Special Pleading and the PoE (Part 3)

[Rise]

This is appeal to definition fallacy (which is the fallacy I was looking for earlier when I said something was "on the same track as the etymological fallacy," I forget in which post: but this is the one I was looking for).

Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. Because many people use the term "culpable" within the framework of objective morality or moral realism, the dictionary is going to describe the word in such a way. However for instance in that same definition there is the archaic definition of being guilty.

When I say that X is culpable for Y, I mean that X has performed actions that helped to bring about Y in a way that they can reasonably be held accountable for.

If a person sets a cup on a table and a Rube Goldberg sequence of events unfolds where a bird flies in and knocks over the cup, someone else trips on the cup, then they try to steady themselves on the charcoal grill and burn their hand -- the person that set the cup down is not culpable.

If a person toes a string across a doorframe trying to play a mean trick on their sibling, but their grandmother unexpectedly trips over the string and hurts herself instead, there is culpability there: this can be tied back to the person's intentions even though the target was unintended. We don't have to have objective morality (or moral realism, though I understand we're not bothering with that here) to be able to talk about intention and culpability.

You are making false reference to a logical fallacy.

An "appeal to definition" fallacy is not saying it is wrong to establish the true meaning of a word.

In fact, the entire nature of the analytic philosopher discipline is based around recognizing the need to accurately define what words and concepts mean before we can make accurate conclusions about what is true.

Take note here:
Appeal to Definition
How it says that it's not fallacious to merely appeal to a dictionary, but it is only fallacious if you appeal to a dictionary while ignoring what other sources like an encyclopedia might also have to say.

The problem here is not that it is inherently wrong to appeal to sources that could establish what a word means but that it would be wrong to appeal only to a dictionary to the exclusion of other sources that might furnish a more full meaning of a word.

So let's look at an encylopedia for "culapbility" to see who is right:
Culpability - Wikipedia
Culpability, or being culpable, is a measure of the degree to which an agent, such as a person, can be held morally or legally responsible for action and inaction. It has been noted that the word, culpability, "ordinarily has normative force, for in nonlegal English, a person is culpable only if he is justly to blame for his conduct".[1] Culpability therefore marks the dividing line between moral evil, like murder, for which someone may be held legally responsible and a randomly occurring event, like naturally occurring earthquakes or naturally arriving meteorites, for which no human can be held responsible.

Like I said: Culpability is an inherently moral term used in a moral sense. Punishing crime is an inherently moral activity -which is why it is also inherently a legal term.

Placing "blame" on someone is an inherently moral claim in the legal sense that it carries with it punishment because one should have known it was wrong to do.

You are misusing that word if you don't intend to imply moral guilt.

It is impossible to claim God has either moral guilt or legal blame for the fall of Adam - if that were the case you would expect God to be punished for what he did. But you can't justify that expectation because you can't accuse God of doing anything wrong for the reasons I have already outlined in detail in previous posts.


We must insist on accuracy in the words and concepts we use if we expect to be able to accurately communicate about truth and therefore arrive at truth.

Likewise, your issue with omnibenevolence as a definition was not just that the dictionary was against you but that you simply were misusing that word based on it's current and historic meaning.

Likewise, Kraus misuses the current and historic definition of "nothing". It's not an appeal to dictionary to point out that he simply is abusing language by changing the definition of a concept to be something which is not the current or historical meaning of that word.

 

[Rise]

This might be possible, but I have a problem: if we tried to talk about the PoE using your exact premises, I don't understand some of them. This would prevent me from being able to hold up my side of the discussion. It seems clear to me that I have to understand some of your arguments before I can get back to the PoE, or they will just come up again, and then I still won't understand them. That would be the problems listed under section 5 on my list probably. Also understanding where duty comes from in section 3. I think the other sections are places where I do understand what you're saying, but believe that it's wrong; so those are less pressing.

I don't know that a lot of the things we're talking about are really necessary to actually resolve the PoE question. It's actually pretty straitforward from a logical standpoint.

Premise 1: God is all good. (which implies objective morality exists)
Premise 2: God is all knowing.
Premise 3: God is all powerful (except God doesn't violate His own nature).
Premise 4: Evil exists.
[And these are all standard accepted premises for Biblical theism. Nothing unique to me]
Conclusion: God has sufficiently good reason for permitting evil to exist.

It's an ironclad logical response because the only way you can disprove it is by proving 100% you can know that any action God has taken is not all good.

It's a burden of proof you simply aren't in a position to meet. Therefore, the premises of the formulation require us to conclude that because God is all good and all knowing that if he permits something there must be a good reason for it.

You can't begin to bring the first three premises into question without first being able to prove that evil's existence is actually a contradiction of God's all good nature.

So why didn't I take that approach, even though it's technically true? Because I was trying to give a more nuanced conclusion. I think there are other factors involved here that shed more light on the hows and whys of evil and God's relationship to it.

But, if I wanted to, I could logically solve the question by simply asserting God must have a good reason for allowing it - and it's perfectly logically consistent with the premises.
You might not like the answer but it does work.


When it comes to the more nuanced conclusion I tried to give: I didn't alter the premises in any way to reach my more nuanced conclusion but I did bring in some other Biblical premises to aid in my conclusion formation.

So if we want to get into my more nuanced answer to the PoE you would need to understand more about my other premises. But the point I was trying to make is that the question can be answered without even having to do that.
The only reason I avoided taking the easy route is because, although it might be a technically accurate answer, I don't think it gives us much detailed understanding of the hows and whys behind the topic.

I believe, however, before getting into the more nuanced details, it's important to recognize the PoE has already been logically answered by the formulation I gave in this post.
Anything else we talk about at that point would not be about proving my answer to the PoE is logically correct - it would simply be about discussing the details about how and why that works.

And if you don't think the PoE has already been answered by my simple formulation and conclusion in this post, then I think we need to first deal with why you think it isn't answered before we try to deal with the more nuanced version of the conclusion.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Rise

I’ll have to respond tomorrow. Power went out because of the stupid storm, had to come into the creepy office. By myself

If I’m not back by tomorrow surely some unnamed monster got me out of the dark. (Haha, the light switches were labelled, “please do not touch.” Like absolutely not, I don’t feel safe here, I have a voice disability that makes me really nervous to be alone in a space like this… I’m flipping all of these lights on and you can complain tomorrow if you like! ^.^)

Anyway this means no laptop because no non-company electronics allowed on wifi and my phone won’t hotspot. Which sucks for my schoolwork too. Womp womp.

 

[Rise]

274 (Cognitivity)



Here's where I'm encountering trouble. I prefer a biological definition of life, which would be a list of properties like "seeking homeostasis, response to stimuli," so on and so forth. But I can take a look at a dictionary and see what it says. This is what I get from Google for "life":

"the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death."

The reason why I don't think this works in your schema is because it makes no sense to me for God's nature to be "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death." I understand that you're saying something different from "God is alive" when you say "God's nature is life," and with this definition of life, it doesn't make sense to say a nature "is" that definition. This is why I have to conclude things like "you're saying 'life' in some novel way, and it does matter what way that is" and "I don't know what you mean when you say 'God's nature is life.'"

...

I think I can summarize my need for clarification:

1) What does it mean for a nature to be a property? My understanding of what "nature" means in this context is to possess properties: your nature is defined by what properties you possess. I don't know what it means to say that a nature is a property. I understand "Erin's nature is to be mortal," but I do not understand "Erin's nature is to be mortality."

...

This leads me to think that what I think when you say that is not what you mean. So I have to ask you what you're saying. What does it mean for God's nature to be that it is necessary for me to have a body that seeks homeostasis, that I respond to stimuli, and so on?

It is not quite precise to say "god is that definition" you pulled up from the dictionary.

It would be more precise to say "God has something which is required for something to meet the definition".

The dictionary recognizes the opposite difference between life and death. God has that which you need to be in a state of life rather than death. However it is you think that should be biologically defined it won't change the fact is there is something beyond biological mechanistic processes, something spiritual, that is required for life to exist and for death to be avoided.

That spiritual thing is found only in God.

And it is a part of who/what He is.

Therefore, you can't have that thing without having God.

2) What does it mean to "remove a nature" from something? I have properties like being mortal, being female, having tattoos, some list of properties that make me myself. I have no conception of what it would mean to "put my nature onto something" in order to "remove" it.

To put it simply: the spiritual thing which God has that you need to have life rather than death would be absent from you.

And that thing which God has that you need is part of who God is.

3) The definitions of life and love may or may not matter depending on how I'm to cognize (1) and (2), I suppose. We'll see?



This is what I cognize when you say "there is something about God's nature that is necessary for you to have life." I think, "okay, I'm alive, which means that my body seeks homeostasis, I respond to stimuli, so on and so forth; and it's possible for these processes to stop (death)." If there is something about God's nature that makes it necessary for me to have life, the only sort of property that makes sense for that is the property "being the creator of the conditions for life," which means God wrote physics to allow for systems which seek homeostasis, respond to stimuli, etc. But if that's what's meant, I still don't know what it means for God to "remove his nature" such that homeostasis and response to stimuli ceases: the physics of the universe don't change just because we die after all.

You are trying to solve the problem in physical materialistic terms without regard for the reality of a spiritual dimension which does not operate according to materialistic physics.

Biblically, what makes you alive rather than dead is not just the laws of physics but something spiritual.

It says God formed Adam from the dust of the ground (elements, one could say), but Adam did not begin to be alive until God breathed into Adam. The Hebrew worth for breath is from the same root as the word for life, spirit, soul, living being, etc.

I said that I don't know what it means to say that "God's nature is love." If you had said "God's nature is to be loving," that I would cognize. I know what "God is loving" means, I do not know what "God is love" means. Natures are about having properties, not being identical to them.

Your philosophical premise is not Biblicaly true.
God is singular and the embodiment of what He is. That something we describe in many ways and break down into separate ideas to help us understand it - but God is still a singular nature.
God is not a collection of separate things (properties) pieced together to assemble who He is

 

[Rise]

275 (Omnipotence)



The argument is that "all" includes logical limits:

Whose argument?
Yours?
Your argument isn't relevant here if you are attacking someone else's premises.

What you define as omnipotent is not relevant to the PoE formulation which is an attack on Biblical beliefs. Which is why there would be no reason for me to respond to your definition of omnipotence unless you could identify it as a Biblical belief.

Your definition of omnipotence and it's required limits is not in line with what the Bible says about God's omnipotence.

Which is not that God is bound by the laws of logic as a pre-existing entity; but that God acts in accordance with the laws of logic because God is the embodiment of truth and the laws of logic are merely descriptions of truth. And God does not violate who He is or change.

If I say that God must have had some primordial properties, I mean that if God is capable of choosing His own properties (and maybe He is),
He could not have chosen his original properties: because how could He have? That would be putting the cart before the horse!

In order for God to choose properties for Himself, He must already have properties: for instance, the knowledge of what properties are possible to choose between, and the power to make the change. So God could not have chosen to be omnipotent and omniscient: He must have been omniscient and omnipotent beyond His ability to object, He had no choice in the matter. He was powerless to choose His primordial properties. If He later uses omnipotence to change His properties (in some possible way, of course), that is fine, but there will always be one set of properties He could never have had any control over: His "first" ones.

But this simply means that the aseity-sovereignty intuition is incorrect: He didn't have sovereignty over His primordial properties (because He couldn't have), and since He didn't have sovereignty over them, the fact that He had that set of primordial properties is a relevant dependence and so not congruent with existing a se.

This is why I pointed out the problem early on was that you aren't merely using someone else's beliefs to form the PoE and attack it - but you are trying to impose your own premises onto the formulation.

The platonism view of God you are advocating is not what the Bible says. It is not what Christians today or historically have generally believed.

You therefore need to identify whose premises you are trying to attack.
It sounds more like you are trying to attack Plantinga's premises specifically rather than Biblical Christianity in general.

But Plantinga's beliefs don't represent the Biblical viewpoint. Nor do they represent what the overwhelming majority of Christians or Jews today think or have historically thought about Biblical aseity in relationship to platonsim.

I am not saying that God began to exist, so I'm skipping past arguments combatting that notion. Things can be "prior" and "primordial" without meaning a temporal context.

The Bible explicitly says nothing existed, aside from God Himself, without God creating it.

There is no Biblical justification for the idea that abstract concepts/properties existed prior to God.

Well, you bring up things that can't be true, but then say it's for a different thread: I can contain myself, I suppose. But I will tell you: it can't be true that logic was created by God, and it's totally incorrect that logical limitation is an "abstraction" that has anything to do with a mind. We will get to it when we get to it I guess.

You're trying to insist that we must adopt your premise of God's nature and his relationship to reality - which means you are no longer arguing the PoE from the perspective of what Bible believers actually believe about God and His relationship to reality.

And since, as I already established, the PoE is only relevant in the context of opposing the Biblical God - your formulation can't be relevant if you try to ignore what Bible believers actually believe about God.

 

[Rise]

282 (Morality and noncognitivism, objective morality/moral realism distinction)



You'll find value-based definitions under the definition of morality (not that I think dictionaries are the ultimate arbiter of what words we use so long as we make ourselves clear).

For instance: "a particular system of values and principles of conduct, especially one held by a specified person or society."

Value-based morality is still morality because it deals with what a person thinks ought to be. The word covers this under its umbrella.

When I said what the definition of morality was, I was speaking from a logical and analytical philosophical perspective that forces us to arrive at what the true definition is.

You admit that morality is a statement of how things are suppose to be.

But you admit you believe there exists no objectively true definition of how things are suppose to be. And admit there couldn't be.

Therefore, you admit there is no morality by definition because there is no "how things are suppose to be".

To claim you have the ability to decide how things are suppose to be is logically and philosophically false - because you didn't create objective reality. So you can't assign purpose to it.

If no one created it then no one can assign purpose to it.

For you to then talk about your opinion of how you wish things were as though it were a statement of how things are suppose to be is logically incoherent.

Morality by definition is singular and exclusive in the same way that truth is singular and exclusive - there can be only one truth and one way "things are suppose to be".

Either there is no way things are suppose to be, or there is one way. By definition there can't be more than one way things are suppose to be.

So either there is morality or there is not. You can't call your preference morality because by definition you aren't genuinely talking about true morality from an analytic philosophical perspective.

There are two kinds of values (at least, I guess: that I can think of right now). They all relate to preferences, but there is a difference between a preference and a moral preference.

I prefer peanut M&M's because I value them over regular M&M's, but my value doesn't entail a self-imposed duty: I feel nothing like a duty because if I choose regular M&M's instead, I would only do this if I wanted to at the time (or perhaps to make a point that I could, or any number of things). So this kind of value doesn't really have a duty attached.

Some values do have self-imposed duties attached, though. If I value property, then there may be some times where I want an item, I would prefer to have it, but I feel a self-imposed duty not to take it as part of my value about the states of affairs surrounding the item in question (the concept of theft).

When I value my cat sitting on my lap as opposed to across the room, I don't have a duty, I just have a preference. When I feel like I have a duty to transfer some of my biweekly activism funds from local causes to help displaced Afghans and Haitian earthquake survivors, I can know the value I'm operating on is of a different kind because it comes with that self-imposed feeling of having a duty. This is why moral preferences feel different from regular preferences. I value peanut M&M's, but I don't feel a duty regarding them. I do feel a duty regarding my moral values.

I feel the need to add pre-emptively: the duty felt is self-imposed, it doesn't seem to come from anywhere transcendental; and different peoples' felt duties can contradict between each other anyway.

There is no such thing as a duty you could impose on yourself because you don't have any authority to impose duty on yourself. You didn't create yourself. If you weren't created with purpose and duties then you have none and nothing you can do would change that.

Therefore, without an objective moral source, everything you prefer is just a preference regardless of how strongly you prefer it or what you tell yourself about it being a duty you hold yourself to.

Your preferences can never logically be duties. Not to yourself or to others.

To be able to logically impose a duty would first require you to have the authority to decide how things are suppose to be.

Since you did not create reality, you don't get to decide how it is suppose to be.

Any conclusion you did draw about how you think things are suppose to be would have no authority to impose itself upon creation and give it purpose that is objectively binding to creation and therefore objectively binding to others.

Therefore, any idea you have of duty is merely just preference - objectively no different than your preference for one type of candy over another. Even if you feel it more strongly than another preference, its fundamental nature as a preference doesn't change.

Irreconcilable value hierarchies don't always have to lead to violence. But in the case of Nazis: yes, you're exactly right. I think that describes the world. We have to kill the Nazis (or otherwise stop them) if we value protecting the people they want to kill. They will try to kill us (or whomever we're killing them to protect). That seems to describe the world alright. We had better always make sure there are more people that despise genocide than support it: or that we are stronger.

Side note: what are you going to do if the Nazis become strong? I do not think we are in such different positions. You may believe that God will punish Nazis in the afterlife, but it still seems you need to hope and help ensure there are more (or that there are stronger) people that abhor genocide than support it here in the world we inhabit right now.

There are options available to a follower of God that aren't available to others.

You are operating from the false presumption that the hand of God plays no role here and it's just up to your own physical efforts.

There is a book called "Rees Howells: Interessor" which shows how intercessory prayer saved Britain from the Nazis and led to their ultimate defeat.

We see this throughout the Bible as well, where entire armies are wiped out by the power of God moving on behalf of protecting His people.

It should also be noted: Intercessory prayer is the first line of defense to change hearts to align with God's will so that nazism, or other equally bad ideologies like communism, doesn't take root in the first place.

There are also Biblical and historical or contemporary accounts of attackers having a change of heart in response to prayer which brings an end to conflict without either side having to be destroyed.

 

[Rise]

There is a longstanding joke about the "God of the Philosophers," where it's thought with a nudge and a wink by theologians that it's this deity that everybody talks about when they're doing analytical philosophy, but that nobody believes in. I'm not sure that's true (not that this is very important). Antony Flew, when he famously converted, as far as I know ended up believing in some sort of "God of the Philosophers."

If I were to reconvert, I imagine that's the sort of god I would be convinced of. I can buy that there might be an omnipotent and omniscient creator-being, but the particular characters sketched out in holy texts I've been exposed to are so problematic to the point of being ridiculous (and I am not trying to be offensive by saying this, just giving my point of view).

In any case, I don't find who it's pointed at to be a problem. As long as someone agrees with the premises for whatever reason, they must deal with it somehow.

Your statement doesn't resolve the fundamental problem I raised.

Which is that the problem of evil never made sense, and still doesn't make sense, in any context other than as a challenge to the logical consistency of a god that has it's roots in Judaic belief.

Therefore, to pose the question in a way that does not line up with what an Abrahamic religion actually believes is to be philosophically pointless.

If you are making up your own premises to attack, under the pretense that someone out there probably believes it, then it's not a very useful philosophical exercise.

It's no more useful than for me to make up my own premise that god hates ice cream and use that premise to prove that god can't exist.

It might be a logically true argument - but what does it ultimately prove if no one actually believes in that god?

How does it get us any closer to what is true about reality if you haven't knocked down a genuine belief system but just a strawman of your own invention?

I know there are different kinds of theism. When I said it's pointed at theists, that's for brevity. Anyone that believes the premises is obviously a theist.

That doesn't resolve the fundamental problem here which is that it's flatly false to claim the PoE question is a philosophically neutral question that can be posed to theism in general and doesn't have to be posed to a particular religion specifically.

About a third of the world believes in a form of theism which would outright contradict the PoE premises. The non-abahamic religions like buddhism and hinduism.

Only the Abrahamic religions believe in the PoE premises. And that's because they are all rooted in Judaic belief about the nature of God.

And since that belief about God is rooted in the Hebrew Biblical texts, any PoE question is inherently posed as a challenge to Biblical conceptions of God.

There's no way of getting away from that.

Therefore, you can't pose the PoE question with premises that doesn't line up with Abrahamic beliefs and have the question retain any theological or philosophical usefulness.

The omnipotence thing has its own response at this point, so I'll just say that the omnipotence premise is widely accepted.

Accepted by whom?

If it's not accepted by the Abrahamic faiths then you can't impose your definition of omnipotence on them and claim to be using their premises to disprove their beliefs.

Your definition of omnipotence contradicts what the Bible says about God.

As for the omnibenevolence thing, it doesn't matter why the theist believes God doesn't like suffering, would attempt not to cause it if possible, etc.; it only matters that they do. If this leads them to launch into a defense of why God can not like suffering and want to prevent it isn't incongruent with the observation of suffering in the world, then that is the tack they can take. I don't see this as a problem.

You are changing the definition of omnibenevolence again in a way that is no longer it's current or historical meaning. Nor does your definition fit what Abrahamic religions fully believe about God.

An Abrahamic theist doesn't believe the definition of omnibenevolence is "god doesn't like suffering".

An Abrahamic theist defines omnibenevolence as "God is morally all good, and objective morality exists".

The fact that God is premised to be all good and that objective morality is premised to exist by inference completely change the conclusion one draws about the PoE question.

You have no basis for trying to strip those two premises from the PoE formulation considering that all Abrahamic beleifs are generally going to have to ascribe to them - and the PoE can't be posed to a non-Abrahamic religion and still be relevant.

I'm tempted to start an RF poll asking about some of the premises you find to be contentious to see whether even with that rather unscientific sampling we find that there are, in fact, theists that accept them -- as I'm very certain there are.

Which premises?
The ones you made up, or the ones that Abrahamic faiths actually believe?

If we're talking about Abrahamic premises then Buddhism and Hinduism make no provision for believing in a single personal god with a will that is all powerful, all knowing, and all good at the same time. Which implies also that objective morality exists by saying he's all good.

If we're talking about the premises you make up, then what relevance do they serve? They collectively don't accurately reflect what any particular religion believes.

It doesn't matter if you can find people who believe in just one of the premises. They need to believe in all the premises for your challenge to be relevant to them.

Your modifications to the premises to reject the historical definitions of omnibenevolent and omnipotent mean you are no longer talking about the Abrahamic god or what the Abrahamic religions believe about him.

And I don't think you'll find any other religion that fits your new premises you invented.

 

[Rise]

282 (Morality and noncognitivism, objective morality/moral realism distinction)

The premises about whether God likes suffering or not are probably still believed by people that believe God is omnibenevolent and that DCT is true. So the PoE still triggers. They can respond to the PoE by making arguments from DCT as you have done, and that's valid to attempt -- but it doesn't mean the PoE as presented is pointless; it still has to be answered if the premises trigger.

An Abrahamic belief would only answer the question by bringing in additional premises which you have failed to include in your formulation: Such as the belief that God is all good and that objective morality exists.

By trying to insist that such premises are not allowed in the question you are inventing your own idea of God and no longer attacking what someone else actually believes about God.

I think it is useful as I've argued above -- because I don't think it matters whether someone believes God doesn't like suffering because God is omnibenevolent and DCT is true, or whether someone believes God doesn't like suffering because it's just happenstance that He doesn't (yes, I know probably nobody believes this second one, just making a point). It doesn't matter how they arrive to the specific premises about suffering I laid out; if they believe all the premises, they must answer the Problem. If it's "easy" for them by being able to solve the Problem by appealing to some new premise which causes the suffering premises to fall out of that new premise, then they've done a good job answering the Problem.

You are fallaciously begging the question by saying that the suffering must be removed from the equation by the addition of new premises.

You aren't acknowledging the possibility that there are other ways to explain why the suffering is not removed if God doesn't like it.

Such as:
Because we know God is all good, and all knowing, we must assume God has a good reason for not stopping it right away or fully,
That implies that there isn't a better way to achieve the good God aims at without this happening. Because God is all knowing and all good, so if there was a better way we would expect it would be taken.

Or:
Perhaps there are reasons it would contradict God's nature/character for Him to intervene to immediately force change. Such as if it would require violating free will, and free will is a greater good that must be preserved.

Now, the problem we encounter there is that if they appeal to stuff that is contentious in its own right, then we have to have those debates before getting back to the PoE. This is what's happened to us. And that's okay with me, I like these discussions (I hope you do too). For instance, perhaps they can't appeal to what they think they can, but they still want to believe the PoE premise.

The issue I take with that is that you have no basis to be telling them they can't use their premises if you start from the assumption that you are trying to use their premises to refute their own beliefs.

If you try to attack their premises as not true then you have ceased to try to logically use their own premises against them.

It's a completely different kind of debate at that point.

It's a debate over attacking their premises as being untrue on philosophical or logical grounds instead of trying to show logical inconsistency in their existing premises. The later would require accepting their premises as-is and showing why they can't all be true.

It doesn't work to try to do both at the same time. I think you have to pick one approach and stick with it in order to have a meaningful and nonconfusing debate.

If you want to try to show contradiction in Abrahamic premises via the PoE then feel free to - but stick with what Abrahamics actually believe. It doesn't do any good to make up your own premises and try to hold Abrahamics to that as part of trying to prove their beliefs are supposedly in contradiction.

I you want to abandon the PoE question based on Abrahamic premises entirely then you would be free to take a different debate approach by trying to attack a particular premise of the Abrahamic faith using philosophy/logic.

But trying to do both at the same time, demanding the Abrahamic accept your premises as their own, is just asking for confusion.

Half of these are debates unto themselves, and some of them are contradictory with things you've argued (e.g. that God can't lie or contradict His nature, yet you also argue He can do illogical things, which means He can lie and contradict his nature!)

I was not arguing that God can do illogical things.

I was trying to point out that you were forcing your own premises onto the PoE question and not identifying an existing belief to show contradiction with.

I think you take a lot of your premises for granted without realizing that not every religious belief system is going to accept you premises.

You might be surprised how many people on this forum alone don't seem to think that logic and truth are real concepts they are bound by. And if they don't think they are bound by them then why should they think god is bound by them?

Just in this thread alone we had someone try to say that there's no such thing as objective truth regarding interpreting what the Bible says. Which would imply he could say Jesus was a pink elephant in the 22nd century on Neptune and I could say Jesus was a Jewish man in 1st century Judea and there would be absolutely no way for either of us to prove our conclusion is right by interpreting what the Bible says about this fact.

I'm not sure this is true. The PoE premises trigger whether or not objective morality is meaningful and/or exists. Objective morality can be appealed to as a response to the Problem. So the Problem is looming, with this appeal hanging in the balance as a response: that doesn't make the Problem worthless. It just means a sub-debate has to occur on the appeal now.

Your version of the PoE doesn't represent the one that Plantinga responded to nor the one that has historically always been posed before that.

Given that omnibenevolence is an inherently moral word, the PoE has always been an inherently moral question.

It fundamentally is asking how God's action or inaction can be considered morally good in light of evil.

Or, similarly, how God could create evil if he were all good.

Suffering and death generally fall under the category of things we consider to be evil. We feel there is something morally wrong with their existence.

 

[Rise]

That is all I was saying: the objectivity is in the hypothetical imperative. It's objective that if one values x one ought to do y, but not objective that one ought to do y nakedly (without the hypothetical). So, what you're saying is correct. I'm clarifying that I wasn't trying to assert otherwise.

That is not relevant to the point I as making.

I was talking about the fact that there is no such thing as morality other than objective morality just as there is no such thing as truth other than objective truth.

While it might be subjectively true to say something believes something is true - there is only one objective truth about what is actually true. Whether it's knowable or not - there is only one truth because that is by definition that makes something truth. It is singular and exclusionary, and objective (has no regard for what people think is true)

Subjective truth is an oxymoron. All you are talking about is your opinion or perspective. You can't call it truth unless you are making a claim to believe that your opinion/perspective represents what is objectively true.

Just because you can say it’s true you believe something doesn’t make it actual truth. As truth is singular.

Likewise, two opposing beliefs about "how things are suppose to be" can't both be true. There can only be one definition of how things are suppose to be. Otherwise there is no definition of how things are suppose to be and it's not suppose to be any way.

That is why it's an oxymoron to talk about "subjective morality" Morality is singular and objective because by definition it implies that things are suppose to be a certain way.

Your preference for how you wish things to be doesn't mean you can claim it's actually how things are suppose to be.
You are no longer talking about morality by definition at that point. You are just talking about preferences unless you try to claim your preference is an accurate representation of how things are actually suppose to be. But you can’t do that if you don’t even believe there exists a definition of how things are suppose to be because you don’t believe in a creator who can assign purpose.

My objection has been that your hidden premise that a creator's intent for the space they live in is deontological for the creation is unjustified: it's just asserted. I've said that you need to justify that assertion.

None of my reasons were hidden nor just asserted. I was explicit with them and gave specific reasons for them.

You are confusing two separate issues.
I was arguing for objective moral values - while you are trying to deal with objective moral duties. They are entirely separate arguments.

You are falsely claiming my argument has a premise of deontology (duties that arise from commands one is obligated to follow) because you probably did not understand my argument as being an argument for objective moral values which is different from objective moral duties.

My argument was specifically formulated to not require deontology for the conclusion to be true.
Therefore my argument has no requirement to establish why God's commands carry with them a duty to be obeyed. Because my argument was never based on the idea that God giving commands is what inherently makes something become an objective moral value and not just an objective moral duty.

Reasons why:
1. By breaking down the definition of morality philosophically to it's core essence of "a statement of how things are suppose to be".
2. By showing that purpose (ie. how things are suppose to be) can only be assigned to something by it's creator.
3. By showing that something can only be created by a mind with intention. The ability to have intention is something only minds possess and is probably one of the, if not the most, defining attributes of what it means to be conscious and have free will. (which is, side note: also why you can't truly be conscious without having free will. Because you associate consciousness with the ability to have intent. But you can't have intention without a free will).
4. We therefore are logically forced to arrive at the conclusion that if we are created then a statement of how things are suppose to be" (ie. morality) is already embedded in the act of creation itself and there was no way something can be created without assigning some kind of purpose via intention.

Now, the question of what obligates you to do what you are purposed to do is a different issue. That is not what I tried to establish nor was required to establish for the conclusion I was drawing.

Which is that morality is inherent to the act of creation itself, it is impossible to be otherwise, therefore we know morality (how things are suppose to be) exists if the universe was create; but it is impossible for morality (how things are suppose to be) to exist if the universe was not created.

There is no way for any person to change the definition of how things are suppose to be (ie morality) or add a definition where one did not already exist. An objective definition of morality (ie. how things are suppose to be) either exists or it does not and that question hinges on whether or not our universe is created by a personal being with a mind. .

Establishing deontology (the duty to obey your purpose. Ie objective moral duties) is a separate issue from establishing that objective purpose actually exists (ie. objective moral values).

We could establish deontology by going over other attributes of God - but that would be a separate argument from the one I was trying to make. And my specific argument here doesn't depend on establishing deontology to be true in order for my conclusion to be true that objective moral values exist. Because proving the necessary existence of objective moral values does not require proving that objective moral duties exist).

You had summarized like this in 265:
"1. All acts of creation are only the product of a free will mind. Otherwise it's not an act of creation it's just random uncaused forces.
2. The defining attributes of what makes something a creation is intent by a mind.
3. It is impossible to create something without having some level of intent behind it.
4. Morality is defined as "how things are suppose to be".
5. Intent implies purpose.
6. "How a creation is suppose to be" is necessarily determined by what the creator intended/purposed when he created.
7. God created all things.
8. Therefore, God has an intent and purpose behind all things.
9. God is uncaused and uncreated, with nothing above him, before him, or beside him. Therefore, he alone is the source of the intent and purpose behind things. It's objective sole source.
10. Only free will created beings could have the ability to violate their intended purpose.
11. Hence, morality becomes a concern for free will created beings because they need to know what their intended purpose is so they can follow it as opposed to doing what is wrong."

Here is my trouble with this line of reasoning. If "wrong" is just definitionally assigned to going against God's intent for the world, such that we can replace the word "wrong" with "going/went against what God was intending," this doesn't answer the question of whether there's a duty.

Why ought we go with God's intent? This part isn't justified, it's just asserted nakedly.

The idea that you ought to go with God's intent was never in my conclusion nor required to be there (as I explained above). Therefore, your arguments based on this misunderstanding are not relevant.

The argument was that the objective moral values exist as statements about purpose by the creator.

Why we have the duty to obey objective moral values (ie. purpose) is a separate argument entirely.

But the fact remains that your opinion about your purpose is never capable of creating nor changing objective moral values about the universe because you didn't create it and you can not ever recreate it.

 

[Rise]

why should I care what God's intent is if it doesn't align with my values? This is a gap that you would need to bridge for this line of reasoning to go anywhere.

...

why is that negative (even if that being created the world)? Why ought I care what the purpose assigned to the world by God is if I have my own purposes for it?

"Why you should care" and "why you are obligated to obey" are actually two different questions.
And neither of which is actually required for my original argument to go through.

I will point out why they are two different questions though:

You have a reason to care what your design and purpose is even in the absence of a duty to obey it.

If you buy a device but don't use it as the creator intended it to be used, you may at best break the device and render it useless, or at worse may incur injury or death upon yourself or others you care about for failing to use the device properly.

It therefore is in your interest to know what the creator's intent was for you as a person and for mankind as a society - if you want things to go well with you.

That is separate from asking why you have duty to do what is right.

I could make an argument from natural consequences by way of design/intent that you have an interest in doing what is right without even having to establish that you would have any duty to do so.

And establishing that there is, in fact, a right way to do things based on what the designer intended (my original argument) is a separate argument from establishing why it's good for you to follow your designer's intentions.

We can establish that creation has an objective intention and purpose without even having to argue that you have a beneficial reason to follow that purpose. Much less having to establish that you have a duty to follow that purpose.

We think of the word "wrong" with negative contexts, but if "wrong" just means "not in accordance with some being's whims,"

I believe you are falsely categorizing the nature of purpose by calling it "some being's whims".

Purpose is embedded in the act of creation itself and it is impossible not to embed purpose into any act of creation.

To call it a whim seems to implies it's unnecessary or frivolous.

No, determining purpose is a requirement of the act of creation. You can't have creation without it.

Purpose is what defines "how things are suppose to be".

"How things are suppose to be" is what defines moral values.

Therefore, moral values have to be intrinsic to the act of creation itself.

The fact that you have a negative association with not doing things according to their purpose is a separate issue.

We can argue that the reason you have a negative association with no doing things according to their purpose is because when you don't do things according to the intent of the designer all kinds of bad unintended consequences result.

What about God's creating the world means that only God's purpose for it matters?

You are asking the question from the false presumption that there exists any other purpose or that there could exist any other purpose that what the Creator of the universe gives it.

By virtue of being the creator of everything, God is the only one who can assign purpose to everything.

If no one created everything then there would be no purpose to anything.

So the question is not "why does God's purpose matter?" as though there are other competing purposes to choose from.

The real question is "In light of the fact that God's purpose is the only possible purpose, why does God's purpose matter to me?"

I can take other peoples' creative projects and repurpose them; I recently took an old nightstand someone else had painted and painted it to match my own decor, for instance: their choice of paint came from their free will (so not from God, to pre-empt that argument); so they purposed it to be an ugly brown. I have my own purpose, and I purposed it to be eggshell. If I have a duty not to make my own purpose in God's world, where does that duty come from, and what form does it take?

Did God intend for you to create lampshades only according to a certain color?

If not, then your choice of what color to use was never a moral question to begin with.

You can't say "lampshades are only suppose to be a certain color".
Or "lampshades are never suppose to be a certain color".

You do not believe there is any objective standard about how lampshades are suppose to be colored.

Therefore, you do not believe any morality exists related to that question.

Nor do you believe God has purposed you to do anything with regards to that lampshade, therefore what you do with was never a moral question to begin with.

Biblically there is no reason to believe you don’t have the freedom to do things which don’t violate God’s purpose for you.

I have never been impressed with these lines of reasoning. The theist says the skeptic "knows" God exists but suppresses it so they can sin, the skeptic turns around and says the theist "knows" they're fooling themselves because they want to live forever, so on and so forth.

Your level of impression with a given reasoning has no bearing on whether or not it’s true.

But that is missing the point of what I said: Which is that we have reason to believe it is possible for someone to will themselves to believe something.

Furthermore, even when we're fooling ourselves, we can introspect that we are; there's an awareness, however dim.

That does get into the question I raised of whether or not someone who suppresses their knowledge of God is ever truly believing their lie or if deep down they always know it’s a lie.

Do you truly believe God in the Bible doesn’t exist, or deep down somewhere do you know otherwise?

You might be suppressing it so well you can’t even bring yourself to introspective awareness that it’s even there.

Or perhaps you don’t want to bring yourself to that awareness? How would you know the difference if you are trying to prevent yourself from being aware of it in the first place by ignoring it.

Furthermore still, I don't think any good definition of knowledge allows for us to know without introspection of that knowing. Part of knowing is knowing that one knows. Otherwise we're doing foolish things in the same category as saying "It is raining, but I don't believe that it is."

You make two assertions here which aren’t true.
1. The idea that we have to know how we know something in order to know it is clearly false. People believe they know things all the time without ever even bothering to ask themselves how they know. People believe they know things that they never had to reason to a conclusion for in their life but simply have always known (the definition of “properly basic beliefs”), So this proves that the act of knowing doesn’t have to involve establishing why you know something before we can engage in the act of knowing.

In fact, some times we believe to know to be true have no answer for how we know it’s true other than the fact that we simply know deep down in our being that it is true; Such as knowing we exist in a physical reality and not a computer program.


2. That someone can’t say they don’t believe what they acknowledge is true. It seems to me people do this every time they engage in cognitive dissonance. They know one of the things they believe can’t be true but they continue to believe both. It does raise the question of whether or not they truly believe it though. But at least as far as they are consciously aware or willing to admit to themselves they do really believe it.

 

[Rise]

"God over all" deals with indispensability, something I'm less impressed with than incorrigibility. I'm not familiar with "God and Abstract Objects," and it's $123 for a copy. I'd like to get this at some point, but right now a lot of my disposable income for books and the like is going to Haiti and Afghans. If you've read this first work, I'd welcome a discussion about it: I wonder if WLC is addressing what I'm talking about at all, or something else (because the logic and math I speak of are not abstractions).

I have good news then:
Barnes and Noble has God and Abstract Objects by William Lane Craig for only $25 in paperback if you buy online.
God and Abstract Objects: The Coherence of Theism: Aseity|Paperback
I have no idea why it's so cheap there. The hardcover is still expensive.
Who knows how long it will be available at such a price.

I have not read God Over All. I would have gotten it but I assumed it contains information already found in "God and Abstract Objects" so there was probably no need to.
God and Abstract Objects is 285 pages longer and came out only 9 months after God Over All.

Because both books deal with platonism and it's challenge to aseity, I assume they must both deal with the issues you have been trying to raise. Unless I am misunderstanding what you are arguing for, or if you don't realize platonism is what you are actually arguing for.
It seems like you are taking Plantinga's platonism based arguments about aseity and affirming those.

If the two books were significantly different I would get both, but I have a hard time seeing how God Over All could be significantly different based on the titles and descriptions of both. I am assuming God Over All must be just an abbreviated more popular level version of God and Abstract Objects which is the more scholarly level work.

 

[Meow Mix]

I have good news then:
Barnes and Noble has God and Abstract Objects by William Lane Craig for only $25 in paperback if you buy online.
I have no idea why it's so cheap there. The hardcover is still expensive.
Who knows how long it will be available at such a price.

I have not read God Over All. I would have gotten it but I assumed it contains information already found in "God and Abstract Objects" so there was probably no need to.
God and Abstract Objects is 285 pages longer and came out only 9 months after God Over All.

The full title is "God Over all: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism".
I assume based on the title it absolutely must deal with the issues you are raising.

Because it sounds like a lot of your arguments related to properties and God are coming from Plantinga's platonism. So I imagine either of these books should be able to address what you are trying to argue from.

If the two books were significantly different I would get both, but I have a hard time seeing how God Over All could be significantly different based on the titles and descriptions of both. I am assuming God Over All must be just an abbreviated more popular level version of God and Abstract Objects which is the more scholarly level work.

Responding to the rest later, have a date tonight.

But what I’ve looked into regarding God and Abstract Objects is that it responds to the indispensability argument which I’m not impressed by in the first place; it’s geared towards something else. The other book, from review of the contents, deals more directly with aseity in general and should be more on topic.

 

[Rise]

The point of the PoE is to make the person second-guess the premises they've already accepted.

As I pointed out already: You can't make someone second-guess their premises if you don't start from all the premises they actually hold.

You are trying to set up the premises in a way that forces you to reach the conclusion you want, which seems to be a form of circular reasoning; instead of allowing believers in the Biblical God to tell you what their premises actually are.

The purpose of this series of threads, starting with Part One, has been a meta-epistemic argument about why turning around and adopting the premise that God has an unknowable reason for causing suffering that's congruent with benevolence is not reasonable for a person to uphold.

By what you have said you are forcing a certain set of premises that Abrahamic religions don't necessarily believe or aren't required to believe.

1. You try to redefine benevolence to no longer be it's current and historic meaning, and certainly not it's Biblical meaning. Which is not a premise any Abrahamic religion is generally going to accept, and they have no reason to accept it.
2. That God causes all suffering. And it can't happen as a natural consequence of free will.
3. That all suffering is inherently bad and can't serve a good and necessary purpose.
4. That we don't have reason to assume God's reasons are good.
5. That we need to know what God's reasons are exactly, and that it isn't sufficient to know He is good.

The reason I've had to reformulate my arguments not to mention objective God-given morality is because I don't think that concept makes sense, so how can I answer objections about something I don't think makes sense to stay on the PoE topic?

You are no longer dealing with the Abrahamic premises of what they believe if you reformulate the premises to be something that is no longer what they believe.

The fact that you don't understand what they believe doesn't entitle you to change their premises to something you think you do understand and then claim you are still representing what they claim to believe.

You've shifted the argument to be trying to tell them their premises are untrue instead of trying to use their premises to show a contradiction in what they believe.

We've moved away from the topic anyway; but that was the reasoning for setting up the PoE with narrower premises simply related to what God likes or not rather than why God likes them or not.

Your question is meaningless as formulated because no Abrahamic religion merely believes that God doesn't like suffering. They believe a lot of things about God's attributes and his relationship to suffering that will radically alter the kind of conclusion one will draw.

You have tried to strip a central premises Biblical religions start with: That God is all good, God can't change, and objective morality exists

If you'd have preferred, instead of giving the PoE in terms I could understand, I could have turned around and just made the entire discussion about objective morality: but then we wouldn't be talking about the PoE for a long time, if ever (if we never reached an agreement). Is what I'm saying here making any sense? This has become quite convoluted.

You're trying to have it both ways, but it doesn't work.
Are we talking about Abrahamic premises and trying to show if they are coherent or are we talking about your premises and why Abrahamic religions need to adopt your premises?

Debating whether or not you need to accept that objective morality exists as a premise is not relevant if you are only trying to start from Abrahamic premises and show why they can't be consistent

It only becomes necessary to debate objective morality's existence if you are trying to force Abrahamic religions to adopt your premises that it doesn't exist and therefore isn't relevant to the question.

If you want to show why there is a supposed contradiction in Biblical ideas of God then you are forced to accept their premise that objective morality exists and God is all good.

The original PoE never tried to change what the Bible says about God. It accepted the Biblical premise that God is all good and that morality exists. It tried to show a contradiction in Biblical conceptions of God by using what was actually believed to be true about God - not by trying to tell people they needed to change what premises they believed about God before trying to show a contradiction in the new premises.

Let me try again. I presented the PoE. You raised objections that would make me either talk about concepts that I'm not convinced are meaningful in order to continue the conversation. So, I amended the premises to avoid having to do that, but which should still "snag" the theism you're defending. You insist on talking about those concepts that I'm not convinced are meaningful though (and there is nothing wrong with that, I'm not complaining). But that means we do have to just talk about the objective morality thing after all, and put the PoE on the back burner, the situation I was attempting to avoid by being more specific about the premises.

Your starting premise is false. Your false premise is the idea that you can strip morality from the PoE question and have it still be relevant to the viewpoints you are trying to disprove.

Inherent in the viewpoints you are trying to challenge is the assumption that objective morality exists and that God is all good.

I don't think you can name a single religion that asserts God is all powerful and all knowing but then also asserts that objective morality doesn't exist and that God isn't believed to be all good.

So your premises are not relevant to refuting any particular religion's belief's anymore than premising "god hates ice cream" would allow you to disprove any particular religion's belief.

Hopefully that explains why I've done what I've done a little better. It may well be that we can never talk about the PoE itself because we will first have to hash out whether objective morality is meaningful, and several of these other things, that there's no guarantee whether or not we'll ever find common ground on. So we may just never "get to" the PoE. I'm still fine with seeing where everything goes.

We can, if you can simply identify whose premises you are trying to show a contradiction with.

If you identify whose premises you are trying to contradict then we can examine your premises to see if they are an accurate representation of any particular belief system.

If they are an accurate representation of what they believe,, then we can start to examine whether or not those premises can be reconciled and how they can be reconciled.

If, however, we are only dealing with your own premises about God then that is just incoherent because you say you don't believe in God so why would you expect us to debate your own premises about something you don't believe is real?

It would be like asking us to debate your premise that hates ice cream therefore God can't be real.because ice cream exists.
What would be the point of doing that if you don't actually believe in the being you are formulating and no one else believes in the premises of your formulation?

If I were to win every sub-battle though, we would eventually arrive to the PoE.

Proving your beliefs about the premises are true would not be relevant to the goal of the PoE.

The goal of the PoE, as stated by your own admission, is to take the premises someone else believes and try to show why they are in contradiction.

If you don't accept their premises and try to use their premises against them, but simply try to tell them they must abandon their premises because you don't accept them or understand them - then you are no longer engaging in the purpose of the PoE question.

I'm under no illusion that will happen for various reasons. For instance, I'm very confident that some of the conceptions you have are either incoherent or self-contradictory. (Easy example is believing God can do the illogical in and of itself; but especially in conjunction with believing that God "can't" do some things like lie. If God can do the illogical, then God can lie even if God can't lie.

As I pointed out in a previous post, you misunderstood what I was saying.

I never said God could do illogical things.

I was examining the ontological basis upon which we believe God can't do illogical things.

 

[Rise]

But what I’ve looked into regarding God and Abstract Objects is that it responds to the indispensability argument which I’m not impressed by in the first place; it’s geared towards something else. The other book, from review of the contents, deals more directly with aseity in general and should be more on topic.

God and Abstract Objects description:
This book is an exploration and defense of the coherence of classical theism’s doctrine of divine aseity in the face of the challenge posed by Platonism with respect to abstract objects. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, the book engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology. It addresses absolute creationism, non-Platonic realism, fictionalism, neutralism, and alternative logics and semantics, among other topics. The book offers a helpful taxonomy of the wide range of options available to the classical theist for dealing with the challenge of Platonism. It probes in detail the diverse views on the reality of abstract objects and their compatibility with classical theism. It contains a most thorough discussion, rooted in careful exegesis, of the biblical and patristic basis of the doctrine of divine aseity. Finally, it challenges the influential Quinean metaontological theses concerning the way in which we make ontological commitments.

Table of Contents
Part 1. The Problematic.
Chapter 1. Introduction.
Chapter 2. Theology Proper and Abstract Objects.
Chapter 3. The Indispensability Argument for Platonism.
Part 2. Realist Solutions.
Chapter 4. Absolute Creationism.
Chapter 5. Non-Platonic Realism.
Part 3. Anti-Realist Solutions.
Chapter 6. Alternative Logics and Semantics. Chapter 7. Fictionalism.
Chapter 8. Ultima Facie Interpretive Strategies. Chapter 9. Pretense Theory.
Chapter 10. Neo-Meinongianism.
Chapter 11. Neutralism.
Part 4. Conclusion.
Chapter 12. Concluding Remarks.


God Over All Description:
God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism is a defense of God's aseity and unique status as the Creator of all things apart from Himself in the face of the challenge posed by mathematical Platonism. After providing the biblical, theological, and philosophical basis for the traditional doctrine of divine aseity, William Lane Craig explains the challenge presented to that doctrine by the Indispensability Argument for Platonism, which postulates the existence of uncreated abstract objects. Craig provides detailed examination of a wide range of responses to that argument, both realist and anti-realist, with a view toward assessing the most promising options for the theist. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, this groundbreaking volume engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. God: The Sole Ultimate Reality
3. The Challenge of Platonism
4. Absolute Creation
5. Divine Conceptualism
6. Making Ontological Commitments (1)
7. Making Ontological Commitments (2)
8. Useful Fictions
9. Figuratively Speaking
10. Make-Believe
11. God Over All
Works Cited
Index


I can see why from the table of contents it might appear the later is more focused on aseity, but from the descriptions it appears very clear to me they are both basically talking about the same thing.

I think the chapters on the first one are worded in a more academic way. I think it is geared towards elaborating on his arguments in the excruciating detail he would need for dealing with other professional philosophers to conclusively prove his case at a scholarly level. I can only assume the second book is an abridged version of his argument designed to be more easily consumed by those who aren't professional philosophers.

 

[Rise]

That is not what I've been arguing: I've been purposely choosing the torture world example just to grate against intuition. The argument has not been "torture world is evil, and God doing it would make evil good, but it can't be good because it's evil." Beings in torture world would probably not want to be tortured is the point (by definition), the example is just to give an easy instance where they might want to go against God's intention. By DCT definitions, it would be wrong of them to do so (and I'm not saying this ironically, it would literally be "wrong" by DCT definitions, as you know).

But my real question has been: so what if it's "wrong," if "wrong" only means to literally go against a creator being's intentions? Why do they have a duty not to do wrong? "Going against God's intentions" does not inherently carry a duty: if you assert it does, then that needs justification.

...

God has a purpose for the world, but this is like an artist having a purpose for a piece. Other free beings don't seem to have a duty to go along with that purpose just because they're in the world any more than I have a duty to go along with a room's designation by an architect as "bedroom" just because I'm inside of it, maybe I want to use it as an office or a yoga studio. Creators imparting purpose to an environment doesn't spread that purpose to other beings even if they are in that environment, there is no duty imparted. If you assert that there is, the onus is on you to demonstrate that.

As I pointed out in a previous post, my argument was for the ontology of objective moral values - which was not intended to require establishing that one has a duty to obey the objective moral values. But merely establishes that they do objectively exist and where they come from.

I could justify why you do have a duty to obey God's purpose but that would be a separate argument.

When you say the world has a purpose imposed on it by God, I don't see how this is different from an artist having a purpose for a sculpture. We intuitively understand that an artist's purpose for their piece doesn't rub off on everyone else: I'm not bound to the artist's purpose for their piece, I don't have a duty to use their piece as the artist intended. If I buy that sculpture to use as a doorstop, I might be tacky, but I haven't broken some duty because there was never a duty.

...

Quick caveat: art comes from free will. I'm wondering how you reconcile this: does the artist get to assign purpose for their art? It seems it would be equivalent to saying the artist doesn't have free will if you say "no," you might get trapped in a contradiction.

You can't assign purpose for the universe, the earth's biosphere, mankind, society, or even yourself - because you didn't create any of those things.

And while you might nominally be able to create a purpose for something you do create because you have the free will of intention - but the real question is whether or not you creating that thing fits into what God designed you to be doing.
It also may fall under the guidance of whether or not what you are doing is in line with the purpose God has for mankind, the earth, or the universe as a whole depending on how what you are doing impacts other things He created.

So you have to make a distinction between moral purpose and nominal purpose.

Only God can determine if whether or not your action is consistent with the objective purpose of His creation - how things are suppose to be.

Your nominal purpose for your invention (how it is suppose to work, and what you intend for it to do) doesn't change what the ultimate purpose of creation already is.

For example: If you invent the maxim heavy machine gun prior to world war one because you either want to make lots of money or want to increase the scale of death involved in war, what do we say of this?

You very well could say you have given purpose to this invention.

But the real question is:
Is creating this invention with this purpose in line with the purpose God has given for your life? Is this perhaps violating the purpose God has given not just for your life, but the purpose God has for mankind as well?

That is why I said, with regards to your matrix analogy, that only an uncreated/uncaused being can truly be said to assign ultimate purpose to something.

Anything that is created by a created being is subject to whether or not what they are creating lines up with the ultimate purpose of the one who created them.

Anyone who is merely caused and not created can't even make intentional choices because they are just materialistic robots.

Already clarified that I wasn't making the argument you thought I was at the beginning of this response, so skipped some stuff (I was not asserting that my moral compass tingling meant anything about the way the world ought to be outside of my hypothetical imperatives).

Why would you reference your own moral compass then as though it were relevant?

Your moral compass is only relevant to guiding you to objective moral truth if it's capable of tapping into some transcendent source of moral truth.

If not, then your moral compass doesn't mean anything for assessing whether or not something is truly right or wrong. It's just a statement of your personal preference.

Even some atheist philosophers recognize the need for this: which is why they try to argue for moral platonism whereby moral concepts are abstract objects that exist as part of the fabric of reality and there's something inside of us that is able to sense them.

They really are at that point describing something not unlike Biblical theism - they just don't want to have to acknowledge the fact that their worldview doesn't make sense without a personal being with a mind being the source of this transcendent morality.

But on this note, there are instances where my moral compass is not in line with what the Biblical God's character are supposed to be: for instance, I do not think homosexuals choosing to enter a relationship rather than remaining chaste to be bad. If God is responsible for my moral compass, and somehow it is bad, then something went wrong somewhere.

That's the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil we see in Genesis with the fall of man.

In Romans we see that people suppress Truth in order to sin.

2 Thessalonians 2:10.
You have to love truth more than you love sin in order to be saved from sin and the effect of it which is death.

You cannot expect to be able to right your moral compass if you don't first love truth more than anything else.

If you truly love truth then you'll be willing to give up any belief you hold that is a lie - no matter how much you might like that lie or think it serves to benefit you.

That is why the Bible tells people to love God more than anything else. God is also said to be Truth itself.

Without taking that first step of loving truth more than anything else, you'll never be able to uncover what lies you believe because you don't have an incentive to let go of the lies.

That is, conversely, why people believe lies in the first place: they think they get something out of it.

You can't believe the truth until you're willing to sacrifice your favored lies first.

Why doesn't God make our moral compasses register correctly so we can correctly be culpable for sins? How is someone culpable for a sin if it doesn't even register to them as bad?

Who said he didn't?

The Bible says He did. Which is precisely why no man will be without excuse in the day of judgement by appealing to ignorance. No man, literally not one. Even if no one every spoke a word of truth to them in their life - they had their inner God given witness about what is right or wrong. And they made their choices.

The Bible also tells us that when sin doesn't register as sin to someone, it's because they have chosen to sear their conscious closed by wanting to believe a lie instead of the truth.

I don't think I said anything about "commands," and if I did (I haven't scrolled up), let me be clear that it doesn't have to be anything like a verbal command. If God creates a thing with an intention and expects things to follow that intention, that is a command. If beings must do things "the way they are supposed to be," that is a duty. I would ask "why must created beings do things the way God intended," but that is a rehash of the top part of this post, so don't answer again here, just answer up there.

I wasn't implying it had to be a verbal command. I was referring to it in the sense of the existence of duties being inherently a type of command.

Oh no, not another subject! I'll shortly say that consciousness appears to be able to arise from mechanistic processes (after all, here we are) and we'll debate that some other time.

You would be using a fallacy of begging the question/circular reasoning to try to argue that way.

Premise: Consciousness arose out of mechanistic processes.
Conclusion: Consciousness can arise out of mechanistic processes.

Your premise depends on assuming it's true that humans arose out of purely mechanistic processes and therefore their consciousness must be mechanistic as well.

But you can't prove humans arose purely out of mechanistic processes. Which would be implying a worldview of materialism.

You can't prove materialism as a worldview is true nor than theism as a worldview is false.

If you can't start from the premise that materialism as a worldview is true then you can't point to the fact that mankind exists with consciousness as proof that materialistic/mechanistic processes can create consciousness.

 

[Rise]

Irreconcilable value hierarchies don't always have to lead to violence. But in the case of Nazis: yes, you're exactly right. I think that describes the world. We have to kill the Nazis (or otherwise stop them) if we value protecting the people they want to kill. They will try to kill us (or whomever we're killing them to protect). That seems to describe the world alright. We had better always make sure there are more people that despise genocide than support it: or that we are stronger.

Side note: what are you going to do if the Nazis become strong? I do not think we are in such different positions. You may believe that God will punish Nazis in the afterlife, but it still seems you need to hope and help ensure there are more (or that there are stronger) people that abhor genocide than support it here in the world we inhabit right now.

This question raises an important issue which I didn't address in my original response.

You are saying you are willing to put the death penalty on people because you disagree with them, even though you don't believe in objective right or wrong.

This is inherently dangerous from an atheistic perspective that only believes in opinions and preferences and not objective moral values.

What defines the point at which an atheist can say it's ok to kill someone because they disagree with them vs when it's not ok?

Without an objective standard outside of ourselves to appeal to this creates the potential for a sliding scale where even the mildest disagreement can result in murder and the murderer can feel completely justified in doing so because they got to create their own moral standard in their mind about what was considered "going too far".

You have no way of telling someone their threshold for murder is wrong and yours is right.

You don't even have any objective mooring for assessing whether or not your own threshold or murder is right or wrong.
You cant, because right and wrong don't really exist.

So here's why it's so dangerous: You think nazis deserve to die when they start to commit genocide. Not a controversial starting point.

What about people who are nazis who advocate genocide but just aren't actually doing it yet? Some people would think it's justified to kill them as either a pre-emptive precaution or just because they don't deserve to live because of their views.

But here's where it gets really dangerous, and relevant to today:
What if people are just being labeled as nazis by their political opponents, and don't actually advocate genocide or any genuine nazi ideas?

Or what if one expands their definition of what it means to be a nazi to include things that normally wouldn't justify the death penalty in their eyes, but these people end up getting seen as deserving of death anyway just because they now have the nazi label put on them?

That is the slippery slope we find ourselves in where a large segment of the political left in this country sees no problem with calling everyone and everything a racist that disagrees with them. Completely without logical justification, but simply disagreeing with the leftwing party line means you must be a defacto racist because only a racist would disagree with the progressive agenda. A dangerously circular fallacy.

If you start from the premise that killing racists is ok, but then start to label increasingly more things as falling under the label of being racist (Even when it can't reasonably have anything to do with race, but you just dont like their viewpoints and can't argue against them with reason), then you're going to necessarily end up with a bloodbath if those people are able to get a sufficient amount of power to act in accordance with what they say they believe.

There is a segment of this country, antifa types or sympathizers, who think it's not only ok to violently assault their political opponents but who think they are the heroes for doing so - because they have decided that anyone who disagrees with them must be a nazi or nazi sympathizer. They deceive themselves into thinking they are the good guys fighting the bad guys by putting false labels on their opponents.

But this strategy of putting false labels on their opponents would not yield such dangerous fruit if they did not already start from the premise that it's ok to assault or kill people of certain viewpoints (like nazism or racism).

When you open the door to killing people because you disagree with their viewpoint (as you do when you advocate killing nazis for their viewpoint that genocide is good once they start trying to put that viewpoint into action) this is a disaster waiting to happen without an objective standard of moral values to moor your conclusions to about what is genuinely worthy of the death penalty and what isn't.

This is why athestic communism always results in bloodbath purges - they decide simply that anyone who disagrees with the party line deserves death. Being atheist by definition as communists, no one can tell them they are wrong for doing so. All that matters if what they want and they think killing everyone who gets in their way is the easiest way to get what they want.

There is a segment of this country that sees fit to label their political opposition as nazis/racists, without any factual justification for that accusation, and would be perfectly happy to round them up in camps and execute them if they were given the power to do so. And they seem completely incapable of seeing the irony and hypocrisy of their beliefs.

 

[BrightShadow]

I think through out the history of our ancestors - God has sent numerous prophets who have genuinely tried to deliver God's message to us. If we are going to take biblical message into account then in my opinion it should be fair to say that the message got distorted and went through some transformation over the last 2000 years since the delivery system was primitive back then and preservation method was faulty. There are many other reason these messages may be corrupted as well such as 1) they went through multiple translation and retranslations, 2) mis-interpretations, 3) cultural influence, 4) maybe intentional distortion by people in charge of collecting and writing or 5) faulty or biased comprehension of an event by people in charge of writing them. Under normal conditions these documents could be considered "hearsays". However I believe there is sufficient information out there. We need to sort through it IMO.
Furthermore I believe God gave us limited information as on a "need to know" basis. So I think many of these revelations are scattered among some different monotheistic religions because they came at different periods.
In my earlier post in this thread (post #277) I stated my opinion that God could have allowed babies to get leukemia and even though it sounds like a horrible thing to us but from God's prospective it could have made sense and could have been a necessary act. I tried to explain my views there!
As you know - from God's prospective - no permanent damage was done to the babies as God can erase all memory and grant the babies permanent status in Heaven even though they went through the sufferings. But maybe that was part of their atonement for their "original sin", which is (in my opinion) different than Adam and Eve's apple eating sin per se.
If we are going to take biblical God into consideration then I believe there are proof in the Bible that God does drastic things sometimes in order to accommodate the flow of certain events.
For example, in the following verse it shows that God put diseases on to the Egyptians even though not all Egyptians can be blamed for the leader's decision!

Exodus 15:26 ESV : “If you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in his eyes, and give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, your healer.”

If we examine Moses story then we will see God unleased 10 plagues on to the Egyptians so that Pharaoh agrees and allows the Israelites to leave Egypt for the promised land!

Exodus 11:4 And Moses said, Thus saith the Lord, About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt:
Exodus 11:5 And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts.
Exodus 11:6 And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more.
Exodus 11:7 But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast: that ye may know how that the Lord doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.
Exodus 11:12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord.
Exodus 11:13 And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.

At first the Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites go but after the tenth plague that involved death of the first born sons in every household - Pharaoh finally agreed. Even though innocent firstborn sons of Egyptians were killed but the sons of Israelites were spared from this plague. This forced the Pharaoh to change his mind and let the Israelites go free .But he later changed his mind and sent his army after Moses and Israelites. God then also destroyed the Pharaoh army when the Red Sea pathway closed on them. Well, I don't believe those first born sons were at any fault and didn't need to die like that but God didn't hesitate to sacrifice them to convince Pharaoh.
So, since Biblical God did put Plagues and diseases to the Egyptians - why would He/she have any problem to sacrifice babies to leukemia? Especially if there is a valid reason?
I believe we have to look from God's prospective. God can restore all innocent souls back into Heaven. The parents of those Egyptians first born sons suffered the loss of their son but they are adults and they could have gone to Pharaoh and demanded the release of the Israelites. But still I don't personally agree that innocents should suffer like that!
Anyhow, if these events are true then - in the end all innocents will be forgiven and taken back to heaven IMO. So no worries! But my point is - I believe we have a history with God in our soul form. I believe God did create everything in Heaven and earth! Some may not make sense to us but that's because our knowledge is erased of our past dealings with God IMO. Everything that doesn't make sense is because we don't have sufficient information. But I believe God is Good.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Rise

We're going to have to wait a bit longer for my replies, sorry. Have been getting ready for classes to begin... technically today since it's after midnight for me now. Hopefully tomorrow. (Edit: er, today. You know what I mean!)

 

[Meow Mix]

There is no time as we understand it, yet events do still happen in a casual sequence.

So, meta-time. Time as we know it follows the entropic gradient.

They didn't believe God.
They believed satan when he said God was lying about the consequences.

This seems like a problem. Why didn't they believe God? Here are some possibilities that come to mind:

1) They weren't equipped with enough information to realize that they should believe God. God, being omniscient, would have known that. If God didn't give them the necessary information, that seems to place some blame on God.

2) They were equipped with enough information to realize that they should believe God, but they weren't equipped with enough information to know that they shouldn't believe Satan. The problems here are similar to the problems with (1) as far as God's culpability.

When I was younger, and leaving Christianity, I thought about this option a lot: I was under the impression at the time that Adam and Eve were innocent of knowledge of good and evil (pre-fruit). My objection at the time was, "well if they didn't know what evil was, then they didn't know what a lie was. How could they be blamed for believing the serpent? To a person that doesn't know what a lie is, anything that anyone tells them registers as true!" Now, that might be a little naïve now (and probably not congruent with your interpretation), but it feels relevant here.

3) They were equipped with enough information to realize they should believe God, and they were equipped with enough information to know that they shouldn't believe Satan, but they didn't fully understand the consequences of what would happen. (You have rejected this one by stating they cognized the consequences in an earlier thread). This one would also be a problem, because it again comes down to God being able to provide the adequate information omnipotently and omnisciently.

4) They were equipped with enough information to realize they should believe God, they were equipped with enough information to know that they shouldn't believe Satan, they were cognizant of the consequences of their choice (death, famine, rape, disease, etc.), and they chose to do it anyway. But this is incongruent with your assertion that they were in "union with God," whatever that means, before making the choice such that they would be incapable of making hateful choices. That doesn't add up with your prior arguments.

What other possibilities are there?

We can talk about it in more detail, sure; but it's really not a complicated explanation.

There is something God has which can give you the eternal life as opposed to death.

Only God has it.

If you aren't willing to take it from God then there's no other way to have it.

Of course you want to understand more of the hows and whys behind how this works. And that curiosity is great to have. But I think it has to be recognized that the simple explanation is already sufficient as a valid explanation without the need for more details to make it a valid explanation.

I think the false assumption you seem to be operating out of is the assumption that any explanation I give is not valid unless it can be explained to a certain degree of detail.

This brings to mind something I saw William Lane Craig say which I think is most apt for much of our objections:
"You don't need an explanation of the explanation in order for the explanation to be valid".

The reason being:
If you always had to have an explanation of your explanation before it could be accepted as a valid explanation then you could never have an explanation for literally anything because nothing can ever be fully explained. Not in science or any other field.

My simple explanation for life and death and God's relationship to it is logically valid and sufficiently explanatory as it stands. It doesn't necessarily require more detail to be sufficient.

Although I welcome discussion about more detail, I think it's important to point out where some false premises may be at work behind your questions.

The way you've said it here actually makes sense, though: the problem was the phrasing, perhaps. All of the "God puts his nature on things" and "God takes his nature off things," that is not a way of explaining that made any sense to me.

So I'm to understand that you simply mean, God provides a thing, and if God stops providing that thing, then you can't live forever. I'm assuming we're not talking about bodily death (so I think we're still being a little confusing on what's meant by "life" and "death," using them in different ways than we normally do: that's fine, if it's explained).

I don't understand what this has to do with physical suffering though, which is related to bodies and the physics of the universe. So, this still doesn't explain very much to me. This is an explanation that might matter if I asked "what happens to us after death," which I did not.

I don't think it would be expected to make a lot of sense without having a broader understanding of Biblical knowledge about the nature of God's spirit, it's work in the believer, the nature of sin, redemption, etc.

I did give you an answer to your question, but I suspect you may be lacking sufficient Biblical schema to plug that answer in to have it fully make sense.

I am not sure what the best way to explain this succinctly is without risking not giving you enough schema to understand the answer.

Let's try it this way:
1. God's spirit resided with mankind, inside of them, and over them as a covering prior to the fall.
2. This is union with God and if received fully conforms one to God's nature of all good.
3. This was lost with the fall of Adam. We at best now only partially experience God's spirit in and upon us, with few achieving a restoration of full union with God in this lifetime.
4. Jesus, the second Adam, begotten directly of God and not descended from Adam via a male lineage, restored what was lost with Adam's fall via Jesus's sacrifice and resurrection to a fully restored nature.
5. We can experience what Adam once had through faith in Jesus and receiving of the Holy Spirit (God's Spirit) inside of us.
6. The Holy Spirit transforms us to be more like God, to the degree we are willing to be transformed and obey God.
7. One day those people who put faith in Jesus will be transformed at the return of Jesus to earth to resurrected with new bodies and a fully new nature like Jesus has.
8. Those that don't will be permanently separated from God, experiencing eternal torment.

Now, that may very well just raise more questions for you.

Yeah, I don't really form a mental picture of what a spirit residing with, inside, and over means. Are these literal? Is there a misty thing floating next to, inside, and over people in the picture? I very much doubt it. So I don't know what this means; which is supposed to be explaining the "union" concept I also don't really get.

(Edit: I didn't mean to give the impression that I'm thinking of a physical mist. I understand spirits are supposed to be unphysical, so that was a poor choice of words. But I still don't understand what it's supposed to mean for a spirit to be in, upon, or over a thing).

I understand things like "my views are in line with this person's views." If you mean to just say people's views were in line with God's and mean only that, then just say that. The mystical sounding stuff isn't registering in a way that informs me of anything. If it's something else, maybe we need a different tack of explaining it to me?

Imagine to yourself, "Ok, Erin says that the leprechaun's chariminess resided in, around, and over Joe," and imagine what kinds of questions you would have about what that even means. That would give you a good idea of where I'm lost and maybe of how to help. No offense intended in comparing to something silly like a leprechaun, understand I'm just using an example of how something is said, not comparing concepts.

Ah, an SG-1 reference. That brings back memories. One of the few shows I watched every season and episode for.

This probably won't surprise you one bit, but I almost quit the show when it went all mystical, finger waggly "ascension" and nonsense zen deepities uttered as if they were profoundly wise (my eyes couldn't stop rolling). But then Daniel came back, lightened up (I loved his interactions with Vala so much), and the self-awareness of the show really kicked up a notch. Ended up loving the later seasons even more!

Back to the question:
You have the choice to reject union with God. So you can't accuse God of mind controlling you.

You have to make the choice to willingly want to become more like God, who is all good. And then that option becomes available to you.

So what do you want? Do you want God to force you to be in union with Him or do you want the freedom to make that choice?

The problem is still this: if you understand that not wanting to become more like God is equivalent to making the choice to bring death, disease, starvation, etc. upon literal billions of people in literally a worse genocide than Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot combined, how do you make that choice unless you were given a faulty moral compass? How do you make that choice unless you weren't given the information you needed to make that informed choice?

Wouldn't making that choice qualify you as being irrevocably insane, irrevocably evil (under that worldview: or, under mine, you would have value hierarchies not at all in alignment with altruism and empathy)? Wouldn't that be a very severe design flaw, considering the choice is made before corruption by the choice according to the worldview?

 

[Meow Mix]

You are making false reference to a logical fallacy.

An "appeal to definition" fallacy is not saying it is wrong to establish the true meaning of a word.

In fact, the entire nature of the analytic philosopher discipline is based around recognizing the need to accurately define what words and concepts mean before we can make accurate conclusions about what is true.

Take note here:
Appeal to Definition
How it says that it's not fallacious to merely appeal to a dictionary, but it is only fallacious if you appeal to a dictionary while ignoring what other sources like an encyclopedia might also have to say.

The problem here is not that it is inherently wrong to appeal to sources that could establish what a word means but that it would be wrong to appeal only to a dictionary to the exclusion of other sources that might furnish a more full meaning of a word.

So let's look at an encylopedia for "culapbility" to see who is right:
Culpability - Wikipedia
Culpability, or being culpable, is a measure of the degree to which an agent, such as a person, can be held morally or legally responsible for action and inaction. It has been noted that the word, culpability, "ordinarily has normative force, for in nonlegal English, a person is culpable only if he is justly to blame for his conduct".[1] Culpability therefore marks the dividing line between moral evil, like murder, for which someone may be held legally responsible and a randomly occurring event, like naturally occurring earthquakes or naturally arriving meteorites, for which no human can be held responsible.

Like I said: Culpability is an inherently moral term used in a moral sense. Punishing crime is an inherently moral activity -which is why it is also inherently a legal term.

So I get that, but moral noncognitivists' terms are still called moral terms: the realist or cognitivist definitions of "moral" or "culpability" are not monopolies, there are other ways to use the words. See ye olde Stanford for instance in general (Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))

Noncognitivists' statements are still called moral statements even if they think moral statements are more like preferences than propositions. Saying "no, that's our word, you can't use it" would just gum up communication: would you rather we just make up our own word, like boral or something? Boral and bulpable (for culpable)? It would be silliness: all that's important is that you understand what we mean when we use the words (and we will be careful to demarcate when we're speaking from our own worldview as opposed to a cognitivist's or realist's).

Placing "blame" on someone is an inherently moral claim in the legal sense that it carries with it punishment because one should have known it was wrong to do.

There are different theories of justice than "knowing it was wrong to do." In fact ignorance of the law often doesn't excuse penalty for the law, for instance: I once got an incredibly stupid ticket (thankfully thrown out by the city) for failing to stop where there was no stop sign pulling out of a gas station. Apparently the law is that entering the public street from a private property, which the gas station qualified as, is illegal without a full stop first despite there being a stop sign or not. The city threw it out as unreasonable circumstances against the intent of the law, but they didn't have to. Anyway, that's pretty far off topic.

All I'm saying is that noncognitivists can use words like moral, culpable, guilty, etc., and if you need me to, I can define them more precisely so you know what I mean when I say them (and I can again demarcate when I'm speaking from my worldview from when I'm entertaining yours/cognitivism).

It is impossible to claim God has either moral guilt or legal blame for the fall of Adam - if that were the case you would expect God to be punished for what he did. But you can't justify that expectation because you can't accuse God of doing anything wrong for the reasons I have already outlined in detail in previous posts.

It is possible to be culpable without being punished in my worldview; in fact, it's the norm.

For someone that's concerned with suffering, culpability revolves around whether someone's actions can be tied to intentions that relate to some kind of suffering, as in the examples I gave in an earlier post. I'm fairly sure this is able to form a cognitive picture in your mind of the relation between action, intent, and suffering that I'm talking about.