The only way I’ve found is to attack the idea of omnipotence on the basis of logic. If the questioner is allowed to insist I “consider the possibility of a universe where logic isn’t valid,” I can only dismiss his question as nonsense.
jdgalt
Karma: 56
I don’t like that practice. “I am an atheist” is not a good proxy for “I am a Communist.”
I wasn’t and still am not sure what “Virtue Ethics” is supposed to mean. My personal ethics are based on the libertarian “non-aggression principle,” in other words, don’t violate the rights of other persons, and beyond that, do whatever you want. (Which does not mean I don’t see a point to charity—I just see charity as one of many things you might do with your money or time because it makes you happy. In my experience, enough people feel that way that it’s rare for anyone to starve or freeze unless he behaves so badly that he doesn’t deserve to be helped.)
Apologies if this violates a politics ban, but I can’t really answer an ethics question without going there.
As far as the objective “existence” of morals: it’s a meaningless idea. Even if there is just one God, his opinion doesn’t automatically become The Truth any more than yours or mine does.
Ultimately, morals/ethics are a matter of taste and nothing more. But they’re a unique exception to the old saw “there’s no accounting for taste” because your moral code determines whether you can be trusted (to do any particular thing someone else expects of you, a question that of course depends on who and what it is).
It’s a logical consequence of the premises. The instant there’s a split, all branches except the one you’re in become totally and permanently unreachable by any means whatever. If they did not, the conservation laws would be violated.
If all other interpretations made testable predictions, it wouldn’t be enough unless you could somehow eliminate any possibility that didn’t make the list because nobody’s thought of it yet. It’s like the fallacy in Pascal’s Wager: all possible religions belong in the hat.
I took the survey.
I didn’t like it because some of the questions offered too narrow a range of answers for my taste. Example: I consider the “many worlds” hypothesis to be objectively meaningless (because there’s no possible experiment that can test it). The same goes for “this universe is a simulation.”
As for the “singularity”, I see it as nearly meaningless too. Every definition of it I’ve seen amounts to a horizon, beyond which the future (or some aspects of it) will be unimaginable—but from how far past? Like a physical horizon, if such a “limit of vision” exists it must recede as you approach it. Even a cliff can be looked over.
“Out of wedlock marriage” would be a neat trick. :-)