One of the most common lines of attack against Christianity is that the Christian God is evil. It's not surprising this is the case, because to conclude someone is evil because they do evil things is a fairly unanswerable argument, and there are so many different ways of reaching this conclusion. You can reach it by thinking about Christian theology, especially the doctrine of hell. You can reach it by reading how the God of the Bible just hates some people before they are born. You can reach it by noticing that God cares primarily about people stroking his ego and comparatively little about people actually doing any of the kinds of things that we call good. You can reach it by reading the Bible, and seeing the genocide that God commanded, and the barbarisms that he takes care of himself. You can reach it by simply looking at how the world works, and at how much pain God could stop and chooses not to stop. And yet, somehow, Christians think they can portray their religion as nice and cuddly and loving, and largely seek to win converts in this way.
This is not merely incorrect. The inanity is so breathtaking that it's difficult to organize a coherent response. When a position has a flaw or two, it's not too hard to point it out. But here, the flaws are so severe, so unanswerable, and so pervasive that it's difficult to even convince myself that I'm not engaging minds irreversibly wrecked by religion. But if I let that stop me, I wouldn't have a blog on why I'm not a Christian. And if Christians were really so lost that reasoning can have no effect, I would not have made it out.
But before I lay bare the utter awfulness of Christianity, I wish to first explain what it is that I'm arguing. God is evil arguments are all but universally met with, “but what is your basis for the morality by which you judge Christianity to be evil?” This response usually has more to do with parroting apologists and just believing by faith that it actually engages the argument, than it does with actually thinking about what was said. With the arguments I make, responding like that will merely proclaim that you haven't taken the effort to understand or even read what I clearly state.
First of all, I am arguing that Christianity is evil as judged by Christians' morality. For instance, Christians say they value human life. The Bible and the Christian God do not. Therefore, Christians do not get their morality from the Bible. Christians say they value religious freedom. The Bible and the Christian God do not. Therefore, Christians do not get their morality from the Bible. Christians' theology completely and utterly fails to account for their ethics, therefore something is seriously wrong with either Christians' ethics or their theology.
The second thing I am arguing when I say Christianity is evil is that some parts of the Bible promote things that are evil as judged by the standards in other parts of the Bible. Therefore, one or both parts of the Bible are false, and not just about matters of history and science, but even about matters of morality. This is what happens when “God is evil here” is met with “but God is good here.” I absolutely agree that doing to your neighbor what you want done to you is good as judged by pretty much any standard of morality. But unless genocide and sadism are things you want done to you, seeking to answer the genocide and sadism in Christianity with nicer parts merely shows that the Bible contradicts itself. Nice and cuddly parts affect the degree to which Christianity is damaging, but it does nothing to answer the argument that Christianity is false.
The third thing I am doing is opposing the deceitful PR campaign more commonly known as “evangelism.” People are told that Jesus loves them. The truth is that Jesus loves people in much the same way that a stalker in a horror movie loves the woman he's harassing. When he's turned down, he'll turn nasty, hunt her down, and begin torturing her. But if only she hadn't rejected his love, she would have seen how loving he is! Nice and cuddly evangelism is claiming that God is good and loving in ways that are consistent with what people mean when they use the words good and loving to describe anything else. God is clearly not loving in the sense that evangelists are communicating. He is also not loving in a “not a tame lion” sense either. I am exposing the lie.
And fourth, when I point out that God is evil as judged by human moral intuitions, I am blocking the moral argument for the existence of God. The argument is premised on taking seriously our moral intuitions as a valid basis for learning about moral truth. One of many ways to parry this argument is to simply point out that our moral intuitions judge God to be evil. Therefore, either our moral intuitions are wrong, or God is evil. Either way, the moral argument fails. If you say that our moral intuitions are evidence for God, despite believing in a God that is the exact opposite of our moral intuitions, you are not merely being illogical. You are being dishonest. If this is your position, then you don't believe because of this moral evidence. You are believing in willful defiance of the very sort of evidence that you claim is the evidence for your beliefs.
God commanded genocide in the Bible. There are three possibilities: God didn't really do this, commanding genocide does not mean you are evil, or God is evil. The options are similar with the other barbarisms of evangelical Christianity. To believe the Bible, it's quite obvious that you must be an apologist for genocide, and trying to parry with “AH, AH, but what's your basis for morality!!” only serves as a proclamation of one's unwillingness to think about the four implications that I have listed.
It is true that Christians who fully bite the bullet and embrace the utter awfulness of their religion are immune to many of these arguments, and all of these arguments if they can explain how the nice parts of the Bible wouldn't really be nice if we understood them correctly and disowned the heretical moral argument for God. Fred Phelps nearly qualifies. Maybe God hates America. To say it would suck if true is not an argument that it is false. I fully recognize that I haven't debunked his religion with this post. But if you say or even think things like “Jesus loves you”, “God is love”, or something else emotionally equivalent, then this post does contradict your version of Christianity.
Another response that says absolutely nothing is that good is simply defined as what God's character is, therefore God being evil is logically impossible. The obvious problem here is that this is not all Christians and the Bible say about goodness. Being good and loving also means having specific loving intentions and performing certain loving actions, as described in the list in I Corinthians 13. Surely Christians would also claim that being a genocidal sadist is not good, and this implies that Christians are claiming that God is not a genocidal sadist. So when I argue that Christian beliefs mean that God is a genocidal sadist, this is a perfectly valid argument that Christian beliefs are false, regardless of how you twist the definition of good. Similarly, if you define “fuzzy” as “what alligators are like”, all that can be said against this position is that it's an abuse of language that facilitates misunderstanding. It's not false yet, because for a claim to be false, it must first be a claim. If you go further and claim that not only is the nature of alligators the definition of fuzziness, but fuzziness also means having lots of hair, this is a position that can easily be disproven by simply looking at an alligator. It's rather disingenuous to counter this argument by inquiring about the basis for my concept of fuzziness. (The analogy is due to Phil Stilwell.)
While it's not always easy the cut through the rhetorical wordplay of theologians to see precisely where the flaw is, it should be obvious that the “but what basis do you have morality” response is not even a response. It is a question completely unrelated the argument that God is evil, for in all four of the ways I've listed, I clearly state what standard of goodness I'm talking about and what the implications are if God is not good according to that standard. All I'm really saying is that when someone is called a genocidal sadist, any defense of their complete and perfect goodness will have to involve saying they are not a genocidal sadist. I've belabored this point for so long because Christians consistently try so hard to not understand it. Although, this is to be expected. Once it is granted that “human” reasoning about morality should be allowed to influence beliefs about God, Christianity is doomed.
The clearest way to see that the Christian God is evil is to look at the doctrine of hell. I have one suggestion I'd like to give God: make hell only last 100 years, after which the souls of the damned are snuffed out of existence. Or the time can very from an instant up to 100 years depending on how evil someone was. I'm certainly not saying this plan would make God good either, but I don't need to imagine what moral perfection would look like to see that God is less than perfect. If a single improvement exists, then God is not perfectly good. And if an infinitely massive improvement exists, then God is not even moderately good.
Imagine this: the world ended 100 years ago, and God is trying to decide what to do with all the souls. One of his options is for one billion people to continue enjoying eternal bliss, while 9 billion continue to experience eternal torture. Another option is for only the one billion to continue enjoying eternal bliss and for the others to no longer suffer. Christians believe that God will choose the first, and will continue to make this choice for every moment for all eternity.
Whenever someone makes a choice, it tells you something about what they want and what they value. God's choice tells us he wants some people to suffer. Or more precisely, what evangelicals believe God's choice will be tells us something about what they believe God wants and values. In other circumstances, such as not stopping suffering on earth, or commanding genocide, it could mean that God wants some beneficial result that comes from suffering more than he wants to stop the suffering. Not a great position, but at least there is some minor suffering that can be explained this way. But not with hell. The end is already known. The damned will not eventually become better people who no longer need the punishment, and there is no one watching them to receive moral instruction from seeing the consequences. In fact, many evangelicals believe in the mind-wipe theory of heaven, where God deletes all knowledge of the damned from the minds of people in heaven, so there is not even any room for making up ways that hell produces even marginal benefits for the people in heaven. The damned continue to suffer simply because God wants them to. It makes him happier than he would be if they were not suffering. It is difficult to image how a being could be more perfectly described as an infinitely cruel sadist.
(The mind-wipe theory comes from the verse that says there will be no tears in heaven. For people in heaven to be happy despite knowing about hell would require them to be utterly unfeeling and heartless. Evangelicals usually find it unimaginable that they could be so unfeeling and heartless in heaven, and instead imagine the goodness of a God who is equally unfeeling and heartless.)
This isn't something that should be “balanced out” with the nice things God does. With hell, we're talking about eternity for the majority of people. If one really must bend to the other, it's the nice things God does that should be balanced out with his eternal sadism.
Perhaps the most biblical answer is “Who are you, O man, who answers back at God?” Or to put it more practically, “Thou shalt not think about these things!” It's difficult to overstate the influence of this biblical defense of not allowing thinking to effect beliefs. I suspect this is the biggest reason for merely asking the questioner what their basis for morality is instead of thinking about the question. Rebuttals this poor usually originate not with apologists themselves, but with the Bible. To repeat: God is evil as judged by even what Christians will say they believe is good and evil, therefore Christians don't get their basis for morality from religion. The God of the Bible is evil as judged by other parts of the Bible, therefore one of both contradictory parts of the Bible is false. Evangelists' emotional arguments about how loving the Christian God is are based on lies. And the moral argument for God fails because it's premised on trusting the moral intuition that Christians cannot trust without judging God to be evil.
The standard Calvinistic “you're so evil that you deserve it” is no good here either. Look back at the argument: either God doesn't want people to suffer for eternity, and so they won't, or God wants them to suffer, and is a sadist by definition. Either explain how God isn't a sadist, or admit to worshiping a sadist. Just saying people deserve it is nothing more than an explanation of why sadism follows as a consequence of the Christian definition of goodness. And I certainly agree that it does.
A sickeningly weak way of defending the claim that people deserve hell is to hypothetically exaggerate how evil God is and say that it would still be “justice” if everyone went to hell. What's so amusing about this is that it sounds like a slippery slope argument that skeptics would come up with: “What's next? Soon you be saying that we would still owe worship to the justice of a God who does nothing but torture people.” But, no. This is an actual argument used by actual people who are trying to defend the justice of hell. This isn't one step further down the slippery slope. This is what Christians already believe.
I like to imagine what would happen if God threw everyone in hell, and then after a million years, God let Satan out and gave him the reins to the universe. Satan would be more frustrated than a monkey in a canned banana factory: What!? You're already torturing everyone? That was my idea! This really sucks, because there is no way for me to do anything evil, for the universe is already as bad as it could possibly be. Oh, I know what I can do! I can be rebellious, and defy the will of God! I'm going to just choose some people, not based on anything they have done, and create a heaven for them! That would be completely unjust, and that'll show God! Total depravity is not the inherent nature of man. It's choosing to worship the goodness of an all-sadistic God whose actions make him indistinguishable from Satan, and then pretending that evil means not joining in the worship of Satan.
The response of “I'm sorry it's like this, but it's still true” is worth something, but certainly not what apologists would like it to be worth. How could you be sorry that it's true? It's not an impersonal fact, like an atheist being sorry that a hurricane is about to hit. Hell is the way it is because a good God wants it to be like that. Even if, contra many Calvinists, God wants all people to be saved, hell is still eternal because God wants it to be eternal. If you believe that a good God chooses to make hell eternal, you must logically believe that in the balance of the good and bad results, it is good that hell is eternal. (Unless, of course, I'm building a straw man by using the words “logically” and “believe” in the same sentence.) When Christians are sorry it's true, this tells me that many Christians don't really believe their own theology, and are replacing it at select points with their compassion. So while being sorry hell is true does keep me from calling someone a sadist for believing in hell, it only dodges the criticism by backing down from Christian beliefs. You can only be sorry that hell is true to the extent that you don't really believe that a good God makes it or that you don't believe God has the power to make it work the way he wants.
Despite the way hell is clearly not consistent with the kinds of things Christians usually call good, still, Christians believe that “somehow” hell will still be good once we understand it better. It's a mystery, which is a euphemism for a belief that has been shown to be false. This reasoning about hell is why I can't believe Christians when they claim to be trusting that God has a plan with smaller things, like financial needs, or that Jesus really is coming quickly. You aren't trusting that God has a plan and will make things work out in the end. The reason I know this is that even when you know what the end is, you still try to apply the same reasoning and have faith that God will work things out, even when you already have an inflexible belief in precisely how it is that things will not be worked out. So I must conclude that you aren't really trusting God. You are living in rebellion against reality, and willfully refusing to allow facts, reason, or even a basic sense of decency to influence your beliefs.
Showing posts with label Morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morality. Show all posts
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Saturday, August 29, 2009
The Moral Argument – A Follow-Up
Courtesy of Google Analytics, I found a link to my post on the Moral Argument on Paul Wright's blog.
Paul paraphrased part of my argument as: “a God whose morality was similar to ours wouldn't allow there to be so much suffering in the world.” In response, one commenter wrote “Why not? We do...” This was probably tongue in cheek, but a valid point is raised. Our morality says we should care about a poor person in a third world country even at a small cost to us, but this small cost is sufficient to prevent us from helping them nearly as much as our morality says we should. And yet I talk about what a God who shares our morality would do. This shows there is something is wrong with at least the presentation of my argument – I will show that only the presentation is at fault.
My second rebuttal depends on the dichotomy “God's morality is/isn't similar to ours.” While these two cases cover Christianity, they do not cover all of theism. The implicit assumption in both cases is that God is living in a manner consistent with his own morality. Because this assumption is being made about God but not about people, it makes sense to say God necessarily would help if he could, despite the fact that we quite often don't help even in cases where mortals could solve the problem. I'm perfectly happy with the content of my arguments, I just need to specify that there are three cases: “God's morality isn't similar to ours,” “God's morality is similar to ours and God is moral by his own standards,” and a new case, “God's morality is similar to ours but God isn't moral by his own standards.”
This third option leads to perhaps the easiest of the rebuttals. If God is condemned by a set of standards, these standards must be above God. But now God is in a position directly analogous to the position people are in within the moral argument. So how can there be standards above God without a Higher God who wrote them? This rebuttal cannot be answered without undermining the moral argument. So the moral argument fails in all cases.
In case you are confused by how I can make this argument consistently, I'll put it in symbolic terms.
A: The moral argument is valid.
B: A God exists of the third kind, that is, God's morality is similar to ours but God isn't moral by his own standards.
I'm showing that A implies ~B. This is sufficient to refute the position A & B, and I can consistently evaluate the implications of A, even though I don't actually accept A. This doesn't specify which of A or B is false, but this is not needed to refute “I accept B because of A.”
This is perhaps a trivial point – I'm refuting a position that pretty much no one holds. But I expect my explanation of why it matters to actually be more important than the argument itself.
The outline of most cases for Christianity are: common knowledge implies God exists, given that God exists Jesus' Resurrection is plausible, given the Resurrection Christianity is plausible. But within this argument, games get played with the definition of “God.” The sort of God you get at the end is one who must resort to “who are you, O man, who answers back to God?” to “explain” how he is other than a cruel and unjust tyrant. This is very different from the sort of God imagined when the Moral Argument is being made.
So while the logical content of refuting the case for the God no one believes in is low, it blocks a common apologetic tactic – get any God you can in the door, even if its nature is directly opposite that of the Christian God, and then start turning it into the Christian God. While I object primarily to the use of the bait and switch, I will also argue against the bait itself. A God who is implicitly assumed to think about morality in much the same way that people think about morality is such common bait that it deserves a direct response.
Paul paraphrased part of my argument as: “a God whose morality was similar to ours wouldn't allow there to be so much suffering in the world.” In response, one commenter wrote “Why not? We do...” This was probably tongue in cheek, but a valid point is raised. Our morality says we should care about a poor person in a third world country even at a small cost to us, but this small cost is sufficient to prevent us from helping them nearly as much as our morality says we should. And yet I talk about what a God who shares our morality would do. This shows there is something is wrong with at least the presentation of my argument – I will show that only the presentation is at fault.
My second rebuttal depends on the dichotomy “God's morality is/isn't similar to ours.” While these two cases cover Christianity, they do not cover all of theism. The implicit assumption in both cases is that God is living in a manner consistent with his own morality. Because this assumption is being made about God but not about people, it makes sense to say God necessarily would help if he could, despite the fact that we quite often don't help even in cases where mortals could solve the problem. I'm perfectly happy with the content of my arguments, I just need to specify that there are three cases: “God's morality isn't similar to ours,” “God's morality is similar to ours and God is moral by his own standards,” and a new case, “God's morality is similar to ours but God isn't moral by his own standards.”
This third option leads to perhaps the easiest of the rebuttals. If God is condemned by a set of standards, these standards must be above God. But now God is in a position directly analogous to the position people are in within the moral argument. So how can there be standards above God without a Higher God who wrote them? This rebuttal cannot be answered without undermining the moral argument. So the moral argument fails in all cases.
In case you are confused by how I can make this argument consistently, I'll put it in symbolic terms.
A: The moral argument is valid.
B: A God exists of the third kind, that is, God's morality is similar to ours but God isn't moral by his own standards.
I'm showing that A implies ~B. This is sufficient to refute the position A & B, and I can consistently evaluate the implications of A, even though I don't actually accept A. This doesn't specify which of A or B is false, but this is not needed to refute “I accept B because of A.”
This is perhaps a trivial point – I'm refuting a position that pretty much no one holds. But I expect my explanation of why it matters to actually be more important than the argument itself.
The outline of most cases for Christianity are: common knowledge implies God exists, given that God exists Jesus' Resurrection is plausible, given the Resurrection Christianity is plausible. But within this argument, games get played with the definition of “God.” The sort of God you get at the end is one who must resort to “who are you, O man, who answers back to God?” to “explain” how he is other than a cruel and unjust tyrant. This is very different from the sort of God imagined when the Moral Argument is being made.
So while the logical content of refuting the case for the God no one believes in is low, it blocks a common apologetic tactic – get any God you can in the door, even if its nature is directly opposite that of the Christian God, and then start turning it into the Christian God. While I object primarily to the use of the bait and switch, I will also argue against the bait itself. A God who is implicitly assumed to think about morality in much the same way that people think about morality is such common bait that it deserves a direct response.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
The Moral Argument for the Existence of God
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.
“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.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Evolution and the Holocaust
One argument against evolution that comes up exasperating often is that evolution taken to its logical conclusion resulted in the Holocaust. This is rather like a gay person deciding to reject electromagnetic theory because they dislike the cultural impact of laws like “opposite charges attract.” It's only funny until millions of people believe it and vote accordingly.
This is such an inflammatory argument that it is rarely is given a passionless rebuttal. Shouting back at it is an enormous rhetorical mistake. All you have to blow on it a bit and the whole thing collapses marvelously.
To justify the Holocaust with evolution requires four different conclusions. First, it is logically possible that some races are better or more fit than other races. Second, Aryans are in fact superior and Jews are in fact inferior. Third, eugenics could effectively be used to advance evolution. Fourth, doing so is morally right. The Theory of Evolution fails to be at fault in all four steps.
Are Some Races Inferior?
The first issue is whether or not evolution creates a basis for racism by providing a basis for the possibility of one race being better than another. And it certainly does. It is logically possible that one race is more fit than another due to evolution.
However, different races are all part of the same species. So we're talking about microevolution. Creationists accept microevolution, so it makes absolutely no difference which view of origins you accept. Poodles and wolves are part of the same species and differ only due to microevolution – one certainty need not believe in their equality. Similarly, it might be the case that one race has better genes than another regardless of your theory of origins.
Which Races Are Inferior?
Evolutionary theory does not tell us which race is superior, or even if a superior race exists at all. If someone wants to argue that evolution led to the Holocaust, the least they could do is explain how evolution leads to a negative view of Jews or any of the other races that were targeted.
The hatred of the Jews had nothing to do with Darwin. It goes back to at least the Middle Ages and is due in large part to religious differences and anti-Jewish propaganda spread by the church. This component of the case for the Holocaust comes not from a distortion of evolution, but a distortion of Christianity.
Is Eugenics Effective?
How do you get rid of Jews? You kill them, or otherwise prevent them from reproducing. Any view of science sufficiently advanced to realize that Jewish children typically come from Jewish parents will reach this conclusion. Of course, I'm not talking about ethics, I'm only asking if a worldwide Holocaust would have accomplished Hitler's goal. The answer is yes. This hardly shows us the evils of believing that children usually look like their parents.
A harder question is if killing the weak and disabled would have a noticeable effect upon improving the human race's gene pool. Would it take three generations to see a difference? One thousand? Would it never help at all? But notice that the question here is about the effectiveness of a particular means of reducing the frequency of particular alleles so that a less fit homo sapiens population can become a more fit homo sapiens population. Or in other words, eugenics deals with microevolution, which is kind of funny, because creationists accept microevolution. Thus, it is not defenders of macroevolution who are inadvertently making the case for eugenics – we explicitly argue that evolution doesn't imply eugenics. The people whose rhetoric makes the case for eugenics are creationists.
Is Eugenics Morally Acceptable?
The alleged reason that evolution defends the morality of eugenics is that in evolution, life progresses through struggle and death. While there are some awkward moral issues if you believe that a loving God set it up to work this way, evolution itself does not say anything about the morality of the process. Evolution is a description of how the process works.
To argue that the efficacy of survival of the fittest somehow implies that a Darwinian society should be our goal is the “is-ought” fallacy. This is rather like telling the child of a rape victim that because their existence is good, they must believe rape to be morally acceptable. Or rather, it is like the child concluding that he wasn't conceived by means of rape because the moral implications of this would just be too terrible to be true. Evolution is merely a theory about the manner in which it happened – this isn't a moral claim, and only the barest amount of common sense is needed to see this.
Conclusion
I don't reject Christianity because Hitler also used religious language to defend hatred of the Jews. I don't even fault religion for Hitler's use of religious language – this would only be relevant if the Bible actually taught people to hate the Jews. The question is if Hitler's evolutionary case for the Holocaust was valid.
It is difficult to overstate just how bad the case for evolution leading to the Holocaust is, or just how badly it reflects on creationists' integrity. Ignorance is no excuse for falsely accusing others of harboring mass murderers. All you have to know to see through the argument is that different races are part of the same species, and thus the origin and extent of racial differences are questions for microevolution. I can more easily forgive the good-faith mistake of accepting many of creationists' other arguments, as they at least require some level of scientific knowledge to be refuted. But this takes next to nothing to be refuted and still it is a mainstream creationist argument. Just how gullible do creationists have to be for their leaders to be able to get away with this kind of thing for decades on end without an enormous backlash from within? Well, there actually is a backlash from within. We, the former creationists, are vilified for “trusting the reasoning of man.” When a group has catchphrases that antagonize people for the sin of thinking, there is no limit to what they will believe.
This is such an inflammatory argument that it is rarely is given a passionless rebuttal. Shouting back at it is an enormous rhetorical mistake. All you have to blow on it a bit and the whole thing collapses marvelously.
To justify the Holocaust with evolution requires four different conclusions. First, it is logically possible that some races are better or more fit than other races. Second, Aryans are in fact superior and Jews are in fact inferior. Third, eugenics could effectively be used to advance evolution. Fourth, doing so is morally right. The Theory of Evolution fails to be at fault in all four steps.
Are Some Races Inferior?
The first issue is whether or not evolution creates a basis for racism by providing a basis for the possibility of one race being better than another. And it certainly does. It is logically possible that one race is more fit than another due to evolution.
However, different races are all part of the same species. So we're talking about microevolution. Creationists accept microevolution, so it makes absolutely no difference which view of origins you accept. Poodles and wolves are part of the same species and differ only due to microevolution – one certainty need not believe in their equality. Similarly, it might be the case that one race has better genes than another regardless of your theory of origins.
Which Races Are Inferior?
Evolutionary theory does not tell us which race is superior, or even if a superior race exists at all. If someone wants to argue that evolution led to the Holocaust, the least they could do is explain how evolution leads to a negative view of Jews or any of the other races that were targeted.
The hatred of the Jews had nothing to do with Darwin. It goes back to at least the Middle Ages and is due in large part to religious differences and anti-Jewish propaganda spread by the church. This component of the case for the Holocaust comes not from a distortion of evolution, but a distortion of Christianity.
Is Eugenics Effective?
How do you get rid of Jews? You kill them, or otherwise prevent them from reproducing. Any view of science sufficiently advanced to realize that Jewish children typically come from Jewish parents will reach this conclusion. Of course, I'm not talking about ethics, I'm only asking if a worldwide Holocaust would have accomplished Hitler's goal. The answer is yes. This hardly shows us the evils of believing that children usually look like their parents.
A harder question is if killing the weak and disabled would have a noticeable effect upon improving the human race's gene pool. Would it take three generations to see a difference? One thousand? Would it never help at all? But notice that the question here is about the effectiveness of a particular means of reducing the frequency of particular alleles so that a less fit homo sapiens population can become a more fit homo sapiens population. Or in other words, eugenics deals with microevolution, which is kind of funny, because creationists accept microevolution. Thus, it is not defenders of macroevolution who are inadvertently making the case for eugenics – we explicitly argue that evolution doesn't imply eugenics. The people whose rhetoric makes the case for eugenics are creationists.
Is Eugenics Morally Acceptable?
The alleged reason that evolution defends the morality of eugenics is that in evolution, life progresses through struggle and death. While there are some awkward moral issues if you believe that a loving God set it up to work this way, evolution itself does not say anything about the morality of the process. Evolution is a description of how the process works.
To argue that the efficacy of survival of the fittest somehow implies that a Darwinian society should be our goal is the “is-ought” fallacy. This is rather like telling the child of a rape victim that because their existence is good, they must believe rape to be morally acceptable. Or rather, it is like the child concluding that he wasn't conceived by means of rape because the moral implications of this would just be too terrible to be true. Evolution is merely a theory about the manner in which it happened – this isn't a moral claim, and only the barest amount of common sense is needed to see this.
Conclusion
I don't reject Christianity because Hitler also used religious language to defend hatred of the Jews. I don't even fault religion for Hitler's use of religious language – this would only be relevant if the Bible actually taught people to hate the Jews. The question is if Hitler's evolutionary case for the Holocaust was valid.
It is difficult to overstate just how bad the case for evolution leading to the Holocaust is, or just how badly it reflects on creationists' integrity. Ignorance is no excuse for falsely accusing others of harboring mass murderers. All you have to know to see through the argument is that different races are part of the same species, and thus the origin and extent of racial differences are questions for microevolution. I can more easily forgive the good-faith mistake of accepting many of creationists' other arguments, as they at least require some level of scientific knowledge to be refuted. But this takes next to nothing to be refuted and still it is a mainstream creationist argument. Just how gullible do creationists have to be for their leaders to be able to get away with this kind of thing for decades on end without an enormous backlash from within? Well, there actually is a backlash from within. We, the former creationists, are vilified for “trusting the reasoning of man.” When a group has catchphrases that antagonize people for the sin of thinking, there is no limit to what they will believe.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
The Answers of C. S. Lewis: Genocide, Vessels of Wrath, and the Bible
The influence the moral argument against the Bible had on me was not so much as a positive argument itself, but rather as a rebuttal to the moral and anthropomorphic arguments for the existence of the Christian God. It was through Lewis that I learned about the moral argument for God, so I find his rebuttal quite interesting.
John Beversluis noticed an inconsistency in the way Lewis dealt with the problem of pain and wrote to him about it. The entirety of his reply follows:
"Dear Mr. Beversluis
"Yes. On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him 'good' and worshiping Him, is still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.
"To this some will reply 'ah, but we are fallen and don't recognize good when we see it.' But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen at all that. He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: 'Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?' -- 'What fault hath my people found in me?' And so on. Socrates' answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham's, Paley's) leads to an absurdity. If 'good' means 'what God wills' then to say 'God is good' can mean only 'God wills what he wills.' Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.
"But of course having said all this, we must apply it with fear and trembling. Some things which seem to us bad may be good. But we must not consult our consciences by trying to feel a thing good when it seems to us totally evil. We can only pray that if there is an invisible goodness hidden in such things, God, in His own good time will enable us to see it. If we need to. For perhaps sometimes God's answer might be What is that to thee?' The passage may not be 'addressed to our (your or my) condition' at all.
"I think we are v. much in agreement, aren't we?
"Yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis"
So Lewis would agree with me – the same moral arguments that get one to the existence of a God get one away from the concept of God as revealed in the Bible. Lewis got around this by holding some parts of the Bible to not be inspired.
This quotation comes from pages 295-296 of C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion by John Beversluis, a book which I highly recommend. As Beversluis writes in the introduction:
"C. S. Lewis needs to rescued: not only from the evils of excessive loyalty. His apologetic writings deserve better than cavalier rejection or uncritical acceptance. He believed that Christianity is not only true but rationally defensible, and he was willing to debate it with all comers. An open forum of this kind is rare. In the following chapters, I take up his challenge and reconstruct and critically examine his 'case for Christianity.'"
John Beversluis noticed an inconsistency in the way Lewis dealt with the problem of pain and wrote to him about it. The entirety of his reply follows:
"Dear Mr. Beversluis
"Yes. On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him 'good' and worshiping Him, is still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.
"To this some will reply 'ah, but we are fallen and don't recognize good when we see it.' But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen at all that. He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: 'Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?' -- 'What fault hath my people found in me?' And so on. Socrates' answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham's, Paley's) leads to an absurdity. If 'good' means 'what God wills' then to say 'God is good' can mean only 'God wills what he wills.' Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.
"But of course having said all this, we must apply it with fear and trembling. Some things which seem to us bad may be good. But we must not consult our consciences by trying to feel a thing good when it seems to us totally evil. We can only pray that if there is an invisible goodness hidden in such things, God, in His own good time will enable us to see it. If we need to. For perhaps sometimes God's answer might be What is that to thee?' The passage may not be 'addressed to our (your or my) condition' at all.
"I think we are v. much in agreement, aren't we?
"Yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis"
So Lewis would agree with me – the same moral arguments that get one to the existence of a God get one away from the concept of God as revealed in the Bible. Lewis got around this by holding some parts of the Bible to not be inspired.
This quotation comes from pages 295-296 of C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion by John Beversluis, a book which I highly recommend. As Beversluis writes in the introduction:
"C. S. Lewis needs to rescued: not only from the evils of excessive loyalty. His apologetic writings deserve better than cavalier rejection or uncritical acceptance. He believed that Christianity is not only true but rationally defensible, and he was willing to debate it with all comers. An open forum of this kind is rare. In the following chapters, I take up his challenge and reconstruct and critically examine his 'case for Christianity.'"
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Genocide, Vessels of Wrath, and the Bible
I have been asked multiple times what basis I have for morality without God. To this I freely admit that I have no basis for absolute morality. Common sense and playing by the rules of society get me pretty far concerning a pragmatic concept of morality, secular philosophers wiser than I get further still, but I fall short of what Christians at least think they have. It is certainly the case that something in me wants to believe that good and evil are absolutes. However, even were I to judge the truth of Christianity solely on whether it gives me the comfort of moral answers, I would still reject it.
Christianity theology easily answers the question of how an absolute standard could exist, but it raises questions regarding many of the immoral acts in the Bible. Before I give a specific example, first consider the criticisms people have of the morality of radical Moslems. They spread their beliefs not through persuasion, but by the sword. They believe that at times, they are the instruments of Allah who are commanded to execute his wrath on the infidels by wiping them out.
Numbers 31:1-3, 7, 9, 12, 14, 17-18: “Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 'Take full vengeance for the sons of Israel on the Midianites;' ... Moses spoke to the people, saying, 'Arm men from among you for the war, that they may go against Midian to execute the LORD'S vengeance on Midian.' ... So they made war against Midian, just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed every male. ... The sons of Israel captured the women of Midian and their little ones; ... They brought the captives and the prey and the spoil to Moses, ... Moses was angry with the officers of the army. And Moses said to them, ... 'kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.'”
Three thousand years later, the religion whose God ordered this slaughter would have evolved into a very different religion. This religion would include large segments who disbelieve in evolution because it justified the Holocaust - what would happen to society if everyone accepted a belief that condones genocide?
Psalm 34:8 - “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Psalms suggests that when we see the Lord is good, this is evidence that the Lord actually is good. What should we then conclude when we taste and see that the Lord is evil?
Hitler is not the only moral monster whom Christians berate for behaving in the manner in which God commanded Moses to act. If it were Allah rather than God commanding this, Christians would see this as evidence that Allah is evil. To believe this genocide was commanded by God and therefore righteous is no more reasonable than the religion of Al Qaeda. What if Bin Laden made the argument that Allah is a god of both peace and justice, but Islam is just going through its old testament? Maybe it's a spiritual blindness to our own sinfulness caused by our rejection of Allah that causes us to condemn 9/11. Who are we to judge what Allah has called righteous?
If the fact that the Midianites were evil and would cause trouble in the future was sufficient to justify these actions, then Hitler was not evil but merely uninformed in his belief that the Jews were evil and would cause trouble. Does the end justify the means?
Another defense that is used is so bad that I'm only repeating it because it is used in the Bible. In Romans 9:22-23: “What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory...” Consider the reverse argument: maybe God wants all people to suffer, but in order to make them appreciate how great their suffering is, he blesses a select few. This makes more sense than Paul's argument for several reasons. First, a minority is blessed, so it makes more sense to rationalize how a evil God could bless a few than the rationalize how a good God could condemn so many. Second, it is unusual for people to be blessed out of the sight of the suffering, but common for suffering to be invisible to the blessed. Thus, if God is using blessings to taunt the cursed, he's doing a fine job, while if he's using the suffering to help the blessed realize how blessed they are, he's wasting a lot of suffering.
One way around my second objection is the early Christian idea that hell is visible from heaven, and the people in heaven will rejoice at the sight of the wicked being tormented. In a very twisted way, this would explain how suffering makes known the riches of his glory. The best argument against this view of heaven is that the cruelty of it makes one's stomach turn. Similarly, my stomach turns at the idea of “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction.” Why trust the former reaction, but not the latter?
This is not merely me standing in judgment of God based on what I think is right, but me observing that God doesn't follow his own descriptions of what he is, and therefore concluding that either God lied or didn't inspire the Bible - Romans 9:20 and Job 40-41 deal with the former objection only. I don't think that Midianite children burning in hell agree with I John 4:8's descriptions of God as love, or that this disagreement should be attributed to their sin causing them to miss the big picture. Little kids can be pretty bratty, but the punishment doesn't match the crime. They have no inherent right to heaven, but do they not have a right to a real chance to miss eternal torment? Supposedly, the Lord is not willing that any should perish, but in the context of the Midianite children, that's rather like Hitler telling a Jew he wishes all men were Aryan.
Deuteronomy 10:17-19: “For the LORD your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who does not show partiality nor take a bribe. He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”
Where was this God when the Midianites were being slaughtered at His command? Revealing his love for his chosen people through these vessels of wrath prepared for destruction is perhaps the most extreme form of partiality imaginable.
Deuteronomy 24:16 - “Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin.”
I've always heard that one of the ways that the law points to God is that it reveals his justice. The justice of this verse is violated by God's actions. Why kill the children? Their death was not an unfortunate reality of war. They were captured, and then after thinking about it, slaughtered. It's not like the Israelites lacked the resources – they had no trouble providing for the virgin girls and saving them for whatever it is that victorious soldiers do with girls.
The one last argument that apologists grasp for is the “we don't know” card. Maybe the Bible doesn't teach with clarity that children passively accepting paganism go to hell. Maybe hell isn't eternal conscience torment. Maybe the children were vastly more wicked and more capable of choice than we suppose. To paraphrase Bertrand Russel, if someone opened a crate of oranges and found the top layer to be spoiled, they would not conclude that the bottom layer must be extra good to balance out the rottenness of the top. If the bottom cannot be inspected, the far better theory is that the entire crate is spoiled.
This is why I seek the truth about morality apart from Christianity. I don't want my basis for compassion to be mixed in with a basis for genocide. I'll take not knowing why or if Hitler's genocide was absolutely wrong over knowing for certain that Moses' genocide was absolutely right.
(By the way, this argument was not that significant to my change of position. It made a difference not as its own argument, but as a counter-point to the moral and anthropologic arguments for the existence of God. Neither of those two can persuade me as long as I consider them to be weaker than the genocide argument against Christianity, or more generally, the Problem of Pain.)
Christianity theology easily answers the question of how an absolute standard could exist, but it raises questions regarding many of the immoral acts in the Bible. Before I give a specific example, first consider the criticisms people have of the morality of radical Moslems. They spread their beliefs not through persuasion, but by the sword. They believe that at times, they are the instruments of Allah who are commanded to execute his wrath on the infidels by wiping them out.
Numbers 31:1-3, 7, 9, 12, 14, 17-18: “Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 'Take full vengeance for the sons of Israel on the Midianites;' ... Moses spoke to the people, saying, 'Arm men from among you for the war, that they may go against Midian to execute the LORD'S vengeance on Midian.' ... So they made war against Midian, just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed every male. ... The sons of Israel captured the women of Midian and their little ones; ... They brought the captives and the prey and the spoil to Moses, ... Moses was angry with the officers of the army. And Moses said to them, ... 'kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.'”
Three thousand years later, the religion whose God ordered this slaughter would have evolved into a very different religion. This religion would include large segments who disbelieve in evolution because it justified the Holocaust - what would happen to society if everyone accepted a belief that condones genocide?
Psalm 34:8 - “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Psalms suggests that when we see the Lord is good, this is evidence that the Lord actually is good. What should we then conclude when we taste and see that the Lord is evil?
Hitler is not the only moral monster whom Christians berate for behaving in the manner in which God commanded Moses to act. If it were Allah rather than God commanding this, Christians would see this as evidence that Allah is evil. To believe this genocide was commanded by God and therefore righteous is no more reasonable than the religion of Al Qaeda. What if Bin Laden made the argument that Allah is a god of both peace and justice, but Islam is just going through its old testament? Maybe it's a spiritual blindness to our own sinfulness caused by our rejection of Allah that causes us to condemn 9/11. Who are we to judge what Allah has called righteous?
If the fact that the Midianites were evil and would cause trouble in the future was sufficient to justify these actions, then Hitler was not evil but merely uninformed in his belief that the Jews were evil and would cause trouble. Does the end justify the means?
Another defense that is used is so bad that I'm only repeating it because it is used in the Bible. In Romans 9:22-23: “What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory...” Consider the reverse argument: maybe God wants all people to suffer, but in order to make them appreciate how great their suffering is, he blesses a select few. This makes more sense than Paul's argument for several reasons. First, a minority is blessed, so it makes more sense to rationalize how a evil God could bless a few than the rationalize how a good God could condemn so many. Second, it is unusual for people to be blessed out of the sight of the suffering, but common for suffering to be invisible to the blessed. Thus, if God is using blessings to taunt the cursed, he's doing a fine job, while if he's using the suffering to help the blessed realize how blessed they are, he's wasting a lot of suffering.
One way around my second objection is the early Christian idea that hell is visible from heaven, and the people in heaven will rejoice at the sight of the wicked being tormented. In a very twisted way, this would explain how suffering makes known the riches of his glory. The best argument against this view of heaven is that the cruelty of it makes one's stomach turn. Similarly, my stomach turns at the idea of “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction.” Why trust the former reaction, but not the latter?
This is not merely me standing in judgment of God based on what I think is right, but me observing that God doesn't follow his own descriptions of what he is, and therefore concluding that either God lied or didn't inspire the Bible - Romans 9:20 and Job 40-41 deal with the former objection only. I don't think that Midianite children burning in hell agree with I John 4:8's descriptions of God as love, or that this disagreement should be attributed to their sin causing them to miss the big picture. Little kids can be pretty bratty, but the punishment doesn't match the crime. They have no inherent right to heaven, but do they not have a right to a real chance to miss eternal torment? Supposedly, the Lord is not willing that any should perish, but in the context of the Midianite children, that's rather like Hitler telling a Jew he wishes all men were Aryan.
Deuteronomy 10:17-19: “For the LORD your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who does not show partiality nor take a bribe. He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”
Where was this God when the Midianites were being slaughtered at His command? Revealing his love for his chosen people through these vessels of wrath prepared for destruction is perhaps the most extreme form of partiality imaginable.
Deuteronomy 24:16 - “Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin.”
I've always heard that one of the ways that the law points to God is that it reveals his justice. The justice of this verse is violated by God's actions. Why kill the children? Their death was not an unfortunate reality of war. They were captured, and then after thinking about it, slaughtered. It's not like the Israelites lacked the resources – they had no trouble providing for the virgin girls and saving them for whatever it is that victorious soldiers do with girls.
The one last argument that apologists grasp for is the “we don't know” card. Maybe the Bible doesn't teach with clarity that children passively accepting paganism go to hell. Maybe hell isn't eternal conscience torment. Maybe the children were vastly more wicked and more capable of choice than we suppose. To paraphrase Bertrand Russel, if someone opened a crate of oranges and found the top layer to be spoiled, they would not conclude that the bottom layer must be extra good to balance out the rottenness of the top. If the bottom cannot be inspected, the far better theory is that the entire crate is spoiled.
This is why I seek the truth about morality apart from Christianity. I don't want my basis for compassion to be mixed in with a basis for genocide. I'll take not knowing why or if Hitler's genocide was absolutely wrong over knowing for certain that Moses' genocide was absolutely right.
(By the way, this argument was not that significant to my change of position. It made a difference not as its own argument, but as a counter-point to the moral and anthropologic arguments for the existence of God. Neither of those two can persuade me as long as I consider them to be weaker than the genocide argument against Christianity, or more generally, the Problem of Pain.)
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