Posted by Anthony on January 22, 2009
Astute, yet snarky readers, will fix on this title and surmise from the start that I’ve got it all wrong. I’ve done it backwards. The Euthyphro Dilemma has nothing to do with Man and everything to do with God or the gods. “He’s got it wrong!” Nonsense. I am a professional apologist. I always know what I’m doing. 
But seriously, it is not uncommon to hear the Euthyphro dilemma issue forth from atheists and skeptics. There is always a smug satisfaction latent in their tone of typing as the invoke it, confident they’ve laid an unanswerable doozy in your lap.
For the purposes of this post, I am going to concede that it is indeed an unanswerable doozy. What that proves exactly, I don’t know. The problem is that if it is in fact an unanswerable doozy, and especially if you then conclude that it shows theism to be untenable and incoherent, the problem doesn’t go away. What has happened in that case is that the argument is taken from the now proved non-existent deity of your choice and plopped down into the laps of individual humans.
The attempt is frequently made to try to fight off the charge that moral relativism is open season by invoking concepts like the ‘collective’ and ’social contracts.’ This accomplishes nothing. In the end, as you sit there reading this entry, whether or not you will behave in this way or that depends on your own conceptions of what are good, decent, and right. The idea of a ’social contract’ is just another one of your conceptions. So, are the things you choose good, decent, and right because you choose them or do you choose them because they are good, decent and right?
The Euthyphro Dilemma returns with a vengeance. Now, instead of the problem being distilled into a single entity, putatively non-contingent, transcendent, immanent, eternal, etc, it is diffused out over the billions of little gods wandering around in their little neck of the wasteland. Here the secular humanist’s attitude becomes twisted and warped. They are the first to make the argument that humans believe that God cares about them out of sheer arrogance, as if God would care about our petty affairs, yet here is an arrogance that far exceeds that, by far. For if there is no God then there is only we ‘gods’ and the Euthyphro Dilemma proves that we don’t exist. I guess.
I am not so arrogant to believe that the sum of all moral truth is determined and dictated by my existential experience of reality. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on August 20, 2008
When I was in college I made a nuisance of myself once by finding the slope of a vertical line (which, we are told, is ‘undefined.’) Impossible, you say. As did the math instructor. But I ‘found’ it by rotating the grid beneath the line and recalculated, for now, of course, the line wasn’t perfectly vertical anymore.
You may say that this was a cheap trick and doesn’t really find the slope of a ‘vertical’ line. You might say that we are required, by assumption, to take the graph in a certain way. I might reply that that is only an assumption and there is nothing that says I can’t rotate the grid back and forth as it suits my fancy. If I want to find the slope of the vertical line I can change the grid for a moment and then change it back. To this you might say that this is all well and good but the net result of such an approach is that you couldn’t trust any slope measurement and moreover, the whole program seems designed specifically to attack one particular mathematical proposition (ie, a vertical line has an undefined slope).
Such an exercise illustrates what anyone worth their salt already understands: most of what we believe is true rests on assumptions which can’t themselves be demonstrated. The data of our experience is set upon a particular ‘grid’ or ‘graph’ which by convention we accept and adopt.
In order to make any progress at all, we have to posit a certain ‘alignment’ of our graph. Here now is the problem: What if in the course of talking someone they begin by having the same alignment as you but halfway through they ‘rotate’ their grid – specifically to undermine a particular assertion you’ve just made- and then hoping you don’t notice, rotate it back? And how if you call them on this, they denied that they performed such a rotation and/or that there was never an agreed upon frame of reference in the first place?
Or, how if you don’t begin with the same ‘alignment’ in hand at all? Now the two people are setting their data in different frames of references and their calculations may be using the same formulas but the conclusions will be different? How could it be that either individual could say that the other is ‘wrong’ in their ‘calculations’?
This is precisely what transpires every day in debates between theists and atheists. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on June 8, 2008
In the first part of this discussion I explained that I believe that Christians need to distinguish between how we feel about homosexuality as a matter of our faith and religion and how we feel about it as citizens of this country. I had recently issued a call to Christians to do that on the ChristianPost.com, where I contribute columns. Part one talked about concerns strictly as a citizen of this country. This part will approach the matter from the spiritual side of things.
The very first thing I want to say is that the basic premise of Christianity on such a matter is simply that people would actually be happier all around if they did things the way that God wanted them to be done. In other words, those involved in homosexual (and extra-wedded) sexual behaviors think that they are in pursuit of their own best interests and happiness, but in fact the reality is that they will never be happier than if they followed God’s outline for sexuality, ie, a single man wedded with a single woman, to death do they part.
Note that this argument represents a different dynamic than the way many Christians have presented it. It is not an assertion that homosexuality is wrong… it is an assertion that homosexuality can never be as satisfying as heterosexual marriage. So, if those involved in homosexual behaviors really had their own best interests and happines in mind, they would choose the God’s model. You may disagree, but where is the offense? I have not issued a fire and brimstone assertion, but one of care and concern and promise. If there is a God and he designed things to be a certain way then it follows that you’ll be happier doing it his way.
God made it so that a man will be a better man when married to a woman and a woman a better woman when married to a man.
If you don’t think there is a God, or that he designed things to be a certain way, then you certainly shouldn’t be offended by this approach. Why should you care what those with these assumptions think? Surely the question becomes “Is there a God?” and “Did he design things to be a certain way?” I don’t suppose anyone is going to argue “I really enjoy my sexual habits and it appears that they would be outside of God’s design, if there were one, and I don’t like that, so I’ll simply say that there is no God!”
Of course, homosexual behavior is wrong, but with the above context in mind let’s try to explain how and why.
It certainly can’t be wrong because sex is wrong. The Christian consensus is that sex is quite good. God created it. It was his idea. (presuming there is a God). Yes, some Christians have been prudish about sexuality, but that doesn’t mean they were right to do so.
There is another thing that is wrong, too. Purposely breaking one’s arm is wrong. It hurts, you know. God created your arm to be a certain way and function in such a way as to be able to perform in a certain way. God believes that arms are good. He created them. They were his idea. But if you break your arm and your bone pokes out and it doesn’t work very well in the future exactly whose fault is this? If it heals but remains disfigured because you didn’t set it right, whose fault is this?
The only difference in these scenarios is that breaking one’s own arm obviously is painful from the outset whereas in homosexual behavior the initial act is presumably quite pleasurable, and the painful consequences are not obvious or necessarily immediate.
The underlying question remains whether or not God designed things a certain way, or not.
There is a different sort of ‘wrong’ at work, here. Read the rest of the entry… »
