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The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

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Want your voice to be heard? Submit a letter to the editor, send us an op-ed pitch or check out our open positions for the chance to be published by the Daily Utah Chronicle.
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Re: Larry Christensen’s letter to editor

By [email protected]

Objective morality can be logically justified. But “objective” morality which is religiously based is logically fallacious. Objective morality is morality that is based on moral facts. Those facts are unchanging, they cannot be swayed by majority opinions etc. When morality is based upon God it becomes problematic. Is something good because God commands it? What if God commanded that murdering and raping was our moral duty. Would murdering and raping suddenly become morally good? Whether or not God would command them is irrelevant, what is relevant is that if he commanded them, it would not make them good. What if God commanded things because they were good. This would mean that they were good independent of God. It would also render God a worthless intermediary because we would not need him to know if something was good or bad. What if God was a standard of good that we could judge acts against? But then goodness would have no meaning apart from its existence in God. We would need independent knowledge of good before we could use God as its standard. We would have to pick out God’s goodness from among his other qualities. If we didn’t know what goodness was how could we pick it out from his other qualities? Moral goodness is either independent of God or it originates from God. If goodness originates from God, it is a form of subjective moral imperialism. If it is independent of God, his will, or approval, then it cannot originate from God.Objective morality could logically exist independent of God. It could be rationally justified through the theory of the Ideal Observer but that is a whole other topic.Christensen states, “This is a logical fallacy that one cannot prove something to be true does not imply it to be false.” This is neglecting that it also doesn’t make it true. The burden of proof, the responsibility to show evidence for some claim, falls upon the person who asserts the claim. I believe that a cute, invisible, pink monkey follows me everywhere I go. No one could absolutely prove it doesn’t exist because its invisible, does that mean that the monkey exists? I hope so, I like monkeys, but the monkey probably doesn’t exist.People are not stupid for believing in things. Beliefs like the existence of God are held on grounds of faith, not reason. People don’t believe in God because they found the cosmological argument convincing, they believe in God because of faith or emotion. Logically, that belief in God cannot hold up to critical scrutiny, to persist it must remain in the sphere of faith. Faith cannot be prove anything. That is not anti-Christian bigotry, but faith, by its nature, is anti-reason. Joe BellJunior, Sociology and Political Science

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