Here are the interesting parts of a conversation about the sufficiency of Natural Law theory apart from the Christian God:

Jimmy Stephens:

This is going to mean that the powers, the goals, or some relation between the two is intrinsically good, if this is to avoid irreducible normativity.

In virtue of being created, nothing in creation has purpose underived.

To be created, is to be given purpose.

Xico:

A hammer is an artifact. It’s something you experience as meaningful, but the meaning is only related to your use for the hammer. Hammer are distinct from us in that hammers are like 4 different things thrown together with no irreducible powers that are different from like a chunk of iron and a rubber hilt sitting next to each other. Humans have growth, nutrition, reproduction, sensation, intellection, and will, none of which are reducible to other powers.

Jimmy Stephens:

Let’s build on the hammer comment.

The universe has meaning, but only related to God’s use for it.

So it has no intrinsic purpose in the sense defined above

We can say it has intrinsic purpose if we just mean that the natures of creation/created things include God given purpose. So things are intrinsically purposeful in that God makes them purposeful in and of themselves.

We’re going to run into an Ecclesiastes problem fast.

How do we know what God’s use for the universe is?

How do we acquire knowledge of the Divine’s purpose?

Or if you like:

God has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom the work that God has done from beginning to end.

Anyway, this NLT is going to devolve.

We’re going to see that you can’t know the purpose without special revelation.

But then we’re going to see that purpose per se is not the sufficient condition of good.

– from Scripture, I mean

Purpose is a necessary condition and constitutive component of good.

It is not the end-all-be-all of morality.

Hound of  Heaven:

It’s only in knowing God’s intentions for something we have access to it’s purpose.
The purposes things have are the origin in the powers a thing has. When I look at a pencil and think “it’s for writing”, the purpose is in my head. For actual things though that have their own powers, it’s found in their abilities that aren’t reduced to each other (nutrition, growth, reproduction, sensation, knowing, and loving among other things). All the teloi a person has are found in these places.
Now, if you know these powers, you do know God’s purpose for an object. However, it sounds like you’re saying people need revelation for that. Not sure why I’d accept that if it is what you’re saying. If it isn’t, I guess there probably isn’t much to argue about.

some other way it can be used
Yeah, just the normal use. When I have a good pencil, I have a pencil which is good for writing. When I have a good car, I have a car which is good for transportation. The meaning of the term is bound up in the goal you have. Things are good relative to having a goal. My personal definition is “The fulfillment of a practical intention”, but “being considered as an end” works as well. It’s just completing a goal. Bad then is just failing to fulfill a practical intention. Evil is a species of bad, so it’s a species of failing to fulfill a practical intention. Unless you think failure to fulfill a practical intention is a substance of some kind, this fits in nicely with privation theory

Jimmy Stephens:

There is no forthcoming solution to the guillotine dilemma in this appeal to powers. Putting aside the issue that a pencil has intrinsic causal powers and the issue that the causal powers of reproduction and nutrition (one example) do not appear mutually exclusive, the issue remains that the act of reproducing or the power to do so does not entail one is purposed to do so.

Furthermore, suppose an object is designed for the soul purpose of supporting abortion. In a universe where Yog Sothoth has so endowed the object with this irreducible purpose, it’s obviously evil from the perspective of Christians living in a Christian universe. Being irreducibly purposed to x in no way entails goodness of the teloi, the object, whatever.

The fulfillment of a practical intention
The problem is we know this definition does not match up with God’s, since there are many things good for human aims which aims and/or their fulfillment does not fulfill the moral law.

 

The reason to bring in revelation is that knowing the purpose of God’s creation is to know God’s purpose for creation. But you cannot infer that without special revelation since doing so would entail God’s classification as an object subject to creational laws.

Now, when we read the Scriptures, none of this Aristotelian speculation about reproduction and nutrition appears. Those are actually quite subject to a much greater purpose linked to the very constitution of mankind: imaging God. Man is a covenant being, making his purpose to be glory in glorifying God, which is the general purpose of all creation: God’s glory.

So it seems we have four problems, to summarize, for this version of NLT:

1.) Irreducible powers does not entail purpose or good.
2.) Irreducible purpose does not entail good.
3.) Knowing Yahweh’s purpose requires special revelation, on pain of theologies like open theism.
4.) The relation between purpose and morality in the Bible isn’t NLT.

Hound of  Heaven:

Putting aside the issue that a pencil has intrinsic causal powers and the issue that the causal powers of reproduction and nutrition (one example) do not appear mutually exclusive
It isn’t that they’re mutually exclusive, it’s that they are different types of powers.
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the issue remains that the act of reproducing or the power to do so does not entail one is purposed to do so.
Purpose is just another word for goal or end. The main reason people posit powers is because they explain regularity in nature. When I drop a rock, it always falls, when I get some light smacking into my eyes, I see stuff. Powers explain why the rock doesn’t grow wings and fly to the moon, or explode with the force of an atom bomb. The reason they do this is because they are goal directed. That’s the whole idea, they are purposes
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suppose an object is designed for the soul purpose of supporting abortion
There is no abortion power, it’s a misuse of other powers a thing has. For that reason, I just don’t think that’s a possible power. On the flip side, if it was, it would be good. That probably makes you cringe, but just remember, you just posited a counterpossible on my view. If you want to create impossible situations, go ahead, but they’re just obviously going to entail stupid stuff.
There’s an extended response to stuff like this which follows this broad form: All of creation has a hierarchy of purposes/powers which bottom out in a humans goal of the universal good, which is God. Abortion is definitionally against the good of an individual, and thus one creature doing it to another would be unjust (bad). There are no powers which aim at bads, because those are just definitionally failures to use your powers correctly.

The problem is we know this definition does not match up with God’s
Yeah, it was explicitly a non moral definition of goodness. Moral goodness is just a species of it. Humans clearly have practical intentions which aim at bad things, but the reason they’re bad is that those practical intentions are contrary to some deeper intention they have.
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But you cannot infer that without special revelation since doing so would entail God’s classification as an object subject to creational laws.
Don’t know what this means
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none of this Aristotelian speculation about reproduction and nutrition appears
Genesis 1:28, Genesis 9:7. Aside from verses where God commands reproduction, specifically for reproduction, there’s also the fact that it’s related to being in the image of God. The relationship between a husband and his wife is used to explain God repeatedly, and in multiple ways 1 cor 11:3. In fact, if you take the verse from first Genesis I posted above in context, it comes right after the author affirms that man and women are made in the image of God. The author connects being man and woman and reproduction to being in the image of God.
I will admit that I don’t have the same evidence on hand with respect to nutrition and I really don’t care enough to dig it up. Off the cuff I’d just say it’s clearly related to the moral law, and that that’s pretty easily seen in the beatitudes (matthew 25:35). The clear upshot of something like that is just that if the purpose of the covenants with God is God’s glory, and you think that that’s what the moral law is about, that reproduction and nutrition are just obviously part of how human’s are related to God’s glory.

Jimmy Stephens:

1.) Irreducible powers –/–> purpose or good
Powers explain why the rock doesn’t grow wings and fly to the moon, or explode with the force of an atom bomb. The reason they do this is because they are goal directed.
This is equivocation. Yes, people posit causal or conditional powers to things, such as the conditional if-then in your rock-dropping scenario. That is not a goal or an aim, just a condition. You have conflated the two.

If I throw a pencil in a fire, it burns. That says nothing about the design-plan behind a pencil. The problem, put another way, is that you cannot get from mere causal disposition to purpose. A pencil is intrinsically burnable, but that power (read: causal disposition) has nothing to do with the human aims that explain the existence of pencils.

2.) Irreducible purpose –/–> good
There is no abortion power. . .
Same equivocation. That the power is reducible does not mean the purpose is reducible: purpose and power are not the same thing and, QED, you can’t determine purpose from mere power. So we can grant, for the sake of argument, that there is in fact no irreducible abortion power, but that’s quite irrelevant.

they’re just obviously going to entail stupid stuff.
No, we use reductios / derivations of contradictions to infer interesting and insightful things all the time. This line is silly.

if it was, it would be good.
I appreciate your attempt to be consistent, but I think you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. See, I was assuming you could see a bunch of problems this raises, but it appears I need to clarify them for you.

 

If things are good merely due to purpose and so indifferent to the moral law presented to us from God as Christians, then your meta-ethic entails global skepticism. How?

If the universe were purposed by whatever Lovecraftian thing is behind for the purpose of subjecting minds to ceaseless irrational torture, then that would constitute good. Good would no longer have any correspondance to our epistemic norms and mechanisms, unless we count that it would be set against them.

You could try reasoning from this or that fact, but it would be futile since since this Lovecraftian creator has purposed everything for the good of making you a confused monkey. All you’ve got to think and say is gibberish, including whatever you reflect on that gibberish.

Part of what salvages epistemology from such a scenario is the fact that Yahweh sets up values and norms in conjunction with purposes. He’s not an arbitrary voluntarist who imposes His aims on things apart from values He grants things and the laws He establishes for the judgment and determination of their relation.

Or, in other words, while your system divorces normativity from purpose, and so makes knowledge impossible, let alone ethics, the system of meta-ethics in Christianity is a perfect harmony of virtue, deontology, and consequences, without divorcing one aspect of morality from another in the reductionist fashion of your NLT.

3.) Knowing Yahweh’s purpose requires special revelation
Moral goodness is just a species of it.
This is nowhere the case in Scripture, and the above critiques I think suffice to say it’s not even philosophically promising.

God is not a species of created things. He is not a primas inter pares, a special superman alien among humans inside the universe. He is outside the universe, the uncreated creator, and so He is sui generis in the most absolute sense of the phrase. (Actually one of things Thomas rightly affirms.)

Our notions of human purposes and aims are just that: human, creaturely. They do not apply to God essentially. That is, God is not intrinsically delineated by human purposes or by human concepts of purpose; He transcends them.

However, that is just to say that the One who determines what the purposes of things are is also the One we can’t understand or reason about on our own because He is beyond all the human categories and concepts we have of power, purpose, etc. All we have are creature-concepts. God is not a creature. So how do we acquire any knowledge of Him whatsoever?

The only way would be for God to put into those creature-concepts the communication of what He is like without those creature-concepts, and put into human-language a description of the One who is beyond human-language. God has to condescend and reveal Himself, as He does for example in the first chapters of Genesis to Adam and Eve, providing them special revelation about their relationship with God and their purpose granted by Him.

 

4.) The Bible
Genesis 1:28, Genesis 9:7
both say nothing about irreducible power, its relation to purpose, or reduce the moral imperativity of God’s commands to His purposes. This is classic prooftexting, which is quote-mining a book.

You go on to list some standard Christian ethical factoids that are perfectly consistent with non-NLT outlooks. In light of the above criticisms of your NLT, they actually falsify your version of NLT. (To be fair, Roman Scholasticism is the down syndrome member in the family, and there are Reformed varieties with a much better take on natural law.)

But on to substance:

I’ll just note that you’re hermeneutically barred by your own meta-ethic from trying to interpret Scripture. Remember, norms – like those that you would otherwise invoke to distinguish good from bad readings of the text – don’t really exist. There’s just whatever the creator of the universe purposed. If he purposed the bible to just make you a confused monkey, you’d just be mumbling nonsense in text format right now, and that would constitute the highest good for you.

Now, we all know that’s not true, impossible, whatever, but the fact that we know it goes to show that we need to know that scenario is not the case, which means we would have to already know what kind of God is purposing things, and that He does so in a way complementary, not indifferent, to normativity – like the kind we use to interpret the Bible in the first place.

 

As far as a positive case, when we read Genesis, what we see is a covenantal outlook on meta-ethics. Three components: God, man, the law established between. God has intrinsic value, man has derivative value, and God establishes a covenant by which to interpret the correct entailments for each member according to His/his value in that relationship.

God creates man, naming him, designing him, verbally (not leaving it up to inductive inquiry or Aristotelian toilet-musings to figure it out thousands of years later) announcing man’s purpose, and the language is that of the Old Testament suzerainty.

If God were not intrinsically valuable, He would neither be inherently worthy of the worship he demands, nor would He possess moral authority to initiate this covenant.

If man were not derivatively valuable, God would be contradicting Himself (treating as worthy His relationship what is not), and the law would misrepresent man as possessor of rights and duties when he is in fact not a moral agent at all.

If there were no covenant union established between the two, God could not know what man is supposed to do or not do or how he is supposed to relate to Himself, because God has not set up any facts about how the creature-Creator union. Man could not know what is he supposed to do or how he is supposed to relate to God because the landscape of theo-ethics would involve facts about a being totally unlike the rest of his experience, beyond its created laws, and so unbound by any of the implications he comes up with without the aid of revelation.

The Biblical picture of meta-ethics is that of covenant union between an intrinsically worthy God and a derivatively worthy man.

No doubt, purpose features as an essential component of this system. But it would be just as… well, stupid, to think that purpose bears abductive monopoly on the system.

Hound of  Heaven:

That is not a goal or an aim, just a condition. You have conflated the two.
The conditional is only true in virtue of a goal. That’s the entire point of all powers ontology prior to like descartes, and a lot of current powers ontology. The reason the conditional is true is that there is a goal it rests on. Just saying the power is a set of conditionals would do no actual explanatory work at all.

That the power is reducible does not mean the purpose is reducible: purpose and power are not the same thing
Purpose is a genus, power is a species. If you have a power, you also have a purpose because power is a type of purpose.
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[12:50 PM]
No, we use reductios / derivations of contradictions to infer interesting
Counterpossibles aren’t interesting because they play on intuitions built for our universe and bump them into a universe that literally has different metaphysics

and so indifferent to the moral law presented to us from God as Christians
I would never say that for at least two reasons. First, God has the capacity for positive law. The laws present in human nature don’t exclude God giving us positive laws, which he does all the time. Obvious examples of this are dietary laws, or keeping the sabbath. Second, God gives men a supernatural destiny which isn’t simply their natural end, and isn’t known about just by knowing their natural end. Knowledge of revelation is necessary to know this.

I’m going to skip epistemology here because I genuinely think presup epistemology is embarrassing, but along with that I don’t have a complete epistemology myself, so it’s also probably a pointless conversation.

You go on to list some standard Christian ethical factoids that are perfectly consistent with non-NLT outlooks.
The point of those was just to throw up places where the disparaged powers were taken as relating directly to the moral life, not to prove natural law. I have no idea if anyone does that, though you could look at Matthew Levering’s book on NLT and scripture if you want.

The Biblical picture of meta-ethics is that of covenant union between an intrinsically worthy God and a derivatively worthy man.
Don’t really have an issue with that, not sure which one I’m supposed to have with it. That would just fall into the area of positive laws created by God.

Jimmy Stephens:

1.) Irreducible powers –/–> purpose or good
The conditional is only true in virtue of a goal. . .Just saying the power is a set of conditionals would do no actual explanatory work at all. . .Purpose is a genus, power is a species.
a) Purposing x to y in no way confers x power to y. Paganism is full of using fetishes for purposes well beyond the power of the object.

b) We already saw in the pencil’s power to burn that power to y in no way entails purpose to y.

So we have good reason to be skeptical about your claim that power is a species of purpose and you have not yet provided any reason to think it is.

In the meantime, no one is claiming to reduce power to a set of conditionals. Rather, power just is itself the property that explains the conditionals’ fulfillments. A pencil’s power to burn is the property whereby it burns under the right circumstances – that’s all. We can ask the further question why it has that property, and you could even say God purposed it to do so, but that would not make the property a species of purpose, just an explinandum of purpose.

Counterpossibles aren’t interesting
Given how much the Scholastic tradition, especially Thomas, has relied on them, given how often I and countless philosphers use them daily, since I don’t see any reason to believe it, I think this is false.

I don’t know what counterpossibles have to do with intuitions. That sounds like a staple of your epistemology, not mine.

We can move on, though. Anyone familiar with the Scholastic tradition who intends not to be silly won’t agree with you here.

———–
You conceded the issue on epistemology and I don’t see where you addressed the problem of the guillotine dilemma and self-undermining purposes, but I was admittedly obscure in my explanation. Let’s see if we can’t recover some of that.

Let’s start with the scenario in which God purposes all human beings to be evil. If intrinsic purposes just constitute the good or moral obligations, humans are good for being evil. If humans can’t be good for being evil, intrinsic purposes do not constitute the good or moral obligations per this scenario.

Now, this scenario might be impossible, but not for reasons relevant to purpose.

(Purpose may be a necessary condition of moral facts, the good, obligations, etc., but not a sufficient condition.)

Hound of  Heaven:

Purposing x to y in no way confers x power to y. Paganism is full of using fetishes for purposes well beyond the power of the object.
Purposing something isn’t sufficient for something to be a power, but an object having a goal/purpose is a necessary condition. Otherwise nothing specifies the object of the action, and as such there can be no explanation for why one effect results rather than another. I have no comment on paganism, what they do incorrectly is of no interest

We already saw in the pencil’s power to burn that power to y in no way entails purpose to y.
Yeah, the powers associated with burning are all reducible to other powers a person has. You only need to posit irreducible purposes for different kinds of action, like moving, reproducing, sensing, knowing, blah blah blah. The pencil’s power to burn entails it’s purpose to move.

power just is itself the property that explains the conditionals’ fulfillments
Yeah, but it can only explain the conditional, at least partially in virtue of being goal directed.

Not interested in the counterpossible thing, I think this is just a pretense at knowledge. No reason to think they’re useful.

humans are good for being evil
Evil is just voluntary badness. Humans can be good at voluntary badness, but badness is just the failure to fulfill a practical intention.

Let’s start with the scenario in which God purposes all human beings to be evil. If intrinsic purposes just constitute the good or moral obligations, humans are good for being evil. If humans can’t be good for being evil, intrinsic purposes do not constitute the good or moral obligations per this scenario.
No idea what’s being said here

Jimmy Stephens:

I have no comment on paganism
You don’t have to be interested in counterexamples, but they are interesting. We can skip this conversation if you aren’t interested in addressing objections.

The pencil’s power to burn entails it’s purpose to move.
Can you clarify how the purpose of moving entails the ability to burn? If I build a pencil in a simulation, like a video game or something, it doesn’t need to be able to burn.

it [causal power] can only explain the conditional
I don’t know how this contradicts anything I said.

Evil is just voluntary badness.
So God can’t purpose things to be evil?

No idea what’s being said here
Okay, well, let me know what’s difficult to understand, and I can try to dumb it down for you.

Hound of  Heaven:

You don’t have to be interested in counterexamples, but they are interesting.

Paganism is full of using fetishes for purposes well beyond the power of the object.

What is this a counter example to?

Can you clarify how the purpose of moving entails the ability to burn? If I build a pencil in a simulation, like a video game or something, it doesn’t need to be able to burn.
I might be a complete tard, but I’m like 25% sure that the ability to burn that a pencil has is derivative of it’s power to change locations at different speeds. There are probably a few other things bound up in that, like the ability to be effected by other objects, and some stuff about fundamental physics I will never be qualified to comment on.

So God can’t purpose things to be evil?
Insofar as you’re asking “is God able to create a being whose goal is badness”, then no, because there’s no content to the goal. It would literally be saying that you have the goal of failing to have a goal.

I can try to dumb it down for you.
God purposes all human beings to be evil
What does that mean
If humans can’t be good for being evil, intrinsic purposes do not constitute the good or moral obligations per this scenario
What’s the connection between the antecedent and the consequent?

TheSire:

What is this a counter example to?

It probably is a counter-example to the idea that purposes are sufficient for obligations.

Insofar as you’re asking “is God able to create a being whose goal is badness”, then no, because there’s no content to the goal. It would literally be saying that you have the goal of failing to have a goal.

Would that not be question-begging? Maybe I’m missing the point of @Christodestinist (Jimmy Stephens) but wouldn’t this just suppose the goals are arbitrary. If God could just switch the purposes that he has set for human beings and those be good, then there’s nothing about having these goals that are intrinsically linked to doing actual good.

The argument isn’t that we should have the goal of lacking goals, but rather why can’t our goals be directed towards evil. It seems that the content is why can’t we simply be obligated to lie all the time, rape, murder, etc.

Jimmy Stephens:

wouldn’t this just suppose the goals are arbitrary.
Right – specifically, they don’t have anything to do with God’s good character / they do not reveal anything about the character of God.

Hound of  Heaven:

It probably is a counter-example to the idea that purposes are sufficient for obligations.

He just said pagans cared about stuff other than purposes too. I don’t have to concern myself with what a bunch of dummies thought, if they want to be wrong that’s their business.

Would that not be question begging?

I was just explaining why I thought the goal of being bad is incoherent.

wouldn’t this just suppose the goals are arbitrary.

There’s nothing about the goals on natural law theory that is arbitrary. All of your abilities are based on the goals you have, so if God changes a goal from “knowing true things” to “eating food”, you wouldn’t just have a different goal. You having that different goal would make you a non human animal. The goals God gives you make up who you are

why can’t we simply be obligated to lie all the time, rape, murder, etc.

Take the example of lying. To lie, the person you’re talking to has to have the ability to know true things (same for you). Thus, if you’re in a situation where lying is even possible, you already have the goal of knowing true things (and through the common good, telling people true things). The possibility of any of the things you consider bad already presupposes that the beings in question already have the obligation to do the opposite

they don’t have anything to do with God’s good character / they do not reveal anything about the character of God.

They have plenty to do with God’s character. First, all goals refer to God either mediately or immediately, so in that way they all have to do with God. Second, God designed people in such a way that you can learn about Him through the study of the structure of the goals He placed in us (examples of people doing this are JP2s Theology of the Body, the first book of Clement of Alexandria’s Pedagogus, and 1 Corinthians 11 from St Paul).

TheSire:

Jimmy brought the Greeks up as those that utilized thought experiments to see that ethics has much more to do than merely goals.

You were saying that a world in which agents are obligated to do evil is like a world in which we are obligated to have no obligations. But the criticism was supposed to be why such goals couldn’t be reversed. I’m sure we could ask why humans couldn’t have the goal of being irrational but that’s beside the point.

I think this view about goal essentialism raises the next question. Why think these goals are essential to who we are? Why are the goals human beings possess essential to who they are?

Why does it follow from the fact you can know certain facts that you shouldn’t lie? Humans aren’t obliged to know everything they possibly could just as humans aren’t obligated to eat everything they possibly could. So, having the goals of knowing truth doesn’t entail that lying is a sin. But maybe I’m missing the point, but this seems based on the prior point that goals are essential, but that’s being questioned. Another issue is the universalizing of such, but many goals aren’t universal but still may be obligatory. Jesus’ goal to die on the cross for sinners is not shared by us. We are not meant to be atoning deaths for all mankind. But that’s not universally required because that’s a goal for a particular person. It very may well be the case where lying is a goal.

This is somewhat agreeable, but it establishes in my mind that merely having goals or telos isn’t sufficient for ethics.

I think this is also the epistemological difference about how one knows God through creation. 

Jimmy Stephens:

The problem is that you cannot distinguish purposes if purpose is a sufficient condition for moral good.

God purposes some things for evil.

That’s only possible if there exist other conditions besides God’s purposing to distinguish good and evil.