Re: nature, pleasing rhetoric and anthropological fact

My overall impression of your reply is that there is an awful lot of mere assertion. This could go on forever, but I shall just make a few brief observations. “not that we don't experience evil as real … but that what we rightly experience as evil doesn't properly belong to the world in the way that love and goodness and peace do.” If evil is not real I don't see how we can “rightly” experience it as real. If you shift your ground and say that evil, though real, doesn't “properly belong” in the world, then what does that mean? That evil should not be in the world? Certainly, but it is still there nevertheless. You can call it a “failure”, a “wound”, whatever, you can hurl every insult you can think of at it, but if it were not there then there would be nothing for you to get worked up about. Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there!­ He wasn't there again today, I wish, I wish he'd go away. At most, the assertion that evil is not real amounts to an announcement that you will henceforth refuse to use the word “real” for anything evil, but will reserve that august word only for what is good. Fine, but then we will still require some other word to assert the existence of evil things. Or do you deny that evil does exist in the world? What would you call 70,000 dead Palestinians? Nothing is accomplished by this wordplay; it does no useful philosophical work. “It is not that a standard of goodness can exist independently of God, but rather that nothing at all conceivably exists independently of God. Goodness is of the very nature of God” This sort of verbal juggling does not get you off the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma. If the standard of goodness is not independent of the nature of God then “Goodness is of the nature of God” is equivalent to “the nature of God is the nature of God”, which is not an informative proposition. And, I'm sorry, but there is no suggestion in any of Plato's dialogues that he identified goodness with God. In the Timaeus, the demiurge is good, but is not identified with the form of the good. Plato was too good a logician for such elementary logical errors. “I utterly reject Hume: yes is and ought are totally, inextricably, self-evidently related. … I am not sure quite why you require me to bridge a gulf of which I deny the very existence.” Because there is a logical distinction between saying that some state of affairs obtains and saying that it ought to obtain. One can only derive an ethical conclusion from a factual statement by means of a concealed ethical premise. If you think you can derive an “ought” from an “is” without an ethical premise, then give me an example. Searle tried it once (in his 1964 paper “How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'”) but most philosophers think the attempt was unsuccessful, despite its ingenuity. “Nor do I think, as you suppose, that without religious insight "humans would be rationally compelled to engage in a life of murder and rapine," though indeed without "religion" (broadly construed!) there is certainly nothing that could possibly prevent unregenerate humankind from this.” There is nothing that “prevents” evil behaviour anyway. The question is whether in the absence of God it would be irrational to be genuinely altruistic and trustworthy (as opposed to just feigning trustworthiness for personal gain). You seem to imply that this would indeed be the case, but you have furnished no justification for this proposition whatever, and I can see no justification for it. If morality were not a dimension of human behaviour arising from our need for social cooperation, then we should not even have a concept of morality at all, and we would not have a functioning society. Social cooperation depends on trust, which is precisely why we feel indignant when people violate that trust. My objection to scammers swindling old ladies out of their savings has nothing whatever to do with theological propositions. So I really don't think that you've shown that ethics has an indispensible grounding in the supernatural. Nor do I see that the only alternative to Christian morality is Nietzschean ethics, as you seem to imply.