Agreed but appeal to nature is a fallacy. Why don't you show pictures of animals eating their progeny? Most of the time nature is vicious and cruel, not cuddly.
We're not beasts after all. But yes, that lady on the picture is an obvious psycho. You can see the demon peeking through her peepers.
And yet the species that eat their progeny are in the minority and even among those species I think it's normally only done in somewhat extreme or unusual circumstances. Not everything in nature is good, but there are definitely general rules that nature follows and those are usually a good guide which also give us a window into the mind of the creator. The creator has also given us a conscience, rationality and intuitive common sense by which to discern what is right.
The point is we can't induce moral principles by observing nature. This is the naturalist fallacy aka the is/ought problem of Hume. I can look at nature through a darwinian will to power worldview or a Christian worldview and arrive at completely different conclusions.
The creator has also given us a conscience, rationality and intuitive common sense by which to discern what is right.
All of those are subject to interpretation though. Yes, we have the moral law on our hearts but we're also fallen, weak minded, sinful, susceptible to delusion and deception, etc. We can only discern what's right with God's help and by following His commandments.
Hume's is/ought problem assumes that things are the way they are for no reason. If instead you assume things are the way they are for a reason (which is intuitively obvious) then the way things are can potentially tell you about what ought to be (although we haven't defined what "ought" means). Specifically, if you assume that things were created by intelligent design for some purpose (that everything happened by chance for no reason is literally retarded, putting deductive logic and epistemology aside because then you literally can't prove anything) then it makes sense that we might be able to discern some of the purpose and principles behind the design, and we might decide to call things in line with those principles and ultimate purpose how things "ought" to be.
Is it subject to interpretation? Yes. Does that mean any interpretation is legitimate and there are no right or wrong answers? No. It's like trying to estimate the mean of a population and other characteristics of it from a sample. There are correct answers even if we don't know what they are, and there are rational methods which will give us a decent estimate of the correct answer from what we can observe. These methods are not irrational and arbitrary, which is why virtually every culture in history (that I've heard of) has inferred the existence of a creator(s) despite not directly observing one (until rationalism came along).
Man has a natural ability to interpret nature even if it's not always correct. Neither is the conscience always correct, nor our intuitions, nor is nature always good. Hardly anything is always correct or known for certain, which is why man has an ability to work with fuzzy logic and why it was wrong to try to prove everything deductively from first principles. It would be nice if things were that easy, but God apparently doesn't want to make it too easy and wants us to figure stuff out the hard way, which would explain why he keeps himself hidden and doesn't interact with us directly. The way God guides us is through life and nature that he has designed, and these teach us to learn and develop ourselves so we can overcome challenges, not expect someone or something else to have all the answers and always be there to rescue us.
Yes, Hume assumes a skeptical position and his problem is critique of naive empiricism (along with his problem of induction which is a classic defeater for empiricism). He demonstrates that observation of what is alone can't tell you what is good, preferable, desirable, etc. There is an epistemological gap between knowledge of how things are and how they should be. So everyone has to appeal to some other paradigm that informs morality. The problem is, atheists and materialists can't justify the existence of a moral standard because their paradigm only accepts empirical observation and sense data. Their position always reduces to moral relativism where nothing is inherently good or bad, but everything is a matter of personal preference.
So for moral realists, the question ultimately is what is the standard for morality and how do we have knowledge of it. I'd argue only the Orthodox Christian worldview can give a coherent, consistent and holistic worldview that can justify and answer those questions. In essence:
metaphysics: God is the ultimate good and we're created in His image with free will that allows us to choose the good.
epistemology: we know what's moral through divine revelation and through our communion with God in His Church (participation in the divine energies).
The reason why our intuition and reason alone is insufficient to have that knowledge is our fallen nature which inclines our free will away from God, thus being deceived into choosing evil/sin.
Agreed but appeal to nature is a fallacy. Why don't you show pictures of animals eating their progeny? Most of the time nature is vicious and cruel, not cuddly.
We're not beasts after all. But yes, that lady on the picture is an obvious psycho. You can see the demon peeking through her peepers.
And yet the species that eat their progeny are in the minority and even among those species I think it's normally only done in somewhat extreme or unusual circumstances. Not everything in nature is good, but there are definitely general rules that nature follows and those are usually a good guide which also give us a window into the mind of the creator. The creator has also given us a conscience, rationality and intuitive common sense by which to discern what is right.
The point is we can't induce moral principles by observing nature. This is the naturalist fallacy aka the is/ought problem of Hume. I can look at nature through a darwinian will to power worldview or a Christian worldview and arrive at completely different conclusions.
All of those are subject to interpretation though. Yes, we have the moral law on our hearts but we're also fallen, weak minded, sinful, susceptible to delusion and deception, etc. We can only discern what's right with God's help and by following His commandments.
Hume's is/ought problem assumes that things are the way they are for no reason. If instead you assume things are the way they are for a reason (which is intuitively obvious) then the way things are can potentially tell you about what ought to be (although we haven't defined what "ought" means). Specifically, if you assume that things were created by intelligent design for some purpose (that everything happened by chance for no reason is literally retarded, putting deductive logic and epistemology aside because then you literally can't prove anything) then it makes sense that we might be able to discern some of the purpose and principles behind the design, and we might decide to call things in line with those principles and ultimate purpose how things "ought" to be.
Is it subject to interpretation? Yes. Does that mean any interpretation is legitimate and there are no right or wrong answers? No. It's like trying to estimate the mean of a population and other characteristics of it from a sample. There are correct answers even if we don't know what they are, and there are rational methods which will give us a decent estimate of the correct answer from what we can observe. These methods are not irrational and arbitrary, which is why virtually every culture in history (that I've heard of) has inferred the existence of a creator(s) despite not directly observing one (until rationalism came along).
Man has a natural ability to interpret nature even if it's not always correct. Neither is the conscience always correct, nor our intuitions, nor is nature always good. Hardly anything is always correct or known for certain, which is why man has an ability to work with fuzzy logic and why it was wrong to try to prove everything deductively from first principles. It would be nice if things were that easy, but God apparently doesn't want to make it too easy and wants us to figure stuff out the hard way, which would explain why he keeps himself hidden and doesn't interact with us directly. The way God guides us is through life and nature that he has designed, and these teach us to learn and develop ourselves so we can overcome challenges, not expect someone or something else to have all the answers and always be there to rescue us.
Yes, Hume assumes a skeptical position and his problem is critique of naive empiricism (along with his problem of induction which is a classic defeater for empiricism). He demonstrates that observation of what is alone can't tell you what is good, preferable, desirable, etc. There is an epistemological gap between knowledge of how things are and how they should be. So everyone has to appeal to some other paradigm that informs morality. The problem is, atheists and materialists can't justify the existence of a moral standard because their paradigm only accepts empirical observation and sense data. Their position always reduces to moral relativism where nothing is inherently good or bad, but everything is a matter of personal preference.
So for moral realists, the question ultimately is what is the standard for morality and how do we have knowledge of it. I'd argue only the Orthodox Christian worldview can give a coherent, consistent and holistic worldview that can justify and answer those questions. In essence:
The reason why our intuition and reason alone is insufficient to have that knowledge is our fallen nature which inclines our free will away from God, thus being deceived into choosing evil/sin.