NotThatGuy

@RonJohn I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make, but it sounds like you're trying to argue insignificant technicalities and semantics. Morality is obviously grounded in our emotions. But acting purely and directly based on emotion doesn't make one moral (it often makes people immoral). Morality is principles we built on top of our emotions, using reason (even if a lot of moral progress in society was emotion-based). That meets a reasonable definition of "invent", but I don't really care to argue semantics.

@RonJohn One could argue that treating everyone with decency (regardless of race, gender, etc) is extending principles that's been around for as long as humans have been around (and before that). But it took people eons to reach that conclusion (not that progress was strictly linear throughout history). So it would be hard to argue that such an extension is trivial (even if one could argue that it's rational).

Side note: just about every modern society, especially the western world, has wildly different moral values compared to 1000+, or even 100, years ago. We undeniably HAVE changed our morals by agreement (well, technically we change our laws after our morality has already changed for other reasons, e.g. empathy). So to say morality was discovered, one has to (a) reject all moral progress throughout history, (b) justify claiming that people discovered the unchanging morality at some point in history, or (c) somehow justify how moral progress equals "fixing" our knowledge of objective moral laws.

@Anixx (a) Who says it needs to be a "scientific experiment"? Scientific experiments are ideal, but that doesn't mean it's possible for everything. (b) It's incorrect to say scientific experiments "don't count" if they aren't independently reproducible. They just count a lot less (particularly for those who didn't observe the experiment). (c) Reproducing a scientific experiment only requires comparable circumstances, not necessarily identical ones (the latter isn't viable in general). (d) You haven't addressed how or why this problem is specific to physicalism and how non-physicalism solves it

@Anixx I can see my physical body using my physical eyes, and I can feel it using my physical hands, and I can establish a reference frame for where my body is in physical space at any given point in time using a number of physical senses. It's the same answer a non-physicalist should give.

@Anixx It's pretty easy to distinguish myself from another person on account of us inhabiting different physical bodies. This is true independent of physicalism.

@Anixx Physicalism doesn't deny the existence of qualia (unless you presuppose qualia to be non-physical, in which case there'd be a corresponding concept of qualia that is physical, or a broader concept which doesn't presuppose meta-physical composition).

For what it's worth, the free will defence is far, far worse than saying a police officer shouldn't shoot an active shooter to respect their free will (already absurd). According to Christianity, God made any and every criminal, gave them the means and opportunity to harm others, put them in scenarios that shaped their personality such that they end up wanting to do harm, knows ahead of time that they'll do harm, and can intervene with the utmost precision and timing, and with minimal impact. It's closer to a parent who birthed, raised and armed them, with 24/7 monitoring and a killswitch.

* The accuracy of the analogy should be obvious to anyone who is sincerely pursuing the truth. It may not be obvious to those who are simply looking for excuses to defend their beliefs (or those who are blinded by their biases).

Oh, also: your analogy is just an invitation to go live with the employer. But that isn't an accurate analogy for Christianity, where you're asked to dedicate your life to said employer, who doesn't seem to exist, for the promise of one day going to live with the employer, in a place that doesn't seem to exist.

If you want a painfully detailed and overly explicit breakdown of why my analogy is more accurate (although all of this should already be obvious from just reading the analogy):

@MichaelHall "My assertions are based on scripture" - your interpretation of scripture, that is. But I prefer logic above a subjective interpretation of a fictionalised book. And you're just continuing to tell outright lies about what I said. I explained why my analogy makes more sense. "let's leave it at that" - if you really wanted to leave it at that, you wouldn't have made a bunch of objectionable accusations. That's just you engaging in more bad-faith rhetorical tactics, by trying to act like you're the one wanting to disengage amicably, when in fact you just want the last word.

@MichaelHall Didn't you say in the past that it's not productive to try to talk to me? You spawned and engaged in a 20+ comment discussion that in no way relates to question or answer, all because you had an issue with half a sentence in another comment. And, unsurprisingly, this discussion didn't get us anywhere except leaving us with more vitriol.

@MichaelHall "you are making unsubstantiated assertions and putting forth personal opinion as logic based fact" - that's yet another dishonest comment from you. I supported what I said with arguments. Please stop telling blatant lies about what I said - you're just creating vitriol. "You don't know theology as well as you think" - as I said half a dozen comments ago, I know perfectly well that you claim otherwise, but I'm not going to take your baseless dogmatic assertions as fact. That doesn't mean I'm ignorant. Rather, it means my brain works properly.

@MichaelHall "The Bible is not a logic puzzle" - yes, it's a self-contradictory inconsistent unreliable vague mythologised mess. The old testament contains plenty of laws, which you still adhere to. But you use the "new covenant" nonsense to dismiss all the laws that don't conform to your modern moral values. It's just a convenient excuse for cherry picking.

@MichaelHall "No modern Christian believes..." - you cherry picking from your holy book reflects poorly on your beliefs, not on my objection. If it's immoral, why did God plan for it to be included in his chosen method of communication which would last for thousands of years? That sounds like a pretty abysmal plan. "[my analogy is] not perfect" - well, that's the understatement of the year. I provided a point-by-point explanation of why your analogy fails on every level, and why my is more accurate. Just asserting that actually yours is more accurate is just another baseless assertion.

@Rushi I never said anything about forgiveness. I merely pointed to a Christian-based god belief involving eternal torture. That's something many Christians believe. If you think that's not supported by Christian doctrine, go argue against those Christians. If you think God can be forgiving and still enact a plan where people are tortured for all eternity, then you have a very twisted view of forgiveness, but that also doesn't refute what I said.

@MichaelHall "John 3:16 trumps ancient Jewish customs and laws" - huh? You have to make some pretty wild leaps in logic to think "God gave his son" in any way overrides "it's fine to beat your slave", "stone rape victims to death" or "go and genocide some people". "that's not even what we are arguing about here" - yet another bad-faith tactic to criticise me for responding to someone else who brought that up (especially given that I myself pointed out that it's not what we're arguing about).

@MichaelHall You aren't "correcting" me. You're sharing your opinion about whether God would be responsible for people being tortured, if he created everything in question, with perfect foreknowledge and knowing intent. And you want me to agree with your opinion while denying my contrary conclusion. You can't just claim that God not being responsible is part of your theology, and then insist that atheists are wrong for drawing the logical conclusion that he is responsible. This is philosophy - we make logical arguments here, we don't just repeat baseless dogmatic assertions.

@Rushi "Turn the other cheek" has little to do with whether God will torture people for all eternity, and whether God can do that and still be all-loving. But also, for every "turn the other cheek" there is a verse telling people to go and wipe out entire nations and kill everything that breathes (Deut 20:16), or to stone a rape victim to death because she didn't scream loud enough (Deut 22:23), or to buy slaves (Lev 25:44), or saying it's fine to beat slaves unconscious, as long as they get up after a day or two (Exodus 21:21). People can and do see the Bible fundamentally differently.

@MichaelHall "I am insisting that if you are going to make theological based claims that they be accurate" - you're insisting that I swallow and regurgitate your self-contradictory apologetic nonsense, while abandoning my accurate, consistent and logical inferences from the claims you make. I will not do that.

@MichaelHall "A question you avoided" - I avoided your question because you presented an analogy that's about as closely related to your god belief as asking whether one should put butter on a sandwich. I fixed your analogy, and then provided a clear answer: yes, God is responsible. Labelling my counter-argument as "rubbish" is just a disrespectful and bad-faith rhetorical tactic, which in no way addresses the merits of what I said. As for "free will", define that. You slapping a sticker with the text "free will" on a black box inside the killbot doesn't absolve its creator of responsibility.

@MichaelHall "the rogue criminal is not my son" - one's child is the closest analogy to one's creation. Well, actually a closer analogy would be: the rogue criminal is a robot you personally programmed to be a killbot. "Maybe I'm busy" - you have all the time in the world, literally. So... you're spending most of your time sipping mojitos on a beach while your killbot is going around murdering people. "maybe I haven't yet grown the company" - you have 100 trillion US dollars sitting in a bank account, and you're refusing to spend even a dollar to stop your killbot.

@MichaelHall Well, the rogue criminal you're warning me about is also your son, who you alone raised, you gave him a gun, you have 24-hour surveillance of him, you can stop him at any time with a press of a button, and rather than personally telling me any of this, you just tell it to other people who told other people who told other people, round and round and round, until finally someone told me, with me having no way to verify any of this, and those people are asking me to dedicate my life to serving you, so that one day, I'll get into your compound, which I have no reason to believe exists

@MichaelHall I know theists keep insisting that God carries no responsibility whatsoever for people being tortured in hell... even though God created hell, and God created the universe, and God created us, and God created Satan, and God created sin, and God created temptation, and God created the rules of who goes to hell and who doesn't, and things perfectly follow God's plan, and God could've created things differently, and God could at any point give us evidence that would convince us, and God could freely suspend the rules of who goes to hell. But sure, no responsibility

@JadeVanadium When you go more into conspiracy theory circles (or rather, conspiracy theory debunking circles), you start to hear people talking about the emotional appeal of the simulation hypothesis. The points in my answer are mostly things I've heard other people actually say (in some form or another). It's understandable that you wouldn't really hear these from more academic types, who try to argue more formally (but still dubiously) for the simulation hypothesis - they'd recognise that there's no argument supporting these emotional appeals, so they wouldn't try to argue for them)

@JadeVanadium There are also many people who argue that when you consider the implications of certain gods existing (especially the god depicted in the Bible, who committed and ordered genocides, and the one who'll torture people for all eternity for not being convinced of the truth of a claim), you end up with a rather bad thing. But still, people find plenty of emotional appeal in those god beliefs. Also, the point in my answer about someone else being responsible/to blame for all bad things - that's most likely a bad thing, but still carries some appeal in getting to abdicate responsibility

@JadeVanadium Our cognitive biases make us see a truth claim as more or less reasonable than is rationally warranted. This would certainly apply if some truth claim has desirable consequences. I'd say you'd be taking too narrow of a view of the "appeal to consequences" fallacy to exclude this, to the point where practically nothing would be that fallacy. Fallacious reasoning often push people, knowingly or not, in one direction or the other, rather than being explicitly employed to say the conclusion is definitely true. But okay, it's potentially that fallacy, not necessarily so.

* I mean the "ultimate focus" of epistemology, of evaluating claims and coming to beliefs. One could have whichever focus beyond that.

You do seem to lean quite heavily into the "well it's fine to believe Christianity even if it isn't true", which maybe suggests that you might on some level know you aren't quite THAT committed to the pursuit of truth (if that pursuit would lead you away from Christianity).

^ A pretty good summary (if one doesn't mind facetiousness) of my overall thoughts regarding the difference between reasoning while having the pursuit of truth as one's ultimate focus, versus reasoning to try to reach or support a specific conclusion (with some shots fired at apologists). Although I doubt the usefulness of linking it here.

I can imagine some hypothetical being sitting in a parallel universe with entirely different universal constants, where life looks entirely different, and thinking how their universe is just so perfectly suited to their form of life. Like a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"

The cosmological argument concludes that every conceivable universe has a god - I can't imagine a much stronger way to assume your conclusion. The teleological argument: apart from many, many things being very, very far from perfect, we haven't the slightest idea whether universal constants could even be different, never mind what the universe would look like if they were.

These arguments come from people who spent too long sitting in an armchair, staring into the void, spending countless hours wracking their brain to find ways to bend and squeeze reality into premises that would support their preexisting conclusion. But every part of that tends to be counter-productive for coming to truth. The arguments just sound good because you like the conclusion.

There is "universal longing" ... except for all the people who don't have such longing, who found no fulfilment in religion or who ended up far more fulfilled outside of their religion. A lot of these arguments have premises that outright deny reality and they're little more than wishful thinking - e.g. we WANT there to be some universal shared sense of morality, but we have overwhelming evidence disproving this idea.

"Everything is perfect" ... except for the many, many things that are very far from ideal. Consciousness is supposedly evidence of god, yet we have a well-supported explanation for the emergence of consciousness via evolutionary processes. We see various stages/levels of consciousness across the animal kingdom, with animals displaying more and less conscious capability.

I can't imagine a universe much LESS indicative of there being a loving god. A lot of the origin-based arguments assume their conclusion or have no way to reach a different conclusion, whereas other origin-based arguments stumble over themselves when one thinks about them for more than a few minutes. "We all sense objective right and wrong" ... except the thing we supposedly sense is undeniably wildly different across different cultures and generations and even between neighbours.

We needed to invent things just to mitigate some of the exceedingly common failures (e.g. glasses). There are far too many people willing to commit unspeakable acts on countless others with no conscience to hold them back, and who have the means and opportunity to do so. Entire generations of people had no problem enslaving other human beings. I'm sure most people, if able, would create a universe much better than the one we've got.

About origin-based arguments: what would a universe/Earth look like if there were no god (or not a loving powerful god)? If YOU could create a universe/Earth, would it have as much suffering/death as this one? In this universe, complex life took billions of years to form, it's exceedingly rare and it's in a constant struggle for survival. Our bodies are a hackjob of parts that we managed to pull together from evolutionary processes, and it's rather prone to catastrophic failure.

And running out of gas is a super mundane claim. In the case of Jesus, one might point out that there's a significant downside to not believing it, if it ends up being true, so it's not entirely analogous. Although there are also many scams that promise a significant benefit to you, which may be treated similar to the above. There are also plenty of other miraculous claims, that promise eternal benefits. This also gets back to: why would God expect us to believe something based on poor evidence.

* Applying more scrutiny to things based on how much it affects our lives is something we already tend to do. If a stranger tells you their car ran out of gas, you may tentatively believe them. If they then ask for money, you may then be more inclined to suppose they're lying (even without the fact that them asking for money makes it much more likely that they're lying / trying to scam you). Their say-so doesn't create enough confidence in the claim to warrant the investment from your side.

Meanwhile, people making stuff up (especially extraordinary things) is highly plausible and happens all the time.

"Since it doesn't affect my life much, I grant that Caesar existed" - since it doesn't affect my life much AND the claims about Caesar are not extraordinary. It consists of things which we understand the underlying working of and which we have plenty of other examples of. When there are extraordinary claims, we tend to reject those as fictional. That's how historical analysis is done. We try to find the most plausible explanation, and extraordinary or one-of-a-kind things are highly implausible.

@candied_orange There's already an entire section in my answer, dedicated to addressing the exact thing you're saying. It's been there since before your first comment. I don't really see the benefit of ruining a perfectly good answer by clarifying the same thing over and over again, because one commenter is being obtuse (especially not when all those clarifications seems to have had less than zero impact on their understanding of what I'm saying).