(Aug 6, 2021 12:38 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]I get the feeling there’s nothing God can do that’s immoral.
But the thing is, an absolute, immutable "God" by definition couldn't DO anything without being perversely subordinated to time (change) and space (having extension, size, location, malleable outer appearance and other traits). Becoming the same as natural entities -- being yet another "developing" entity, subservient to a higher regulating process Itself or alternatively being an array of differentiated states that co-exist as some higher dimensional version of an _X_'s total sum of stages and configurations.[1]
A invulnerable God would instead be the provenance for the physical realm by being a supreme principle or kind of intellectual Platonic form prior in rank to those material characteristics.
Instead of our usual "horizontal" hierarchy or order of "causes-effects" (Mary giving birth to Cindy, Cindy giving birth to Sally, etc) it would be a "vertical" hierarchy where such an immutable God was the provenance of the natural world by being completely prior in rank to space and time (and its "horizontal" sequence). This supreme principle would be without location, size, shape, etc. Simply receiving a rational-based relational responsibility, ownership, or whatever for the physical domain rather than literally "doing/creating" as part of an action timeline.
But since "material" attributes and mechanistic relationships are the only thing human minds can apprehend in a phenomenal, empirical/convincing way -- it's perfectly fine for the physicalist (in that scheme) to assert that God by not requiring a place to exist and not requiring a spatial form and not requiring the ability to perform via changes (not being subordinate to such items) -- then accordingly this supposed immaterial, supreme principle could be construed by the physicalist as superfluous as a provenance for the natural world. ("I have no need for that hypothesis" cliche.)
When fixated with the concept of morality (rather than existence in general, as this thread is) and morality "requiring" a source prior in rank to Nature -- then, of course, the individual who needs a "grounding" or a "vertical cause" for that would more perceive their need for God in that context.
But as even Kant seems to suggest in the [2] footnote below, from a skeptic's perspective about non-material affairs it can be deemed something falling out of the motivated reasoning of that theist agent -- some conviction, that either the believer or the society or both needs this practical hypothesis in order to adhere to rules and maintain civilization.
In this area, Kant was never doing much more with his noumenal outlook than securing a refuge for traditional beliefs (not the raw folk ones, but those made more coherent by scholarly apologetics). So as to protect them from the ravages of what would be termed "scientism" today. He feared society would fall apart if it had a heavily malleable ethics that was based on Hume's view of stemming from unstable feelings (also dictated by consequences), and the contingent and relativistic situations of the phenomenal world, rather than duty (laws that were universal in extant).
For instance (to over-simplify this severely), a person benefits from a partner who loves them out of duty or principle rather than obscure sentiment or carnal rewards, because the latter is going to bail out on them when they no longer feel that way or the going gets rough.
Similar with tribal members who support each other out of duty, rather than variable contingent circumstances.
But, again, that's a crude, introductory depiction. Whatever the actual rules outputted by the categorical imperative would be, they surely wouldn't consist of blind loyalty to a person or persons, especially if the latter were breaking those global rules themselves. The intellectual allegiance would be to the laws.
- - - footnotes - - -
[1] However, this doesn't necessarily rule out an absolute God having a compromised avatar of itself or a mediator that is subordinated to the material template. But the latter shouldn't be mistaken as the former.
[2]
Kant, from "Opus Postumum":
(21:83) Reason inevitably creates objects for itself. Hence everything that thinks has a God. [Obviously that would have to be refined to rational agents that "think a certain way" that would lead them to such a need.]
(22:123) It is not a substance outside myself, whose existence I postulate as a hypothetical being for the explanation for certain phenomena in the world; but the concept of duty (of a universal practical principle) is contained identically in the concept of a divine being as ideal of human reason for the sake of the latter's law-giving [...breaks off...] There is contained in man, as a subordinate moral being, a concept of duty, namely, that of the relation of right; to stand under the law of the determination his will, which he imposes upon himself, and to which he subordinates himself -- which, however, he also treats imperatively, and *asserts* independent of all empirical grounds of determination (and [which] is determining merely as a formal principle for willing).
(22:129) In moral-practical reason, there is contained the principle of the knowledge of my duties as commands, that is, not according to the rule which makes the subject into an [object], but that which emerges from freedom and which [the subject] prescribes to itself, and yet as if another higher person had made it a rule for him. The subject feels himself necessitated through his own reason (not analytically, according to the principle of identity, but synthetically, as a transition from metaphysics to transcendental philosophy) to obey these duties. What God may be can be developed from concepts, by means of metaphysics; but that there is a God belongs to transcendental philosophy and can only be proved hypothetically.