The Counter Apologoist's Attack on the Moral Argument part 2

 

The Counter Apologist continues his assault, from last Monday,[1] upon William Lane Craig's Moral argument.[2] In this section he takes up the premise "objective more values exist." He doesn't dispute that issue He faults apologists for not being ale to produce real reasons for objective moral values. He says those can work as well for atheism because they don't have to come from God, but apologists can't prove them. Apologists will often observe that life is unlivable without such moral values but that is not proof they exist. "Plus, such an appeal can do as much work for a moral system that is compatible with atheism." [3]

In my mind this is no problem  at all. First because I would make a different moral argument, and I will make it either in part 3 or 4.What I hope to accomplish here in defending an argument I don't intend to make is to show that belief in God is still stronger grounding for moral axioms than not believing in God. It doesn't have to prove God exists. I don't even argue for proof ,I only argue for warranted belief. It's not that atheists can't be moral but that belief in God is always stronger grounding. Last time I showed that his major argument is wrong, the idea that theistic moral arguments assume an untenable nondescript notion for some magical good that can't be discussed.

At this point he's going to show that the notion of objective moral values is incompatible with belief in God and so introduces the Euthyphro  dilemma. One of the atheists greatest hits this argument comes out of the writings of Plato. “Is something good because god says it is, or does god say something is good because of some other quality it has?” I dealt with the ensuing issue in a post a few months ago discussing an article by Jeff  Lowder who was defending Wes Moriston's argument. [4]  What came out of that was the same answer I'm going to give CA but I have to set it up first. At the first go round the atheist charges a dilemma, either God's will is arbitrary and capricious or God is subject to a higher authority. Of course there isn't one so most Christians take the first horn of the dilemma better a capricious God than a subordinate one. I wont follow that out because there is a better answer. It's the one I use and the Craig uses.  Go's commands are based upon his own nature, which is love, So the authority to which God heeds is his own being.

CA quotes Jeremy Koons who argues that this only pushes the problem back further but doesn't answer it. That's because he's going to go through a tiresome litany of questions like a child asking "why..,," "why..,," "why?" Why  good? why  love?  why ?..."Essentially Koon’s asks 'are the properties like loving-kindness, impartiality, and generosity good because god possesses them in his nature, or does god possess them in his nature because they are good?...'" He's going to argue that in the end the apologist is forced to accept the first side of the dilemma.

Consider a situation where two humans express love for each other. This expression of love has the same basic motivations behind it, and the same effects on both parties.  According to Divine Command Theory if god exists, this can be called good. However if god does not exist, this exact same situation cannot be called good. In short, Modified Divine Command Theory says that the intentions and consequences of an action have absolutely no bearing on the goodness of that action. This conclusion is extremely counter-intuitive, and violates our deeply held pre-theoretical moral intuitions.   The very same intuitions that apologists need to appeal to in order to justify the idea that objective moral values really do exist. This puts the apologist in a dilemma.  If they want to hold that our intuitions can be good enough to justify belief in objective moral values, then they have to deal with the fact that they must also say those intuitions are wrong about what it is that makes love good. [5]

In my answer to Morriston it came down to his argument generosity is good only because God says it's good. His answer is against modified command theory. I agree with Craig that God's character is moral is the immediate answer but Modified Command theory is not the answer. I don't argue that one. He turns the deeply held intuitions against the MDCT. The problem is I don't know if he's making a straw man argument or not. If  not Craig argues the intent of the agent doesn't play a role in goodness then Craig is confused. I doubt know that he says it. In any case Jesus tells us God Looks on the heart so the intent does matter. Jesus addresses the motives when he tells us the attitude makes the sin.  That goes back to the foundation from which I draw my overall answer about the good being based upon God's character. [6] The moral ought would be derived from duty and obligation. So the statement is true in term of Meta ethical theory. Does that mean it's also true in terms of personal guilt? If guilt is not accessed by a strict rule keeping mentality then it's not arbitrary.

Now Koons is still intent upon getting the apologist to be stuck with an arbitrary good, as is CA. Thus he quotes Koon's questions, why love? What makes love good? Is it because God says it or because there's a higher standard. The problem is they've used that trick already. It's neither. God is not loosing because he's obeying a higher standard. He is loving because his love. Nor is he loving because it's an arbitrary whim. He is loving because he is love and thus it is his nature to be loving. That is not arbitrary it's not as standard higher than God. CA ascribes morality to brute fact. There is no reason why morality is real or why a particular action is moral they just are. He turns against th believer on the basis that the atheist doesn't need a reason The believer can't prove why God is loving, the big metaphysical magic thing has been discorded so the believer has no basis for the good and the atheist doesn't need one.

Apologists who defend a Modified Divine Command Theory can’t really object here, because their solution to the problem suffers from exactly the same issue.  The concept that “god has a loving nature” is itself a brute fact!

Notice how there is no explanation as to why god’s nature is loving instead of say hateful.  Appeals to gods definition as the “greatest conceivable being” doesn’t help here because you can’t say god’s nature includes love because it is better than hate without already having a concept of moral value that is external to god’s nature.   Neither can an apologist appeal to god’s nature as a necessary being. This is because even if Christians conceive of god as having a loving nature in every possible world, there’s no logical reason as to why we couldn’t say god has a hateful nature in every possible world instead.

On all of these things both CA and Koons are very mixed up. Not the least of their befuddlement is the notion that God's love is a brute fact. God's love is not a brute fact, there is a reason for it. That reason is hinted at by the great Catholic mystic and theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar. He speaks of the nature of being in terms of being for itself, consciousness. In that encounter the horizon of all unlimited opens unto him.”[8] What he means by that is it is only through being por soir, for itself, in other words, consciousness, that we are able to comprehend the infinite and that only in contrast to the finite. Before we can do that, however, we have to become aware of ourselves so we can know we are finite. I think he’s making an implication that love is a link to being itself, and that through our encounter with love, the mother, we encounter the father, so to speak—by way of encountering love. We can see this in four truths that Balthasar finds rooted in this encounter:(1) realizing that he Is other to the mother, the only way the child realizes he loves the mother; (2) love is good, therefore, being is good; (3) love is true, therefore, being is true; (4) love evokes joy therefore being is beautiful.[9] Notice the link between being and love. He is one of the rare theologians to point out this curial link.

The one, the true, the good, the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of being, because they surpass all the limits of essence, and are coextensive with Being. If there is an insurmountable distance between God and his creature, but if there is also an analogy between them which cannot be resolved in any form of identity, there must also exist an analogy between the transcendentals—between those of the creature and those in God.[7]

In other words There is a close link between being itself and love. Because God is being itself God's nature is to love. The loving nature of God is rooted in his perfection and that in the fact that he is being itself. In this sense he is  being for itself (as Sartre says por soir). There may be a brute fact in relation to God's being but it is to at the point of love. I call brute facts connected with God "deep structures" because none of them are total without reason or without meaning, The only one that may have no higher reason grounding it is God's existence or the fact of being itself. There could note a higher purpose since that would, mean purpose higher than God's. Even though God as being itself is not the consequence of a higher purpose it is not unconnected to meaning since it is the basis of all meaning. It is at the very bottom of ontology where the only choices are something or nothing. That means nothing connected to moral values is totally arbitrary if it is grounded in God.

The are further confused because their ethics are  grounded in arbitrary brute facts. He's so proud of it thinking it's on a par with Christian ethics because the big magic whoha he imagines Christian ethics is based upon has been done away now both are on a level playing field of meaninglessness. Such is not the case to any degree. God's moral values are grounded in the deep structures of being itself while atheist values are arbitrary and meaningless. When he says "you can’t say god’s nature includes love because it is better than hate without already having a concept of moral value that is external to god’s nature" yes you can. Rather you can ground it in God himself for what he is, being itself and love and hate come after that. I've published before on why God is love and not hate. that is logical and based the same point, it's not arbitrary it's a consequence of being.[8]










[1] The Counter Apologiost, "A much longer Counter to the Moral Argument." The Counter Apologist Blog. (May 13, 2016) URL:
https://counterapologist.blogspot.com/2016/05/note-this-is-much-longer-version-of-my.html?showComment=1464336604963#c3125601153601767783
accessed 5/28/2016

[2] Craig's moral argument

(1) if God exists, there are objective moral values

(2) there are objective moral values

(3) therefore God exists.

[3] Counter Apologist, op cit.

[4] Joseph Hinman, "The Euthyphro Dilemma and the Arbitrariness Objection." Metacrock's Blog, Feb 29, 2016.
http://metacrock.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-euthyphro-dilemma-and-arbitrariness.html  accessed 6/4/16.
The arguments with Morriston are somewhat different than  CA's. zI urge the reader to read that peice.

[5] Counter Apologist op cit

[6] The foundation of my moral philosophy is Augustine's view that love is the background f the moral universe. CA claims that the statement is counter intuitive but is that because he's a consequentialist?

[7] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “A Resume of my Thought,” in David L. Schindler, Hans Urs Von Balthasar: His Life and Work. San Francisco:Ignatious Press, 1991, 3. on like version p1-2 URL:

http://books.google.com/books?id=LLhBuwGFEugC&pg=PA237&lpg=PA237&dq=Hans+Urs+Von+Balthasar+connection+between+Love+and+Being&source=bl&ots=E6-L_5GF4p&sig=A-MzjMjMmqjBqRmAaUOWGYiOUww&hl=en&ei=xrTSSdLiJdqJnAe4tNTgBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result#v=onepage&q=Hans%20Urs%20Von%20Balthasar%20connection%20between%20Love%20and%20Being&f=true

[8] this blog, how we knkow God is good and not evil

http://metacrock.blogspot.com/2014/08/how-do-we-know-god-is-not-evil.html

The Counter Apologiost Attacks The Moral Argument

The Fountain scene from La Duce Vita
one of my favorite films. I use it as symbol of
moral relativism.

 

I know nothing about this guy, who calls himself "counter apologist:" (I'll call him CA) except that he is a philosophy student somewhere in the US.I don't know graduate or undergraduate, I will say this for him, he's a good student. He is arguing against the moral argument for the existence of
God as it is ran by William Lane Craig, so it is a modified version of divine command theory. The basic argument says:

(1) if God exists, there are objective moral values

(2) there are objective moral values

(3) therefore God exists.

This is a lousy argument. I will say it up front. I never argue this  it's just a bad expression of a moral argument that I have to wonder if he isn't making  straw man hat is except it is a version WLC uses. I can't fault the guy but one does wonder why he doesn't  take on Kant's moral argument? My contention is that this argument is invalid because it's  committing the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Just because it is true that if God exists there will be objective moral values doesn't mean that the presence of objective moral values means that God exists. You would need another  premise saying that god is the only source of grounding possible. That would be pretty thought to prove. I'm going to argue the possibility of a moral argument and present my own better version. But I'm to engage CA at the point where he opposes oral realism to theistic morality.

But before we get into that there is another basic paradigm he brings into the discussion which I also want to challenge. In discussion Christian moral theology he labels the idea of God as proper grounding for moral axioms as "the grand metaphysics object" (GMO).He's doing the same thing with that phrase that Dennett is doing speaking of "wonder tissue," he's sarcastically mocking an ideal that he can't answer. That ideas is the notion that God grounds moral axioms. He can't conceive of how God could  equal a moral axiom being true so therefore it's like a magic trick just an arbitrary notion like some big magic trick. He juxtaposes this to antsiest version of moral realism where moral conclusions are just factually arbitrarily and we are given to think so, but no supernatural is required to make it so.

Before starting let me make clear my assumptions. I understand virtue ethics and deontology as two sides of the same coin. I also understand both as almost synonymous with Christian ethics. So he begins by playing what I call they wonder tissue card," that is asserting that the believer's notion of morality is some magical thinking thing that has no meaning. to witt:

Moral Realism and Atheism: "Why should we consider the 'grand metaphysical object' view of morality to be the only game in town when it comes to getting an objective morality?"  Objective could be used as a key, in that if the apologist was to use the word to mean “object-like” could be a way to insinuate that, but why would we care? We can have objective, independent reasons that apply equally to all moral agents, to adjudicate between right and wrong.   In fact, it is this second kind of objectivity that’s referred to in debates about the moral argument...

It is Hard to understand how literally he takes "object." He seems to be trying to build a straw man argument by re defining virtue/obligation in terms that portray it as "wonder tissue." [2] That is to say some kind of magic thing that can't be explained and has a reality beyond the world. of the physical; as though there is some magical moral stuff up in heaven that makes things good. It's a straw man argument because that's what religious people mean by ":the good" At least it[s not what I mean.

while there no doubt are those whose conception of the good is similar to the GMO idea there are obviously major thinkers (and also me) who don't have that idea so he's not challenging thke best examples, me.

 

What’s important to note here is that there’s a difference between “objective” moral values and any notion of moral values “existing” as a grand metaphysical object.  This is an important distinction to realize: moral objectivism is quite different from moral realism...If moral values are simply the basis that moral agents use to determine between right and wrong actions, then we can have an objective moral value system that does not require a “value” to exist as some object.  On this conception of morality, it would be equivalent to something like “money” or “chess”.   One certainly would say that these things “exist” even if it is only a concept that is used by human beings, and we can derive objective facts about these kind of things. 

 

Of course we can. We religious people can have that as well. I don't believe that the good is some magical stuff like a physical object. The good is not a magic stuff or some physical thing. It's based upon God's character,. So "the good" is an abstraction based upon the nature of God's inclination to prefer the other; ie "Love." The good is as concept and an attitude that regulates behavior in relations with others. But since CA thinks it's a magic stuff then he's going to compare it as competing against his philosophy of "moral realism." I may have a tendency to make a straw mam argument out of his views. Bearing that in mind, I think moral realism is the view that is irrational and most similar to magical thinking. But there can be theistic moral realism. In a sense any Christian ethical thinker is a moral realist in that we think moral values have real meaning and actually count. That's really the issue. Moral thinkers consider that moral values have meaning and there are reasons to hold to them beyond the pragmatic. It don't just want to be good to avoid fights and problems we think it means it matters that we are good. We think the meaning of moral value and the nature of it's gravitas is grounded in God's command. God has authority because he created all that is and all that could ever be is contingent upon God's active will or forbearance. It's not an arbitrary whim that makes it good but it's the basis of love. God as all knowing source of all that is judges the level of veracity against the acts of virtue, not for meritorious consequences but so that we might know in what ways our conduct and attitudes have fallen short. All of that tempered with love's propensity for mercy.

 

Moral realism when not backed by the divine is much like presupositionalism, there's no real reason given and non e will ever  be defended, he says: "I’m touching on a debate about what counts as 'moral realism'.  Moral realism is a philosophical position that there are true moral facts that accurately describe reality.  That’s a bit confusing if you’re not into philosophy, so let’s use an illustration." What makes something a true moral fact (as opposed to a false moral fact)? Nor will any be offered. Look at what passes for an answer in CA's argument.

Consider the following two statements:

1.)    I used to own a pit bul.

2.)    It is morally wrong to torture babies for fun.

 Moral realism holds that both statements, if true, are true in the same way. That is the statements actually describe some facts about reality. Suffice it to say, if one is a moral realist, you will affirm premise two of the moral argument.

What makes them facts? How do we know they are facts? That is as much like moral good being an object as theist morality ever comes. Now he uses moral realism to .put atheism in a position of parity, atheism has the equivalent of objective morals too because it has moral facts. He says:

One of the things that isn’t brought up often enough in debates over the moral argument is that the majority of “moral realist” theories in contemporary philosophy are completely compatible with atheism." There’s John Rawls’s Social Contract theory, various forms of consequentialism, Railton’s Reductive Naturalism, the Ideal Observer Theory, and a host of others.  Each of these theories provides a basis for moral agents to be able to tell the difference between right and wrong in an objective way. 

Here he shifted his argument, Those are not examples of moral realism. In fact some of them are not even moral but are based upon abandoning the moral. John Rawls is opposed to consequentialism,. Consequentialism is based upon outcomes matching value system but without grounding the value systems in something they are arbitrary. Most ethicists today feel that Rawls disproved consequentialism. Rawls social contract is limited to the dictates of society can't arbitrate between competing values such as a fascist based social contract. Reductive naturalism is like giving up on morality. I don't think any of those are moral realism.

There are entire families of “atheism compatible” moral realist theories that satisfy the criteria of there being objective moral values in the sense Dr. Craig describes with his Nazi example.  The list provided above isn’t even close to exhaustive. This is why the moral argument is so unconvincing to anyone who has spent time studying moral philosophy.  One of the first things that become clear is that there are a plethora of meta-ethical theories out there that can get us to this kind of “objective moral values”.  An apologist might counter that the above kinds of conceptions of morality don’t actually count as moral realist views as they don’t get you a Grand Metaphysical Object kind of morality.  Sometimes you’ll hear them refer to “robust moral realism” in order to indicate belief in the “Grand Metaphysical Object” style of moral values.  My response there is to ask why it should matter if there is no Grand Metaphysical Object.

This is actually a bait and Switch, None of those theories are moral realism, comseqntualism does not assert that it's axioms are moral facts it asserts that they grounded in being consequences, and so withy all the others. Moral realism is not just any other moral system that's not divine command. That is essentially what he's asserting. Moral realism is a specific idea that moral axioms are moral facts but they still have to be grounded or it's just as arbitrary as the big magic who ha that he tries to say God is, the wonder tissue idea. He's selling secular naturalistic wonder tissue.Moral realists don't believe in grounding but they offer not basis for moral facts.[3]
 

This is because even if one denies the Grand Metaphysical Object style of moral values, they can still get an objective moral value system that gives the atheist a basis for discerning between right and wrong, like in Dr. Craig’s Nazi example.  All that we’re arguing over is a semantic issue on whether or not such systems count as “real” even if they’re not fundamental parts of reality, but rather if morality was a “real” as “the economy” or “baseball”. The point is that atheism, even if one is a naturalist or materialist, allows one to avoid collapse into nihilism or moral relativism.

What's going to make it be objective? Look at Rawls social contract. That says moral axioms are moral because society says they are moral. In WWII we had  society that said gassing people and baking them in ovens was moral. What makes it not moral? society confined it. By definition social contract theory is relative to society. Consequentialism is relative to consequences. He is doing what an atheist friend of mine describes as pour ought sauce on it.[4]

Moral realism I either mysterious and arbitrary or it is based upon values that themselves reduce to non ethical values meaning it's as firmly grounded as values commanded by God because they relative and not universal. Moral realists are violating vthe4 is/;ought dichotomy, Grounding axioms would mean one has a reason to attach an ought, merely saying "one ought" doesn't establish the basis for ought, Saying X is a moral fact doesn't ell us why omen should do X or not do X.

Having eliminated the bait and switch to the secular wonder tissue it's no different then any other atheist who has to ground his values and axioms. God is always going to be the most certain and  universal grounding because he is the source of moral values and the source of love upon which morality is based.[5] Morality is not magic, it's an object in the physical sense, it's the mandated consequences of God's Love. Fletcher got the idea from St. Augustine who said Love is the background of the moral universe. Without a universal mind making judgments and instilling moral laws  and communicated and role modeling love atheists might maintain some moral motions and they can love. I am betting they wont have the strong grounding God supplies or the spiritual strength of love enemies. Let's just hope we have that. Without a universal mind to pass judgment on an ought where is the universality?


 see sources for more quotes.







Sources

[1] The Counter Apologiost, "A much longer Counter to the Moral Argument." The Counter Apologist Blog. (May 13, 2016) URL:
https://counterapologist.blogspot.com/2016/05/note-this-is-much-longer-version-of-my.html?showComment=1464336604963#c3125601153601767783
accessed 5/28/2016

[2] Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained. New York: Back Bay Books; 1 edition (October 20, 1992)

Wonder tissue a term Dennett uses to stand for the mysterious qualities of mind that can't be pinned down and that he doesn't believe exist.

[3] Shin Kim, Internet Encyclopedia: A Peer Reviewed Academic Resource.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/moralrea/ accessed 5/28/2016

The moral realist contends that there are moral facts, so moral realism is a thesis in ontology, the study of what is. The ontological category “moral facts” includes both the descriptive moral judgment that is allegedly true of an individual, such as,“Sam is morally good,” and the descriptive moral judgment that is allegedly true for all individuals such as, “Lying for personal gain is wrong.” A signature of the latter type of moral fact is that it not only describes an enduring condition of the world but also proscribes what ought to be the case (or what ought not to be the case) in terms of an individual’s behavior.The traditional areas of disagreement between the realist camp and the antirealist camp are cognitivism, descriptivism, moral truth, moral knowledge, and moral objectivity. The long and recalcitrant history of the realism/antirealism debate records that the focal point of the debate has been shaped and reshaped over centuries, with a third way, namely, Quasi-realism, attracting more recent attention. Quasi-realism debunks the positions of both realism and antirealism.

The point being realists have no  clear grounding.

Kim, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Korea.

 

[4] Fred D'Agostino, Gerald Gaus,  and John Thrasher,  "Contemporary Approaches to the Social Contract", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/contractarianism-contemporary/>.

The social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all stressed that the justification of the state depends on showing that everyone would, in some way, consent to it. By relying on consent, social contract theory seemed to suppose a voluntarist conception of political justice and obligation: what is just depends on what people choose to agree to—what they will. Only in Kant (1797) does it become clear that consent is not fundamental to a social contract view: we have a duty to agree to act according to the idea of the “original contract.” Rawls's revival of social contract theory in A Theory of Justice did not base obligations on consent, though the apparatus of an “original agreement” persisted as a way to help solve the problem of justification. As the question of public justification takes center stage (we might say as contractualist liberalism becomes justificatory liberalism), it becomes clear that posing the problem of justification in terms of a deliberative or a bargaining problem is a heuristic: the real issue is “the problem of justification”—what principles can be justified to all reasonable citizens or persons.

 That quote essentially says even though Rawls version is not based upon concert it's still  based upn society,

[5] Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality, Westminster John Knox Press; 2nd edition (July 1, 1997) 57, 87






 

Is God Necessary for Humans to Love?

 This argument is a probabilistic basis for assuming that belief in God offers a much more stable grounding for ethical axioms than does secular moral realism, or any other such assumption made by secular thought. It's not deductive and it's not a brash dogmatic assumption, but a probabilistic assumption based upon a couple of things that offer reason to think that we would not have the full expansion of the concept of agape without God. I defined agape as the will to the good of the other, or the desire to  seek the best for the other. That is a good reason to assume that love is a standard based upon divine character and given us by God as the basis of the moral. This assumes the imago die, it assumes the moral law is internalized within us as part of the image of God, via Romans 2:6-14.


No meta-ethical system makes more sense than Augustine-Fletcher love as the background of the moral universe. We are talking about agape, "God's love" or as Tillich puts it "the will to the good of the other." The materialist assertion that love is a feeling caused by brain chemistry is not even based upon the right concept of love. We are not talking about feelings but about a philosophy. That brain chemistry is involved in feelings connected to the concept is not proof that that is all there is to the matter.

Agape functions as grounding for moral axioms. The dictates of a moral system can be seen as pragmatic playing out of the ideal of agape. There are five major reasons why centering meta ethical grounding in agape is the best form of grounding for moral axioms:

The systems secularists and skeptics turn to can't ground moral axioms in anything better than social contract or fine feelings. Those systems usually based ethics, in either social contract, a nebulous utilitarian "good of the whole" that reduces moral thinking to a ledger sheet, or personal feelings, social sanction or genetics. All of these are inadequate because they don't actually ground the "ought." They don't really tell us why an action is moral, they stipulate that it's part of a value system or not. Why we should value the values is another matter.

(1) If assume that agape is God's character and that God but it in place as the basis of moral grounding for that reason, we have a moral system that is written into reality at the metaphsyical level.

(2) It does not require turning "is" into "ought," so do secular views, since the purpose of creation in spelled out by the creator.Rather I should say It offers a basis to understand how "is" can be "ought."

(3) grounding axioms in love/being/God provides the same kind of transcendent basis for truth that "spirit of the law" provides over the letter of the law. That establishes grace rather than rule keeping (and this is analogous somewhat to duty and obligation as meta-ethical basis rather than rule keeping). In other words it's not just a list of rules to keep but embodies an actual personal understanding of duty and obligation.

(4) this makes much more sense becasue it means the basis of right and wrong are written into the fabric of being by the mind that created the beings, and it means good is motivated by purpose (the purpose being love: which is the will to the well being of the other) rather than grounding it in social contract or fine feelings, and are relative and discordable.

(5) Humans are ends in themselves. Humans are the objects of God's love, thus we are to express God's love toward all people. We just see the individual as an end in herself rather than a mere means to an end.


 I am not arguing dogmatically that we just couldn't have evolved to be conscious, endowed with free will, and capable of love. I think perhaps we could. Yet it is not very likely for several reasons. It's just a reason to believe we might not be so, not a dogmatic instance or a claim to proof. Given all of that let's explore a couple of reasons to assume that God is the source of love and that agape might not be possible for us if we were merely accidents in a Godless universe with no purpose other immediate survival.

Why are we conscious? There is an explanatory gap in the nature of what is called "the Hard problem." There is no necessary reason why humans are conscious, not one immediately discernible.


Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: a peer reviewed Academic Resource

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious.  It is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject.  The usual methods of science involve explanation of functional, dynamical, and structural properties—explanation of what a thing does, how it changes over time, and how it is put together.  But even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind, we can still meaningfully ask the question, Why is it conscious? This suggests that an explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science.  Consciousness therefore presents a hard problem for science, or perhaps it marks the limits of what science can explain.  Explaining why consciousness occurs at all can be contrasted with so-called “easy problems” of consciousness:  the problems of explaining the function, dynamics, and structure of consciousness.  These features can be explained using the usual methods of science.  But that leaves the question of why there is something it is like for the subject when these functions, dynamics, and structures are present.  This is the hard problem.

why aren't we like ants? Since nature is not progressive and there is no telos in evolution, the end sought is merely perpetuation of gene frequency not graduated or sublated success moving toward any promised goal, then there's no reason why we should not just be big ants. The ant option would be so much more efficient. Why should we bother expending energy on argument over what's true and how the world works? We could keep the species going and multiply our genes much better by just being drones and doing our jobs and not thinking. Why do we even have a moral sense?

If the point was just to say that God might be necessary for humans to have consciousness and a full blown capacity for the sort of love that grounds moral axioms, then  one could plug in the fine tuning argument. Since we are working against the odds, there's no reason to assume humans had to have consciousness, given its inefficiency it's really improbable. That could be added to the improbabilities of the fine tuning argument. If a life bearing universe is so very improbable, as the argument charges, then a life bearing universe that results in conscious beings who philosophize about love is even less probable.

 If we don't want to do that the argument by itself might work as a God argument. It would work in conjunction with the classic moral argument. The moral argument as I make it on argument list:

Argument:

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(1) Humans are possessed of moral motions which we find to be real and important. We cannot deny the senes of moral outrage over "evil" or the sense that one "ought" to do that which we find "good."

(2) Such moral motions can be understood as grounded in terms of behavior in our genetic endowment, but no explanation can tell us why we find them moral or how to justify them as "ought's."

(3) Genetic explanations only provide an understanding of behavior, they do not offer the basis of a moral dimension.

(4) Stoical contract theory offers only relativism that can be changed or ignored in the shifting sands of social necessity and politics.

(5) matters of feeling are merely matters of taste and should be ignored as subjective (the atheist dread of the subjective).

(6) God is the only source of grounding which works as a regulative concept for our moral axioms and at the same time actually explains the deep seated nature of moral motions.

We might put some more fiber into this argument by adding that our moral sense stems from a moral universe the background of which is this agapic sort of love, with a philosophical basis in the good of the other that can ground specific axioms. God is the better way of explaining the regulative concept, that's even enhanced by the agape aspect. It just so happens that the enhancement is better understood as rooted in God since the consciousness necessary to produce it is not necessary to our existence as humans.

Like the Philosophical zombie argument humans could be exactly as they appear now but without the conscious ability to think about these things, without a concept of love beyond just the butterflys and other feelings that tell us we like something. So the aspect that make sense of the feelings of moral outrage and motions that we doub "moral" are themselves best expalined as inheritance of God's creation and image. Thus it makes more sense to think that these moral motions are of divine origin and that they point to reality of the divine.

Of cousre the physicalist will charge that we are just assuming the value of the system from the outset and looking at the process backwards. Nature and evolution resulted in the kind of thinking we demonstrate as matter of course, survival of the fittest, random chance, and becuase it's our kind of thinking we establish special sense to it. That is, of cousre, a plausible way to see it, and I'm not trying to be dogmatic about the way it "has to be." Nevertheless, my system explains why we find moral outrage outrageous, why we value good over evil, what that means, why we love, and love is more than just butterfly and good feelings but might actually mean sacrificing ourselves for those we don't know or don't even like.If we are just imposing meaning then scinece must imposing order. While by way of looking at it may be out of fashion it's only one that really makes ethics work.



My Version of the Fine Tuning Argument.

Complete account of my version of classic
moral argument