Reddit reviews Practical Ethics

Thank you for the effort! I'll try to do you justice with a thorough response.

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> 1. God says what he needs to say to us through the Bible.

Sure it's the Bible and not Harry Potter? To anyone without your obvious bias, the Bible looks like a collection of fanciful but poorly edited fiction. God's message hasn't reached me and it hasn't reached 5 billion other humans alone among the living. In other words, if this is an omnipotent's idea of effective communication, God sucks as a communicator.

> 2. God is not inert, he sometimes does miracles

Prove this and I'll leave you alone. Has God ever healed an amputee? Has God ever accomplished a miracle that has no natural explanation?

No wait, references to the work of fiction mentioned in #1 don't count. There is not the slightest bit of evidence that your precious Bible is anything more than a stack of useful rolling papers. I've addressed this before. J.K. Rowling has Harry Potter performing scores of miracles in her books, it's really easy to create a miracle with pen and paper.

> 3. The evidence is not inadequate. If you want evidence of his existence, there is evidence everywhere, and in sheer necessity, it is pointed out that God must exist.

So you say. Your following arguments are... sorely lacking. Here we go:

> 3.1 The need of a creator
If you saw a car in the forest, you wouldn't say it randomly came into existence and over time came together by itself, because it is too complex for that to have happened.

Correct. That's easy for me to say because I know exactly what a car is and how it's made.

> In the same way, this universe and everything in it is far too complex to randomly explode into existence and come together by itself, a creator is needed and that creator is God.

Your analogy doesn't hold. The universe is not very complex conceptually, it's been satisfactorily explained how all heavenly bodies resulted from the expansion of space followed by the clumping of clouds of primeval hydrogen. Suns and the nuclear process in them? A natural consequence of packing a lot of hydrogen with gravity. Heavy elements? The ashes of nuclear fusion. Planets circling around suns? That's what happens when heavenly bodies nearly collide in a vacuum, influenced only by each other's gravity. Finally, the complexity of life on earth is neatly explained by evolution from very primitive beginnings from substances that occur -naturally- in the void of lifeless space. No magic is required to explain any of this. But I see we get to talk about this in greater depth in #4.

Still, for your interest, this video refutes Craig's Kalam Cosmological argument and is thoroughly captivating while presenting modern cosmology. Highly recommended!

> 3.2 The need for an original mover/causer
You know nothing moves by itself correct?

No, I don't know this, because I have a solid education in physics. Atomic nuclei spontaneously explode and particles fly from them - movement without a mover. Plato's Prime Mover argument dates back to a time when people didn't know anything about physics and science was done by sitting on your butt, guessing and thinking.

> 3.3 The need of a standard
When you call something, for instance let's say "good", there has to be a standard upon which good is based.

This response of yours -so far- is sounding suspiciously like a copy of a William Lane Craig debate argument. Please note that all of his arguments have been successfully refuted - though not necessarily within one debate or only within debates. But regardless, I can easily address your arguments on my own.

Now then. Basic moral behavior has been shown to emerge naturally as a result of evolution. Yes, this is why theists hate evolution so much. It explains a lot of stuff that used to be attributed to God. Animals in the wild show moral behavior such as altruism, fairness, love, cooperation, justice and so forth. Even robot simulations, given only the most minimal initial instructions, develop "moral" behavior because that turns out to be a successful selection criteria for survival.

If you try to point out that humans display and think about much more complex moral situations than animals, I'll agree. But you know who invented those extensions of purely survival-oriented moral behavior? Humans did, not God. Humans look at the behaviors that promote survival and well-being in animals and humans and call it "good." They see behavior that hurts and kills animals and people and makes them suffer, and they call it "bad." Your five year old kid can grasp this concept - you insult your god when you claim this is so difficult it necessarily requires divine intervention. I recommend Peter Singer's book Practical Ethics, a thoughtful and thorough discussion of morals far more nuanced and acceptable to a modern society than the barbaric postulates of scripture. Rape a virgin, buy her as a wife for 50 shekels, indeed!

> 4.1 About the Origin of Life/Finely tuning a killer cosmos

> Anyway, for life to come together even by accident, you would need matter

Correct.

> now the universe is not infinite and even scientists know that.

I'm not sure that's certain, but it's probably irrelevant. Let's move on.

> that scientists say made the universe would need matter present.

Correct. We certainly observe a helluva lot of matter in the present-day universe (to the extent we can observe it).

> Where do you expect that matter to have come from?

An empty geometry and some very basic laws of physics (including quantum physics). This is very un-intuitive, which is why people restricted to Platonic thinking have trouble with it. But you know that matter and energy are equivalent, via E=mc^2 , right? Given the raw physics of the very early universe, matter could be created from energy and vice versa. OK, that still doesn't explain where the (matter+energy) came from. Here's the fun part: it turns out that the universe contains not just the conventional "positive" energy we're familiar with, but also negative energy. And it turns out that the sum of (matter + positive energy) on one hand and (negative energy) on the other are exactly equal and cancel out. In other words, and this is important, the creation of the universe incurred no net "cost" in matter or energy. This being the case, it becomes similarly plausible for for the entire universe to have spontaneously popped into existence just like those sub-atomic particles that cause the Casimir Effect. Stephen Hawking has explained this eloquently in his book The Grand Design but you may prefer Lawrence Krauss' engaging lecture A Universe From Nothing.

> I know for a fact that people are smarter than an explosion and even they have been unsuccessful in making organic life forms from scratch

Wrong again. It took them 15 years, but Craig Venter and his project recently succeeded in constructing the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell.

By way of interest, people making the kind of claims you do were similarly amazed when Friedrich Wöhler, in 1828, synthesized the first chemical compound, urea, that is otherwise only created by living beings. This achievement torpedoed the Vital Force theory dating back to Galen. Yet another job taken off God's hands.

> let alone have them survive the forming of a planet.

Now this is just dumb. First the planet formed, then it cooled down a bit, then life developed.

> Because of that, I doubt an explosion could do it either.

So you're right there: The explosion just created the planet and the raw materials. Life later arose on the planet.

> Chance doesn't make matter pop into existence.

Yes it does. The effect I was mentioning earlier is called quantum fluctuation.

> 4.2 The human brain

(skipping the comparison of man with god. I don't see it contributing anything. All of this postulating doesn't make God plausible in any way)

> 4.3 The Original Christian Cosmos

> 4.3.1. Maybe because we are after the fall, we have already lost that perfect original cosmos Paul imagined.

Wait, this contradicts your next point.

> 4.3.2 You have to give Paul some credit for trying. He didn't have any the information or technology we have today.

Thank you, this confirms my assertion that the Bible and its authors contain no divinely inspired knowledge. The Bible is a collection of writings by people who thought you could cleanse leprosy by killing a couple of pigeons.

Now, about that original cosmos: either Paul was too uneducated to conceive the cosmos as it really exists, or what he imagined is irrelevant. In any case, what you consider the "after loss" cosmos is trillions of times larger than Paul imagined; it would be silly to call this a loss.

The fact remains that the world as described in the Bible is a pitiful caricature of the world as it is known today. And Carrier's main point remains that our cosmos is incredibly hostile to life; and if man were indeed God's favorite creation, the immensity of the cosmos would be a complete waste if it only served as a backdrop for our tiny little planet.

I’m no philosopher, and wouldn’t be able to articulate it as well as others have. If you truly care, there is a wide variety of literature on the subject.

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/kenan-malik-on-morality-without-god/

http://ebooks.bharathuniv.ac.in/gdlc1/gdlc4/Arts_and_Science_Books/arts/philosophy/Books/Elements%20of%20Moral%20Philosophy.pdf

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Morality-Introduction-Ethics-Bernard-Williams/dp/0521457297

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/052143971X/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_yewmAbY8W8TGR

>A newborn Infant can in no real sense be considered a person. Not only would a painless death not bother them, their brain would never have developed to the point that they ever would have known they were alive. It's the same reason I have no problem eating beef.

If you want a thourough philosophical argument, I recomend:
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/052143971X

>Right before the delivery, the only difference between the baby before, and the baby after, is whether it is inside or outside of mom.

Exactly, and as Peter Singer noted in Practical Ethics this is an appropriate consideration for establishing the morality of euthanizing severely disabled infants:

>Yet in discussing abortion, we saw that birth does not mark a morally significant dividing line. I cannot see how one could defend the view that fetuses may be 'replaced' before birth, but newborn infants may not be. Nor is there any other point, such as viability, that does a better job of dividing the fetus from the infant. Self-consciousness, which could provide a basis for holding that it is wrong to kill one being and replace it with another is not to be found in either the fetus or the newborn infant. Neither the fetus nor the newborn infant is an individual capable of regarding itself as a distinct entity with a life of its own to lead, and it only for newborn infants, or for still earlier stages of human life, that replaceability should be considered to be an ethically acceptable option. [page 188]

I don't agree with all of Singer's analyses (in the book), but he makes an excellent case that a truly moral stance toward killing requires more than identifying the organism's species or stage of life. And, that membership in the species homo sapien does not, in and of itself, denote a privileged status. Rather than discussing "abortion" maybe we should be discussing what it means to be human and whether that definition should be solely based on the biological origin of an organism.

Just some food for thought.... And, Singer does make one think, to consider, to stop and reflect. The entire book is worth reading, if only for this reason.

Singer addresses this in his book Practical Ethics. First, most mammals and some birds are not only sentient as well as self-aware. Thus, they can have "goals" for the future (for example, some mammals have life-long partners, and killing them would basically frustrate their preference of always being with them), and thus it becomes wrong to take those from them.

But fishes and bugs are not self-aware, and so as long as we keep the overall "quantity" of happiness, it is acceptable. That means tough, that for each being killed, we need a new one to appear.

He wrote a great (and controversial) book on utilitarian approaches to ethics:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/052143971X

His utilitarianism is based on his personal, pragmatic, double-entry-bookkeeping values for 'good'. Even Mill had doubts, but not Singer.

Yet: “an ethical judgement that is no good in practice must suffer from a theoretical defect as well, for the whole point of ethical judgement is to guide practice.” (Singer, Practical Ethics, 1993) and he often admits he fails in his own silly standards yet doesn't admit his edifice of morality is fundamentally flawed.

I confess I prefer American pragmatism and some elements of relativism, but still.