Making Sense of Morality: Sociobiology

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Ruse and Evolutionary Ethics

Michael Ruse (b. 1940) is another cognitivist in that moral sentences can be true or false. Yet, he is not an objectivist. If he were, then moral statements would be about facts concerning moral acts or objects thought to have moral value. Yet, there are no intrinsically moral properties, or any that transcend our biology. Instead, he too is a subjectivist. Moral discourse ends up being a way of describing the biological. Ruse also grounds ethics in naturalistic evolution and science.

Ruse’s Sociobiology

Ruse rejects as a myth the older paradigm that evolution is essentially progressive and that it generates value, for humans are its successful endpoint. Instead, he embraces sociobiology, in which morality is part of biology. Social norms develop by their evolutionary emergence.

On this view, moral behavior simply is a biological adaptation. Cooperation with others is a good survival strategy, which he claims is virtually the norm in the animal kingdom. Since we cooperate, we are successful in surviving and reproducing. Moreover, “social success” leads to the evolution of more efficient means of cooperation.

Following Richard Dawkins’s idea of the “selfish” gene, Ruse believes that what appear to be “altruistic” acts relate back to an individual’s self-interest. That is, such acts occur because ultimately they benefit the performer’s biological ends. But, since we have a self-centered nature, and we have adapted via sociality, we need a mechanism to break through that self-centeredness. Morality is that mechanism, which has been selected for cooperative behavior.

So, Ruse thinks he can derive the moral ought from what biologically is the case and thereby avoid the issue posed by the “naturalistic fallacy”: i.e., how do we get what is morally normative from what is biologically descriptive? Moreover, he is consistent as a naturalist, denying that there are any intrinsic morals. While morality seems objective to us, it does not exist objectively (i.e., independently of us), for it is an illusion of our genes.

While this position might make Ruse’s ethics seem vulnerable to charges of relativism, he flatly rejects that charge. Instead, he strongly rejects as immoral many clear cases of wrongdoing, such as rape, Hitler’s savagery, female circumcision, and more. 

Assessment

Clearly, Ruse’s ethics is an important attempt to account for ethics in a naturalistic, evolutionary framework. Surely he is right that cooperation is a good strategy for survival, and that humans seem to have a self-centered nature. He also rightly addresses the need to preserve the oughtness of morality, that it not be reduced merely to what is the case.

Now, Ruse admits that “altruistic” and “selfish” are metaphorical ways of describing behaviors. They are not the case in reality, for morality simply is an illusion. Indeed, all moral discourse would seem to be a metaphorical way of talking about biological behavior.

In that case, Ruse’s claim that his view can preserve the normativity of morality (especially of core morals like murder and rape are wrong) seems to do nothing of the sort. As he has admitted, there are no intrinsic moral properties, even to biology. But, generally, how we talk about something does not confer new properties upon it. Clearly, Ruse is not suggesting that our moral speech adds moral properties to biology. In that case, we can talk in whatever ways we want about morality, even that murder is right, but it will do nothing to change the biological facts of the matter, that there are no moral properties in our biology.

Furthermore, due to how natural selection happened to work, it is conceivable that we could have evolved differently, such that murder or rape would not be wrong, but perhaps even right and obligatory. After all, since morality’s “objectivity” is just an illusion of our genes, then murder’s or rape’s being wrong, or justice’s and love’s being good, could have turned out otherwise, or not ever have evolved. But that seems deeply mistaken.

For Further Reading

Michael Ruse, “Evolution and Ethics: The Sociobiological Approach,” in Ethical Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Louis Pojman, 4th ed.

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 5

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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

Making Sense of Morality: Naturalism and Moral Cognitivist Options: Subjectivism

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Naturalism and Moral Cognitivist Options: Subjectivism

In terms of the meaning of moral sentences, naturalists also could be cognitivists. They maintain moral claims are truth apt, yet they still deny there are any intrinsically moral properties. There are three main branches of moral cognitivism: subjectivism, error theory, and objectivism. Subjectivists generally reduce morals to what a speaker likes or dislikes (private subjectivism), or what a culture likes or dislikes (cultural relativism). This essay will look at subjectivism in general, and then in particular at that of Gilbert Harman.

In general, while subjectivist theories about the meaning of moral statements are compatible with naturalism, there is an obvious problem with them – they reduce moral claims, which are normative, into merely descriptive ones. But that does not seem to do justice when we claim (for example) that murder is wrong. We do not mean that we simply dislike murder; rather, we mean it is wrong. For example, when we see people cry out for justice when a murder has been committed, it is not because they merely dislike murder. Instead, they know something morally wrong has been committed, and justice should be done.

Harman’s Subjectivism

Now, for Harman (b. 1938), there is another sense of subjectivism. According to him, moral facts are natural facts. Consistent with naturalism, there are no intrinsically moral facts. Moral facts should be understood as being relational facts, which are about reasons that are grounded in a given subject’s goals. Moreover, our moral beliefs arise from our interaction with natural facts. But that interaction always is conditioned by our upbringing and psychology, so all moral beliefs are our constructs. Morals are dependent upon us, so they are subjective in that sense.

In terms of moral reasons, Harman thinks people likely have them only if they have implicitly entered into an agreement with others about what to do. Nevertheless, these motivating reasons will not be the same for all, and he thinks it is likely only some people have made those agreements. So, Harman’s ethics is relativistic.

Discussion

For now, let me make some observations about Harman’s ethics. For one, we can see a consistent naturalistic position at work, that there are no intrinsically moral properties or facts. If everything is natural, and the world has been “disenchanted” of things like essential natures, then surely morals would not have essences either.

Also consistent with naturalism is his relativism, even though many naturalists have not embraced ethical relativism as a system. Still, it is consistent because naturalists usually are nominalists, and on that view, everything is particular. On ethical relativism, there are no universal morals, which fits very much with nominalism.

Notice too that he admits morals are our constructs. This will be true of ethical relativism in general, which we will discuss later. But, later I also will address an issue that I think will show that on naturalism all knowledge, even of morals, must be, at best, just our constructs. This will stand in contrast to what naturalists who are objectivists believe.

For Further Reading

Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, and Explaining Value: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 5

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Making Sense of Morality: An Introduction to Naturalism

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Pictured: A. J. Ayer

Introduction to Naturalism

The next major move in ethics has been based on naturalism, which roughly is the view that there is only the natural; there is nothing supernatural. Usually this means all that exists is physical or dependent upon the physical. There are no essential natures or universal properties, like Plato thought. Already, we have seen many shifts in this direction, with materialist, nominalist, and empiricist moves. Plus, the Scientific Revolution gave rise to the view that the universe is a causally closed machine. When Darwin’s Origin was published, there was no longer a need to appeal to God as Creator. Naturalism became the dominant worldview in the west.

Naturalistic Ethics

To be consistent, ethics needed to be adapted to a naturalistic framework. Historically, this has taken many forms. In this and the following essays on naturalistic ethics, I will focus on one or more such proposals. In this essay, I will look at naturalistic moral views that are noncognitivist. This will include A. J. Ayer’s emotivism and Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism.

Noncognitivism

Moral noncognitivism includes the views that 1) intrinsically moral properties don’t exist, and 2) moral judgments are neither true nor false. While there is some debate about what moral judgments are, noncognitivism denies a place for beliefs. Since knowledge involves justified true beliefs, there is no moral knowledge on this view.

Ayer (d. 1989) was one of the logical positivists. Fitting with naturalism, meanings had to be something physical and empirically knowable. For them, a sentence is meaningful if and only if it is empirically verifiable. Ayer denied that moral sentences are meaningful; they do not have cognitive content and cannot be true or false. Sentences like “murder is wrong” is code language that just expresses emotions; e.g., “ugh, murder!” Similarly, “justice is good” translates to “hooray, justice!” His is a kind of emotivism. (Similarly, another noncognitivist option is prescriptivism: moral sentences just express commands; e.g., “don’t murder!” They too are not true or false.)

Simon Blackburn (b. 1944) is a noncognitivist who endorses quasi-realism. He too denies the reality of intrinsically moral properties since we live in a naturalistic, “disenchanted” world. He focuses on our ways of talking morally. His project attempts to give moral discourse the right to engage in talk as though morals exist (realism), and moral claims are true or false. Based on the surface grammar of a moral sentence, we can treat them as such. But, like Ayer, there really are no morals, and moral claims are not true or false. In both Ayer’s and Blackburn’s cases, the focus is on the way we talk morally and the denial of intrinsically moral properties.  

Assessment

What should we make of these noncognitivist views? First, by reducing away any cognitive content from moral sentences, they end up being merely descriptive. But, morality deeply seems to be about what is normative, or prescriptive. If people protest against a miscarriage of justice (e.g., an unarmed African-American man who was walking down a street, but was murdered by white men), they are not merely emoting. Instead, they deeply believe there was an injustice done, which is why they are upset.

Second, moral judgments are not identical with feelings or commands, for the former can occur without the latter. We do not need to have any feelings when we state, “Murder is wrong.” And, we can have feelings without moral judgments.

Third, there is no room for any moral education or training on these views, since there is no cognitive content to learn and therefore no real moral disagreement. But, this result undermines any training in moral virtue, such as in why we should address examples of injustices in society. It also does not do justice to the fact that many of us do disagree morally. This is plain to see when we look at the many social and moral issues we deliberate and debate.

These noncognitivist views undermine our four core morals, but there are more naturalistic options yet to be considered.

For Further Reading

A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic

Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 5

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Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

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Mailbag: Arguing for the Premises of the Moral Argument

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I had a few questions regarding the following argument:  

1. If there is moral obligation / knowledge / transformation, then God exists. (Theistic Metaethical Theory) 

2. There is moral obligation / knowledge / transformation. (Moral Realism) 

3. Therefore, God exists.  

Is there a way to argue for this in a succinct way or are 1 and 2 separate arguments in and of themselves?   

Evans in "God and Moral Obligation” argues roughly for 1 (he limits it to moral obligation). And arguments in response to people like Joyce are needed to establish 2.  

Is your adductive argument as you lay out for 1 and your forthcoming book is aimed at 2? 

Kevin 

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               Hi Kevin, thanks for this. Yes, I think you’re quite right. So yeah, this modus ponens version of the argument is a popular way of putting the argument(s). As you note, I prefer an abductive approach for several reasons, one being that the contrapositive of the first premise above involves what I consider to be a counteressential: a situation in which God doesn’t exist. If God exists necessarily, as I think he does, then we’re literally envisioning an impossible world, indeed a null world. So to ask of such a world what its features are strikes me as problematic. 

               Both deductive and abductive versions, though, begin with moral phenomena realistically construed. So the second premise requires a defense of moral realism. This is the book in the tetralogy that Jerry and I haven’t written yet, yes, but we just got a contract with OUP to write it, which is exciting. We will argue against error theory, expressivism, constructivism, etc., and try to answer debunking objections (this is where Joyce comes in, exactly right, along with folks like Kahane, Ruse, Street, etc.). Of course we’ll also attempt to provide several positive reasons to believe in moral realism. 

               The first premise requires that the theistic explanation be shown explanatorily superior to the secular alternatives. So it involves two tasks: defending theistic ethics against objections (and giving positive reasons for it), and critiquing secular ethics that attempt to make sense of moral realism. Good God was on the first topic, and God and Cosmos was on the second. 

               I think quite separate arguments are needed, then, for the two premises in question. Defending moral realism logically comes first (though we’re getting around to it last), and then the case for the comparative superiority of theistic ethics. 

               Evans makes the case for both premises (delimited, as you say, to moral duties)—why theism makes such good sense of them, why we have reason to believe duties are real in the first place, and the limitations naturalistic accounts encounter making sense of them. 

               Our abductive argument, too, makes the case for both premises (though the second premise would be couched in terms of best explanation). There really are three tasks, again: defending moral realism (current book), defending theistic ethics and arguing in favor of it positively (Good God), and critiquing secular ethics (God and Cosmos). A yet fuller case would expand that last point to include a critique of nonChristian religious ethics, which I haven’t done, but some students are working on (taking on Islam, Mormonism, etc.). It’s something I hope to do more later, especially Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam.  

               Does that help? 

               Merry Christmas, friend! 

Blessings, 

Dave 

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

Making Sense of Morality: Bentham, Mill, and Utilitarianism

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction

After Kant, the next major thinkers in the Enlightenment were the utilitarians. Two exemplars were Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832) and John Stuart Mill (d. 1873). On utilitarianism, no morals are intrinsically right or wrong, or good or bad. Following the trend we’ve seen, they thought pleasures and pains, and benefits and harms, could be measured empirically. Utilitarianism uses means-to-end reasoning to determine what is moral, based on the sum of an action’s consequences.  

Bentham, Mill, and More

Bentham was a hedonistic utilitarian: what action maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain is right. He treated all pleasures and pains alike, focusing on the net quantity of pleasure. But Mill realized some pleasures (e.g., intellectual ones) are better than others (e.g., sensual ones). Thus he focused on their quality. For him, we should act to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

There also is act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. The former focuses on individual acts; the one that maximizes utility should be performed. The latter looks at kinds of acts that, from experience, we know tend to maximize utility. This is helpful, e.g., in taxation policies, so that we don’t have to re-run the calculus each time we consider a proposal.  

Assessment

There definitely is a place for appeals to utility in moral reasoning. E.g., when crafting public policy, we should consider the likely consequences of a proposed action, even when a deontological principle clearly applies. After all, people have to live with such decisions. Moreover, utilitarianism appeals to people, especially in secular societies, as apparently being morally neutral. There is no appeal to God or some other set of values to determine what is moral.

However, what gets to count as a “good” or “bad” consequence in the first place? Who gets to decide that? According to whom is something (or someone) more valuable than another? Biases easily could enter the calculation here. To make such judgments seems to presuppose some outside standard, beyond utility.

Another issue is that utilitarianism seems inadequate in terms of how it treats motives. Yet, surely they are morally important. If someone kills another, it makes a major difference if it was done intentionally or accidentally. We rightly recognize that difference in the law.

Relatedly, utilitarianism undermines acts of moral supererogation, ones that are heroic and praiseworthy, yet not required. Suppose someone is jogging but notices another person in danger of being attacked by a third person with a knife. While we should expect that jogger to at least call for help (call the police or cry out, to scare off the attacker), it would be above and beyond the call of duty for that jogger to fight off the attacker and save the would-be victim. Yet, on utilitarianism, that act would be obligatory if it would result overall in net good consequences.

Perhaps most significantly, utilitarianism makes net utility the basis for what is moral. Consider again our core morals: murder and rape are wrong, and justice and love are good. If the good consequences of a murder outweigh the bad, then that act would be justified and even obligatory. The same goes for rape, whether under act or rule utilitarianism. But these results clearly are deeply mistaken, to say the least. If this justification held, it could be moral to rape another person, or murder a racial minority person who is protesting peacefully for civil rights. But, we deeply know such acts are wrong; otherwise, why would there be such uproars against these acts?

Likewise, justice would be reduced to whatever is the result of the calculation. A rape or murder would be just in a society that is predominately one race if that act would maximize the overall benefits for the majority. Yet, if these acts can be just on this moral system, we have lost justice. Indeed, murder’s and rape’s wrongness, and justice’s and love’s goodness, seem to be intrinsically so.

So, it seems utilitarianism undermines our four core morals and is inadequate as the basis for ethics.

For Further Reading

Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 4

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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

Making Sense of Morality: Kant’s Ethics

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction

Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) thought all knowledge begins with sense experience. However, as a nominalist, there are no literally identical qualities in experiences. Moreover, experiences always show us what contingently the case is. These are a posteriori truths (ones known by experience).

Yet, he also wanted to preserve a major role for reason. To him, there also are a priori truths, which are known by reason independently of experience. There are two kinds of a priori truths: analytic a priori truths (ones true by definition; e.g., a bachelor is an unmarried male), and synthetic a priori truths, which are true due to how the world is. So, for him there are universal and necessary truths.

Unlike many we surveyed before Hobbes, Kant did not conceive of knowledge as the mind’s matching up with reality. Instead, it is an activity which generates knowledge. For him, we cannot know things as they are really are in themselves, but only as they appear to us.

This move led him to posit two realms, that of experience (the phenomena) and that of reality as it is apart from our experience (the noumena). But, if all experiences are discrete and there are no universal, necessary qualities given in experience, how can we share in a common, intersubjective world? Kant posited that a transcendent mind (not God) constructed the same world in each of us.

Kant’s Ethics

Kant conceived of morals as categorical, or absolute, commands. They are valid independently of experience. Therefore, morals could not be dependent upon the contingent, phenomenal realm. Morals are part of the noumena, and as such, they are known by reason. But as a nominalist, he could not appeal to transcendent, objectively real, universal morals like Plato. Instead, he believed that we should self-legislate a maxim (plan of action) that would apply universally. That is, we would generalize a maxim to be applicable for all people, a move fitting with nominalism.

By self-legislating morals, we are being autonomous. Why should we obey the moral law? Though he was raised as a Pietist, it was not out of love for God. Rather, we should do our duty for duty’s sake, out of pure respect for the moral law. By acting autonomously, we live out the categorical imperative. He gave it different formulations. For example, whatever I choose to do, I should will it to be universal for everyone. Additionally, we always should treat all humans (including ourselves) as an end, and never just as a means to an end. Fittingly, the goal of ethics is to develop a good will that acts autonomously and independently of consequences.

Kant made several posits to make his system “work.” For example, we should act as if God exists to make full sense of morals. Also, to achieve a holy will, the soul must be immortal; and to freely will our maxims, we need free will. Yet, none of these are empirically knowable, so it seems they are postulates.

Kant’s Legacy

Kant’s ethics has endured. His reasoning influences bioethics with the principles of autonomy, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence. He also tried to provide universal morals and respect of persons.

Kant believed we cannot know things as they really are in themselves, but only as they appear to us. Many take that idea as “settled.” However, suppose we see a tiger. For him, we cannot see the tiger, but only as it appears to us. Call that A1. But, we cannot see A1 as it is, but only as it appears to us (A2). The same result repeats without end. Disastrously, it seems we cannot get started to know anything empirically. Yet, if all knowledge begins with sense experience, there’s no knowledge.

Thus, while Kant tried to preserve universal morality, it is at best just a human construct. In terms of his legacy, people thought he gave much prestige to science, which uses an empirical method. Thereafter, the fact-value split became more entrenched: the sciences give us knowledge of facts, while religion and ethics are just opinions, preferences, and values.

For Further Reading

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 4

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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

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Making Sense of Morality: Hume’s Ethics

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction

David Hume (d. 1776) also was heavily influenced by mechanical atomism and nominalism. So, no two things are identical; everything is particular. He also was a major British empiricist, such that all knowledge comes by the five senses. Moreover, all that we experience are particular sensory impressions. It is not the case that in daily life we experience objects like tables and cars themselves. Rather, from those sense impressions the mind projects those objects due to custom.

Since we cannot sense empirically anything immaterial, Hume’s views lead to a radical skepticism. We could not know God or the human soul is real. Yet, we also cannot sense the mind, so perhaps we should wonder what it is that does the projecting. Nor can we know custom by the five senses, so we could doubt its reality too.

Hume’s Ethics

Applied to morals, they cannot be something immaterial, like many previous ancients and medievals thought, lest we not be able to know them. Additionally, for him, morals are not subject to reason. Reason deals with matters of facts and relations of ideas, he held, but reason cannot tell us what is moral or move us to action. Instead, the prospects of pleasure and pain move us to action, while, in a very move very unlike Aristotle, reason is powerless to do so.

Yet, there is a subordinate role for reason. It can help us figure how to accomplish what we want. Thus, reason is slave of the passions.

There is a major consequence of this view. Consider the sentence, “murder is wrong.” Sentences are empirically knowable. However, many have argued that a proposition is the cognitive content (or meaning) of a sentence. In that case, murder is wrong is a proposition. Now, suppose we deleted that sentence; would we thereby destroy its meaning and that proposition, too? It does not seem so. Moreover, the very same proposition can be expressed in many languages, but that is a characteristic of an immaterial universal, like Plato and Aristotle thought. Such things have an essence, and each universal is one thing, and yet be present in many concrete instances (here, sentences).

This means that for Hume, while sentences are subjects of knowledge, propositions, including moral principles, are not. In these ways, Hume severed facts from morals. That move has been called the fact-value split, which has been with us in the west ever since.

Key for Hume’s morality is the moral sense, or sentiment or feeling. That seems to make an action moral or not. Yet, each feeling is particular and highly individualistic. Also, his ethics seems to be like emotivism, such that moral statements (“murder is wrong”) would be just emotive utterances (e.g., “ugh, murder!”). But, if so, they cannot be true or false, for they are non-cognitive. They are just expressions of feelings.

With this highly individualistic emphasis, Hume’s ethics could seem to lead to anarchy. Yet, he also was quite high on keeping the status quo. To do that, he also held a high place for social order and utility.

Assessment

What then should we make of his ethics, particularly in terms of preserving our core morals? Clearly, the idea that morality is just a matter of each person’s own feelings is very much alive now, especially in the U.S. Still, by gutting morals of their cognitive content, he also removed their normativity. So, murder’s and rape’s wrongness, and justice’s and love’s goodness, would be undermined. All we would have would be expressions of feelings. But those are just descriptive, not normative.

Moreover, on his view, why should a sociopath be prevented from acting on his or her passions? Without any cognitive content to morals, we lose all ability to know what actions we should, or shouldn’t, do. Yet, from our core morals, we know that that is not so. Further, his appeal to social order seems ad hoc, given the rest of his theory.

Next, we will look at Immanuel Kant’s ethics.

For Further Reading

Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and A Treatise of Human Nature R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 4

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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

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Making Sense of Morality: Hobbes

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction

As key thinker behind the shifts in the Scientific Revolution, Thomas Hobbes embraced mechanical atomism and nominalism. A major focus on empirical knowledge also ensued. Not only was his book, Leviathan (1651), shaped by these factors, he also was influenced by the English civil war between Charles I and Parliament.

Hobbes’s Ethics

For Hobbes, humans are just material beings. Fittingly, he thought external objects caused motions in us, and these motions included things like desires and aversions, thoughts, beliefs, and more. An external object causes a motion in us toward it. Such a motion is a desire for something, which he claimed is good. Similarly, aversions were caused by external objects, but they caused motions away from them, which he said were bad.

He also defined the good in terms of self-interest (ethical egoism), which we ought to pursue. Further, we do in fact act in our self-interest (psychological egoism). But, self-interest is not necessarily identical with pleasure.

Hobbes posited that we have a restless desire for power. If people desire the same object, there is conflict. If everyone pursues his or her self-interest, there will be a persistent fear of violence, which he called a state of war.

Now, unlike the views we just surveyed, on materialism, there are no transcendent, objectively real morals. So, acts are not wrong until a humanly-made law forbids it. To preserve a peoples’ safety, they need to form a social contract with a sovereign ruler, or Leviathan, to keep the peace and defend their rights which he would promulgate. The Leviathan would exercise all functions (executive, legislative, and judicial) of government. While this could be a tyrant, Hobbes thought that the sovereign’s body is composed of the people he rules. Since he too would act egoistically, he would act in the peoples’ best interests. 

Only the Leviathan gives rights; there are no natural rights, except the right of nature (to preserve one’s own life). Nor would any other rights be inalienable, for they are given by government. While Hobbes spoke of “natural laws,” they were not objectively real, immaterial laws that we could know by reason. Rather, they were maxims for our lives.

By way of assessment, there are several issues with his ethics. First, there is no room for moral reformers. Whatever the sovereign decrees is law and therefore moral, unless of course he violates peoples’ own right of nature.

Second, Hobbes doesn’t seem to anticipate any problem with material beings making choices, like ceding their rights and forming a social contract. Nor does he see an issue with making rational decisions. Yet, if we are but mechanisms, and even our desires (or aversions), let alone other “mental” states, are caused by the motions external, material objects produce in us, then it seems there is no room for free will. How then can we be ethically responsible for our actions? Likewise, how can we make rational choices to believe the truth?

Third, can his views preserve our core morals: murder and rape are wrong, and justice and love are good? I don’t think so. In a completely material world, things can be exhausted descriptively. But while careful descriptions of the various factors involved in ethical decision-making is important, ethics involves what we ought, or ought not, do or be. Ethics is a normative discipline, but Hobbes’s materialism seems unable to account for that.

Finally, consider what is good (or bad) in terms of Hobbesian motions. Murder’s or rape’s wrongness would be based on the motions an object (presumably the intended victim) caused in the perpetrator. According to Hobbes, something morally wrong would be a motion away from something. But that is not what happens in acts of murder or rape; the perpetrator moves toward the victim, which, on Hobbes’s view, would be good. Moreover, it seems the victim is the one to be blamed, for that person caused the motions in the perpetrator! Further, justice is more than motions; both a just and an unjust act could involve motions toward someone, or something. So, tellingly, it seems Hobbes’s theory cannot preserve our core morals.

For Further Reading

Hobbes, Leviathan

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 4

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Making Sense of Morality: Shifts from the Scientific Revolution

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction

Like we have seen with Thomas Aquinas, the Scholastics’ Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages stressed metaphysics, especially real, immaterial, and universal qualities. This applied not only to human nature, but also to virtues and moral principles. As universals, many particular, individual humans can exemplify the very same quality (a one-in-many).

The Shift

With this stress upon universals and their essential natures, Aristotelianism lent itself to a more a priori (in-principle), deductive approach to science. But, this position started to shift with William of Ockham (d. 1347). Ockham rejected universals, and in its place embraced nominalism. Unlike universals, nominalism maintains that everything is particular. For instance, while we may speak of the virtue of justice, each instance of justice is particular, and they do not share literally the identical quality. Now, Plato’s universals, which held that universals (or forms) themselves are not located in space and time, and this would fit with their being immaterial. But, nominalism rejects that view. On it, all particulars are located in space and time. That implies that they are material and sense perceptible.

About two and one-half centuries later, two key philosophers in the early modern period, Pierre Gassendi (d. 1655) and Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679), embraced nominalism. Gassendi also revived Democritus’ atomism, on which the material world is made up of atoms in the void. Hobbes and Gassendi also adopted a mechanical view of the universe: it is a large-scale machine, and so are the things within it. These views shift away the reality of immaterial things and embrace instead materialism.

These philosophers helped set a basis for natural philosophy (science) in the emerging modern era. Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) adopted the mechanical view, and scientists such as Francis Bacon (d. 1626), Galileo Galilei (d. 1642), Robert Boyle (d. 1691), and Isaac Newton (d. 1727) endorsed mechanical atomism. Yet, there was a key difference in the atomism of this period from that of Democritus. Probably due to the influence of Christianity in Europe in this time, people tended to think that atomism applied only to the material realm, but not the spiritual one. They still had room for the reality of minds, souls, angels, and God.

The qualities of matter (e.g., size, shape, quantity, and location) were thought to be primary qualities. In contrast, the qualities of the spiritual realm (e.g., colors, tastes, or odors) were considered to be secondary qualities. Secondary qualities either were subjective qualities in the mind of an observer, or words that people used. In other words, they did not exist objectively.

Here, we must note something of immense importance. It was not scientific discoveries which drove this shift away from universals and a dualistic view of reality. Instead, it largely was due to the adoption of philosophical theories, namely, nominalism and mechanical atomism.

The Rise of a New Scientific Methodology

What is the significance of this shift? Boyle illustrates it well; he thought secondary qualities and Aristotelian universals were unintelligible due to what he conceived to be real in the material world. Of course, that conception was informed deeply by mechanical atomism and nominalism.

Instead of the Aristotelian paradigm, a new scientific methodology developed. It stressed empirical observation of particular, material things. On the new paradigm, things did not have essences that necessitated certain causal effects. Instead, the new scientific methodology focused on contingent causes and induction. While Aristotelianism had encountered empirical problems (e.g., the discovery of new species of which he did not know), the new methodology provided an advancement. Instead of relying overly on metaphysical theories, it emphasized the importance of empirical observation of the world.

Conclusion

These shifts in the nature of what is real, and how we know it, became deeply entrenched, and they affected ethics too. Next, I will look at Hobbes’s ethics. The key question will be: can his ethics preserve core morals?

For Further Reading

Alan Chalmers, “Atomism from the 17th to the 20th Century,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atomism-modern/

Eva Del Soldato, “Natural Philosophy in the Renaissance,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natphil-ren/.

Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore [The Assayer], in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/h291/assayer.htm#_ftn19. Jürgen Klein, “Francis Bacon.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/

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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

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Good God: Interview with David Baggett

From Logically Faithful

What logical reason is there that God is good? In this episode, I Interview David Baggett. Dr. Baggett author of Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. The book won Christianity Today’s 2012 apologetics book of the year of the award. He published a sequel with Walls that critiques naturalistic ethics, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. A third book in the series, The Moral Argument: A History, chronicles the history of moral arguments for God’s existence. Dr. Baggett has also co-edited a collection of essays exploring the philosophy of C.S. Lewis, and edited the third debate between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew on the resurrection of Jesus. Dr. Baggett currently is a professor at Houston Baptist University

Click here to listen to the podcast.

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Making Sense of Morality: Islamic Ethics

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

A Spectrum of Views

In this period between the ancient Greeks and the Scientific Revolution, there also was the rise of Islamic ethics. In Islam’s “classical” period, several schools of thought developed, which cover an epistemological spectrum of how we know what is right. At one end were the rationalists, including Avicenna and Averroes. In their view, moral truths exist objectively, even apart from Allah. Reason can discover moral truths, which does not conflict with revelation.

Next along this spectrum were the Mutazalites. For them, too, morals exist objectively. We can know them from the Qur’an, the Traditions of Mohammed, or independent reason. Some thought we could know morals independently of revelation. Further, they reasoned that theistic voluntarism (morality is based solely on Allah’s will) could lead to some immoral conclusions.

In response, Sunni theologians (or traditionalists) held the sovereignty of Allah as their supreme principle. They disputed the Mutazalites’ view that there are objectively real moral principles that even Allah follows. Such truths would exist independently of Allah’s sovereign will. In effect, independent reason limited Allah’s power, and objective morals had to be rejected. For Ashari, morals are what Allah commands, which ultimately we know only from revelation.

For traditionalists, ethics is one of action (doing Allah’s will). While there has been room for virtue in Islamic ethics, for traditionalists, virtues are not ends in themselves. Instead, the beginning of Islamic ethics is submission, and the end is obedience. Since the traditionalist view realizes both the fundamental point of Allah’s omnipotence, as well as revelation as the basis for knowing what is right, it is easy to see how this view came to dominate.

So, can the traditionalist view preserve these core morals? Yes, but only if Allah so wills that they are valid. But, there are no limits on Allah’s sovereignty, as is the case with the Judeo-Christian God’s character, so conceivably Allah could will they are invalid, and we would have no basis for complaint.

For Further Reading

George F. Hourani, Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 3

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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

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Making Sense of Morality: Plato and Aristotle

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction

To begin our historical tour, I will start with the ancient Greeks. I will focus on Plato and Aristotle, who still much influence on western ethics.

Plato

For Plato, morals are not human products. Instead, they exist objectively in the intelligible realm, which includes the forms. A form is a universal that itself is not located in space and time (it is metaphysically abstract). A universal is one thing, yet it can have many instances in the visible, sensible realm. For example, justice is a universal, and there can be many just people. The identical quality, justice, can be found in many instances.

A comparison of these two realms:

Plato’s Two Realms

Justice can be instanced in a human being because humans are a body-soul duality, and the soul is their essential nature that defines them as the kind of thing they are. All humans should be just, and to reach their true goal, or telos, they need a proper balance of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Yet, it is hard to reach the telos, for the process of education in the knowledge of the good is very difficult. His “cave” illustration shows that only a few people leave the “shadows,” a place of illusions which they mistake for reality. Instead, only a few strive toward the true light outside the cave and acquire knowledge of the forms.

In this, Plato questionably assumes all people want to be virtuous. All they need is education and effort. Furthermore, though he realizes people should be virtuous, he seems to lack a “connection” between the moral forms and human nature. Why is justice appropriate for our souls?

Today, it is hard for many even to conceive that there could be immaterial and objectively real entities. Still, can Plato’s view sustain the four core morals? It seems it can; the virtues of love and justice, as well as the principles that we should not murder or rape, would be universals that are normative for all. Moreover, we know these morals by reason, which fits with our intuitive knowledge of their validity.

Aristotle

For Aristotle, there is a deep unity between the body and the soul. The body is appropriate for humans due to the kind of thing they are (i.e., our essence). Similarly, the cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, justice, and courage) are appropriate for humans due to their soul’s nature. As one’s essence, the soul enables a person to grow and change and yet remain the same person. That is, one’s personal identity is constituted by one’s set of essential properties and capacities (even for virtues), which do not change. If people changed in some way essential to them, they’d no longer exist! Yet, they can undergo other kinds of changes, like the development of the virtues, and still be the same individuals.

Aristotle’s ethics is practical, seeking how to achieve the function of a human being, which is to guide one’s actions by reason. The virtues are developed by habituation and training. This involves being apprenticed to someone who has the virtues. Moreover, virtues are a mean between two extremes. For instance, courage is a mean between cowardliness (a vice of deficiency) and rashness (the vice of excessiveness). Moreover, like Plato, the good is found in community; Aristotle would not support the western, autonomous individual.

Like Plato, Aristotle believed in universals, though they always had to be instanced in particulars. Still, immaterial, objectively real universals exist, which rubs against today’s common belief that humans are just physical things. Moreover, he was pretty confident in human abilities to use our reason and know universal truths, as well as in our abilities to be virtuous by habituation. Even so, like Plato, it seems his views can preserve the four core morals and our knowledge thereof. Of course, we will have to see later if it is reasonable to believe there are real, immaterial universals.  

Further Reading

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Plato, The Republic, Books, 4, 6, 7, & 10

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 2

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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

Making Sense of Morality: Judeo-Christian Ethics

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Between the time of the ancient Greeks and the Scientific Revolution, western ethics was dominated by religious traditions. I will give a broad overview of several key thinkers from Jewish and Christian thought. Could these ethical views preserve these core morals?

Jewish Thought

First I will focus on the Hebrew Scriptures. There, ethics are grounded ultimately in God’s moral character and thus what He commands. Those commands, or laws, were not arbitrary. Instead, He always would will what fits with His morally perfect character. Thus, it was a deontological (duty-based) ethical approach.

As God’s people, Israelites were to be like God. For instance, because God is just, holy morally pure and undefiled by sin (evil), and compassionate and loving, they too were to practice justice (Micah 6:8), be holy (Lev 19:2), and be compassionate and loving.

In addition, there was room for other forms of ethical reasoning. The wisdom literature appealed at times to utility (consequences) of actions (e.g., Prov 6:20-29). There also was room for self-interest (e.g., Deut 28:1-7, 15, where Moses spells out blessings of obedience, and the consequences of disobedience). There also was room for appeals to reason, or natural law. People should know particular moral principles based on how God has created them and nature (e.g., from observing nature, be diligent, Prov 6:6-11; do not slaughter pregnant women to extend one’s territory, Amos 1:13).

Also, Maimonides (d. 1204) lived in Spain, home of the Jewish intellectual center during the Islamic empire. He tried to synthesize Aristotle’s thought (which he received through Islamic sources) with the Mosaic Law, or Torah. To him, God’s revelation is perfectly compatible with natural law. Moreover, both sources give us knowledge of objective moral truths, which ultimately are grounded in God. As with Aristotle, Jewish thought has room for virtues, but the primary emphasis is obedience.

Christian Ethics

Christians draw ethics from both the Old and New Testaments. However, unlike Israel in the Old Testament, Christians do not live under a theocracy. Moreover, they are not under the Mosaic Law, but grace, to be in relationship with God. Still, they should obey the moral law out of love for God.

Specifically, they are to love God with all their being, their neighbors as themselves (Matt 22:37, 39), and one another as Jesus has loved them (John 13:34). They also are to care for the vulnerable (James 1:27, Luke 14:16-24) and, generally, to embody Jesus’ kingdom’s values. Moreover, there is a continued stress upon obedience, but with special emphasis upon heart attitudes (Matt 5:17-20). However, Christians cannot do this apart from the power of God’s Spirit in them. Virtues continue to matter, for Christians are to become like Christ, their telos (Eph 4:13, Col 1:28).

Augustine (d. 430) built upon the biblical teaching that God is intrinsically good and sovereign. Since God only does what is good, His creation is good, so He did not create evil. Instead, evil arose from humans’ feely willed rebellion against God. Evil, then, is spoiled, perverted goodness.

Augustine posited two cities, or kingdoms: that of humans, and that of God. Members of the city of man live after their sinful desires. At best, they can achieve a rough peace and justice, and they follow their love of themselves. In contrast, members of the city of God follow God’s Spirit, and they have the peace of God and with God. They are motivated by God’s love.

Augustine adopted the cardinal virtues and tied them to the theological ones, faith, hope, and love. Yet, he refocused the cardinal ones in terms of the love of God. Due humans’ sin, it is impossible to be truly virtuous by their own efforts.

As a Catholic, Aquinas (d. 1274) synthesized Augustinian theology with Aristotelian philosophy. Aquinas posited two realms that can be depicted variously: the heavenly and the earthly; revelation and reason; sacred and secular; supernatural and natural; and grace and nature. The supernatural realm includes the theological virtues, while the natural realm includes the cardinal, or natural, virtues.

In each pair, each realm is for the other. For instance, God cares for and gives revelation to creation, and creation is to glorify God. Also, revelation is intelligible by reason, though reason cannot exhaust what we know by revelation.

Aquinas also blends both deontological and virtue ethics. Christians should embody the theological and natural virtues, while non-Christians should embody the natural ones. So, his ethics applies universally, and we can know ethics by reason and revelation.

In all these Christian and Jewish views, there is a body-soul dualism, with the soul as humans’ essence. So, the virtues and commands are appropriate for humans due to their nature, and morals exist objectively. In these ways, it seems they can preserve our four core morals.  

For Further Reading

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part (on law), and the Second Part of the Second Part (on virtues)

Augustine, City of God, and The Enchiridion

Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought, 393-408

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, chs. 1, 3

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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

Making Sense of Morality: Introduction

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Our Moral Landscape

Today, in the west, we live in a time with many different moral “voices” and competing claims. When I was a graduate student in Religion and Social Ethics at the University of Southern California from 1995-2000, this was quickly apparent. Many of my fellow grad students rejected any kind of objectively real morals. Instead, they saw morals as their own construct, which were based on a wide range of preferred views. One person, a Reformed Jew, tried to integrate her religious tradition with the insights of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism and the sociology of knowledge. Many rejected their Catholic roots and instead embraced some form of critical theory, which is deeply liberationist in spirit. Some followed Foucault and queer theory, while others embraced Nietzsche. Still others followed various feminist theorists.

Like them, many people think morality is simply “up to us”; morals are just particular to individuals or communities. Indeed, they are deeply suspicious of any claims that there are morals that transcend and exist independently of us. They think that to impose others’ morals, including “objective” ones, on people is deeply imperialistic and oppressive. After all, who are you to say what is right or wrong?

There also are different social visions that align with these moral viewpoints. For example, progressives seem to be secular, such that morals for society should be based on secular, public reasons, not narrow, sectarian, or religious reasons. Otherwise, how could we come together and be a society in which there are so many different, private moral visions?

Shaping Influences

Now, for those influenced by western thought, and especially those who have grown up in the west, it easily can seem that not only is this moral diversity the way things are, but also the way things should be. After all, in the west (and especially the U. S.), we prize the value of autonomy, which we understand as being free to determine our own lives. Coupled with the view that morals are basically “up to us,” we should expect there to be an irreducible plurality of viewpoints, norms, and values.

Over time, in the west a large number of competing moral theories have been advanced. But these did not come out of a vacuum. They have a history with many shaping influences, leading even to the mindset that morals are up to us. One of the things I will do in this series is to explore those shaping factors. Two of them are the Scientific Revolution, and the “fact-value split” in the late 1700s.

Core Morals

Despite this great plurality of ethical views, it still seems there are at least some core morals all people simply know to be valid. For instance, people want justice to be done. They may disagree about what constitutes justice, or their theories about justice. But, it seems people know that justice is good and should be done. Love is another virtue people know to be good. They may disagree about what the loving action should be, but they still seem to agree that we should be loving. 

Image by Mary Pahlke from Pixabay

Besides these virtues, there are some principles that people simply seem to know are right. For instance, it seems people simply know murder is wrong. While some may disagree about what act should count as murder, nevertheless, we know that murder (as the intentional taking of an innocent person’s life) is wrong. I would add that rape is wrong too. These four morals seem to be core –we simply seem to know they are valid.

Some might add other moral principles and values to that short list. For example, for many, it is clear that genocide and chattel slavery are wrong. In this series, I will focus on those four core morals. I will look at the various types of ethical views in western historical context, to see if they can preserve those core morals. If a theory cannot do that, then it seems we should reject it. In that process, a key question I will ask is this: what kind of thing are these core morals? But, before I start that survey, I will explore the influences from the Scientific Revolution on our ethical thinking.

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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part III

In previous installments I have spoken of three experiences from my past—from my childhood, in fact—that shaped me as a moral apologist. These were the following: being raised in the holiness and camp meeting tradition, watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and seeing a poignant television commercial about a relief organization’s work in an underprivileged part of the world. All of those experiences were what we might call positive ones—inspiring me to think about what moral goodness is, what it looks like, and what it feels like.

Not all of the experiences that shaped me, though, were positive. Like all of us, there were also plenty of negative experiences from my past, so today I’m going to share one of those in particular. It is an especially difficult chapter from my past to share. It is the source of a fair amount of shame, because it was no small moral infraction.

More than once I had the opportunity to put a stop to a particular kid getting bullied. He was an easy target, not a physically strong boy, and in various ways an outlier, just not fitting in. Although more than once I had a strong impulse to reach out, to protect him, to include him, to befriend him, I did not. And on more than one occasion I actually saw him getting cruelly bullied and did nothing about it. I have thought about this many times since then, and I am still ashamed for not doing the right thing.

In fact, my resounding silence and abject failure to do the right thing was actually doing the radically wrong thing. My failure to act was wicked, and the reason, I’m convinced, I felt guilty about it is because in fact I was guilty. The feeling was indicative of a deeper problem, tracking the reality of an objective condition. I knew to do right and failed to do it, and in so failing I did something unspeakably awful. I know that now, but I knew it then, too.

In his Confessions, Augustine shared with laudable transparency his own painful childhood lesson in depravity. The example seems trivial—stealing pears—but the key to grasping its import is understanding that beneath its garden-variety nature lurked something far more sinister. He elaborated like this:

I wanted to carry out an act of theft and did so, driven by no kind of need other than my inner lack of any sense of, or feeling for, justice. Wickedness filled me. I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong. There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive in neither [color] nor taste. To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night after (in our usual pestilential way) we had continued our game in the streets. We carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our feasts but merely to throw to the pigs. Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed.

Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.[1]

Of course all human beings have their redeeming characteristics and moral strengths—each of us is made in God’s image, after all. We are far from being as bad as we can be. Still, only after recognizing our need to be forgiven—our having fallen short of the moral law, both our draw and repulsion to the good, our love and hate of shame, our indulgence of darkness, our taste for wickedness—are we able to apprehend just how good is the good news of the gospel.

In an essay called “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis identifies salient features of those in his generation, and his analysis is perhaps even timelier today. Among such features was skepticism about ancient history and distrust of old texts; another one—most relevant for present purposes—was that a sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Lewis writes that

Our situation is thus very different from that of the Apostles. The Pagans … to whom they preached were haunted by a sense of guilt and to them the [g]ospel was, therefore, “good news.” We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else’s fault—the Capitalists, the Government’s, the Nazis’, the Generals’, etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world.

In attacking this fatal insensibility it is useless to direct attention (a) To sins your audience do not commit, or (b) To things they do, but do not regard as sins. They are usually not drunkards. They are mostly fornicators, but then they do not feel fornication to be wrong. It is, therefore, useless to dwell on either of these subjects. (Now that contraceptives have removed the obviously uncharitable element in fornication I do not myself think we can expect people to recognize it as sin until they have accepted Christianity as a whole.)

I cannot offer you a water-tight technique for awakening the sense of sin. I can only say that, in my experience, if one begins from the sin that has been one’s own chief problem during the last week, one is very often surprised at the way this shaft goes home. But whatever method we use, our continual effort must be to get their mind away from public affairs and “crime” and bring them down to brass tacks—in the whole network of spite, greed, envy, unfairness, and conceit in the lives of “ordinary decent people” like themselves (and ourselves).[2] 

In class I sometimes ask how best to address this ubiquitous notion nowadays that none, or at least hardly any, of us are deep sinners in need of forgiveness. It is a challenging situation to confront, but very often a prominent part of our current context. Perhaps one way is to talk about one’s own failures, rather than our neighbor’s. For another, Lewis directed folks to consider their chief sin of the previous week. Yet another approach might be to reframe the question like this: Ask folks to consider the biggest mistake they ever made, and then ask them what went into that mistake. Specifically, is there, in their resultant regret, any moral element? That may edge people closer to considering their moral failures.

Of course, for Christians encouraging such reflection, the point is not to put people under condemnation to leave them there, but to share the news of liberation from guilt and reconciliation with a loving God anxious to save them to the uttermost. Not the false liberation of defiantly denying, or simply failing to recognize, one’s guilt, but the true freedom that comes from knowing the truth.

I also hope one day I run into the man who had been that bullied boy, and tell him I am sincerely sorry for my wretched cowardice and complicity in cruelty.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

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[1] Saint Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29.

[2] C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), 95-96.

The Necessity of a Cosmic Mind

Anyone who is anyone in apologetics has heard of the kalam cosmological argument. Short, concise, and powerful; the kalam argument notes the causal agency behind the origins of the universe. Simply put, the kalam argument holds:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause (C&M, 102).

After further researching the kalam argument, it was discovered that an ontological reality underlies the argument. That ontological reality is that one cannot escape the necessity of a Cosmic Mind for three reasons.

1. Necessity from Absolute Beginning of All Physical Universes. Physicists like Stephen Hawking and others posit that this universe is but one of many endless universes. Some theories contend that an endless movement of branes (not brains) collide and cause universes to “pop” into being. Other theories hold that an eternal multiverse gave rise to universes like ours. However, William Lane Craig and others have noted that the BGV theorem, named for its founders (Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin), indicates that any and all physical universes demand an absolute beginning. I do not deny that a multiverse could exist. A multiverse is entirely possible as are many other universes. Neither is problematic for the Christian worldview. When one notes the enormity of God’s Being, multiple universes become child’s play for such a God. Nonetheless, mindless universes cannot be the answer for why something exists as they too would require an explanation for their existence.

2. Necessity from an Impossibility of an Infinite Regress. Second, it is impossible for an infinite regress of physical past events to have occurred. That is, endless physical events of the past are impossible. There comes a point where something beyond the scope of the physical world is required to explain physical origins. Craig offers two philosophical arguments to verify this claim.

1. An actual infinite cannot exist.

2. An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite.

3. Therefore an infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist (W&D, 390).

While mathematical infinities can exist, Craig notes that such infinities are a different story when considering physical infinities. Craig does not dismiss infinities. Rather, he holds an Aristotelian model of time where time is viewed as eternal but broken into segments (C&M, 114; W&D, 398-399). However, infinite past physical events are impossible given that actual infinities do not exist in spacetime.

            Additionally, Craig argues,

1. A collection formed by successive addition cannot be an actual infinite.

2. The temporal series of events is a collection formed by successive addition.

3. Therefore, the temporal series of events cannot be an actual infinite (W&D, 396).

Herein, no universe or universes could hold an infinite number of additions in time’s past. Thus, physical universes are temporal and finite.

3. Necessity from the Inability of Forms to Explain the First Cause. Some, like Erik Wielenberg, agree that the answer to the finitude of the universe is not found in an infinite regress of events, but rather in transcendent entities. However, these transcendent entities are not God, per se, but mindless Platonic Forms. Yet this is a fairly simple objection to answer. Mindless entities can do nothing. If mindless entities exist in the world of Platonic Forms, they just are. They do not do anything. They exist. Thus, a transcendent Mind is the only logical answer to this problem. This Cosmic Mind would need to be, as Swinburne and Craig note, “immaterial, beginningless, uncaused, timeless, and spaceless” (C&M, 193). Interestingly, the Cosmic Mind that is necessitated sounds a lot like the God of the Bible.

If one follows the trail of necessities, one lands at the necessity of a Cosmic Mind. While this does not necessarily connect the God of the Bible with the Cosmic Mind implied, the similarities are so intricately connected that it would take more faith not to connect God with the Cosmic Mind than to connect the two. This Cosmic Mind knows all and sees all. Thankfully, this Cosmic Mind eventually became the Incarnate Son who provided redemption for all who would receive him.

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Source

Craig, William Lane, and J. P. Moreland, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Walls, Jerry L., and Trent Dougherty, eds. Two Dozen (Or So) Arguments for God. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018.

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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 served as a pastor in pastoral ministry for nearly 20 years.

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

© 2020. BellatorChristi.com.

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part II

In the second installment of this series, I want to talk about two other childhood experiences that shaped me as a moral apologist. Last time I talked about being a child of camp meetings. Experience number two was this: One of my earliest memories as a child was watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers had a saying, and it went like this: he wanted to “make goodness attractive.” I still remember a few years ago when a documentary was released about his life and work, and how grown men could be seen openly weeping as they watched and remembered. I have read, and from my experience as both students and teacher I suspect it is true, that students won’t always remember what a teacher says, but won’t forget how teachers make them feel. Fred Rogers was, for many of us, one of our first teachers, and he had an uncanny knack for making people feel better about themselves, for making people feel loved, respected, and appreciated. He most definitely made goodness attractive, and the documentary was so powerful, in part, because it was a reminder that moral goodness isn’t vacuous sentimentality, but something real and solid. Rather than a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. Fred gave viewers, young and old alike, an experience of goodness, and especially to give a child such an experience is truly a gift of great value.

I bring up Fred Rogers in the context of moral apologetics because when I think of morality, I think of one like him. I don’t think of rules and regulations; burdensome, onerous requirements; projections of piety and suffocating sanctimony; goody two shoes; or someone afraid of living life to the full for fear of offending the heavens. I do not think of moralism, legalism, holier-than-thou attitudes, fear of sex, avoiding tobacco or alcohol, or never getting angry. Nor does morality invoke the specter of weakness or carry connotations of something effete or enervating. Rather it is about strength and character, integrity and fidelity, and an abundant, rich, creative life. It is about excellence and living as we were intended to live, and it is about loving our neighbor as ourselves, and seeing the infinite dignity and value and worth of every human being we encounter as creatures made in the very image of God, the sort of thing Auden had experienced with his fellow teachers on that one occasion. A man like Fred Rogers, though anathema to Nietzsche, was, contra Friedrich, a man of incredible strength, willing to do the hard work of loving even his unlovely neighbors, a man who strove to make goodness attractive—not in a mousy, Pollyannaish way, but in a genuine, transparent, risk-taking, courageous way. Mention of morality doesn’t make me cringe or turn sheepish, nor tempt me to engage in derision and derogation. It rather inspires and ennobles. When I think of morality, I think of Fred Rogers.

Now, experience number three: When I was very young, maybe six or seven, I saw a television advertisement. The commercial was designed to raise money for a relief agency helping needy people in a different country. One image struck me as particularly poignant, and it was this: A relief worker handed a piece of food to an obviously hungry child. I still remember vividly how visceral my reaction was. There was something about the scene that struck me as remarkable, and in a quite specific sense. It seemed to me at the time morally remarkable—it was more than merely proper or appropriate, nice or kind; it was those things, for sure, but it was more than that. I may not have had all the vocabulary at the time, but I had at least the cursory concepts, and it was beautiful and right; it was altogether lovely and good. Although I was very young, I remember what seemed for all the world to me at the time as an apprehension of sorts. It was nothing less than an epiphanous moral experience for me, and one that would exert a quite long-term effect. It was as if in that moment I became deeply convinced that morality is something real. A thought occurred to me at the time that I have never forgotten, and of which I remain convinced, namely, that I will never be surer of anything else than I was that what I had seen was a morally good action. Of course there were other formative childhood experiences, including ones that shaped my eventual vocation, but this was certainly an important one.

Children of course can be mistaken, and they often are. In fact, on some models of childhood development children are morally immature and often predominantly egoistic at least early on. But former University of Massachusetts philosopher Gary Matthews some years ago challenged that idea by suggesting that there are numerous ways to measure moral maturity, of which descriptions of moral theory are but one. It is true children are not good at doing that, but there’s another important measure, something like empathy, and he wrote that children often put adults to shame on this score. They often display great capacity for recognizing and empathizing with suffering. So he thought children have much to teach adults about ethics, contra those who in condescending fashion look down on children as morally stunted. I think I can honestly say that I have spent much of my professional career trying to get a better grasp on what I took that day to be a rock solid foundation on which to build. I don’t pretend for a moment to think this establishes the thesis of moral realism. A variety of challenges to moral realism are on offer and in need of careful assessment. Nevertheless, much of what moves me about the moral argument is a sturdy commitment to moral realism that none of my work in philosophy ever since has undermined. In fact, it has strengthened it.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

Fatherlessness and Incarceration

Sometimes various folks like to adduce statistics to drive home the value of being raised with two parents. Of course two parents are not always better than one—one deeply loving parent is better than having two cruel ones, for example—but there are some compelling statistics that provide reason to think that the nurture and stability of two-parent homes, generally speaking, better conduce to healthy socialization. A commonly cited figure pertains to incarceration. Empirical studies show that 85% of youths in prison grew up in fatherless homes. On occasion pastors will point to such statistics as a quick way in which to encourage parents to stay together and raise their children in a healthy environment.

All that is well-rehearsed material, but here I would invite folks to consider how a kid, say, from a fatherless family may interpret such statistics. Perhaps he’s in church as a youngster, and the pastor cites these numbers, or any of plenty of others that indeed reveal how growing up without a father is disadvantageous. I ask you to consider such a scenario because I know of a young man who had this very experience, and for years afterwards he struggled with what the statistics meant for him. Since he wasn’t old enough to process the information, he (mistakenly and understandably) confused what he had heard with the thought that it was likely that he himself, as one growing up fatherless, would end up behind bars. Although this was a mistake, logically speaking, that’s the sort of thing kids are naturally wont to do, and it was hardly his fault. Sadly the experience left him feeling for years that he was doomed to a subpar life, perhaps even something like prison. Worse, he thought this was one of the messages the church itself had to offer him.

It dawned on me today that the math of this matter is a good problem for Bayes’ Theorem, and the result is telling and, for this young friend, hopeful. So the question is this: What is the probability that someone raised without a father will end up incarcerated? There are three variables: the antecedent probability of becoming incarcerated; the antecedent probability of growing up fatherless; and the conditional probability of being fatherless if one is incarcerated. Respectively, those figures go like this: .00716, .39, and .85. The formula looks like this:

P(IlF) = [P(FlI)P(I)]/P(F)

This is to say that the probability of becoming incarcerated if one grows up without a father is the product of the (conditional) probability of being fatherless if one is incarcerated and the (antecedent) probability of being incarcerated, divided by the (antecedent) probability of being fatherless. Plugging in the values, the result is .0156. Which is to say that there’s about a 1.56% chance, if one grows up without a father, of ending up incarcerated. Admittedly this is all course grained, and it remains several times higher than for those who do not grow up without a father. But it is nothing like the initial, stark conditional 85% probability of having grown up fatherless if one is incarcerated.

Fathers are important, undoubtedly. Having been blessed with a great one myself, I am aware of this truth very well. However, especially for vulnerable kids without the capacity to make sense of and process troubling statistics, perhaps we can and should, with some sensitivity and delicacy, empathy and kindness, save them some heartache, dissonance, and angst by carefully avoiding the suggestion that to be raised without a father probably relegates them to an inferior life. Such a nonredemptive message isn’t just bad math, it is bad theology. We are called to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, not add to their burden, even if unwittingly.

Reference:

Abwesende Vater statistik, aktualisierte Forschung | Lovefreund.de

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part I

When I was in graduate school, a very good teacher of mine once suggested that I “purge the personal” from my work. It was generally good advice, which I tried to follow, and I was appreciative of his insight. It is indeed often best to do so as we strive to write about a topic objectively and dispassionately. But when it comes to moral apologetics, it is not always easy or even possible for me and others to do so at a distance, and sometimes it does well for us to consider some of the reasons why.

So in series of short posts I intend to discuss moral apologetics and various ways in which it has reverberated in my life and the lives of others. This is important, I suspect, for several reasons, one of which is this. In order for something like morality to be taken as importantly evidential in a person’s life, something about morality must seem especially striking. Unlike a geometric proof that need not engage one’s affective or imaginative sides (though for some it may), the moral argument, to have purchase in a person’s life, likely requires a requisite prior experience of goodness. Likewise with an aesthetic apologetic, requiring enough prior experience of beauty. Goodness and Beauty are quite analogous in this way, which makes a great deal of sense if anything in the vicinity of Plato’s view is right that they are practically flip sides of the same coin. Both of these “Transcendentals” are deeply experiential realities.[1]

The anecdotes in this post, then, are designed to illuminate an aspect of moral apologetics that logically and often chronologically precedes close examination of a formal moral argument. These are the sorts of experiences that prepare the ground, as it were, make fertile the soil of our hearts and minds to hear the argument and feel its force. Perhaps the reason why some remain largely unmoved by the moral argument is that they lack the requisite experience of goodness, and as a result the argument lacks purchase for them. In the same way some raised without a loving father in their life have a harder time believing in a loving Heavenly Father—while, interestingly, some with missing or unloving parents naturally gravitate to a loving God like a ravenous man to a delicious meal.

Acknowledging the contours of our personal stories is not the same as reducing questions of evidence to psychology. It’s rather simply to apprehend how various aspects of our past have helped shape us, sometimes giving us eyes with which to discern what’s there, and sometimes serving as blinders or obstructions impeding our vision. Just as good intellectual habits make more likely our acquisition of truth, and a rule of reason is a bad one that prevents us from discerning truth and evidence that are really there, likewise our formative experiences can either help or hinder our quest for reality.

In my own life story, three episodes in particular stand out as shaping my vocation as a natural theologian and moral apologist. One is that I was a child of the holiness tradition. To this day I can still smell the sawdust trails of camp meetings from my earliest years. We often attended more than one camp meeting a year, and any summer season I now experience bereft of a visit to camp meeting strikes me as emaciated somehow. A few years ago Marybeth and I wrote a history of a camp meeting in Michigan I attended for many years, and it started like this:

Eaton Rapids Camp Meeting has touched my life profoundly. One of my earliest memories, in fact, was looking high into the air at the windows near the top of the tabernacle. It was after an evening service, if my faint memory serves, and I must have been herded back to the main auditorium after the youth service was done. People were milling about and darting in various directions. I still recall seeing some tables set up with various advertisements (likely from Bible schools and the like) at the back of the tabernacle, and the outstanding impression I experienced at that age was the sheer enormity of the structure. It was simple but elegant—it seemed well-nigh ornate to me—with doors propped up all around its perimeter. Its capacious wooden canopy was enough to mesmerize my imagination for quite some time. I am guessing I was around five or six years of age. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was smack dab in the center of a vintage piece of classic Americana. This was camp meeting, in Eaton Rapids, Michigan, and it was, to my best guess, 1971 or 1972.[2]      

Camp meeting shaped my soul. I had been taught many of the same things in church, of course, but camp meeting was like church on steroids, and it drove home a great many lessons. God is love, for example—essentially, perfectly love—and God desires the very best for each of us. He loves us enough to send Jesus to die for us. God does not merely want us to believe in him, or treat him like a miracle dispenser to bail us out of trouble. He want us to know him, find our vocation in him, and love him. God’s grace is sufficient for us, and enough both to forgive for our committed sins, and deliver us from our condition of sinfulness.

Longtime Asbury College president Dennis Kinlaw once wrote that even our good deeds, done for Christ and in his strength, can be tinged with self-centered self-interest that permeates the depths of our psyches and defiles even our best. “This raises the question of a clean heart and of an undivided heart full of the love of God…. That is why the experience of a clean heart and of a perfect love for God is often described as ‘a second work of grace.’ The identification of this need in the believer’s life and the provision in Christ for a pure heart is the special mission of the camp meeting.”[3] 

When Kinlaw was in his nineties, Marybeth and I went to visit him in Wilmore and were able to pummel him with questions for a few hours. Still sharp as a tack, he regaled us with stories as college president, presiding over the famous 1970 revival at Asbury, pastor, professor, administrator, camp meeting preacher. He was an eminently impressive person, just brilliant, but something about him struck me as particularly interesting. He didn’t point to his tenure as college president as central to his identity, nor his PhD in Old Testament from Brandeis, but to an experience he had as a thirteen year old boy at Indian Springs Camp Meeting in Georgia. In the twilight of his life, with the benefit of all the hindsight afforded a 90-year-old man, he pointed to those altar experiences he had as a boy, when he met God in person—under the preaching of another longtime Asbury college president, its founder Henry Morrison, no less—as what was at the heart of who he was. More than anything else from his experiences, that was what he saw as defining him.

My next post will discuss a second feature of my childhood that softened my heart and opened my mind to the moral argument.

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With his co-author, Jerry Walls, Dr. Baggett authored Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. The book won Christianity Today’s 2012 apologetics book of the year of the award. He published a sequel with Walls that critiques naturalistic ethics, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. A third book in the series, The Moral Argument: A History, chronicles the history of moral arguments for God’s existence. Dr. Baggett has also co-edited a collection of essays exploring the philosophy of C.S. Lewis, and edited the third debate between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew on the resurrection of Jesus. Dr. Baggett currently is a professor at Houston Baptist University.

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[1] Readers are strongly encouraged to listen to David Horner’s remarkable talk “Too Good Not to be True,” accessible here: https://www.moralapologetics.com/wordpress/video-too-good-not-to-be-true-the-shape-of-moral-apologetics-david-horner.

[2] David & Marybeth Baggett, At the Bend of the River Grand (Wilmore, KY: Emeth Press, 2016), xi.

[3] Ibid., 265.

The Paradox of Preservation

Accustomed to the tumultuous turquoise of the Pacific, the static, dusty-emerald undulation of Yosemite’s slopes, floors, and ridges transfixed me. Traversing 2,500 miles of open ocean every time I left my home of Honolulu, Hawaii gave me a sense for vast spaces. But in Yosemite I, a land mammal, found an untamed vastness where I could do more than dabble around the edges; I could enter. Fueled by light, cool air, exertion that would have been toilsome between the Tropics flowed easily. Wind and vistas, not exhaustion, stole my breath as I followed a trail from the canyon rim to the valley floor.

Enjoyment of Nature

Yosemite National Park comprises 761,747.50 acres of the 50,543,372.74 acres devoted to National Parks in the United States.[1] These parks reflect the value judgement that preserving land from human habitation is worthwhile. While National Parks existed before 1916, the 1916 act establishing the National Park Service enshrines in law the rationale behind their existence:

To conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.[2]

John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and chief advocate for preserving Yosemite, placed a similar emphasis on the capacity of wilderness to bring abiding joy to humans. Against proposals to dam a portion of the Yosemite protected area, he wrote, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”[3] At first blush, both the founding documents of the National Park Service and Muir’s statement imply that protecting land from human habitation is important because doing so enables a different, more refined human use—enjoyment. 

Beneath this superficial human-centeredness, however, lies a deeper value judgement. The splendor of glaciers and granite, of foliage and fiery sunsets, brings joy to humans precisely because nature is good; joy is the emotional consequence of experiencing nature’s goodness. Enjoyment of nature can be human-centered even as friendship can be me-centered. But both enjoyment of nature and enjoyment of a friend can stem from recognizing and reveling in the goodness of the other. The non-human world brings health and cheer at least partly because it is not a world of our own making; its value enjoins preservation.

Enjoyment of Nature and the Paradox of Preservation

The U.S. National Parks reflect the value judgement that preserving human enjoyment of nature is worth significant national resources. To the 318,211,833 people who enjoyed these parks in 2018, U.S. National Parks also made an assertion; they asserted that nature is good and thus worthy of preservation.[4] But the manner of this assertion, enjoyment of nature, is paradoxical. Nature is good apart from us, but we recognize this goodness only in relationship with it. To hear nature’s proclamation of its value, we must enter it. And by that act, we render it less natural—by entering the non-human world, we render it part of the human world. By venturing into a world that is not of our own making, we make it, if only marginally, a world we have made.

This paradox is present in nearly all preservationist ecological endeavors, not just the National Park system. Preservationist ecological endeavors are motivated by experience of nature, but they require withdrawal from nature. They demand, often in moral terms, that humans make a double movement, both towards nature in ecological enjoyment, study, and intervention and away from nature by restraining our presence in it.

It seems that this dual movement of humans towards and away from nature requires a framework in which humans are both part of and distinct from the rest of nature. For human enjoyment, study, and mere presence in nature to be legitimate, this presence must not be unnatural; it must not be inherently corrupting. But to justify the moral mandate that humans exercise restraint in interactions with nature, preservationist ecological endeavors require that humans are not just another part of nature—if humans ought not to thoughtlessly decimate miles of rainforest, but Army Ants are under no similar obligation, then there must be some distinction between humans and ants. If preservation is, as is widely recognized, good (and perhaps even morally obligatory), there must be some way to both uphold and adjudicate between these paradoxical principles of human unity with and distinctness from nature.

Naturalism and the Paradox of Preservation

Naturalism, for instance, can uphold each of these principles. Historically speaking, evolutionary naturalism suggests that there is unity between humans and the rest of nature because we all have the same ancestors; all that separates us from other animals is a few genetic mutations. In contrast, an emphasis on present empirical observation of humans’ seeming intellectual uniqueness suggests a large divide between humans and other animals. Thus, naturalism provides some justification for each of the paradox-producing principles that are assumed in preservationist ecological endeavors.

But naturalism does not seem to provide a way of navigating this paradox. Naturalism must do more than simply state that humans are both a part of and distinct from nature; it must explain how these two seemingly contradictory truths can be integrated. While naturalism can account for either human unity with nature or human distinctness from nature, it provides no non-arbitrary way of integrating these two principles, no grounds for discerning when we should move towards nature per our unity with it and when we should move away from nature per our distinctness from it. It takes something more than naturalism to account for what we know about our relationship with nature.

Christianity and the Paradox of Preservation

Christian Theism seems to provide this something more. Whether they are interpreted evolutionarily or not, the first few chapters of the Christian Bible teach that humans are both part of nature and distinct from the rest nature. Humans are part of nature in that they, just like the rest of nature, are created by God, from whom they derive their identity and value. God designed humans and the rest of his creation to harmoniously cohabit the Earth. But these same chapters also teach that humans are distinct from nature in two ways, one positive and one negative.

Positively, humans are the only part of the world that is said to be created “in the image of God.” This means that humans are not just another part of creation, which helps explain the fact that humans have ecological moral obligations, while ants do not. Negatively, these chapters recount that, while God created humans to live in harmony with God and the rest of God’s creation, humans rejected right relationship with God. By doing this, humans corrupted themselves and their relationship with all of God’s creations. Human presence in nature introduces an unnatural, corrupting element because we have, within ourselves, an unnatural, corrupted element.

Thus, Christianity, like naturalism, upholds the paradoxical principles of human unity with and distinctness from nature. But it also goes beyond naturalism by providing a principle for navigating this paradox. Christianity says that humans should engage with nature in all of the ways that are in accord with God’s design for our presence in it and withdraw from nature when our corruption would corrupt God’s design. Admittedly, the specifications of God’s design are much debated among Christians. But this does not minimize the fact that, because Christianity appeals to a God who is beyond both the human and natural realms, it has a basis for defining these two realms and describing how they should interact.

National parks and other preservationist ecological efforts stem from one of our era’s great moments of moral clarity. But these efforts rely on a paradox that naturalism can at best uphold, not navigate. By both upholding and navigating this paradox, Christianity provides a better accounting for our known ecological moral obligations.

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[1] National Park Service, Land Resources Division. 2019. “Summary of Acreage.” September 30, 2019. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/lwcf/upload/NPS-Acreage-9-30-2019.pdf.

[2] “The Organic Act.” 1994. In America’s National Park System: The Critical Documents, edited by Larry Dislaver. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/anps/index.htm.

[3] Muir, John. 1908. “The Hetch Hetchy Valley.” Sierra Club Bulletin VI, no. 4 (January): 211-220. https://vault.sierraclub.org/ca/hetchhetchy/hetch_hetchy_muir_scb_1908.html.

[4] National Park Service. n.d. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Accessed January 16, 2020. https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/faqs.htm.