Vox Day vs Common Sense Atheism — A few thoughts
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Two bloggers have been going back and forth with some religious debate. Luke from Common Sense Atheism and Vox Day from Vox Day have been going back and forth via letters between their two blogs. I’ve witnessed 5 from Luke, 4 from Vox and hundreds of comments. [The 1st letter from Luke; the 1st response from Vox] I was going to link to each and every letter, but if you are compelled enough to read through all of them, the first salvos are enough to get you started.
I’m interested in examining an argument from Vox that I have not encountered before (at least not directly).
When asked why he is a Christian –
Vox Day: Why am I a Christian? Because I believe in evil. I believe in objective, material, tangible evil that insensibly envelops every single one of us sooner or later.
Which does not seem to immediately follow. A person could easily have the same reason for being a Satanist (in the real sense of worshipping Lucifer, the supernatural creature — not LaVey). “Why am I a Satanist? Because I believe in evil… ”
VD continues –
VD: The fact that we live in a world of pain, suffering, injustice, and cruelty is not evidence of God’s nonexistence or maleficence, it is exactly the worldview that is described in the Bible. In my own experience and observations, I find that worldview to be far more accurate than any other, including the shiny science fiction utopianism of the secular humanists.
Still isn’t clear what having an accurate description about the pain, suffering, injustice and cruelty of the world; therefore worship whatever wrote the description? Seriously, imagine some guy on the street tells you, “So this supernatural being spoke to me last night, and he had the best grasp of the true meaning of evil. He could give a perfect account of the suffering, cruelty, injustice — just everything rotten about this world. His name is Lucifer, and boy, I cannot tell you how AWESOME this guy was at describing evil. It’s like… he’s lived it! So, I decided to worship this being.”
One might be tempted to say, “Sounds like you’ve thought a lot about this…”
I think VD’s argument from evil is the worst argument for being a Christian that I’ve seen written in full sentences, but I may be forgetting a couple.
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Semi-relatedly, VD goes into his idea of God’s morality and chastises Luke for having a non-objective standard of evil. Fair enough, but a little inconsistent from what I can tell.
VD: I believe logic dictates that the Creator alone has the right to set the standards for His Creation. His game, His rules. In keeping with that principle, God always has the absolute right to do as He sees fit, which just so happens to be precisely the answer He gave to Job and company. The answer to Euthyphro’s so-called dilemma is that the good is good because it is commanded by God, since there is no objective, supra-divine standard of Good by which His commands may be judged.
VD: I stated there that the arbitrary nature of God’s goodness, which has long been a known solution to the first horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma, “can only be considered a genuine problem for those who insist that a fixed principle cannot be arbitrary.”
This is a fairly standard response to Euthyphro. There are some semi-weird consequences, but I’ll save those for another time.
Vox then took Luke to task for having a subjective concept of evil:
VD: Applying the relevant definition of objective to your answer – “not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion” – regarding the nature of evil clearly indicates that you believe evil is a fundamentally subjective concept. In fact, based on your explication of desirism, it is apparent that in your view, evil is not only subjective, but dynamic and transitory as well. Unfortunately, this rejection of the concept of objective evil renders it impossible for us to compare the Christian view of evil with other accounts of it because neither of us can possibly know what your definition of evil is for any single act or individual at any given point on the space-time continuum.
I’ll just make the observation that this criticism seems inconsistent with the earlier statements on evil by VD.
VD: “because neither of us can possibly know what your definition of evil is for any single act or individual at any given point on the space-time continuum.”
But God, allegedly, has no restrictions on what He calls evil. All right. There is no restrictions or supra-divine standard which His commands may be judged. All right. So God has the right to set the standards for His creation and the absolute right to do as He sees fit. All right.
Does this mean that God could say that murder is good and it would be good?
Yes.
Does this mean that God could say that stomping puppies to death for fun is good on Tuesdays alone, and every other day of the week it is evil?
Yes.
Does this mean that God could exactly flip what was evil and what was good at whim, any time He wanted, as many times as He wanted, throughout the course of all time?
Yes.
Could God flip what was good and what was evil without telling us humans?
Yes.
Could God flip on a daily basis the moral standing of stomping puppies and keep constant our visceral reactions to the same event the same?
Yes.
Is this not a completely arbitrary conception of evil?
Yes.
So what was that again about VD claiming we could not possibly know what is evil for any single act at any given point on the space-time continuum — non-objective?
These are some of my observations so far; depending on where the Luke/Vox discussion goes from here I may comment on it more in the future.
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To borrow from OBI-WAN KENOBI (Star Wars Episode IV):
Who's the more foolish: the fool, or the fool who ARGUES WITH him?
False dichotomy. You forgot about the person who asks such questions.
I'm pretty sure you got it backwards: God isn't arbitrary because he changes the rules whenever he wants to, he's arbitrary because when he was first making the rules, he could make any rules he wanted. Once he made them and told the people about them, he expects the people to obey them. When it comes right down to it, he gave people only 2 rules: love God and love people. All the rest is HOW and WHY.
God COULD change the rules whenever He wants to, therefore, you can never be sure that any specific act at any given point in the space-time continuum is definitely evil unless you have a direct hotline to God.
I did not argue that God is arbitrary because he changes the rules.
I argue that the conception of evil that relies only on the whim of a creature who could reverse what is good and evil whenever he wants — is arbitrary and potentially unstable. Especially if that creature has not supra-morality that he must conform to. Beyond that, figuring out what is good and evil in such a conception is impossible.
If god hasn't changed the rules in the past 1000+ years, why do you assume that he is potentially unstable? The rules of gravity haven't changed since the calculations were done a 100+ years ago, and I'm sure you don't assume that gravity is potentially unstable and not worth following.
Ah I see, you don't agree with the questions and answers in the entry.
To the questions:
1. Does this mean that God could exactly flip what was evil and what was good at whim, any time He wanted, as many times as He wanted, throughout the course of all time?
and
2. Could God flip what was good and what was evil without telling us humans?
You must be answering "no, God cannot do that."
My apologies, I thought you were in the camp that God could do anything He wanted with regards to defining morality.
By the way, Could gravity change without us knowing about it? Not in any substantial way.
But we can glean why the laws of gravity are the way they are (ie, as a consequence of specific broken symmetries), so they are not arbitrary (which does not mean they won't change tomorrow, just makes it much less likely). An appeal to God as a source of morality, however, is an appeal to a perfectly arbitray agent who can change her mind about things at any moment.
[...] Another blogger with a reaction to the Vox/Luke exchange so far: Conversational Atheist. [...]
@ Mrs. Ward & Converse Atheist,
I think James Tracy is right.
God can change the rules whenever he wants to – and guess what? He HAS.
Old Testament: "an eye for an eye"
New Testament: "turn the other cheek"
Isn't this evidence that God's 'moral law' is not absolute (i.e. immutable)? Between Old and New testaments, there is a near-180 degree turn. Christians typically call this change a shift from the 'old covenant' to the 'new covenant'.
So which is it? It can't be both. Do we exact revenge, or turn the other cheek? Or are we to exact revenge WHILE turning the other cheek? How does this work, exactly?
Under the 'Old' covenant we were supposed to stone to death adulterers, homosexuals, witches, disobedient children, people collecting sticks on the Sabbath..etc. These were God's explicit orders back then. Now, according to God, it is considered to be explicitly wrong to stone people to death on account of these actions, as per the 'new' covenant. Apparently nowadays God doesn't mind people working on the Sabbath either. How come he CHANGED THE RULES?
All this variance… yet we are being asked to believe that this God's rules are immutable or unchanging? Get real.
Old Testament=God's regulations for HEBREWS. If I ain't HEBREW, the regulations ain't for me. (I'm not a TEXAN, so I don't pay taxes to the state of TEXAS.)
New Testament=God's regulations for CHRISTIANS. If I ain't CHRISTIAN, the regulations ain't for me.
They only people who have to figure out the Old/New Testament issue are HEBREWS that are also CHRISTIANS. If I ain't his type of person, why would I waste my time trying to figure it out?
You obviously have more time to waste than I do. But why would do you care so much? Why let this issue upset you enough that you've read all the regulations in the Old Testament and all the ones in the New Testament so they could be compared? Instead of wasting all that time on something you dislike, you could have been doing something fun: enjoying this great life that we all have. The time we have is too short to spend doing useless things.
If you believe religion is useless, stop wasting your time talking/writing about it; find useful/fun things to do that fill your life with joy. Ride a jetski or learn to crochet or fly a Cessna or ask the local library if they need people for a project (libraries are always doing useful long-term projects): you would *enjoy* one of these things more than you enjoy studying religion, so go do something you enjoy.
Ha ha, wouldn't that be nice? But, of course, the problem is not with what individual people choose to believe (no matter how fascinating and delusionary I may consider it), but with those who try to force me to believe it or at least follow their laws. I am glad you feel that the rules of either OT or NT do not apply to me, but many of your co-religionists are not so accommodating.
Meanwhile, of course, religions are fascinating in the insights they provide into human psychology and are well worth studying for that reason alone. I am sure you are familiar with the term "intellectual curiosity".
God/s often have long been claimed as,those that are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Yet we see many times in faith books written about them that this is often false and not very true.
We see that the so called absolute morals are actually often much more like relative morals relative to religion and time.