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Were the parameters such that no form of life existed, would that show that God favored no form or would it be due to Leucippus' necessity? I find that necessity, including randomness, explains why life arose: the conditions that natural selections and drift and other forces used to cause it to arise need no divine boss. Mechanism, not teleology-intent-orthogenesis-vitalism- explains the how and the - why. We need no supernatural, superstitious, supercilious why- that argument from personal incredulity answered by that argument from ignorance. Random events have natural causes, being random on how they affect other matters. Random mutations do not favor any living thing but just happen to living things. The comet or asteroid or meteoroid that helped cause the demise of the dinosaurs, the cooling- off period and the arise of the flowering plants all were random events that influenced our own evolution but did not teleologically favor it; and natural selection the non-programming, anti-chance agent of Nature did not teleologically favor it. Necessity can seem to favor developments, but not teleologically. Theists ever adduce misinterpretations of evidence as evidence. The parameters involved in the putative fine-tuning that the weak anthropic argument notes does not favor life teleologically but only mechanistically. What people find as mysteries to favor God is just another argument from ignorance-no evidence that people take as evidence! Folks, the pre-Socratics are right against their fellow naturalist Aristotle -no form of intent lies in Nature. His error and his own science kept Europe scientifically backwards! Aquinas failed and others fail to overcome the Euthyphro, because they beg the question of God being good by his own nature, and the same question arises as to that nature! Our evolved moral sense is the background for our morality that we ground ontologically in ourselves; we need no God to ground it, and indeed, the notion that we do has matters inverse!^ Most of us most of the time use empathy in our relations with others; people need to extend empathy as the source of the planetary ethic that the late, great Paul Kurttz ever admonished us to develop. I stress that most of most of the time do good so as to overcome that religious and - secular notion that why, behold: all those Holocausts and other murders and such evil portray us all as wretched or at least show our moral sense as favoring the good as much as the bad. I find that ignorance explains some moral failings. As Kurtz in " Forbidden Fruit" and Quentin Smith note most people follow the common moral decencies. My covenant morality for humanity- the presumption of humanism explains how we can have a humanist ethic. ^ An essay exists that adduced why divine morality would be immoral. Devine morality is just simple subjectivist morality of mean-minded, misogynistic misanthropists who use their own egregious tastes and whims for the most part to establish so-called divine command morality. And no God came forth with a progressive morality; our ancestors found out better morals as time went by. Again, God did it explains nothing, but is only a false assumption due to the arguments from personal incredulity and from ignorance. We naturalists on the other hand use the scientific argument from the conservation -background- of knowledge with which to start, adducing evidence for new knowledge. That conservation keeps us from adducing woo as evidence. It takes real evidence not misinterpretations thereof to add to that conservation. The Aquinas-Shellley superfluity argument embraces that conservation. That argument boomerangs on his own five ways!
The general strategy used to defeat a dilemma is to show that it's a false one. There are not two options, but three.
The Christian rejects the first option, that morality is an arbitrary function of God's power. And he rejects the second option, that God is responsible to a higher law. There is no Law over God.
The third option is that an objective standard exists (this avoids the first horn of the dilemma). However, the standard is not external to God, but internal (avoiding the second horn). Morality is grounded in the immutable character of God, who is perfectly good. His commands are not whims, but rooted in His holiness.
Could God simply decree that torturing babies was moral? "No," the Christian answers, "God would never do that." It's not a matter of command. It's a matter of character.
So the Christian answer avoids the dilemma entirely. Morality is not anterior to God--logically prior to Him--as Bertrand Russell suggests, but rooted in His nature. As Scott Rae puts it, "Morality is not grounded ultimately in God's commands, but in His character, which then expresses itself in His commands."[9] In other words, whatever a good God commands will always be good.
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We atheists must live the best life we can in the here and nowforgive.
What is the " best " life ? For the nazis, the best thing to do, was to exterminate the jews. Based on atheism, you cannot condemn their doings as bad. They had just a different opinion on the subject, than you and me, have today......
What is the " best " life ? For the nazis, the best thing to do, was to exterminate the jews. Based on atheism, you cannot condemn their doings as bad. They had just a different opinion on the subject, than you and me, have today......
Science has given us incredibly good reasons for thinking that we simply don't need the "God hypothesis" because we now have powerful conceptual tools to explain the origins of order in the natural world, but science continues to be utterly silent on the origins and nature of qualitative consciousness (the "hard problem" in philosophy of mind).
What is the " best " life ? For the nazis, the best thing to do, was to exterminate the jews. Based on atheism, you cannot condemn their doings as bad. They had just a different opinion on the subject, than you and me, have today......
There are ways to talk about the objective basis for some moral principles. I suggest looking at the arguments offered by Sam Harris. Here is a link to the Wiki page that summarizes some of his ideas: The Moral Landscape - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Because we have evolved social structures as have all animal species. .
but we are the only species that has a moral behavior, and free will. Why is that ?
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