Remember Your Creator: God is Necessary for Grounding Moral Axioms; this is not Devine Command Theory

Discussion on CARM with Poster "Lance:" he argues that we don't need God for morality because by imposing "moral realism" we can see moral axioms as "real" and true just becuase they are. The problem with this view, as I pointed out, is that you just can't stipulate that moral values are true merely because you want them to be. All values are subjective, all values are relative. That's why ethicist say we need to ground our axioms in something bigger than just the value itself (such as social contract theory, divine command theory, deductive logic or soemthing). Just imposing "we should" merely because we want too is violation of Hume's fork, you can't derive an ought from an is. I had contended that my reason for assuming God makes the rules is because he's the ground of being, he's the gate keeper of all that is. Not only existing things not exist without God, not only are they made according to God's purpose but they are not even potentially possible without God's thought making them potential. In my book that gives God a front row seat in deciding what's what.

(Side Bar Note to Atheists:don't borhter making a comment saying "you are assuming God exist in the first place!" Yes of course I am, becuase we are comparing grounding for moral axioms that means we have to reason "as if" each particular moral system were true to the see the consequences of it.) So this Lance fellow asserts his own ability to determine what's what and assumes that God's view is nothing more than a mere opinion no better than his own.

Originally Posted by Lance

Wow you can't keep a train of thought for even two posts can you. I ground my moral values in objective reality, like Shelly Kagan, so my moral values are real. You ground your morality in the opinion of another person, so your values are arbitrary and relative. You again and again demonstrate that you don't understand this topic, you should educate yourself before so aggressively pushing your silly ideas around.

Meta:wow you can't understand things when people say them clearly. read slow:

Grounding axioms in "objective reality" is an impossible task that doesn't work.

I already said this several times. I'm sorry you can't understand what you read. I sometimes forget atheist have trouble with reading comprehension and understanding concepts and I need to slow down for you. So let me take it more slowly:

(1) objective reality is an illusion.

(2) you are committing the fallacy of Hume's fork. you are trying to derive an ought form an is.

If we could understand objective reality, which we can't becuase we can't get outside of those old human perceptions that you don't trust (remember the "s' word? it starts with "sub..."?) if we could do that even so, you still could not ground axioms in any kind of "objective reality" because objective reality doesn't come with instruction books telling us about the ought.

that's what I meant when I said it's a value system. trying to ground a value system in something that can't be translated in to an ought is pointless.

On my boards Miles raises the problem that I'm verging on "divine command theory." I don't accept divine command theory either, although there are respectable thinkers who might. It is the view that says "God says so that makes it ture." That sounds like what I'm saying, but the problem is it means good is only good becuase God says so, so tomorrow if God says murdering babies for fun is good then it will be. That means God's views are just whims and they are only true becuase God has the power to hurt you if you don't agree. This also opens up the Euthephroe dilemma, that there's an independent standard higher than God.

My view is not the divine command theory, God's commands are not whims, they aren't merely right because God will hurt you if you don't agree but becuase the reason God gives them in the first place is that God is the true source of objectivity since he's all knowing and can understand your all feels of all sentient beings better than the beings themselves can. God's jugements are true becuase they are all knowing and because all reality is the expression of God's creative wisdom in the first place. Moraltiy is derived form love, love is the basic princile that animaltes the good; love is also God's basic character. So the "independent standard" is not independent but is God himself.

This is the difference in the atheist world and a world conceived with God in it: the difference between surface level and depth of being.

God = truth: and this is not merely divine command theory or some arbitrary thing where you have to believe because God said it. Lance and others are confused becuase they think God is just a big man with another opinion. At least it to me they must think this based upon what they say. they will say "I don't think the Christian is just a big man in the sky" but obviously they do becuase they feel perfectly justified in contradicting God's views and in saying he's just a big guy with an opinion like anyone else. I think this is exceedingly foolish.

That's not to say the alternative is divine command theory. Divine command theory would say X is good because God says so. that means if God says tomorrow that X is bad X will become bad. There's a link bewteen God's commands and truth and that link exists without God's commands being arbitrary whim that he can change. Austine argued that God is truth. Several theologians, Tillich among them, have noticed a link between love and being. Joel Gravure's summary of Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Retrospective of his theology (1988). So this means that the standard is not independent of God it is God: Love is the basis of the good, the moral, and God is love. Sicne God is truth and God is love and these part of being itself then intrinsic nature of the good is part of reality by virtue of being an expression of God's nature.


There's a reason why the Bible ways God doesn't change. he's not going to change his mind tomorrow and say murder is ok. It's not just so we can have a stable existence but because the reason he said it's wrong in first place is because his commands are consistent with the nature of love. Murder will always be unloving however you slice it.So then as it seems, it is not that God is necessary for morality, but love is necessary for morality and God is love.

For some strange reason I can't understand, when I argue this, Lance responded:"I would like to say, though, that if you believe that God is love or that God is truth, I would consider you just as much an atheist as myself. Albeit you have some very very strange metaphysical views, but your conception of God is something that I think any atheist could consistently accept."

My response:that really doesn't make much sense. you appear to be saying "if you have a more sophisticated version of God than the atheist straw man than you are an atheist" I guess the problem is you don't get what it means to believe in God. It doesn't mean belief in a big man with power. clearly that is your concept but that's a straw man argument. The result of taking the atheist straw man too seriously. The real difference in Atheism and belief is that belief in God sees a depth to being and atheism believes there is only surface. That's what you are saying when you see God as a big man with powers and refusal to think of god in those terms as atheism you are just saying "if there is no X then one doesn't believe in God" that has be becuase you ignore the possibility of depth in being. I think the atheist idea of love is surface level too. Don't you see love as just chemicals in your head?


Now the guys like Lance who are trying to do an atheist version of moral realism will say if murder is wrong then it would be wrong without God anyway. That's not true. the difference in God and not God is the difference in surface level existence and depth of being. Love comes out of the depth of being, which is what is: being itself means being more than just the existence on the surface of x,y,z but that there is something to the nature of being such that it does link up with things like turth and love.

Lance:

"You seem to be trying to say God's existence is logically necessary and that God is responsible for all things. Then to say that God is necessary for morality is tautologous."

Meta:

Greater precision in defining the meaning of statements is not a tautology. I don't know about logical necessity. God is ontologically necessary. That's all I can handle.

"The atheist does not, on the other hand, believe that God's existence is logically necessary (or even true for that matter). So the statement "God is necessary for morality" is only true if you already assume theism is true. If you do not already have the assumption that God exists then there is no reason to believe that God is necessary for morality."

Meta:

Well of cousre! no one is using this an argument for God's existence. I have a moral argument but this is not it. That should go without saying. You can't say God is necessary for morality then say that proves God exists. that would be circular.

I think he's also making a mistake in confusing "logical necessity" with empirical proof. Logical necessity means true by definition, that's what makes it tautology, but it can't be proved by observation of the world that's empirical that's a contraction to logical necessity.

The meaning of being lies in love, and knowledge is only explainable through love and for love. The will which exists in the object to open itself and the will which exists in the knowing subject to open itself in receptivity are the double form of the surrender which manifests itself in these two ways. From this follows the insight that love is never separable from the truth. Just as little as there could be knowledge with the will, so also truth is hardly knowable without love.

there we have a link between love and being itself. The two are connected. Also includes a link between love and truth. So therefore we are talking about truth, love and being itself when we speak of "God." As Garver points out (link above) we recognize our own fainted and contingency as well as the contingency of the world of things around us—and yet we are aware of being itself as something absolute and unlimited. Various philosophical and theological attempts have been made at explaining the problem of being. Some (such as Parminades) have tried to say that all things are infinite and immutable being, while others (such as Heraclitus) have said that everything is movement and becoming. The Parmenidean solution—which is also that of Buddhism and neo-Platonism—falters since anything finite must be non-being, an illusion to be discovered, and the One is attained only through mystical experience. The Heraclitean solution must end in contradiction, identifying life with death, wisdom with folly. We are left then with an inescapable dualism between finite and infinite, contingent and necessary, and so on.


In other words, Balthasar recognizes the link between love and being. That link is also the basis of knowledge, but all attempts to reconcile the sense of duality that emerges from the realization, outside of the Christian God have failed. The Christian God solves the problem through the Trinitarian solution, because God creates out a desire but not out of a need. Through Trinity God is self sufficient, containing both the other and the self at the same time. Thus, love, being, knowledge and community all wrapped up in one thing, and their place in world flows out of God's disbursement.

One final note, since we are making this connection bewteen love, being and truth, the reader might want to check out my view on "can the ground of being be personal?"

Why has the economy stopped working for everyone but the 1%?

Bill Moyers

Why has the economy stopped working fore everyone?-- Moyers

see the show

Bill Moyers has had some excellent programs recently on how big money interest changes the rules of American and led to the economic crisis of 2008, the effects of which are on going. Weather one is liberal, conservative, Tea Party or Occupy movement this a must see. It's incredible. This is not just a few little things that led to come of the problems, Moyers, traces the entire crisis back to human greed and literally a plot to change the rules by destroying protections of the middle class enacted by Roosevelt to limit unbridled risk taking by money interests. The entire system as a whole failed to secure us form the problem, and almost brought about systemic financial failure and all of this can be traced to greed.

Moyers is not interviewing wild eyed radicals. He's talking to conservatives who are still involved in the banking industry. John Reed former Citibanck CEO, for example. He's now at MIT. The Glass-Steagall act was eliminated so that investment firms could the middle class and take greater risks. Moyers interview with Reed examines this process. Republicans had been working on the destruction of Glass Steagall for a long time, one of the major leaders in that plot was former Texas Senator Phil Graham. Reed helped bring about the destruction of the act and now is crusading to alter people as to the major mistake that this was.

Moyer's blog

Reed served as co-chair of Citigroup from its creation in 1998 until his retirement in 2000. He later served as the interim CEO at the New York Stock Exchange, where he established new governance protocols as the NYSE became a public entity. Since 2010, he has served as the Chairman of the MIT Corporation, the governing body of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The same year, he testified before the Senate Banking Committee and came out in support of the Volcker Rule, a regulation that would restrict U.S. banks from taking part in speculative investments that do not benefit consumers. The Volcker Rule has been compared to the Glass-Steagall Act, the same law that Reed worked to repeal in order to make the Citigroup merger legal. Today, Reed continues to be a vocal supporter of strong financial reform.

The most thing that comes out of these interviews is how planned it was. How they all knew what they were doing and just rationalized it with the valuing of greed. The one major thing coming out of republican candidates now is to blame the democrats and liberals for the economy via the cry against government regulation. It was that say tactic that destroy Glass-Steagall; they speak of environmental burdens on small business but what they really want to eliminate is the regulations that protect homeowners, middle class workers, and tax payers. The rich don't pay taxes that much. Wealth among the top one percent has gown 250% while among everyone else it's grown about 10% and that's only becuase this is include the rich who are not in the 1%. It's obvious that real economic loss is in the Trillions and it comes from the foreclosures, the near callable of banking, the near death of American industry and this is all coming from, not EPA, not welfare, not liberals taxing the middle class, but bailouts for big money, the collapse of the housing industry,the two wars and the economics contractions brought on by the ensuring results of these problems.

Each problem in this chain goes back to greed. This is directly traceable to the writings of Ayn Rand. Alan Greenspan was a Randian and the moneyed interests of the 1990s turned to Rand as a means of stoking their ideology of "greed is good" that allowed them justify their rape of the middle and lower class.

Moyers also Talks to former Senator Byron Dorgan. Dorgan fought to save the Glass-Steagall act and also to make banks play by the rules. Speaking of Glass-Steagall Drogan says: “If you were to rank big mistakes in the history of this country,” Dorgan tells Moyers, “that was one of the bigger ones, because it has set back this country in a very significant way and caused so much heartbreak and heartache, and a near total collapse of the American economy. ”


former Senator Byron Dorgan
to see interview click here

"It's the have it all vs everyone else"
see Moyer's show on "winner Take all Politics"

Answering Brap: Understanding Mystical Eperience

These are comments that were sent to me by Brap a we days ago. Brap is an atheist who makes good comments and pretends to be an alien exploring our world for the first time, which enables him to play the stranger and force me to explain the obvious (at least I think he's pretending...).


Brap:

He [Sam Harris] is saying there is more to these experiences than simply being in awe of nature, but there is no basis to extrapolate from these personal experiences (universal or not) to anything about the origin of the universe.

Meta: certainly there is. the historical association says it all. It's just a matter of preferring a different metaphor.

Brap:

Can you expand on “the historical association?” I don’t recall seeing that term in this context before.

Meta: The original term "super nature" was coined in 500 by pseudo Dionysus.what he meant by the term was the transformative sense of the experiences. So Mystical experience is by its every nature a priori supernatural. It's in the enlightenment that the term SN was changed to mean magic or other realms of something beyond what is natural. The real term refers to the process of experince whereby one is elevated in consciousness.

So by that definition the word “supernatural” simply refers to the changes (mental, physical, whatever) one goes through during (and after?) a mystical experience, correct? I’m ok with that definition, so let’s go with that. Now since that doesn’t seem to imply the existence of anything outside of the natural world, how does one get from “mystical experience” to “God exists?”

The historical association goes back way before that. It could go back to stone age or even Nanderthal times. That's harder to prove, but as we look at late neolithic humans we see they seemed to experience a sense of the numinous in they developed thoughts of after life, decoration of implements pertaining to it, mazes and other artifacts that seem to indicate the were experiencing spiritual phenomena. Certainly as long as writing has been around people have written about such things.

Moreover,not only the historical association but also the content of the experience indicates its an experience of the divine. Most of them time people say they are experiencing holiness, or deity or the divine, all pervasive love; it's giving them a sense of the oneness of things but more than that, it's most often wrapped up in a sense of the divine.



Brap:

Can you provide some examples of outcomes (of mystical experiences) that can’t be explained by natural means?

two of the best early studies demonstrate the experimental group as a whole experienced certain things:

Wuthnow, Robert (1978). "Peak Experiences: Some Empirical Tests." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18 (3), 59-75.

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

21% more likely to experience these things lasting for the first year after the experience. One can also have them again.



Noble, Kathleen D. (1987). ``Psychological Health and the Experience of Transcendence.'' The Counseling Psychologist, 15 (4), 601-614.

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

From Council on Spiritual Practices Website

"States of Univtive Consciousness"


Brap:

When you say “the content of the experience is usually about God or the divine or the meaning of life,” what exactly do you mean? Is that how the people who have a mystical experience describe it?

Yes, they are overwhelmingly religious in content, meaning in most cases they are associated this way.

Examples:

An example of the sort of experience is found in a study by Robinson.[i]

Finally, Robinson (1977) found that 15% of his adult respondents spoke of childhood mystical experiences. As this from a 40 year old female:

When I was eleven years old I spent part of a summer holiday in the Wye Valley. Waking up very early one bright morning, before any of the household was about, I left my bed and went to kneel on the window seat, to look out over the curve, which the river took just below the house. The trees between the house and river ... The scene was very beautiful, and quite suddenly I felt myself on the verge of a great revelation. It was as if I had stumbled unwittingly on a place where I was not expected, and was about to be initiated into some wonderful mystery, something of indescribable significance. Then, just as suddenly, the feeling faded. But for the brief seconds while it lasted I had known that in some strange way I, the essential "me", was a part of the trees, of the sunshine, and the river, that we all belonged to some great unity. I was left filled with exhilaration and exultation of spirit. This is one of the most memorable experiences of my life, of a quite different quality and greater intensity than the sudden lift of the spirit one may often feel when confronted with beauty in Nature (p. 37).(quoted by Gackenback)[ii]

Another example (this one from William James used by William Alston):

“…all at once I…felt the presence of God—I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it—as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether…I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day to day, in humility and poverty, leaving him the Almighty God, to judge of whether I should some time be called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the communion, which he had granted.[iii]

Still another example, used by Alston:

There was no sensible vision, but the room was filled by a Presence, which in a strange way was both about me and within me. I was overwhelmingly possessed by Someone who was not myself, and yet I felt I was more myself than I had ever been before.[iv]

---

Brap:

Or do people have a hard time describing it, so that’s the closest our language can come to describing it? If people have a hard time describing it in our current language, how do we know it’s really about God or the divine and not simply some mental state not yet fully explained or documented by science?

The concept is that you can't communicate the experience in words. It's like trying to transcribe music you hear in your head to paper, it's never going to be the same. The nature of language is metaphorical and religoius language is analogy. Within an analogical framework people are lucid about what they describe. The examples above seem lucid to me.

Brap:

The following quote is attributed to Hippocrates: “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things.” Is it possible that mystical experiences are considered divine because we don't really understand what's going on in that state of consciousness?

That's argument from analogy. Epilepsy seems like mystical experience, not because its not understood but becuase both convey a sense of total peace and a sense of understanding all things for a certain time, which then fades away. This is argument from analogy since both seem similar in texture of the experience that doesn't mean they are cased by the same things. It's possible that both effect similar centers of the brain. That doesnt' reduce mystical experince to something that originates only in Brain Chemistry. Epilepsy doesn't have the kind of track record for totally transforming people's lives in ways that make them better across the board. A couple of hindered studies show that mystical experience dos so.



[i]Quoted in Gackenback , Jayne. website: “Trans personal Childhood Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness: Literature Review and Theoretical Integration” (unpublished paper 1992) URL: http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/cehsc/ipure.htm (last visited summer 2008)

[ii] ibid

[iii] anonymous report in James (Verities of Religious Experience, 67-68) Quoted by William Alston, Perceiving God, the Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1991, 1993, 13.

[iv] Timothy Breadsworth, A Sense of Presence (1977) in Ibid, 17.

Proto-pan-psychism:Tying up Lose ends in theology

I said that I would answer certain comments made by Brap in the comment section which pertain to my arguments on religious experience. I'm still going to get around to those and I hope Brap will forgive me for pushing them back to Wednesday. This was a post I put on CARM the other where atheists were going wild with certain kinds of statements they always make, such as "where did God come from, what caused God?" that sort of thing.I decided to try and tie it all up in one post.

I see a whole host of problems talked about in many threads that can be all done away with just a couple of simple ideas.

problems:
God simple or complex?
where does God come from?
why doesn't God need a cause?
Is God a brute fact?
Is God indifferent?

Answers:

"God" is a term for a category of existence not a name for a guy. god is not a big man in the sky but a from of existence all its own--eternal, necessary, aka "primordial being."
The nature of that level of existence (the divine) can be varied and debated: for my money the most rational understanding is that God is a mind and the reality we know and take to be so solid is a thought in that mind.

"God" is the framework in which all this stuff of matter, and chemicals and biology cohere and take place. It's analogous to a big mind that is thinking the processes that are contained in that framework.

Because it's a mind is not indifferent, it does love it capable of caring but since it works on a level beyond our understanding we can't really know what it's up to or how it's worked things out or how it's concern is motivated except in so far as we can become agents of its will and express its love for others.

Because it's the basis of reality we can't compare it to things we understand. So we can't say "it's simple," "it's complex" those terms have no more meaning for that level of being as do the terms "up" and "down"in outer space. To use those terms one must have a standard where "up" is always a certain pole and it's opposite is "down." you can't establish that with God becuase God is not a thing in creation but is the mind that creates the reality we think of as "the world."

We are figments in an imagination we take that to be solid "reality" when in reality it's just an idea in a mind. I call this idea "proto-pan-pshychism." Pan psychism is the idea that mind is part of nature. Or that matter is conscoius. I don't any reason to assume that when the same basic evidence of it can also point to a mind not part of matter but standing behind nature, so to speak. This view related to Berkeley but of cousre isn't exactly the same. Berkeley thought that God's observation of reality made it real. I am arguing that God actively thinks reality into being. A similar view is hinted at in my Berkeley-Gaswami God argument. This argument tends to really anger atheists and they always demand immediate proof. Some proof is offered in the argument from temporal beginning (another God argument) where I argue that only a mind really answers the problem of temporal beginning. One might also see my fire in the equations re-boot, as well as my version of the fine tuning argument as these also imply the necessity of a mind in creation.

New paradigms in scientific thinking are on the horizon which radically change our notions of what consciousness is. We tend to think of consciousness as the side effect or sellf awareness that comes from brain activity. This is no longer the only way to think about it as some physicists are actaully willing to consider other views.
One of those is Amit Goswamai, a Physicist teaching at the university of Organ.
Craig Hamilton tells us:

Goswami is convinced, along with a number of others who subscribe to the same view, that the universe, in order to exist, requires a conscious sentient being to be aware of it. Without an observer, he claims, it only exists as a possibility. And as they say in the world of science, Goswami has done his math. Marshaling evidence from recent research in cognitive psychology, biology, parapsychology and quantum physics, and leaning heavily on the ancient mystical traditions of the world, Goswami is building a case for a new paradigm that he calls "monistic idealism," the view that consciousness, not matter, is the foundation of everything that is.

Goswami himself says:

The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter, the basic constituents—building blocks—of matter. And cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary particles. This is the belief—all cause moves from the elementary particles. This is what we call "upward causation." So in this view, what human beings—you and I—think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an illusion. This is the current paradigm.

Now, the opposite view is that everything starts with consciousness.That is, consciousness is the ground of all being. In this view, consciousness imposes "downward causation." In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world we really are acting with causal power. This view does not deny that matter also has causal potency—it does not deny that there is causal power from elementary particles upward, so there is upward causation—but in addition it insists that there is also downward causation. It shows up in our creativity and acts of free will, or when we make moral decisions. In those occasions we are actually witnessing downward causation by consciousness.

Goswami actually says that consciousness is the ground of being. This is because the ground of being is what being is grounded in, and if that is consciousness, if the nature of existence is to be a thought in a mind, than the ground of being is consciousness.

Another Physicist, Peter Russell, who studied at Cambridge with professor Hawking also supports Goswami's Vedantic assumptions.

The really hard problem-as David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, has said-is consciousness itself. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain lead to an inner experience? Why doesn't it all go on in the dark, without any subjective aspect? Why do we have any inner life at all?

This paradox-namely, the absolutely undeniable existence of human consciousness set against the complete absence of any satisfactory scientific account for it-suggests to me that something is seriously amiss with the contemporary scientific worldview. For a long time I could not put my finger on exactly what it was. Then suddenly, about four years ago on a flight back to San Francisco, I saw where the error lay.

If consciousness is not some emergent property of life, as Western science supposes, but is instead a primary quality of the cosmos-as fundamental as space, time, and matter, perhaps even more fundamental-then we arrive at a very different picture of reality. As far as our understanding of the material world goes, nothing much changes; but when it comes to our understanding of mind, we are led to a very different worldview indeed. I realized that the hard problem of consciousness was not a problem to be solved so much as the trigger that would, in time, push Western science into what the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a "paradigm shift."

The continued failure of science to make any appreciable headway into this fundamental problem suggests that, to date, all approaches may be on the wrong track. They are all based on the assumption that consciousness emerges from, or is dependent upon, the physical world of space, time, and matter. In one way or another they are trying to accommodate the anomaly of consciousness within a worldview that is intrinsically materialist. As happened with the medieval astronomers, who kept adding more and more epicycles to explain the anomalous motions of the planets, the underlying assumptions are seldom, if ever, questioned.

I now believe that rather than trying to explain consciousness in terms of the material world, we should be developing a new worldview in which consciousness is a fundamental component of reality. The key ingredients for this new paradigm-a "superparadigm"-are already in place. We need not wait for any new discoveries. All we need do is put various pieces of our existing knowledge together, and consider the new picture of reality that emerges.

Consciousness and Reality
Because the word "consciousness" can be used in so many different ways, confusion often arises around statements about its nature. The way I use the word is not in reference to a particular state of consciousness, or particular way of thinking, but to the faculty of consciousness itself-the capacity for inner experience, whatever the nature or degree of the experience.

A useful analogy is the image from a video projector. The projector shines light onto a screen, modifying the light so as to produce any one of an infinity of images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we experience-what I call the "contents of consciousness." The light itself, without which no images would be possible, corresponds to the faculty of consciousness.

We know all the images on the screen are composed of this light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself; our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but we are usually aware only of the many different experiences, thoughts, and feelings that appear in the mind. We are seldom aware of consciousness itself. Yet without this faculty there would be no experience of any kind.

The faculty of consciousness is one thing we all share, but what goes on in our consciousness, the content of our consciousness, varies widely. This is our personal reality, the reality we each know and experience. Most of the time, however, we forget that this is just our personal reality and think we are experiencing physical reality directly. We see the ground beneath our feet; we can pick up a rock, and throw it through the air; we feel the heat from a fire, and smell its burning wood. It feels as if we are in direct contact with the world "out there." But this is not so. The colors, textures, smells, and sounds we experience are not really "out there"; they are all images of reality constructed in the mind.

It was this aspect of perception that most caught my attention during my studies of experimental psychology (and amplified by my readings of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant). At that time, scientists were beginning to discover the ways in which the brain pieces together its perception of the world, and I was fascinated by the implications of these discoveries for the way we construct our picture of reality. It was clear that what we perceive and what is actually out there are two different things.

This, I know, runs counter to common sense. Right now you are aware of the pages in front of you, various objects around you, sensations in your own body, and sounds in the air. Even though you may understand that all of this is just your reconstruction of reality, it still seems as if you are having a direct perception of the physical world. And I am not suggesting you should try to see it otherwise. What is important for now is the understanding that all our experience is an image of reality constructed in the mind.

At least some scientists are willing to think of consciousness along new lines, not just as a property of an biological organism stemming from brain chemistry. These two are practicing a form of Hindu mysticism called "Vedanta," I am not in line with Vedanta. But I do agree that reality is a thought in the mind of God. I think this is the answer to many theological problems.

It would make no sense to ask where this primordial nature of being comes from because it's eternal. Time is created by the mind that thinks the universe it s function is that of a conventional frame of reference for us like up and down. It's a temporal up and down.

God is no more subject to these things than we are to day dreams.

For this same reason God doesn't need a cause. We can't speak of God as "brute fact." Brute facts are problematic and may be discounted as exiting merely becuase they are brute facts. God is not a brute fact because the definition of that it has no purpose either within itself or from without.

God's purpose can't be bestowed upon him from without because there's nothing higher.He's the end of the series. The purpose of God is within God. The purpose stems form God's postilion as eternal necessary being, and that is giving and bestowing upon the beings (the contingencies the consequences of its thinking).

In other words love. Love (giving--the will to the good of the other) is the primary attribute of god and is linked to being at the primordial level.

Thus God is not indifferent. God is not without purpose but the purpose of God is within God himself as the mind.

This has often prompted atheists to charge that I'm not a Christian and they call it "new age" to mock it. I'm not new age. I have no affilation with anything one might call "new age." I think new age is bubble brain. This is not new age, pan psychism is not what I support. My view is not that it just bounces off the body of evidence they use and bends the trajectory of some of it to the service of God. There is no statement in Christian doctrine that ays "God is not thinking the universe." The Bible says God spoke creation into existence. What's the difference in speaking it and thinking it? Just becuase I've thought of a way that most christian haven't hit upon yet to answer certain questions doesn't mean it's not within the bounds of Christian doctrine. I use evidence from eclectic sources. Russell and Gaswami are not Christians and do qualify closer to being "new age" than I would like. They also offer knowledge of physicists and show there is a movement among phsyicists, which dos illicit the ire of colleagues, I want to expose both Christians and atheists to thinking outside the box.

Answering Brap: Understanding Mystical Expernice

These are comments that were sent to me by Brap a we days ago. Brap is an atheist who makes good comments and pretends to be an alien exploring our world for the first time, which enables him to play the stranger and force me to explain the obvious (at least I think he's pretending...).


Brap:

He [Sam Harris] is saying there is more to these experiences than simply being in awe of nature, but there is no basis to extrapolate from these personal experiences (universal or not) to anything about the origin of the universe.

Meta: certainly there is. the historical association says it all. It's just a matter of preferring a different metaphor.

Brap:

Can you expand on “the historical association?” I don’t recall seeing that term in this context before.

Meta: The original term "super nature" was coined in 500 by pseudo Dionysus.what he meant by the term was the transformative sense of the experiences. So Mystical experience is by its every nature a priori supernatural. It's in the enlightenment that the term SN was changed to mean magic or other realms of something beyond what is natural. The real term refers to the process of experince whereby one is elevated in consciousness.

So by that definition the word “supernatural” simply refers to the changes (mental, physical, whatever) one goes through during (and after?) a mystical experience, correct? I’m ok with that definition, so let’s go with that. Now since that doesn’t seem to imply the existence of anything outside of the natural world, how does one get from “mystical experience” to “God exists?”

The historical association goes back way before that. It could go back to stone age or even Nanderthal times. That's harder to prove, but as we look at late neolithic humans we see they seemed to experience a sense of the numinous in they developed thoughts of after life, decoration of implements pertaining to it, mazes and other artifacts that seem to indicate the were experiencing spiritual phenomena. Certainly as long as writing has been around people have written about such things.

Moreover,not only the historical association but also the content of the experience indicates its an experience of the divine. Most of them time people say they are experiencing holiness, or deity or the divine, all pervasive love; it's giving them a sense of the oneness of things but more than that, it's most often wrapped up in a sense of the divine.



Brap:

Can you provide some examples of outcomes (of mystical experiences) that can’t be explained by natural means?

two of the best early studies demonstrate the experimental group as a whole experienced certain things:

Wuthnow, Robert (1978). "Peak Experiences: Some Empirical Tests." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18 (3), 59-75.

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

21% more likely to experience these things lasting for the first year after the experience. One can also have them again.



Noble, Kathleen D. (1987). ``Psychological Health and the Experience of Transcendence.'' The Counseling Psychologist, 15 (4), 601-614.

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

From Council on Spiritual Practices Website

"States of Univtive Consciousness"


Brap:

When you say “the content of the experience is usually about God or the divine or the meaning of life,” what exactly do you mean? Is that how the people who have a mystical experience describe it?

Yes, they are overwhelmingly religious in content, meaning in most cases they are associated this way.

Examples:

An example of the sort of experience is found in a study by Robinson.[i]

Finally, Robinson (1977) found that 15% of his adult respondents spoke of childhood mystical experiences. As this from a 40 year old female:

When I was eleven years old I spent part of a summer holiday in the Wye Valley. Waking up very early one bright morning, before any of the household was about, I left my bed and went to kneel on the window seat, to look out over the curve, which the river took just below the house. The trees between the house and river ... The scene was very beautiful, and quite suddenly I felt myself on the verge of a great revelation. It was as if I had stumbled unwittingly on a place where I was not expected, and was about to be initiated into some wonderful mystery, something of indescribable significance. Then, just as suddenly, the feeling faded. But for the brief seconds while it lasted I had known that in some strange way I, the essential "me", was a part of the trees, of the sunshine, and the river, that we all belonged to some great unity. I was left filled with exhilaration and exultation of spirit. This is one of the most memorable experiences of my life, of a quite different quality and greater intensity than the sudden lift of the spirit one may often feel when confronted with beauty in Nature (p. 37).(quoted by Gackenback)[ii]

Another example (this one from William James used by William Alston):

“…all at once I…felt the presence of God—I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it—as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether…I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day to day, in humility and poverty, leaving him the Almighty God, to judge of whether I should some time be called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the communion, which he had granted.[iii]

Still another example, used by Alston:

There was no sensible vision, but the room was filled by a Presence, which in a strange way was both about me and within me. I was overwhelmingly possessed by Someone who was not myself, and yet I felt I was more myself than I had ever been before.[iv]

---

Brap:

Or do people have a hard time describing it, so that’s the closest our language can come to describing it? If people have a hard time describing it in our current language, how do we know it’s really about God or the divine and not simply some mental state not yet fully explained or documented by science?

The concept is that you can't communicate the experience in words. It's like trying to transcribe music you hear in your head to paper, it's never going to be the same. The nature of language is metaphorical and religoius language is analogy. Within an analogical framework people are lucid about what they describe. The examples above seem lucid to me.

Brap:

The following quote is attributed to Hippocrates: “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things.” Is it possible that mystical experiences are considered divine because we don't really understand what's going on in that state of consciousness?

That's argument from analogy. Epilepsy seems like mystical experience, not because its not understood but becuase both convey a sense of total peace and a sense of understanding all things for a certain time, which then fades away. This is argument from analogy since both seem similar in texture of the experience that doesn't mean they are cased by the same things. It's possible that both effect similar centers of the brain. That doesnt' reduce mystical experince to something that originates only in Brain Chemistry. Epilepsy doesn't have the kind of track record for totally transforming people's lives in ways that make them better across the board. A couple of hindered studies show that mystical experience dos so.



[i]Quoted in Gackenback , Jayne. website: “Trans personal Childhood Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness: Literature Review and Theoretical Integration” (unpublished paper 1992) URL: http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/cehsc/ipure.htm (last visited summer 2008)

[ii] ibid

[iii] anonymous report in James (Verities of Religious Experience, 67-68) Quoted by William Alston, Perceiving God, the Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1991, 1993, 13.

[iv] Timothy Breadsworth, A Sense of Presence (1977) in Ibid, 17.

The Importance of Humans and the Importance of Self Acceptence

Originally Posted by Dr Pepper

Some theists will say that Atheism is a self-centered ego-centric belief since does not acknowledges a superior being. I maintain that it is exactly the opposite case.

Theists maintain that they are so important that they had to be created special in the image of a God. Not only that, but said God is concerned about them personally to the point that it cares about their behavior, even about who they sleep with. In addition, they are so loved that all they have to do is believe in a specific dogma and they will be resurrected from death to spend eternity in a special place specifically designed for them.

This has got to be one of the most bizarre ideas a mind can conceive. And they have the audacity to call atheists self-centered and egotistical.

It has always been very curious to me how atheists can so thoroughly warp the meanings of the gospel and then when one straightens them out it doesn't even phase them that they got it wrong. This mess really muddles the Gospel and totally distorts Christian belief. We find out latter in the thread that he knows he's doing that.

Theists maintain that they are so important that they had to be created special in the image of a God.

This makes it sound like theists (Of cousre by that he means Christians) thnk they personally were created special but other humans were not. In fact of course Christians believe that human are created in the image of God.

Not only that, but said God is concerned about them personally to the point that it cares about their behavior, even about who they sleep with.

That creates the impression that God is just concerned with a given Christian sleeping with the wrong person. Can you imagine God telling a Christian woman "that guy isn't rich enough, you need to be sleeping with this other guy." That's how he makes it sound. Not only is it all people that God is concerned with but not because of some petty sense or micro-managing of sleeping arrangements. It's about emotional behavior and what we do to hurt others.

In addition, they are so loved that all they have to do is believe in a specific dogma and they will be resurrected from death to spend eternity in a special place specifically designed for them.

Of course it's not about getting off easy with some specialty dogma. It's not the act of accepting dogma that saves its the act of trusting Jesus' atonement on the cross that saves. Jesus death on the cross is God's statement of solidarity with humanity. When we accept and trust that statement we are in effect returning the agreement of solidarity with God. If we re in solidarity God has forgiven us a prori. That means the act of trusting trusting God's solidarity (his desire to identify with and be related to us) creates the ground of forgiveness. That's an act of love basically. It's not meeting a requirement for special belief system that saves us but God's love and your acceptance of God's forgiveness.

This has got to be one of the most bizarre ideas a mind can conceive. And they have the audacity to call atheists self-centered and egotistical.

Actually I think self centered is really a compensation for lack of self acceptance.I've shown that there are studies* that show atheists have low self esteem.

People with low self esteem often seem to think that those who have self confidence or a positive self image are arrogant and egotistical. Those who are truly egocentric are trying to compensate for real feelings of inferiority or fears about their ability. One thing that atheists can't accept is the fact that knowing God will fix your self image if you allow it to. I used to have a total inferiority complex and feelings of self loathing. Atheists always accuse me of being egotistical becuase I know I'm loved and I'm confident in who I am in the Lord. To them that's unforgivable pride. I also don't see any reason to persuade the otherwise. The prospect of making posts that say "I am humble, I really am" is absurd.

DP makes it sound like he thinks Christians believe God creates only Christians in the image of God. Yet latter he admits he knows better, he just thinks Christians make it sound that way. Well maybe some do. I can see making that criticism of the fundie Calvinist types. Yet HRG (the Austrian Mathematician and atheist guru of the CARM atheist board) answers a question in saying that "man is the only known measure of all things." So how does that make atheism sound?




*part 2

How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong

Book Review:
The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong. by by William C. Placher, John Knox Press, 1996.

This is a ground breaking book. I would not be surprised to learn that it was ignored for the most part. I read part of it in the 90s and forgot all about until recently when my old professor form Perkins, William S. Babcock, recommended it for something things I am studying at present. This book brought back for me some of my former quests as a beginning and pre seminarian and observations I made by then, late 80s and wanted to make good on and was side tracked from. This book is ground breaking and deserves to be seen as the seminal literary event in theology for that 90s. I'm sure it wasn't seen that way by the theological community.

Placher was writting mid 90s and begins his work discussing how theology in that decade was laced with either talk of postmodenism and atteapts to expalin what "modern" is, or attacks upon "classical theism" which focus on "static" notions of a remote God distantly orchastrating hierarchies and all the other bad things Derridians feared. These were the classic signs of the times in '96. These concerns promped Placher to seek the divide that separates seventeenth century form per seventeenth century Christianity. That there is a divide is seperated by the distinction bewteen the Luther talks about God and the way those arguign against Deism in the time of Tillotson and Stillingfleet argued about God. They God seem like a thing in creation. Here one will recognize a great deal of the terminology I use which I find all over this book. I didn't read it that much I don't think I got it form the book. Yet he definitely has the same concerns and use many of the phrases I thought were my own. Some of these concerns cross paths with Tillich. So how did we go from Augustine's "God who is closer to me than my inmost being" to God as an efficient cause for things that happen in the world?

Placher focuses on seventeenth century divines who were no longer content to experience a reality beyond our understanding, but wanted to think it out to the level of obliterating all problems of understanding. For theologians before the seventeenth century God's transcendence was not "contrastive." Talk about transcendence did not make God less immanent. The mystics of the mid dark ages (Dionysus 500AD) spoke of God as totally remote in some vastly far flung realm, but didn't make God non participatory or absent from the world. It was becasue God was transcendent (transcendence also includes immanence) that God could be immanent in all of creation (Placher, 128).

Since God was not one agent among others, but operated at a different level of agency it made no sense to ask which things had been done by God or which things has been done by someone or something else.AT the begining of the modern era, however,theologians and philosophers began to worry about just where to put God in the universe. Debates about miracles and about Grace and free will dominated the theology of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and both of those debates involved asking which things God, as oppossed to someone or something else, did.(ibid)

The nature of thought about the world at that time creates forces that influenced theologians to seek to explain God's place in the world in such a way as to locate him in the world alongside things. Placher talks about language growing in univocity, that means stripping it of indications of higher realms. Also the turn away from viewing reality as a hierarchy of levels made up of remote realms (ibid). This all goes hand in hand with what Fairweather says in his essay on "Christianity and the Supernatural" (New Theology No 1, circa 1964, ed. Martin E. Marty). He traces the bifurcation of immanence and transcendence to enlightenment univocity and Reformation equivocity. In other words, the enlightenment became reductionist and grounding everything in phsyical scinece sought immediate and visible sense data oriented explaitions for psychical reality alone. While the Calvinist severed the relation between the world and the spirit, the immanent and transcendent, the harmonious relation between the two facets of the one reality that Fairweather talks about and put emphasis upon the "other worldly." Then becuase the two (immanent and transcendent, nature and super nature) are not harmoionous anymore to bind them together a phony supernaturalism that magnifies some aspect of nature (the will) and places it over against the rest of nature as a false transcendent based upon something we know and can understand.

This is all Fariweather's notion form the article in the anthology edited by Marty but Placher follows along those same lines. He goes into much greater detail in his book than Fairweather did in an article. These are also the ideas behind my essay on Supernature on Doxa. Placher's work is invaluable for understanding the SN and for answering the problematic questions raised by atheists in their desire to disprove concept of alternative realms. The athist oncept of SN as a realm beyond the natural is an extension of both tendencies form the enlightenment and from the Calvinists. It's an attempt to put God on a level with things in creation while denouncing the concept of God as 'removed' or 'unnecessary' or 'something beyond the realm we can control.'

Placher provides a complex and nuanced understanding of the thinking which created the divide between a world charged by supernatural and world forever collapsed into one dimension of nature, one voice (univocal).This has to be understood if we are going to re-claim historical Christianity and move beyond the reductionism that currently threatens the very possibility of belief. It's a powerful weapon in my arsenal to wave about in the face of those who butcher the meaning of supernatural. It belongs up there with books like Nature and Grace by Mathias Joseph Scheeben which explicated the meaning of the Supernatural.

Why Did God Create? Atheist Assumptions about Free Will Defense

Originally Posted by hsmithson

In discussions about fine-tuning/design, it is usually taken for granted that God would want to create stuff. But it doesn’t seem obvious to me that he would want to create anything. Outside of pointing to a specific theology (which seems kind of question-begging), how could we possibly know what God’s preferences are when it comes to creating versus not creating? Could we perhaps argue as follows?

(1) If God exists, then he would ensure that the best possible world exists.
(2) Because God is maximally great, the possible world containing God and nothing else is the best possible world.
(3) Therefore, if God exists, he would not create anything.

I don’t have any real confidence in this argument, but I’m curious how people would object to it. And aside from the argument's success/failure, I’m curious how we can know whether or not God would create stuff.

That's just tailor made to find fault with God. set up your own expectations which obviously haven't been met, then you can blame God for not meeting them.

You are also assuming God is like a big man becuase you seem him as building contractor in the sky. He has to have a man's style of rational reason for doing something, he's gonna do it in a way that you can understand and approve. There's no reason to assume that.

You don't even understand all human motivations for doing things. if God were a big artist in the sky he might create for a pure reason of artistic creativity. Could you relate to that? Could you call it a failure?

The basic assumption in p1 is basically utilitarian at least. That's going to be a major assumption that most atheists will make. It's assumes the only consideration God has to work with is pleasure over pain. It also assumes there can't be any higher goal than avoiding pain. Atheits are often asking things like "why God just ignore sin? why can't God just give amnesty and everyone enjoy themselves?" This assumes there's no higher reason than pleasure over pain.

In my view God created becuase he wanted free moral agents who willing choose the good. That's why he constructs a world that is morally neutral and that doesn't give off obvious indications of having been created. That way we have to seek truth and come to a conclusion about why we are here and the existence of God.

He's left obvious clues that set us on the right path if we are to seek with he heart. If what I'm saying is true the real challenge is to find what it means to seek with the heart. This has a close bearing on my free will defense. Atheists most often ask why did God create so they can charge God with being absent since the world is so screwed up. The answer to that is the free will defense.

Let's examine my basic assumptions in making this arguemnt, and I will show how I use it to answer arguments about why does God allow pain and evil?

Basic assumptions

There are three basic assumptions that are hidden, or perhaps not so obivioius, but nevertheless must be dealt with here.

(1) The assumption that God wants a "moral universe" and that this value outweighs all others.


The idea that God wants a moral universe I take from my basic view of God and morality. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics) I assume that love is the background of the moral universe (this is also an Augustinian view). I also assume that there is a deeply ontological connection between love and Being. Axiomatically, in my view point, love is the basic impetus of Being itself. Thus, it seems reasonable to me that, if morality is an upshot of love, or if love motivates moral behavior, then the creation of a moral universe is essential.


(2) that internal "seeking" leads to greater internalization of values than forced compliance or complaisance that would be the result of intimidation.

That's a pretty fair assumption. We all know that people will a lot more to achieve a goal they truly beileve in than one they merely feel forced or obligated to follow but couldn't care less about.

(3)the the drama or the big mystery is the only way to accomplish that end.

The pursuit of the value system becomes a search of the heart for ultimate meaning,that ensures that people continue to seek it until it has been fully internalized.

The argument would look like this:


(1)God's purpose in creation: to create a Moral Universe, that is one in which free moral agents willingly choose the Good.

(2) Moral choice requires absolutely that choice be free (thus free will is necessitated).

(3) Allowance of free choices requires the risk that the chooser will make evil choices

(4)The possibility of evil choices is a risk God must run, thus the value of free outweighs all other considerations, since without there would be no moral universe and the purpose of creation would be thwarted.


This leaves the atheist in the position of demanding to know why God doesn't just tell everyone that he's there, and that he requires moral behavior, and what that entails. Thus there would be no mystery and people would be much less inclined to sin.

This is the point where Soteriological Drama figures into it. Argument on Soteriological Drama:


(5) Life is a "Drama" not for the sake of entertainment, but in the sense that a dramatic tension exists between our ordinary observations of life on a daily basis, and the ultimate goals, ends and purposes for which we are on this earth.

(6) Clearly God wants us to seek on a level other than the obvious, daily, demonstrative level or he would have made the situation more plain to us

(7) We can assume that the reason for the "big mystery" is the internalization of choices. If God appeared to the world in open objective fashion and laid down the rules, we would probably all try to follow them, but we would not want to follow them. Thus our obedience would be lip service and not from the heart.

(8) therefore, God wants a heart felt response which is internationalized value system that comes through the search for existential answers; that search is phenomenological; introspective, internal, not amenable to ordinary demonstrative evidence.


In other words, we are part of a great drama and our actions and our dilemmas and our choices are all part of the way we respond to the situation as characters in a drama.

This theory also explains why God doesn't often regenerate limbs in healing the sick. That would be a dead giveaway. God creates criteria under which healing takes place, that criteria can't negate the overall plan of a search.

Objection:

One might object that this couldn't outweigh babies dying or the horrors of war or the all the countless injustices and outrages that must be allowed and that permeate human history. It may seem at first glance that free will is petty compared to human suffering. But I am advocating free will for the sake any sort of pleasure or imagined moral victory that accrues from having free will, it's a totally pragmatic issue; that internalizing the value of the good requires that one choose to do so, and free will is essential if choice is required. Thus it is not a capricious or selfish defense of free will, not a matter of choosing our advantage or our pleasure over that of dying babies, but of choosing the key to saving the babies in the long run,and to understanding why we want to save them, and to care about saving them, and to actually choosing their saving over our own good.

In deciding what values outweigh other values we have to be clear about our decision making paradigm. From a utilitarian standpoint the determinate of lexically ordered values would be utility, what is the greatest good for the greatest number? This would be determined by means of outcome, what is the final tally sheet in terms of pleasure over pain to the greatest aggregate? But why that be the value system we decide by? It's just one value system and much has been written about the bankruptcy of consequentialist ethics. If one uses a deontological standard it might be a different thing to consider the lexically ordered values. Free will predominates because it allows internalization of the good. The good is the key to any moral value system. This could be justified on both deontolgoical and teleological premises.

My own moral decision making paradigm is deontological, because I believe that teleological ethics reduces morality to the decision making of a ledger sheet and forces the individual to do immoral things in the name of "the greatest good for the greatest number." I find most atheists are utilitarians so this will make no sense to them. They can't help but think of the greatest good/greatest number as the ultimate adage, and deontology as empty duty with no logic to it. But that is not the case. Deontology is not just rule keeping, it is also duty oriented ethics. The duty that we must internalize is that ultimate duty that love demands of any action. Robots don't love. One must freely choose to give up self and make a selfless act in order to act from Love. Thus we cannot have a loved oriented ethics, or we cannot have love as the background of the moral universe without free will, because love involves the will.

The choice of free will at the expense of countless lives and untold suffering cannot be an easy thing, but it is essential and can be justified from either deontolgoical or teleological perspective. Although I think the deontologcial makes more sense. From the teleological stand point, free will ultimately leads to the greatest good for the greatest number because in the long run it assumes us that one is willing to die for the other, or sacrifice for the other, or live for the other. That is essential to promoting a good beyond ourselves. The individual sacrifices for the good of the whole, very utilitarian. It is also deontolgocially justifiable since duty would tell us that we must give of ourselves for the good of the other.

Thus anyway you slice it free will outweighs all other concerns because it makes available the values of the good and of love. Free will is the key to ultimately saving the babies, and saving them because we care about them, a triumph of the heart, not just action from wrote. It's internalization of a value system without which other and greater injustices could be foisted upon an unsuspecting humanity that has not been thought to choose to lay down one's own life for the other.


Objection 2: questions


(from "UCOA" On CARM boards (atheism)

Quote:


In addition, there is no explanation of why god randomly decided to make a "moral universe".


Why do you describe the decision as random? Of course all of this is second guessing God, so the real answer is "I don't know, duh" But far be it form me to give-up without an opinion. My opinion as to why God would create moral universe:
to understand this you must understand my view of God, and that will take some doing. I'll try to just put it in a nut shell. In my view love is the background of the moral universe. The essence of "the good" or of what is moral is that which conforms to "lug." But love in the apogee sense, the will to the good of the other. I do not believe that that this is just derived arbitrarily, but is the outpouring of the wellspring of God's character. God is love, thus love is the background of the moral universe because God is the background of the moral universe.

Now I also describe God as "being itself." Meaning God is the foundation of all that is. I see a connection between love and being. Both are positive and giving and turning on in the face of nothingness, which is negativity. To say that another way, if we think of nothingness as a big drain pipe, it is threatening to **** all that exits into it. Being is the power to resist nothingness, being the stopper in the great cosmic drain pipe of non existence.

The act of bestowing being upon the beings is the nature of God because God is being. Those the two things God does because that's what he is, he "BES" (um, exists) and he gives out being bestowing it upon other beings. This is connected to love which also gives out and bestows. So being and love are connected, thus the moral universe is an outgrowth of the nature of God as giving and bestowing and being and loving.

Quote:
Thus the question isn't really answered. Why does god allow/create evil? To create a "moral universe". Why? The only answer that is given is, because he wants to. Putting it together, Why does god allow/create evil? Because he wants to?

In a nut shell, God allows evil as an inherent risk in allowing moral agency. (the reason for which is given above).


There is a big difference in doing something and allowing it to be done. God does not create evil, he allows the risk of evil to be run by the beings, because that risk is required to have free moral agency. The answer is not "because he wants to" the answer is because he wants free moral agency so that free moral agents will internalize the values of love. To have free moral agency he must allow them to:

(1)run the risk of evil choices

(2) live in a real world where hurt is part of the dice throw.

see my answers to atheist attacks on this idea in my essay: "Twelve Angry Stereotypes"