If your argument against God boils down to "you can't be certain," then, yeah, ya' got me. But then my questions become a) why this is a good standard to have in the first place and b) how do you manage to believe in other things you aren't certain about.
It's not about getting you or anybody else but I want to start with this because I think it strikes at the heart of this entire debate: If you can't be certain of a particular claim--be it religious, metaphysical or scientific--where does that leave you and how should you proceed? it seems it essentially leaves you where you started and nowhere to proceed. In terms of religion, you can choose to take that proverbial leap of faith, but why believe and devote yourself to something that may be mistaken?
You want theists to know you think their worldview is a futile, vacuous pursuit, and their God is a terrible moral instructor, but that it's not your business? Then why say all that?
I'll admit I gave you a hard time for a spell when you refused to define objective morality but this casts my views in an unfair light. My position on metaphysics, religion, morality in The Bible has been academic, quite conventional really, and while I may think adherents follow what amounts to folklore, their beliefs are their own business and no doubt valuable to them.
If you're defining "speculation" as anything not empirically observed, then your claim is simply true by definition, and boils down to "the non-physical isn't physical." In which case, yes, I "concede" this. Though I never disputed it.
Well, this is the problem that plagues metaphysics and theology which is why they languish.
This is another one of those half-truths that gets passed around millions of times without anyone bothering to look into it. The only verse that can be remotely contorted to say this, to my mind, is the one in Joshua (which I just read the other day, by coincidence), where he commands the Sun to "stand still." To say this endorses geocentrism is a huge stretch, given that from the perspective of the person saying it, the sun stands still in the sky. In other words, it's one of those things that only looks wrong if you're looking for things that look wrong.
Also, where did this paragraph even come from? It feels like just random pot shots, disconnected from anything we've been talking about.
The Koran certainly asserts the sun moves and while The Bible may not (the writer of Joshua certainly thinks it does) it makes other errors, some cosmic, which I'm sure you're aware of. This isn't a potshot; it's to demonstrate what I've been saying about these holy books from the beginning: they're products of their age not divine revelation as claimed.
It's not misleading at all, because the point of the argument is not the number of religions, but the number of adherents within them. The fact that four are basically branches of the same governing, initial religion only strengthens my point that there is broad agreement.
But regardless, even if this were not true, it wouldn't be telling or significant, any more than it would be telling that you recognize other beliefs as false, just not your own. This is only revealing to someone who has already lumped them all under the category of folklore to begin with.
I agree that nothing is proven here, but I'm curious about these four religions that branch off the initial one which I gather is Judaism. I thought only Christianity and Islam had a relationship with Judaism.
I don't see how swapping in the word "dictate" would invalidate anything I just said (I used it myself, after all).
I misunderstood your reply but it seems you don't have a rational basis for your morality as I said before and, yes, I know that does nothing for my position.
And I don't understand how thinking of morality as a cognitive phenomenon changes any of it, either.
Morality is a cognition which involves neural activity which is physical so the principle of assigning a divine cause to physical phenomena would stand. However, I think this principle is really applicable to anything that's not understood. Just because something is not explained doesn't justify assigning a divine reason for it. God/s can't be a default position.
And how reasonable would it have been to believe in evolution before you'd ever heard of it?
That's my point. Until Darwin the explanation for biodiversity was a divine one because it couldn't be explained otherwise.
You cannot trumpet empirical claims above others and then brush off simple questions about your morality with "well, maybe we'll discover something that retroactively justifies what I already believe." That's aggressively speculative. Aggressively non-empirical. It is completely inconsistent with the ideology you've been espousing.
And it's worse than that, even, because you're not waiting on a scientific breakthrough: you're waiting on an answer to a question that is definitionally outside of science to begin with. Science is about whys and hows, not oughts. It is literally impossible for any scientific breakthrough to prove that something is moral or immoral, or that something like duty exists.
I don't see a problem with saying we don't know at the moment, which isn't to say there aren't theories some find convincing. Remember that neurology and psychology are very young fields so it may turn out that oughts will be explained--not that there aren't theories that claim to explain that already. What I think you can't do is assign a divine cause simply because something is not yet understood.
I don't see how this makes sense, either as an answer or as a comparison. "Deities" is not the analog for morality, religion is, because we also know that to exist. You believe religion exists, but you don't believe it has a rational basis (God).
I think religion originally had a rational basis because the world was not understood and I do think there are understandable or rational reasons why people still follow religion such as community, hope, purpose, answers, and more.
Similarly, you can believe morality exists (in the sense that ideas exist, at least), but that doesn't mean it has a rational basis. And that was the question: how can you hope to reconcile the fact that you require proof to believe in God, but not the moral standard which governs your life? The fact that morality exists as an idea/impulse doesn't answer this question at all.
I don't think I understand the question. Why would I need proof to believe in my morality if it's manifest. The question is how it develops outside of it being learned through one's parents and culture. And I'm still not sure why morality must be rational. If, for argument's sake, morality was purely biological like something we may be seeing in other primates, why is that a problem?
Closed Thread
I honestly don't think anyone's going to get the wrong idea, but it's a fair request.