First, why should we be willing to entertain that notion? I'd no more entertain that notion than I would the notion that 2+2=5 in Peano arithmetic, or there exists a married bachelor.
I don't think that those are really comparable. One way that we might be mistaken about whether child sacrifice is moral is if we have some misunderstanding about the nature of death or the nature of the child. For a far-fetched example, suppose God reveals us to be living in a simulation - the child is not real and sacrificing it carries no moral weight. In general, making an undoubtable moral pronouncement about a scenario would require us to have perfect information about the scenario. Since we surely lack that, our moral judgments must have at least an every-so-tiny bit of doubt left in them.
Second, this looks like a standard argumentum ad verecundiam to me. If we're ultimately going to ground morality in logic, then everyone has to justify their moral claims, even God. "Because I said so" is not a formally sound argumentative technique.
If God is known to be omniscient, then "because I said so" is a perfectly sound technique for him. God cannot be wrong about what is moral, so his say-so is as good of a justification as we could imagine. This, of course, would be fallacious if God were short of omniscient. If God were just "usually right" then of course this would be problematic, but if God is omniscient, then that implies his statements on morality are correct.
I disagree. In the fashion of Kant, I claim that at least some moral propositions are analytically true in the sense that their negations are contradictory. Child sacrifice is at the very least not many logical steps removed from such a proposition.
One way that we might be mistaken about whether child sacrifice is moral is if we have some misunderstanding about the nature of death or the nature of the child. For a far-fetched example, suppose God reveals us to be living in a simulation - the child is not real and sacrificing it carries no moral weight.
In this example, it seems like you are illicitly redefining the terms mid-argument in such a way as to wholly denature them. It's only a child sacrifice if a child really dies, isn't it? I mean, if we're going to allow this sort of distortion, then anything goes. 1+2=5 is true if by 1 we actually mean 8, and by + we of course mean -, and by 2 we mean 3.
Therefore I deny that this example speaks to the point at all.
In general, making an undoubtable moral pronouncement about a scenario would require us to have perfect information about the scenario. Since we surely lack that, our moral judgments must have at least an every-so-tiny bit of doubt left in them.
Certainly I'd agree with you as far as basic empirical skepticism goes, so to the extent that a particular moral judgment depends on empirical observations, we'd have to acknowledge the nonzero possibility of error.
However, there are two reasons why empirical skepticism is inapplicable here in my view. First, I think a prohibition against child sacrifice can be derived categorically using Kant-type arguments, and if I'm right about that, then there may be no opening for empirical skepticism, just as there's no room for skepticism about married bachelors or 2+2=4.
Second, the thing about empirical skepticism is that, as Walter would say, it's not 'Nam -- there are rules. In particular, those who wish to make a skeptical challenge to prevailing empirical claims must always provide evidence, even if they are omniscient.
If God is known to be omniscient, then "because I said so" is a perfectly sound technique for him. God cannot be wrong about what is moral, so his say-so is as good of a justification as we could imagine.
Again, not if we are going to agree to ground things in logic, which we must do if we're going to debate about it. A logical system comes complete with rules explaining what constitutes a justification and what doesn't. No standard logical system has "because God says so" as a rule of justification, and in this argument I would not agree to utilize a non-standard one that does have such a rule, because I would view it as begging the question in matters of examining God's own properties.
I disagree. In the fashion of Kant, I claim that at least some moral propositions are analytically true in the sense that their negations are contradictory. Child sacrifice is at the very least not many logical steps removed from such a proposition.
In this example, it seems like you are illicitly redefining the terms mid-argument in such a way as to wholly denature them. It's only a child sacrifice if a child really dies, isn't it? I mean, if we're going to allow this sort of distortion, then anything goes. 1+2=5 is true if by 1 we actually mean 8, and by + we of course mean -, and by 2 we mean 3.
Therefore I deny that this example speaks to the point at all.
Ultimately, the discussion is about what to do if you're in Abraham's shoes. Abraham doesn't know that the angel is going to stop him at the last moment, and we won't know all the facts about our scenario either. What we might think is an immoral action may turn out to be different than we expected, and therefore be morally acceptable. Perhaps because are wrong about what is moral, perhaps because we are wrong about what the nature of the situation is.
Even if we conclude that child sacrifice is immoral with absolute certainty, we still can never be absolutely sure that a particular act is in fact child sacrifice as we understand it. We will always have the tiniest sliver of ambiguity, which will be larger than the zero ambiguity provided by omniscient divine proclamation. Therefore, when they conflict, we must side with God instead of our own conclusions.
Certainly I'd agree with you as far as basic empirical skepticism goes, so to the extent that a particular moral judgment depends on empirical observations, we'd have to acknowledge the nonzero possibility of error.
However, there are two reasons why empirical skepticism is inapplicable here in my view. First, I think a prohibition against child sacrifice can be derived categorically using Kant-type arguments, and if I'm right about that, then there may be no opening for empirical skepticism, just as there's no room for skepticism about married bachelors or 2+2=4.
Second, the thing about empirical skepticism is that, as Walter would say, it's not 'Nam -- there are rules. In particular, those who wish to make a skeptical challenge to prevailing empirical claims must always provide evidence, even if they are omniscient.
If they are omniscient, their challenge itself is evidence. If the prevailing claim were correct, they could not challenge it. The reason appeal to authority is a fallacy is that authorities are not omniscient. However, in this special case, we have an authority who is omniscient, and thus appeals to it are perfectly acceptable.
Again, not if we are going to agree to ground things in logic, which we must do if we're going to debate about it. A logical system comes complete with rules explaining what constitutes a justification and what doesn't. No standard logical system has "because God says so" as a rule of justification, and in this argument I would not agree to utilize a non-standard one that does have such a rule, because I would view it as begging the question in matters of examining God's own properties.
I contend that the following is valid, unassailable logic:
Premise 1: God is omniscient and honest.
Premise 2: God tells us X.
Conclusion: X is true.
As long as you accept the premises, you must accept the conclusion.
Ultimately, the discussion is about what to do if you're in Abraham's shoes. Abraham doesn't know that the angel is going to stop him at the last moment, and we won't know all the facts about our scenario either. What we might think is an immoral action may turn out to be different than we expected, and therefore be morally acceptable. Perhaps because are wrong about what is moral, perhaps because we are wrong about what the nature of the situation is.
Even if we conclude that child sacrifice is immoral with absolute certainty, we still can never be absolutely sure that a particular act is in fact child sacrifice as we understand it. We will always have the tiniest sliver of ambiguity, which will be larger than the zero ambiguity provided by omniscient divine proclamation. Therefore, when they conflict, we must side with God instead of our own conclusions.
If we're permitted ambiguity as to whether killing the child will "really" kill him, then surely we are also permitted ambiguity that the order actually comes from God. (In fact, it seems to me that any skeptical doubts about whether people really die when killed should be outweighed, in a Bayesian sense, by skeptical doubts about whether voices in our head our really divine.) And if we allow ambiguity about that, then we are in a case where we cannot regard the authority of the command as perfect or infallible.
If they are omniscient, their challenge itself is evidence. If the prevailing claim were correct, they could not challenge it. The reason appeal to authority is a fallacy is that authorities are not omniscient. However, in this special case, we have an authority who is omniscient, and thus appeals to it are perfectly acceptable.
It is a popular misunderstanding that some arguments from authority are not fallacious. Any appeal to authority in formal reasoning is fallacious. In particular, the following meta-logical statements are true:
1) no syllogism with the single premise "Y said P" and the single conclusion "P" is valid. (by inspection; a syllogism with only one premise is valid only when the conclusion is identical to the premise.)
2) any valid syllogism with the premise "Y said P" together with some additional premises, having the single conclusion P, would remain valid if the premise "Y said P" were dropped. (This can be proved by induction on proof length.)
3) Invalid but intuitively reasonable-sounding syllogisms with the premise "Y said P" tend to be variants of the truth-teller paradox. (See below.)
I contend that the following is valid, unassailable logic:
Premise 1: God is omniscient and honest.
Premise 2: God tells us X.
Conclusion: X is true.
As long as you accept the premises, you must accept the conclusion.
I oppose your contention, so I'm going to assail this logic by showing that it's invalid. Consider that an argument is valid only when it is not possible for its premises to be true and its conclusion false, then let X be the statement "it is not the case that God is omniscient and honest."
(This is an instance of the "truth-teller paradox," a somewhat obscure variant of the better known Liar paradox. Goedel and Tarski demonstrated that all such constructions are problematic.)
If we're permitted ambiguity as to whether killing the child will really kill him, then surely we are also permitted ambiguity that the order actually comes from God. (In fact, it seems to me that any skeptical doubts about whether people really die when killed should be outweighed, in a Bayesian sense, by skeptical doubts about whether voices in our head our really divine.) And if we allow ambiguity about that, then we are in a case where we cannot regard the authority of the command as perfect or infallible.
If we are willing to also doubt the source of the order, then I certainly agree. The premise of the discussion, however, was the that order does in fact come from God, and we believe he is omniscient. Now, certainly we shouldn't be willing to accept those as unquestionable facts, but the question seems to be directed at those who do.
It is a popular misunderstanding that some arguments from authority are not fallacious. Any appeal to authority in formal reasoning is fallacious. In particular, the following meta-logical statements are true:
1) no syllogism with the single premise "Y said P" and the single conclusion "P" is valid,
Considering syllogisms have two or more premises, this is hardly surprising, is it?
2) any valid syllogism with the premise "Y said P" together with some additional premises, having the single conclusion P, would remain valid if the premise "Y said P" were dropped. (This can be proved by induction on proof length.)
3) Invalid syllogisms with the premise "Y said P" and the conclusion "P" do exist; they are variants of the truth-teller paradox. (See below.)
I oppose your contention, so I'm going to assail this logic by showing that it's invalid. Consider that an argument is valid only when it is not possible for its premises to be true and its conclusion false, then let X be the statement "it is not the case that God is omniscient and honest."
(This is an instance of the "truth-teller paradox," a somewhat obscure variant of the better known Liar paradox. Goedel and Tarski demonstrated that all such constructions are problematic.)
Ultimately, this is just a variant of the following:
1) All A are B
2) P is A
3) Therefore P is B
Where A is "things God says" and B is "true".
Yes, we can come up with things to substitute for A, B and P that make for troubling self-referntial paradoxes, but does that mean that this entire class of reasoning is invalid?
If we are willing to also doubt the source of the order, then I certainly agree. The premise of the discussion, however, was the that order does in fact come from God, and we believe he is omniscient. Now, certainly we shouldn't be willing to accept those as unquestionable facts, but the question seems to be directed at those who do.
Another premise of the discussion, at least on my reading, was that God was really asking for the real sacrifice of a child as opposed to some crazy rewiring of that statement where there is in fact no sacrifice. It seems to me that to allow that kind of doubt violates the premises just as much as allowing doubt about the provenance of the order. As I said, the discussion can quickly become incoherent if we're willing to rip apart the premises like this.
Considering syllogisms have two or more premises, this is hardly surprising, is it?
That case is obvious but nevertheless required for an exhaustive analysis of the fallacy.
Ultimately, this is just a variant of the following:
1) All A are B
2) P is A
3) Therefore P is B
Where A is "things God says" and B is "true".
Yes, we can come up with things to substitute for A, B and P that make for troubling self-referntial paradoxes, but does that mean that this entire class of reasoning is invalid?
It's a bit more subtle than that. As with all Goedelian issues, it's easy to see but harder to explain properly. You can clearly see that your syllogism is invalid for any choice of A that represents a coherent property of statements, so long as B is "true" - just let P be "~(all A are true)". There isn't much room for disagreement that that substitution falsifies validity. (In fact, the truth-teller paradox is in a sense "less self-referential" than the traditional Liar paradox, because you don't need to invoke the diagonal lemma to construct any of the sentences in it. This causes some logicians to regard it as an even more serious problem than the Liar. But I digress.)
But, you object, your argument is clearly of a valid form, and logic is supposed to guarantee that every instance of a valid form is valid. That's so, and yet your instance is clearly not valid. Logic can't fail to honor its own guarantees, so we have a reductio -- you must have done something that violates an axiom or limitation of logic itself!
And indeed you did. You might, after some thought, land on the intuition that the problem seems to originate in the fact that you've assigned B to mean "true," and if you did you'd be correct. If you were to unpack it in great detail, you'd see that your argument requires the unrestricted disquotational truth predicate True(P), but Tarski's indefinability theorem shows that no language can capture its own True(P). Your construction violates the indefinability theorem, and is therefore outside the scope of the formal guarantees of validity which would otherwise hold. (Incidentally, this discussion we're having is an informal mini-proof of the indefinability theorem.)
If you had made an argument of the same form that did not violate the indefinability theorem, then it may well have been valid. This one's not, though.
Another premise of the discussion, at least on my reading, was that God was really asking for the real sacrifice of a child as opposed to some crazy rewiring of that statement where there is in fact no sacrifice. It seems to me that to allow that kind of doubt violates the premises just as much as allowing doubt about the provenance of the order. As I said, the discussion can quickly become incoherent if we're willing to rip apart the premises like this.
Considering the source of the discussion is the story of Abraham, in which God is not really going to let him kill the child, I don't think that's a fair reading of what our premises are.
It's a bit more subtle than that. As with all Goedelian issues, it's easy to see but harder to explain properly. You can clearly see that your syllogism is invalid for any choice of A that represents a coherent property of statements, so long as B is "true" - just let P be "~(all A are true)". There isn't much room for disagreement that that substitution falsifies validity. (In fact, the truth-teller paradox is in a sense "less self-referential" than the traditional Liar paradox, because you don't need to invoke the diagonal lemma to construct any of the sentences in it. This causes some logicians to regard it as an even more serious problem than the Liar. But I digress.)
But, you object, your argument is clearly of a valid form, and logic is supposed to guarantee that every instance of a valid form is valid. That's so, and yet your instance is clearly not valid. Logic can't fail to honor its own guarantees, so we have a reductio -- you must have done something that violates an axiom or limitation of logic itself!
And indeed you did. You might, after some thought, land on the intuition that the problem seems to originate in the fact that you've assigned B to mean "true," and if you did you'd be correct. If you were to unpack it in great detail, you'd see that your argument requires the unrestricted disquotational truth predicate True(P), but Tarski's indefinability theorem shows that no language can capture its own True(P). Your construction violates the indefinability theorem, and is therefore outside the scope of the formal guarantees of validity which would otherwise hold. (Incidentally, this discussion we're having is an informal mini-proof of the indefinability theorem.)
If you had made an argument of the same form that did not violate the indefinability theorem, then it may well have been valid. This one's not, though.
It's trivial to adjust the argument. Let A be "things God advocates", let B be "moral" and let P still be "child sacrifice".
If we are willing to also doubt the source of the order, then I certainly agree. The premise of the discussion, however, was the that order does in fact come from God, and we believe he is omniscient. Now, certainly we shouldn't be willing to accept those as unquestionable facts, but the question seems to be directed at those who do.
Another premise of the discussion, at least on my reading, was that God was really asking for the real sacrifice of a child as opposed to some crazy rewiring of that statement where there is in fact no sacrifice. It seems to me that to allow that kind of doubt violates the premises just as much as allowing doubt about the provenance of the order. As I said, the discussion can quickly become incoherent if we're willing to rip apart the premises like this.
You don't have to rip apart the premises at all. All Tiax did was give one example of how given the premises, the "child sacrifice" might not be immoral. If someone truly believes God is omniscient and gave them a command it stands to reason that that person may not even be able to fathom God's reasoning, but it is much simpler to accept that God said so, so it's ok to do. When a General tells his people to make certain moves in battle the individual soldiers do not necessarily know why they are being asked to do things. In-fact to them it may seem worthless or even detrimental, but they still do what they are told because they know that they don't have all of the information. This premises of God asking someone to do something is very similar.
And indeed you did. You might, after some thought, land on the intuition that the problem seems to originate in the fact that you've assigned B to mean "true," and if you did you'd be correct. If you were to unpack it in great detail, you'd see that your argument requires the unrestricted disquotational truth predicate True(P), but Tarski's indefinability theorem shows that no language can capture its own True(P). Your construction violates the indefinability theorem, and is therefore outside the scope of the formal guarantees of validity which would otherwise hold. (Incidentally, this discussion we're having is an informal mini-proof of the indefinability theorem.)
If you had made an argument of the same form that did not violate the indefinability theorem, then it may well have been valid. This one's not, though.
Doesn't this application of the indefinability theorem mean that all statements of truth in language are flawed?
Considering the source of the discussion is the story of Abraham, in which God is not really going to let him kill the child, I don't think that's a fair reading of what our premises are.
You do have to split hairs a little more finely than this to see what I'm getting at, but nevertheless I think it is a very important distinction to make. There is a moral and logical difference between the following two scenarios:
1: God asked Abraham to perform an actual child sacrifice in which he would actually kill a child who would actually die. God then rescinded his requiest for this actual sacrifice, so it was not performed; however, if it had been carried out, it would have actually resulted in the child's actual death.
2: God asked Abraham to perform a deed which, though superficially similar to a child sacrifice, was -- because of no reasoning, evidence, or explanation other than generic unidentified skepticism -- not actually that. God then rescinded his request for this action. The action was not actually a child sacrifice and so there was no reason for him to rescind it prima facie, but he did anyway, because, hey, none of this makes any sense, so why not.
I believe that both the story of Abraham and the premises of the question we are considering are rightly construed as falling squarely within case 1, or at the very least, case 1 represents a far more coherent unpacking than case 2.
It's trivial to adjust the argument. Let A be "things God advocates", let B be "moral" and let P still be "child sacrifice".
I'm afraid this doesn't fix the issue; it merely kicks the can down the street. Consider:
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do that which is immoral"
Conclusion: It is moral to do that which is immoral.
This is no longer a paradox of pure logic, since we don't technically have anything of the form P and ~P. In that sense you have repaired it. It is, however, a paradox of moral logic under two additional and very modest moral assumptions, namely that (1) it is not moral to do that which is immoral and (2) there exists at least one immoral act.
Logical Sidebar:
The reason this is still a problematic construction is because of the presence of a so-called "unrestricted disquotational operator" -- something that allows you to "remove the quotation marks" from quoted assertions, which are arbitrary and can even contradict the premises or rules of the system, and convert them directly into truths of the system, which are supposed to be confined to a system of deduction from the premises which, unlike quoted assertions, can't produce arbitrary results. It can be shown that all unrestricted disquotational operators are as powerful as Tarski's disquotational operator, True("P") = P.
Under some basic cognitivist moral hypotheses, moral statements are just special kinds of truths; they're still subject to excluded middle, noncontradiction, and all the other rules that make Tarski's theorem work. Thus, simply shifting from "true" to "moral" doesn't ultimately save you from paradox. (unless your associated moral theory is trivial, absurd, or noncognitive.)
Doesn't this application of the indefinability theorem mean that all statements of truth in language are flawed?
*sigh* I was afraid this might happen. In a word, no. Though these incompleteness results are very profound and have wide-ranging consequences, it's not the case that they completely undermine the idea of truth.
Essentially, what we've learned is that it is okay to talk about truth as long as there is a clean separation between the so-called "object level" and "meta-level," and our conversation about truth takes place entirely on the meta-level and is entirely about the object level. And 99.99% of the times we talk about truth, this is already the case.
Consider a more classical version of Tiax's syllogism: "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal." There is absolutely no problem in saying that all of these statements are true; Tarski's theorem simply doesn't apply; there is no usage of the truth predicate in the actual syllogism; there's a clean and obvious object/meta separation. Most usage of the concept of truth in ordinary language is already like this. You don't have to think about issues of recursion, and indeed ordinary human language absolves you from thinking about it and allows you to operate recursively without any obvious problems. This is good; we wouldn't be able to get anything done if we had to constantly think about this crazy stuff or formalize our language in exhaustive logical detail.
However, there's that other 00.01% to consider, and that's when the blessing of free and easy recursion that informal language grants us can become a curse. When you permit the object and meta-levels to mix without precautions, as you do when you introduce an unrestricted disquotational predicate into your logic, things quickly go awry.
The important thing is that in "ordinary" discussions, debates, and arguments, this almost never happens. It's only when you start introducing overpowered recursive entities, like infallible truth-tellers, that you begin running into trouble.
Here's a good heuristic to go by: if you encounter a logical construct which appears to allow you to derive true statements without any hard work or deduction then someone has introduced an overpowered construct into their logic and may be violating an incompleteness theorem of the ground system. Otherwise, don't sweat it.
You do have to split hairs a little more finely than this to see what I'm getting at, but nevertheless I think it is a very important distinction to make. There is a moral and logical difference between the following two scenarios:
1: God asked Abraham to perform an actual child sacrifice in which he would actually kill a child who would actually die. God then rescinded his requiest for this actual sacrifice, so it was not performed; however, if it had been carried out, it would have actually resulted in the child's actual death.
2: God asked Abraham to perform a deed which, though superficially similar to a child sacrifice, was -- because of no reasoning, evidence, or explanation other than generic unidentified skepticism -- not actually that. God then rescinded his request for this action. The action was not actually a child sacrifice and so there was no reason for him to rescind it prima facie, but he did anyway, because, hey, none of this makes any sense, so why not.
I believe that both the story of Abraham and the premises of the question we are considering are rightly construed as falling squarely within case 1, or at the very least, case 1 represents a far more coherent unpacking than case 2.
I disagree - when Abraham takes Isaac up on the mountain, binds him, and raises the knife, he believes he is taking part in an actual sacrifice. Instead, as it turns out, he is taking part in a sham sacrifice, in which Isaac will not be killed, because the angel will stop him. The fact that the angel will stop him is but one of any number of possible key pieces of knowledge that Abraham may be missing. Abraham might be wrong about the medical implications of chest wounds. Abraham might be wrong about what it means to die and the moral implications of death. Abraham might be wrong about the nature of Isaac and what moral standing Isaac holds.
I'm afraid this doesn't fix the issue; it merely kicks the can down the street. Consider:
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do that which is immoral"
Conclusion: It is moral to do that which is immoral.
This is no longer a paradox of pure logic, since we don't technically have anything of the form P and ~P. In that sense you have repaired it. It is, however, a paradox of moral logic under two additional and very modest moral assumptions, namely that (1) it is not moral to do that which is immoral and (2) there exists at least one immoral act.
Suppose an omniscient bachelor honestly claims to be married. Is he married? Then he's not a bachelor. Is he unmarried? Then he's either not omniscient or not honest.
This is not a reductio of omniscience, honesty, or bachelorhood; it's a reductio of the notion that an honest, omniscient bachelor could ever make that claim. So if your argument shows anything, it's that God literally cannot ask for a child sacrifice. It's logically impossible.
As you say, it's impossible for God to advocate for immoral action. The sentence you have presented as premise 2 is simply not possible. It's not particularly impressive to find a contradictory conclusion from an impossible premise.
Part of the issue with this is that God is eternal and never changing.
Which means, if he condemns the killing of the innocent in the past, He will condemn the killing of the innocent today. ergo, no child sacrifices.
Another issue is that he's already done this, with Abraham. The meaning of this story is not that we should give everything to God, but that we should be WILLING to give everything to God. Abraham demonstrated perfect faith in that story, and was blessed for it. It wasn't Abraham killing his child, it was Abraham WILLING to give up what was essentially his lineage. As they say, it's the thought that counts.
Also, take into account Abraham's son: at this time, Abraham is old and his son is in the prime of his youth. How hard would it have been for Isaac to overpower Abraham and run off? Why didn't that happen?
So, to answer your question: Yes, I am willing to give everything to God. No, I do not expect to have to do that, because God would not ask that of me, in part because the point is made with Abraham.
You keep arguing that *if* God asked, would you do it? when you should be asking *why* God is asking you to do it, because he quite simply does not expect that of people.
That's not an answer. That's the opposite of an answer. That's attempting to pass the lack of an answer off as an answer.
God's logic for demanding this act is clearly beyond your human comprehension.
I mean, yes, you are correct, I have absolutely no comprehension as to how an omnibenevolent God would give me the command to kill my own child.
That's precisely why I wouldn't do it.
And while you as a man cannot coneceive of any reason to slaughter your own child, perhaps there are reasons fathomable by God to order this.
And if God were omniscient and omnipotent, or even just omniscient, he'd more than welcome to explain this to me.
The problem here is (and I know you're just playing devil's advocate) the tactic you're using to try to undermine my proclaiming the order to sacrifice my son is wrong is attacking my ability to understand right and wrong.
But there's an issue with that. If right and wrong are beyond my comprehension, then right and wrong are beyond my ability to understand or conceive, right?
So with that in mind, what meaning does someone telling me something is right (or wrong) have for me then?
Because we've established that I not only do not, but cannot understand right from wrong. And if that's the case, then saying something is right is totally meaningless to me. I don't know whether it's right or not. I cannot know whether it is right or not. And since I cannot know if something is right or something is wrong, what's the point? Why be right, or wrong?
Therefore, what meaning does the claim that sacrificing my son is the right thing to do have for me? What reason do I have to do it?
Isn't the argument that goes "I'm God and I'm omnibenevolent and omniscient and I say that killing your kid is something you should do" about as compelling as one can get?
No, that's not an argument.
I see what you're trying to say here, but there's an obvious problem. God commands things because they are good. They are not good because God commands them. An omnibenevolent God would never command an action that was not good, not because his commanding them determines whether they are good or not good, but because God, out of his omnibenevolent nature, would only command actions that were good and not actions that were not.
Therefore, the fact that God proclaims it good is not what makes it good. Instead, what makes it good is the reason God proclaims it good.
My question is "Well then, what makes it good?"
If you accept that God really is omnibenevolent and omniscient, then he can't be wrong about what you should do.
But that's just it. You called into question my understanding of God, remember? You asked me to assume my knowledge about God was flawed.
And not only you. This situation is proposing that God, or at least someone who claims to be God, is asking me to do something that is directly contrary to my understanding both of what God has claimed, and of what God would claim. This situation therefore necessitates that I reevaluate my understanding of God. Either whoever's talking to me is lying about being God, or it is God and God has somehow changed in nature from when he issued commands previously, or this is the same God and I am greatly confused about morality, or this is the same God and I am incorrect about God being benevolent because I am correct about child sacrifice being wrong.
Therefore, I cannot just take this situation at face value. It would be morally irresponsible of me to do so. I cannot heedlessly kill someone just assuming there is justification when I myself do not have it. Unjustified killing is the definition of murder, one of the most heinous acts a person can commit. I have a moral responsibility to not commit murder, and as such I have a moral responsibility to demand justification for killing someone.
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do that which is immoral"
Conclusion: It is moral to do that which is immoral.
You are drawing the wrong conclusions...
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do action X"
Conclusion: Action X must be moral.
*sigh* I was afraid this might happen. In a word, no. Though these incompleteness results are very profound and have wide-ranging consequences, it's not the case that they completely undermine the idea of truth.
Essentially, what we've learned is that it is okay to talk about truth as long as there is a clean separation between the so-called "object level" and "meta-level," and our conversation about truth takes place entirely on the meta-level and is entirely about the object level. And 99.99% of the times we talk about truth, this is already the case.
Consider a more classical version of Tiax's syllogism: "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal." There is absolutely no problem in saying that all of these statements are true; Tarski's theorem simply doesn't apply; there is no usage of the truth predicate in the actual syllogism; there's a clean and obvious object/meta separation. Most usage of the concept of truth in ordinary language is already like this. You don't have to think about issues of recursion, and indeed ordinary human language absolves you from thinking about it and allows you to operate recursively without any obvious problems. This is good; we wouldn't be able to get anything done if we had to constantly think about this crazy stuff or formalize our language in exhaustive logical detail.
However, there's that other 00.01% to consider, and that's when the blessing of free and easy recursion that informal language grants us can become a curse. When you permit the object and meta-levels to mix without precautions, as you do when you introduce an unrestricted disquotational predicate into your logic, things quickly go awry.
The important thing is that in "ordinary" discussions, debates, and arguments, this almost never happens. It's only when you start introducing overpowered recursive entities, like infallible truth-tellers, that you begin running into trouble.
Here's a good heuristic to go by: if you encounter a logical construct which appears to allow you to derive true statements without any hard work or deduction then someone has introduced an overpowered construct into their logic and may be violating an incompleteness theorem of the ground system. Otherwise, don't sweat it.
I'll be honest- This went over my head. Too many terms and concepts that I'm unfamiliar with.
But based on the brief stuff I've read on Tarski's undefiability theorem online,
and our conversation about truth takes place entirely on the meta-level and is entirely about the object level. And 99.99% of the times we talk about truth, this is already the case.
seems to be the main point you're making.
So could you elaborate on that? Specifically, what is the "meta-level" for the English language and how is it readily obvious?
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do action X"
Conclusion: Action X must be moral.
I'm afraid you've missed the point. God isn't advocating a specific action in the second premise; he's saying generally that, if some action available to you is immoral, you ought to do it.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do action X"
Conclusion: Action X must be moral.
I'm afraid you've missed the point. God isn't advocating a specific action in the second premise; he's saying generally that, if some action available to you is immoral, you ought to do it.
When did anyone say anything to the effect of "God says do any action that would normally be considered immoral". I thought we discussing the specific case of God asking you to do a particular action.
Edit:
Ok I think I may see now that he was trying to make a logical proof... and forgive me if this is just "not allowed" but couldn't you just say that God cannot tell you to "do that which is immoral" in a generic like that? If it's impossible for God to tell you something is immoral then we know that anything God tells you to must be moral because of the first premises.
I would say that this:
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do that which is immoral"
Conclusion: It is moral to do that which is immoral.
Is still the wrong conclusion and instead I would conclude that In the second premises we are mistaken about the action being immoral otherwise it violates the first premises.
He's basically saying
Premises #1: I will never tell you to kill anyone
Premises #2 Go kill Bob
Conclusion: Killing Bob is not killing anyone....
I see what you're trying to say here, but there's an obvious problem. God commands things because they are good. They are not good because God commands them. An omnibenevolent God would never command an action that was not good, not because his commanding them determines whether they are good or not good, but because God, out of his omnibenevolent nature, would only command actions that were good and not actions that were not.
Therefore, the fact that God proclaims it good is not what makes it good. Instead, what makes it good is the reason God proclaims it good.
My question is "Well then, what makes it good?"
Right, so I'm not suggesting that it becomes good because God commands it. I'm suggesting that if it weren't good, God couldn't command it.
But that's just it. You called into question my understanding of God, remember? You asked me to assume my knowledge about God was flawed.
And not only you. This situation is proposing that God, or at least someone who claims to be God, is asking me to do something that is directly contrary to my understanding both of what God has claimed, and of what God would claim. This situation therefore necessitates that I reevaluate my understanding of God. Either whoever's talking to me is lying about being God, or it is God and God has somehow changed in nature from when he issued commands previously, or this is the same God and I am greatly confused about morality, or this is the same God and I am incorrect about God being benevolent because I am correct about child sacrifice being wrong.
Therefore, I cannot just take this situation at face value. It would be morally irresponsible of me to do so. I cannot heedlessly kill someone just assuming there is justification when I myself do not have it. Unjustified killing is the definition of murder, one of the most heinous acts a person can commit. I have a moral responsibility to not commit murder, and as such I have a moral responsibility to demand justification for killing someone.
We agreed that God could prove himself to you in some manner. If he does so, then isn't that justification?
Considering the source of the discussion is the story of Abraham, in which God is not really going to let him kill the child, I don't think that's a fair reading of what our premises are.
You do have to split hairs a little more finely than this to see what I'm getting at, but nevertheless I think it is a very important distinction to make. There is a moral and logical difference between the following two scenarios:
1: God asked Abraham to perform an actual child sacrifice in which he would actually kill a child who would actually die. God then rescinded his requiest for this actual sacrifice, so it was not performed; however, if it had been carried out, it would have actually resulted in the child's actual death.
An issue with this scenario is that God is all knowing, and thus knew that he was going to rescind his own request before he made it. So there is no such thing as "if it had been carried out". God gave the command knowing that he was going to stop Abraham from fulfilling it.
Abraham himself didn't know what was going to happen, but he knew something was up because God had just spent the last 20 or so years convincing Abraham that Isaac was going to have a lot of descendants. The writer of Hebrews suggests that Abraham knew God was up to something, but thinks that Abraham thought God was going to resurrect Isaac. Point is, God knew it wasn't going to happen, and Abraham didn't but he knew God wasn't going to let Isaac die (permanently).
First, I think a prohibition against child sacrifice can be derived categorically using Kant-type arguments, and if I'm right about that, then there may be no opening for empirical skepticism, just as there's no room for skepticism about married bachelors or 2+2=4.
Not to jump in here... but has someone -like- actually done this? Is there some book I could read that would show "child sacrifice is immoral" is as grounded in logic as "2+2=4?"
Because if there is, I would very much like to read it. I've been looking for such a book for a while now...
We agreed that God could prove himself to you in some manner. If he does so, then isn't that justification?
Wait, are you talking about the voice claiming to be God proving he's God, or God proving he's omnibenevolent?
God can prove he's omnibenevolent by explaining to me why the hell killing my kid in this scenario is a loving and benevolent action. As I said before, he's more than welcome to do that. Barring that, I'm not killing my kid.
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do that which is immoral"
Conclusion: It is moral to do that which is immoral.
Is still the wrong conclusion and instead I would conclude that In the second premises we are mistaken about the action being immoral otherwise it violates the first premises.
He's basically saying
Premises #1: I will never tell you to kill anyone
Premises #2 Go kill Bob
Conclusion: Killing Bob is not killing anyone....
When you change the premises of an argument, yes, you can change the conclusion. This is not a particularly interesting discovery.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Wait, are you talking about the voice claiming to be God proving he's God, or God proving he's omnibenevolent?
God can prove he's omnibenevolent by explaining to me why the hell killing my kid in this scenario is a loving and benevolent action. As I said before, he's more than welcome to do that. Barring that, I'm not killing my kid.
Presumably he hasn't given you a step-by-step explanation ever before, so how did you come to believe he's omnibenevolent without that? Surely there must be a way for him to prove that to you without providing a proof for every commandment he gives.
Presumably he hasn't given you a step-by-step explanation ever before, so how did you come to believe he's omnibenevolent without that?
Because every experience I've had of God as been one of kindness, benevolence, and compassion.
Also, most distinctly NOT someone who would ask me to kill my own child.
Surely there must be a way for him to prove that to you without providing a proof for every commandment he gives.
A way of proving that killing a child is an act of benevolence, love, and kindness without breaking it down and providing a logical proof? Ok, maybe there is, but I certainly can't think of one, because I don't see how that makes any sense at all. What is loving or kind or compassionate about the scenario we're talking about? It doesn't make any sense.
I don't think that those are really comparable. One way that we might be mistaken about whether child sacrifice is moral is if we have some misunderstanding about the nature of death or the nature of the child. For a far-fetched example, suppose God reveals us to be living in a simulation - the child is not real and sacrificing it carries no moral weight. In general, making an undoubtable moral pronouncement about a scenario would require us to have perfect information about the scenario. Since we surely lack that, our moral judgments must have at least an every-so-tiny bit of doubt left in them.
If God is known to be omniscient, then "because I said so" is a perfectly sound technique for him. God cannot be wrong about what is moral, so his say-so is as good of a justification as we could imagine. This, of course, would be fallacious if God were short of omniscient. If God were just "usually right" then of course this would be problematic, but if God is omniscient, then that implies his statements on morality are correct.
I disagree. In the fashion of Kant, I claim that at least some moral propositions are analytically true in the sense that their negations are contradictory. Child sacrifice is at the very least not many logical steps removed from such a proposition.
In this example, it seems like you are illicitly redefining the terms mid-argument in such a way as to wholly denature them. It's only a child sacrifice if a child really dies, isn't it? I mean, if we're going to allow this sort of distortion, then anything goes. 1+2=5 is true if by 1 we actually mean 8, and by + we of course mean -, and by 2 we mean 3.
Therefore I deny that this example speaks to the point at all.
Certainly I'd agree with you as far as basic empirical skepticism goes, so to the extent that a particular moral judgment depends on empirical observations, we'd have to acknowledge the nonzero possibility of error.
However, there are two reasons why empirical skepticism is inapplicable here in my view. First, I think a prohibition against child sacrifice can be derived categorically using Kant-type arguments, and if I'm right about that, then there may be no opening for empirical skepticism, just as there's no room for skepticism about married bachelors or 2+2=4.
Second, the thing about empirical skepticism is that, as Walter would say, it's not 'Nam -- there are rules. In particular, those who wish to make a skeptical challenge to prevailing empirical claims must always provide evidence, even if they are omniscient.
Again, not if we are going to agree to ground things in logic, which we must do if we're going to debate about it. A logical system comes complete with rules explaining what constitutes a justification and what doesn't. No standard logical system has "because God says so" as a rule of justification, and in this argument I would not agree to utilize a non-standard one that does have such a rule, because I would view it as begging the question in matters of examining God's own properties.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Ultimately, the discussion is about what to do if you're in Abraham's shoes. Abraham doesn't know that the angel is going to stop him at the last moment, and we won't know all the facts about our scenario either. What we might think is an immoral action may turn out to be different than we expected, and therefore be morally acceptable. Perhaps because are wrong about what is moral, perhaps because we are wrong about what the nature of the situation is.
Even if we conclude that child sacrifice is immoral with absolute certainty, we still can never be absolutely sure that a particular act is in fact child sacrifice as we understand it. We will always have the tiniest sliver of ambiguity, which will be larger than the zero ambiguity provided by omniscient divine proclamation. Therefore, when they conflict, we must side with God instead of our own conclusions.
If they are omniscient, their challenge itself is evidence. If the prevailing claim were correct, they could not challenge it. The reason appeal to authority is a fallacy is that authorities are not omniscient. However, in this special case, we have an authority who is omniscient, and thus appeals to it are perfectly acceptable.
I contend that the following is valid, unassailable logic:
Premise 1: God is omniscient and honest.
Premise 2: God tells us X.
Conclusion: X is true.
As long as you accept the premises, you must accept the conclusion.
If we're permitted ambiguity as to whether killing the child will "really" kill him, then surely we are also permitted ambiguity that the order actually comes from God. (In fact, it seems to me that any skeptical doubts about whether people really die when killed should be outweighed, in a Bayesian sense, by skeptical doubts about whether voices in our head our really divine.) And if we allow ambiguity about that, then we are in a case where we cannot regard the authority of the command as perfect or infallible.
It is a popular misunderstanding that some arguments from authority are not fallacious. Any appeal to authority in formal reasoning is fallacious. In particular, the following meta-logical statements are true:
1) no syllogism with the single premise "Y said P" and the single conclusion "P" is valid. (by inspection; a syllogism with only one premise is valid only when the conclusion is identical to the premise.)
2) any valid syllogism with the premise "Y said P" together with some additional premises, having the single conclusion P, would remain valid if the premise "Y said P" were dropped. (This can be proved by induction on proof length.)
3) Invalid but intuitively reasonable-sounding syllogisms with the premise "Y said P" tend to be variants of the truth-teller paradox. (See below.)
I oppose your contention, so I'm going to assail this logic by showing that it's invalid. Consider that an argument is valid only when it is not possible for its premises to be true and its conclusion false, then let X be the statement "it is not the case that God is omniscient and honest."
(This is an instance of the "truth-teller paradox," a somewhat obscure variant of the better known Liar paradox. Goedel and Tarski demonstrated that all such constructions are problematic.)
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
If we are willing to also doubt the source of the order, then I certainly agree. The premise of the discussion, however, was the that order does in fact come from God, and we believe he is omniscient. Now, certainly we shouldn't be willing to accept those as unquestionable facts, but the question seems to be directed at those who do.
Considering syllogisms have two or more premises, this is hardly surprising, is it?
Ultimately, this is just a variant of the following:
1) All A are B
2) P is A
3) Therefore P is B
Where A is "things God says" and B is "true".
Yes, we can come up with things to substitute for A, B and P that make for troubling self-referntial paradoxes, but does that mean that this entire class of reasoning is invalid?
Another premise of the discussion, at least on my reading, was that God was really asking for the real sacrifice of a child as opposed to some crazy rewiring of that statement where there is in fact no sacrifice. It seems to me that to allow that kind of doubt violates the premises just as much as allowing doubt about the provenance of the order. As I said, the discussion can quickly become incoherent if we're willing to rip apart the premises like this.
That case is obvious but nevertheless required for an exhaustive analysis of the fallacy.
It's a bit more subtle than that. As with all Goedelian issues, it's easy to see but harder to explain properly. You can clearly see that your syllogism is invalid for any choice of A that represents a coherent property of statements, so long as B is "true" - just let P be "~(all A are true)". There isn't much room for disagreement that that substitution falsifies validity. (In fact, the truth-teller paradox is in a sense "less self-referential" than the traditional Liar paradox, because you don't need to invoke the diagonal lemma to construct any of the sentences in it. This causes some logicians to regard it as an even more serious problem than the Liar. But I digress.)
But, you object, your argument is clearly of a valid form, and logic is supposed to guarantee that every instance of a valid form is valid. That's so, and yet your instance is clearly not valid. Logic can't fail to honor its own guarantees, so we have a reductio -- you must have done something that violates an axiom or limitation of logic itself!
And indeed you did. You might, after some thought, land on the intuition that the problem seems to originate in the fact that you've assigned B to mean "true," and if you did you'd be correct. If you were to unpack it in great detail, you'd see that your argument requires the unrestricted disquotational truth predicate True(P), but Tarski's indefinability theorem shows that no language can capture its own True(P). Your construction violates the indefinability theorem, and is therefore outside the scope of the formal guarantees of validity which would otherwise hold. (Incidentally, this discussion we're having is an informal mini-proof of the indefinability theorem.)
If you had made an argument of the same form that did not violate the indefinability theorem, then it may well have been valid. This one's not, though.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Considering the source of the discussion is the story of Abraham, in which God is not really going to let him kill the child, I don't think that's a fair reading of what our premises are.
It's trivial to adjust the argument. Let A be "things God advocates", let B be "moral" and let P still be "child sacrifice".
You don't have to rip apart the premises at all. All Tiax did was give one example of how given the premises, the "child sacrifice" might not be immoral. If someone truly believes God is omniscient and gave them a command it stands to reason that that person may not even be able to fathom God's reasoning, but it is much simpler to accept that God said so, so it's ok to do. When a General tells his people to make certain moves in battle the individual soldiers do not necessarily know why they are being asked to do things. In-fact to them it may seem worthless or even detrimental, but they still do what they are told because they know that they don't have all of the information. This premises of God asking someone to do something is very similar.
Doesn't this application of the indefinability theorem mean that all statements of truth in language are flawed?
You do have to split hairs a little more finely than this to see what I'm getting at, but nevertheless I think it is a very important distinction to make. There is a moral and logical difference between the following two scenarios:
1: God asked Abraham to perform an actual child sacrifice in which he would actually kill a child who would actually die. God then rescinded his requiest for this actual sacrifice, so it was not performed; however, if it had been carried out, it would have actually resulted in the child's actual death.
2: God asked Abraham to perform a deed which, though superficially similar to a child sacrifice, was -- because of no reasoning, evidence, or explanation other than generic unidentified skepticism -- not actually that. God then rescinded his request for this action. The action was not actually a child sacrifice and so there was no reason for him to rescind it prima facie, but he did anyway, because, hey, none of this makes any sense, so why not.
I believe that both the story of Abraham and the premises of the question we are considering are rightly construed as falling squarely within case 1, or at the very least, case 1 represents a far more coherent unpacking than case 2.
I'm afraid this doesn't fix the issue; it merely kicks the can down the street. Consider:
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do that which is immoral"
Conclusion: It is moral to do that which is immoral.
This is no longer a paradox of pure logic, since we don't technically have anything of the form P and ~P. In that sense you have repaired it. It is, however, a paradox of moral logic under two additional and very modest moral assumptions, namely that (1) it is not moral to do that which is immoral and (2) there exists at least one immoral act.
*sigh* I was afraid this might happen. In a word, no. Though these incompleteness results are very profound and have wide-ranging consequences, it's not the case that they completely undermine the idea of truth.
Essentially, what we've learned is that it is okay to talk about truth as long as there is a clean separation between the so-called "object level" and "meta-level," and our conversation about truth takes place entirely on the meta-level and is entirely about the object level. And 99.99% of the times we talk about truth, this is already the case.
Consider a more classical version of Tiax's syllogism: "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal." There is absolutely no problem in saying that all of these statements are true; Tarski's theorem simply doesn't apply; there is no usage of the truth predicate in the actual syllogism; there's a clean and obvious object/meta separation. Most usage of the concept of truth in ordinary language is already like this. You don't have to think about issues of recursion, and indeed ordinary human language absolves you from thinking about it and allows you to operate recursively without any obvious problems. This is good; we wouldn't be able to get anything done if we had to constantly think about this crazy stuff or formalize our language in exhaustive logical detail.
However, there's that other 00.01% to consider, and that's when the blessing of free and easy recursion that informal language grants us can become a curse. When you permit the object and meta-levels to mix without precautions, as you do when you introduce an unrestricted disquotational predicate into your logic, things quickly go awry.
The important thing is that in "ordinary" discussions, debates, and arguments, this almost never happens. It's only when you start introducing overpowered recursive entities, like infallible truth-tellers, that you begin running into trouble.
Here's a good heuristic to go by: if you encounter a logical construct which appears to allow you to derive true statements without any hard work or deduction then someone has introduced an overpowered construct into their logic and may be violating an incompleteness theorem of the ground system. Otherwise, don't sweat it.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I disagree - when Abraham takes Isaac up on the mountain, binds him, and raises the knife, he believes he is taking part in an actual sacrifice. Instead, as it turns out, he is taking part in a sham sacrifice, in which Isaac will not be killed, because the angel will stop him. The fact that the angel will stop him is but one of any number of possible key pieces of knowledge that Abraham may be missing. Abraham might be wrong about the medical implications of chest wounds. Abraham might be wrong about what it means to die and the moral implications of death. Abraham might be wrong about the nature of Isaac and what moral standing Isaac holds.
As you say, it's impossible for God to advocate for immoral action. The sentence you have presented as premise 2 is simply not possible. It's not particularly impressive to find a contradictory conclusion from an impossible premise.
Which means, if he condemns the killing of the innocent in the past, He will condemn the killing of the innocent today. ergo, no child sacrifices.
Another issue is that he's already done this, with Abraham. The meaning of this story is not that we should give everything to God, but that we should be WILLING to give everything to God. Abraham demonstrated perfect faith in that story, and was blessed for it. It wasn't Abraham killing his child, it was Abraham WILLING to give up what was essentially his lineage. As they say, it's the thought that counts.
Also, take into account Abraham's son: at this time, Abraham is old and his son is in the prime of his youth. How hard would it have been for Isaac to overpower Abraham and run off? Why didn't that happen?
So, to answer your question: Yes, I am willing to give everything to God. No, I do not expect to have to do that, because God would not ask that of me, in part because the point is made with Abraham.
You keep arguing that *if* God asked, would you do it? when you should be asking *why* God is asking you to do it, because he quite simply does not expect that of people.
"normality is a paved road: it is comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow there."
-Vincent Van Gogh
things I hate:
1. lists.
b. inconsistencies.
V. incorrect math.
2. quotes in signatures
III: irony.
there are two kinds of people in the world: those who can make reasonable conclusions based on conjecture.
I mean, yes, you are correct, I have absolutely no comprehension as to how an omnibenevolent God would give me the command to kill my own child.
That's precisely why I wouldn't do it.
And if God were omniscient and omnipotent, or even just omniscient, he'd more than welcome to explain this to me.
The problem here is (and I know you're just playing devil's advocate) the tactic you're using to try to undermine my proclaiming the order to sacrifice my son is wrong is attacking my ability to understand right and wrong.
But there's an issue with that. If right and wrong are beyond my comprehension, then right and wrong are beyond my ability to understand or conceive, right?
So with that in mind, what meaning does someone telling me something is right (or wrong) have for me then?
Because we've established that I not only do not, but cannot understand right from wrong. And if that's the case, then saying something is right is totally meaningless to me. I don't know whether it's right or not. I cannot know whether it is right or not. And since I cannot know if something is right or something is wrong, what's the point? Why be right, or wrong?
Therefore, what meaning does the claim that sacrificing my son is the right thing to do have for me? What reason do I have to do it?
No, that's not an argument.
I see what you're trying to say here, but there's an obvious problem. God commands things because they are good. They are not good because God commands them. An omnibenevolent God would never command an action that was not good, not because his commanding them determines whether they are good or not good, but because God, out of his omnibenevolent nature, would only command actions that were good and not actions that were not.
Therefore, the fact that God proclaims it good is not what makes it good. Instead, what makes it good is the reason God proclaims it good.
My question is "Well then, what makes it good?"
But that's just it. You called into question my understanding of God, remember? You asked me to assume my knowledge about God was flawed.
And not only you. This situation is proposing that God, or at least someone who claims to be God, is asking me to do something that is directly contrary to my understanding both of what God has claimed, and of what God would claim. This situation therefore necessitates that I reevaluate my understanding of God. Either whoever's talking to me is lying about being God, or it is God and God has somehow changed in nature from when he issued commands previously, or this is the same God and I am greatly confused about morality, or this is the same God and I am incorrect about God being benevolent because I am correct about child sacrifice being wrong.
Therefore, I cannot just take this situation at face value. It would be morally irresponsible of me to do so. I cannot heedlessly kill someone just assuming there is justification when I myself do not have it. Unjustified killing is the definition of murder, one of the most heinous acts a person can commit. I have a moral responsibility to not commit murder, and as such I have a moral responsibility to demand justification for killing someone.
You are drawing the wrong conclusions...
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do action X"
Conclusion: Action X must be moral.
I'll be honest- This went over my head. Too many terms and concepts that I'm unfamiliar with.
But based on the brief stuff I've read on Tarski's undefiability theorem online, seems to be the main point you're making.
So could you elaborate on that? Specifically, what is the "meta-level" for the English language and how is it readily obvious?
I'm afraid you've missed the point. God isn't advocating a specific action in the second premise; he's saying generally that, if some action available to you is immoral, you ought to do it.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
When did anyone say anything to the effect of "God says do any action that would normally be considered immoral". I thought we discussing the specific case of God asking you to do a particular action.
Edit:
Ok I think I may see now that he was trying to make a logical proof... and forgive me if this is just "not allowed" but couldn't you just say that God cannot tell you to "do that which is immoral" in a generic like that? If it's impossible for God to tell you something is immoral then we know that anything God tells you to must be moral because of the first premises.
I would say that this:
Premise: All actions that God advocates are moral.
Premise: God advocates "do that which is immoral"
Conclusion: It is moral to do that which is immoral.
Is still the wrong conclusion and instead I would conclude that In the second premises we are mistaken about the action being immoral otherwise it violates the first premises.
He's basically saying
Premises #1: I will never tell you to kill anyone
Premises #2 Go kill Bob
Conclusion: Killing Bob is not killing anyone....
Right, so I'm not suggesting that it becomes good because God commands it. I'm suggesting that if it weren't good, God couldn't command it.
We agreed that God could prove himself to you in some manner. If he does so, then isn't that justification?
An issue with this scenario is that God is all knowing, and thus knew that he was going to rescind his own request before he made it. So there is no such thing as "if it had been carried out". God gave the command knowing that he was going to stop Abraham from fulfilling it.
Abraham himself didn't know what was going to happen, but he knew something was up because God had just spent the last 20 or so years convincing Abraham that Isaac was going to have a lot of descendants. The writer of Hebrews suggests that Abraham knew God was up to something, but thinks that Abraham thought God was going to resurrect Isaac. Point is, God knew it wasn't going to happen, and Abraham didn't but he knew God wasn't going to let Isaac die (permanently).
Because if there is, I would very much like to read it. I've been looking for such a book for a while now...
God can prove he's omnibenevolent by explaining to me why the hell killing my kid in this scenario is a loving and benevolent action. As I said before, he's more than welcome to do that. Barring that, I'm not killing my kid.
Correct. So if God tells you, "Do something immoral", there is a contradiction. Which is what the argument was intended to prove.
When you change the premises of an argument, yes, you can change the conclusion. This is not a particularly interesting discovery.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Presumably he hasn't given you a step-by-step explanation ever before, so how did you come to believe he's omnibenevolent without that? Surely there must be a way for him to prove that to you without providing a proof for every commandment he gives.
Isn't that baked right into being omnibenevolent? What does omnibenevolence mean if an omnibenevolent being advocates for immoral actions?
Wouldn't the contradiction be if God stated something as immoral, only to say that it is moral a moment later?
But who cares if we define something as immoral while God considers it moral?
Also, most distinctly NOT someone who would ask me to kill my own child.
A way of proving that killing a child is an act of benevolence, love, and kindness without breaking it down and providing a logical proof? Ok, maybe there is, but I certainly can't think of one, because I don't see how that makes any sense at all. What is loving or kind or compassionate about the scenario we're talking about? It doesn't make any sense.