Posted: Apr 29, 2012 1:36 am
John P. M. wrote:I don't really have much to add to the discussion, at least not at this time, other than to point out that if 'good' equals 'God's Nature', then the word and concept 'good' loses its meaning (to us humans anyway).
What I mean is that we couldn't then really look at an action and say 'it is good to do so', unless we had some precedence that God had once done exactly that thing, or commanded it. We would have no idea on our own what 'good' is.
Further trouble / complication comes when one considers that this God supposedly has been OK with detailing, doing or commanding things that we feel in our guts are wrong. These things are then not wrong, since they emanate from God's Nature, which is 'good'.
We would have no right, and for that matter no clue from which to say that this God was wrong in those instances; we should be unable to judge the actions one way or another.
Now because of that, we're left not knowing what is 'good', or what is 'bad'. We have some internal sensibilities, and one could point to them as a moral compass I suppose, and as the sense of good/bad that God has given us, but evidently those sensibilities do not inform us of what actions this God supports. If they did, certain cases of slavery and genocide would not trigger negative emotions in us, we would instinctively look at them as the most wonderful things to happen in our history (maybe they never happened as the case may be, but that's a little beside the point here). They would be good, and we could have no clue to the contrary.
All this in turn makes the story of how we gained 'knowledge of good and evil, becoming like God', seem out of sync and rather peculiar. If we take all this for granted for the sake of argument.
It seems to me. Maybe I'm missing some apologetics.
It seems with all these ad hoc arguments theists engage in to escape dilemmas created by this or that pronouncement always seems to create even worse dilemmas for them down the road, which in turn requires new ad hockery to rescue them.
This is why more ink has been spilled in the service of proving there is a simple, obvious god than in any other human endeavor (excepting perhaps general bureaucracy).