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The Moral Argument, Part 1

Posted By metzler On February 28, 2009 @ 5:32 pm In Anthropology,Morality | Comments Disabled

splash_02“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 [1]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 [2]between Wilson and Hitchens, splash_041also 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 [3]. During the time of my monastic career in the Kirk, Peter Leithart [4]assigned Turnbull’s book as mandatory reading for his year-long theology class at New St. Andrews College [5].  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 [6]). 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.”

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URLs in this post:

[1] Christopher Hitchens : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens

[2] debate : http://www.collisionmovie.com/

[3] The Mountain People: http://illadvised.blogspot.com/2006/08/book-colin-turnbull-mountain-people.html

[4] Peter Leithart : http://www.nsa.edu/community/faculty/leithart.html

[5] St. Andrews College: http://www.nsa.edu/index.html

[6] here: http://www.kalahari-meerkats.com/index.php?id=publications

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