Here's some blather.

I'm agnostic on the matter myself.

But anyways, since the question was asked... so why is the existence of a 'Universal Moral Law' evidence of God? I don't really think its necessarily evidence of anything besides its own existance. Humanity had to develop in some way, and it had to have some characteristics, or no characteristics and then as chaos, but whatever way we ended up there is nothing special in it that suggests the cause. Evolutionists, I think, have a similar flaw when they say that Universal Moral Law is proof that it is the best way for us to develop. I don't think we can say that for certain either. i don't see how our morality, or any other characteristic we have, has any attribute that implies its originating cause. Because we recognize it, we can be sure it exists, but beyond that, I think the rest is just speculation.

Its conjecture!

Now that I'm thinking about it, this would seem to me to be the start of a good argument against evolution. That there is nothing intrinsic about the way we are that suggests that evolutionary forces have been at play in our development. Its all speculation. Evolution says survival of the fittest, which really isn't saying anything, just that the one's most fit to survive, do survive. Of course you could turn the same argument onto the existance of God.

If you really want to argue something on this point, you have to do so by saying something like 'the existance of any Universal Moral Law is evidence of God' which basically is saying that existance itself is evidence of God. Because if we admit that our specific version of Universal Morality has no traits that prove that it is of a divine nature when compared to other possible Universal Moralities, then it follows that the only way Universal Morality can prove the existance of God is by being in existance itself. But once again, we don't really understand existance yet, so you're going to have a tough time coming to any conclusion on that.

But you know, as a sideline, I think that a real flaw in this whole line of reasoning is that there is an underlying assumption that humans are completely rational being. Economists try to use this all the time, and I really believe its a bunch of nonsense. When he says 'In the same way, if a man asks what is the point of behaving decently, it is no good replying, 'in order to benefit society', he makes the assumption that every person thinks through rationally what is in their best interests and what is not, and that that is the only factor that plays into the decision. But its not true. When I make the decision to behave decently I do so based on a bunch of things - on convention, that this is the easiest way to live, - on intuition, that it just seems to feel like the right thing to do, - on experience, that this seems to have worked pretty well in the past. Now you might argue that these things are proof of the existance of God, I can see that argument as I write this, but really they aren't. Like what I said above, they don't prove anything except that these are the characteristics that factor into human decisions. They don't imply the existance of a God or deny the existance of a God. The only attribute they really have that supercedes their actual essence is that they exist, so any argument that this is evidence of God really boils down again to saying that existance is evidence of God.

So all this stuff comes back to the same thing. Nothing about us really proves anything, except that we exist. I don't see how we can infer anything from any of our qualities about the existance of a some higher motivating force. And that's the end of that.

And in the end we're all dead.
- posted by Sigurd1/14/2004 01:17:00 PM