This has been an interesting read but could someone please supply the constitutive means attack on Mises’ argument?
The God that is revealed in the Bible is about the most evil creature imaginable, routinely killing and slaughtering utterly innocent people because of his jealousy. This slaughter even included the death by drowing of every man, woman and child – yes, utterly innocent babies included – (except for Noah’s family) just because God didn’t like what was in their imagination.
So, yes, God does “define himself” in the Bible – and if that is what you regard as virtuous, well then we know what you are.
In the first place, you’re judging God by your own personal standards of right and wrong. But if God actually created mankind, does he not have the authority to do with them as he wishes and determine who is good and evil? Even if you assume that the Bible is fiction, then you should judge the character of God from the perspective of the author, which is that God created mankind and as the creator is the only one with the moral authority over mankind to determine good and evil and to carry out punishment for evil.
On what grounds do you call " routinely killing and slaughtering utterly innocent people" evil? As the great philosophers of history have recognized, good and evil are religious terms and when you eliminate God, those categories disappear, too. A chief reason for that is the fact that no man has moral authority over other men, so any concept of ethics becomes nothing more than personal opinion. In fact, I would argue that what passes for “ethics” today are the table scraps left over from a religious heritage.
The old natural law tradition did the best job of anyone I have read at coming up with a moral code based on reason, but even they had to admit that if those principles weren’t in agreement with God, they were nothing but opinions and not enforceable.
Without God, good and evil don’t exist. What people do is what is natural to them, whether killing others for no reason or feeding a hungry person. Neither is more or less moral than the other.
Well, sometimes I think, folks should go back to the roots and read the first Book of Moses, where some Mystics described the way, mankind some 600-odd years ago conceived the epistemological process of becoming mankind.
My favorite translation has been made by Martin Buber et al., slightly controversial, but clarifying, because there is no Christian influence in it. Gorgeous language skill, if you ask me, but I digress.
The first memories of mankind are of living in a paradise-like naïvity. Man was not to be held responsible for his actions, as he was not aware of the difference between good and bad. It was “god(s)” who wanted to hold man this way. One of them disagreed and gave man the power to recognize good and bad, thus developing in him the power that makes him a “god” himself.
This is being expressed in the Thorah in a much clearer way than in the Christian translations. There is a direct link to Erich von Däniken’s assumtions, that the “gods” were nothing but humanoids, non-humans, who were present on Earth for a while. There seemed to have been a war between then, that’s the cause for the commandment “You may not recognuize other gods except Yahve Shebaoth”. The commandment is not “There ARE NO OTHER GODS” - because there WERE. What caused them to visit our mudball or what caused them to leave, I have no idea. But Bronze age men would have conceived them as gods for their powers. What they did to man was to add abilities to his brain and speed up mankind’s development.
So there is no divine monopoly, any being, capable of cognition, can be a “god”.
Dead wrong. Without abolities of cognition, you won’t know about good or evil even if both were sitting on your lap and started to nibble on your necktie. Any being can tell, more or less, what’s good and what’s bad. H. sapiens can do it. Staphylococcus aureus can do it with slightly restricted capabilities of relection, but they know what#s food and what ain’t.
Wrong. See the arguments of the natural law philosophers and theologians, for example.
Regarding the Garden of Eden story, I like the interpretations given in the two quotes at the beginning of this blog post.
The question is has does one decide what is good or bad without an absolute reference point? If one does not you cannot pronounce on whether an action is good or bad. Even if you argue that there is no right or wrong you need an absolute reference point to objectivel argue this.
On natural law- I consider Hans Hoppe’s argumentational ethics and Rothbard’s Aristotilean arguments against the state the best examples of these however neither ultimately justify their positions. Even with Hoppe’s, even assuming it is entirely accurate (it has the problem if one argues God…), it says anarchism is the only justifiable society however even if it is it does not say why I should be an anarchist. Further it begs the question why is argumentation as it is? Likewise Rothbard’s arguments assume that survival is a given good; but why is that so?
Ultimately no naturalistic argument can solve the is ought dichotomy or have an objective foundation for morality. Richard Dawkins recently admitted this.
In Eden becoming gods does not refer to knowing good and evil but deciding what is good or evil. Even though it uses the word knowing the context suggests it has heavy connotations of deciding. Since before eating the fruit Adam knew what was good and evil- eating from every tree apart from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was good; eating it was not. So unless you argue that this a piece of appallingly written literature the conclusion must be that in the context knowing means deciding.
On the refutation of Mises’ argument Roderick Long emailed me this:
Mises’ argument is essentially this:
- Action involves the use of means to achieve ends.
- An omnipotent being could achieve any desired end directly, without
the use of means. - Therefore, an omnipotent being could not act.
My criticism is of premise 2. I claim that Mises is thinking only of
cases where means are external to the end. But what about the case
where the means is part of the end? In other words, suppose that God’s
goal is not just “to achieve X” but “to achieve X by means Y.” In that
case, even an omnipotent being couldn’t achieve that goal except by
means Y. Hence God could intelligibly choose Y as a means to X, and so
could act.
I retract the my point on the is ought dichotomy. It can never be crossed even in a theistic world view. Not even argumentational ethics, even if it is entirely correct, cannot do it.
I don’t see how God could be such an absolute reference point seeing as how he cannot be defined and no evidence for him exists. On the flipside, I don’t see that there is no absolute reference point in the absence of a God.
I agree that Hoppe’s and Rothbard’s theories ultimately fail. These are not the only natural law theories, however. There are older ones and other contemporary ones. For some more successful contemporary theories I recommend Roderick Long’s, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl’s, and my own (which synthesizes the two). One last point, I wouldn’t consider Hoppe’s theory a version of natural law.
With all due respect, I think this is a bunch of bull and Dawkins does not know what he is talking about. Don’t be so quick to uncritically accept and echo the allegedly insurmountable is-ought gap, along with the alleged fact-value dichotomy and Moore’s Open Question Argument and Naturalistic Fallacy. They only have any legitimacy if one accepts the positivistic world-view (as Hoppe does), but this world-view cannot be sustained and has many trenchant critics. I recommend the works of Henry Veatch and Liberty and Nature by the Dougs, for starters.
The problem is not the “is-ought” gap. It’s that whatever an man comes up with is just opinion. Sure anyone can determine what he considers good and evil; that’s trivial. The real question is “Why should anyone care about what you think?” Socialists have considered it good to murder opponents. Are they right? The think they are doing what’s best for mankind. The real problem is that no man has authority over any other man in the area of morals. It’s very much like when kids fight because one is trying to force another to do something they don’t want to do and one of the kids yells “You’re not my mom!” Kids understand the role of authority very well. So ethicists can come up with any rules they want, just as children do, but how will other people respond? With the classic “Who died and made you God?” Classic natural law writers understood this too well and claimed that they were merely using reason to discover God’s principles. Modern ethicists ignore the problem, but that doesn’t mean it has gone away.
And I’m not saying that nonbelievers are automatically evil people. Mankind has an instinctive moral sense, so that most atheists are decent people why some “believers” are bad. I’m saying that when atheists act morally and advocate moral positions, they’re contradicting their own declared philosophy. It’s really sad that people have forgotten philosophical greats like Sartre and Camus. They pointed out the problem of morals with atheism very well and forcefully. Philosophers who followed agreed, then went on buidling ethical systems as if they hadn’t heard what Sartre and Camus had said. They didn’t even bother to argue about it; they have simply ignored it.
Roger, can’t you imagine that people have a moral code of their own, derivedfrom their own experiences, developed in their own mind? That people don’t have to claim some supernatural power because they themselves can THINK?
It is a poor attitude to hide behind an invisible playmate. Stand up and say “I think, so I am”. THat’s all. You on your feet, no god or devil around.
Or better, a very Aristotelian: “I am, therefore I must think.”
Is that really Aristotle? In Atlas Shrugged, Rand says “I am, therefore I’ll think”
Aristotle is usually associated with naive empiricism, whereas Descartes is the father of Platonic rationalism. Whoever said it, it is Aristotelian.
I’m aware of that. Note that I didn’t write something like ‘Aristotle said’ but rather ‘Aristotelian’. The previous poster beat me to it, but what I was going to say is that it in terms of philosophical traditions it is a very Aristotelian thing to say (as opposed to Cartesian, for example). I don’t think Rand would have objected to this characterization, although maybe she would want me to cite her.
I know ‘naive empricism’ is a technical term, but personally the word ‘naive’ has a negative connotation. My preference would be to call it common-sense empiricism. This too might be confusing, however, given the modern connotations of empiricism, which don’t apply to Aristotle.
As opposed, I presume, to what God “came up with” (assuming the divine command theory, which not a few theologians don’t accept); or, more accurately, somes guys claimed God “came up with.”
In that case, neither does God because Christian morality is in the final analysis up to men anyway: to determine, to enforce, etc. The secular natural law ethicists answer: Reason has authority.
I can’t help but note the many divisions within Christianity as to how to interpret the Bible, Christian morality, and so forth.
And many of them also argued that natural law moral principles would be true, and man could still discover them by reason, even if God did not exist.
I’d like to see God’s arguement against the existance of Mises. [:P]
I think Mises makes a great observation, but he didn’t take this insight all the way to its logical conclusion.
- God exists and is certainly perfect.
- Action is taken to alleviate uneasiness, including action by God.
- God took action in creating the universe because there is ONE THING that God, being perfect by definition, cannot do: experience the thrill of choosing perfection or not.
- Thus, Mises came close to understanding what must be one of God’s primary purposes in creation: to experience choice through the lives of His imperfect creations.
Therefore, it is not by accident that choice plays such an important role in life and why Austrian economics has been so successful in explaining human reality, as it closely embodies God’s own purpose: The Individual’s Freedom of Choice.