One of the most common arguments in modern apologetics is the moral argument. Rather than coming up with my own summary, I'll quote a Christian site at length.
“The moral argument appeals to the existence of moral laws as evidence of God’s existence. According to this argument, there couldn’t be such a thing as morality without God; to use the words that Sartre attributed to Dostoyevsky, 'If there is no God, then everything is permissible.' That there are moral laws, then, that not everything is permissible, proves that God exists.
“Some facts are facts about the way that the world is. … For most facts, there are objects in the world that make them true. Moral facts aren’t like that. The fact that we ought to do something about the problem of famine isn’t a fact about the way that the world is, it’s a fact about the way that the world ought to be. There is nothing out there in the physical world that makes moral facts true. This is because moral facts aren’t descriptive, they’re prescriptive; moral facts have the form of commands.
“… If the moral argument can be defended against the various objections that have been raised against it, then it proves the existence of an author of morality, of a being that has authority over and that actively rules over all creation.”
I first need to unpack what the two sides mean by their terms.
What is right and wrong? Most theists will postpone the question to God: right and wrong depends on God's will and/or God's commands. What makes God's actions and commands right? God's will and/or nature are the definition of right, that is, God commands things and/or does things and that makes it right. While there are alternative Christian answers, this is probably the most common and it's the one I know the most about, so I will not address alternatives.
The atheistic answer (or rather, the answer I give) is that morality is a partially unwritten social contract. This contract involves primarily fundamental values, such as treating others the way you want to be treated, as opposed to more specific ethics. To the extent that people share these fundamental values, conversations about specific ethics are meaningful, whether or not people agree on what “morality” actually is.
Apologists often confuse the issue by suggesting that the two views are that morals are either absolute or relative. The better question is “relative to what and absolute in what context?” For instance, if God were different, then Christian morality would be different. That means Christian morality is relative to God's nature and absolute in contexts where God's nature is fixed.
Similarly, my concept of morality is relative to society and relative to human nature. But when human nature and which society I'm talking about are fixed, most of my moral ideas are absolute. Furthermore, with most of the fundamentals there is agreement between nearly all societies – so most of my moral ideas are only relative to human nature.
There is yet another way my moral ideas are objective: “What does society think” and “what fundamental values are led to by human nature” are questions which usually have objective answers. The dichotomy where morality is completely absolute or everything is permissible is a false one. Morality can be thought of as something that is dependent on humanity and still something that I can't change just because I feel like it.
Having laid out what I mean by morality, I will show that the moral argument fails on two independent lines.
First Rebuttal: Exposing the Rhetoric
“For most facts, there are objects in the world that make them true. Moral facts aren’t like that. The fact that we ought to do something about the problem of famine isn’t a fact about the way that the world is, it’s a fact about the way that the world ought to be.”
The problem with this claim is that morals are both kinds of facts within my understanding of morality. The claim “stopping famines is a moral goal” is not a simple fact about how the world is. But on the other hand, the claim “most people have the sort of morality that wishes for no famines” is a claim with physical objects showing it to be true. Similarly, “human nature is such that people are prone to thinking that stopping famines is moral” is a claim with a physical object showing it to be true. Statements about peoples' sentiments and human nature are claims with objects in the world that makes it true. So while the moral claim itself is not a claim about how reality is, the claim that a particular claim really is "moral" is a statement with physical objects in the world making it true.
The entire argument depends on a subtle rhetorical play to hide its most dubious claim. When unpacked, the argument is:
1. People have a moral concept.
2. The only moral concept is the Christian one.
3. Therefore people believe in Christian moral concepts.
4. Christian moral concepts only make sense if God exists.
5. Therefore God exists.
My primary disagreement with the argument is with 2. Notice just how strong the claim must be for the argument to work. To contradict the argument, I don't need to show my moral views to be true – only that I have a view differing greatly from the Christian view. The input data in the argument is a claim about what “everyone believes.” But I don't believe what is claimed that I believe. This alone is sufficient to rebut the moral argument.
Once the terms are defined it becomes clear that no argument exists underneath the rhetoric. With Christian definitions, I don't believe in morality. With atheistic definitions, I believe in morality, and this implies absolutely nothing. It is my intention to be rebutting the moral argument in general and not simply this one articulation of it. However, every single version I have read either depends on this rhetorical slight of hand, or explicitly makes the claim which I have rebutted.
Very little knowledge of apologetics is needed to foresee Christians' response to my position. The response is that the social contract I described isn't really a system of “morality.” What makes it wrong to violate our social contract?
All moral systems have this problem: where to start? Theism has the exact same problem. What makes what God says right? Sure Christians can define that what they mean by “right” is aligning with God's will, but isn't that still just might makes right on a cosmic scale? Christians tend to object when I claim that Yahweh is a barbaric tyrant. But they shouldn't react at all if they consistently hold to their definition of good. God could be a barbaric tyrant, and this simply implies that being a barbaric tyrant is what being good means. The reaction shows that Christians think of good as meaning something deeper than “the way God is.” How could I be accusing God of something unless there is a higher moral law over God and I'm accusing God of violating this higher law? When consistently thinking of good as “the way God is,” objections should only be raised if I say something factually wrong about God, instead of simply using different adjectives to describe the same actions. I don't pat myself on the back for spotting this problem. It's obvious, because all moral systems have this problem: where to start?
It is reasonable to reject either “good is determined by society” or “good is determined by God” as a definitional cheat that avoids the real problem. And they are cheats, unless accompanied by an acknowledgment that they haven't solved the key problem, at which point they simply become unprofound. It is also reasonable to grant that either one could work in principle. What is not reasonable is the double standard that is needed to make the moral argument work.
(On the flip side, this implies that I think the Euthyphro dilemma is an invalid reason to disbelieve in God. While it's a good clarifying question and it shows that theism doesn't answer any foundational moral questions, on the other hand, theism isn't creating new problems either.)
Second Rebuttal
To make an argument for the existence of God, one needs to first specify what is meant by “God.” Our society has a sufficiently specific idea about what this means that it's not always necessary to do so explicitly, but the ideas that different God-concepts have in common are not specific enough for my second rebuttal. The split is based on if the God being argued for has a concept of morality that is at least similar to human moral intuitions.
One half of my rebuttal could work well against some concepts of God while looking like a straw man to people who are arguing for a different concept of God. While either half is easily avoidable, one of the prongs must be faced directly. For this reason, it is important that they be viewed together. For quite while, I bounced between near-Calvinism and C. S. Lewis' explicit non-Calvinism. This wasn't just indecision, but largely due to a disorganized attempt to avoid two different problems that cannot both be avoided. Clarity of thought is sufficient to shut the door on that option.
(By Lewis' position, what I really mean is “what I understood of Lewis' position in 2007-early 2008,” that is, the C. S. Lewis of Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. As John Beversluis painstakingly documents in C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, Lewis himself went through similar indecision later in life, although his indecision went all the way back to his answer to the Euthyphro dilemma. He never articulated a clear reconciliation.)
If God's morality is not similar to ours:
Suppose the moral argument makes it as far as “people believe in moral ideas which imply God's existence.” There is a difference between establishing factual claims that imply God's existence, and establishing that people believe things implying God's existence. If everyone's moral ideas imply God exists, one possibility remaining is that everyone's moral ideas are flawed. Moral dilemmas are inherent in all moral views because they all imply absurdities and/or they are simply not livable. The idea that everyone's moral ideas are incorrect is extremely plausible. Perhaps what's really true is the social contract idea of morality, despite the fact that I and all other freethinking people don't “really” believe it.
Normally, I would be on my last legs if I was reduced to making argument like “sure everyone including me believes X, but we still might all be wrong.” In most cases, this would mean I'm stuck defending the possible, yet highly implausible. But here, there is a key difference: the concept of God that I'm rebutting implies that everyone's moral views are wrong. So it's a very small leap for me to suggest that yes, perhaps everyone's moral views are wrong, but simply in a very different way than the one suggested by Total Depravity.
If God's morality is at least similar to ours:
(*Update* This should be split into "God's morality is at least similar to ours but God isn't moral by his own standards" and "God's morality is at least similar to ours and God is moral by his own standards." What follows is my answer to the second. My next post deals with the first.)
But God's morality is almost diametrically opposite to our own morality as evidenced by the problem of pain. There are a number of ways to set up this argument, and in my opinion, by far the best way is as an empirical problem. I'm not suggesting that pain proves this kind of God does not exist – what I am claiming is that pain is very strong evidence against his existence, although this is the sort of evidence that could potentially be outweighed by contrary evidence. As an empirical argument, the real issue isn't that pain and evil exist at all – the problem is that there is so much.
Similarly, if you are making the case that the police in a particular city are failing, the existence of a robbery is a poor argument – the level of surveillance needed to achieve perfection wouldn't be worth it even if it were possible. But millions and millions of robberies is good evidence for the failure of law enforcement. An explanation of how, in a free society, some level of abuse of freedom is to be expected completely and utterly fails to explain why there is so much crime. With God, I'm not saying that a good plan couldn't involve any discomfort. I'm saying that based on the extreme level of pain in the world, it sure looks like his plan is either not loving or very poorly thought out.
Suppose a person discovered a cure to every single disease in the world. Suppose they had the resources to deliver these cures to the people who need it, and they knew about the need. Suppose this could be done with very little effort. And yet they then did absolutely nothing about it. They just watched while people died from diseases because doing so helped them seek their own glory. If we rely on human intuitions about morality to tell us what morality is, we would call this person the most extreme kind of evil. This person is God.
Christianity's problem of pain is far more severe than that of general theism. Not only is there the overhead of the inaction of God to deal with, there is also all the genocide and killing that God either did himself or delegated to his minions, not to mention hell.
But I bring up diseases in particular because it's something about which we have experiential knowledge and it cannot be avoided with a weaker view of biblical inspiration. We cannot reasonably speculate that diseases are needed to bring about some other greater good – some diseases have been cured in the past and that turned out quite well. Even while knowing about the lack of negative consequences, God still didn't cure these diseases sooner. Furthermore, whenever a person claims to have a new cure, one question that is not asked is “but is curing diseases a good idea?” We don't look back with skepticism at the morally questionable activities of the World Health Organization and others in eradicating polio. We don't do this because while it is a remote possibility that curing diseases is damaging, it is not a reasonable possibility.
Without a justification for God's inaction, the evidence suggests that if God exists, he does not follow a system of morality similar to ours. And if we are so wrong about morality to have so badly misjudged the morality of cosmic inaction to pain, then an argument cannot be grounded in the trusting of our moral intuitions.
"If we rely on human intuitions about morality to tell us what morality is, we would call this person the most extreme kind of evil. This person is God."
ReplyDeleteVery good article. So well said in so many ways.
I just couldn't help but think of the classic Christian response that God has provided the cure - Jesus. We just have to accept the cure.
They fail to realize that it has to be delivered - by fallible, error-prone humans. And that all the while the cure is being delivered, millions and billions of people die without access to the cure.
That started to put things into perspective for me.
In addition, I began to realize that post-Christian cultures are evidence Christ can never return. Because every culture heads toward post-Christian at some point and basically becomes a new culture and Christ can't return until all the tribes of the world have been reached. And new "tribes" are created annually.
Jesus has his work cut out for Him. I'm not sure He realized the job He was signing up for, poor fellow.
:)
Thanks!
ReplyDelete>I just couldn't help but think of the classic Christian response that God has provided the cure - Jesus.
Good ol' religion - trying to trump claims about objective reality with the invisible promises of an invisible man...
>Christ can't return until all the tribes of the world have been reached.
Yup, even after going through the strained interpretations of evangelicals, the Bible still fails to line up with reality.
Although as Babinski pointed out in "The Lowdown on God's showdown," it's not even biblical:
"Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith;" - Romans 16:25
So this is one place where "all the nations" taken in context means all the nations in the known world. So we've been ready for Christ's return for nearly 2000 years. What's he waiting for?
“All moral systems have this problem: where to start?”
ReplyDeleteIntriguing. Here you are essentially admitting that reasoning and logic ultimately has nothing to do with a choice of moral systems. It can’t. Rather your choice of moral systems, and everyone else’s for that matter, boils down to a presupposition of where the logic starts. The presupposition is a leap of faith. I guess atheists live by faith too!
“…my concept of morality is relative to society and relative to human nature. But when human nature and which society I'm talking about are fixed, most of my moral ideas are absolute. Furthermore, with most of the fundamentals there is agreement between nearly all societies – so most of my moral ideas are only relative to human nature.”
I take issue with the rhetorical blurring of societies and human nature. Unless you can prove otherwise, these are very different things. The majority of my response will be based on the society aspect since you have repeatedly used the idea of a “social contract”.
I – “Absolute” Morality Relative to a fixed aspect of Humanity
You need to more explicitly explain what aspect or aspects of human nature are fixed and/or that there is something out there that all humanity agrees on. I don’t know what that might be from an atheist position. I believe that the moral argument for God (or at least a god) has merit because people always believe in “ought to” in some form or another, but I don’t agree that there is any specific “ought to” that can be universally agreed upon by all humanity.
““What does society think” and “what fundamental values are led to by human nature” are questions which usually have objective answers.”
In regard to human nature, this is a claim that needs more specifics. Merely asserting it in this highly generic form is inadequate. Can you give me an example of a fixed aspect of human nature? The only two things in humanity that I believe are absolutely fixed is the fact that we are made in the image of God and that we have a sin nature. I expect that a non-Christian would take exception with both of these, though. From an atheist standpoint then, what is common to humanity then? Can you be specific? If not, you don’t really have a starting point for anything.
II – “Absolute” Morality Relative to a “Fixed” Society
“The atheistic answer (or rather, the answer I give) is that morality is a partially unwritten social contract. This contract involves primarily fundamental values, such as treating others the way you want to be treated, as opposed to more specific ethics…. Morality can be thought of as something that is dependent on humanity and still something that I can't change just because I feel like it.”
Making morality relative to society leaves open uncertainty, ambiguity, and self-contradiction.
IIa – Uncertainty Within a Society
I would assert that all societies are in a constant state of change. As an evolutionist, I don’t really expect you to object to that. It should be fairly clear then that any moral code that is fixed per a society’s constant change doesn’t make morality “absolute” in any meaningful way. How do you determine what is morally right and wrong during the process of change? That is, when one person in a society has changed their view and another hasn’t, who is right and who is wrong?
IIa1 – Power
ReplyDeleteWhat if you have power to change society? How can morality be something that can’t change just because a person feels like it, if a person is in a position to change society? Is brainwashing wrong? Say X, Y, and Z are “fundamental values”. What if all the people of a society were brainwashed to think that X, Y, Z, and brainwashing are OK? Would X, Y, Z, and brainwashing then become good? This is at least a plausible scenario, and I don’t thank it would even really take brainwashing. It could only take a massive social campaign and lots of time. Or it could take natural evolution of thought and time. Or some other thing and lots of time. Doesn’t really matter…pick one. The only way I see to really lend your view credible meaning is to prove that there is an X, a Y, or a Z aspect of societies that cannot be changed.
This sort of a view of morality would allow the leaders of a society to be in a position at least somewhat above and outside of the moral codes required of the common man. All leaders of societies would have to be considered amoral in their moral directing of the people, even if one leader followed the other who was leading in a totally different direction. This is a very strange, uncertain and inconsistent position for a voting member of a constitutional, democratic republic to hold.
IIa2 – Natural Change (Modernism to Postmodernism)
Consider postmodernism. The one fundamental postmodern value is that there is no common morality or “fundamental value” that can be forced on others (aside from that one major fundamental value of course). Everybody decides for himself what is good and bad regardless of what others think, and even regardless of how it impacts others. Personal morality can change “just because I feel like it” and/or based on personal experiences. Even internal inconsistency and irrationality is irrelevant to at least many postmodernists.
1) The source of morality is a “fundamental value” – Despite the fact that your views are very Modern, you would have to accept the growing postmodern values as completely valid because postmodernism is the natural evolution of thought in our society (and others too). In other words, after enough time passes in this culture, your “social contract” moral position which bases morals on majority view would be forced to accept a “social contract” based on a postmodern majority. Such modernism affirming post-modernism would obviously be a logical self contradiction.
2) The source of morality is not a “fundamental value” – Alternatively, you could reject the postmodern views regarding the source of morality on the basis that the source of morality is not a “fundamental value” that is led to by human nature. But if beliefs regarding the source of morality cannot be considered a fundamental value, then your specific belief regarding the source of morality cannot be considered a fundamental value either. Obviously then, all views regarding the source of morality would be amoral – on par with each other morally even if not logically. From this position the term “immoral” would only have meaning within a specific moral code, not without. You could call people with differing views on the source of morality “illogical” all day, but never “immoral”. On a practical level, since differences of opinion on the source of morality exist within a society, this amoral standpoint would even have to exist within a society on a personal level – which leads straight towards post-modernism.
Perhaps the either-or scenario above is the reason why modernism in our country is slowly being replaced by post-modernism. Modernism simply can’t stand against it.
IIb – Uncertainty Between Societies
ReplyDeleteMore uncertainty comes from the differences between societies. Take for example your offered “fundamental value” of “treating others the way you want to be treated”. This sounds like a safe “fundamental value” as long as you are speaking to a Christian or post-Christian culture. However, Hindus have had a cast system for over a millennia that does not agree with that at all. Inveterate Communists do not follow it either. Neither do Muslims (at least that is, those consistent with the kill-the-infidel parts of the Koran). Pretty much any kind of tyrant does not follow this either. Should Hindus, Communists, Muslims, and tyrants be considered immoral by Christian and post-Christian societies? Or should we consider differences between societies to be amoral since they have a different “social contract”? From this position it is illogical to judge any cross-cultural and historical viewpoints of morality (including theistic views). For example, the events of 9/11 could not be considered immoral actions committed by radical Muslims. They were amoral examples of different social contracts colliding. The terrorists were good and brave per their society for doing what they did, and the firefighters were equally good and brave per their society for doing what they did. The others who died were just unlucky.
How do you reconcile the uncertainty of cross-cultural moral codes?
IIc – Uncertainty per Choosing a Preferred Morality by Choosing a Society
“The dichotomy where morality is completely absolute or everything is permissible ...” is not false. Anything or everything could be permissible depending only the era and/or culture one lived in. If morality is different between societies, does this mean that I have to change my personal moral codes if I move to a different society? If I have to change my personal moral codes depending on the society I live in, couldn’t I just pick the society that I want to live in as a way to cheat so that my morality can “change just because I feel like it”? In other words just anything may not be permissible per a society, but so what? Move or change the society that you are in and you can get morality that is what you feel like having (or at least close).
Here is another rub. What if a specific society determines that it is immoral to personally switch moral codes via the above tactics (such as Islamic societies)? Is it really wrong for that person to choose, or is the society wrong? How would you make such a determination without some kind of morality based on something other than societies?
III – Implications of a god
ReplyDelete“With atheistic definitions, I believe in morality, and this implies absolutely nothing.”
With your definitions, humanity is directly implied to be god. The humanity-is-god implication can easily be seen in your response to the last conversation that we had regarding the moral argument for God.
“Caring for the elderly may hurt our society, but the effort I must spend now to be part of a society that does so is nothing compared to the value I gain when I am old”
What you are doing here is setting up collective humanity above the individual. Due to the fact that the collective is more important than the individual, the collective must be served first and foremost. This serving of the collective requires some personal sacrifice, but the promised reward from the collective for this sacrifice is great personal gain. Replace the above idea of “collective” with “god”. How is this any different from any old, pagan religion?
Humanists usually like to think of themselves as atheists, but they really are not. Humanism is another religion with a god. It is just a different god and is usually not called “god”. But for all intensive, practical purposes, it is a god. As long as the definition of atheism can be determined by its linguistic roots, humanism and atheism are incompatible. Humanism and atheism can only be reconciled if “atheism” is redefined to allow belief in non-supernatural gods such as humanity.
Perhaps now you can see the problem I have with some of your arguments. You are calling yourself an atheist, but you are using humanist arguments to support that morality-via-atheism. Perhaps you can also see now why I was so adamant before (and still am) about the fact that atheism (strictly defined as zero gods) leads only to nihilism. Zero-gods can go nowhere else. Every anti-nihilism argument you offered in our last conversation is a humanist argument not an atheist argument.
With zero-gods, there can be no morality. As soon as a moral code exists, this means that a god of some kind exists regardless of whether or not it is officially called a god. One only has to be perceptive enough to see what the god is.
Here we come one of the cruxes of the moral argument for God (or rather a god). It is impossible to have a moral code of any kind without one. The reasoning can be summed up as follows.
1. People have moral concepts.
ReplyDelete2. Moral concepts cannot exist without a god.
3. Therefore a god must exist.
Your line of reasoning in trying to prove an “atheistic” form of morality follows this perfectly. You can’t do it without making something god – in this case humanity. The above 1-3 does not necessarily get us to any specific god, but it gets us to some kind of god. The only alternative here is nihilism.
IV – Implications of God
The sub-argument to the above is:
4. People believe that there exists a moral concept that is absolute. – That is, people believe in at least one moral concept that is an unchangeable, universal law.
5. An absolute moral concept, having an unchangeable, law-like nature, cannot exist without an absolute, unchangeable god.
6. Therefore an absolute, unchangeable god must exist.
7. The final Christian assertion then is that the God of the Bible is the only god that satisfies the absolute requirements.
This argument is more difficult to work through, but it still works. Much of the difficulty is in whether or not 4 is accepted as true. I believe that while there may be some people who ideologically reject 4, they cannot and do not live that way, subtly proving that they really do believe in 4 regardless of whether they realize it and/or admit it. In other words, 4 can be believed based on an empirical basis. As a side note, any claim to reject 4 does not invalidate 1 through 3.
Whether or not a moral system meets the absolute, unchangeable criteria obviously takes examination of the moral system. My above examination of your “social contract” moral system finds the system lacking the force necessary to live up to 4 if 4 is what you are aiming at. Even if you are not aiming at living up to a level of unchangeable, absoluteness as stated in 4, though, I still think that your “social contract” fails to live up to even your own claims of qualified absoluteness that morality is “something that I can't change just because I feel like it.”
V – Everyone’s Moral Views Implying God’s Existence
“There is a difference between establishing factual claims that imply God's existence, and establishing that people believe things implying God's existence. If everyone's moral ideas imply God exists, one possibility remaining is that everyone's moral ideas are flawed… it's a very small leap for me to suggest that yes, perhaps everyone's moral views are wrong, but simply in a very different way than the one suggested by Total Depravity
Now wait a minute! Firstly, your whole if-God's-morality-is-at-least-similar-to-ours argument is offered as an “empirical argument”, but if humanity’s beliefs and actions imply God’s existence, you would reject this empirical argument? If we are God’s creation it would be only natural for everyone to demonstrate it on some level or another. Such a common belief would be evidence, even if not comprehensive proof, of God’s existence and that he created us. To reject the empirical argument by making a “small leap” to the idea that everyone’s moral views are wrong is rather uncharacteristic for you considering your propensity to like empirical arguments. Isn’t it a smaller leap to believe that God does exist? Do you have any reason to make your preferred “small leap” besides the fact that you just don’t want to believe in God? From the perspective you have offered it seems just as rational, perhaps even more rational, to make a leap of faith that God does exist than to make a leap of faith that he does not exist. Interestingly, it is a leap of faith either way, isn’t it? I guess atheistic humanists live by faith too.
Secondarily, in your post you are very eager to accept what humanity thinks as a basis for morality. Why can’t what humanity thinks be used as a basis for an argument for God? Why is it OK to use what humanity believes for one but not the other?
VI – Quantity of Pain
ReplyDelete“But God's morality is almost diametrically opposite to our own morality as evidenced by the problem of pain…As an empirical argument, the real issue isn't that pain and evil exist at all – the problem is that there is so much.”
VIa - Disease
“Suppose a person discovered a cure to every single disease in the world. Suppose they had the resources to deliver these cures to the people who need it, and they knew about the need. Suppose this could be done with very little effort. And yet they then did absolutely nothing about it. They just watched while people died from diseases because doing so helped them seek their own glory. If we rely on human intuitions about morality to tell us what morality is, we would call this person the most extreme kind of evil. This person is God.”
The problem with this problem-of-pain argument is that it subtly confuses “disease” with “pain”. Disease is a cause of pain. Pain is an effect. When a physician only administers painkillers to a patient, he is only treating a symptom of a problem, not the actual problem. Hence, the above analogy is not a problem-of-pain argument, but is rather a problem-of-root-causes-of-pain argument. Really it has to be. As you pointed out, we would not consider a physician “good” if he had the knowledge, ability, and resources to cure a disease, but didn’t. This still remains true even if the physician administered painkillers as the person was dying.
That said, this problem-of-root-causes-of-pain argument is a straw man argument against Christianity, since your phrase “And yet they then did absolutely nothing about it“ is a misrepresentation of Christianity on this point. Christ’s death and resurrection, which Christianity is based around, is for the purpose of addressing and curing the root cause of all disease and all pain, which is sin. Certainly, the cure which is offered is not an instantaneous quick-fix (from our perspective), hence pain, disease, and various other consequences of sin are not instantaneously removed either. But that is not proof that it is not a cure. As to the question of why God doesn’t apply the cure to everyone - just as ethical physicians respect the right of a person to refuse treatment, even to his or her own detriment, God also allows us the freedom to reject His cure, even to our own detriment. We are morally responsible for our own decisions at this point.
“We cannot reasonably speculate that diseases are needed to bring about some other greater good”
Again this is a subtle misrepresentation. Rom 8:28 says “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Diseases are not “needed” to bring about some other greater good. God works “all things” both good and bad, moral and immoral, “for the good of those who love Him”. There is no Biblically consistent reason for us not to work toward a cure for diseases. That said there is no good reason to expect a cure to diseases from God, either. After all if He quickly eliminated diseases which are a consequence of sin, why couldn’t we expect Him to quickly eliminate other consequences of sin – such as pain. At what point does our hedonism stop such that we say, “OK that’s enough pain elimination”? Any too-much-pain argument at least flirts with this reduce-to-zero problem, which would reduce the objection to “Why doesn’t God eliminate pain altogether?”
VIa – Parental Intervention
ReplyDeleteYou brought up a better sounding argument than the disease argument last time.
“To what degree should a parent intervene when their children are fighting? Surely it should not be absolutely always. To stop a conversation whenever the first hint of bickering started would not only be practically impossible, but this level of external control would not be desirable. However, if one kid pulls out a knife with the intent and ability to kill, no parent with the ability to stop the murder should choose not to.
But suppose a parent did just this and allowed one child to kill another knowing full well what was not being stopped. I wouldn't need a complete understand of the perfect balance between control and freedom to observe that the single change “intervene when someone's about to be killed” is an improvement. Would the defense of parental inaction that children need a degree of freedom be acceptable? Of course not. “
What if both children have rebelled and run away from home? Your example is of two children under the protection and authority of the parent and only attacking each other. What if they have rejected the protection and authority of the parent? Is the parent still at fault then? Sin is our rejection of God, not just our ill deeds to each other (which are more side effects of rejecting God). Rearrange your analogy such that both of the children hate their parent more than they hate each other; are running from their parent’s authority; and want to kill the parent even more than they want to kill each other, and you will have a slightly more accurate analogy to Christian beliefs.
Could a parent pursue a runaway child? Certainly. Should a parent pursue a runaway child? To a certain extent, yes. Should a parent expect the child to have a change of heart and stop running just because the parent lovingly pursued? Not necessarily. The child might respond positively, but the child would be very likely to rebel and run even more. Total depravity impacts the way that God loves us in this way. We cannot expect that if he chases us, forces us to be under his authority, and/or takes our knives away by force indefinitely that people will become fundamentally better. If God prevented all of us from killing each other by sheer force, we would likely just hate him even more. Besides that, we would probably also just find creative, hateful ways to spite each other and make each other miserable such that we would eventually want to kill ourselves. If God is going to make anybody’s life fundamentally better, he would have to do something to change people’s hearts, not just their actions. And that is exactly what he does for those who repent.
VIc – Total Depravity
The real difference between us on the quantity-of-pain issue is more a difference of presuppositions regarding how good or bad humanity is. Christians believe in an inherent sin nature in all human beings. C.H. Spurgeon put it this way “You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.” This does not mean that all men are as bad as they can be, but that all men have the potential to be as bad as they can be. As an empirical argument, why can’t the quantity of pain in the world be evidence of the incredible degree man’s sinful nature instead of evidence of God’s supposed inaction? The only reason why it becomes an argument against Christianity instead of for Christianity is because of the presupposition that inherent sin is either non-existent or else not as bad as the Bible says it is. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this is probably one of the primary reasons why you left Christianity – you don’t believe that your sin is as bad as the Bible says it is and/or you like your sin and don’t want to let it go. By the grace of God, I pray that you will realize how bad your sin really is, and how much you need deliverance.
I will be responding for real eventually, meaning within a couple weeks.
ReplyDeleteUnlike my first year out, I no longer have an insatiable desire for religious debate. It's nearly impossible to match the passion of a recent convert in either direction - this phase is now over for me. In the last four months, I've had only two posts that were real posts.
By my ad hoc definition of a "real" post (my "born again" post was a fail that I'm not counting), I had 31 in the first 12 months, so that means I'm 19% of the internet debater I used to be. And that's fairly representative of what's occupied my mind. I welcome this change. I'm not a "seeker" by any stretch of the imagination, so trying to move on with my life is something I see as a good thing. On other sites, I often got questions like "If God isn't real, why do you care so much?" I don't fully agree with the ideas behind the question, but they've got a point too.
A rational Christian should care more about evangelism than a rational atheist, and slowly I am starting to align with this. After all, if you are wrong and you die, well, you might have inspired more people to be wrong, but all things considered, you probably lived a life that was more enjoyable and more beneficial to other people that that of many, if not most, atheists. Hell isn't waiting for you, so this really is all things considered.
When I've responded to people when I didn't really want to, I've usually regretted my tone or just written things that were kind of stupid. As I actually know you from real life, I don't want to repeat that mistake with you.
I've probably written about one third of my real response, and finishing it right now would be a bad idea.
Jeffery,
ReplyDeleteTake your time. I took mine. Internet debates, while sometimes interesting and engaging, certainly can have their drawbacks. I know all too well how easy it is to write something regrettable in the wrong tone or kind of stupid. Been there. Done that. Not something I want to do again. If I have come across as offensive in the past, I apologize. It was not intentional.
I certainly am interested in evangelism. However, though God can use pretty much any form of communication for his purposes, I don't necessarily expect that blog posts will have massive converting effects on most people. If you get nothing else out of my responses, please understand this - I am still interested in what you think, hence I read your blog on occasion; and I am praying that God will reach you, hence my responses.
-Andrew
>Rather your choice of moral systems, and everyone else’s for that matter, boils down to a presupposition of where the logic starts. The presupposition is a leap of faith. I guess atheists live by faith too!
ReplyDeleteYep! In a world without a god, starting the logic at humanity is exactly as arbitrary as starting the logic at God is in a world where he exists. One difference is the level of certainty that we have about the existence of humanity as compared to the existence of God. Where we are the same is the grounding for our jumps from existence claims to moral claims – except my moral claims are not claims about objective reality.
This means that atheists don't have a monopoly on morality. Atheists aren't the only people who can justify using moral language, and weaknesses in theistic bases for morality are not a good argument against the existence of God. This is the implication of the realization that we are making parallel leaps of faith from existence claims to moral claims. I'm rather surprised that you think the parallelism helps your case, because I doubt that you are willing to make equivalent concessions. If you are, the moral argument is instantly dead.
>Can you give me an example of a fixed aspect of human nature?
This certainly is a conspicuously missing topic in my post. But it's omission was intentional.
There are two very different ways of making the moral argument. C. S. Lewis' way, and the way I've linked to in my post begin by establishing that people have many moral concepts in common. Sociopaths who don't hold to morality like the rest of us weaken the argument – Lewis recognizes this, and answers by pointing out that they are the exception. If there were lots of people who held to completely different moral ideas than we do, there would be no moral argument.
In symbolic terms:
A – humans have many moral concepts in common
B – Lewis' version of the moral argument is unsound
In my post, I take A for granted and show that A implies B. But A is an essential first step in the moral argument. Thus ~A implies B. Therefore B holds, even without A. I do actually hold A (although not very tightly), but I don't have to defend A to maintain my case for B.
>I believe that the moral argument for God (or at least a god) has merit because people always believe in “ought to” in some form or another, but I don’t agree that there is any specific “ought to” that can be universally agreed upon by all humanity.
This is a very different moral argument than Lewis'. That's not to say this makes it immediately flawed, but it should be noted that they are different. So if my post answers your argument poorly in places, that's because it's a very different argument. In fact, your argument depends on ~A, while Lewis' depends on A.
>That is, when one person in a society has changed their view and another hasn’t, who is right and who is wrong?
ReplyDeleteYou seem to be working hard to establish points that I've already conceded. It's relativity easy to construct cases where my morals can't say what is right. This is especially true when limited to the degree to which I've developed them here. To only slightly tweak my original post: “My moral system has this problem: where to start? ... It is reasonable to reject my view as a definitional cheat that avoids the real problem. And it is a cheat, save for the fact the I realize it and point it out myself. ... Moral dilemmas are inherent in my moral views because it implies absurdities and/or is not simply not livable. The idea that my moral ideas are incorrect is extremely plausible.”
But so what? It makes sense of the circumstances I face in my life. My goal was to describe how I thought about morality, and how this is other than some transcendent standard. I expect to have to think harder eventually, but it wasn't my goal to lay out a road map for life.
These weaknesses are already accounted for in my rebuttal. I've made a list of my debts and assets and I come out ahead, or at least even – pointing back at how much debt I have isn't all that enlightening. They have already been weighed in the scale.
Your moral critiques are relevant only to the extent that you can phrase it as an argument that God exists. (Which you go on to do.)
>With zero-gods, there can be no morality. As soon as a moral code exists, this means that a god of some kind exists regardless of whether or not it is officially called a god. One only has to be perceptive enough to see what the god is.
My position is that moral language makes sense even in the absence of a transcendent being. Your position is that if moral language makes sense, then either a transcendent being exists, or man is god. We'll, okay. Man is god. Although, I personally wouldn't use language that invites confusion like speaking of a “god” who existence is consistent with naturalism. In much clearer language, I see no reason to believe in a transcendent being, and I care about humanity.
To maintain the morals leads to a god argument, you have to define “god” in a way that could include “man.” Under more usual definitions, getting from a god to the Christian God is like flying a plane to the moon. Under you're definitions, it's like trying to drive a car to the moon – not even unsustainable progress has been made. I feel like you've just given away most of the moral argument. I'm struggling to even see where we disagree outside of semantics.
And similarly with your atheism leads to nihilism argument. What you're down to now, is that atheism leads to either nihilism or humanism. I'm fairly untroubled by this “dilemma.” All that's left to discuss is the appropriateness of the word “atheist.” But most people think of “a god” as a being that is more than physical, so I think that my language communicates much more clearly.
>1. People have moral concepts.
ReplyDelete>2. Moral concepts cannot exist without a god.
>3. Therefore a god must exist.
Under your definition, I'll go with it. A god exists. I'm not persuaded by the reasoning (namely 2), but I don't disagree with 3, so I see no need to answer it. Similarly, if you define “unicorn” to include the unicorns that don't have horns, then I believe in unicorns too. Fortunately, I'm not famous and I don't have to worry about little bits of this being quoted out of context in an apologetics book.
>4. People believe that there exists a moral concept that is absolute. – That is, people believe in at least one moral concept that is an unchangeable, universal law.
Christians are usually offended at Yahweh being called a genocidal control freak. The reason is that Christians think of God following a particular standard that is other than “whatever it is that God does.” So even Christians have the concept that God does not define goodness. Even if you profess to believe otherwise, you don't really. You really believe that God has moral concepts that transcend even him. How can God have this moral concept without a Higher God above him?
>5. An absolute moral concept, having an unchangeable, law-like nature, cannot exist without an absolute, unchangeable god.
You missed a step: 4b. Because people believe this, it must be true. And I want to hear you say it: “people believe X implies X is true” is a key step in your argument. The reason I want to hear you say it is because it is inconsistent with other things that you believe, which I suspect is the reason you are trying to avoid saying it.
“An absolute moral concept … cannot exist without … god.” You start the sentence thinking of a “concept” simply as something that people think. You end the sentence thinking of a “concept” as something that actually is true. Stop making me dig this key step out of your rhetoric – just because apologists constantly try to get away with it doesn't mean you can slip it past me. Rephrasing it and trying again won't help. When your input data is what people think, and your conclusion is a claim about a reality external to human brains, at some point you have to jump from what people think to a claim about external reality.
And it's even more of a jump if you look back at what you mean by “people believe X.” You don't mean people profess this to be true, as in fact, many affirm the opposite. The claim about what people believe is based on a psychoanalysis of what subconscious beliefs “really” motivate people. So in this context, what you really need for the argument to work is “I think that people's subconsciouses believe X, even though they explicit deny X, therefore X is true.”
>Secondarily, in your post you are very eager to accept what humanity thinks as a basis for morality. Why can’t what humanity thinks be used as a basis for an argument for God? Why is it OK to use what humanity believes for one but not the other?
Under Christian definitions of morality: I don't use what humanity thinks as a basis for morality.
Under my definition: I use what humanity thinks as a guide for … what humanity thinks. I fail to see a problem. Sure, it's not that profound, but I'm not being inconsistent as you are implying.
>That said, this problem-of-root-causes-of-pain argument is a straw man argument against Christianity, since your phrase “And yet they then did absolutely nothing about it“ is a misrepresentation of Christianity on this point. Christ’s death and resurrection ...
People actually suffer and die from disease. Not in a thought experiment, in reality. Only if this claim is false have I made a straw man argument.
Because people actually die, either God does nothing about it, or what he does is a failure. Also, if you take a full five point Calvinistic approach, Jesus didn't die for most of them, so I'm right on the money.
>You brought up a better sounding argument than the disease argument last time.
ReplyDeleteLOL. Granted!
>What if both children have rebelled and run away from home? …
One problem with children running away is that the parents literally lack the ability to control them. Unless God isn't omnipotent, the running away analogy breaks immediately. At some point, physical parents should either admit to themselves that they were bad parents and they need to give up, or that they did their best but they have finite ability and hence need to give up. I suspect you don't say the same of God. So the analogy breaks again. And in all cases, if the child is about to kill someone, if the parents have the ability to stop them, they should, even if it means prison. Even within your analogy, the parent's inaction does not make sense – unless you think of the parents as powerless.
>We cannot expect that if he chases us, forces us to be under his authority, and/or takes our knives away by force indefinitely that people will become fundamentally better.
Your answer would work better if we were talking about primarily self-destructive things like drugs and suicide. But with violence, even if the aggressor is beyond help, it makes sense to stop them, because the victim isn't. Not all people literally kill. Sometimes actual, literal killers target people who are not actual, literal killers. You would condemn a person who had the power to stop the killer at a small expense to themselves, but instead let the killer exercise their free will.
You don't condemn God because you believe in a God whose sense of morality is not similar to ours. Which isn't a contradiction – unless you insist that God's “goodness” means something similar to what is meant when we can a person good.
>God works “all things” both good and bad, moral and immoral, “for the good of those who love Him”.
Invisible promises are poor answers to visible problems. Sure, maybe I should just have faith, but in this case, the alternative to “faith” is calling things like I see them and like everyone else sees it too. Having faith that God works things for good is voluntary blindness.
Furthermore, what about those who don't love him? Most starving children and victims of disease have not been indoctrinated into Christianity. I guess God just hates them, not because of what man has willed, but because of God who hardens whom he desires. Once you trace the problem of pain back far enough, it always comes down to “does the clay ever say to the potter?” In other words, “thou shalt not think about Christianity” or “thou shalt not allow your mind to make the call.”
Apostasy is not primarily caused by intelligence, for everyone has the capacity to see through Christianity. Christians themselves know that it doesn't make sense. Apostasy is caused by a willingness to allow the conclusions of one's reasoning to influence what is ultimately believed.
>”You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.” This does not mean that all men are as bad as they can be, but that all men have the potential to be as bad as they can be.
ReplyDeleteLike with “god”, to maintain this position, you have to use words to mean something other than what they usually mean. When we call Hitler evil, we aren't talking about what he could have done. We are talking about what he did do. Even the Bible is consistent with this in many if not most places. Noah, Abraham, David, Cornelius, and hundreds of others are described in the Bible as “righteous,” despite this same potential for evil. When Sodom is torched, it's not because of “potential for evil,” but due to things they were actually doing. When Abraham asks about ten righteous people, he's not talking about people who lack this potential for evil. Ananias is not struck dead for a potential to do evil, but for actually doing it. Adam is not cast out of the garden for a potential for sin, but for sinning. So you can slander human nature. You can say that it always leads people to express a certain level of evil by means of their actions.
Furthermore, when you define how evil man is based on potential for evil, then this is a flaw in our nature preceding even the Fall, and not a consequence of Adam's or our choices. Someone's true potential for evil can never rise – were it to rise, the previous potential would have been false. Therefore, under your idea of what it is that makes people evil, you cannot slander just how bad of a creator God is. His works are worse than words can paint them. And that is the point of the Problem of Pain.
All theodicies have this problem. The state of man is not some unfortunate circumstance that God found himself in. If God exists and God is sovereign, then the world exists the way it does precisely because God wants it to be that way. People are bound for hell without hearing the Gospel and without possessing a nature that could allow the to choose God – it's this way because God wants it to be this way. It does no good to say God brings pain as a just reward for our potential for evil (or actual level of evil) when we are this way because God wants us to be this way.
God rigged the deck in Eden so that he would lose. If an all-powerful being wants to do that, well, sure, I can't stop him. But the outcome isn't something that was beyond his control, and pretending that God is a victim is a cheap PR campaign.
And finally, with this concept of what it means for man to be evil, you've lost all connection with the moral law that begins your case for God. People think of evil as certain actions, attitudes, desires, and decisions. This isn't just within people's subconscious beliefs – this is also what they say they think is evil. Now that we've reached Christian beliefs, they involve a moral claim about people's inherent guilt being the primary fault in humanity. This is a claim that people believe to be false. And yet “people believe X, therefore X is true” was an essential step in getting to god in the first place.
> The only reason why it becomes an argument against Christianity instead of for Christianity is because of the presupposition that inherent sin is either non-existent or else not as bad as the Bible says it is. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this is probably one of the primary reasons why you left Christianity
I'll bet lots of Christians don't think the Bible says inherent sin is as bad as you think the Bible says it is.
Calvinistic, theologically-phobic, charismatic, fideistic, moderate, or emerging, there is one belief that all Christians have in common. If only I had believed like them, I wouldn't have left, for theirs is the true faith, unlike all those Other Christians who are obviously either taking things to extremes or watering down the truth.
Maybe you cover this in a previous post (still working my way through), but I think you miss a really interesting area regarding the "evolution" of laws (both moral and concrete). "The Evolution of God" (Robert Wright) gives a very nice depiction of how gods and society evolved in the transformation from hunter-gather type societies to chieftans, then to city-states, etc., and Robert describes how religion and laws evolved through necessity. It is a good read, and worth your time (at least the first half of the book, the second half is weaker).
ReplyDeleteSeveral people have recommended The Evolution of God to me. I haven't read it yet, and I don't know that much about the history of the development of morality.
ReplyDeleteIt certainly could be a third independent way of rebutting the moral argument. But IMHO, it's much more complicated than needed. To learn about the history of morality, you can't be in denial of all civilizations before 2300 B.C., and of the idea that people were hunters/gatherers for any length of time. You must first accept the general arc of history before accepting an argument grounded in the minute details of history. So while it may be an entirely correct rebuttal, I don't see it breaking through evangelicals' intellectual defense mechanisms.
But of course, the history of morality is interesting far beyond just countering the moral argument. It will matter for the rest of humanity, while my arguments will only matter until Christianity evolves again.
>You missed a step: 4b. Because people believe this, it must be true. And I want to hear you say it: “people believe X implies X is true” is a key step in your argument… When your input data is what people think, and your conclusion is a claim about a reality external to human brains, at some point you have to jump from what people think to a claim about external reality.
ReplyDeleteOK. What is truth? Is truth nothing but natural fact, or can “truth” refer to some kind of transcendental reality? According to you, is there any kind of transcendental reality? There are only two possibilities here.
1) The metaphysical, supernatural world exists or (since it has not been disproven) at least could exist. Within this presuppositional context “truth” could refer to something objective that is transcendent to nature. Here the moral argument for God works very well as an empirical argument (as I have mentioned before). It is like proving gravity. We cannot prove the existence of gravity by actually observing the invisible force. Instead, we observe gravity’s repeated, predictable effects on visible nature. These observations are so repeatable and predictable that we can empirically draw conclusions about what we cannot see. In this process, these observations and conclusions must be drawn by multiple people, not just one erudite scientist, in order to call it a fact. Hence, for gravity, we are essentially requiring an “everybody believes it therefore it is true” step. At some point along this process we make a jump from what people think based on what they observe to a claim about an invisible reality.
I will grant that “people believe X implies X is true” does not work at all on a purely philosophical level. But on an empirical level, I see no problem with this at all, and an empirical argument is exactly what the moral argument is. I believe that at a minimum this should be considered scientifically respectable since an open, scientific mind allows for the possibility of the unproven.
2) The other possibility is pure naturalism – the supernatural world does not exist. Within this presuppositional context the moral argument for God does not work at all because it is trying to prove the existence of something that cannot exist (per the for-chosen presupposition). “People believe X implies X is true” in regard to morality is nothing but a philosophical statement and is therefore bogus.
Since this is your position, your objection is that we cannot make any claims about an external, supernatural, metaphysical reality based on natural phenomena (even empirically), so you are immune to any natural argument for God. Congratulations. That said, you are not immune because you have out-reasoned anyone or proven that God does not exist. Rather you have from the outset presupositionally excluded the possibility of God’s existence. In my opinion, this is not really a very respectable presupposition to be holding. It reminds me a lot of the old scientists who rejected the theory that the earth revolves around the sun, despite empirical evidence, because their presupositional worldview demanded that the sun revolve around the earth.
Andrew - Secondarily, in your post you are very eager to accept what humanity thinks as a basis for morality. Why can’t what humanity thinks be used as a basis for an argument for God? Why is it OK to use what humanity believes for one but not the other?
ReplyDeleteJeffery - Under Christian definitions of morality: I don't use what humanity thinks as a basis for morality.
Under my definition: I use what humanity thinks as a guide for … what humanity thinks. I fail to see a problem. Sure, it's not that profound, but I'm not being inconsistent as you are implying.
Jeffery - Yep! In a world without a god, starting the logic at humanity is exactly as arbitrary as starting the logic at God is in a world where he exists. One difference is the level of certainty that we have about the existence of humanity as compared to the existence of God. Where we are the same is the grounding for our jumps from existence claims to moral claims – except my moral claims are not claims about objective reality.
1) Under your definition of morality it sounds like a person would still be moral even if he actually did immoral things, just so long as he was thinking morally. Under any normal definition of morality, morality involves more than just thinking. It is a set of rules for what we objectively do and do not do; therefore using objective terms to talk about morality as objective truth is completely appropriate. When someone breaks a moral rule, regardless of which moral system is being used, people objectively asses the situation per the moral code and take objective actions as a result. This kind of scientific, objective usage of morality only works when we think of morality as objectively true and law-like. If we only think of morality as generic majority thought, morality looses its objective and law-like usefulness, therefore assessments must necessarily loose their firmness and certitude. Such a moral code becomes floppy and impotent. Your assessment of the genocide written about in Numbers is hardly a pensive “that might have been wrong” assessment. You have made very firm claims there; so I do not believe that you are not making objective claims.
2) You also use pain as a basis for morality, which is definitely something that can be objectively observed. So again, per your definitions, morality has some objective qualities to it.
3) So, from the presupposition that the supernatural exists or could exist, we are both making objective claims about reality when we talk about morality. In this presupposition, my question still stands. Why is it OK to use what humanity believes as a basis for one objective truth but not another? With the presupposition that the supernatural is possible, you are being inconsistent in adopting what humanity thinks as a basis for morality while not accepting what humanity thinks as a basis for the moral argument for God. Here the level of certainty about the existence humanity and what humanity thinks works just as much in my favor.
4) From the presupposition that the supernatural is not possible, you are not being inconsistent on the level of thinking “I use what humanity thinks as a guide for … what humanity thinks.” However, you are being inconsistent in a) using this as a basis to make firm, objective assessments about the morality of others and b) using this naturalist finding to make non-naturalist moral claims.
ReplyDelete4a) If your moral claims are not claims about objective reality, any moral assessments you make loose all potency, including your assessments about the Hitler and Israelites in Numbers. Perhaps what they did was good per the popular morality then. Also, your accusation that God is “a genocidal control freak” looses its validity and usefulness. Again, this would be very floppy and impotent morality.
4b) “I use what humanity thinks as a guide for … what humanity thinks.” - Within a pure naturalist perspective this cannot be rephrased humanity-exists-therefore-it-ought-to-exist-and-be-promoted, because within a pure naturalist perspective, “ought-to” is an impossibility. The only perspective a naturalist can consistently have is humanity-exists-therefore…humanity-exists. While this may seem consistent, it is not merely unprofound as you have called it; it is useless. Therefore using it for anything is inconsistent.
You are trying to get out of accepting the moral argument for God by appealing to humanity-exists-therefore-humanity-exists while at the same time using the philosophical benefits of humanity-exists-therefore-it-ought-to-exist-and-be-promoted. But these two come from different presuppositions. You can only hold one of these, not both.
>But so what? It makes sense of the circumstances I face in my life. My goal was to describe how I thought about morality, and how this is other than some transcendent standard. I expect to have to think harder eventually, but it wasn't my goal to lay out a road map for life.
ReplyDeleteA very selfish comment, to say the least. By the time Nietzsche’s and Hitler’s is-ought fallacy permeated the culture over time, it was indubitably too late for Nietzsche or Hitler to stop the social machine if they had suddenly decided to think harder. The same could be, and likely is, true of your is-ought starting point, too. The Nietzschean is-ought fallacy resulted in genocide supposedly for the benefit of society. For the benefit of society and the elimination/reduction of pain, are you prepared to genocidally kill whole groups of people because they have contracted a highly painful, absolutely incurable, highly contagious disease? For the benefit of society and the elimination/reduction of pain, would you be willing to actually pull the trigger? What about euthanasia? Insofar as your morality is based on pain, your morality lays the basis for mass euthanasia of the infirm.
This touches on the brutal, ironic, dark side of humanism. The “high” view of mankind results in the demotion of the sanctity of life and barbarisms that most people throughout history would call evil. Whereas a “low” view of mankind in relation to a high view of God, results in a belief in the sanctity of life because a higher power ordained that life, and only that higher power can ordain its end. You seem to think that your moral code eliminates genocide as a possibility, but it does not. In any moral code, as soon as good and evil are defined, genocide becomes possible.
>Christians are usually offended at Yahweh being called a genocidal control freak. The reason is that Christians think of God following a particular standard that is other than “whatever it is that God does.” So even Christians have the concept that God does not define goodness.
1) I have become content to use the word “genocide” in this response on a purely logical level and not an emotional one, but that was not true initially. Initially, I was offended by your calling God “a genocidal control freak”, but not because I abandoned my claim that God is the definition of good. Rather it was because words not only have literal meaning, but emotional meaning as well. If you are going to use a loaded phrase that is intentionally designed to evoke an emotional response, you should not confuse the emotional response with rational inconsistency.
2) Sure, there are individual Christians who are rationally inconsistent on this p0int, but does the inconsistency of an individual disprove Christianity as a whole? If it does, you have opened up a “proof” by which all systems can be disproven without actually examining the system itself.
>One problem with children running away is that the parents literally lack the ability to control them. Unless God isn't omnipotent, the running away analogy breaks immediately.
ReplyDeleteMost, if not all, analogies in regard to God break at some point due to the fact that we are using limited language to describe an infinite God. I have pointed out where your analogy breaks down and you have pointed out where mine breaks down. OK. The relevant point I was making, which you bypassed entirely, is the responsibility of man in regard to the problem of pain. It seems to me that your problem-of-pain argument completely ignores the responsibility of man while having tunnel-vision on the sovereignty of God.
From a humanist perspective, where does pain come from? I think it is at least somewhat fair to say that from a humanist perspective humans are responsible for most of the pain in the world. The difference then between this perspective and the Christian perspective that humans are responsible for all pain in the world is a relatively minor difference. The difference between our two systems in regard to the responsibility of man should likewise then be small.
The Bible teaches both the responsibility of man and the sovereignty of God. I don’t pretend to fully understand the paradox of how the two fit together, but I don’t see them as a contradiction. After all if God is sovereign and omnipotent then he can create responsibility.
In general, any attack on Christianity is a poor one if it focuses on one aspect of Christian doctrine and does not take all the various balances of Christian theology into consideration. If God created responsibility and humans are responsible for all evil and pain, then humans are responsible for the quantity of evil and pain in the world. Even when taking the sovereignty of God into consideration (without having tunnel-vision on it), the balanced consideration of the responsibility of man immediately weakens your quantity-of-pain argument by at least half strength. Considering that, by your own admission, the existence of some pain does not disprove the existence of God, your argument falls far short of what is necessary to be effective even per your own admission.
I see a parallel between your quantity-of-pain argument against God and a how-soon-my-car-broke-down argument against an automotive engineer. Suppose that a car owner decided to forgo oil changes and all other maintenance on his car and cheat on fuel by pouring cheap perfume and old liquor in the gas tank of his car (designed for regular gasoline). When the car breaks down at much less miles than it should have, does the owner have a right to blame the engineer for how soon it broke down? Could the designing engineer have foreseen the possibility of what would happen if someone skipped maintenance and used the wrong fuel? Certainly. Is he responsible for the car breaking down so soon because he didn’t design the car to resilient enough to such abuse? Not at all. It wasn’t his responsibility as soon as ownership changed hands. Since he wrote an owners manual describing proper use and care of the car, the engineer is even more off the hook. In fact, the engineer most likely did take such things into consideration to a practical degree, and what is really amazing is that the car didn’t break down sooner.
ReplyDeleteAny differences the engineer would have made to mitigate the possibility of the car breaking down so soon would have resulted in a bulky, impractical engine that would fall far short of perfect, good or even useful. If God had designed creation, including the responsibility of man, to fully or largely mitigate the fall or the effects of the fall, his original design would have been far less than perfect or practical. He could not have said “It is very good”. (I’ll grant in advance that this is an imperfect analogy, but the similarities should be visible enough.) The sovereignty of God does not make God morally responsible for evil and pain or for the quantity of evil and pain. Omnipotence means “all powerful”. It does not mean “always using all power”.
>Invisible promises are poor answers to visible problems.
Hey, you brought up the reference. All I did was point out that you used it out of context and that it therefore, consistent with the context in the Bible, was never intended to be an answer to your position. In other words, you brought up a “Biblical” answer to your position that is not in the Bible.
>Sure, maybe I should just have faith, but in this case, the alternative to “faith” is calling things like I see them…
ReplyDeleteNo. For both of us how we see things is based on our faith. The alternative is NOT between faith and no faith. The alternative is between two different faiths.
>Having faith that God works things for good is voluntary blindness.
No one is more blinded by his faith than one who doesn’t realize that he has it. A close runner up is one who knows but chooses to ignore it. Again, can you give me empirical proof for the belief that all beliefs must be empirically proven? Many, perhaps most, atheists are blissfully ignorant of the inconsistency of this presupposition which they hold so dear, or even the existence of it. Their trust (which is another word for faith) in it could just as easily be labeled voluntary blindness. Empiricists, like everyone, have faith and are presuppositionalists first - usually without realizing it. Going back to my fore mentioned measuring rod of internal consistency, empiricists have a real problem with this presuppositional faith claim.
When at some point in time you chose to trust in empiricism above all else, the fact that you would become an atheist was only a matter of time, even if it took several months. Your faith in empiricism (was/is it blind?) determined the way you would see things, and it still does. Please don’t pretend that your faith doesn’t exist while everyone else’s does. It is dishonest. Just admit it – you are a baptized member of the Church of Empiricism, and at the end of the day, the reason why you joined that church is faith.
I blatantly state that I have faith (trust) and flatly state who that faith is in, which makes it easy to paint a big target on that faith. But you have faith, too – and one that is absolutely no less problematic than believing in a God that we cannot see.
>Apostasy is caused by a willingness to allow the conclusions of one's reasoning to influence what is ultimately believed.
But where does one’s reasoning start? In a vacuum? Impossible. With some presupposition? Indubitably. Both belief and apostasy involve logic. The question is what presupposition, believed in by faith, the logic started with.
>Furthermore, what about those who don't love him? …I guess God just hates them, not because of what man has willed, but because of God who hardens whom he desires. Once you trace the problem of pain back far enough, it always comes down to “does the clay ever say to the potter?” In other words, “thou shalt not think about Christianity” or “thou shalt not allow your mind to make the call.”
“…does the clay ever say to the potter?” does not mean “thou shalt not think about Christianity…” The context of Romans 9 means “who are you to talk back to God after screwing things up so badly”. Again you are denying the impact of sin on man’s thinking.
God does harden those whom he desires, but in the sense that the engineer doesn’t do anything to fix the car that the owner messed up. The owner can be as irate as he wants to when his request for a new car is denied; the engineer owes the owner nothing. If this hardens the owner even more, it is hardly the engineer’s fault. What would be amazing is a gift of a new car to the owner at the expense of the engineer.
>“…Ananias is not struck dead for a potential to do evil, but for actually doing it… So you can slander human nature.”
ReplyDeleteThere is a difference between talking about the predatory nature of leopards and the actual kills leopards make. The same difference exists in talking about sinful human nature and actual sin committed by humans. You are jumping right past the concept of sin nature to talk about specific sin. Yes, we are actually punished according to our actual sins committed. My point in bringing up human nature was not to talk about punishment, but presuppositions. Your arguments fall apart completely if it is accepted that mankind is basically sinful. Your apostasy was not caused by reason alone but by reason that started with a lack of repentance.
>“…when you define how evil man is based on potential for evil, then this is a flaw in our nature preceding even the Fall, and not a consequence of Adam's or our choices.”
I was not defining how evil man is based on his potential. I was describing man’s fallen state. There is a big difference. If this was not clear, I apologize. I didn’t think I needed to define the Christian doctrine of sin nature for you.
> “The state of man is not some unfortunate circumstance that God found himself in. If God exists and God is sovereign, then the world exists the way it does precisely because God wants it to be that way.”
Are all things governed by your will the way you want them? Or are some things governed by your will the way you allow them to be? For things that you could micro-manage but allow to take a life of their own, do you consider yourself to be fully responsible for them when they fall apart? Or were there other factors that make you morally innocent? How about the leaky water pipe that I heard you had in your basement? Instead of allowing it to cause more and more destruction, you could have fixed the problem yourself, and then tried to bill your landlord. But doing so would have been outside of established order of responsibility. When God made man responsible, an order of responsibility was established. We get to reap the benefits of our own decisions and actions. That God allows evil to happen does not detract from his sovereignty or make God responsible for the evil.
>“But the outcome isn't something that was beyond his control, and pretending that God is a victim is a cheap PR campaign.”
Was the allowance of evil beyond God’s power to control? No. But no matter how significant the consequences, if God intervened it would have been outside the established order of responsibility. In this case (since we are talking about God), operating outside the established order of responsibility would be the same thing as eliminating the responsibility. Adam could have been prevented from sinning, but at the expense of the elimination of his responsibility, which would have lowered him to the level of an animal or a robot.
Jeffery - Suppose a person discovered a cure to every single disease in the world. Suppose they had the resources to deliver these cures to the people who need it, and they knew about the need. Suppose this could be done with very little effort. And yet they then did absolutely nothing about it. They just watched while people died from diseases because doing so helped them seek their own glory. If we rely on human intuitions about morality to tell us what morality is, we would call this person the most extreme kind of evil.
ReplyDeleteAndrew - That said, this problem-of-root-causes-of-pain argument is a straw man argument against Christianity, since your phrase “And yet they then did absolutely nothing about it“ is a misrepresentation of Christianity on this point. Christ’s death and resurrection ...
Jeffery - People actually suffer and die from disease. Not in a thought experiment, in reality. Only if this claim is false have I made a straw man argument. Because people actually die, either God does nothing about it, or what he does is a failure. Also, if you take a full five point Calvinistic approach, Jesus didn't die for most of them, so I'm right on the money.
1) “Absolutely nothing” are your key words that do result in a misrepresentation of Christianity. Christ’s death and resurrection which has begun the restoration of the world is something, whether you admit it or not. The only way you can rephrase your argument to keep it intact is to say that God does not do enough. At this stage my arguments regarding the responsibility of man and order of responsibility kick in.
2) A full five point Calvinistic approach not only includes particular atonement but also total depravity, which means that people do not want the cure that exists. Would you bother forcing a cure on someone knowing that they would just reject it and get themselves sick again? How many times would you force a cure on the same person(s) before giving up?
Include both the moral responsibility and the depravity of the sick people in your original analogy, and we get a much different story.
>“We cannot reasonably speculate that diseases are needed to bring about some other greater good – some diseases have been cured in the past and that turned out quite well.”
Again, presuppositions are everything here. Within the presupposition that the supernatural exists or could exist, positive consequences could be in the supernatural realm, which you are obviously not considering. If you were seriously evaluating the existence of God, your diseases argument would allow for this possibility. Within the presupposition that the supernatural does not exist, this disease argument at first seems to have some validity, until it is realized that the issue in question (does God exist) is being eliminated as a possibility even before the argument began.