I have repeatedly received flak from Christians on various pages for using the accepted philosophical definition of objective as meaning independent of minds, personal preference or views, which I find very irritating because Christians tend to either leave the term deliberately ill-defined, or else have it mean something that is the complete opposite of the philosophical definition. What else could you possibly mean when you say that objective moral values exist? That it is objectively true that subjective moral values exist? That much is obvious, and yet clearly not what you are talking about. And you also cant mean that, given a particular definition of moral and immoral, certain actions are objectively moral or immoral insofar as what we mean when we call them such, since in that case the argument would be completely useless (not that it isnt already). So why dont you simply say what you ACTUALLY mean here and rephrase the argument thus: 1) If God does not exist, divine moral value/standards do not exist. 2) Divine moral values/standards exist. C) Therefore God exists. That at least would be an honest representation of what you are actually saying. Of course it would be a shameless case of question begging, as in order to accept the second premise you have to be assuming the conclusion, but then again, so is the argument in its typical form, since objective moral values are implicitly defined in such a way as to make them contingent on the existence of God (yes, I know the argument doesnt EXPLICITLY say that, but it is implied).
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 11:55:11 +0000
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