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.

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:

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.

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.

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!

Yes, I do know how it is! No rush.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

The acquaintance theorist . . . is convinced that with respect to at least noninferentially justified belief, one can find a kind of justification that can satisfy in an ideal way the philosophical search for truth. The acquaintance theorist is convinced that with respect to some truths, on can be directly aware of both the truth-bearer and the truth-maker and the correspondence that defines truth. When one has all of the elements of truth directly before consciousness, there is nothing else one could want or need when it comes to having further or better justification (Depaul, 2001, p70).

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?