4 Popular Objections to Theistic Ethics

I’ve had the opportunity to teach ethics and philosophy as an online adjunct for about five years now. During that time, I’ve noticed that students often express similar concerns about the moral argument specifically and theistic ethics in general. Here are the four most popular objections to theistic ethics I’ve encountered and a brief reply.

1.     People can be good without God. Theistic ethics says that people need God to be moral, but there are many good atheists. So, theistic ethics must be incomplete or incorrect.

First, it will help to settle what is meant by “good” atheist in this context. Most of the time, when we say Ms. Smith is a good person, we just mean it in a relative sense. Relative to other people, Ms. Smith is a good person. She is kind to others, she donates to charity, she is generous, and so on.

This objection usually comes from a misunderstanding of the implications of one of the premises of the deductive moral argument. That argument goes like this:

1.     If objective moral values and duties exist, then God exists.

2.     There are objective moral values and duties.

3.     Therefore, God exists.

A correct implication of (1) would be that morality requires God and, therefore, one needs God to be good. God must exist for there to be morality at all. However, (1) does not imply that atheists cannot be good, moral people. All that (1) implies is a view about moral ontology, and not a view about what it takes to be a moral person. Nothing in the moral argument suggests that an atheist cannot be a moral person. An atheist is someone who disbelieves in God. Disbelief of this sort does not make it impossible to be a good person. God can be the ground of morality and atheists can be good people. These are not contradictory statements.

Some may think that while the moral argument doesn’t say that one must believe in God to be good, the Bible nonetheless does. So, if one is committed to a theistic ethical theory that affirms the teaching of the Bible, then she is, at the end of the day, saying one must believe in God to be good. However, I am not convinced that is what the Bible teaches. A key verse in this debate comes from Romans 3:10 “…there is none righteous, not even one.” Often, the verse is interpreted to mean that, apart from salvation in Christ, there are no good people. However, “righteousness” here has a specific, forensic or legal meaning.[1] A better gloss might be “no one is justified, not even one.” In this case, at least, the Bible has in view something different than what me mean by “good person.”

Some may think that the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity stipulates that atheists cannot be good people. But this is not always the case. According to one theological dictionary, 

Total depravity refers to the extent and comprehensiveness of the effects of sin on all humans such that all are unable to do anything to obtain salvation. Total depravity, therefore, does not mean that humans are thoroughly sinful but rather that they are totally incapable of saving themselves.[2]

Total depravity only says no one can earn that forensic status of righteousness.

So, neither the moral argument nor the bible implies that an atheist cannot be a good person or do good things.  

2.     Theistic ethics is too narrow. Not everyone agrees that God exists, so not everyone could have moral knowledge. We need an ethical theory that’s accessible to all.  

This might be the most common of these four objections and it leverages an important concern: the availability of moral knowledge.  As a preliminary reply, we can point out that this sort of critique would work for any ethical theory. We could argue against the utilitarian: Well, not everyone believes that the good is identical to utility (or pleasure), so not everyone could have moral knowledge. Or against the Kantian: Well, not everyone agrees with the categorical imperative, so not everyone could have moral knowledge. The objector might say that in both those cases, one gains moral knowledge through common sense or introspection. These modes of investigation are available to all people, while access to divine commands are not.

There are three vital points to make in response. First, if some ethical theory implies that moral knowledge will be inaccessible, that does not entail it is false. It may be a problem for that ethical theory, but problems can be addressed. Plato’s ethical theory is a good example of this. Morality is grounded in the Forms, but from our present position and with our current abilities, we cannot access the realm of the Forms. Thus, Plato proposes some alternative means through which such knowledge can be attained, including his ambitious doctrine of pre-existence. Possibly, Plato’s ethical theory is correct and moral knowledge just is hard to come by.

Second, most versions of theistic ethics, despite the impression of many, say that moral knowledge is widely accessible, and by means like common sense and introspection. Clearly, this is the case with theistic natural law theories, but it is also the case for divine command theory, which is usually the target of this sort of objection. If we consider the sort of divine command theory offered by David Baggett and Jerry Walls in Good God, we can see how this is so. They say that God’s commands are not arbitrary, but flow from his nature. God’s nature, in their view, is identical to the good. Therefore, one can infer, purely based on reason and her implicit knowledge of the good, what is right and wrong in many cases and, thus, what God has likely commanded. For example, given these things, one should easily see that it is wrong to murder, even if she doesn’t know that God has prohibited murder. In this way, someone has access to much of moral knowledge without access to special revelation; a point consistent with the teaching of Romans 1.

Third, from the Christian perspective, God has revealed himself dramatically and publicly in the person of Jesus Christ and there is sufficient evidence of this (ably demonstrated by scholars like Gary Habermas and Michael Licona). That some people find the evidence unconvincing does not imply that evidence is, in fact, insufficient. If the Christian perspective is correct, then God has provided direct, sufficient, and accessible evidence for his moral authority and the authenticity of his commands through Jesus and his resurrection.

3.     The meaning of the Bible is unknowable. No one really knows that the Bible teaches. It’s all open to interpretation and we don’t know what it originally said anyway.

When I run across this objection, students often give one of two motivations for their view. First, they often say something like this: “The Bible has been copied so many times! All we have is a translation of a copy of translation. It’s been copied and translated so many times, who knows what it really said at the start!” This concern represents a widely held misunderstanding of the origin of our modern Bibles. Our modern Bibles are not copied from other translations; they are copied from the original languages. Some pieces of these texts even date to the second century for the New Testament and the seventh century B.C. for the Old Testament. The source texts for the modern Bible are early and they are in abundance. Through careful study, textual critics of the New Testament conclude that what we have now accurately represents over 99% of the original manuscripts. So, we know with a high degree of confidence what the books and letters of the Bible actually said.

The other motivation seems to come from a general skepticism about the clarity of the Bible. Certainly, there are unique interpretive challenges when it comes to the Bible. It was written in another time, place, and culture. Some passages remain deeply debated and mysterious. However, much of the Bible can be understood on its face, in a straightforward way. This is true in the case of the Bible’s central ethical teaching, presented by Jesus himself: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). This command in particular does not seem especially hard to understand or interpret. On many central ethical issues, the Bible is perspicuous. But even in those cases where the Bible presents readers with an interpretive challenge, one can still often discern the correct meaning with careful, methodical hermeneutics. Therefore, we do know what the Bible originally said, and we can know what it originally meant.

4.     The Bible is unenlightened. The Bible is full of bronze age ethics that we know are immoral now. Theistic ethics needs to be discarded in favor a more modern ethical theory that fits with a modern perspective.

My aim here is not to respond to all of the specific ethical issues in the Bible, but I will offer a general reply in two directions. First, in defense of the Bible, it is very likely that for many of the difficult passages, we are simply misreading them. The Bible can often be read and understood at face value, but not always. Not infrequently, our modern assumptions distort our reading and understanding of the Bible. A possible example of this comes in the Conquest of Canaan narratives. In the ancient world contemporary to the Conquest, it was common to exaggerate one’s victory over the enemy. Language of total destruction of cities, including its citizens, was often used, when it is clear from the surrounding context that such cities were not utterly destroyed. One example of such a text comes from Joshua 10:40:

Thus Joshua struck all the land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings. He left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.

Paul Copan notes of passages like this:

Joshua’s conventional warfare rhetoric was common in many other ancient Near Eastern military accounts in the second and first millennia BC. The language is typically exaggerated and full of bravado, depicting total devastation. The knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized this as hyperbole; the accounts weren’t understood to be literally true.[3]

It may be that similar interpretative issues exist for all the ethically difficult passages in the Bible. However, that is unlikely to be the case.

Second, it would be rather strange if the moral vision of the Bible comfortably fit our own. That some parts of the Bible cause us discomfort suggests that the Bible is not a mirror for our own views or some pliable clay to be shaped to our own liking. Rather, it suggests that in the Bible we encounter a moral perspective that is not our own. It belongs to someone else, even if we have adopted it in some measure.

In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis wrote this:

Divine "goodness" differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.

Lewis argues that our moral knowledge is not exactly correct. Our knowledge of the good is not univocal, but analogical. It’s off by some margin of error.

If morality is objective, this is what we should expect. If morality was made in our image, a mere human convention, then moral truth should cause us no discomfort or distress. But if morality comes from without and not within, then so long as our moral vision is imperfect, there will be some incongruence between what is actually the case and what we merely believe to be the case. That’s exactly the experience we have when reading the Bible. Significantly, though, this dissonance runs in multiple directions. The wrath of God on display in the Bible may make us shudder, but the Bible also teaches that we should love our enemies, that we should give without withholding to the poor and destitute, that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. This incredible calling sounds its own discordant note in our modern, Western minds. The horizons of our moral vision are widened by the Bible. An effect that should come as no surprise if in it we find an ethic from someone else.

[1] Moo, D. J. (1996). The Epistle to the Romans (p. 203). Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Here’s a fuller comment from Moo on this passage (including Romans 3:12):

10b–12 The quotations begin with a series of phrases taken from Ps. 14:1–3 (LXX 13:1–3) (Ps. 53:1–3 is almost identical). As is the case with most of the quotations in this series, Paul’s wording agrees closely with the LXX.28 But there is one important difference: where the Psalms text has “there is no one who does good,” Paul has “there is no one who is righteous.” Granted the importance of the language of “righteousness” in this part of Romans (cf. 3:4, 5, 8, 19, 20), the word is almost certainly Paul’s own editorial change.29 It will thus carry with it Paul’s specifically forensic nuance (cf. 1:17). What he means is that there is not a single person who, apart from God’s justifying grace, can stand as “right” before God. This meaning is not far from David’s intention in the Psalm, as he unfolds the myriad dimensions of human folly.

Here is what Kruse says in the Pillar commentary on Romans:

Paul’s purpose in listing these quotations is to say that as a people Jews are no better than Gentiles. Paul would certainly know of the many righteous persons spoken of in the OT, not least Abraham, to whom he refers in the next chapter (4:1–25). However, it must be said that such ‘righteous’ persons are not the morally flawless, but those who have responded with repentance to the goodness of God. Not one of them would have been declared righteous by God because of their peerless behavior. Thus Paul’s conclusion that follows in the next verse stands.

Still, some Calvinists, like R.C. Sproul, seem to understand total depravity and the thrust of Romans 3:10-12 to be teaching that only Christians can do good things. Sproul says this in his commentary on this passage:

Is Paul saying here that unless a person is a believer in Christ, he will not ever do a good deed? That is precisely what it means. It may seem outrageous, but nobody ever does a single thing that is good, we are so corrupt that our sin infects even the best of our deeds.

However, even in this very strong view of the implications of the passage, Sproul clarifies that Paul here is using “good” in a technical sense. A good deed consists in right and action and right motivation. Only Christians can have the right sort of motivation, pleasing God, so only Christians can do what is good. But if Paul has this technical sense of “good” in mind, that does nothing to undermine the idea that atheists or other non-Christians can do “good” things in the everyday sense of that word.

Sproul makes the dubious claim that actions are either motivated by selfishness or a desire to please God. It seems obvious from human experience that many actions are motivated by a sincere concern for others, without explicit reference to God (that this is appropriate is perhaps evidenced by the fact that Jesus says that there are two commands that sum up the law: Love of God and love of neighbor. cf. Matt 22:40). Further, even if my actions are motivated by a concern for my own interests, that does not entail that they are not good actions. If we suppose, for the sake of the argument, that Bill Gates, an atheist, works on eradicating malaria because it brings him satisfaction, the fact that he is the sort of person that finds satisfaction in curing malaria rather than spreading it is an obviously good moral quality. So, it seems to me, that Sproul’s binary understanding of moral motivation should be rejected.

[2] Grenz, S., Guretzki, D., & Nordling, C. F. (1999). In Pocket dictionary of theological terms (p. 37). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

[3] Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God, vol. 1 (Baker Books, 2011), 171.

Socrates and Jesus on Allegiances

You have probably heard the saying, “Great minds think alike.” I think there is more truth to the claim that we might imagine. The ancient philosopher Socrates had a conversation with Plato’s eldest brother Glaucon about transcendent truths known as Forms. Forms are metaphysical truths that exist independently of personal opinions and the physical world. His conversation with Glaucon is recorded in Plato’s book The Republic. Socrates explains Forms and the importance of pursuing them in his Allegory of the Cave (Republic 514a-517a).

The Allegory tells the story of a group of men held captive since their youth. They are held in a cave and tied down so that the only thing they can see is the shadows cast on the cave’s wall by their captors playing in front of a fire. This life is the only life these men know. All their knowledge of the world stems from the shadow puppets cast for their entertainment pleasure. But, Socrates inquires, what if one of the captives was released and allowed to see the world outside of the cave? The light from the sun would hurt his eyes. His mind would have trouble comprehending the beauty of the exterior world that is so new to him. The birds, the sky, the animals of the field, and the beauty of flowers and trees would overwhelm his imagination. Socrates further questions Glaucon by asking, what if the man wanted to free his brothers in the cave? What if he were to return to tell of the wondrous things that he had seen? Would his brothers not think him to be a madman and eventually kill him? Socrates holds that this is the response of individuals living only with a mindset on the Particulars (the physical attributes of the world) to those who observe the beauty of the Forms (the unseen realm).

Jesus told a parable somewhat comparable to Socrates’s called the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen or the Parable of the Bad Tenants in Matthew 21:33-46; Mark 12:1-12; and Luke 20:9-19. The parable is about a group of tenant farmers who gave a portion of their harvest to the owner for payment for the use of the landowner’s property. The harvest was part of their rental agreement. Rather than paying the agreed harvest, the wicked tenant farmers beat and killed the servants sent by the landowner to acquire payment. Last of all, they killed the son thinking that they would steal his inheritance. Finally, the landowner came after the tenant farmers and destroyed those wicked men. While the two parables differ substantially, they hold three common truth claims.

The Reality of the Unseen Realm. Both Socrates and Jesus point to the reality of the unseen realm. The unseen realm of Forms is clearly in view in the Allegory of the Cave. However, the same is in view in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. The landowner represents God who is unseen in the parable. At God’s command, the servants and son are sent, and the wicked tenants are punished. The reality of God’s existence at least to some degree verifies unseen transcendent truths. This is not to say that Jesus defends the Platonic Forms, but it does draw a similarity between the two stories, although the philosophical implications cannot be pressed too far. Both stories show that there is more to the world than just the physical reality one sees.

The Advocates Proclaiming the Truths of the Unseen Realm. In both stories, the authors hold that servants of the unseen truths are often ridiculed and abused. This is true of the freedman in Socrates’s Allegory of the Cave and the servants and son in Jesus’s Parable of the Wicked Tenants. It is also fascinating to consider that both Socrates and Jesus were executed by the authorities because of their teachings. Jesus’s execution was far more torturous and viler. Nonetheless, both Jesus and Socrates asked questions. As one professor pointed out to me, it can sometimes be dangerous to ask too many questions.

The Choice Between God and the World. Socrates, like Jesus, was likely a monotheist living in a polytheistic world, a henotheist at the very least. By his own admonition, Socrates claims to have encountered the one true God. Regardless of the case, Socrates challenges his readers to make a choice to either live in a world of shadows by only looking to the physical world, or to step out of the cave and experience the transcendent, metaphysical truths of the divine. In like manner, Jesus noted that it was impossible to serve both God and the world (Matt. 6:24), a point that Paul addresses in Colossians 3:23-24. For whom are you working? What are you seeking? Everyone must make a choice. A non-choice is a choice. Whatever masters your heart, masters your life.

Amid the uncertainties of life, we all must ask ourselves where our allegiances lie. If you decide to work for the world, then know that it is of no profit to gain the whole world and lose your soul (Matt. 16:26). If you are only living for the here and now, then you are missing out on a larger portion of reality. Reality is like an iceberg. The part we see is minuscule compared to the realm we cannot see. If you choose to serve God, your life will not necessarily become easier. In some ways, it may become more difficult. But you will find that your life holds greater purpose and value if you do.

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About the Author

Brian G. Chilton is the founder of BellatorChristi.com, the host of The Bellator Christi Podcast, and the author of the Layman’s Manual on Christian Apologetics. He received his Master of Divinity in Theology from Liberty University (with high distinction); his Bachelor of Science in Religious Studies and Philosophy from Gardner-Webb University (with honors); and received certification in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. Brian is enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Theology and Apologetics at Liberty University and is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Brian has been in the ministry for nearly 20 years and serves as the Senior Pastor of Westfield Baptist Church in northwestern North Carolina.

https://www.amazon.com/Laymans-Manual-Christian-Apologetics-Essentials/dp/1532697104

© 2020. BellatorChristi.com.

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Moral Apologetics 101: Ethical Theory and Moral Realism

Editor’s note: In this series, we introduce the basics of building a moral argument. In this first installment, we explore the concept of ethical theory and two main positions on ethical theory: moral realism and anti-realism.

Some people think the earth is flat and they have a theory about that; that is, they have a justification or explanation for why it is rational to think that the earth is flat. This theory might involve nefarious and shadowy figures working in the dark corners of power to fake the moon landings, among other things, but there is a theory that (attempts) to explain why the earth is flat.

The same is true for other claims. Us round-earthers have a theory about why it’s rational to believe the earth is sphere shaped. Maybe the theory is a simple as this: “That the earth is round has been the consistent testimony of people in a position to know for over 2000 years and that sort of testimony is trustworthy.” The sense of theory here is broader and looser than its use in a scientific context, where theory has a narrower meaning.

Our theories extend beyond these, roughly, scientific concerns about the shape of the earth. We have theories about mundane things as well. For example, I might have a theory about why my wife is angry. Likely, she is angry because I forgot to take out the trash, though I promised I would. I have a belief and I have reasons for my belief. We can call those reasons collectively my “theory” about why my wife is angry. Now, that theory could be right or wrong. It could be partly right and partly wrong. But it is my explanation for why my wife is angry.

When we think about “theory” this way, it seems fair to say that any time we assert that something is the case (that is, we take the attitude “What I am saying is true or correct”), then we have reasons for that view. We have a theory about why we are right.

Even though this is a simple idea, there’s an important objection to consider. Sometimes, we have not reflected on why we think something is true or correct. We do not have internal, cognitive (thoughtful/meaningful) reasons for some of our beliefs. Sometimes, we simply inherit a view from our culture or our parents or some other source. If one asks a sixth grader, “Why do you think the earth is sphere shaped?” she might not have a ready explanation for why she thinks that is the case. She simply “absorbed” the view of her culture or her parents. We might say this an “external” cause of belief. It’s not a belief that is held because of investigation or introspection, but because one was caused to believe by something external to one’s self. (Significantly, an externally caused belief can be correct and rational to hold. Our sixth grade would certainly be correct that the earth is a sphere, for example). 

So, one may find herself believing that certain things are true, like the earth is a sphere or that a spouse is angry, and she either has reasons for those views that internal to herself (they are her reasons) or they are external (she was caused to believe something). Or, to put it in other words, whenever we believe that something is so, we have a theory about that something that is either held on the basis of introspection and reflection or it is given to us by our surroundings (culture/parents/friends). We have considered theories and given theories.

This is a general point, true in all aspects of life, but it’s also true when it comes to ethical theory. We all have moral or ethical beliefs that we take to be correct or true. For example, we might consider the following statements:

Stealing is always wrong.

The government should pay for healthcare.

Sometimes, it is ok to tell a lie.

People have a right to defend themselves.

It is always wrong to torture children for fun.

The best sort of life requires good friends.

It is your duty to vote.

Claims about what one ought to do, what one should do or should not do, claims about what sort of life is worthwhile and whether people have essential rights, these are often moral claims.[1] Likely, most would have a certain attitude of affirm or deny to each of these moral claims. For example, someone might take the attitude toward the proposition “stealing is always wrong,” that this moral claim is false; one might disbelieve that it is always wrong to steal.  Perhaps, thinks this person, it is right to steal if it is the only way to feed one’s family.

These reasons for a moral belief, whether they come from within oneself or from their surroundings, are an “ethical theory.”

If one believes that at least some moral claims are true, then she thinks there are “moral facts” and she is a “moral realist.”

A moral fact is a true proposition that makes some morally relevant claim.

A moral realist is a person who thinks that there are at least some moral facts.

A moral anti-realist is a person who denies that there are any moral facts.

Sometimes people are tempted to say that there are no moral facts because of “grey areas.” We’ve all heard the term “moral grey area” before. A moral “grey area” occurs when there is not  an obviously right or wrong answer to a moral question. Some moral claims are more obvious than others and, in some cases, we might not have a specific attitude toward a moral claim. For example, if I ask whether it’s morally right that the government provide healthcare, someone could say that he sees good reasons for both sides and that he’s not sure whether it is a moral obligation or not. However, if one is not sure, that does not imply that there’s no fact of the matter about whether the government should provide healthcare. It could be there is a fact of the matter, but some simply cannot discern what that fact is very easily.

However, it may be that there is no fact of the matter about whether the government should provide healthcare. If that were the case, that would not imply that there are not “deeper” moral facts about the rights of individuals, the obligations for communities to care for those who need assistance, and so on. It is important to see that the moral realist claims only that there are some moral facts and not there is a fact about every moral issue.

When asked to give an example of a moral fact, moral realists want to give what they consider to be the most obvious, least controversial example. One oft used example is this: “It is always wrong to torture children for fun.” If anything is a moral fact, this would have to be a moral fact. If one agrees that it is really, actually true that “It is always wrong to torture children for fun,” then one is a moral realist.

Some moral philosophers deny that there are such things as moral facts. They are “anti-realists” about morality and their view is called “anti-realism.” According to this view, no moral claims are correct. All moral claims may be false or even meaningless. An anti-realist might say that proposition, “it is always wrong to torture children for fun” has nothing that makes it true; no moral proposition does. Perhaps moral claims are simply statements about one’s own feelings. In that case, if one asserts that “It is always wrong to torture children for fun,” she can only really mean that she dislikes child torture or that it makes her feel bad. Asserting it is wrong like saying, “Boo! Child torture Boo!”  Anti-realists may also say that moral claims are merely conventional statements that have only a provisional meaning based on custom, tradition, or habit.

Therefore, with respect to moral judgments, we can see that there are two camps: realist and anti-realist. The realist says that there are at least some moral facts, moral claims are cognitive (they have meaning and they are intelligible) and the anti-realist denies that there any moral facts. There’s nothing to ground moral truths, in this view, or, perhaps, moral claims are non-cognitive expressions of emotion or preference.  

As we can see, in terms of ethical theory, there are deep disagreements and the natural question, at this point, would be why. What motivates these fundamentally different views about ethical truth?

In general, moral realism is considered the “default” position and so, often, moral anti-realists are saddled with the burden of proof. According to an informal survey of philosophers (PhilPapers Survey), most agree that moral realism is the correct view while about 30% argue that anti-realism is correct. Geoff Sayre-McCord, a philosopher teaching at the University of North Carolina, claims that “moral realism can fairly claim to have common sense and initial appearances on its side.”

The reason that Sayre-McCord might say that moral realism has this advantage is that most of us simply find ourselves believing in moral realism and we find ourselves having a high degree of confidence in these beliefs. It seems obvious to most people that there are at least some moral facts. A simple argument for moral realism might go like this: “I am surer that it is wrong to torture children for fun than I could be of any argument against this belief.”

This might not seem like a very good argument for moral realism, and perhaps it is not. Although, this sort of reply is a widely employed reply to other kinds of skepticism.  For example, suppose that Joe looks at a tree outside the window. For Joe, this means he has the experience of looking out the window at a tree. For Joe, it seems there is a tree out there. In walks Jim. Jim just finished watching The Matrix and now Jim thinks that the external world is an illusion created by very sophisticated robots. Jim sees Joe looking at the tree and says, “There’s no tree out there, Joe. Wake up!”

What might Joe’s response be? Joe could develop a number of replies to this distressing assertion, but it also seems warranted for Joe to reply like this: “Jim, I am more sure that there is a tree out there than any harebrained argument you might give! I see the tree; it’s right there!”  For many, the truth of moral facts are impressed on the mind in a way analogous to the way the “tree out there” is impressed on Joe’s mind. It is a basic fact of experience and, therefore, one is rationally warranted in believing there are trees out the window as well as that there are moral facts.

Still, one might have good reasons for thinking there actually is not a tree out there and so that basic belief in “the tree out there” might lose its warrant. What if Joe had evidence that he actually did live in a simulation?

Anti-realists have two main strategies in defense of their view. First, anti-realists often argue that there is dis-confirming evidence of the existence of moral facts. In our analogy, they would offer Joe some evidence that undermines Joe’s belief in the tree out there. It’s important to see that anti-realists don’t need to show that there are no moral facts; he could simply show that we are not justified in believing there are any moral facts.

One of the most popular ways to argue this point flows from what is called “the diversity thesis.” The diversity thesis is the observation that there is widespread moral disagreement in the world. People disagree about what is moral, and they disagree frequently and substantially. That this is so is obvious from human experience (and is admitted readily by moral realists), but it may be that sometimes the depth of moral disagreements is exaggerated. Nevertheless, some anti-realists think this is an important piece of evidence. They might use this piece of evidence like this: If there were moral facts, then we would expect that people would mostly agree on these facts. However, people disagree on virtually any candidate for a moral fact. Therefore, the level of moral agreement is inconsistent with there being moral facts. Likely, then, there are no moral facts (or, at least, moral facts are indiscernible).

The diversity thesis is the observation that there is widespread moral disagreement in the world.

Anti-realists might also build a more positive case. They might begin by assuming a materialist perspective, or a sufficiently similar view. Materialism is the view that only material things exist, things like space, energy, and matter. For there to be moral facts, there must be something to make these facts true; there must be a moral “truth-maker.”  But there is no obvious way that facts about material things can ground moral facts. What sort of truth about atoms and energy could ground something as strange and exotic as morality? Moral facts, if such things exist, would seem to be facts about something qualitatively different than merely material things. Of course, that is not to say that all materialists are anti-realists. A good many are moral realists. Many materialists who are not, though, would argue there just is no real connection between the real (material) world and our moral assertions.

Realists might also develop a positive case. One common assumption among moral realists is that there are moral facts and there is something that makes these moral facts true. There is a reason or ground for moral facts. Earlier, I suggested that people are entitled to belief in some moral facts on the basis of a certain kind of impression on the mind, like someone is entitled to believe “there is a tree out there” when things align in such way that he has a certain kind of impression that “there is a tree out there.” But moral realists can go beyond appealing to moral experience (which many consider sufficient grounds). One might argue first for something that could ground moral facts and then that this thing actually does ground moral facts. Perhaps the most obvious and popular way to do this would be to argue that God exists. God would be the sort of thing that could ground moral facts, since he is the “greatest conceivable being,” or that is how God is thought of in the Western philosophical tradition. So, if God exists, it is natural to think that moral facts also obtain.

There are other ways to argue for a ground of moral facts, though. One might argue that some sort of realm of abstract objects is needed to make sense out of language and to solve the problem of the one and the many. If there is some non-material realm which gives sense and meaning to our concepts, perhaps this realm could also ground the sense and meaning of moral claims. Why think that claims about abstract ideas like triangles and mathematics are fundamentally different sorts of claims than moral ones? Perhaps, like Plato thought, the Good exists and has the power to determine the truth or falsity of moral claims.

What we see from these examples of positive cases is that different views about what is ultimately real or the ultimate nature of the world make a difference in how moral claims are justified (if they are justified) and they may, as we will see later in term, make a difference in what is considered moral in the first place.

To sum up: We have seen that people make moral claims and that when a moral claim is made, it assumes something about the world. If a person thinks that her moral claims are true, then she assumes some form of moral realism. This is how most people think about their moral claims; they think they are true. However, some people doubt that moral claims are true or that they can be known to be true. These are moral anti-realists.

[1]One can distinguish between a moral should/ought and a merely teleological should/ought. If I want to achieve X, then I should do Y which results in X.  If I want to be a better bowler, then I should invest bowling lessons. This is a merely teleological use of should/ought. 

Assessing Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (Crash Course Apologetics Interview with Dr. Tomas Bogardus)

From Crash Course Apologetics:

In this interview, Dr. Tomas Bogardus joins me to discuss his paper "Only All Naturalists Should Worry About Only One Evolutionary Debunking Argument." The pdf of the paper is linked below. In the paper, he presents three versions of evolutionary debunking arguments (EDA's) against moral knowledge and shows why each fails. He then presents a fourth version of an EDA that is successful, but explains why it should only concern naturalists.

https://philpapers.org/archive/BOGOAN...

Introducing a Thomist Moral Argument

Editor’s note:

Here at MoralApologetics.com, we are really excited at younger scholars turning their attention and directing their considerable talents to variations on the moral argument. Moral apologetics can come in lots of stripes and shades, depending on the particular moral phenomena in need of explanation, the methodology involved in argumentation, the alleged tightness of the relationship between evidence and conclusion, and the operative variant of theistic ethic employed. Here Suan Sonna shares some highlights of his ongoing research project in which he proposes a moral argument predicated on natural law. We suspect that Suan’s voice will a prominent one indeed in this discussion for many years to come, and we are delighted to showcase his perspicacious work today.

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My moral argument took form while studying Judith Jarvis Thomson’s defense of abortion. As a Thomist, I wanted to tackle her thought experiments and whatever metaethical foundations prevented her from accepting my view. I read her paper “The Right and the Good” and was positively shocked. Thomson appealed to teleology, except she used the words “design functions”, to ground her approach to ethics. Rather than embracing teleological realism, however, she settled for teleological nominalism. I was curious thereafter and wondered if other philosophers were borrowing ideas from the Aristotelian-Thomist (AT) synthesis for their theories. As I began combing through the literature, I noticed a subtle pattern emerge – when moral philosophers contemplated the metaethical commitments of their theories, they all depended upon some idea of teleology, some notion of “fulfillment” as goodness, and deployed concepts that sounded awfully familiar to me as a Thomist – consider Moore’s understanding of the simplicity and indefinability of the good which rubs right into the classical theist conception of God! Over time, I decided to develop a moral argument for God’s existence from these observations.

Here is the argument:

(1)   Moral realism is true.

(2)   Moral realism requires a foundation that yields (A) objective moral truths, (B) is comprehensive, and (C) is compelling.

(3)   Either theistic or nontheistic moral realism is true.

(4)   Nontheistic moral realism fails to meet at least one of the three requirements.

(5)   Therefore, nontheistic moral realism is necessarily false.

(6)   Therefore, theistic moral realism is true.

(7)   If theistic moral realism is true, then God exists.

(8)   Therefore, God exists.

I divide versions of moral realism into those that imply the existence of God (theistic moral realism) and those that do not (nontheistic moral realism). Nontheistic versions of moral realism simply might have nothing to say about God’s existence or perhaps depend upon foundations incompatible with His existence. And, by “foundation” here I mean the ultimate explanation or grounding of moral facts whether it be our intuitions, some evolutionary norm, reason, or God. Theistic moral realism must say that the foundation of moral facts is God, while nontheistic moral realism need not.  

I then present in (2) three overarching standards for testing which of the two moral realisms is true. I maintain that moral realism requires a source that yields objective moral truths, is itself comprehensive and compelling.

By “objectivity” I mean the nature of the foundation or explanans must itself be consistent with the explanandum. It would be strange to get an objective theory of ethics from a purely subjective, mind-dependent foundation.

“Comprehensiveness” means that the foundation in question must tackle the most relevant metaphysical and epistemological questions for a proper account of moral realism. For instance, the foundation should help us understand the nature of normativity, it should yield an account of moral knowledge, and ensure we have reliable faculties for moral comprehension. Here, I narrow the debate down to five fundamental explananda – normativity, semantics, causation, cognition, and ontology.

In other words, the foundation should explain both the nature and origin of normativity. Regarding semantics, it should avoid making the world unintelligible but render its information content accessible to our intellects. Even the causal order itself requires an explanation such that we demystify the connection between facts about the world and our actions, the behavior of objects and persons in our unfolding moral drama. The foundation should not simply take for granted that we have reliable cognitive faculties for moral reasoning but explain the origin and reliability of those faculties. Finally, this foundation should illumine us on who or what counts as a moral subject, what is the good, the bad, the right and the wrong? This is the most demanding requirement of the three. And, I propose it in order to avoid moral realisms that are simply constructed to suit our ends or attempt to avoid the ultimate question. We are seeking the version of moral realism that actually covers the relevant and required explananda.

Of course, we also need a way of discerning which foundation most compellingly explains the explananda. I propose here several standards:

1)     Intuitive Fit

2)     Empirical Adequacy - “consistency with what we know about the world, including our best scientific knowledge.”1

3)     Epistemic Access - “the theory should include some account of how we could come to know its truth.”2

4)     Metaphysical Fecundity - “the theory should shed light on a variety of metaphysical issues.”3

5)     Unification - “We should not accept a bifurcated, disjunctive account of thought and of knowledge as long as a unified account is possible.”4

6)     Simplicity - “A good metaphysical theory should not be in need of ad hoc rescues or endless epicyclic tinkering.”5

The standard of unification staves off the objection that the comprehensiveness standard is too demanding. If there is a unified explanation that can explain all of the explananda and do it well, then that unified theory is to be strongly preferred. In other words, comprehensiveness is not too demanding since it is a burden that can be carried by other approaches and perhaps not the objector’s.         

Over the course of my research, I found that the AT synthesis simply bests its competitors. It provides an objective, comprehensive, and compelling foundation of moral realism in the very existence of God.

AT moral realism is founded upon six highly plausible metaphysical theses that simultaneously yield a comprehensive moral theory and proofs of the existence of God. The theses are the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), the causal principle (CP), the principle of proportionate causality (PPC), real essentialism (RE), the convertibility principle (TCP), and the principle of finality (PF).

The PSR means that, “Everything that is the case must have a reason why it is the case. Necessarily, every true or at least every contingent true proposition has an explanation. Every event has a cause.”6 Aside from the PSR being highly intuitive, I think Alexander Pruss and Robert C. Koons have provided powerful reasons for suggesting that its denial simply costs too much, including the intelligibility of the universe itself.7

The CP is inspired by Aristotle’s response to Zeno’s denial of change. Zeno argued that true change requires non-being to produce being, since what was not there before must suddenly emerge. Aristotle unraveled the paradox by proposing the CP: change is the actualization of an object’s potential by an already actual actualizer, meaning that being can be divided into being-in-act and being-in-potency. It also appears that denying the CP eviscerates the intelligibility of the universe and the reality of change.

The PPC simply follows from the PSR and CP, since there is an explanation for why events occur and this explanation must preserve the transaction of being. St. Thomas Aquinas defines the PPC as “effects must be proportionate to their causes and principles”8 so that “whatever perfections exist in the effect must be found in the effective cause.”9 To put it more straightforwardly, “a cause cannot give what it does not first have.”10 Consider for instance how materialists argue that consciousness cannot be immaterial, since our origins are purely material and so too is the fundamental nature of the universe. Like things beget like things.

RE is “... the metaphysical position that everything in the world has an essence or nature that fixes its identity.”11 and “The essence of a thing is its nature, that whereby it is what it is. It is what we grasp intellectually when we identify a thing’s genus and specific difference.”12 Things have a real definition of what they are, which makes possible our distinguishing one kind of thing from another kind. It is not that we are inventing the difference between a mushroom and a human but there really is something different about the two, and this difference is ultimately due to the nature of human beings and other plants. To deny this point seems to place a huge hole in evolutionary theory and the project of speciation, or even the trustworthiness of our perception since it seems to really be the case that humans, horses, and fish are not absolutely the same kind of thing and one can identify their differences.

TCP states, “... goodness is the same as being itself, but considered from a particular point of view - that of fulfillment of appetite.”13 In other words, goodness is the actualization of potential, a kind of fullness. For example, we say that one thing is better than another when said thing is more as it should be. A triangle drawn with a radiograph pen is better than one etched into the seat of a shaky bus. The instantiated triangles are obviously aiming towards triangularity and are hence held to that standard. Likewise, human beings are ordered towards “humanity,” and humans are better when they are more in harmony with and fulfillment of their human nature. The fullness of triangularity is the measure of goodness for a triangle. The fullness of humanity is the measure of goodness for a human.

Finally, the PF sates that “... every nature is ordered to an end; that nature does not act in vain; that the end is the first principle of activity; and that the end is the reason for all movement.”14 and “In short, if A is by nature an efficient cause of B, then generating B must be the final cause of A.”15 Another way of framing this is that nature behaves with intentionality or directedness. For instance, the laws of nature do not describe mere accidental regularities but they reveal the natures of the objects in question and how they act under certain conditions. This activity is intrinsic to the objects themselves, meaning they are acting as they should. For instance, an electron is a negatively charged particle that orbits the nucleus. Such a description gives us the nature and activity of the entity in question – even the “negative” charge label is connected to activity. Or, consider even how horses are tetrapods but some are obviously born with more or less legs than they should have. The nature of the horse provides us the norm and allows us to identify deviations and when things are not as they should be.

Two significant consequences follow from these theses. The first is that a comprehensive moral theory known as classical natural law theory follows. Classical natural law theory states that ethics is the science of how to fulfill one’s nature. Just as scientists discover laws of nature through observing the tendencies of objects and what should happen under normal circumstances, the same sort of study is done on human activity in order to unveil the natural law.  

The second consequence is that any properly constructed argument for the existence of God dependent upon any of the theses is given a significant plausibility boost. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, famously developed six ways to demonstrate the existence of God. The first is known as the argument from motion; the second is the argument from efficient causality; the third is a contingency argument of sorts; the fourth is an argument from the gradation of being; the fifth is a teleological argument; and the sixth is his lesser known De Ente argument.

The PSR makes the first, second, third, and sixth ways eminently plausible. For example, the first way begins with the CP and argues that there must be a purely actual actualizer in order to prevent an infinite causal regress. There must be a causal agent who is the source of all change but is not itself subject to change.

De Ente rightly observes that since beings are composites of essence and existence, meaning a real distinction exists between the two and not merely a logical or conceptual one, there must be an explanation for why they exist despite their essences not securing or entailing their existence. This can be viewed as a more precise contingency argument. St. Thomas located this ultimate explanation in a being whose very essence is existence itself lest there be another endless causal regress. In tandem with TCP, RE, and PPC, we arrive at a being who is essentially perfect and the source of all beings - of their essence and existence included! Since human beings are by nature rational animals, meaning our specific difference from the rest of the animal kingdom is our rationality, our cause must also possess something like an intellect in order for it “contain” and “impart” our intellects to us.

Furthermore, we know that this being has an intellect due to the fifth way, the teleological argument, where St. Thomas noted that even beings without minds are drawn or attracted towards their final ends just like an arrow is directed towards its target by an intellect. The PF and PPC get us a creator who must have something like an intellect or mind in order for its creation to have this feature of intentionality or directedness.

If St. Thomas’ arguments hold, then we arrive at one and in principle only one supreme being who is the essentially omnibenevolent or perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent reality.

This is my longwinded way of saying that nontheistic moral realisms have an incredible challenge to face, since theistic moral realism has a foundation that yields objective moral truths (since moral truths are fixed truths about being which emanate from God), a comprehensive explanation, and one that is indeed compelling. Robert C. Koons has demonstrated in his work Realism Regained how the AT synthesis can yield not only a moral theory but also an exact theory of causation, mind, and metaphysics. Significant work has been done in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science to demonstrate the plausibility of the AT synthesis and its relevance to quantum mechanics, biology, physics, and psychology. Theists have the theory of everything!

My moral argument attempts to leave no stone unturned and forces everyone to examine the foundations of morality. I conclude that God is the best and most comprehensive explanation, while nontheistic moral realism fails to provide what is required for a complete and compelling account of moral realism. Of course, further research needs to be done in order to secure this conclusion, but I think the argument has plausible foundations and deserves more attention.

---

1. Koons, Robert C. Realism Regained an Exact Theory of Causation, Teleology, and the Mind. Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 3.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Pruss, Alexander R. The Principle of Sufficient Reason: a Reassessment. Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 3.

7. See Pruss’ The Principle of Sufficient Reason and my dialogue with Robert C. Koons here.

8. Aquinas, Thomas. “Of the Causes of Virtue.” Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Coyote Canyon Press, 2018, pg. 391. I-II. Q. 63. Art. 3.

9. Aquinas, Thomas. “The Perfection of God.” Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Coyote Canyon Press, 2018, pg. 34. I. Q. 4. Art. 2.

10. Feser, Edward. Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Ignatius Press., pg. 170.

11. See the opening page of Oderberg, S. David Real Essentialism (2007).

12. Feser, Edward. Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction. Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, p. 211.

13. Oderberg, David S. The Metaphysics of Good and Evil. Routledge, 2020, p. 14.

14. Ibid, p. 28.

15. Feser, Edward. Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction. Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, p. 92.

Mailbag: Which Books on the Moral Argument Do You Recommend?

Hello, 

I am an aspiring philosopher/theologian with a graduate degree in and passion for apologetics, and I was hoping you could help me out. I'm looking for your personal list of books that someone who wants an advanced understanding moral argument needs to read.

For context, I'm looking to develop a list containing between 20 and 30 books dedicated to the moral argument. Ideally I'd have 15-20 books that provide support for and at least 5-10 books that challenge the argument. Ideally these texts would be mostly at the advanced level, or minimally, intermediate. 

The reason I'd like to do this is so that in the future I could dedicate a year to working through the best resources related to the argument. Ultimately, I'm looking to have advanced understanding of the argument.

I appreciate any recommendations you can give. 

Sincerely, 

Lucas

Hi, Lucas! Love that you want to spend time sinking into the moral argument. I think that too often nowadays arguments like this are treated as just a tool in the arsenal, rather than the rich resource they are for reflection, enjoyment, beauty, insight, spiritual formation, etc. The moral argument has it all going on.

There are five major components to the moral argument as I think about it. One is the history of the argument; another is a critique of secular ethics; another is a defense of theistic ethics; another is a defense of the moral realism on which it is all based; and another is an extension of the argument beyond theism to Christianity.

Regarding its history, Jerry Walls and I wrote The Moral Argument: A History, which directs you to folks like Kant, Newman, Taylor, Sorley, Rashdall, and others. Some of that’s really rich reading—especially Newman’s Grammar of Assent and Taylor’s Faith of a Moralist. Classics. Anyway, lots of recommendations in that book.

In terms of a critique of secular ethics, we wrote God and Cosmos, but just a start and promissory note. Linville’s piece on the moral argument, easily accessible online, is well worth reading. The debate between Craig and Wielenberg is coming out this year; that’s quite good. Edited by Adam Johnson. In terms of defending theistic ethics, that was the main goal of our Good God. But there are lots of possibilities here, including Zagzebski’s Divine Motivation Theory, Evans’ God and Moral Obligations, Hare’s Moral Gap, Adams’ Finite and Infinite Goods, Ritchie’s From Morality to Metaphysics. Most of these cover more than just one aspect of the moral argument—both defending theistic ethics and critiquing alternatives, for example. Wielenberg’s Robust Ethics offers criticisms of theistic ethics and an effort at a more secular account of ethics. Wielenberg and I have a written debate on Lewis’s moral argument in a book edited by Greg Bassham.

In terms of defending moral realism, see Cuneo’s The Normative Web, Shafer-Landau’s Moral Realism, and Enoch’s Taking Morality Seriously; all are important. Jerry and I aim to write our fourth book on the moral argument on this topic, finishing our planned tetralogy.

For extending the moral argument to Christianity, that is cutting-edge stuff. We need to see more books on this—especially using, say, Trinitarian resources. Adam Johnson wrote his dissertation on this recently at Southeastern, and Brian Trapp did about a decade ago at Southern. There may be more resources along such lines but I’m not as familiar with this literature. I have some doctoral students working on such topics in their dissertations. My guess is great work is coming here as the community of moral apologists builds and the momentum of the movement grows.

Incidentally, several of the folks mentioned—Hare, Adams, Evans, etc.—have done more than one book that’s important for the moral argument.

Important folks who are more secular to consider can be found when you look at rival ethical accounts. I mentioned Wielenberg, Enoch, and Shafer-Landau (though he aims for more neutrality on the God question than most), but as you get into error theory, expressivism, constructivism, sensibility, theory, and nontheistic moral realism (either natural or non-natural), you run into a host of thinkers: McDowell, Blackburn, Wiggins, Mackie, R. M. Hare (John’s father), Joyce, Korsgaard, Brink, Harman, Boyd, Foot, Parfit, etc.

There’s a four views book on God and morality edited by Loftin, and a nice anthology on God and ethics edited by Garcia and King called Is Goodness without God Good Enough? that’s eminently worth reading.

Of course avail yourself of this website, MoralApologetics.com, for a host of resources related to the moral argument from a wide array of disciplines. (The site will soon come under the auspices of the Center for Moral Apologetics we get to start at Houston Baptist this fall, as we are joining all the exciting things already happening there.) Recently the site’s begun a new series about recent developments in the moral argument—which reminds me, I have hardly mentioned contemporaries working on the moral argument; we’ve seen a real resurgence of work and interest on the topic over the last several decades.

Mark Murphy is an important thinker who has written some serious books on ethics from a theistic perspective although he is more reticent than many to make it into an apologetic matter. Still, though, quite worth reading, rife with trenchant insight and philosophical rigor. Kevin Kinghorn is a friend and good philosopher who studied with Swinburne and has written some important and germane books: A Framework of the Good, & (with Travis) But What About God’s Wrath? Much recommended.

In taking on alternative moral theories, of which there are a plethora, one might also be interested in taking on not just nonreligious alternatives, but non-Christian religious perspectives. Brian Scalise has done nice work using the Trinity to contrast an Islamic conception of love with that of Christianity’s; Ronnie Campbell has contrasted a Christian perspective on the problem of evil with those of several worldviews (pantheism, panentheism, etc.); TJ Gentry is finishing up a dissertation at North-Western using resources from moral apologetics to critique Mormonism; etc.

Paul Copan has penned a widely anthologized piece on the moral argument, and my wife and I have done a more popular level book that incorporated elements of Good God, God and Cosmos, and the history of the moral argument called Morals of the Story.

Sorry I can’t give you a more exhaustive list for now, but this is at least suggestive. You can find more resources in the notes and bibliographies of these books. I encourage you in your study! I am excited you have the interest; please keep in touch and let me know how it goes.

Blessings,

djb

Mailbag: How do you define the good?

Hi. I had a quick morality question for you. I hope that’s okay. I’ve been working with students at the local college campus, discussing morality. I’m wondering how do you define “the Good”? I’ll usually say something like “the Good is that which conforms to the nature and will of God.” What do you think?

Dave

Hi Dave! Thanks for the note. Your question is of course such a great one, and it is one of the hardest ones. Let me say a bit why I find it so devilishly difficult. Of course folks use “good” in nonmoral evaluative ways all the time—like "my computer is good." Thomists though want to put this sort of teleological consideration into the center of their ethical theory. Something is good to the extent it fulfills its function, or something like that, they will say.

Likewise with human beings, though morality enters the picture more explicitly with us, and if we are made by God and for intimacy with Him and others, then loving God and neighbor is what our purpose is. Thus, to the extent we do such things, we are (morally) good.

I don’t think that’s terrible. It probably has a lot going for it. But there has to be more, it seems to me, because of an example I think Wolterstorff comes up with: a serial killer’s “purpose” is to kill lots of people. So he’s a good serial killer if he does. But there is nothing moral about such goodness. So we have to ask not just whether someone or something performs his or her or its function or purpose, but whether the function or purpose is itself good. At that point a purely teleological account of the good seems to require something more deontological.

So regarding moral goodness in particular, what constitutes the standard or ground of moral value? To me the best account we have is the Christian God, owing to his nature. Of course our naturalist friends who are objectivists on such matters usually point to something like human flourishing. And there is some truth in that, it seems to me. This is what makes disambiguating these partially divergent/overlapping views onerous. As a Christian I’m convinced we were meant for flourishing, eudaimonia, shalom, joy, etc. But the question then becomes, what does that look like for us as humans? And the answer to that query invariably rides on what is ultimately real. If we are mere collocations of atoms and nothing else, our highest fulfillments are likely reducible to naturalistic items. But moral langauge and logic and phenomenology, to my thinking, all point beyond categories that naturalism alone can manage.

So I’m inclined to think the joy and telos for which we were designed requires more than that. So even if I were to agree that what's “good” for us is our flourishing (or something in that vicinity), it still points to something likely transcendent—something, I suspect, like the beatific vision. It seems to me the point is this: we cannot simply speak of what’s good for us and think we’re done; that very question drives us to ask what is good in and of itself.

Now, certain of our experiences are good intrinsically—like our friendships. But what is the ground of such intrinsic goods? Again, I don’t see how we avoid metaphysics if we really want to be thoughtful about it, and to me the best explanation seems likely to be classical theism. The nature of such a God seems to be at the front and center of what “the Good” is. This puts me in the theistic Platonist camp, but of course one can be a Christian without buying that. But it’s where I tend to go. Like you, I’m inclined to say that things are good to the extent they partake in or resemble the ultimate good. That is what makes sense of the value of friendship—it resembles God’s loving nature. At least that’s how I see it.

Christian theology makes even more fine-grained the analysis, since we know God’s nature to be Trinitarian—an eternal dance of other-regarding love. So this makes great sense of love being at the center of things, and of loving God and neighbor capturing all the laws and prophets. We are invited to participate in the love that functions at the foundation of reality and always has.

Ultimately I suspect we can effect a sort of rapprochement between Platonic and Thomistic accounts of the good, since we have been made in God’s image. What is best for us (loving relationships with God and others) and most conduces to our joy depends on what is most ultimately real and good in and of itself (God himself, indeed Trinitarian love).

Note, though, that this isn’t so much a “definition” of goodness as something else. I agree with Moore that we can’t define it. I still suspect, and think there’s good reason to believe, God is in some sense constitutive of it. That is more analysis than definition. And since God’s ineffable, this account has the advantage of rendering ultimate goodness, too, beyond our ken in ineliminable respects, necessitating what Adams calls a “critical stance” toward any other (likely deflationary) rival account of the good.

So, yes, hard question!! But in a nutshell that’s what I’m inclined to say. Thanks for the question.

djb

Critiquing Arguments for Moral Nihilism

From Crash Course Apologetics:

The moral error theorist does not believe in such things as moral values and moral obligations. John Mackie offered two arguments for this view that have come to be held with high regard among moral nihilists. The first is the argument from disagreement. The second is the argument from queerness. In this interview, Eric Sampson critiques both arguments. Eric Sampson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

The two papers linked below are the topic of this interview.

https://philpapers.org/rec/SAMTSA-6

https://philpapers.org/rec/MORPAT-23

Critiquing Dr. Eric Wielenberg's Metaethical Model (Interview with Adam Johnson)

Photo by James Sullivan on Unsplash

From Crash Course Apologetics:

Adam Lloyd Johnson is a PhD candidate at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary specializing in metaethics. He teaches philosophy at Theologisches Seminar Rhineland in Wölmerson, Germany. He is also a campus missionary with Ratio Christi.

In 2015 he published a paper in the journal Philosophia Christi titled, “Debunking Nontheistic Moral Realism: A Critique of Eric Wielenberg's Attempt to Deflect the Lucky Coincidence Objection.” The paper is linked below. Adam summarizes the paper in this interview.

https://www.pdcnet.org/pc/content/pc_...

A NEW Moral Argument for the Christian God

From Crash Course Apologetics

Dr. Bobby Conway runs an apologetics YouTube ministry called “The One Minute Apologist.” He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham. The topic of his dissertation is a moral argument for the existence of the Christian God from the existence of objective guilt. The link to his channel is below along with a livestream he did outlining some of the major points of his argument. You should definitely subscribe to his channel!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXkg...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDTNj...

A Case for Objective Moral Facts (Interview with Dr. Terence Cuneo)

From Crash Course Apologetics:

Professor Terence Cuneo is an analytic philosopher at the University of Vermont. He's published two books (The Normative Web, and Speech and Morality) with Oxford University Press arguing for moral realism. In this interview, he summarizes those arguments and offers responses to objections against moral realism.

Problems in Value Theory An Introduction to Contemporary Debates: Matt Flannagan's Chapter with Graham Oppy is finally published

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at MandM.org.nz.

Problems in Value Theory: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates

Bloomsbury Academic

Yesterday, I was informed that the book Problems in Value Theory An Introduction to Contemporary Debates has finally been published. The book is now available both on amazon on Bloomsbury’s website. Chapter 3 of this book “Does Morality Depend on God?” is co-authored by myself and Graham Oppy (Monash University). Both Graham and I each wrote an article (around 5000 words) spelling out our respective answers to the question, and then wrote a shorter piece (1500 words) where we responded to the other’s original essay. 

Problems in Value Theory is edited by Steve Cowan (Lincoln Memorial University). The table of contents is as follows:

  Introduction, Steven B. Cowan

  Part I: Problems in Ethics and Aesthetics

 Introduction to Part I, Steven B. Cowan

  1. Is Morality Relative?

 Morality Is Relative, Michael Ruse

 Morality Is Objective, Francis J. Beckwith

 Responses:

 Beckwith’s Response to Ruse

 Ruse’s Response to Beckwith

  2. What Makes Actions Right or Wrong?

 Consequences Make Actions Right, Alastair Norcross

 Respect for Persons Makes Actions Right, Mark Linville

 Responses:

 Linville’s Response to Norcross

 Norcross’s Response to Linville

  3. Does Morality Depend on God?

 Morality Depends on God, Matthew Flannagan

 Morality Does Not Depend on God, Graham Oppy

 Responses:

 Oppy’s Response to Flannagan

 Flannagan’s Response to Oppy

  4. Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?

 Beauty is Relative, James Mock

 Beauty is Objective, Carol S. Gould

 Responses:

 Gould’s Response to Mock

 Mock’s Response to Gould

  5. What Is the Meaning of Life?

 The Meaning of Life Is Found in God, Douglas Groothuis

 The Meaning of Life Can Be Found without God, Christine Vitrano

 Responses:

 Vitrano’s Response to Groothuis

 Groothuis” s Response to Vitrano

  Essay Suggestions

 For Further Reading

  Part II: Problems in Political Philosophy

 Introduction to Part II, Steven B. Cowan

  6. Do We Need Government?

 We Do Not Need Government, Roderick T. Long

 We Need Some Government, Alex Tuckness

 Responses:

 Tuckness’s Response to Long

 Long’s Response to Tuckness

  7. Should Wealth Be Redistributed?

 Wealth Should Be Redistributed, Jon Mandle

 Wealth Should Not Be Redistributed, Jan Narveson

 Responses:

 Narveson’s Response to Mandle

 Mandle’s Response to Narveson

 8. When May the Government Wage War?

 The Government Should Never Wage War, Andrew Alexandra

 The Government May Sometimes Wage War, Nathan L. Cartagena

 Responses:

 Cartagena’s Response to Alexandra

 Alexandra’s Response to Cartagena

  Essay Suggestions

 For Further Reading

 Index

 The blurb from Bloomberry is as follows:

Problems in Value Theory takes a pro and con approach to central topics in aesthetics, ethics and political theory.

 Each chapter begins with a question: What Makes Actions Right or Wrong? Does Morality Depend on God? Do We Need Government? Contemporary philosophers with opposing viewpoints are then paired together to argue their position and raise problems with conflicting standpoints. Alongside an up-to-date introduction to a core philosophical stance, each contributor provides a critical response to their opponent and clear explanation of their view.

 Discussion questions are included at the end of each chapter to guide further discussion.

 With chapters ranging from why the government should never wage war to what is art and does morality depend on God, this introduction covers questions lying at the heart of debates about what does and does not have value.

Get your copy now, read it, and let me know what you think both here and on Amazon. I am sure there is much more both Graham and I could say on this topic. Graham Oppy is one the best Philosophers of Religion in the world, and it was a real privilege being part of this project with him.  

An Abductive Moral Argument for a Good God (Interview with Dr. David Baggett)

From Crash Course Apologetics:

Dr. David Baggett earned his Ph.D. from Wayne State University and he is currently professor of philosophy at Liberty University School of Divinity. There are various moral arguments for the existence of God, but Dr. Baggett's is intriguing because his moral argument points uniquely combines the others in a way that points specifically to the Christian God. If this interests you, check out his book called The Morals of the Story: Good News About a Good God published by IVP in 2018.

Divine Command Theory: Answering Classic and Contemporary Objections (Interview with Matthew Flannagan)

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at MandM.

Last week Jordan Hampton from Crash Course Apologetics interviewed me about chapters 12-13 of my book Did God Really Command Genocide. In this is the section of the book, I discuss divine command metaethics and critique some of the most important objections raised against divine command theories. The interview is nearly two and a half hours long. We go over every objection I respond to in the book. Enjoy

---

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is a Theologian with proficiency in contemporary analytic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of Otago, a Masters (with First Class Honours) and a Bachelors in Philosophy from the University of Waikato; he also holds a post-graduate diploma in secondary teaching from Bethlehem Tertiary Institute and a Graduate Diploma in history from Massey University

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 2)

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 2)

Michael Mendoza

NIETZSCHE MISUNDERSTOOD CHRISTIANITY

Admittedly, the Christendom of Europe that Nietzsche observed was at a low point spiritually. The German Enlightenment grew out of rationalism in conjunction with German Idealism. Nineteenth-century German theologians personified the barren Apollonian culture against which Nietzsche rebelled. Christianity had become sterile and arid. Theological Liberalism, left with nothing miraculous or authoritative, emphasized ethics over doctrine. The higher critical method of interpretation chipped away at the biblical standard for morality leaving moral issues up to individuals, the church, or the state. In the words of the Old Testament, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”[i] Thus, Nietzsche called Christianity Nihilism. The culprits were the priestcraft that included ministers, theologians, and philosophers.

 Concerning the philosophical cognoscenti of the previous two centuries, Nietzsche wrote, “German intellect is my foul air: I breathe with difficulty in the neighborhood of this psychological uncleanliness that has now become instinctive – an uncleanliness which in every word and expression betrays a German.”[ii] He had no sympathy for philosophers such as Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, or even Schopenhauer, calling them “unconscious swindlers.”[iii] Nietzsche attacked David Friedrich Strauss, for example, as a “type of German Philistine of Culture and a man of smug self-content.”[iv] Yet, he accepts without question the fundamental presuppositions of German theologians that deny the historicity and authority of the New Testament. Because of this Nietzsche completely misinterpreted Jesus and Paul. Though he despised Strauss, Nietzsche acceded to Strauss’ rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Walter Kaufmann obsequiously defended Nietzsche’s atheism as “a corollary of his basic commitment to question all premises and to reject them unless they are for some reason inescapable.”[v] However, Nietzsche did not challenge the theological premise that created the European Christendom he opposed so passionately. If Nietzsche had questioned the underlying rationalistic presuppositions of the German Enlightenment concerning the nature and authority of the Bible, he might still have rejected Christianity; however, he would at least have had a clearer understanding of what it meant to have an existential encounter with the risen Christ. From Nietzsche onward, modernism and postmodernism have seen Christianity as a “bad fiction”[vi] based on a set of bad ideas. Nietzsche’s fatal flaw was that he had no concept of Christianity as a relationship with the Creator of the universe. He could not conceive of any Dionysian aspects of the genuine Christian life. An encounter with the risen Christ fills the follower with a joy that passes understanding and overflows with music and dance.

DIONYSIAN ASPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY

            The metaphor of Dionysian ecstasy in music and dance can easily be seen in the lives of those who have encountered Christ. The Christian’s Holy Scripture is replete with examples of people who experience a joyous encountered with, as Francis Schaeffer put it, “the God who is there.”[vii] Though the Bible does present a Christian philosophy, it is not primarily a philosophical book. Evangelical Christians believe the Bible is divine revelation from God in propositional form. In any case, it is a written record of people’s experience with God. Believers throughout history lived the Dionysian life-affirmation Nietzsche hoped to achieve. Examples from the Old Testament and the New Testament demonstrate the positive aspects of Dionysian enthusiasm.

            The book of Exodus records the historical events of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel through the Red Sea. Once safely across the sea, Moses and the people broke out into ecstatic celebration.

I will sing to the Lord,

For He has triumphed gloriously!

The horse and its rider

He has thrown into the sea!

The Lord is my strength and song,

And He has become my salvation.[viii]

Immediately after the Song of Moses, Miriam could not contain her enthusiasm. “Then Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took the timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.” In a truly Dionysian life-affirming style of celebration, she danced and sang. Nietzsche’s experience at Bayreuth in 1876 convinced him that Wagner’s attempt to make a religion of the art of music could not work. Safranski explained that Nietzsche “experienced firsthand how a hallowed art event could deteriorate into banality.”[ix] Miriam’s dance, however, was a spontaneous improvisation.[x] Music welled up from within the crowd and compelled the women into a unifying dance. The jubilation was not drug or wine induced. The people experienced Dionysian ecstasy in its purest and most positive form.

2 Samuel 6:1-17 provides another example of exuberance resulting in an encounter with the Living God. King David brought the Ark of the Covenant into the City of Jerusalem. The Scripture understates his delight saying he brought, the “ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with gladness.”[xi] He took six steps and then overcome with euphoria, the Bible says, ““Then David danced before the Lord with all his might.”[xii] David’s Dionysian fête had an Apollonian effect on his wife. “Michal, Saul’s daughter, looked through a window and saw King David leaping and whirling before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.”[xiii] She called his display of passionate merriment “shameless” (נִגְל֖וֹת). As indicated earlier, Apollonian art is sterile and represents restraint. Michal’s response left her barren for the rest of her life. She represents the somatophobia that Nietzsche observed in nineteenth-century European Christendom. In simple terms, European church goers believed the spiritual is good, and the physical is bad because it left nature “bloodless and passionless.”[xiv] Nietzsche wrote, “The Christian is an example of exaggerated self-control: in order to tame his passions, he seems to find it necessary to extirpate or crucify them.”[xv] David responded with Dionysian passion in music and dance, “I will play music before the Lord. And I will be even more undignified than this.”[xvi] Iselin and Meteyard express the duality as an epistemic clash. “When reflecting on their personal epistemology, or individual ways of knowing God and his truth, many Christians today distinguish between so-called head-knowledge and heart-knowledge.”[xvii] David blended both Apollonian and Dionysian culture. His rational and experiential understanding of God led him to coin the phrase praise the Lord.

The Apostle Paul, whom Nietzsche called “that pernicious blockhead,”[xviii] demonstrated a Dionysian exuberance which Nietzsche completely overlooked. Suffering from a severe beating and shackled hand and foot to a prison wall, Paul and Silas jubilantly sang.[xix] They did not sing out of a lack of hope or from despair over an eternally repeating tragedy. Their music was not a desperate attempt to embrace their fate – amor fati. They sang because they had a genuine relationship with the God of creation. Saints like Paul did not need to reject this world. They did not merely look toward the next world for hope. They lived a life of joy embracing the present world. They said yea to life as an existential encounter with the God who exists which included both this world and the next. The metaphor of Dionysian – Apollonian duality can be seen in other passages in the Bible. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus told about two sons. The younger son squanders his inheritance and in desperation returns home to his father who greeted the wayward son with a jubilant celebration of music and dance. The older son, representing the Apollonian attitude, responded in anger toward the revelry. His life was spent in self-denial desperately hoping for some future inheritance.

From the creation narrative in Genesis to the last chapters of the book of Revelation, history is portrayed as a great dance performed by the Creator. Genesis chapter one is written in poetic form, perhaps as an ancient Hebrew song of creation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Spirit moved across the water. I might paraphrase it as the Spirit danced across the waters. The book of John chapter one tells us that Jesus, the Word, was there in the beginning participating in the dance of the Triune God.

According to Jerry Walls, the doctrine of the Trinity explains the eternal nature of love. God is one in three persons. He did not need to create in order to express his love. Yet, he created “us out of love, and his choice to create us is an overflow of who he is in his eternal nature.”[xx] Walls invoked the words of C.S. Lewis to explain what this means. God is not a static thing, but rather a “dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”[xxi] The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existed from all eternity in a relationship of mutual love, joy, and delight. God wants us to join him in “the dance of joy that energizes the three persons of the Trinity.”[xxii] In the final chapters of the Bible, George Frederic Handel heard the music of the angelic hosts at the culmination of history when he penned the Hallelujah Chorus. From before the beginning of time and throughout eternity, God desires for us to share in the Triune dance. Walls concluded that some, like Nietzsche, rather than embracing the opportunity to dance, “choose to reject the offer and attempt to construct their own substitute for joy... In so doing, they reject the only possible source of deep and lasting happiness, and thereby consign themselves to frustration, misery and suffering.”[xxiii] Nietzsche personified the results of choosing not to dance with the Creator. He manufactured a hopeless eternal recurrence whereas God offers a joyous eternal dance.

CONCLUSION

            Nietzsche’s philosophy was not a radical departure from the dry, lifeless dogma of German intellectualism. He represents the culmination of all Enlightenment thinking. If the atheists are correct and God does not exist, then Nietzsche’s conclusions follow naturally. Life is meaningless leading to a worldview of despair. If Nietzsche’s fundamental assumption that God is dead, however, is not the case, then the entire structure of his philosophy falls like the house built upon the sand. Nietzsche’s understanding of Christianity, according to Horton, is “insipid” and a “caricature.”[xxiv] If God exists, Nihilism will not be the result of genuine Christianity as Nietzsche predicted. Francis Schaeffer concluded that Christianity “differs from Nihilism, for Nihilism, though it is correctly realistic, nevertheless can give neither a proper diagnosis nor the proper treatment for its own ills.”[xxv]

Ultimately, Michael Horton correctly concluded that “the definitive power for the Christian community is neither Apollo (resignation to defeat) nor Dionysus (the will to power) but the Lamb who was slain for others but now is alive.”[xxvi] Christianity is not Romanticism, Mysticism, or an Existentialist leap of faith which have abandoned the authenticity and authority of Scripture. Experiencing the life-affirming God revolves around God communicating in propositional statements that are true. St. Jerome wrote, “For if, according to the Apostle Paul, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, and the one who does not know the Scriptures does not know the power of God and his wisdom, [then] ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”[xxvii] As I apply the metaphor of Apollo and Dionysus, I see no tension between the existential encounter with the risen Christ and the propositional truth found in his Word. Christianity provides the reason for tragedy in the world but also allows access to the One who can bring joy in this world and the next. Those in despair need only to embrace the God who is there. In the words of Zarathustra, “I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.”[xxviii] As Walls concluded, “that God wants to dance with Nietzsche, and he will do everything he can to get Nietzsche... in the dance.”[xxix] Even the death of Jesus Christ on the cross is “God’s ultimate statement that he wants us to come home to him and learn to dance.”[xxx] Since Nietzsche is wrong about the non-existence of God, it is possible to embrace a relationship with the God who is there. Jesus does more than know how to dance. He is the Lord of the Dance.

notes:

[i] Judges 17:6, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+17:6&version=NKJV

[ii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Thoughts Out of Season, translator: Anthony M. Ludovici, Horace B. Samuel, John McFarland Kennedy, Paul V. Cohen, Francis Bickly, Herman Scheffauer, and G.T. Wrench, (The Modern Philosophy Series, http://www.e-artnow.org/, 2017), 661. Digital version.

[iii] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 661.

[iv] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 661.

[v] Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 134.

[vi] Brian Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology, (UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2.

[vii] Francis Schaeffer, The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossways Books, 1990), 47.

[viii] Exodus 15:1-2 NKJV.

[ix] Safranski, 140.

[x] Exodus 15:20-21 NKJV.

[xi] 2 Samuel 6:12 NKJV.

[xii] 2 Samuel 6:14-15 NKJV.

[xiii] 2 Samuel 6:16 NKJV.

[xiv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 133.

[xv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 133.

[xvi] 2 Samuel 6:21-22 NKJV.

[xvii] Darren Iselin and John D. Meteyard, The ‘Beyond in the Midst’: An Incarnational Response to the Dynamic Dance of Christian Worldview, Faith and Learning, Journal of Education & Christian Belief 14, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 33–46. doi:10.1177/205699711001400105.

[xviii] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 105.

[xix] Acts 16 NKJV.

[xx] Walls, 160.

[xxi] Walls, 160. Quoted from C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (San Francisco: Harper, 2001), 175.

[xxii] Walls, 161.

[xxiii] Walls, 162.

[xxiv] Michael Horton, “Eschatology After Nietzsche: Apollonian, Dionysian or Pauline?” International Journal of Systematic Theology, vol. 2, number 1, March 2000, 59. 29-62.

[xxv] Schaeffer, 46.

[xxvi] Horton, 59.

[xxvii] The Commentary on Isaiah By St. Jerome,1. Ancient Christian Writers, The Works of The Fathers in Translation, Translated and Introduction by Thomas P. Scheck, (New York: The Newman Press, 2015). https://biblia.com/api/plugins/embeddedpreview?resourceName=LLS:JEROMECOMMIS&layout=minimal&historybuttons=false&navigationbox=false&sharebutton=false#

[xxviii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Dover Thrift Edition, Translated by Thomas Common, (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999), 24.

[xxix] Walls, 164.

[xxx] Walls, 163.

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 1)

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 1)

Michael Mendoza

            Friedrich Nietzsche introduced his philological study of the Ancient Greek’s Apollonian and Dionysian duality in 1872 with his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music.  His interpretation of the two Greek gods underpinned his philosophy of the will to power, the Übermensch, and eternal recurrence throughout his career. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy would have some merit as a metaphor for Greek culture and the German society in which he lived if his underlying assumption about atheism is correct. His explicit rejection of Christianity, however, led to a fatal flaw in his reasoning because the existence of the Christian God can be rationally defended as the inference to the best explanation[i] in an Apollonian manner. Anyone can also experience a Dionysian life-affirming existential encounter with the Living God. Jesus declared, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”[ii]

Nietzsche’s assessment of Christendom in late nineteenth-century Europe was essentially correct. Christianity in Europe had become stale and spiritless. German Protestantism, especially, gave in to the temptations of anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny. Nietzsche even showed some of these traits. Because of the failures of German religiosity, Nietzsche felt Christianity represented the negative aspects of the Apollonian denial of life. He held that Christianity would necessarily lead to Nihilism, and “the Christian doctrine is the counter-doctrine to the Dionysian.”[iii] Jerry Walls described Nietzsche’s view of the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell as “a way for weak, dishonest people to get vengeance on their powerful enemies.”[iv] The German philosopher could not conceive of any Dionysian aspects of the Christian life. An encounter with the risen Christ fills the follower with a joy that passes understanding and overflows with music and dance. A genuine existential experience with the God of the Bible, however, fulfills the positive elements of Dionysian life-affirmation Nietzsche sought.

Others have taken up the question of whether Nietzsche’s evaluation of Apollos and his brother Dionysus is accurate;[v] therefore, I will not delve into the matter. I also do not suggest that the genuine Christian experience is Dionysian in the sense of chaotic or uncontrolled frenzy. Nor is Christianity solely an intellectual assent to a set of philosophical ideas. Instead, I use the Apollonian and Dionysian duality as a metaphor not only for Greek culture but as a foundation for understanding modern Christianity. I will demonstrate how embracing Christianity is both an intelligent and life-affirming choice – a true will to power. I begin with a summary of Nietzschean Apollonian and Dionysian duality focusing on the so-called life-affirming aspects of Dionysus. Next, I examine the fatal flaw in his understanding of Christianity. I provide examples of Dionysian Christians in the Old and New Testament as well as current trends in Christendom. I conclude with Dionysian elements of Christianity by defending the claim that the positive aspects of Nietzsche’s Dionysian life-affirmation are found in a genuine relationship with the God of the New Testament. A balance of Apollonian and Dionysian elements brings music, art, science, and Christian faith into a joyful dance.

NIETZSCHE’S APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN DUALITY

            Nietzsche described Apollo and Dionysus as the “two art deities of the Greeks.”[vi] Anne-Marie Schultz summed up Nietzsche’s view of the Apollonian aspect of human experience. She wrote, “the Apollonian is associated with reason and rationality, intellectual vision, healing, and dreams.”[vii] He is the god of calm stability and self-control. Apollonian art represents the motionless aspect of the Platonic ideal. Apollonian art is symbolic. Walter Kaufmann pointed out that Nietzsche used Apollo as a symbol for the aspect of Greek culture that “found superb expression in classical Greek temples and sculptures: the genius of restraint, measure, and harmony.”[viii] Thus, paintings and sculptures in Apollo’s domain represented the static or motionlessness endurance of life. Nietzsche held that the colorless marble of Greek statues and architecture characterized Apollonian culture as sterile and dreamlike. He is the god of the “beautiful illusion.” In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote, “This joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies [bildnerischen Kraefte], is at the same time the soothsaying god.”[ix] Thus, he is also the god of the inner world of fantasy, “ruler over the beautiful illusion.”[x] Apollonian art is a denial of this world. Nietzsche compares this to the Christian focus on the next life. Apollonian and Christianity are life-denying.

On the other side of Greek culture, Nietzsche understood that the Dionysian art of music and dance referred to the world of frenzied intoxication. According to Ulfers in his introduction to Nietzsche’s The Dionysian Vision of the World, this intoxication is not a narcotic stupor, but an exhilarating “rush,” a Rausch “that spells unboundedness.”[xi] Ulfers further explained that “Speech – conceptual language (the Begriff) – is replaced by singing, and the measured steps of walking are overtaken by dancing.”[xii] Dionysus is the liberator, and the intoxicating ecstasy tears down the boundaries of the Apollonian. Schultz explained that the Dionysian “resides in the disruption of everyday experience” and “in ecstatic moments where one loses a sense of self in communal experience.”[xiii] In the Dionysian festival the individual’s self-control is lost. The euphoric experience of this side of Greek culture in its ritualistic music and dance was, as Kaufmann pointed out, “barbarous by comparison and found expression in the Dionysian festivals.”[xiv] According to Nietzsche, Greek Dionysian festivals happened under the influence of a narcotic draught or the “potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy.”[xv] The emotions intensify, and in the frenzied state everything is subjective; for example, the Apollonian principium individuationis disappears into “complete self-forgetfulness.”[xvi]

Regarding Dionysian music, Nietzsche held that other cultures such as Egypt and Babylon celebrated similar festivals which centered around “sexual licentiousness, the annihilation of all familiarity through an unbounded hetaerism.”[xvii] The Greek celebration of Dionysus, as seen in Euripides’ The Bacchae, differed from them in that “from it flows that same charm, the same musically transfiguring intoxication, that Skopas and Praxiteles concretized in statues.”[xviii] Nietzsche’s focus was on the euphoric experience of the music and dance rather than the orgiastic nature of the Dionysian ritual. The point of the ceremony was for people to join as a unified whole. Safranski describes Nietzsche’s view of Dionysian music as the ecstasy that “melts away the masks representing specific characters to expose an emphatic sense of unity.”[xix] The music draws people into a oneness that communicates more fundamentally and profoundly than words. Safranski explained that music was, “the oldest universal language, intelligible to all people, and yet impossible to translate into any other idiom.”[xx] Music is the voice of the cosmos. The Christian parallel for the cosmic voice is Λόγος (Logos).  The cosmic language is the Word and the cosmic activity is the dance. Sokel added, “It is the union of universal energy and individuated form or shape which the Dionysian orgiastic dance triumphantly enacts by projecting as an individual image the force that binds all together.”[xxi]

In his essay Attempt at Self-Criticism, Nietzsche urges Christians to learn the art of this worldly comfort and laugh to “dispatch all metaphysical comforts to the devil.” Then he adjures Christians in the words of Zarathustra, “Rise up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs! Rise up your legs, too, good dancers; and still better, stand on your heads.”[xxii] Dance is an expression of Dionysian life-affirmation. In the book The Birth of Tragedy, he wrote, “In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing.”[xxiii] Enthusiasm in pure rapturous music compels the Dionysian to dance and embrace life. Dionysian art “gives us the power of grand attitudes, of passion, of song, and of dance.”[xxiv]

Yet, Nietzsche saw how Dionysian drama turns into tragedy. It is through the Dionysian tragedy that hope is abandoned, and the will must intercede. Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power, as well as eternal recurrence, is born out of the symbolism of the Dionysian Greek tragedy. The Dionysian must accept the fact that life is meaningless and painful. Sorrow and suffering are inevitable. Nietzsche’s formula for embracing life’s pain is amor fati. “The Dionysian affirmation of the world, as it is, without subtraction, exception, or choice – it would have eternal circular motion.”[xxv] Nietzsche insisted the tragedy of the world is that even though nothing matters because everything is doomed to recur, the superior man will say yea rather than nay. Nietzsche concluded his discussion of Dionysus in The Will to Power with these words:

The tragic man says yea even to the most excruciating suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying, to be able to do this; the Christian denies even the happy lots on earth: he is weak, poor and disinherited enough to suffer from life in any form. God on the Cross is a curse upon Life, a signpost directing people to deliver themselves from it.[xxvi]

Only through tragedy can the will to power be exercised. For Nietzsche, the greatest tragedy is that life repeats itself in the eternal recurrence. Since there is no hope, the will to power must seize life and embrace the tragedy.

Nietzsche, however, did not intend for Apollonian and Dionysian duality to be considered antithetical. They are not opposites in a Hegelian sense of thesis and antithesis. In Section 1 of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche looked back at his earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy, and said it “smells offensively Hegelian.”[xxvii] Nietzsche’s position is that both the Apollonian and Dionysian are “conditions in which art manifests itself in man as a force of nature... Both of these states let loose all manner artistic powers within us, but each unfetters powers of a different kind.”[xxviii]  Apollonian art produces the power of vision and poetry. Nietzsche held that Socrates sprang from Apollonian intellectualism and thereby developed into all philosophers who devise the fiction of an unseen world or thing-in-itself.

Christopher Cox pointed out that although Nietzsche’s duality looks like a dialectic in the sense of Hegel or Socrates, it is not. “Were it so,” Cox explained, “the Dionysian would be sublated in a higher form. But tragedy does no such thing. Rather it thoroughly affirms the Dionysian.”[xxix] In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, tragic pessimism is superior to the optimism of Socratic and Hegelian dialectic, and thus it is preferred to Apollonian culture.

Years after he published The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche added an essay titled, An Attempt at Self-Criticism. He made it clear that even though he did not mention Christianity, it was nevertheless written as an attack on the Christian faith. He wrote, “Perhaps the depth of this anti-moral propensity is best inferred from the careful and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the whole book – Christianity as the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has ever been subjected.”[xxx] His atheism and antipathy toward Christianity is well documented in many of his works. In The Will to Power, for example, he railed against the “falsehood and fictitiousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and its history.”[xxxi]

At this point, Nietzsche’s fatal flaw about Christianity must be examined.

Notes:

[i] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[ii] John 10:10. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10%3A10&version=KJV.

[iii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Including Autobiography and Selected Personal Letters, translator: Anthony M. Ludovici, Horace B. Samuel, John McFarland Kennedy, Paul V. Cohen, Francis Bickly, Herman Scheffauer, and G.T. Wrench, (The Modern Philosophy Series, http://www.e-artnow.org/, 2017), 554.. Digital version.

[iv] Jerry Walls, “How Could God Create Hell?” God is Great, God is Good: Why Believing in God is Reasonable, Edited by William Lane Craig & Chad Meister, (Downers Grove, Il: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 158.

[v] Silk, M., & Stern, J. (2016). Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge Philosophy Classics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316534786. See also, Nickolas Pappas, “Nietzsche’s Apollo,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 45, No.1 (Spring 2014), pp.43-53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.45.1.0043.

[vi] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, Translated and Edited, with Commentaries, by Walter Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: The Modern Library Edition, 1992), 4.

[vii] Anne-Marie Schultz, “Nietzsche and the Socratic Art of Narrative Self-Care: An Apollonian and Dionysian Synthesis,” Socrates and Dionysus: Philosophy and Art in Dialogue, Edited by Ann Ward, (UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 139.

[viii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, Translated and Edited with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1992), 8.

[ix] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 35. Bildnerischen Kraefte is better translated, artistic energies. The word plastic was first coined in 1907. Nietzsche would not have had that in mind.

[x] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy,35.

[xi] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, Translated by Ira J. Allen, Introduction by Friedrich Ulfers, (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013), 9.

[xii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 9.

[xiii] Schultz, 140.

[xiv] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 35.

[xv] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 36.

[xvi] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 36.

[xvii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 31.

[xviii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 31.

[xix] Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Translated by Shelley Frisch, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 100.

[xx] Safranski, 101.

[xxi] Walter H. Sokel, “On the Dionysian in Nietzsche,” New Literary History, Autumn 2005, 36, 4; ProQuest, page 501.

[xxii] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 26.

[xxiii] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 34.

[xxiv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.

[xxv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 540.

[xxvi] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.

[xxvii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Translated and Edited with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1992), 726.

[xxviii] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 432.

[xxix] Christopher Cox, “Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the Ontology of Music,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson, (UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 498.

[xxx] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 23.

[xxxi] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 17.

Editor's Recommendation: The Layman’s Manual on Christian Apologetics by Brian Chilton

Editor's Recommendation: The Layman’s Manual on Christian Apologetics by Brian Chilton

Recommended by David Baggett

“Chilton’s Manual delivers on its promise to make accessible to the local church the powerful resources of apologetics. Providing an aerial view of the apologetic landscape at once refreshing and required, written with winsomeness and good humor, it shows the author’s pastoral heart, practitioner’s spirit, and rigorous mind. This book can and will equip readers to answer honest questions and gain confidence and boldness in sharing, explaining, and defending the good news of the gospel.”

— David Baggett, Executive Editor

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More Recommendations

Gratitude, Thankfulness, and the Existence of God

Gratitude, Thankfulness, and the Existence of God

Stephen S. Jordan

Every year around Thanksgiving Day, and also throughout the Christmas season, we pause to reflect on all that we have for which to be grateful. There are other times throughout the year when we sense the need to say thanks, and we realize we ought to be more grateful than we presently are—but do we ever stop and think about how the very nature of gratitude and thankfulness actually point to the existence of God?

Gratitude is the awareness of goodness in one’s life and the understanding that the sources of this goodness lie, at least partly, outside oneself. It is not a self-contained or self-sufficient emotion but rather a human person’s inner response to another person or group of persons for benefits, gifts, or favors obtained from them. For example, consider the gratitude one experiences as a result of loving family members, thoughtful friends, and devoted teachers or mentors. The duty of gratitude is to honor these persons by thanking them for the benefits they have provided. Similarly, when gratitude is felt due to a country, school, or some other collective body, it is owed to them not as impersonal establishments, but as communities of human persons. Therefore, gratitude is a deeply personal emotion directed toward persons or groups of persons.[1]

Thankfulness occurs when one outwardly expresses the inner gratitude that is felt. Like gratitude, thankfulness is personal in nature. The difference between the two lies in that being grateful is a state, whereas thanking is an action.[2] With thankfulness, a personal object is in view when someone receives a special gift from a friend or family member and responds by saying “thank you” or writing a “thank you” card or note. In every expression of thanks, the verb “thank” is used in conjunction with an object—typically with the word “you.” Without an object of thanks, there can be no thankfulness. This means that every time one utters the words “thank you,” it is directed toward someone. Thus, thankfulness is an outward personal response directed toward individual persons or communities of persons.[3]

On a deeper level, when one experiences the richness of life which culminates in a deep sense of gratitude and a profound desire to express thankfulness, to whom is this gratitude, this desire to offer thanks, to be directed? G. K. Chesterton once stated, “The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels thankful and has no one to thank.”[4] Of course, it is easy to understand how an atheist or agnostic feels gratitude toward human persons who have made positive differences in their lives, but what about the blessings that cannot be ascribed to human agency? For example, when one considers the overwhelming immensity of a galaxy or the dynamic intricacy of a single living cell and feels as if they are a part of something special, of something bigger than themselves—to what or whom is this sense of gratitude due? While looking at things like a galaxy or cell, the well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, admits that he is overcome with an immense feeling of gratitude: “It’s a feeling of sort of an abstract gratitude that I am alive to appreciate these wonders. When I look down a microscope it’s the same feeling. I am grateful to be alive to appreciate these wonders.”[5] An atheist or agnostic finding himself or herself in a situation like that of Dawkins, where gratitude arises and there is no personal being to thank, is presented with a difficult conundrum that is difficult to overcome.

There are a number of other examples that illustrate this same point. For instance, when one drinks a cool glass of mountain spring water after a long hike and experiences refreshment not only of the body but seemingly of the soul, or when one is lying on the beach and enjoys the warmth of the sun beaming down on their skin—to what or whom should this person offer their thanks? In moments like these, is one’s gratitude directed toward impersonal things like galaxies, cells, water or the sun—or is this gratitude more appropriately directed toward a personal God who cares deeply for human persons and makes possible their enjoyment and overall well-being? Does it make sense to offer thanks to a galaxy, a cell, water or the sun for the good gifts of life—or does it make more sense to thank God as the personal Creator and transcendent Giver of all good gifts that we enjoy in life?[6]

In his book Thanks!, Robert Emmons shares a story involving Stephen King, the most successful horror novelist of all-time, where King’s survival of a serious automobile accident causes his heart to become flooded with a deep-seated gratitude that King directs toward God. As Emmons explains,

“In 1999, the renowned writer Stephen King was the victim of a serious automobile accident. While King was walking on a country road not far from his summer home in rural Maine, the driver of a van, distracted by his rottweiler, veered off the road and struck King, throwing him over the van’s windshield and into a ditch. He just missed falling against a rocky ledge. King was hospitalized with multiple fractures to his right leg and hip, a collapsed lung, broken ribs, and a scalp laceration. When later asked what he was thinking when told he could have died, his one-word answer: ‘Gratitude.’ An avowedly nonreligious individual in his personal life, he nonetheless on this occasion perceived the goodness of divine influence in the outcome. In discussing the issue of culpability for the accident, King said, ‘It’s God’s grace that he [the driver of the van] isn’t responsible for my death.’”[7]

Interestingly, as a result of his life being spared, King directs the gratitude that arises in his heart to God. Even though there was another human in view, it would have been odd for King to thank the driver of the van who nearly killed him. If it did not make sense for King to thank the driver of the van, then who else could he thank if not God, who was responsible (in King’s own words) for saving his life on a day when he probably should have died?

The examples above illustrate that there are times when it does not make sense to direct gratitude and offer thanks to human persons. Even those who deny God’s existence and believe that the world is the result of blind, purposeless forces still agree that there are instances of gratitude that reach beyond a human benefactor. One’s sense of gratitude and desire to give thanks does not go away on an atheistic worldview—it is only frustrated.

In these instances (when it doesn’t make sense to thank a human person), we ought to direct our gratitude and thankfulness, even our praise, to God. Indeed, in every moment of every day, in all circumstances (1 Thess. 5:18), our hearts and minds ought to be characterized by gratitude and thankfulness; nothing less is appropriate considering God’s wonderful blessings upon our lives (James 1:17). Our prayer to God ought to be that of the Welsh poet and priest of the Church of England, George Herbert, who wrote,

“Thou that hast given so much to me,

Give one thing more, a grateful heart.”[8]

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Stephen S. Jordan currently serves as a high school Bible teacher at Liberty Christian Academy in Lynchburg, Virginia. He is also a Bible teacher, curriculum developer, and curriculum editor at Liberty University Online Academy, as well as a PhD student at Liberty University. Prior to his current positions, Stephen served as youth pastor at Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church in State Road, North Carolina. He and his wife, along with their three children and German shepherd, reside in Goode, Virginia.

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Notes:

[1] According to Robert Emmons, a leading scholar on the science of gratitude, “[G]ratitude is more than a feeling. It requires a willingness to recognize (a) that one has been the beneficiary of someone’s kindness, (b) that the benefactor has intentionally provided a benefit, often incurring some personal cost, and (c) that the benefit has value in the eyes of the beneficiary.” Robert A Emmons, Thanks!: How the Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 5. Many of the ideas from this section on gratitude come from Alma Acevedo, “Gratitude: An Atheist’s Dissonance,” First Things, published April 14, 2011, accessed November 23, 2019, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/04/gratitude-an-atheists-dissonance.

[2] For example, when I feel grateful for a friend, this inner gratitude motivates me to display thankfulness for my friend by doing something kind for them (e.g., purchasing them a Starbucks gift card). Emmons and McCullough explain the difference between gratitude and thankfulness in this way: “Being grateful is a state; thanking is an action.” Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, The Psychology of Gratitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 286.

[3] Can gratefulness be directed toward something material (i.e., something other than a person)? Does it make sense to offer thanks to a material item, such as a coffeemaker? As Emmons notes, “If we subscribe to a standard conception of gratitude, then the answer must be no. My Technivorm Moccamaster coffee brewer does not intentionally provide me with a kindness every morning. But there might be another way to see it. In a blog essay entitled Gratitude as a Measure of Technology, Michael Sacasas suggests that there is nothing bizarre about feeling grateful for technological advances. We could in fact be grateful for material goods…So we can think of gratitude as a measure of what lends genuine value to our lives…So although I am not grateful to my coffeemaker I could legitimately be grateful for it…Thinking about gratitude and technology this way verified what I have believed for some time. We are not grateful for the object itself. Rather, we are grateful for the role the object plays within the complex dynamic of everyday experience. That is what triggers a sense of gratefulness. When it comes to happiness, material goods are not evil in and of themselves. Our ability to feel grateful is not compromised each time we leave home to go shopping or with each click of the ‘add-to-cart’ button. When we are grateful, we can realize that happiness is not contingent on materialistic happenings in our lives but rather comes from our being embedded in caring networks of giving and receiving.” Robert A. Emmons, Gratitude Works!: A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 92-93.

[4] Actually, this is a quote of Dante Rossetti that Chesterton cites. Many people often attribute it to Chesterton, which is why it appears that way in this article, but it is actually a statement by Rossetti.

[5] This was stated by Dawkins in a November 2009 debate at Wellington College in England. The debate was sponsored by a rationalist group known as Intelligence Squared.

[6] Why is a personal God necessary here? Can a person not direct gratitude or offer thanks to an impersonal god (i.e., a force)? Due to the intrinsically personal nature of gratitude and thankfulness, it seems odd to direct these feelings and actions toward anything less than a God who is personal himself. What about other religions, besides Christianity, that claim that God is personal? Although this discussion needs more time and space in order to hash out all of the details, a few brief things need to be mentioned. Because Christianity is the only religion that offers a Trinitarian conception of God, it is the only religion that can claim that God is intrinsically personal. The circulatory character of the triune God (i.e., the doctrine of perichoresis), the mutual giving and receiving of love among the three Persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—serves as a solid ground for maintaining God’s essentially personal nature. Other religions may claim that God is personal, but only in the sense that humans are able to relate to him. Thus, in non-Christian religions, God may be called “personal,” but he is dependent upon humans for his personality and is therefore not intrinsically personal.

[7] Emmons, Thanks!

[8] A special thanks to two of my close friends, Jay Hamilton and Chris Rocco, for proofreading an earlier version of this article and offering helpful feedback. I am so grateful for your friendship!