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[quote=Anonymous][quote]No; you went there, when you said that life is bad if God doesn't exist but good if he does. 
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Don't think anyone said that.

7/28, 17:25 from the OP: "The facts are the same. The meaning of the facts is completely different." "The facts" referred to are the facts of people's lives, which the OP called nasty, etc. if there is no God. [/quote]

I see the confusion now.  I'll try to explain.

If materialism is true, the material universe is all that there is.  There is no metaphysical world.  There are no souls, no life after physical death.  And no God.

If that is an accurate understanding of the universe, then human life is a highly evolved life form, but all life forms are just compilations of matter and energy, come together by chance.  There is no caring Creator who made everything for a purpose.  There is probability and chaos and perhaps wonderment at the order that springs from that, but metaphysical, abstract concepts like good and evil, justice and injustice, right and wrong, don't actually exist.  Because there is no final Authority on right and wrong.  There is no perfect Justice.  There are no consequences beyond what happens in this physical world.

So there are no "good" or "bad" human lives in a materialist universe.  Human lives just are.  It would be like saying there are "good" and "bad" fish lives.

The idea of free will means we can choose to assign value to human life, or choose to make judgments about human behavior.  But without an absolute standard that transcends our ideas of what is good and what is bad, they are just personal feelings and perceptions.  In fact, the very notion of free will kind of fades away.  It becomes an illusion.

But let's say that humans universally believe we can choose our actions and our values, that we are not purely instinctual like other mammals.  Even so, under materialism, we are still just left with our personal opinions.  Materialism might grant freedom to every human person to make their own definition of right and wrong.  But then that means we can never definitively say that anyone [i]else[/i] is right or wrong.

So the fact that most humans throughout history have lived lives that were "nasty, brutish, and short" is not a value judgment.  It is just an observation.  It is not good or bad.  It is just a description of the human experience.  Just as we would describe other animal life.

Under theism, humans throughout history have [i]still[/i] lived lives that were "nasty, brutish, and short."  It is the exact same observation.  The exact same set of facts.

The [i]meaning[/i] is different because this physical life is not all that there is.  Humans did not arise blindly.  They were made purposefully.  They were made for eternity.  So they are not atoms that come together and fall apart.  They are that, and something immaterial, too.  And their physical life informs their metaphysical life.

So it is not "no God, bad" versus "God, good."  It is "no God, no bad or good," versus "God, good that we can choose to do or not do."  Or, more specifically, "no God, no bad or good, except what we choose to believe for ourselves," versus, "God, good that we can choose to conform to or reject."

Does that make any sense?[/quote]

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