“Do you disagree with this argument?”
– this is interesting.
serious religious people do indeed think that absolute moral norms … must be grounded in something other than personal whim, social convention, or biological evolution. They must, in fact, find their justification in the deepest structures of reality, which is another way of saying in the very being of God.
This is really an assertion without justification. Bishop Barron makes the alternative sound flimsy, but there’s nothing flimsy about personal well being, prosocial behaviour and cultural matrices of values, and nothing flimsy about biological evolution.
According to the famous dictum of Will Herberg, morality severed from its religious source is like cut flowers placed in a vase. It will flourish for a short time, but without the enacted praise of God, it will fade quickly enough.
I believe he has some kind of point here. It’s difficult to maintain cooperative behaviour on a large scale, because it’s difficult to scale up interpersonal relations to a large scale. So, having a watchful God can be successful in this regard, even if some of His rules are quirky to say the least. But if we are lucky, there are strong state institutions to take His place.
Gottlieb goes on: “[Spinoza’s philosophy] rejects the idea of a personal God who created, cares about and occasionally even tinkers with the world.”
Philosophically, I think this is an unwarranted position in that it can’t be proved either way. In fact, the world does behave this way, as well as, it doesn’t.
We must come, finally, to some reality that exists simply through the power of its own nature. And we recognize that this unconditioned being is the source of the being of everything outside of itself; we acknowledge, in a word, that it is the creator of the universe.
We could just as easily say “the Big Bang”. But it is a truly interesting question, how did everything begin? Somehow I think a part of the answer to the puzzle is to recognise that time was created along with space, in the Big Bang. So it’s nonsensical to talk about “beginning” when time doesn’t exist in the way that we experience it.
is Spinoza at least correct in characterizing this uncaused cause as fundamentally impersonal? We must answer no, since that which is absolutely unconditioned remains incapable of being further actualized and hence is in possession of any and all perfections of being, very much including mind, will, and freedom. “It” must be, therefore, a “he,” a person.
This is very unwarranted wishful thinking, and actually, a bit childish in my opinion, to assume that whatever created the universe has all these qualities of a living being.
the supernatural is that which transcends the world of ordinary experience, of the visible and the measurable. Why should this be ruled peremptorily out of court? … And isn’t it just a crude prejudice to claim that reality is limited to what we human beings can take in with our senses and measure with our puny instruments?
This is a good point.
Simon Paynton 6 days, 16 hours ago.
