Pete Hegseth reposts video that says women shouldn’t be allowed to vote

Your knowledge of these moral absolutes that span across cultures and time to condemn that culture comes from where then? Is it magic? Do you just speak these things into existence and they are true? If not where do these truths come from? What is their source?

 

I’ll respectfully suggest that “how do we know slavery is wrong?” probably isn’t the rhetorical hill you want to fight this battle on.

 

I don’t think you are discerning the point here. The point is not to argue that slavery is OK. The point here is dangole lacks the machinery in the worldview being defended here to account for slavery being wrong. You don’t get to have your cake and deny the Christian worldview, and then simultaneously in the same breath get the benefit of the doubt in accounting for moral absolutes. It doesn’t work that way. Immanuel Kant engaged in this kind of reasoning when he advanced the Transcendental argument for God’s existence. I’m doing nothing different than that here.

Christian worldview deniers should not get a free pass where the assumptions of their worldview are allowed to go unchallenged and undebated IMO.

 

I understood where you were going, I was suggesting that slavery is a very messy basis to use as the jumping off point for your argument.

Both because it’s likely to lead to a nasty discussion, and because I’m not sure you need a divinely-gifted absolute moral clarity to be able to perceive that subjugating a race isn’t good.

 

If there is no God there is no basis for objective morality. That is what Kant argued. Every other way to account for objective morality is self-defeating and incoherent.

 

Sure there is. You can accept the idea that “God is good” without also accepting the idea that good only exists because of God.

If the Fifth Commandment was “kill thy father and mother” instead of “honor thy father and mother,” it wouldn’t suddenly become “good” to kill your parents because God said so. Which necessarily implies that there has to be objective good, at least to some extent, that exists independently of God’s commands.

So, having introduced the monotheistic version of the Euthyphro dilemma to this discussion (if God loves something because it is good, good exists independently of God; if something is good because God loves it, good is arbitrary), I will take my leave because I don’t find philosophy enjoyable.

 

Interesting. I had heard of this argument, but I never knew the formal name for it or where it came from.

FWIW…I don’t find that to be an accounting for morality without God. The argument was effective at the time against the pantheon of Greek of gods, but the Greek gods differ from the God of the Bible in a few notable ways. First, the Greek gods were evil. Zeus, for example, raped a human being for his own sexual pleasure. There are many more examples of the clear immoral nature of the Greek gods, but that is a great example that is the tip of the iceberg with respect to the immoral nature of the Greek gods. I see the Euthyphro Dilemma as a helpful argument against non-Christian forms of theism, but Plato when he mounted the argument had not yet seen the dawn of Christianity. Christianity, and most especially historic Protestant Christianity, has a unique accounting for objective morality not seen in other religions that make the Euthyphro Dilemma not an effective argument against it. In historic Protestantism God gives commands according to His eternal unchanging moral character. His will and His holy moral nature are therefore always in perfect alignment. The grounding of objective morality therefore depends on the eternal immutable existence of an absolutely perfect moral being, who acts in 100% alignment at all times with His perfect moral nature. With the existence of such a being Plato’s dilemma goes away, and so Plato paves the way to the argument that the Christian God is the only God who can account for objective morality.

I think it is important to note that only one side of the Euthyphro Dilemma offers an accounting of objective morality. Picking the side of the dilemma that rejects a divine accounting for objective morality still leaves you at ground zero with no way to account for objective morality.