re after years can we say that christian morality is in r n hfj horus ap mchp sni de frank d s uucp writes deletia in case anybody hadn t noticed frank and i are debating objective morality and seemingly hitting semantics secondly how can i refute your definition i can only point up its logical implications and say that they seem to contradict the usage of the word objective in other areas indeed by your definition an objective x is an oxymoron for all x i have no quibble with that belief other than that it is useless and that objective is a perfectly good word it may be that being a non native english speaker i ve misunderstood your usage of objective and tried to debate something you don t assert my apologies i m at a loss to imagine what you really do mean though how many ages can the universe have and still be internally self consistent i d be amazed if it was more than one how many different moral systems can different members of society have indeed single individuals in some cases and humanity still stick together begging the question people can have many opinions about the age of the universe and humanity can still stick together you are saying that the universe has a real age independent of my beliefs about it why wrong point the age of the universe has no direct effect on humanity s sticking power in the way the moral system of a society can have i m saying the universe has a real age because i see evidence for it cosmology astronomy and so on i say this age is independent of people s opinions of it because i know different people have a lot of different opinions in the matter yet empirical tests consistently seem to give roughly the same results the age of the universe like most scientific facts can be emirically verified through means that ll give the same result no matter who performs the testing albeit there are error bars that may be on the largish side this assumes that the universe has a real age or any kind of reality which doesn t depend on what we think i can t see how it does that put a creationist to the task of performing the tests and calculations see to it s he makes no blatant errors in measuring or calculating and the result of the test will be the same why should an extreme biblical creationist give a rat s ass about the means of which you speak because logically consistent empirical tests contradict their opinion if those tests were just my opinion then their own tests which would then be their opinion would contradict mine even if we conducted said tests in identical manner no they don t which i take as showing these tests have some validity beyond our opinion of them i ve heard of no way to verify morality in a consistent way much less compute the errors of the measurement care to enlighten me the same is true of pain but painkillers exist and can be predicted to work with some accuracy better than a random guess map the activity of nerves and neural activity if you mean physical pain you have a sharp point i ll give you that but you still haven t given me a way to quantify morality i wrote elsewhere that morality should be hypotheses about observed value we agree hypotheses however can change i hold that there is no ultimate hypothesis of morality towards which these changes could gravitate but that they could be changed in any way imaginable producing different results suitable for different tasks or purposes if a moral system makes a prediction it will be better if that can be tested better and worse are almost always defined in the context of a moral system your prediction will always be correct within that moral system what you need now is an objective definition of good and bad i wish you luck people s ideas about the age of object x are not objective you can have any idea you like and i can t stop you universae and their ages is another ballgame they are what they are and if you dislike some detail of them that s a problem with your opinion of them sure assume an objective reality and you get statements like this isn t that what you re doing when assuming an objectively real morality besides what exactly is provably wrong with my statement i claim that morality is an opinion of ours and as such subjective and individual if i m wrong then some more or less objectively real thing exists which you label objective morality can you back up this positive claim of existence can you back up your positive claim above no that s because it s an assumption i make the same assumption about values on the basis that there is no logical difference between the two and the empirical basis of the two is precisely the same claiming there is no objective morality is suddenly a positive claim besides i think i can lend some credence to my claim ponder different individuals both fully functional as human beings and members of society but yet with wildly different moral codes if morality was objective at least one should be way off base but yet hir incorrect morality seems to function fine how come as for producing these individuals it might be easiest to pick them from different societies say an islamic one and some polynesian matrilineal system for example if such still exist deletia testing for footballs on desks now take a look at morality see anything if so please inform me which way to look and why to look that particular way as opposed to some other get my drift no just look are you claiming never to know what good means one thing is good under some circumstances because we wish to achieve some goal for some reason other times we wish to do something else and that thing is no longer so clearly good at all some things are hard to make good because we d seldom if ever wish to achieve the sort of goal mass murder would lead one into still the aztecs were doing fine until the spaniards wiped them out i almost always know what good means sometimes i even know why i never claim this good is thereby fixed in stone immutable that s a simple matter of proving the track record of the scientific method i think it s great and should be applied to values i may be completely wrong but that s what i conclude as a result of quite an amount of thought yes me too and i ve tried a thing or two down that line it doesn t look good for objective values to me at all disclaimer it s great to be young and insane
