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PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
…and this is a pharyngula stage embryo.
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What can the divine command theorist mean by saying that God is good (and hence would not approve of torture)? In general, to say that something is good is to say that it meets certain relevant standards. A good painting meets aesthetic standards; a good knife is one that cuts well; a good father is one that can be expected to behave in certain specified ways. A good Deity, then, is presumably one whose acts accord with certain standards. This is not to say that creatures set the standards. Of course they do not. It is merely to say that there must be some standards for the expression 'God is good' to have any content. But on the divine command view it seems there must be some standards for the expression 'God is good' to have any content. But on the divine command view it seems that there are no such standards. To say that God is good is apparently to say that God approves of His own acts, or that He wills whatever acts He performs. So, how can the divine command theorist confidently assert that God would not approve of torture since He is good? If God did approve of torture (rape, theft, etc.), He would still be good from the point of view of the divine command theory.
C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 39.
July 31, 2010
Category: Weblogs
Jen McCreight is participating in that masochistic exercise in prolonged blogging called Blogathon, all to raise money for charity. Take a look, donate if you can, at least give her a little sympathy....
Posted by PZ Myers at 2:10 PM • 40 Comments •
Category: Feminism
This is an appalling story. Those "Girls Gone Wild" videos are already about the sleaziest things you'll find advertised on mainstream TV: they are basically made by getting young women drunk to reduce their inhibitions and than urging them to...
Posted by PZ Myers at 12:18 PM • 1019 Comments •
Category: Cephalopods
We're about to leave lovely Vancouver to return to Kent, Washington, so must leave you with something awful to chew on for a while. This is is a beautiful example of why creationists can be so stupid: spelling and grammar...
Posted by PZ Myers at 11:55 AM • 118 Comments •
July 30, 2010
Category: Media
That would be tough. She's written a diatribe in the NY Times on the Pepsico debacle, and it isn't just that she doesn't like many of the scienceblogs (including yours truly), but that she gets the facts wrong. This...
Posted by PZ Myers at 8:41 PM • 54 Comments •
Category: Open Thread
O Happy Day, let us open this edition of the thread insufferably prolonged with some romance! (Current totals: 10,731 entries with 1,072,626 comments.)...
Posted by PZ Myers at 7:09 PM • 692 Comments •
Category: Administrative
We are currently suffering from a surfeit of cheesiness in the ad blocks being served up — the example to the right is just one of many horrors, including ads for $cientology, various Christian and creationist groups, and even...
Posted by PZ Myers at 12:54 PM • 106 Comments •
Category: Pointless polls
How can I resist? Eric Hovind does the usual trick of putting two reasonable answers on it to split the rational vote, but I think a good goal would be to simply make both of them crush the stupid creationist...
Posted by PZ Myers at 12:05 PM • 545 Comments •
Category: Science
Spiegel has a wonderful interview with Venter. The more I hear from Venter, the more I like him; he's very much a no-BS sort of fellow. He's the guy who really drove the human genome project to completion, and he's...
Posted by PZ Myers at 11:33 AM • 100 Comments •
Category: Religion
The peculiarities of dietary restrictions by the religious are always entertaining. Catholics have their own weird practices: here's a bit of strange information from a Catholic agony aunt forum. Do alligators count as fish? As a Catholic who observes the...
Posted by PZ Myers at 11:21 AM • 139 Comments •
Category: Environment
MPR picked my brains about the impossible plan to eradicate mosquitoes. No, we can't, and no, we shouldn't. That wasn't so hard....
Posted by PZ Myers at 11:16 AM • 29 Comments •
Casaubon's Book 04.30.2012
Thoughts from Kansas 04.29.2012
Starts With a Bang! 04.27.2012
Pharyngula 04.27.2012
Greg Laden's Blog 04.27.2012
