No doubt God is a Utilitarian. If he exists.
E.g., this "God" also knows the same facts/truths, that the earth is round, 2 + 2 = 4, etc., and so also knows the same truths about good/evil or right/wrong.
What if the god that exists is Kali?
OK, in that case the "god" is evil. Hopefully there are some other "gods" which are nice guys. (You do agree that Kali is a bad guy?)
That's not for us to say in this discussion.
You said that any god that existed would probably agree with us on the whole good/bad thing.
What I should have said is that if God exists, then he knows "good/evil" and "right/wrong" just as we do. Maybe he knows it better, but still it's essentially the same as what we know.
I think Kali is not "God" per se, even in Hinduism. Rather, she is part of the "godhead" or something like that. Maybe I was wrong to say she's evil, but she has a negative image. My point is that "God" -- the entire "Godhead" as it were, probably knows "good/evil" just as we know it, assuming this God entity does exist as the theologians claim.
But the point is that we know "good/evil" etc. whether the God entity exists or not. This is not dependent on our belief in God or gods. E.g., an atheist knows "good/evil" and makes judgments about something being "good" or "evil" or "right" or "wrong" etc. You think an atheist cannot make such judgments? Certainly they do make such judgments.
Your belief tends to blind you (or at least suffer a severe case of myopia).
But if there is a god that demands blood sacrifices, then in that god's opinion, blood sacrifices to them are good.
But you and I both agree that there's probably no such "god" and that no legitimate purpose is served by such rituals today.
I'm very sure that God does not require any blood sacrifices (if God exists). And never did. We can explain how humans developed animal sacrifice rituals over thousands of years of pre-history, without God or gods requiring them to do it.
But at the same time, blood sacrifices to another god are bad.
If there are no gods, then blood sacrifices to any gods are bad. I mean, unless the whole 'sacrificial animal' industry is a steady influence on a growing economy, then it could be that they're still objectively good... if you value the economy more than, say, unblemished goats or snow-white doves.
Either way, we cannot be certain that any moral code we develop would automatically be agreed to by any extant skybeast.
Whether they agree or not, our "moral code" is not based on what they might hand down to us. We know "good/evil" without needing them to dictate it to us.
This doesn't change the point I'm making. The question is: What is "good" and "evil" / "right" and "wrong" if "God" is set aside and is not the authority for defining what is "good/evil" or "right/wrong" etc.?
But your point was that we could determine a moral system (good/evil; right/wrong) and that any god that may exist would agree with us.
That's a bad point, considering ALL the various deities that have been offered by various believers. They do not all agree on what makes good or bad things.
But those "gods" do not exist. I said "gods" which really do exist, if there are any, probably agree with us about what is good/evil or right/wrong.
I.e., we KNOW that there is "good" and "evil" etc.
Do we?
Yes, we know it's evil to rob a bank, put Jews into ovens, bomb Black churches in Alabama and stuff like that.
It seems pretty speculative, since there are so many different definitions. It's not like 2+2=good, 2+3=bad.
No, it's like Washington was the first President = true, Julius Caesar was the first Pope = false.
To know that good and evil exist we would need an objective standard of what they are, no? Without that, they appear to just be opinions.
There are objective standards.
We know this for sure, but we don't know for sure about "God" or "gods" and so on. Those may or may not be, but what's "right" and "wrong" is something we know for sure. (Or do you say we don't know for sure that it was wrong for Nazis to put Jews into ovens?
Well, the Nazis thought it was right.
But weren't they wrong? Just because we can know good/evil and right/wrong doesn't mean everyone agrees. Sometimes people can be wrong and do evil things. That doesn't mean there's no objective good/evil.
Many people today think it was right at the time, and many people today think it would be right to do again.
But reasonable people know they're wrong.
It's kinda cheesy to think that you can just throw out 'Nazis' as an objective standard of evil, when certainly plenty of people would disagree.
It's good to take an extreme example to make the point. And those who disagree and say it's OK to burn Black churches or torture someone or fly airplanes into buildings etc. are just wrong. They can be proved wrong the same as if they say Lincoln was the first President.
. . . or for Count Dracula to torture people? etc.?) Let's agree that we know some things for sure, about what is "right" and "wrong," even if there are also some ambiguous cases, like whether it's wrong to kill animals for food, or to use whales and other animals for entertainment, etc.
No. Let's not just agree to a lazy conclusion to the discussion simply because you're pretty damned sure you know right and wrong.
But you're also damned sure that it's wrong to torture and murder etc. Why shouldn't we agree on it? Don't we agree that Washington was the first President and not Lincoln?
Even if everyone agreed, that's still not proving it's an objective standard.
There is an objective standard. It's because there's an objective standard that everyone agrees. The agreement is based upon the objective standard.
A Henry George crusader once said "It's not true because Henry George said it -- rather, Henry George said it because it's true."
Likewise, murder is not wrong because people believe it's wrong -- rather, people believe it's wrong because it is wrong.
Prove to me that 'good' exists, as opposed to just an opinion we flog until everyone agrees with us or at least shuts up. Can you? Or do you just expect agreement?
I think the utilitarians already answered this a long time ago. "Greatest good for the greatest number."
But I'll say it this way: An increase in pleasure is always good if it's not accompanied by a decrease somewhere, or by an increase in pain. So, pure pleasure increase per se, with no other change, is always good.
(Some pleasure can be "bad" because it's superficial and will produce pain later, so we have to add the qualifier that the pleasure does not cause any offsetting pain or deprivation, and then it's "good" in the pure sense.)
The only drawback is the uncertainty about a possible change somewhere which could cancel the increase in pleasure. But we have extreme probability in many cases that an increase in pleasure happened, or also a decrease in pain, without any other change to cancel it.
So, if a terrorist is murdering people at a shopping mall (or is about to), and a gun-owner shows up and kills the terrorist first, just before he would have killed a dozen more, that gun-owner did a "good" thing, and it's "good" that he happened to show up at the right time.
The probability is extremely high that this preventive act produced a condition of less pain and increased pleasure over what would have been the case if the gun-owner had not showed up. So it's a virtual certainty that "good" events like this do happen. In many cases the certainty is not so clear, but we have to choose what probably will lead to the better outcome. And we know this is "good" no matter what we believe about God.
We know this the same as we know historical facts that are "certain" -- like Washington was the first President.
