A new atheistic argument for you to smash

[Guest guest]

Pamho, agtSP!

 

I found the following on a debate forum runned by some danish atheists. I

challenged the author to a formal debate. What do you say?

 

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This came up on the thread "Why can't religion and Atheism get along?",

where I claimed that the concept of a creator god excludes the possibility

of an absolute moral standard. That was of course a typo, since any standard

given by god could be considered absolute, given that god has the power to

enforce any standard he might choose. Rather I meant to write "objective".

Sorry for the confusion.

 

This idea relates to Euthyphro's Dilemma, which asks the following:

 

Quote: The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the

pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it

is beloved of the gods.

 

However, when we turn to the concept of the creator god, the scope of the

problem expands drastically. This can be seen from the following:

 

For a god to be the creator, everything else must be contingent upon the

will of that god. This is obvious, since otherwise that god would not be the

creator of all.

 

However, for a moral standard to be objective, is must not be particular to

a given person, which is to say that it must be external to the will of god.

But for that to be true, there cannot be a creator god. In other words, the

only possible moral standard under the assumption of a creator god, is one

that is subjective to the will of that god, and hence not objective.

 

Now, that is reasonably simple, however, the scope of this problem does not

end at morality. Indeed, it should be clear that no objectivity is possible

when the notion of a creator god is in play, including objective reality,

since reality like everything else is subject to the will of god. Even logic

must thus be concluded to be subjective.

 

The fact that morals, reality, etc. is subject to the will of god implies

that god could potentially change, at any given time, any of these. This

means that the assumption of the uniformity of nature is faulty under the

assumption of a creator god, something which is readily apparent when

talking with Young Earth Creationists. Of course, this is the result of any

god intervening in the natural world, not just the creator god. The result

of this is literally that we are living in a cartoon universe.

 

Now, returning to morals, one could make the argument that god choose the

best set of morals, when he created the universe. However, that suffers from

the obvious problem that it assumes an objective standard by which one could

measure a given moral standard, and it has been shown that such a standard

conflicts with the notion of a creator god. Hence, god could potentially

have chosen any moral standard when creating the universe.

 

Thus, when a theist who believes in a creator god attacks atheists for

lacking an objective moral standard, one can point out that people who live

in balloon shops shouldn't throw porcupines.

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http://debate.atheist.net/showthread.php?p=3078#post3078

 

Ys, AKD