Originally posted by Sushipunk
I can't believe I didn't read this thread until now.
I love you, COR.
I can't believe they blocked TA at work. s.
woscar
quote:
Originally posted by Moongoose
Oh i would love to read that. Nothing better to see a person try to justify murder, slaughter, sacrifice and genocide of almost every living thing on earth save for a few of his closes friends :) Forget the nazis and the jews, according to the source books, god is nothing less that the ultimate bad guy :)
Quench your thirst...It's one of the most embarrassing things I have ever read.
I...I cannont believe someone actually wrote down an argument like this.
quote:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.
Wrote it down...for people to see! Clearly hes not ashamed by it since he wrote it so ill be ashamed for him :( I felt dirtier and dirtier reading that, and a few times i had to stop myself from shouting at the screen.
The sad thing being that the only thing separating this guy and his defence of murder, sacrifice and genocide from the "average" believer is that he put his stance on it in writing. Everyone else who knows this story and is a believer in a just and basically good god has had to rationalise gods actions as just and righteous just as that guy. and just like him, if they agree and see those things as just and good, they are anything but that themselves.
Lews
quote:
Originally posted by Moongoose
I...I cannont believe someone actually wrote down an argument like this.
Wrote it down...for people to see! Clearly hes not ashamed by it since he wrote it so ill be ashamed for him :( I felt dirtier and dirtier reading that, and a few times i had to stop myself from shouting at the screen.
I had to re-read that three times because I couldn't believe he actually wrote that.
woscar
It gets worse. He actually has a PhD in philosophy.
ziptnf
I had a long argument with a friend where he quoted Dr. Craig. Woscar, you probably remember me discussing this argument with you :p
quote:
Hello Dr. Craig,
I attended your debate with Dr. Williamson at the University of Saskatchewan last night, and I was surprised to hear you use the example of child rape being universally viewed as wrong as evidence of objective morality coming from God. This is not to say that I disagree with you that child rape should be universally condemned - of course I do - but if you are to say that objective morality comes from God, and if, as a Christian, you believe that the Bible is the revealed word of God, as you seem to regarding the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, then how do you find child rape so abhorrent when there is nothing in the Bible condemning it? Indeed, Deuteronomy 22:28-29 NLT says that if a woman (regardless of age) is raped, the rapist must pay her father 50 silvers and marry the woman, which hardly seems a punishment to the rapist. This, of course, excludes engaged women, for whom the punishment for being raped is death if they don't cry for help (Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB). The only instance in which it is only the rapist who is punished is if the victim is engaged (possible but not likely if they are a child), and they cry for help (again, a child would very likely be intimidated into not calling for help, and therefore, by Biblical law, be killed). This is of course to say nothing regarding the sexual abuse of male children, for whom it seems that Leviticus 20:13 would dictate that a molested boy be put to death for the crime of being a rape victim. Therefore, your objection to child rape can not come from the Bible. Therefore, how can you argue that this sense of pedophilia's objective immorality, as well as the sense of the immorality of other acts that the Bible does not discuss, comes from God? If it is due to the personal experience of God achieved by opening your heart, as you argued in the debate, what of those of us who have not been fortunate enough to receive this personal relationship with God, but are still morally repulsed by pedophilia?
Thank you,
Spencer
Canada
Dr. Craig responds:
I’m glad you came to the debate, Spencer (though the tone of your question leads me to think you were cheering for the other side!). It was a substantive and entertaining exchange, wasn’t it?
I’m afraid that you’ve seriously misunderstood me, Spencer. Here’s the moral argument for God that I defended:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.
The argument is logically valid; so if you want to deny the conclusion, you must reject one of the two premisses. So which one do you deny? Although you present your reservations as worries about (2), it’s evident that you agree that (2) is true, for you say not only that you are “morally repulsed” by child rape, but that you think “child rape should be universally condemned.” I agree. So if you deny that God exists, you must reject (1). But do you reject (1)? There’s nothing in your letter that suggests that you do.
So how am I to understand your worries? Perhaps as follows: you’re wondering what warrant there is for affirming (2). You seem to think that the justification I offer for (2) is biblical revelation, which you think is inadequate as a justification for (2). If this is not your concern, then I simply don’t understand your worry.
But it should be obvious that this worry is wholly unfounded. I never appealed to biblical revelation as a justification for affirming (2). On the contrary, Spencer, I affirm (2) for probably the same reasons you do! As I put it in my opening speech, “In moral experience we apprehend a realm of moral values and duties that impose themselves upon us. There’s no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world.” I like the way Louise Anthony put it in our debate of the foundations of morality: “Any argument for moral scepticism will based upon premises which are less obvious than the existence of objective moral values themselves.” Hence, moral skepticism can never be justified.
Spencer, you show that you have completely missed the thrust of my argument when you go on to ask, “how can you argue that this sense of pedophilia's objective immorality, as well as the sense of the immorality of other acts that the Bible does not discuss, comes from God?” It was no part of my argument that God is necessary to explain our moral sense of right and wrong, good and evil. Over and over again in the debate I carefully distinguished between moral ontology (questions about the reality of moral values) and moral epistemology (questions about how we come to know moral values), and I said that my argument is solely about the objective reality of moral values, not how we come to know them. I’ll appeal to all the same mechanisms that you appeal to in order to explain how you know that (2) is true. In point of fact, Spencer, I don’t think that we need to appeal to God at all to know that objective moral values and duties exist, so you’re just barking up the wrong tree insofar as I’m concerned.
As for the personal experience of God, you’re conflating the moral argument with my sixth point in the debate that we can know that God exists wholly apart from arguments through personally experiencing him. I do not believe, nor did I suggest, that a personal experience of God is the way one comes to know that (2) is true. Nor, for that matter, did I suggest, as you intimate, that the justification for (2) is universal consent.
So since I don’t appeal to the Bible as justification for (2), why is all this stuff about Old Testament ethics crowding into the discussion? You say that my argument regarding (the resurrection of) Jesus shows my belief in the Bible as the revealed Word of God. Again, Spencer, you’ve failed to understand that my argument regarding the historical credibility of Jesus of Nazareth treats the New Testament documents as we would any ordinary historical documents, not as revealed, much less inerrant. You’re wholly off track here. My argument neither presupposed nor sought to prove that the records of Jesus’ life were anything more than ordinary, fallible records of antiquity, which are reliable, at least, with respect to the three facts I mentioned.
At most, then, your argument from the inadequacies of Old Testament ethics would call into question the infallibility of the Old Testament, which is just irrelevant to the cogency of the case I presented for Christian theism.
But do your examples even do that? The immorality of rape is immediately given in the seventh of the Ten Commandments “You shall not commit adultery.” Any sexual intercourse outside the bounds of marriage is proscribed by the Bible. So rape is always regarded as immoral in the Bible. That puts a quite different perspective on things. What your complaint really is is that the penalties for rape in the passages you cite seem unduly lenient. You think that the criminal laws against rape needed to be even stronger than they were in ancient Israel. Well, maybe you’re right. What does that prove? There’s no claim that Israel’s laws were perfect or adequately expressed God’s moral will. Jesus himself regarded the Mosaic law on divorce as inadequate and failing to capture God’s ideal will for marriage (Matthew 5.31-2). Maybe the same was true for rape laws. Israel’s criminal statutes were not timeless truths for all societies but were intended for Israel at a certain specific time in its history. Moreover, these statutes are examples of case law: if such-and-such happens, then do so-and-so. These were idealizations which served as guides and might admit all sorts of exceptions and mitigating circumstances (like a child’s being afraid to cry for help).
In any case, Spencer, how much effort have you really made to understand these laws in the cultural context of the ancient Near East? None at all, I suspect; you probably got these passages from some free-thought publication or website and repeat them here with little attempt to understand them. By contrast, Paul Copan in his Is God a Moral Monster? (Baker: 2010) deals with these passages in their historical context, thereby shedding light on their meaning (pp. 118-119). Copan observes that there are three cases considered here:
1. Consensual sex between a man and a woman who is engaged to another man, which was a violation of marriage (Deuteronomy 22.23). Both parties were to be executed.
2. Rape of a woman who is engaged to another man (Deuteronomy 22.25). Only the rapist is executed; the woman is an innocent victim.
3. Seduction of a young woman who is not engaged to another man (Deuteronomy 22.28; cf. Exodus 22.16-17). The seducer is obliged to marry the young woman and provide for her, if she will have him; otherwise her father may refuse him and demand payment of the usual bridal gift (rather like a dowry) anyway.
In short, rape was a capital crime in ancient Israel. As for Leviticus 20.13, this verse prescribes the death penalty for consensual sexual intercourse between two men; that you interpret this passage to condemn a child who is assaulted by a pedophile only shows how tendentious your exegesis is.
If anything, then, the Bible is far stricter in its laws concerning sexual behavior than we are today. So even though appeal to the Bible is no part of my argument for (2), what the Bible teaches about the immorality of rape is right in line with my claim that objective moral values and duties exist.
Then went on to say:
quote:
How did we come into existence? Literally no scientific response can come close to answering the absurdity of something coming from nothing, whereas God's eternality is part of what makes him God. Every action we have ever seen was a reaction to an original force or action. What was the first cause or force or reason?
If God does not exist, objective morals do not exist. If we are biological clockwork and the universe began on accident, saying "it's wrong to kill" is no more relevant or weighty than syaing "blue is the best color in the world." if God doesn't exist, we have nothing but subjective opinions. That means mother theresa was morally equivalent to adolf hitler. that means there wasn't anything wrong with katie dumping you. that means there has never been and will never be anything wrong with raping and killing little girls. You cannot live consistently to your worldview, because regardless of what you say there are a many number of actions i could do to you that you would know in your heart and conscience were REALLY, TRULY wrong, and not just wrong because you decided they were. an atheist cannot choose to watch his money stolen or his wife abused and say to himself "this doesn't matter because there's no such thing as right and wrong."
can you seriously answer those questions?
Objective morality has to be one of the biggest cop-outs in the case for Christianity.
Jake Benson
quote:
Originally posted by DarkWater
Religion is a deadly plague which will soon cause the extinction of the human species. Our comprehension of science cannot rely on full "objectivity," and so we are unable to understand the importance of "objectivity" in the development and creation of cures, peace, and social pain relief today
Here's your cure. No religion will tolerate a happy hardcore remix of Britney Spears.
knowhope
You guys are all dirty ing scum bags.
God the C0R rox.
woscar
quote:
Originally posted by ziptnf
I had a long argument with a friend where he quoted Dr. Craig. Woscar, you probably remember me discussing this argument with you :p
Then went on to say:
Objective morality has to be one of the biggest cop-outs in the case for Christianity.
Oh yes, that guy. :stongue:
I loved how Sam Harris dealed with Craig's pathetic philosophical questioning on the debate they had. Harris says that an objective morality exists even in the absence of god because what matters is "wellbeing", and what wellbeing is can be discovered by science. Craig's retort was "Who says that wellbeing is a good thing?". To which Harris brilliantly responded: "We have struck philosophical bedrock with the shovel of a stupid question".
UWM
In breaking news, reason > emotion. Follow-up at 10.
Marcus Summers
I can't believe people still argue about religion. I thought people usually stop caring about that kind of nonsense after about 16 years of age.
