Divine Command Theory (DCT) is the idea that morality is grounded in God or God’s nature such that what God commands is necessarily morally good. Historically speaking, the Euthyphro Dilemma has been used to combat such a position. DCT comes in several forms and is adhered to by a good many theologians and apologists.
Category Philosophy of Religion
Some time back I posted an argument on mentalizing deficits with regard to God being unfair. This broadly stated that certain autistic type people who have an inability to empathise are less likely to believe in God, presumably because the intersubjectivity of empathy allows an agent to see the,selves from somebody else’s point of view. This means that they are less able to suppose what God would think about them whilst doing any given moral action, and such like. The abstract, to the paper looked at in the post, reads:
OK, so it’s not here on my site, but on James A. Lindsay’s (whose book Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly I have just edited) site, God Doesn’t; We Do, in a debate with apologist Tom Gilson.
The Thinker has guested here in the past and has been a frequent visitor to these commenting shores. Check his “Why I am an atheist” post out which comprehensively sets out his reasons for adopting his worldview. Excellent stuff, as ever, from him. Please check out his great blog (Atheism and the City), which I often do (if I could sort out a proper blog roll on this website, he would be on it, but I am struggling). My post in this (so far) short series can be found here.
I, as you may well know, contribute to the Skepticule podcast by recording a counter-apologetics segment for them, Pearced Off.…
Serious H/T to the excellent blog Atheism and the City, by The Thinker. There are often several posts I would…
Here is an old post from DC which John Loftus posted, taken from a then ongoing debate with David Marshall about what faith is. It recently came up in a conversation involving labreuer and David himself. Let me know if it still holds:
David
Part of the problem is that you are extracting these issues from their real world application and in a sense making them irrelevant. Let’s apply the faith vs reason to real life instances:
I came across this quote in response to someone posting my notes on fine-tuning on the Why Doesn’t God Heal Amputees forum. I like it a lot:
The biggest problem I find with the fine-tuned argument is that it is incompatible with dualism, and therefore Christianity.
Here is another piece, this time on the atonement and sin, from a friend who supplies adverts and what have you to the Free Inquiry magazine amongst others. He has a special interest in the fascinating life of Robert Ingersoll.
An online friend of mine whom has a real interest in the concept of free will, and all the problematic baggage it brings with it. He has a proclivity for producing adverts for newspapers and publications like Free Inquiry that concern themselves with this erroneous philosophical belief. Here is one such piece from the Free Inquiry which does a good job of summing up the issues with an account of libertarian free will, and how that works in the context of Christianity. Let me know what you think.
This is essentially the point, I believe, which has come out of, or driven, much of the conversation over the last few days between labreuer, Andy Schueler and myself on another thread. We popped down many rabbit holes, including free will, slavery, epistemology, history, the problem of evil and oughts. The conversation was quick and frenetic, so I decided to move it here, and start not afresh but with a streamlined trajectory. Here is what I think was labreuer’s core gist (his own comment):
Over on the post detailing how God cannot be contrary to his own predictions, kraut2 gave a wickedly succinct tuppence:…
Craig has been involved in a series of discussions in Australia with Laurence Krauss regarding philosophy and science. Unfortunately, Krauss is no great philosopher which is what most of this discussion revolved around. However, both Craig and the annoying moderator claimed the “consequentialism is a terrible ethic” and that utilitarianism and consequentialism had been “renounced” by the Abrahamic faiths.
I have recently listened to a really interesting debate between Justin Schieber of the rather excellent Reasonable Doubts podcast and Max Andrews. Andrews writes at Senentias.org and I believe may be some sort of ‘backroom staff’ for William Lane Craig. His bio is:
Whilst on holiday I finished reading John Loftus’ The Outsider Test for Faith which I greatly enjoyed and will be reviewing in a short while. There is much to talk about within the pages, not least some of the excellent quotes he has gathered from other writers which he uses to defend his own positions on various topics.
For the purposes of this post, I want to just think a little about the jurisdiction, even the residence, of God.
Some time ago I posted a piece called God Loves Abortion, to which Andy Schueler added a nice piece on conception and the creation of the soul and personhood from a biological perspective. The other day on my Free Will, Heaven and the Problem of Evil video, Honest_John_Law linked this summary by Scott Rhoades of an interesting piece by Gregory Paul.
A video of my face for your… er… pleasure? Maybe not, but the words are alright. Aren’t they?
I give regular counter-apologetic podcast segments to the Skepticule podcast and my last one has provoked some interesting debate online…
I have a comment to answer on the original blog post Libertarian Free Will Defeats the Kalam Cosmological Argument and I thought I would not lose all the work to a comment forgotten in the annals of blog history. So here is the original post almost in full to remind you:
Everything which begins to exist has a cause for its existence
The universe began to exist
Therefore the universe had a cause (for its existence)
I gave my first talk of this name this week to Dorset Humanists, covering five different arguments (4 against God…