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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6698939" data-attributes="member: 4937">A refresher course would appear to be in order.  As far as I know, you are wrong.   Certainly there have been atheist philosophers who have wanted to define moral philosophies and even absolutist moral philosophies that don't depend in any way on theology or the existence of a higher power, but defining all of philosophy as that is basically ignoring broad swaths of philosophical thought.  A bit of Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, and Newton might be in order.  Heck, even Kantism need not be contradictory to a theistic world view.Err... why not?  It can be both true that Good and Truth can be discovered through moral reasoning, and that a real god is Good and True.It sounds familiar, it just sounds really boring and cynical.   Boring because if we are going to have beings embody moral philosophy, it's ridiculous make them merely human in their motivations and beliefs as if ideal forms ought to be hypocritical if they are anything other than idealized hypocrisy.   Cynical because it keeps falling into saying that all is evil and there is no good, which is sort of reminding me of my original post.At a fundamental level, the big problem I see backing all your reasoning is that this word 'god' is being really vaguely and poorly defined, so that in between sentences (as it were), you are replacing one definition of the word with another and then rolling on forward without noticing you've done so.   So you either need to decide if this 'god' is the Judeo-Christian god with his infinite properties, or if this 'god' you keep referencing is the incarnated emanations of some Platonic idea, or if this 'god' is merely a pagan superhuman figure lacking any particular differences from the ordinary mortals of common experience save for scale (indeed might even be simply elevated mortal figures), or somewhere else on the scale.  Naturally, if from one sentence to the next, you replace the 'god' the word is referencing, you are going to end up with complete incoherence.  You can say, "There is no Good apart from an Infinitely Good Creator Deity that is the Source of all Good Things", but then that statement is incoherent if you are saying, "There is no Good apart from Zeus."  You can say, "I wouldn't put it past Zeus to do things knowing that they are evil, because Zeus incorporates into himself all the notions of how mortal kings behave good and bad, and because there are no consequences for Zeus being evil.", but then that would be incoherent if we were talking about an Infinitely Good Omniscient Creator Deity.  To put it into very modern terms, we could say that Superman is a god (higher order being) and that he is Good, but we would not say that things are Good because superman does them.  Actually, forget Plato, Aquinas, and Kant, have you read Terry Pratchett?   The Silmarillion?  Modern fantasy generally?And it is worth noting that D&D deities in general don't have to be either the Judeo-Christian god or Zeus, but to the extent that they are like one or the other they tend to be more like Zeus and not actually responsible for the creation of the universe, or its characteristics, much less the external qualities that might be seen evidenced in the design of the universe and imposed on it.  So no, there is no reason to think that the gods of D&D are the higher powers, much less the highest powers, and even if they were they could still be subject to a non-personified but still real set of moral laws.</blockquote>

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