’t know what objective means. We can offer only a subjective opinion they were wrong, and I would offer my subjective rationale explaining why. There is no moral absolute that prohibits genocide, and again your own bible depicts a deity committing global genocide, so again it cannot be both absolutely immoral, and at the same time be moral when a deity does it. Those are mutually exclusive claims.
The standard is subjective, if it is an absolute then the bible depicts your deity being immoral and encouraging immorality, again these are mutually exclusive positions. And of course all you are doing is highlighting how your opinion of a moral standard (and mine) differ from those of Nazis, this is the very definition of subjective.
That’s not no moral standard, it is a different moral standard, it is the basis of all fascist ideologies, and though I find it repugnant for a variety of reason, and though I can offer my rationale as to why I feel this way, this remains a subjective view. again your own deity commits genocide, so how can this act be both absolutely immoral, and the act of committing it ever be called just?
1 Samuel 15:2-3 (CSB): This is what the Lord of Armies says: ‘I witnessed what the Amalekites did to the Israelites when they opposed them along the way as they were coming out of Egypt. Now go and attack the Amalekites and completely destroy everything they have. Do not spare them. Kill men and women, infants and nursing babies, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.
This isn’t moral and one of the reasons why I left Christianity. This looks like it was written by a greedy human, who wanted to go murder some people he didn’t like and steal their shit.
Christians try to make lame excuses about how god should be able to kill who he wants since he created them. It would be like I built a house for puppies. I then told some of the puppies to go and brutally murder a bunch of other puppies because they were doing something I didn’t like. The house I built for them would also sometimes randomly kill some of the puppies too (natural disasters, disease). Would you say that I was a loving dog owner? What does it say about my morality if I see the future perfectly, but I still not only allow this shit to happen, but actively encourage it? If you were god and had two groups of people you loved who were fighting, would you have one go and murder the other or would you have them work it out?
On the subject of absolute morals. A dude in the old testament was stoned for gathering sticks on the sabbath, but in the new testament, it’s fine. Going from an executable offence to nothing isn’t very “absolute”. One man made it up, another said to not worry about it. That is one thing I find funny in the bible is how god somehow knows all these future events, but he always gets surprised and angry when things don’t go his way. It’s almost like it was written by a person who couldn’t actually see the future…
My favorite bible fairy tale is the global flood. Your god decided to kill every living thing on the entire planet with the exception of one family? And they built an ark big enough to house a pair of every animal species? What’s moral about that?
How any adult with an ounce of common sense can believe this crap is beyond me.
Agreed! Many Christians don’t know it was ripped of along with the tower of Babel from the ancient Sumerian “Epic of Gilgamesh”. There are at lest 2 millions species of animals out there now. I would love to see a kangaroo swim the ocean from Australia to get to the Middle East for a boat ride. This is to only have to make a return swim trip after 40 days, once again, without a boat…
Seriously read that back and try not to laugh at such an obvious oxymoron.
He’ll make a non-believer out of you yet, pastor Bull.
This is to only have to make a return swim trip after 40 days, once again, without a boat…