If God told you to kill a baby, would that be self-evidently immoral?

kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.

God,
1 Samuel 15:3

If God told you to kill a baby, would that be self-evidently moral or immoral?

Moral of the story. Self-evident morality is not something IDists should be wasting print on. It doesn’t serve the Intelligent Design community.

26 thoughts on “If God told you to kill a baby, would that be self-evidently immoral?

  1. I wasn’t under the impression that IDers spend much time on self-evident morality. I know Arrington talks about self-evident truths as a weapon against those that disagree with him

  2. I know at least on online correspondent who hears god talking. He has no other cognitive quirks, and he believes it is a brain malfunction not entirely unlike epilepsy. But the voices do not go away with disbelief.

    People who have had limbs amputated sometimes experience phantom pain or other sensations. The late Oliver Sacks spent a lifetime working with people who had odd perceptions and sensations.

    So if god tells you something, who or what is doing the speaking?

  3. Moral of the story. Self-evident morality is not something IDists should be wasting print on. It doesn’t serve the Intelligent Design community.

    The man bought the blog outright, didn’t he? I assume it’s his platform to do with as he pleases; as long as he pays News for a dribble of facially ID-related headlines, he can justify calling it an ID blog.

  4. Also, if I were to guess (and I’m about to), BA’s answer would be that it is an insane question because God would never order that in the modern day. “What about when it happened in the Bible” would be rejected as a stupid question that he already answered before anyway.

    KF’s answer would be to explode. Literally explode, with indignation but also fury.

  5. If God says kill then its moral to kill and immoral not to.
    Its about justice. All humans are executed since the fall. God’s justice demands our execution. We are worst then murderers.
    So in special cases on earth people were too evil and/or rather their evil nullified Gods extra step of love in not killing us.
    God could of done the killing but he is making a point/ We must agree its just also.
    People kill each other almost always without just cause.

  6. BA’s answer would be that it is an insane question because God would never order that in the modern day

    The point being there was at least one time in history, if one hypothetically assumes the Judeo-Christian God, that morality wasn’t self-evident. If there was time it was not self-evident, but depended on God for revelation, then maybe morality was never self-evident. Hence, morality is neither self-evident nor usually apparent.

    But why conflate such irrelevant ill-considered ideas with an ID blog? Pointless.

    I have been collecting a list of arguments IDists should not use to defend ID. “Self Evident Truths” would be one of them.

    Last but not least, the passage I provided shows the notion of “self evident morality” is not exactly in line with the God of the Bible.

  7. Oh, I agree with your points, Sal. I’m simply saying you won’t get an in-depth conversation on them out of people who are confusing faith and logic; prying those two apart is a threat to one’s identity, which nettles people and gets them defensive.

  8. Colin,

    BA suspended my posting privileges when I wouldn’t agree with the exact wording of how I should state the law of non-contradiction.

    Here is an example:

    Comment #206:

    scordova is in moderation until he answers the question posed at 198. See the policy announced here:

    http://www.uncommondescent.com/atheism/understanding-self-evidence-with-a-bit-of-help-from-aquinas/#comment-482283

    Arrington ignored the fact that even before he posed the question, I was on record as stating a position that answered his question. So that was a false insinuation that is easily verified by looking at something I wrote earlier in the thread.

    So I accept strong form of LNC always,

    http://www.uncommondescent.com/atheism/understanding-self-evidence-with-a-bit-of-help-from-aquinas/#comment-482246

    But I didn’t recite the LNC creed with the sort of wording that he and StephenB wanted. StephenB wanted me to word it with in the language of his philosophical BS, not anything like the thousands of pages of formal logic that I had to read through when studying the formal proofs of math and physics.

    You can see the rest of that thread was a bullying session by people less qualified than I to talk about matters of formal logic in applications of math and physics (and that’s not saying much since I know squat about math and physics relative to others in my academic circles).

    I let the conflict go for a season while I was still at UD, but then realized, I didn’t need to deal with garbage. How many visits to UD are made by others except the few regulars?

    When I had access to the UD statistics, the “visit” meter just kept going up whenever I visited the same essay. Hence if there are 100 comments at UD and it registers 1000 visits, it is reasonable to estimate there were only 10 unique visitors. Toward the end I only posted there as a personal diary of my exploration of ID, and the blogs were just an extension of my thought process, not trying to make a splash on the net.

    I’ve addressed live audiences in the hundreds, have been or radio and National TV. I didn’t need to be bullied into reciting creeds just to talk to the same 10 IDists every day. I have my own website and my own in-person outreaches.

    At this point, I wouldn’t recommend UD to the ID students I teach (which include graduate and undergrad science students). It’s devolved as a meaning source of learning quality ID arguments.

    I wouldn’t want any ID student, especially one that is just exploring, to be subject to the Inquisitions and bullying that are now going on there — “agree with what is said, recite the creed the way it is stated, otherwise you’re gobsmackingly stupid.”

    My websites are by invitation only. I have no problem with dis-inviting someone from a website, and I have no problem with BA dis-inviting someone from UD. But what one says, that’s another story, and I have a right to call it garbage. I wouldn’t want students of ID to be exposed to the sort of garbage I was subject to over at UD.

    Barry let posters call me all sorts of demeaning things. Once when I responded and called someone out for his stalking behavior, Barry threatened to suspend my posting privileges again for me “spewing venom”. Yet if someone did the same to Barry, they’d be banned, but he wouldn’t afford the same protection to a UD author like myself.

    Advice to ID students, don’t go to UD anymore to learn ID except maybe posts from people like Cornelius Hunter, VJTorley or some latest news. I certainly wouldn’t go there to learn ID from KairorsFocus. Yikes!

    Go to Don Johnson’s website: ProgrammingOfLife.com.

  9. stcordova: It’s devolved as a meaning source of learning quality ID arguments.

    Oh? And pray tell where is the current best place to go for for ID arguments if not UD?

  10. OMagain,

    Evolutionnews and Views, Cornelius Hunter’s blog, TheMysteryOfLifesOrigin.org, and my personal favorite, ProgrammingOfLife.com. I probably left a few out.

    But some of the ID discussion at TSZ ain’t too shabby either, imho.

  11. OMagain: Oh? And pray tell where is the current best place to go for for ID arguments if not UD?

    I understand the Time cube is out of order. It does leave a vacuum.

  12. Sal,

    Well, that’s the thing about building walls. When you’re really invested in it, you’ve got to make some calls about who belongs on the inside and who belongs on the outside. And when someone doesn’t want to fit your criteria for coming inside, you have to take some steps to clearly, publicly define them as an outsider. The verbal abuse is a feature, not a bug–it defines who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside.

  13. Colin,

    Yes, which is also why it is so ironic that the film “Expelled” played so fiercely on the ‘wall’ metaphor. IDists have really taken the sociology of science insider vs. outsider conversation for a twirl with their two-tongued ‘Design Revolution!’ proselytising narrative. The top dawgs at Discovery Institute sure don’t seem to like it when someone points this out. stcordova is simply wrong if he thinks it is only UD that does this; it is rampant throughout the IDM.

  14. Fortunately this tendency is nonexistent among believers, theists, philosophers and other professional thinking people.

  15. To be fair to Sal, I’d be surprised if he thinks it’s just UD. And frankly I think we all do it. The difference is not who does and who doesn’t build walls, it’s why they do it, whether they’re aware they’re doing it, and whether they’re aware of the true cost.

    (ETA: What Petrushka said, only less pithy.)

  16. “To be fair to Sal, I’d be surprised if he thinks it’s just UD.” – Colin

    Yes, let’s be fair to Sal. Perhaps he will say which other IDist organisations he would distinguish as similar to UD in their ‘wall building.’

    “And frankly I think we all do it.” – Colin

    Yes, partially agreed. Though I think the degree of fierceness differs. If you’ve seen the film ‘Expelled’, Colin, I wonder if you think their portrayal of that ‘wall’ was ‘fierce’ or something else.

    The sad part of the story, which Sal is not necessarily guilty of himself (he actually seems to have crossed a few boundaries recently, e.g. “some of the ID discussion at TSZ ain’t too shabby either”, which means anti-ID discussion, not pro-ID), is that many if not most IDists (especially the few who are scientists or scholars) are actually ‘self-expelled.’ That is, they’ve voluntarily pushed themselves out of the mainstream with their ‘radical’ (shouts of ‘Revolution!’) views and insisting on IDT’s strict scientificity, even while their fellow theists have responsibly cautioned them for going too far. Not only is IDT an anti-atheism ideology (based on its implicationism), but the IDM has also become isolated by world-leading science and religion organisations.

    “Self-evident morality is not something IDists should be wasting print on. It doesn’t serve the Intelligent Design community.” – stcordova

    I agree with Sal on this. And he’s properly capitalised ‘Intelligent Design’ not just as a ‘community’, but as a neo-creationist ideology itself.

  17. Yes, partially agreed. Though I think the degree of fierceness differs. If you’ve seen the film ‘Expelled’, Colin, I wonder if you think their portrayal of that ‘wall’ was ‘fierce’ or something else.

    I haven’t, actually. Do you recommend it?

  18. It depends on your interests. As a sociologist of the IDM, it was a must watch for me. Many IDists see/believe there is a ‘conspiracy’ against them in the Academy. I’ve come to call this ‘Expelled Syndrome’ as Discovery Institute as leaders actually tell young people to use pseudonyms and disguise themselves when promoting IDism in public. For the DI, there is a conspiracy of ‘(neo)Darwinists in contemporary academia and culture such that now folks like the journalist Denyse O’Leary at UD have even used the term ‘Christian Darwinists’ for people who are supposed to be just like atheists in their rejection of IDism.

    ‘Expelled’ is an academic conspiracy story with high production cost that actually made money at the box office. One simply must include the term ‘propaganda’ when speaking about ‘Expelled.’ It’s available in full on youtube.

  19. But, Gregory, you’ve claimed there is a conspiracy against you here, too. You’re like one lone ember of Abrahamic truth, adrift in an unfriendly internet universe.

  20. Salvador, you’re making a fool of yourself. You may be great as an engineer, but you suck as a philosopher. There is absolutely nothing in what you say from which it follows that moral truths are not self-evident.

    If you are going to be the anti-ID ID’ist do stick to what you know best. Perhaps another post on how young the earth is. Or how life itself is only a few thousand years old.

    You don’t gain an once of credibility with the crowd here at TSZ by making supposedly anti-ID posts while holding to such obviously false ideas about the age of the earth and of life on the earth. Go study geology. Or philosophy.

  21. Mung: while holding to such obviously false ideas about the age of the earth and of life on the earth

    Tell me again how people can be thrown into a metaphorical lake of fire.

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