The Moral Argument, Part 1
“Is what is pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved?” This was an unsettling enquiry for our world’s first democratic society. Equilibrium was restored through nothing short of Socrates’ execution. But today, this is a question warmly embraced by the ambassadors of heaven. The answer is now obvious: because it is loved.
To put it in more fashionable terms: a human action is moral only because God thinks it moral. And God is entitled to his opinions on this subject. His own immutable triune personhood is the very fount and standard of all we can rightfully call good, right, beautiful and just. The Almighty has, as the epistemologists say, “special access” to the relevant facts.
No matter what the growing body of evidence suggests about the relation between morality and religion – no matter how horrible God’s character might at times seem to be, how harsh his dictates, how petty and arbitrary his rule, cruel his command of exclusion, condemnation, and genocide – the debate is over as soon as it begins: religion provides the only sufficient standard for morality. Sure, God ordered his chosen people to slaughter all the unarmed women and children in a non-threatening neighboring community. This is of absolutely no consequence to issues of morality; without this God, there would be no such thing as right and wrong anyway.
Anti-theist Christopher Hitchens winces and then stares knowingly at this new confident Euthypro; with gate relaxed, his cheeks droop and swagger with defiance. With his own brand of cavalier authority, Hitchens then pronounces the truth that any half-wit mammal already knows: morality is “innate.” “I just don’t see what the big deal is,” Hitchens retorted while interviewed with Douglas Wilson on CBN.
Well, is there a big deal? This is one question I want to explore. Does the non-theist have a basis for a robust moral claim? And while we are enquiring: Does the theist have a basis for a robust moral claim as he or she supposes? And a third question arises: even if we were to grant a moral claim to the non-theist, what then do we do with Hitchen’s ferocious pronouncements and censorial judgments against the immorality of the Christian faith? The inescapability of solidarity in human communities is one thing; the new atheism’s sermonic roasting of the poor Christian’s conscience is another. On the face of it, this at least seems to be a big deal.
Canon Press has recently published a debate between Wilson and Hitchens, 
also web published at Christianity Today. As any good professing presuppositionalist would do, Wilson centers the debate on a neo-Van Tillian version of the moral argument. I plan to offer an analysis of this debate and in time get on to seeking some answers for the questions above. For now, I want to challenge Hitchens’ elegant claim that morality is simply “innate.”
This claim reminded me of Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People. During the time of my monastic career in the Kirk, Peter Leithart assigned Turnbull’s book as mandatory reading for his year-long theology class at New St. Andrews College. Systematic theology, Leithart explained, does not do as good a job as Turnbull’s anthropology in illuminating the true nature of sin.
Turnbull lived among a small group of “mountain people”, called the ‘Ik’, for two years in the mountains separating northern Uganda, Sudan and Kenya. The Ik once roamed as nomadic bands of hunters and gatherers, but the government forced them into permanent farming settlements on the mountain plateaus. This upheaval of their traditional way of life, and the brutal famine that inevitably followed, provided a sinister situation, and in a natural way, the Ik become an utterly non-social, selfish, and deceitful people. However, Turnbull observed the ’solidarity’ – to use a favorite word of Hitchens’ – among the Ik that helped them survive, but a solidarity that was completely devoid of anything we would call ‘morality’. Turnbull explains, “this seemed to strike hard at the assumption that there are such things as basic human values, at the very notion of virtue, of goodness even . . . biologically it made good sense” (131).
Turnbull spoke beyond the language of the philosopher. As an on-the-ground anthropologist, he provides some narrative observations of this quandary. Here is one:
Hunger was indeed more sever than I knew, and the children were the next to go. It was all quite impersonal – even to me, in most cases, since I had been immunized by the Ik themselves against sorrow on their behalf. But Adupa was an exception. Her stomach grew more and more distended, and her legs and arms more spindly. Her madness was such that she did not know just how vicious humans could be, particularly her playmates. She was older than they, and more tolerant. That too was a madness in an Icien world. Even worse, she thought that parents were for loving, for giving as well as receiving. Her parents were not given to fantasies, and they had two other children, a boy and a girl who were perfectly normal, so they ignored Adupa, except when she brought them food that she had scrounged from somewhere. They snatched that quickly enough. But when she came for shelter they drove her out, and when she came because she was hungry they laughed that Icien laugh, as if she had made them happy.
Partly through her madness, and partly because she was nearly dead anyway, her reactions became slower and slower. When she managed to find food – fruit peels, skins, bits of bone, half-eaten berries, whatever – she held it in her hand and looked at it with wonder and delight, savoring its taste before she at it. Her playmates caught on quickly, and used to watch her wondering around, and even put tid-bits in her way, and watched her simple drawn little face wrinkle in a smile as she looked at the food and savored it while it was yet in her hand. Then as she raised her hand to her mouth they set on her with cries of excitement, fun and laughter, beat her savagely over the head and left her. But that is not how she died. I took to feeding her, which is probably the cruelest thing I could have done, a gross selfishness on my part to try and salve and save, indeed, my own rapidly disappearing conscience. I had to protect her, physically, as I fed her. But the others would beat her anyway, and Adupa cried, not because of the pain in her body, but because of the pain she felt at that great, vast empty wasteland where love should have been.
It was that that killed her. She demanded that her parents love her. She kept going back to their compound, almost next to Atum’s and the closest to my own. Finally they took her in, and Adupa was happy and stopped crying. She stopped crying forever, because her parents went away and closed the asak behind tight behind them, so tight that weak little Adupa could never have moved it if she had tried. But I doubt that she even thought of trying. She waited for them to come back with the food they promised her. . . . her parents took what was left of her and threw it out, as one does the riper garbage, a good distance away (131-132).
Given the many descriptions provided by Turnbull, it seems as though the Ik scavenged for food much like a family of Meerkats, always teetering on the brink of death as they go farther and farther every day in search for sustenance. Although, a hungry band of Meerkats is still a good deal more social and caring than the Ik had become (you can see the ongoing research of Meerkats here). Turnbull likened the Ik to a plague of termites.
Adupa felt emotion only because she truly was ‘mad’; she was a bit physically and cognitively deformed. With moral inaptitude she wrongly expected a love that “should have been.” The mechanism of selection that we owe our moral minds to will need to weed out an Adupa. She could not quickly adapt to the more natural environment of ancient, surviving humanity. Not only did her genetic deformity permit her to feel dehabilitating emotional pain, she was incapable of relating to others in her social group in a way that encouraged their survival – physical and emotional – as well as hers.
On my view, anthropology provides the most important research available to us on the subject of morality and religion. For this reason, I can appreciate the profound work Hitchens has done investigating the relationship between religion and violence in up to 60 different countries over the course of decades. But on Hitchen’s own Darwinian terms and this one small glimpse into the humanity of the Ik, I would have to question the easy claim – one arising from rhetorical necessity rather than Hitchens’ own anthropological experience – that morality is just innate.
Turnbull’s observation again: “this seemed to strike hard at the assumption that there are such things as basic human values, at the very notion of virtue, of goodness even . . . biologically it made good sense.”
Posted by metzler on Saturday, February 28, 2009, at 5:32 pm.
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I guess I would say, morality is innate in some form, but it has to be more than innate in order to be morality at all. This from a non-philosopher.
And welcome back to blogging. I’ve viewed some of your other pages on this site, and am glad for the time you had at Cardiff-By-The-Sea. I also was glad to have read the story of your life up to this point.
Comment by Lynn — March 1, 2009 @ 4:03 pm
Thanks for the note Lynn. I recall the ballanced blogging you used to do back in the day; looks like you are still at it – keeping up with those Baylys too. Would you mind if I put a link to your site under ‘Story’?
Comment by metzler — March 1, 2009 @ 5:39 pm
As a non-theist, I think the central problem with this conversation is that when a theist and a non-theist say “morality” they’re talking about different things. You define morality in terms of what your deity tells you morality is; non-theists define it in utilitarian terms about what is necessary for the human species to survive and prosper. (I don’t need to believe in any higher power to know that no culture could long survive if murder and theft were considered acceptable behavior.)
So when you say that morality is a theological construct, you’re right only because that’s how you’ve defined morality, which means you’re really talking in circles. That doesn’t mean that those of us who live in a godless universe can’t understand that there are perfectly utilitarian reasons for suppressing lying, cheating and stealing, and if that makes morality purely a social construct, well, that’s life. Plus we’ve looked at the practical effects of biblical morality and we’re not impressed. Given human nature our practical results may not turn out to be any better, but they sure couldn’t turn out any worse.
Comment by Jonathan Roberts — March 1, 2009 @ 6:04 pm
Jonathon,
I think you make some good points. I agree with you about the problem of making morality a theological construct. I am neither for Hitchens or The Theologian on this one. I am more comfortable with Sam Harris’ emphasis on the necessity of empathy. I am not comfortable with law-code or divine command notions of morality or with utilitarianism – however useful this may be for a public policy version of morality.
I am also inclined to think that our common ground feelings towards slavery and individual freedom are central to questions of morality, and these feelings seem to be evolving over time.
But I wonder what your interpretation of Turnbull’s story would be. It is interesting that the Ik were not ‘moral’ in a typical sense of the word, and yet their lying and thievery was never tolerated as explicitly ‘acceptable’. And they were not murders; they had no respect for life, and therefore – I presume you would grant – they were not ‘moral’, but they were not inclined to take another’s life. Adultery was an entirely different matter; they would in the past allegedly burn people alive for committing adultery, but when Turnbull arrived, sex with anyone was considered perfectly acceptable. Much to ponder . . .
Comment by metzler — March 1, 2009 @ 6:28 pm
I don’t think Turnbull’s example proves that morality is not innate. The Ik were in a particular situation that was very abnormal in one sense. Turnbull was at the right time and the right place to witness extreme circumstances. But in another sense, their situation is very common. Consider what happened to the American Indians.
Comment by Andrea Metzler — March 1, 2009 @ 8:52 pm
Michael, two things.
First of all, the Ik are living under artificial conditions — the government ended their traditional way of life and imposed a new way of life upon them, and so how they behave now is not necessarily how they would have behaved left to themselves. I strongly suspect, without actually knowing, that they did things differently back when they were making their own societal choices.
Second, the artificial conditions under which they’re living have existed for too short a time frame to draw any real, long-term conclusions. A century or two from now they may be extinct, they may have found better ways to adapt, they may be living under a different regime that allows them to return to their traditional way of life.
However, even if all of those unanswered questions break in the direction you suggest, I would then view them as a vestigal society (which term I think I may have just coined). What I mean by that term is that it isn’t uncommon at all for organisms, and societies of organisms, to carry with them the remnants of an earlier era. Thus, humans have tail bones (and muscles to wag the tails we no longer have), even though we no longer have tails, and haven’t for a very long time.
The type of morality the Ik demonstrate was practiced by all humanoids as we were emerging from a previous stage of development. Most humans and human societies moved past it — we evolved socially. For whatever reason, the Ik didn’t. It’s possible for an organism, and a society, to remain straddled with a trait that used to be desirable but no longer is. Such organisms and societies may hold on, but they usually don’t do very well.
Comment by Jonathan Roberts — March 1, 2009 @ 8:53 pm
Jonathan,
Excellent thoughts. You are right, the Ik are living under artificial conditions. They were very ‘moral’ before their situation drastically changed. I think we are in agreement that what we see with the Ik is a primitive form of society – ‘vestigal society’ seems like an apt phrase to me. And I agree that not much could be deduced from this anthropological discovery on a macro level.
However, please permit me to treat this discovery more along the lines of an experiment. We could have taken a group of Americans and drastically altered their situation in calculated ways and then observe from a distance with pencil in hand – like with the Stanford Prison Experiment. I would not be surprised if the Bush administration conducted such experiments (ahem), but in principle, ethics does not permit us to do this. But Turnbull found the Ik much like a neuroscientist finds an alive but damaged brain. And what he discovered, suggests, in my opinion, that morality is not ‘innate’ in the biological sense.
But it seems you might agree with this; this would be cultural evolution, and cultural evolution is in a very strong sense not ‘innate’ at all it seems to me, in the way a ‘meme’ is not innate. But it also appears that Hitchens might be comfortable with this, given the way he is so fascinated by the way the behavior of pigs change when they are taken from their muddy pins and put into a more natural, dispersed, and clean situation (god is not Great). (I think all this supports the case for Situationism .)
Yes? No?
Comment by metzler — March 2, 2009 @ 11:29 am
I think the Stanford prison experiment shows what people will do under extreme circumstances. You may have heard the joke about the man and woman who were talking at a party. He asked her if she’d sleep with him for a million dollars. She said for a million dollars she probably would. He then said, what about for fifty dollars. She responded, What do you think I am, a whore? To which he responded, “Actually, we’ve already established that; now we’re just dickering over the price.”
I’ve never found that joke terribly persuasive, because I’m not sure it’s fair to judge people by what they do under extreme circumstances (both favorable and unfavorable circumstances; there can be extremes at either end). I wouldn’t kill someone for a million dollars, but then I’m gainfully employed with no dependants still at home and eating very well. If I had children who were crying because they were hungry and I couldn’t find a job, well, I’d like to think I still wouldn’t but that may be wishful thinking. Everyone has a breaking point, and is it really a fair test to push someone past their breaking point and then say gotcha?
So to a point I believe in situationalism, but only to a point. I believe in objective morality if by objective morality you mean behavior that at most times and places fosters human growth. And I also think that while sometimes the rules do need to be bent, that should be a last resort and not a first resort — that extreme situations can and do occur is not an excuse to ditch morality whenever it becomes inconvenient.
And something tells me I just went off on a ramble of my own without answering your question. Did I? And further, something tells me we may not be that far apart. Am I right?
Comment by Jonathan Roberts — March 2, 2009 @ 11:59 am
Dear Andrea (my wife . . .still lives with me too),
We can discuss this over some wine tonight. However, since ‘you have forced yourself into a world’ where my patriarchic methods of control are greatly limited, I will have to seek an argumentative reply to what is, granted, a good point.
You write:
I agree that this is no ‘proof’ in any strong sense of the word. A ’strong suggestion’ perhaps. And granted as well, the extreme, non-natural situation does nothing to show that there is nothing fundamental about morality in human culture, generally speaking. My concern is over why the Ik were able to so quickly adapt in ways that “biologically made sense”, while it took someone ‘mad’ to exhibit what we might consider to be so fundamental to morality and to survival as social creatures. It seems like morality, goodness – whatever – is a form of culture that is not determined by our biology, but rather a well designed technology, a new software package, a meme. If so, there needs to be more explanation from Hitchen’s in reply to the moral argument.
Your other point about the Indians is also a good one. They did not become ‘immoral’ like the Ik, but were likewise put into a very artificial situation. But consider the problems they do have because of this. Further, I would just agree with your first point here: that the situation of Ik was highly specific, and therefore should not be compared to the Indians. Most importantly, however, this post is part of my search for an explanation for what appears so ubiquitous in the world: violence, immorality, slavery, totalitarian brutality. Turnbull’s book in turn becomes read as a commentary of our own society. I think this anthropological narrative evidence gives some clues, as does Zimbardo’s work in The Lucifer Effect.
Comment by metzler — March 2, 2009 @ 3:31 pm
Jonathan,
You are right, we are not far apart as far as I can tell. I think you have nicely stated the situationist thesis: the problem is not necessarily with ‘bad apples’ but with the ‘bad barrels’ and the system that permits and sustains what goes on in those barrels.
I’m not sure if you have kept up with Zimbardo’s work – he testified at the Abu Ghraib trials as an expert witness of sorts, arguing that his defendant was put in a situation far worse, yet similar in kind, to the situation he created for the Stanford Experiment. Zimbardo argued for a lessened sentence for his defendant and accountability for those in authority over him. Instead, the defendant was used as a scapegoat, unsurprisingly.
Zimbardo also gives evidence that the Administration had intentionally put young men and women in those situations so that the interrogators had a full environment to support their efforts at torture, i.e. the defendants were allegedly used by the government to help break their subjects of torture. The military has used the information gained from the Stanford Prison Experiments over the years, and so therefore might not had been ignorant of the situational power they were controlling.
So your point of view rings in harmony with Zimbardo’s, as well as most the young men who participated in the Stanford Prison Experiment: you do not know what you would do, given a change in the situation.
Ultimately, we might just have to collapse the distinction between a dispositional, ‘innate’ understanding of blame and responsibility into a situationist one. But we already have experience with dualisms like this in our intellectual tradition: such as the dualism between the mind and the body, and the tension between personal identity and one’s social environment. This has significant implications for our legal tradition.
I just found this post by Zimbardo at the Situationist. This gives a nice summary of my points above.
What do you think?
Comment by Michael Metzler — March 2, 2009 @ 4:26 pm
I don’t have much to say about the Ik topic, but the Euthyphro opener to the post interests me a lot, especially as in a few weeks I will begin teaching Christian ethics to a group of 7th graders.
The dilemma is either that God loves something because it is good (thereby implying that the Good is something independent of God, to which God is Himself held accountable – an unacceptable option for a Christian theist) or a thing is good because God loves it (thereby implying that the Good is an arbitrary decision made by God – also an unacceptable option for a Christian theist).
I wonder if the Christian theist doesn’t have a third option to the dilemma. If the Euthyphro argument entails that the Good is a Form independent of the gods, how does this impact the Christian idea of God? Well, for one thing, Socrates is concerned about the immorality of the Greek gods, and contrary to some Modern propaganda, Jehovah is not Zeus. Jehovah is God and there are no other Gods. Jehovah has no one to quarrel with about the just and the unjust, so Socrates’ point to Euthyphro in 7d-8b that quarrelsome gods amounts to the same thing being called just and unjust at the same time doesn’t apply to Jehovah. And, as Socrates points out at 11a, the idea that a thing is holy because the gods love it confuses an attribute (being loved) with the essence (being Lovely). Socrates pushes Euthyphro’s argument to a mere tautology (piety is dear to the gods because it is dear to the gods) that demonstrates ethical arbitrariness.
The Christian theist, however, doesn’t have to embrace either horn of the dilemma. We can take the first option (that God loves something because it is Good) and, like Augustine, put the Forms in God’s mind rather than having them stand as independent entities. (And at any rate, again, the Euthyphro argument is talking about finite gods, not an Infinite God.) The Good really is transcendent and logically and practically unassailable, but it is simply a part of God’s inherent character. God’s ethical standards and the morality of His actions are not arbitrary at all, but governed by His own perfect character, which is equally and identically transcendent with the Good.
All the objections raised from evil in the world (like the story of the Iks) don’t count against the transcendent Goodness of God’s character precisely because they are arguments made by finite beings who cannot see the end from the beginning, finite beings trying to comprehend the infinity of the universe with wisdom that is (almost pathetically-comically) trapped inside skulls the size of a cantaloupe. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”, indeed.
Comment by Tim Enloe — March 3, 2009 @ 7:36 am
Thanks Tim. This is an excellent expansion and commentary on the quote I started with – I hope you can forgive my travel through 2500 years of intellectual history in a paragraph. Where will you be teaching?
I do not think we are in much disagreement about today’s Euthyphro. I tried to summarize something similar to the position you present here with the words:
Here, I make what is ultimately being loved that which is Loveliness itself. “Special access” is reference to the internalist’s notion of epistemological foundations, something I have suspected in the past as a bit of dabbling in theology. Richard Fumerton explains:
This does not sound like, as you say, a finite knowing, but more like the Christian God with respect to his beliefs about what is good.
Generally, I think we are dealing with the same general logical space that Socrates was dealing with. I do not think we have changed Socrates’ question, but have rather answered it; a good thing too, since Christians have had 2000 years to come up with an answer. What worries me about this answer, however, is that it is not drawn from the biblical literature but rather from philosophical necessity. If we are going to speak confidently about the things of eternity, it would seem as though God would have to divinely reveal them to us in an authoritative text.
You have not convinced me about arbitrariness. I cannot imagine anything more arbitrary. The standard of right wrong just is what just so happened to always be, by necessity, from all eternity? Perhaps this is a good and holy and dark arbitrariness, but regardless of what we call it, it does not alleviate the concern the non-theist has about moral totalitarianism. Hence, the way Wilson et al respond to the problem of evil: empathy, suffering, slavery, genocide, torture, brutality, hell, and all the like, have nothing to do with the issue for them. It is all just dismissed as irrelevant, since, allegedly, there would be no coherent notion of right, wrong, goodness, etc, without this eternal God. I will be posting an analysis of the debate between Wilson and Hitchens shortly.
But let us back up. What right do you have as a finite being, on your own terms, to defend God the way you are? And who revealed to you that arbitrariness is good or bad when it comes to the subject of morality? Who are we to complain if God created all of us – every last one – to suffer in eternity in hell? Don’t we all deserve it? As you say, we are just “almost pathetically-comically” man.
As for the problem of evil, this was not the subject of this post, but a subject I will get to before the month is up.
Further thoughts?
Comment by Michael Metzler — March 3, 2009 @ 10:08 am
Michael, that’s a lot to chew on. I will have to space out my response (which I hope isn’t the same as a “spaced out” response) due to a tight schedule today and tomorrow. In my first response on Wilson’s “Liberal Arts” post, I noted that while I was very grateful for my NSA education, and would not be where I am without it, I have in some ways “gone my own way” since graduating there. Let me tell you that one of the ways I have gone my own way from NSA is that I am simply not a Van Tillian and plan actively never to be one. That paradigm is far more problematic than what it attempts to solve, and I think that whether anyone at NSA realizes it or not, it is fundamentally antithetical to the goals of a classical education. Embracing Van Til while trying to do classical education is, in a sense, like shooting oneself in the foot. You can still walk, but only with great pain and difficulty. The great attempt to “lose the Greeks” can only end in the evisceration of the very “restore Christendom” ethic that is otherwise so excellently practiced at NSA. So, any response I give on these issues must be distanced from the Van Tillian camp. Hopefully I can reply in more depth later.
Comment by Tim Enloe — March 3, 2009 @ 10:24 am
Tim,
I agree wity you 100% here. But for me, it is still complicated. I struggled with faith and reason and the Pauline literature on the subject a good deal while in the Kirk, and my conclusion now is the same as it was then: a Pauline approach lines up more with Terrtulian than it does with a classical approach. I am seeking to explore this a good deal in my book.
But I look forward to your further thoughts as they come.
Comment by metzler — March 3, 2009 @ 11:09 am
Michael:
Regrettably, last night was rough. The baby wouldn’t sleep, and everyone is exhausted today and I have classwork and then work and yada, yada, yada. I’m sure you know how it is. Sorry, but I’ll have to postpone anything further at least another day.
Comment by Tim Enloe — March 4, 2009 @ 6:46 am
Tim,
Yes, I do know how it is! No rush.
Comment by metzler — March 4, 2009 @ 4:43 pm
Ok, Michael, I’ll take a quick stab at your last post.
What worries me about this answer, however, is that it is not drawn from the biblical literature but rather from philosophical necessity.
Well, I cited the passage from Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” as biblical evidence that God alone is the ultimate standard of ethical evaluation. No doubt more biblical data could be brought to bear on this point
If we are going to speak confidently about the things of eternity, it would seem as though God would have to divinely reveal them to us in an authoritative text.
Why an “authoritative text”? What about general revelation and natural law?
You have not convinced me about arbitrariness. I cannot imagine anything more arbitrary. The standard of right wrong just is what just so happened to always be, by necessity, from all eternity? Perhaps this is a good and holy and dark arbitrariness, but regardless of what we call it, it does not alleviate the concern the non-theist has about moral totalitarianism.
Perhaps not, but then we have to ask can anything alleviate that concern for the really committed non-theist? Does the non-theist have any “non-arbitrary” standard to offer as a counter to the allegedly “arbitrary” foundation of the Christian theist?
Again, how can people whose wisdom resides inside eensy little skulls offer a universal insight into ethics if there isn’t something that is just accepted as transcendent and upon which they can ground the rest of their thinking? R.C. Sproul gives an interesting version of the ontological argument when he says that we literally can’t think of “non being” because every thought we try to have of it is already something, even if only a mental picture of a big blank place. Consequently, knowing that being really is is rationally inescapable for us. Perhaps transcendent ethics are like that, so that as C.S. Lewis says, trying to imagine a society that values cowardice would be like trying to imagine a new primary color. Is it right to call this “arbitrary”? I don’t think so. It’s literally just “the way things are,” and we can’t get away from it.
Hence, the way Wilson et al respond to the problem of evil: empathy, suffering, slavery, genocide, torture, brutality, hell, and all the like, have nothing to do with the issue for them. It is all just dismissed as irrelevant, since, allegedly, there would be no coherent notion of right, wrong, goodness, etc, without this eternal God. I will be posting an analysis of the debate between Wilson and Hitchens shortly.
I haven’t heard the debate, so I can’t comment on it. But again, I’m not a Van Tillian, so any answer I give has to be distinguished from theirs. Some problems with the Van Tillian approach is that it guts natural knowledge in favor of an essentially fideistic acceptance of posited supernatural knowledge, and it favors “coherence” over “correspondence.” Still, the basic idea of a transcendent standard isn’t uniquely Van Tillian. Plato and Cicero held it, and without “an authoritative text” to tell them it was true.
But let us back up. What right do you have as a finite being, on your own terms, to defend God the way you are? And who revealed to you that arbitrariness is good or bad when it comes to the subject of morality? Who are we to complain if God created all of us – every last one – to suffer in eternity in hell? Don’t we all deserve it? As you say, we are just “almost pathetically-comically” man.
But are they “my own” terms – i.e., terms I made up on my own private authority – or are they terms that are perhaps rationally inherent in my makeup? And again, perhaps nature revealed to me that arbitrariness is bad. Can you prove it didn’t? And in a “non-arbitrary” way that doesn’t lead to some sort of ethical “totalitarianism”?
Your last sentences seem to run a couple of distinct things together. First, if God created us for the purpose of suffering in Hell, it may be that we don’t deserve it and that He’s just evil. But your question already assumes that it would be evil for God to do such a thing, so I have to ask you where you get the standard for your implicit ethical judgment of God. And isn’t this a version of Descartes’ “What if everything I think really comes from an evil demon who is deceiving me?” question? That way lies only devastating skepticism. Second, if in fact we do deserve it, it is possible we deserve it because of something we did, not something God did. But now you’re in the realm of Christian theology, and no longer trying to justify ethics on an allegedly “non-totalitarian” basis.
I hope some of that makes sense. I haven’t had coffee yet!
Comment by Tim Enloe — March 5, 2009 @ 5:57 am
Lunch break.
I am enjoying this discussion, but to back door the heart of my post above: while two well fed, educated, white European men banter about transcendental ethics, being, and non-being, vultures pick at the flesh of poor Adupa, still lying in her grave of rubble.
I would submit that the text “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” does not function “as biblical evidence that God alone is the ultimate standard of ethical evaluation.” Rather, I think it functions as evidence that God thinks you have no right to such an opinion to begin with. God refuses to give an explanation to Job, just as Paul refuses to give any explanation to those perplexed by God’s predestination of many to Hell in Romans 9. This is textual evidence that you also have no right to such lofty opinions as the following:
This is a philosophical theory formed from necessity, the need of answering Euthypro, not the clear light of exegesis or natural revelation. Even from a strictly Christian point of view, it seems odd to speak about God’s “ethical standards” the “morality of his actions.” I am also dubious about unfalsifiable tautologies and logical paradoxes that say so much while really explaining nothing. For example, ” . . . governed by His own perfect character, which is equally and identically transcendent with the Good.” While we are making it up, why not bring in a more full analysis of how all this relates to the perichoresis of each person of the Trinity? You can go just about anywhere logically once you start talking about how God is one, but no, three, and that God is the Good, the standard of the Good, but wait, he is also governed by the Good that is not identical to God but now identically transcendent with it.
You write, “Perhaps not, but then we have to ask can anything alleviate that concern for the really committed non-theist?”
Well, I do not know. That is my question for you. Do you have something that would alleviate the concern for even a non-committed non-theist? Or is this an ad hom argument? I hope not, since the Christian religion had more than enough opportunity to alleviate the concerns of western civilization’s intellectuals over the last 300 years.
As for arbitrary standards for morality: The Christian religion does not have a standard for morality any more than the non-theist does. The bible and the appeal to God has been a very reliable standard for some of the most immoral, horrifying acts in human history. We had the perfect standard in support of slavery and now we have the perfect standard against it. A far less arbitrary way to proceed would be to simply ask how we even naturally use the word ‘moral’ in the first place. If we are not referencing practical justice, vengeance, empathy, human suffering, emotion, emancipation, the strong protecting the weak, and parents nurturing their young, then I would imagine we are either back in the clouds of abstract, meaningless concepts, or else the legalistic prattling of dead religion. I guess another possibility is that we would just be a part of the next violent entourage of totalitarian propaganda. Saying that God is the standard is to assert a philosophical principle; it is not the revelation of a real standard for morality.
As for valuing cowardice: this is a logical contradiction if by definition cowardice is something to be devalued. If it is not, then I could use the word to refer to actions by people who would not be willing to use the word to describe their own actions, and I would be delighted to appeal to the brazen, encouraged practice of cowardice we see all around us every day. I see nothing inescapable here. You say that this is just “’the way things are’, and we can’t get away from it.” But all that is clear to me is that this is the way our “eensie little skulls” tend to present things to be. Science just is the progress from perceiving the world as it seems to be to perceiving the world how it does not.
I like your analysis of Van Tillianism.
Lastly, I was not assuming that God would be evil if he sent every last person to hell. I was pointing out that on Christianity’s terms, God would not be evil if he sent every last person to hell. According to the inscrutable eternal decree of God, it would be just, holy, and good for God to create ex nihilo, for his own good pleasure and by the freedom of his own will, billions of human creatures capable of immense physical and psychological suffering, and then damning them to an eternity of nothing but the fulfillment of their maximum capacity of suffering. If they had to do something wrong to ‘deserve’ this punishment, then that was just part of God’s ex nihilo creation.
To perhaps put it too simply, I would just say that real morality is governed by empathy, not codes and deductions. As for the biblical text, I am just a poetic nominalist.
No? Any yeses? Thank you for the discussion.
Comment by Michael Metzler — March 5, 2009 @ 1:03 pm
Michael,
The only answer I have to Adupa, lying in her grave of rubble, is the answer of the Incarnation, that God has Himself in all the most important ways “been there, done that,” and, as the Judge of all the earth, *will* see the right ultimately done. I engaged the Euthyphro argument since you started your post with it, but ultimately, I don’t see God as being constrained by philosophical arguments. Philosophy is a *search for* wisdom, not an *already have* wisdom affair, so any given philosophical argument might certainly be shown to be inadequate to deal with the biblical data. I have no problem with that, and if we have to move past Euthyphro, so be it.
You say what I’ve put forward is just a bunch of tautologies; so, then, what is your answer? And by the way, I’m not sure that either Job or Paul means you have no right to ask the question. At best, they just mean you don’t have a right to get an answer. God is obligated to no one, but that doesn’t seem to logically entail that no one has a right to ask the questions or to think about them and propose possible answers. “Sola Scriptura,” assuming that is your theological matrix, doesn’t mean only the bare text of Scripture is allowable as data for theological arguments. That’s one of many errors the Van Tillians make, but classical Protestants need not – and historically have not – followed them into that viciously closed loop system.
You say “The Christian religion does not have a standard for morality any more than the non-theist does. The bible and the appeal to God has been a very reliable standard for some of the most immoral, horrifying acts in human history.” To the first sentence I’d say that the history of Christian exegesis from the Church Fathers to the Reformers to writers of Christian ethics manuals today simply totally disagrees with you. The burden of proof for such a statement lies on you, not the tradition. To the second sentence I’d say “So what?” Anything can be abused. “Abusus non tollit usus.”
I’m not sure where you get the scenario in your second to last paragraph. It looks like a certain “Arminian” caricature of “Calvinism” that I saw online a few years ago, but I wasn’t aware that Calvinism *required* understanding God as arbitrary. Granted, I’m not a professional theologian, and alas, all my good Reformed theology books are 2,000 miles away in a storage room so that I can’t look anything up, but still, I am not sure that Christianity *requires* or even *allows* the scenario you spun out. What is all that business in Scripture about the Lord being just, never doing wrong, being slow to wrath and abounding in mercy, remembering that we are but dust, etc., if at the end of the day what He’s *really* like is the picture in Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”?
You’ll have to tell me about “poetic nominalism” with respect to Scripture; I’m not sure what you mean.
Comment by Tim Enloe — March 5, 2009 @ 2:30 pm
(After reading a thread I confess is too arcane for me) . . . sure, you may link to my blog.
Comment by Lynn — March 9, 2009 @ 5:51 pm
Hang in there Lynn. If you did read through this entire thread, next time around probably won’t look so arcane – the arcane has the habit of becoming understood with time – and perhaps some merciful patience . . .
Comment by metzler — March 9, 2009 @ 6:06 pm