"I disbelieve. Help thou mine unbelief!"

sdanielmorgan Says:

"I have, however, made photocopies of some good stuff from Armstrong on universals."

http://calvindude.com/dude/blog/2007/01/the-problem-of-evilagain/#comments

I believe that Greg Welty discusses the strengths and limitations of Armstrong's theory in his (Welty's) Oxford M. Thesis.

"First, I will tell you that I do not accept the logical validity of any form of relativism or subjectivism. Either good and evil are real properties, just like red and round, or they are not. Our perception of them does not make them so. Neither does God’s. Either logic and mathematical truths and morality constrain the nature of reality (including God’s own definitions), as well as what and who God can be and is, or those things somehow become a contingency of God’s existence, which is not possible."

This is riddled with equivocations. He also betrays no discernible grasp of the opposing position. Try reading Welty or Pruss for starters.

"As Witmer said in his interview with Gene Cook — it is the nature of what it is to be evil to cause harm for fun. It is a real property of that state of affairs (causing harm for fun). It is the nature of what it is to be good to alleviate suffering whenever possible. It is foundational, self-evident and incorrigible, and it matters not one iota whether God exists or not to make it true. That’s my situation. I stop there. The regress ends there for me."

Translation: "I can't ground secular ethics. I only only posit good and evil as an arbitrary surd. Truth by stipulation."

So, by his own admission, Danny is a moral irrationalist.

This also means he's in no position to argue with anyone else over morality.

"To me, the sort of person who requires justification for those propositions is the same as the person who says, 'But why is blue darker than yellow?' I cannot bring myself to waste time in trying to justify it."

An argument from analogy minus the analogy. How does secularism underwrite his threadbare assertion?

Notice, throughout this exercise, his faith in secularism comes first, followed by whatever supporting arguments he can cobble together. He's having to come up with his reasons after the fact.

So his belief in secularism is a faith-postulate. A leap of faith into the dark, hoping against hope that he will grasp a branch or vine on the way down.