Sharpening the horns

I recently saw a version of the Euthyphro dilemma that to me resonates better than the usual presentation. It's the same argument, but it fits better as a reply when theists do the old "can't be moral without God" dance.

In a comment by Ian Spedding at John Wilkins blog, he said:
"Ask them if they believe their chosen deity is a capricious being or one of reason and order. If the former, why follow a moral code that was thought up on a whim, if the latter, what is to prevent us from reasoning to the same conclusions all by ourselves."

I have a feeling it may be further teased along, but it's a good one as is.

(Some of the other discussion in that comment thread is also interesting.)

[edit: b0rken link fixx0red]

creation and existence

If you assert that everything that exists must have a creator, then you assert that either god does not exist or god in turn had a creator.

If you instead agree that at least some things don't have a creator, then there is no need to posit a creator at all.

What distinguishes the best arguments for god from those of the ordinary believer?

Atheists are often derided for arguing against the dumb arguments for God that we encounter every day. (Well, it makes sense - those are what we're hit in the face with. Those are the ones in the media, in things like school board meetings, in everyday conversations, and the ones that show up in our blog-comments.)

But many of us get slammed for not engaging with the arguments of the sophisticated theists. I've seen a couple of supposedly sophisticated arguments before, and not been impressed.

Now, Greta Christina takes on the best arguments for God.

(Well, they're framed as "questions for atheists", but they're basically a list of "but what about this?" arguments for God.)

And one thing really stands out. I can see the difference now.

What distinguishes the best arguments for god from those of the ordinary believer?

They're not in ALL-CAPS, 14-point purple Comic Sans, they're correctly spelled, and they show a passing acquaintance of grammar... apart from that, well... they're pretty much just slightly more polished versions of exactly the same arguments we see all the time.

That's it.

That's all they got.

I am sad.

The problem of suffering and free will

There's a standard apologetic response to what's usually called "the problem of evil". That response is, basically, that evil is a consequence of free will.

However, that utterly fails to deal with suffering that has nothing to do with free will. Disasters, painful disease and so on have nothing whatever to do with free will, and so the apologetic response does not apply.

There's a second response I've seen (usually from the more fundamentally minded), which is that these things are either "caused by the devil" or "caused by the fall".

I could easily deal with both of these point by point, but they're directly covered by Epicurus' 33AD argument (slightly recast):

"Is God willing to prevent suffering, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh suffering?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?"

Either God is able to stop the devil or not. If not, "caused by the devil" is answered by the first pair of lines, but if God could stop the devil, it's answered by the second pair of lines. If it's caused by the fall, then (second pair) God is punishing the innocent because "hundreds of generations ago" someone didn't believe him when he lied (it's right there in the bible) about the fruit on the tree.

(Yep, the snake told the truth and God lied, and he condemns humans to floods and earthquakes and painful deaths forever - nice guy. Oh, and he pulls the legs off talking snakes that point out he's a big shifty fibber. Niice. And then yells at everyone to get the hell off his lawn.)

So we get stuck - the problem of suffering is not answered by free will. If it's the devil, God is either not omnipotent or malevolent, and if it's the fall, God is plainly malevolent. As well as a big fat liar.

Three second argument: Is God good?

(click to enlarge)

This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of arguments distilled down to some single basic point.

The idea for this grew out of frustration with theist ground-shifting:
[It rains. Or thousands of people die in an earthquake but a 5 year old survives. Or a football team wins.]
Believer: "God is good! Praise the Lord!"
Nonbeliever: "What about all these bad things?"
Believer: "You can't make moral judgements about God's actions!"

I suspect the problem is that the your average god-praising theist doesn't actually have an explicit belief about whether we can make judgements or not (even though the theist will make them all the time). What's going on is we always start in one of the arms, and the believer jumps from one to the other at will - apprently without recognising that they're doing it. I think the inability to follow through with even the most basic of reasoning (reasoning that my six-year-old displays daily) is a consequence of starting with a conclusion based on an emotional response - it's NOT about being right, or making sense, or truth, or ideas. It's about avoiding cognitive dissonance. The belief meme must be protected at all costs, even if it's false.

By making the arms an explicit choice, the ground is established. The commitment to an arm at the beginning makes it harder to keep changing the claim, and the argument from there becomes more straightforward.

I want to expand both the terminal nodes into fuller arguments (particularly the left one, so I can give a few examples), but the original point was to keep it short.

I have a few more of these vaguely swimming around at he back of my head that I will probably bring out as the mood takes me, but if you have a believer's argument involving ground-shifting or circular reasoning (leave it in the comments), I'll see if I can break it down.