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29 Nov 2009 02:22 pm
36 Arguments For The Existence Of God
Edge ran an except from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new book, which combats various justifications for the almighty. From the book:
Reference to God does not help in the least to ground
the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose
the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice
that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while genocide is wrong?
Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us,
and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then
his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other
way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason
to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument,
then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy
of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in
grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be
committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just
because I am me and you are not.
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