The Moral Argument For a Deity

[Ostronomos]

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Cp9Nl6OUEJ0

This argues in favor of moral realism.

[Syne]

Premises 3 & 4 are faulty.

3. Neither the moral errors of some humans nor the disagreement between immoral and moral humans necessarily mean that humans can't be the source for morality. That only tells us that some humans can be irrational, and that rationality and irrationality are not compatible. As per premise 1, we must assume humans are capable of rationality (to conform to any moral facts and duties at all), and 3 only tells us that some are not rational.
4. The requirement of necessity is a non-sequitur, wholly unjustified by the preceding premises.

This is just a convoluted argument from necessity for the existence of God. As such, it has nothing to do with morality all. It's just trying to obscure a very old argument for the existence of God.

[Zinjanthropos]

That was difficult to watch. I got within 17 seconds of watching the whole thing. A thought or question popped in my head while narrator was talking.....Why wasn’t Adam or Adam & Eve given the 10 Commandments or why wait for Moses to come on the scene? I guess it’s possible the biblical scribes might have missed it but entirely possible the commandments were an afterthought.

Anyway I digress. In my atheist mind I feel it’s some metaphysical mumbo jumbo philosophy. When 2+2=4 came on screen I was sure this guy would somehow make the equation equal 5. I was hoping he’d try. In a way he did something similar. Did a good job trying to hammer his points home, lost count on how many times they appeared on screen. Just shows that vision is a more powerful tool than hearing. At least he knew that without it, the listening audience would tune out.

Just another attempt to make something out of nothing. No evidence that there is a god yet that doesn’t mean one can’t prove there is...something like that. I’ll leave the door open. Kudos for giving it a go. He and Ostro should compare notes.

[C C]

https://youtu.be/Cp9Nl6OUEJ0

This argues in favor of moral realism.

"Don't kill another human" isn't universal or immune to non-specific circumstances. Homicide is acceptable in self-defense, war, etc. A complicated rule that addresses all "accidental" circumstances qualifying for exemptions might be devised and treated as global. But the very fact of it acknowledging that it has to bow down to context seems to undermine it or make it suspect as being prior to the shifting, unstable conditions of the empirical world.   

Which is a roundabout way of saying that if a "conduct law" itself isn't absolute, then there doesn't seem to be a problem with contingent beings like us (people) being the source or ground for such morality after all (we simply invent it). As well as the changeable, "unnecessary" natural environment and social interactions humans are actually fashioning their community rules in response to, so to maintain the organization of a nomadic tribe, an agricultural settlement, or sophisticated civilization.

As for mathematics... In the deep past we abstracted basic, common properties from sets of varying counted objects, and it just so happened that those quantitative characteristics and processes -- stripped of their specific empirical features via representation as conceptual symbols -- could float on their own as a sort of game with rules and combinations that yield countless new discoveries within that "game". The fact that those products can often waft back down to Earth and apply usefully to the material world is just indication that mathematics also serves as a way of partially simulating the world on paper (i.e., with quantity and its relationships we captured via a technical language one of the bedrock aspects or "building-blocks" of the cosmos which we could manipulate in thoughts slash systematic procedures -- just as the shapes in artwork capture and replicate spatial forms and patterns). 

I'm not utterly discounting the possibility of "realism" for this or that, only that natural solutions are more practical and immediate (IOW -- what society, if not the freer individual, has little choice but to take up). 

For instance... Death isn't going to validate a metaphysical theory if experience and understanding terminate due to it. And Eastern "transmigration" to a new, prenatal body isn't going to be proved due to the memory loss of the former life. And private revelations achieved during this particular lifetime can't be conveyed directly to others, to the public, and thus receive the status of hallucination. Even if a group of monks -- by practicing the same technique -- participate in a shared "revelation", it's a consensus apprehension confined to a tiny fragment of the world's population. Still garnering nutter classification.

[Syne]

It's not god that had an afterthought, it was man's understanding, of god and morality, that had to evolve enough for man to comprehend certain truths. People tend to think that things like the Greek and Roman gods were something completely unrelated to Christianity, but that was just how much those people could comprehend at the time. Gods with very human motives and weakness. The conception evolved into monotheism, where there's a single god above all the human pettiness. Our ultimate ideal evolved from one of just humans with godly powers to a completely objective entity.

Little Nicki couldn't keep up with the philosophical steps in this video, which is why he has to post it and has never even come close to making any such argument himself. And this will be proven out by him being completely incapable of countering any criticism to it.

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https://youtu.be/Cp9Nl6OUEJ0

This argues in favor of moral realism.

"Don't kill another human" isn't universal or immune to non-specific circumstances. Homicide is acceptable in self-defense, war, etc. A complicated rule that addresses all "accidental" circumstances qualifying for exemptions might be devised and treated as global. But the very fact of it acknowledging that it has to bow down to context seems to undermine it or make it suspect as being prior to the shifting, unstable conditions of the empirical world. 

That's a weak straw man, as the same Bible that says "thou shalt not kill" also depicts god commanding people to kill.

The imperative not to kill is in the context of unlawful killing resulting in bloodguilt.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_kill

So it is universal, in cases of unlawful killing, it's just not absolute, in terms of all killing whatsoever.

[Zinjanthropos]

It's not god that had an afterthought, it was man's understanding, of god and morality, that had to evolve enough for man to comprehend certain truths.

God has evolved but like an idea. I think early man would have recognize the Sun as a giver of life and it isn’t a stretch to think that idea hasn’t evolved to where it is today....one god for most, complete with human characteristics. So it’s still a thought. I think life exists elsewhere in the universe but until it’s actually found, that will always remain a thought for as long as I live. Can UFO sightings evolve from lights in the sky to super intelligent interstellar travellers? I think it has and along with our tech, live aliens are being replaced by mechanical robots in peoples minds. I call that evolution of a thought.

Agree that the video is one giant non sequitur. It’s not logic like 2+2=4, that’s physics/math. He’s talking metaphysics, a whole different ballgame where illogic is basically used to convince oneself that they’re on the right track. Using god variables for instance is like plugging in your x’s & y’s without knowing exactly what they are. At least UFOs actually do appear in the sky on occasion.

How do people become transfixed to an idea that has no empirical basis in reality? Why isn’t the Sun still a god, doesn’t  that idea make more sense? Why did that idea go primarily metaphysical? Why not the other way, make the universe god? Probably some of who think that, idk. Ideas tend to keep pace with discovery and guys like Ostro* or this video maker latch on to them. Like quantum mechanics, not like it hasn’t been around forever but so new a discovery that it’s the missing link between us and a god according to some folk. Watching the evolution of the god idea is pretty much like watching the horse go from a best means of transport idea to a flying machine.

Atheist thought, has it evolved? What can it be compared to? Are people trying to prove god exists or prove atheists wrong?

* Kudos to Ostro ...if he’s trying to create discussion or debate. Religion/God is a great subject for that. However I have my doubts as to the topic being used in this way.

[Syne]

Just because man's understanding has evolved does not mean that god has. It's like our understanding of physics. The physics didn't change with our understanding, our understanding changed to better comprehend the existing physics. And like god, we still can't say what time, gravity, and space really are. We can just see how they work and interact. But the interactions of god are admittedly subjective and between people. And just like some people, even prominent physicists, don't believe that time really exists, some people don't believe that god exists. Both can be hypothesized to be emergent phenomena. But disbelieving in the reality of either does not change how they are perceived or act. In the case of god, real or imagined, it acts, as studies have shown, through greater charity, higher reported happiness and fulfillment, etc.. If it hasn't touched your life, it's okay if you don't believe. It's just like someone who has never found love disbelieving that love exists, preferring to think that it's just a chemical/hormonal reaction that sentimental people mistake for something more significant than it is. For both god and love, people come to believe in what they feel in their lives. There is no empirical evidence of either, but there's many such beliefs that life would be all the poorer for not including.

IMO, an atheist believing in love is contradictory to every reason they give for disbelieving in god.

[Zinjanthropos]

I was talking about the evolution of the idea of god, from star to whatever it is now, from a consciousness to some guy programming a simulator. There’s people who say they can prove either, from Ostro to French physicists. Just give me something empirical, like drop a ball and prove gravity exists. I don’t have to know what exactly gravity is, just one of its properties and watch it happen. And yet there are people who believe gravity is a push not a pull but in either case the ball heads to the floor when released.

Question is whether god exists in reality? Francis Church penned a editorial letter to Virginia to ease her fears about Santa Claus’ existence  but he didn’t go as far to say St Nick was a real physical entity. It isn’t necessary and that’s the problem, we rely on our ideas to prove god exists. To make it real, the concept of reality is questioned and hypothesized. More ideas and away we go, rinse and repeat, evolve some more. It won’t stop and I don’t expect it to.

[Yazata]

I think that I disagree with all five steps in the argument in the video

1. Morality is a rational enterprise -

That seems to me to be false. Morality doesn't seem to me to be based on reason at all, but rather on intuition. People just feel that something is right and something else is wrong. Whatever reason is involved typically follows the intuition, intended to rationalize it in terms of whatever moral principles the individual adheres to.

2. Moral realism is true -

That seems to me to be false as well.

Humans do seem to be pretty much on the same page as far as basic social instincts go. Most of us feel compassion, have a sense of fairness and reciprocity, and the abiity to "mind-read" others of our kind so as to intuit their emotional states.

But other than that, whatever moral ideas are built atop it are all over the map.

The video implicitly acknowledges that by saying...

3. Moral problems and disagreements are too much for us to assume moral facts are grounded in a human sense of rationality -

The video tries to deduce from these...

4. Moral facts and duties are grounded in a necessary, rational source (from 1,2, and 3)

I'm not convinced that 4 follows deductively from 1,2 and 3. And whether it does or not is kind of moot if 1 and 2 are F as I suspect they are.

5. This source is God

Which doesn't seem to follow either, unless we introduce an additional premise about the traditional divine attributes

[Ostronomos]

2. Moral realism is true -

That seems to me to be false as well.

Humans do seem to be pretty much on the same page as far as basic social instincts go. Most of us feel compassion, have a sense of fairness and reciprocity, and the abiity to "mind-read" others of our kind so as to intuit their emotional states.

But other than that, whatever moral ideas are built atop it are all over the map.

The video implicitly acknowledges that by saying...

You seem to think that the immaterial influence of a moral or immoral sight is not objective, when it is. For example, there are undeniable effects of an immoral image, or better yet, evil image that demonstrates that there is indeed a metaphysical element that goes beyond the material or concrete or phenomenal events associated with the image. A person's beliefs have real subjective impact and in the Quantum realm, the subjective IS the objective inside out and has influence on the wavefunction!