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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4951006" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm afraid it doesn't.  I could be percieving the Sun to rise above the shoulder of the Earth, but my perception that that is what is happening - however convincing the evidence of my senses - wouldn't mean that that is what is happening.  The fact that different people percieve different things only establishes differences in our perceptions.  It doesn't establish a difference in the thing percieved. No, they remain just as unprovable in the classic D&D cosmology as they do in this world, you just have to divorse your thinking from your experience of this world.  In this world, we can prove the existance of gravity and electromagnetism (actually, we can't actually do even that much, but let's not go there).  In the other world, we can prove the existance of law, order, good, and evil as primal forces of the universe, but just as we couldn't in this world prove that the world ought to have gravity and that a world with a particular gravitational constant is the best of possible worlds, so the inhabitants of the other world couldn't provide proof that good was better than evil, or law better than chaos, nor could they prove that the world as it existed was the best of all possible worlds or that the particular champions of each cosmological principle both deserved authority and issued wise and benevolent decrees.  All they could establish is that such things were, but establishing that such things are is (you may find this hard to believe from your perspective) a relatively unimpressive thing in itself.  If you can allow me to stray into religion just for a second, for a non-believer in a religion the key hurdle - the key element of faith - is percieved to be believing that a particular diety exists.  For a believer though, this is such a small thing that it barely qualifies as faith at all, and the real crux of the matter could be said to be believing that said god is good (or cares, or can be persuaded, or whatever it is you believe about its relationship to you).  For inhabitants of this other world we imagine, the relatively trivial aspect of believing that a deity or Good exists is stripped off, and we are left with demonstrating the far more important point that 'Good' is good and that a particular way of relating to the universe is the right way to do so.  The reason I find your description of the 'right' way to do it ironic is that you don't dodge around this point as far as you seem to think that you do.  From my perspective, I'm describing a universe where morality objectively exists, but objectively the central question of morality can't be answered.  Whereas from my perspective, you are describing a universe that already gives all the answers.Of course not.  And in the imagined cosmology, the devils of hell may percieve themselves as Lawful and Evil as an objective fact (because they have such information), but still percieve that they are in the right and that their cause is the correct one.   In fact, we can expect that every intelligent being of every alignment also imagines that their cause is the correct one and to be able to provide some sort of reason why this is so, otherwise we would not really expect anyone to hold that view.Yes, I know.  I gathered that from before my first responce to you.  That that was the case was very much my intended point, I just didn't expect you to concede it.</blockquote>

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