Absurd Escapism

Originally posted by gswilm

The fact that so many of your metaphysical commitments hinge critically on the existence of some 2000 year-old zombie water-walker,

Sounds like rather hysterical lashing out. When I hear the word "zombie" I think of a horror movie. Do the Gospels read like a horror movie to you ?

When I think of "zombie" I think of a corpse walking ...[text shortened]... rations. {/quote]

I may have a comment latter.

This is sonship on a relative's home PC.

Another psychoanalyst, sweet, we are blessed indeed.

BTW Houdini was not a magician, he was primarily famous for being an escape-artist.

And I'm glad you didn't have much time for discussion 🙂

Originally posted by DeepThought
[b]...so anyone could argue against a universal now too.

There is no universal "now". The paradigm of universal time dropped out of physics over a century ago with the advent of relativity. This is not a problem for most conceptions of God as an entity outside the universe (but with unlimited access) he can see it all at once, so there doesn't n ...[text shortened]... make the concept of omniscience coherent. I don't think this argument really gets you anywhere.[/b]

Limited to the little sliver of time called "now" we realize it is beyond us, that however isn't beyond one not limited by "now", but to One who is the beginning and the end even "now" is not a limitation.

Originally posted by karoly aczel

BTW Houdini was not a magician, he was primarily famous for being an escape-artist.

Typical careful classification of everyone except the most important Person. .

Originally posted by divegeester
I assume you had your tongue firmly in your cheek when you wrote this...? 😵

The OP for The Triune God in Revelation 4&5 was about 69 words.

The OP for The First and Last verses in the Bible was about 71 words.

The OP for The Triune God in John 16 was about 83 words.

The OP for Starting Points in the Bible was longer as was the OP for
The Triune God in First Corinthians 3

Both needed a little more explanation.

The OP for An Unsolvable Mystery in Exoduswas about 138 words.

The OP for Calling Lord. Lord was about 150 some words.

The Op for What? Not Talk About the Trinity seems over 120 words. But some of it was a paste from someone else's comment.

No tongue in cheek concerning me trying to keep OP as brief and meaningful as I can.

You may compare any of these OPs of mine to the OP of this thread. And I am not complaining. But since you wanted to make a comparison, go ahead.

Originally posted by sonship
You may compare any of these OPs of mine to the OP of this thread. And I am not complaining. But since you wanted to make a comparison, go ahead.

Unless you actively don't want any non-Christians to post any non-Christian threads, why would you think this topic and OP was anything other than excellent and thought provoking?

Originally posted by karoly aczel

Another psychoanalyst, sweet, we are blessed indeed.

Blessed indeed ? Good. Contribute something substantial.

From where does the human sense of the way things ought to be morally, come from ?

Originally posted by LemonJello

There are various arguments that aim to show that God is necessary for [enter here something of high existential importance]. God is requisite, so it goes, for the existence of moral facts, or for value and meaning in life, etc.

LemonJello, let me ask your opinion of this.
If justice does not exist, then does injustice exist ?

Originally posted by sonship
If justice does not exist, then does injustice exist ?

Do you honestly believe you have any credibility discussing "justice" in light of what you have touted as being "perfect justice"?

Originally posted by LemonJello
There you go again, presupposing that "absolute" or "universal" morals constitutively would stand in need of explanation in reference to the mental activity of some particular agent. Again, that is a subjectivist take on it, and as I already told you multiple times I do not subscribe to subjectivist takes on it. (It's a mystery that I would continue in ...[text shortened]... l or imaginary. Like I already said, I think objectivist accounts enjoy more plausibility here.

Yes and when quizzed about why you think the objectivist accounts enjoy more plausibility you cop out with that is beyond the scope of this thread?

Originally posted by LemonJello

I suppose at this point, the motivation of theistic escapism is to dissolve this conflict by taking that bedrock and purporting to place it in something external to us and our world, such as God or something equally as mysterious, where the bedrock here concerns moral grounding or value and meaning, etc.

And this recognition that God must be the starting place of a moral universe, you say is an insult to your intelligence ?

These arguments are SO very bad, you claim, that they are an insult to the intellect.
I've been thinking about this trying to understand why you would think this is so.

"Can I be good without belief in God?" or

Can I be good without the existence of God?"

Which of the two questions do you find kind of insults your intellect? Or is it that either question is an insult to even intellectually contemplate ?

" Can I have meaning in my life without belief in God? or

" Can I have meaning in my life without the existence of God ?

Are both questions an insult to your philosophical intellect ?

Somehow, so the story goes, without God or whatever we are left with this debilitating skepticism towards these matters of high existential seriousness; whereas with God we find our solid footing again. This seems just a way of projecting agency onto the view sub specie aeternitatis , since that just is the view of God in a sense. Clearly enough, though, this sort of escapism does not work. I mean, it may work on some psychological level, the mental equivalent of how sweeping dust under the nearest rug "works" at cleaning the floor. But, I mean, come on: there's still the same dust on the floor. See the balance of the Nagel essay for a clear reading of why escapism fails on a philosophical level:

Well, until I read some Thomas Nagel I will just have to admit I am a Thomas Nagel ignoramus.

I do know a little about what Atheist champion Richard Dawkins has said about morality in his staunchly Darwinian universe. He seems to contradict himself.

On one hand Dawkins says that we are all dancing to our DNA and any thought of moral rightness or wrongness is illusionary.

" In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won't find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference ... DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music"

But on the other hand he realizes SOME kind of escape from this absurdity has to be found in normal human existence. We simply cannot live by such a philosophy. Since it is unlivable to have a society with such a worldview, Dawkins sees the need to escape into some anti-Darwinian mechanism of some kind.

Same person says

"I've always said that I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to the way we should organize our lives and our morality."

An escape, even the militant atheist MUST find from this absurdity of a purposeless unmoral universe.

Again Dawkins has said -

" We want to avoid basing our society on Darwinian principles."

So we cannot in fact just "dance to" our DNA. We have to apply some moral code.
But why should we care so much to do so ?
What makes it not tolerable that injustice simply reign?

So we have to escape into someone's moral standard or else society will be intolerably uncivilized.

Whose, moral standard then, are we to hold as the best ?
Can you give me names of candidates for this ?

To whom should we "escape" to from the absurdity of a "blind pitiless indifference" to the oppressed with moral wrongdoing ?

Originally posted by KellyJay
I cannot speak for Fetchmyjunk's views on moral absolutes or universal truths, but in my
opinion any truth requires a standard to which to judge with. Without a means to measure
truth across all of the universe how can there be a universal truth, and if there isn't any
means with which to judge without absolutely being wrong how can there be anything
ca ...[text shortened]... hat can
see all there is at all times either so anyone could argue against a universal now too.

I don't really understand why you say truth "requires a standard". But perhaps I do not fully understand the claim. One could say that truth just consists in an objective relation between a truth-bearer (e.g., the content of a proposition) and a truth-maker (e.g., a fact). So if you have a proposition that picks out a fact,that sounds like truth to me. What "standard" is required here? More plausibly, reference to standards might be necessary for truths involving comparative evaluation, but I'm not sure how that is relevant here.

Anyway, for the purpose of further discussion, let's suppose you are right that truth requires a standard. Then, what is it about moral truth that would necessitate that this standard involves God? You would have to do a lot more legwork in order to connect the dots. Unfortunately, Fetchmyjunk is not clear in his terminology. But, broadly, I take it that the concerns with universality and absolutism are roughly as follows. For universality, we would require that ethical principles apply equally across all moral agents. For absolutism, we require that moral truth conditions be non-relativistic, that is not relative to the attitudes or conventions of groups of agents; alternatively, we require that they be irrespective of circumstance or setting, etc. God is required for precisely none of that, since God-independent objective facts could get the job done just fine. Secular ethical theories show this.

Lastly, referring to your comments about measurement, you can simply stipulate that God is definitive of morality, similar to how a defining rod could define a unit of length. But such stipulations are a bit arbitrary, don't you think? Acts of measurement will proceed just fine regardless if you stipulate this rod or that rod. If that were not the case, it would be incoherent that some persons use the metric system while others use imperial units. At any rate, the basic problem you will have is captured in the Euthyphro dilemma, which has to do with explanative priority. Is something morally good because God wills it; or does God will it because it is morally good? If you respond with the former (which seems more consistent with stipulating God as morally definitive) then you are stuck with the charge of arbitrarity; if you respond with the latter, then perhaps God is morally exemplary but He is essentially irrelevant to the constitutive nature of morality. And, in any case, that one can simply stipulate God as definitive of morality really has nothing to do with justifying the claim that God is somehow conceptually necessary for moral grounding.

Originally posted by gswilm

The fact that so many of your metaphysical commitments hinge critically on the existence of some 2000 year-old zombie water-walker,

Sounds like rather hysterical lashing out. When I hear the word "zombie" I think of a horror movie. Do the Gospels read like a horror movie to you ?

When I think of "zombie" I think of a corpse walking ...[text shortened]... rations. {/quote]

I may have a comment latter.

This is sonship on a relative's home PC.

I see our humanity as an effect which is due to a cause which is greater. My sense of justice, rightness, fairness, ethics, morality should not be due to something on a lower level of life, like an energy or force. It should be due to Someone of a higher level of life than myself.

Granted that this is your take on it. But that you cannot seem to conceive of things like justice, rightness, morality in the absence of God does not justify the claim that God is conceptually necessary for such things. You and Fetchmyjunk continue to present no actual argument for this, instead falling back on the strength of your own God-dependent commitments and general incredulity regarding any God-independent view, but not showing any appropriate measure of doubt towards the idea that God is necessary. That's all perfectly consistent with what I already described: the failures of perspective-taking and the hazards of extrapolating from a role of explanation within one's view to one of necessity within all viable views.

Originally posted by sonship

There are various arguments that aim to show that God is necessary for [enter here something of high existential importance]. God is requisite, so it goes, for the existence of moral facts, or for value and meaning in life, etc.

LemonJello, let me ask your opinion of this.
If justice does not exist, then does injustice exist ?

I'm not sure I understand the question or its relevance.

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
Yes and when quizzed about why you think the objectivist accounts enjoy more plausibility you cop out with that is beyond the scope of this thread?

Yes, well, it's really not my responsibility to do your homework. Again, one would have reasonably thought, given your penchant for declaiming on the subject of ethics, that you would have conducted at least some minimal study on the topic. That's clearly not the case, and it makes you look foolish in these sorts of discussions. And, talk about copping out. It seems whenever you are pressed to actually provide some rational support for your claims, you resort to administrating your little "quizzes" in a lame, obvious attempt to shift the burden.

What I see in this thread is that folks like you and sonship are making my points for me. Sonship, it seems, cannot conceive of things like justice, rightness, morality in the absence of God. You, it seems, cannot conceive of "absolute morals" or "universal moral truths" in the absence of God. You have the obvious strength of conviction from within your own view, but no actual arguments worth taking seriously for these claims. Again, it's all consistent with failed perspective-taking and unwarranted projection of God's necessity, along with Nagelian elements of escapism from the absurd.