Here is a logic puzzle. You are walking down a road to a town. You come to a fork in the road. Standing there are two men. You already know that one of them always lies and one of them always tells the truth. What one question can you ask one of them that will give you the information you need to choose the right road?
The answer is "which road would he tell me to take?" and when you find out, you go the other way. Now lets add three more liars for a total of four liars and one truthful. At this point, it becomes unsolvable. How can you determine who is telling the truth and who is not?
Now Imagine we replace the town with Heaven, and replace the men with a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim and add a road for each. How can you determine who is telling the truth and who is not? All you can do is just pick a direction and go. That doesn't seem like something that was set up by the supreme intellect in the universe. That strategy violates the principle of minimizing as much uncertainty as possible to increase the likelihood of a successful outcome. That is a strategy that wasn't thought out very well.
Here's a quick response a section in a recent
post by "Dusman", in which we find Dusman, a reducing philosophical materialists to absurdities via the magic of presuppositional apologetics.
Dusman advances the following argument:
Argument One:
1. Material things are extended in space.
2. Logical laws are not extended in space.
3. Therefore, logical laws are non-material.
4. Materialism posits that non-material entities do not exist.
5. Therefore, logical laws do not exist.
Just thinking about that, I wonder if Dusman thinks the activity of "walking" is a materialist absurdity:
The "Walking" Corollary:
1. Material things (like legs) are extended in space.
2. "Walking" is not extended in space.
3. Therefore, "walking" is non-material.
4. Materialism posits that non-material entities do not exist.
5. Therefore, for the materialist, "walking" does not exist.
If you've spent any time wading into the rhetorical devices of presuppositional apologetics, you'll anticipate that Dusman might just want to assert that materialist really don't have any basis for believing in "walking" or any similarly derived concept.
Walking, as a concept, has physical infrastructure -- the brain-state(s) that reify the concept in the mind -- and is thus perfectly "real" and extant as a physical entity, but the subject of the concept is abstract.
Logic, like the activity of walking, isn't a physical entity beyond the electro-chemical patterns of the brain that holds the concept. And logic, like walking, is descriptive of natural properties and phenomena. Both are useful abstractions for understanding and describing the world around us, but they are abstract beyond their physical housing as brain-states. When I get out of my chair and walk across the room, I have not created a "walking" when I get out of my chair and walk across the room, nor destroyed a "walking" when I sit down again. The concept in both cases -- "walking" and logical principles -- is just that: conceptual, and thus real and extant in the form of brain-states. The referents of the concepts are real and existent in the straightforward sense; legs are "extended objects" in space/time, and "walking" is an abstraction about the patterns of movement and activity of the legs.
I don't know who the philosophical materialists are that Dusman can get to take him seriously with the argument he presents, let alone find themselves reduced to absurdities, but whoever they are, they aren't philosophically anything much at all, if they are, in fact, actual in the first place. In any case, all the materialist needs to do is show that "walking" doesn't exist under the terms of Dusman's argument, which winds up making Dusman dealing with the absurdities, not the materialist. Does Dusman believe the materialist thinks "walking" doesn't exist, or must disbelieve in walking as a materialist? It's as if the concept of abstraction itself has somehow eluded him, or that he supposes that the concept of abstraction somehow necessarily eludes the materialist.
In any case it's too bad Dusman doesn't make himself available to actual responses to his arguments, to see who is really trafficking in absurdities.
What say you, materialists? Does "walking" exist? Has Dusman removed that from our cognitive reach along with logic?
This argument is intended to provide the warrant (underlying principle) for the Atheist argument that the Problem of Evil negates a perfectly Just, Moral, Benevolent, Good, etcetera, God. It intends to show that the principle or Warrant comes from God himself. This is the first in a series of articles that create a complex argument against the existence of the Christian God.
It is believed that the bible is revelation from god. 2 Timothy 3:16 tells us that "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness". In the bible, if he has not authored it himself, he has at least approved of being labeled as Good, Just, Merciful, Reasonable and Trustworthy among other things. Since God has approved of this to be said about himself, he implicitly agrees to behave that way. These are his limitations to his behavior. For example a trustworthy person will act in a way that supports that characteristic and is prohibited from acting in ways that negate the trustworthy characteristic. They are limited by their commitment to be trustworthy.
Goodness, Justice, Morality, Mercy and Reasonableness have a meaning and have characteristics that are more or less consistent between languages such as hebrew, Greek and English, to name a few. So If God has approved of these labels being applied to him, he has implicitly agreed to behave in a way that supports those characteristics. He has in effect limited his own behavior to comply with his self-proclaimed characteristics. If he is trustworthy, he will behave in a way that supports that characteristic. If he is reasonable, he will act in way that supports that characteristic.
Morality has meaning to us, and God has agreed to be Moral, therefore in order to appear Moral to us he must agree to behave in a way that doesn't violate enough moral principles to negate that characteristic.
- God is moral.
- the set of morality as understood by humans contains a set, or subset of moral principles.
- God has properties similar to the set of human moral principles.
- We say god is moral because we compare him to the set of principles comprising the set of morality. Otherwise we have no basis for the comparison.
So now if pick a valid principle out of the set of morality, and see if it can be compared to god, this should be a valid test of Gods similarity to the set of morality that we are comparing him to.
Additionally let’s add these qualifiers.
- We are made in gods image,
- God loved us so much that he have his only son so that none should perish
So how moral is god? How many of our characteristics of morality does god possess? And if we make a list of moral principles, and we compare it to god’s behavior can we come up with a value of "how moral is god when compared to our set of moral values"?
Then if we say that some principles in our set are "universal morals" I'd be willing to bet I could get a consensus that god violates some of those "universal moral" principles. A lot of them have been written about here on DC.
If god Violates a Moral principle he becomes less moral. This affects his trustworthiness in a negative direction.
If we say that it is reasonable to impose this set of morals on a human, and we say that god is moral, then we can say in some respect it should be valid to impose this set of morals on god. If we can't, then saying that god is moral is meaningless, especially, perfectly moral. So if humans cannot possibly be more moral than god, then God must meet or beat any expectations that we can place on a human. For example, If we say that a human is deficient in morality for condoning slavery, then if god does not at least meet that expectation, then he is deficient as well, unless we can say that violating this principle is not an indicator of a violation of this principle or any shortcoming of morality.
On what grounds does god not need to meet this expectation? On what grounds do people need to this expectation? If people need to meet this expectation and god meets or beats our expectations of morality, then he should be expected to do it to. Not just because I say so, but because it is consistent with what he has approved of to be said about himself, of which he says about himself, should be trustworthy.
This post is an illustration of the absurdity of the Christian apologist, JW Wartick's argument concerning The Morality of God: Christ at the Center