Ethics and Knowledge, God
Consider God defined as omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent.
Considering definitions list necessary and essential qualities it's understood that ALL 3 qualities (goodness + knowledge + power) are necessary for God to be God.
I understand that power alone is inadequate to be God. It needs to be combined with goodness.
I understand goodness alone is inadequate. A weak God wouldn't be able to do much.
What I'm particularly concerned about is why both goodness and knowledge are necessary. Doesn't this mean that knowledge, even omniscience, can't find reasons to be good. If there are valid reasons to be good then omniscience alone would be enough to ensure that God is good. Omnibenevolence would naturally follow from omniscience and there would be no need to add it to God's definition.
I guess I'm saying if there are actual reasons to be good then God's definition would've been simply Omniscient + Omnipotent. Omnibenevolence would be redundant. [Now that I think of it even omnipotence may follow from omniscience. Ignore that for the present discussion.]
So, does this mean that hidden in the definition of God is a clue that morality actually has no justification? Even an omniscient being, God, can't find reasons to be good and therefore goodness is an additional requirement to make God good.
Comments.
Considering definitions list necessary and essential qualities it's understood that ALL 3 qualities (goodness + knowledge + power) are necessary for God to be God.
I understand that power alone is inadequate to be God. It needs to be combined with goodness.
I understand goodness alone is inadequate. A weak God wouldn't be able to do much.
What I'm particularly concerned about is why both goodness and knowledge are necessary. Doesn't this mean that knowledge, even omniscience, can't find reasons to be good. If there are valid reasons to be good then omniscience alone would be enough to ensure that God is good. Omnibenevolence would naturally follow from omniscience and there would be no need to add it to God's definition.
I guess I'm saying if there are actual reasons to be good then God's definition would've been simply Omniscient + Omnipotent. Omnibenevolence would be redundant. [Now that I think of it even omnipotence may follow from omniscience. Ignore that for the present discussion.]
So, does this mean that hidden in the definition of God is a clue that morality actually has no justification? Even an omniscient being, God, can't find reasons to be good and therefore goodness is an additional requirement to make God good.
Comments.
Comments (94)
The God concept arrived at via reason is a dead god.
God, alone in His Power, had no fun,
So He made Sapiens out of His One,
Our image reflecting His Love’s Knowing,
As His mirror of Divine Perfection.
Eden’s fresh market carried everything;
The shiny red apples called from the Tree,
“Touch me, take me, eat me”, and soon trouble
Was at hand although it was crispy, sweet.
Eden’s sinful Apple, causing our shit,
Made for harsh apple cider, but when it
Was heated with sulfurous brimstone it
Soon turned smooth, the Hell taken out of it!
I found the Garden in the Amazon’s heart,
Wherein lie massive fields of Lady’s Slippers
And all of the rare flowers of Paradise…
And there I put the apple back on the tree.
If we take God and creation to be true then reason is a gift from God. Surely we are meant to apply it.
When that say that is more like a description of God personally, it has more to tell us that He is good rather than He knows what is good.
Other than that yeah.
:smile: I'm just groping in the dark.
This makes sense to me.
Personally, though, I think the biggest error in understanding God is in the assumption that God is a being: an instance of existence. Beings exist in spacetime, but God has no defined spacetime location - it exists as an abstract concept.
Knowledge, goodness and power applied in an absolute sense to the concept of God doesn’t appear to encounter the same problem. If the conceptual source of all knowledge, goodness and power existed outside of spacetime, then surely it would be up to us as beings to draw from that source, rather than expect some all-powerful being to act?
exactly. Because it is a delightfully abstract concept that contains everything within it, and we really don't have a clue as to what everything is...
But I have concluded that it contains evil as well. I'm pondering what that means to me.
I don’t think God contains everything at all. That implies ‘being’ something apart from what it contains, and also implies an actual location in spacetime - albeit a very large one. The potential for what we refer to as ‘evil’ is certainly perceivable, but in my view this ‘evil’ isn’t part of the concept of God, but a conceptual passive resistance to it in its potentiality, at various levels of awareness.
It’s a rather simplified expression, but I think we resist the recognition of knowledge to avoid pain, resist the acknowledgement of power to avoid humility, and resist the awareness of goodness to avoid loss - and all of this contributes to ignorance, anger, hatred, oppression and violence. That this resistance also occurs with all matter in the universe requires a much more in-depth explanation. But to call it ‘evil’ is to deny our contribution to it by our ‘natural’ resistance and fear.
And we do have clues...
A being who is all powerful gets whatever he wants.
So, by virtue of being all powerful an omnipotent being will have whatever character he wants to have. In other words, he'll never be any other way than he wants to be.
Furthermore, a being who is all powerful is not beholden to any laws. A being who is all-powerful makes the laws that bind others, but is not bound by any himself.
That includes moral laws and values. So. an omnipotent beig, by virtue of being all powerful, is the source of moral values and the issuer of moral prescriptions (and all other prescriptions of reason - an all powerful being would therefore have to be Reason). An omnipotent being must therefore be Reason, for if and only if the omnipotent being is Reason will he not be subordinate to anything.
So we now know, just by reflecting on the nature of omnipotence, that a being who possesses it will be Reason and will be the source of moral values and prescriptions. He is not bound by them, because he is their source.
Nevertheless, because an all powerful being will never be any way he does not want to be, that being will always be morally good. Why? Because if the being is the source of moral value, then 'being morally valuable' is just to be a way that the omnipotent being, Reason, approves of. And we know now that because the being is omnipotent he is always what he wants to be. Thus, an omnipotent being will be morally perfect. Not, note, because he will have this or that particular character. But rather because whatever character he has, it is a character he approves of himself having, and 'being morally good' and 'being approved of by the omnipotent being" are one and the same property.
We can see now, then, that an omnipotent being will also be morally perfect. That is, an omnipotent being will also be omnibenevolent.
What about omniscience? Well, as seen above an omnipotent being must be Reason, for then and only then would he be bound by nothing. Now to 'know' something is for one's belief to be one endorsed by Reason, for that is just what it is for a belief to be justified, and 'knowledge' involves having a justified true belief whatever else it involves. Well, if knowledge essentially involves having a belief that Reason endorses, then Reason himself is the arbiter of knowledge and can thus be deemed omniscient.
Thus, an omnipotent being will not only be omnibenevolent, but omniscient also.
In this way, then, it seems clear that these features - omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience - form a unity. Possession of omnipotence, entails possession of the other two, and others besides.
Could an omniscient being do nothing?
If so, then there must be something more to benevolence than just knowing what is happening.
If not, then why not?
All these natural theology threads are no more than crossword puzzles.
Quoting Banno
See? Mere play with being, exist, spacetime...
:lol:
As if "it exists as an abstract concept" said anything.
:joke:
Oh, so funny! My mirth is more than I can contain!
God as essentially selfish.
But of course a truly omnipotent god could be something he does not want to be...
Else there be something he could not do, cancelling out his own preeminence!
And of course, he cannot be bound even by this law...
So, he has the ability to be any way he wants to be, including ways he currently doesn't want to be.
I think it clearly is a truth of reason that an omnipotent being is not bound by any law. But an omnipotent being is not bound by that truth, given that he is the one who made it true and so could unmake it just as easily.
So when I say that an omnipotent being will 'never' this, or 'never' that, I am not dictating to the omnipotent being - the omnipotent being can be whatever he wants to be - I am just describing what Reason, the omnipotent being, says about himself.
No, I don't see how you've arrived at that conclusion.
This question confuses me from the point of view of having to choose from the limited menu offered. Creatures are not in a great place to start interrogating the Creator.
I am with Spinoza in seeing a proportion of power attributed to the Divine as a move away from the intention of the maker. If you are going to have a relationship with something closer than is suggested by absolute properties, then the Creator has problems too. And how a person would relate to such a set of problems is another set of problems.
Belief in a fallible god is more difficult than trusting in the idea of a being who always gets it right.
Yeah - he's just saying that. I bet he can't really be what he doesn't want to be.
Half a bee must, ipso facto, half not-bee.
Anyone else recognise Eric?
You see, Batricks, what you are writing here is nonsense...
Without a complete set of extensive system-wide premises, which will then generate a system, i.e. a theory with its conclusions/theorems, this kind of questions will attract mostly arbitrary answers; the reason being that the system is not only insufficiently specified and constrained, but also insufficiently equipped with generating principles. There will not be enough commitments specified to successfully allow reasoning within that system.
It is like in number theory.
You need to axiomatize a sufficiently complete set of basic principles before it makes sense to do arithmetic and draw conclusions about such system. For example, you can look at what happens with a system of arithmetic without the axiom schema of induction, such as in Robinson arithmetic. However, if you take away too many construction rules, the arithmetic will either produce no results at all, or else, produce rather weak, arbitrary theorems.
So, pick more system-wide premises as to obtain a truly viable system. For example, pick the Torah or the Quran as a system, and then ask the question again. It is harder to do that because in that case you will have to learn more about the details in such system but it is also worthwhile because you will get much more meaningful results.
Reasoning outside system-wide premises may be quite typical in metaphysics, but it also explains why metaphysics (almost?) never achieves anything meaningful.
That does not mean that he is, in fact, something he does not want to be. I can drink a cup of coffee, but I am not doing.
In fact, he is exactly what he wants to be.
Any riddle you try and generate you will be generating by appealing to laws that he is not subject to.
Quoting Bartricks
Hence getting whatever you want is not essentially selfish...
Yep, I can see how that might work.
Again, what is your argument? How are you arriving at your conclusion? Are you saying that getting what you want and being selfish are synonymous? Or are you just sneering as you normally do and then wondering why I sneer back?
Well, it would be, were you, as any good Sophist, being paid to write it.
I thought you wanted to play, not hide.
That's all.
You think that I - I - think that selfishness and getting whatever you want are the same!? No, I don't. I'm not stupid.
But you - not me, you - said that this omnipotent being is essentially selfish.
That came out of nowhere. No argument. Just as blank assertion. So, I am asking you to defend it. I do not see how you've arrived at that conclusion. I am suggesting that perhaps you're equating getting what you want with selfishness. After all, if you did then that would explain how you've arrived at the conclusion.
Now, I think you're getting a bit scared because you don't know how you arrived at that conclusion and you're worried that if you say "yes" to equating 'getting what you want' with 'being selfish' I'll refute you. Which I will.
If so, good - they're not. Then what is your argument? That is, how did you arrive at the conclusion that the omnipotent being would be essentially selfish?
No: I am saying that you must say that, or else be inconsistent.
That is, I am not having a go at your argument.
Now you're claiming that I need to deny this. Er, I don't think an omnipotent being is essentially selfish - nothing in anything I've said implies otherwise.
I mean, it's like saying "so the omnipotent being is essentially a grape"
Then I say "er, what? How on earth do you arrive at that conclusion"
Then you say "oh, you misquoted me. I just meant that you have to deny the omnipotent being is essentially a grape".
Really? Really? Are you planning on telling me a whole load of things I never claimed, are not in any obvious way implied by anything I have said, and yet that I need to deny? Because that strikes me as an entirely pointless exercise.
The. Omnipotent. Being. Is. Not. Essentially. Selfish. Nothing I said implied otherwise. Happy?
Now you also said I was speaking nonsense. Care to justify that? Or did you just mean that I must deny that I am speaking nonsense?
What fun!
Edit: He did!
Edit: Quoting Bartricks
Quite the contrarian, our Bart.
Let's see how deep this agreement between us goes.
An omnipotent will not be bound by any laws, even the laws of Reason. And for that to be the case, an omnipotent being would need to be Reason, no?
That looks like a contradiction.
Plus even I appear able to do things in violation of it. What I am saying is false, for instance. That proposition is true if it is false, and false if it is true. So I just created a contradiction - created a proposition that has the properties of truth and falsity simultaneously.
Consider your statement:
An omnipotent (being) will not be bound by any laws, even the laws of Reason
What is it? It looks like a law, but of course, it can't be - if it were, it would be a law that binds (sic.) an omnipotent being; but an omnipotent being, that very law says, cannot be bound...
So what is it?
For my money, it's on a par with "This statement is false": a nonsense, a broken grammatical amalgam that looks like it should say something, but doesn't.
You, it seems, want to take it seriously.
Because you - you - said that it was a contradiction to say that Reason is not bound by any laws. So, not out of left field, but a direct response to what you said.
An omnipotent being needs to be Reason, because otherwise the being will be bound by the laws of Reason.
Reason isn't bound by the laws of Reason because she's Reason, the maker of the bonds.
Now, it is not, in fact, any kind of contradiction to say any of that. For everything just said, including the claim that an omnipotent being needs not to be bound by the laws of Reason, is consistent with there being an omnipotent being and that omnipotent being being Reason.
And as for this, I am not the only one to take it seriously. There's a vast literature on it.
Well, I don't think your arguments amount to much. So, yes.
Quoting Bartricks
Fine; so don't reply. You don't have to be here.
Quoting Bartricks
That says nothing. Further, the anthropomorphism leaves an odd odour.
Quoting Bartricks
There is a confusion here about what reason is, that is quite telling.
Yes, I was in error to call it a contradiction. To be a contradiction, it would have to make an assertion and its negation. But what you are writing here does not even succeed in doing that.
A quick run down of my opinion, following on from some of the philosophy that happened after Descartes, would be that reason is about how we string words together. Your error, which you share with other rationalists, is to think that reason binds how things are; and that hence by reason alone you can deduce how things are. The poverty of that approach was set out long ago by Hume, Kant and others, but perhaps was best criticised during the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. Few would take this sort of natural theology seriously now.
[i]Roughly speaking, in proving the first incompleteness theorem, Gödel used a modified version of the liar paradox, replacing "this sentence is false" with "this sentence is not provable", called the "Gödel sentence G".
It is not possible to replace "not provable" with "false" in a Gödel sentence because the predicate "Q is the Gödel number of a false formula" cannot be represented as a formula of arithmetic. This result, known as Tarski's undefinability theorem, was discovered independently by Gödel (when he was working on the proof of the incompleteness theorem) and by Alfred Tarski.[/i]
So, a liar-paradoxical statement is indeed "broken" in a sense, in terms of arithmetic. Apparently, it was Gödel's original starting point, but it did not work. In the diagonal lemma:
Let F be any formula in the language with one free variable, then here is a sentence ? such that ? ? F(°#(?)) is provable in T.
It is not allowed to choose F(x) as FALSE(x) or TRUE(x) in this lemma.
At the same time, TRUE and FALSE still are represented as functions in the lambda calculus:
TRUE := ?x.?y.x
FALSE := ?x.?y.y
I am not sure as to how to interpret that ...
In my opinion, Tarski's limitation is actually almost as paradoxical as the liar sentence itself. As far as I am concerned, Tarski's limitation is not intuitive at all.
There's more unsaid than said
Wisdom dies with the dead
what is spoken
of knowledge only a token
There's more truth in silence
Than tears in violence
fools live in paradise
hell overflows with the wise
why knowledge AND goodness?
Surely goodness must be madness
Quoting hachit
A difference that matters. Thanks.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Quoting Banno
Sorry I wasn't clear enough. The problem isn't that God can see the evil. It's that his omniscience doesn't give him reasons to be good. Thus requiring an additional quality - omnibenevolence.
:joke:
You are doing enough of that for all of us.
Sure.
There's a clear way to make sense of "This sentence is not provable", shown by the use you mention.
"This sentence is not true" has no similar place. It is used to confound and entertain neophytes, instead.
If one were to be charitable, might one suppose such a use for "An omnipotent will not be bound by any laws, including this one"?
So far as I can see, the only clear way for the bits of this puzzle to fit together is if omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence are independent.
Hm. Seems to me that the issue is an inability on your part to see the argument before you.
Absolutely spot on !
However, as an atheist who places most theological discussion in the 'word salad' category, I am surprised that nobody has come up the 'man in the image of God' theme as being the source of what we call 'reason' and 'ethics'. Obviously, there is a biological/neurological counter argument which ascribes these as epiphenomena of human behaviour, but instead of what could be that potential philosophical discussion, all I am seeing here is semantic jousting.
I'm not sure to what you are referring.
It said something to me; maybe you weren't listening. One line ripostes get boring fast.
What did I call "evil"? Nothing. I wrote that the concept of God contains everything in it, although we have no way of grasping what infinity is. As far as evil is concerned, I was only referring to what occurs on this planet: that's all I can refer to. So until I know more, evil is definitely anthropomorphic. Neither humanity nor its capacity to commit evil is exterior to the concept of God.
Are there concrete concepts, to oppose to abstract concepts?
And moreover, what sort of thing is a concept?
Yes, and especially in cyber-space it is very challenging to exchange ideas with others when it takes so long to find the common ground--or at the very least, understand what the other person assumes or means when she uses the word concept--, but impatience and cursory dismissal don't help to open communication and exchange of meaningful ideas.
Yes, agreed. There is something specifically problematic with the liar sentence ("This sentence is not true").
Imagine that you could define the True(x) predicate in arithmetic. In that case, for all possible sentences A, the following would hold:
True(g(A)) ? A is true in N
It would define truth in arithmetic. The problem is, however, that the diagonal lemma predicts the existence of a counterexample:
But the diagonal lemma yields a counterexample to this equivalence, by giving a "Liar" sentence S such that S ? ¬True(g(S)) holds in N.
The expression "S ? ¬True(g(S))" means "S says about itself that it does not have the property True". Hence, it is not possible to define the True() predicate in arithmetic. This result is known as Tarski's undefinability theorem.
It is no other than the liar sentence that pops up to prevent the definition of truth in arithmetic. It is simply the show-stopping bug. That thing has therefore a very specific importance in metamathematics:
Smullyan (1991, 2001) has argued forcefully that Tarski's undefinability theorem deserves much of the attention garnered by Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
The remaining problem, however, is that the diagonal lemma, which is practically the contrapositive of Tarski's undefinability, is generally considered mysterious:
[i]Workshop on Proof Theory, Modal Logic and Reflection Principles. October 18, 2017 10:35–11:10, Moscow, Steklov Mathematical Institute.
The Diagonal Lemma (of Go?del and Carnap) is one of the fundamental results in Mathematical Logic. However, its proof (as presented in textbooks) is very un_intuitive, and a kind of “pulling a rabbit out of a hat”.[/i]
The diagonal lemma reappears in so many other results -- it trivially proves Gödel's incompleteness as well as Tarski's undefinability -- while at the same time, it is generally considered incomprehensible. Nowadays, I can "somehow work" with the diagonal lemma, but I admit that I do not fully grasp it (I wonder who does ...).
Quoting alcontali
That doesn't look right.
Yes, in a sense that the symbolic language of first-order logic is obviously less prone to ambiguity. No, in a sense that some of the most famous proofs in math were written in natural language.
For example, John Nash's (published 1950) Nobel-prize (1994) winning theorem and proof is entirely in natural language:
----
[i]Equilibrium points in n-person games
One may define a concept of an n-person game in which each player has a finite set of pure strategies and in which a definite set of payments to the n players corresponds to each n-tuple of pure strategies, one strategy being taken for each player.
Any n-tuple of strategies, one for each player, may be regarded as a point in the product space obtained by multiplying the n strategy spaces of the players. One such n-tuple counters another if the strategy of each player in the countering n-tuple yields the highest obtainable expectation for its player against the n ? 1 strategies of the other players in the countered n-tuple. A self-countering n-tuple is called an equilibrium point.
The correspondence of each n-tuple with its set of countering n-tuples gives a one-to-many mapping of the product space into itself. From the definition of countering we see that the set of countering points of a point is convex. By using the continuity of the pay-off functions we see that the graph of the mapping is closed.
Since the graph is closed and since the image of each point under the mapping is convex, we infer from Kakutani’s theorem that the mapping has a fixed point (i.e., point contained in its image). Hence there is an equilibrium point.[/i]
----
Even though the text above is in natural-language English, it has always been considered an entirely legitimate proof.
Let me try.
Concerning "omnipotence", there will necessarily exist a provable language expression:
I am omnipotent.
On the condition that omnipotence is a computable predicate which maps natural numbers onto yes/no in a theory of arithmetic that is strong enough to represent such predicates.
Weird, isn't it?
Of course, the Achilles heel of the problem is the whole idea of "computable predicate". If it is possible to readily determine if something is omnipotent or not, then it is computable.
The next problem would be to formally establish the conditions under which there will only be exactly one such provable language expression.
But how did you arrive at that conclusion?
So I have to conceive of God's creation as flowing not from any desire at all, but on the contrary, from a superabundance of quality - of love in that sense of love that is opposed to desire.
Just as the Great Nintendo does not lack stars or require the assistance of Mario to defeat Bowser.
It seems fairly obvious to me that knowing things, even everything, and even how to be good, doesn't guarantee actually being good.
First, I do not see why having a desire would be a deficiency. Far from it - a lack of desires will be a deficiency. A being who, for example, has no desire for there to be no cruelty is hardly perfect.
Perhaps what you are thinking is that to have a desire is to be in some sense frustrated. But this, I think, is not true. Imagine you are enjoying yourself and you want the enjoyment to continue and it does and your wanting it to continue is what has made it continue - well, there seems no frustration involved there. (And even if frustration is implicated - that is, if having desires does involve being frustrated to some extent - it does not seem that frustration is always a deficiency either; for instance, it would be entirely fitting to be frustrated that a free agent is behaving badly).
Second, nothing is forbidden to an omnipotent being - that's the point. The omnipotent being, to be omnipotent, would need to be Reason, and it is Reason who determines what does and doesn't make sense - so you can't take something that seems not to make sense to you and then insist that the omnipotent being is constrained to conform to your notion of what does and doesn't make sense. That notion, though it may be rational, is derived from Reason. That is, Reason determines what does and doesn't make sense. But Reason herself, being the arbiter of sense, is not bound to conform to the notion of sense she gives us. That's like thinking that if I say "one must always have tea first thing in the morning" I am somehow bound to have tea first thing in the morning. No, you can reasonably infer that I do have tea first thing in the morning - given this edict I have delivered - but you cannot reasonable infer that I am bound to do so. I am clearly not.
Quoting unenlightened
Nope, no idea what that means. Love, note, involves having desires. You can't love someone and be indifferent to them. And a "superabundance of quality" - er, what's that when it's at home? Krishnamurti nonsense.
I have literally no idea what you are talking about. And let's keep my penis out of this Hugh Janus. I have no clue - none at all - what a 'concentrated being' would be (one that's had the water removed?). I don't think you do either.
But an omnipotent being can do anything. And so if 'concentrating' one's being is a thing, then obviously an omnipotent being could do it.
According to you an omnipotent being should be able to do anything; even if it were "not a thing" (whatever that means) it should be able to make it a thing. This just shows how nonsensical the whole stipulation is.
And yes I would prefer that you kept your tricky bar out of my huge anus.
You seem to think that what you can conceive of places some limits on what an omnipotent being can do. It really doesn't.
According to your argument our reason must be flawed because it can posit contradictions and arrive at antinomies and aporias. If this is so, as it must be, then how can we be sure that there is a divine Reason? It can't be merely because it follows from our reasoning that there must be a divine Reason, since our reason is necessarily flawed.
How on earth does that follow from anything I said? Of course we can know what is and isn't a thing - our reason (which are faculties, note - means of awareness) - provides us with the insight to know, and when we believe something to be a thing that Reason herself decrees to be so, and have come to believe it in manner that Reason approves of, then we know that it is a thing.
Quoting Janus
Again, that simply doesn't follow. It does in your mind, but that's why you need to update your mind. There's no 'must' about it. Our reason is, clearly, flawed, just as our sight is flawed, and our touch and so on. But there's no 'must' to it. There's a world of difference between saying something 'is' the case and saying that it 'must' be. I don't see at all how you got a 'must' out of it.
By your radically malfunctioning reasoning you can't know there is a computer monitor in front of you because sometimes your sight lets you down.
Anyway, you're changing the topic from one to do with the relationship between certain attributes to one to do with how we can know things - anything. So, stick to the topic and resist the urge to keep saying "how do we know?" and raising the prospect of radical scepticism at every turn.
We can know things - for knowledge is just about the right connections existing between a belief, the truth and reasons. The idea that those connections have to be bonds of steel that can never come apart is, I think, a massive exaggeration.
The important point where this debate is concerned is that an omnipotent being can yellow a seven.
And yet you say:
Quoting Bartricks
Which indicates that you are not sure if "concentrating one's being" is a thing. We cannot imagine God being able to create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it and yet being able to lift to be a "thing"; according to our reason it is a contradiction, antinomy that results form our theological stipulation that God must be omnipotent and not even governed by reason as we understand it (although some medieval theological thinkers acknowledged that God must be governed by reason, that is could not act contrary to reason, because the alternative leads to the sovereignty of the irrational).
Quoting Bartricks
This is where you depart from reason. You say our reason is clearly flawed, and yet you say that it is not the case that it must be flawed. In any case the "must" there in my original statement was meant to indicate that we must conclude, not that it is an ontological necessity (although it might be), that our reason is flawed. You acknowledge that our reason is flawed, so how can you trust it to deliver the truth of being? Descartes ultimately relies on his faith that "god would not deceive us". But this is faith, not reason. And our own reason clearly does, since it is flawed as you acknowledge, deceive us.
Where this debate is concerned, the issue is to do with the relationship between certain attributes - omnipotence, omnibenevolence and omniscience.
What I have argued is that from omnipotence we can get the others. For an omnipotent being has the power to do anything whatsoever. An omnipotent being can therefore be whatever they want to be. An omnipotent being is not going to be a way they do not want to be (they have the power to be, but that's different).
An omnipotent being has the power to make anything morally valuable, because being morally valuable involves being valued by Reason and an omnipotent being would be Reason because otherwise the omnipotent being would be bound by Reason (which is incompatible with being omnipotent).
So, because an omnipotent will be Reason, and because an omnipotent being is going to approve of her own character, then an omnipotent being will be morally good.
Yes, I don't know what that is. Our source of insight into what's a thing and what's not a thing is our reason. And my reason says that, until more clarifying information is supplied, 'concentrating one's being' is not a thing. That is, not an intelligible activity. I mean, how can I 'be' more intensely? I genuinely don't know what you're talking about. Buddhists and Krishnamurti fans and continental philosophers would nod approvingly at such utterances (which counts for nothing, of course, as that's just the kind of thing they nod approvingly at, as one might to a certain drumbeat). But I don't know what you're on about.
There are coherent activities - going for a walk, lifting rocks, thinking things - and there are incoherent ones - yellowing a seven, concentrating one's being. The omnipotent being has control over what is and isn't coherent. But that doesn't mean that nothing is incoherent. I mean, that doesn't follow at all. No, some things really are incoherent.
She, the omnipotent being, can do anything. Not just anything that is currently coherent, but anything at all. Why? Because she determines what is coherent and what is not. What greater power could there be than that?
Yup.
That's the problem of free will. There's a wide gap between knowledge and practice and this is captured quite well in the sentence "practice what you preach". It then becomes necessary for God to be both good AND knowledgeable. This makes God a great personality but leaves morality without any rational foundation at all. Euthyphro is just a step away.
Let me know when you come to my town. I'll have all lights on all the time.
:rofl: Thanks