It’s only coherent if you don’t expect it to solve the problem (rather than hide it from your view). It’s only attractive if you expect God to fulfill your own terminal values. You should be able to see contrary hypotheses, since you say one of them is close to being true (or at least more likely).
ETA: Actually, the view discussed in the parent could probably be made coherent, but not sound for the true natural numbers, at least not without straightforwardly defining the word “morality” to mean something else which I don’t care about. You could insist that there exists a number encoding a proof that (for example) all attempts at utility functions other than God’s contain contradictions, or otherwise imply God’s values. This would be a lie—but if you’re careful not to accept anything which could prove the lie (by showing certain truths about natural numbers, ‘real’ numbers, and the linked theorem), it would have a “non-standard model” containing a non-standard object encoding a “proof”.
Yes, the Alien God metaphor is a good one, it is very close to the Heideggerian “we are thrown into the world and must cope somehow, cannot really expect elegant solutions” I subscribe to.
I am not at all sure it is a given that people have, just happen to have terminal values. I think you are assuming too much here, perhaps, a very autonomous upbringing where you are expected to form opinions instead of letting your behavior guided by the prevailing opinion without affirming or denying it.
For example some old guy used to go to church and then stopped it because there was some kind of an altercation. At no point he decided whether he is theist or atheist, to him the question felt like taking a position about the many-words interpretation in quantum physics: something far above his “pay grade”, he wanted to leave the question to experts, he never had belief and never had unbelief. He did not think he is entitled to either of them. Rather he did the church-going as a social ritual and then stopped it when there were certain social problems. (I don’t remember the details, it was something about him being a teetotaller as he disliked drunken fist-fights and somehow the churchiest guys were the drunkiest and then it did not go down well.)
I don’t really understand the part about natural numbers.
It’s only coherent if you don’t expect it to solve the problem (rather than hide it from your view). It’s only attractive if you expect God to fulfill your own terminal values. You should be able to see contrary hypotheses, since you say one of them is close to being true (or at least more likely).
ETA: Actually, the view discussed in the parent could probably be made coherent, but not sound for the true natural numbers, at least not without straightforwardly defining the word “morality” to mean something else which I don’t care about. You could insist that there exists a number encoding a proof that (for example) all attempts at utility functions other than God’s contain contradictions, or otherwise imply God’s values. This would be a lie—but if you’re careful not to accept anything which could prove the lie (by showing certain truths about natural numbers, ‘real’ numbers, and the linked theorem), it would have a “non-standard model” containing a non-standard object encoding a “proof”.
Yes, the Alien God metaphor is a good one, it is very close to the Heideggerian “we are thrown into the world and must cope somehow, cannot really expect elegant solutions” I subscribe to.
I am not at all sure it is a given that people have, just happen to have terminal values. I think you are assuming too much here, perhaps, a very autonomous upbringing where you are expected to form opinions instead of letting your behavior guided by the prevailing opinion without affirming or denying it.
For example some old guy used to go to church and then stopped it because there was some kind of an altercation. At no point he decided whether he is theist or atheist, to him the question felt like taking a position about the many-words interpretation in quantum physics: something far above his “pay grade”, he wanted to leave the question to experts, he never had belief and never had unbelief. He did not think he is entitled to either of them. Rather he did the church-going as a social ritual and then stopped it when there were certain social problems. (I don’t remember the details, it was something about him being a teetotaller as he disliked drunken fist-fights and somehow the churchiest guys were the drunkiest and then it did not go down well.)
I don’t really understand the part about natural numbers.