Sam Harris on Faith

I’m always interested to see, as I read a particular author, what he or she thinks about the nature of faith. Some think it’s a good thing, others think it’s bad, if not about the worst thing of all. Not to mention that people can have widely different views of what faith is. In the show “Once Upon a Time”—which I rather love, by the way—faith tends to be characterized as sheer belief. Belief, for example, that the good will win. I like that belief, although it’s not always clear what it entails. But my biggest problem with such belief in the show is that it seems largely unprincipled. More like faith in faith than anything—which, sadly, was also exhibited in Shepherd Book from Firefly—another show I loved. (I think I watch too much television.) I remember realizing this most clearly when, after Book made reference to the importance of faith, Mal said waiting for God is like waiting for a “train that don’t come,” or something like that; at that point Book asked why Mal thought a reference to faith required reference to God. The suggestion seemed to be that something like faith in faith was enough; that it didn’t matter what we have faith in, just as long as we have faith. I really liked the character of Shepherd Book, but that struck me as more than a little lame. But Joss Whedon can be forgiven; he rocks. And heck, he’s an atheist. And for an atheist says pretty cool things, like these words he gave to Captain America, after seeing Thor and Loki: “There’s just one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” So yes, Joss can be forgiven. ANYWAY, back to faith. I’ve suggested before that, largely owing to the influence of an Enlightenment-foisted definition, faith has often nowadays come to be understood along the lines of epistemic disadvantage. The idea is that faith makes up for lack of evidence. So much so, in fact, that—as I’ve heard more than one say—if we had evidence, we’d have no need for faith. This is, to my thinking, sheer faith as fideism. I have a dear friend who’s an atheist and a very smart guy who, though he’s not particularly open to faith, tells me the only faith he’d really consider is fideism. He’s drawn to the likes of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard quite a bit, and, especially in the latter, sees a picture of faith as essentially fideistic—a wild leap in the dark, something that goes contrary to the evidence, a counterintuitive staking of an ultimate claim on what may or may not be the right choice, something radical and outrageous and countercultural and even absurd. Yet somehow winsomely so. My atheist friend sometimes makes me laugh because, of all the variants of faith on offer, this is the one that he, a trained philosopher, might gravitate to.

For the record, I do think there’s something radical and countercultural about biblical faith rightly understood, but I don’t think this translates into fideism. God may challenge our assumptions and cultural convictions about what’s right and wrong, but ultimately, the only way we can love God with all of our minds is if God makes sense. It might take some work and hard thinking, and of course God ever in certain respects remains beyond our ken, but it’s either possible for us to reconcile God with our clearest apprehensions of the dictates of logic and morality or, if it’s not, God makes little to no sense and faith is thus irrational. When Donald Miller says, in Blue Like Jazz, that he wants a God who doesn’t make sense, I get a tad nervous. If he means God might challenge our convictions and help us realize that what we thought had been true in fact is false, that’s fine; surely we should retain a correctable and teachable worldview and theology; but the phrase “doesn’t make sense” could mean a whole lot more, none of which is the slightest bit appealing to me and all of which smacks of anti-intellectualism. I think biblical faith is clearly not fideistic. It’s rooted in evidence. The “not seeing” part of faith usually has more to do with our inability to see how God’s going to work things out than having no evidence to believe trust in God’s faithfulness is warranted. The more evidence we have, in fact, the stronger our faith can and should be, in my estimation, contrary to the fideistic perspective.

Recently I read the atheist Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape, and his view of faith—and of religious people generally—is a delight to read. His fiery rhetoric veritably drips with animus—so much so, I have to confess, it makes for incredibly fun reading. The dude is passionate. I don’t mean to mock his convictions; I really don’t. I found myself liking him more and more as I read his book, however much I disagreed with parts of it. And it seems to me, anyway, that he sincerely cares about people and would like to see the world become a better place. He’s understandably grieved at how some folks, in the name of their religion and faith, do hideous things, and though I think he’s radically mistaken thinking of all religious conviction as of a piece and equally dangerous and deleterious, the fact that he thinks religion is so big a detriment to human well-being renders it eminently understandable he argues so vociferously against it, particularly its harshest manifestations.

For now I’d like to point out his depiction of the nature of faith, as I think it’s informative, and it adds something to the discussion: The condition of faith itself, he writes, is “conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc." So here Harris identifies what he considers to be five salient features of faith:

1. Convictions without sufficient reason;

2. Hope mistaken for knowledge;

3. Bad ideas protected from good ones;

4, Good ideas obscured by bad ones; and

5. Wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation.

I think there’s little doubt as to why, if that’s his view of faith, he rejects it. I’d reject it, too!

But again, I don’t see biblical faith, rightly understood, as anything like this. Biblical faith is trust in the faithfulness of God to do what he’s promised to do. And such trust is predicated on, in my estimation, excellent reasons to think God is trustworthy—a long, established track record of showing himself to be faithful. Not in the sense of giving us everything we want, but in showing his love, fulfilling his promises, and offering his salvation. Whether biblical faith is lacking in evidence is a matter for dialogue and discussion, not dogmatism. It seems to me, in my own study of these questions, philosophical arguments for God’s existence and historical arguments for the truth of Christianity are strong—even if the evidence is not such as to compel the assent of every rational person. There’s both light and darkness, as folks like Paul Moser, C. Stephen Evans, and Pascal before them, have argued is likely to be the case if God wants to do more than enlighten the mind, like woo the heart. The bald assertion that biblical faith lacks evidence grows tiresome. I suggest that atheists find someone who can debate William Lane Craig without getting their clock cleaned before repeating that vacuous mantra ad nauseum. And whether biblical faith involves empty hope, bad ideas, or wishful thinking entirely depends on whether the claims on which such faith is based are true or not. Again, merely repeating such charges as if doing so accomplishes anything is a paradigmatic instance of question-begging assertion without argument. So, once more, this sort of uncharitable and knee-jerk characterization of the nature of faith, however fun it is to read, leaves me unimpressed, and does little to advance substantive discussion.

Why it Matters

In a blog yesterday I offered my critique of God’s Not Dead, the recent Christian movie containing a smattering of apologetic arguments, a cheesy storyline, farfetched caricatures, and a conspicuous absence of subtlety, nuance, and sophistication—however noble and well-intentioned were the motivations of the film-makers. Someone responded with this comment: “Psssst. It’s a movie. Movies are meant to entertain. Provoke feelings. Make you laugh. Make you cry. Maybe start a little thinking. What movie has believable characters?? Really?? Enjoy it! I cried. I got angry. I laughed. I praised my Lord and Savior. It made me think. It inspired God filled conversation with my husband. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do??? So what if a freshman outdid a professor. Doesn’t God lead the ones we least expect??? I for one enjoyed it. Completely.”  

I don’t count it my job or duty or even prerogative to dictate to people what they like or don’t like, but this response was troubling to me for several reasons. Besides its needless and gratuitous snarky tone, the individual is obviously convinced that the main or perhaps even sole purpose of movies is entertainment—to provoke feelings, make you laugh, cry, maybe start a little thinking. And the person appears to be a Christian. This reminds me of when I used to teach business ethics, and students, including Christian students, would inform me, most soberly, that the purpose of business is to make money—which usually was taken to entail that pretty much anything goes. It struck me then as an emaciated picture of the purpose of business—what about a more expansive picture of what business is about? How about serving others, meeting needs, building relationships, following your passion, weaving a fabric of healthy, harmonious relationships—and in the process making a living? A narrow view of movies and the arts, too, strikes me as sadly myopic and theologically deficient. Especially when we’re talking about a Christian movie, what about conveying truth, provoking deep thought, smartly challenging reigning secular plausibility structures, imbuing wisdom, embodying excellence? And in the process, it can also entertain. Assigning primacy to entertainment seems objectionably thin to me, and predicated on a lame worldview.

Besides which, isn’t it relevant what entertains us? What’s entertaining about a movie lacking subtlety, depth, texture, honesty? What’s moving about one-dimensional characters and farfetched storylines, cultivating victimization mentalities and demonizing those to whom we’re called to minister, insulting secularists and trivializing apologetics, confirming people’s worst suspicions about evangelicals and communicating to Hollywood that we care more about a conclusion or resolution we like than quality production values in a film, bolstering the perception that evangelicalism is tantamount to superficiality and shallowness? I can’t say I find any of that remotely entertaining. But the simple truth is that we’re not here to be entertained, at least not primarily; as Christians we have serious business to do, and being entertained by simplistic caricatures and contrived narratives, even if they contain a modicum of cursory apologetics, doesn’t cut it.

I responded to that critic by writing this: “We’re called to think on what’s lovely, beautiful, of good report, excellent. We can and should do better–not convey to Hollywood that we as Christians are content, indeed thrilled to be entertained by movies with bad plots and shallow caricatures. There really is such a thing as excellent movies; there are such things as textured, profound characters; we should strive for these.” Our being merely entertained isn’t the end of the story. We shouldn’t be so easily satisfied and mollified into mediocre acquiescence.

I hate to rain on the parade of my Christian friends who are excited by such a film. I respectfully submit they haven’t thought hard enough about this. Let’s take just one example of the apologetics in the movie—the best part of the movie gesturing in hopeful directions, but still altogether too simple. The student defender of faith argues that secularists can’t make any sense of objective morality, quoting the Dostoevsky line that “everything is permissible without God,” as if that does the trick and makes the point.

The philosopher who replaced me at my old school when I moved to Virginia—a thoroughgoing secularist and bright fellow—recently wrote a scathing critique of the movie for the online version of Psychology Today. This was one of his points: “The ‘everything is permissible without God’ argument is one of the worst arguments for God. Not only are there many secular ethical theories, but divine command theory—the idea that God grounds all ethical truths—is one of the most discredited positions in all of philosophy. Not only is it subject to the Euthyphro problem (which suggests that God determining morality makes morality arbitrary) but it's not clear that divine command theory is any better than a ‘God of the gaps’ argument: ‘What makes a good, good and the bad, bad? I don't know, God did it.’”

I don’t at all agree with his assessment here; in fact, I think it’s predicated on a number of mistakes. The existence of “many secular ethical theories” doesn’t show that such a list contains the best explanation of objective moral values and duties, or even a plausible one; divine command theory is but one way to try couching the locus of moral obligations in God; most divine command theories worth their salt do not entail that God grounds all ethical truths since most divine command theories are delimited to deontic matters of moral obligation; divine command theory has undergone a major resurgence in recent years, garnering defenses and articulations by some of the brightest philosophers alive today from John Hare to Robert Adams to C. Stephen Evans; the Euthyphro Dilemma has been, in my estimation and in that of many others, definitively answered in the recent literature; and a whole panoply of reasons has been offered to take theistic ethics and even divine command theory seriously beyond a “God of the gaps” approach.

But such stiff resistance to the apologetics on offer in the movie is implicitly encouraged. Simplicity breeds simplicity; caricature breeds caricature. This is why this matters. It’s not just about our entertainment. These issues are important, and need to be handled responsibly.

Despite all of the various efforts to answer the Euthyphro Dilemma in the last decade alone, secularists continue relishing pointing to it as an utterly efficacious refutation of theistic ethics. In a recently published book by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Plato at the Googleplex), she writes: “Socrates proceeds to formulate a line of reasoning that will prove to be of fundamental importance in the history of secularism, one that will be adapted by freethinkers from Spinoza to Bertrand Russell to the so-called new atheists of today, persuasively arguing that a belief in the gods—or God—cannot provide the philosophical grounding for morality…. What is still referred to as ‘the Euthyphro Dilemma’ or ‘the Euthyphro Argument’ remains one of the most frequently utilized arguments against the claim that morality can be grounded only in theology, that it is only the belief in God that stands between us and the moral abyss of nihilism. Dostoevsky may have declared that ‘without God all is permissible,’ but Plato’s preemptive riposte, sent out to us across the millennia, is that any act morally impermissible with God is morally impermissible without him, making clear how little the addition of God helps to clarify the ethical situation. The argument Plato has Socrates make in the Euthyphro is one of the most important in the history of moral philosophy. … We humans must reason our way to morality or we will not get there at all. Relying on fiats, even should they emanate from on high, will not allow us to achieve an understanding of virtue.”

Answering these objections is eminently possible, but requires that we develop more sophistication in defending our theistic convictions, not watering down and simplifying the complex matters at issue. It’s remarkable that Goldstein acts as if the capricious pantheon of Greek divinities are on a moral par with the God of Christianity in whom there’s no shadow of turning. This is a huge disanalogy that makes a great deal of difference defending an intelligent theistic ethic, and one she dispenses with by a wave of her hand.

Included in the most important biblical command is loving God with all of our minds; this means we need to stop assigning primacy to entertainment, stop settling for superficiality, stop being indifferent to excellence, and stop settling for pat answers. Or we’ll get the relegation to irrelevance we deserve. If we treat those with whom we disagree like benighted dolts unable to think their way out of a paper bag, driven by irrational impulses, we’ll receive such treatment ourselves.

The Big Ghost, Thor, and the Self

The fourth chapter of C. S. Lewis’s imaginative Great Divorce features the Big Ghost, formerly a man, now an insubstantial wisp of a ghost, a transparent phantom who’s pursued by one of the solid people under whose tread the earth seemed to shake. In contrast the Big Ghost and other inhabitants of the heaven-bound bus from hell had trouble walking at all, for to their feet the blades of grass in this strange land seemed sharp as diamonds. The Big Ghost had already been told he didn’t have to leave this place, but was free to stay as long as he pleased, and his pursuer confirms it by offering to accompany him on his journey into the high country. The Big Ghost is appalled when he recognizes the bright person following him, a solid spirit jocund and established in its youthfulness, for the spirit is none but Len, who as a man had murdered their mutual acquaintance Jack. To the Big Ghost Len is still nothing but a bloody murderer, while he himself had unjustly been relegated to haunt the filthy, macabre streets of Dark Town. The Ghost is incredulous that Len is in this place of light instead of him. Len deserves punishment and should be riddled with guilt and shame, and seems entirely delivered from them, which grates against the Ghost. Len the substantial spirit’s entire orientation contrasts with that of the self-consumed, paradoxically insubstantial Ghost. The bright spirit assures the Ghost, “I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began.” The event in Len’s life that had served as the catalyst for repentance and deliverance from self-consumption is, to the Ghost’s undiscerning eyes, a cause for nothing but perpetual condemnation.

The forgiven spirit isn’t interested in vindicating himself, whereas the Ghost is interested in nothing but trying to vindicate himself. “I done my best all my life, see? I done my best by everyone, that’s the sort of chap I was. I never asked for anything that wasn’t mine by rights.” The Ghost doesn’t see that his very effort at self-vindication is a manifestation of his focus on self that prevents him from the necessary process of losing his self in order to gain it. Comparing his behavior with those of others, he thinks he comes out smelling like a rose, and thus demands nothing but his rights, without realizing that, as the bright spirit says, “I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better. Never fear.” But it’s as if their frameworks of understanding are so different that the wisdom the bright spirit is trying to share doesn’t even register to the Ghost, smacking of inverted or perverted truth, as he remains caught up in indignation that he would be put below “a bloody murderer” like Len.

The irony is palpable that the insubstantial Ghost, unable to move a blade of grass even if he were to exert all his strength, continues puffing himself up. Refusing to give up his self-focus, he’s relegated to becoming ever less substantial, while insisting on the sort of chap he is, how he only wants his rights, and refusing anybody’s bleeding charity.

Elsewhere in Lewis’s writings he laments the diminution of meaning the word ‘charity’ has undergone. Traditionally it wasn’t merely benefits conferred on the less fortunate, but one of the theological virtues, an orientation toward others rather than oneself, putting the needs of others before one’s own, esteeming the other better than oneself. “Ask for the Bleeding Charity,” the spirit exhorts the Ghost. “Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.” But the Big Ghost will have none of it: “I don’t want charity. I’m a decent man and if I had my rights I’d have been here long ago and you can tell them I said so.”

Undeterred, with mirth dancing in his eyes rather than a log of judgmentalism lodged there, the bright spirit points out that the Big Ghost, as a man, didn’t do his best and wasn’t so decent after all. “We none of us were and none of us did,” but he assures the Ghost it doesn’t have to matter now. But once more, the offer of hope sounds to the Big Ghost like nothing but condemnation from a worse sinner, and he won’t countenance it.

In a sense the bright spirit admits it’s worse than that, that his murder of Jack wasn’t the worst thing he himself had done during his life—that he had murdered the Big Ghost in his heart for years while they lived as men. This is why he was sent to him—to ask for forgiveness and to be his servant as long as he needed one, longer if the Ghost pleased. The Ghost bristles at any suggestion of his own shortcomings, insisting they’re his own private affairs, to which the bright spirit replies, “There are no private affairs,” we’re all tied in an interlocking web of mutuality; an insight lost because of the Ghost’s inflated sense of self.

Relishing the chance to refuse the offer, content with his diminished state, insistent on his rights, the Big Ghost tragically chooses hell over heaven. Unwilling to give up his life, he loses it, still unable to bend a blade of grass for being so diminished and insubstantial.

And here I can’t help but contrast the Big Ghost with Thor. In the first movie, the initially brash and arrogant Thor is cast out of Asgard and stripped of his powers, and subsequently unable to lift his hammer, no matter how hard he tries. He’s like the Big Ghost, too weak and diminished to move a small stone or leaf after disembarking from the bus. When Thor was banished, his father, before casting the hammer to earth as well, had said, “Let him who is worthy possess the power of Thor.” And at the climax of the film, a matured, heroic Thor had now become willing to give up his life to save others. He offered his own life to spare the rest, and then, after a moment when it looked like his brother might relent, Thor is killed. And it was then that the hammer, miles away, took off and flew in a fiery trajectory into the hand of a revived Thor. Having given up his life, he found it. Having been unable to so much as move the hammer, now he could wield it with powerful force. It’s a great scene, resonating with a universal truth: life is found when we’re willing to lose it.

Of course Thor is no real god. As Captain America says, after all, “There’s only one God, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” The essence of salvation, on a Christian picture, is not about obtaining a ticket to heaven, saving your cosmic rear end from the flames, but about deliverance from the tyranny of self, from a hell locked from the inside, from sufferings intrinsically connected to the inevitable product of consumption with self. To be saved to the full is to be made able to love God and others with all of our hearts, to find deliverance from an inward orientation that forever blocks us from the life that only comes when we’re willing to give up our own. It’s not about being good enough, but realizing that we’re none of us very decent, and we can do nothing to purchase this life; only receive bloody charity from nail-pierced hands.

Image: By Mårten Eskil Winge - 3gGd_ynWqGjGfQ at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22007120

Foot on Nietzsche

Philippa Foot identifies three issues in Nietzsche and says a bit about each. Let me start by saying that I think she deserves credit for recognizing the need to address Nietzsche, something too often neglected by folks content to ignore him. She wishes to try answering Nietzsche with the resources of her own naturalistic account of moral evaluation.  

Before getting to Nietzsche, she mentions Thrasymachus in the Republic as an example of an immoralist; Thrasymachus argues that justice serves the interests of the stronger. Socrates sort of ties Thrasymachus up in knots, but Glaucon and Adeimantus push the immoralist point, saying the life of the strong unjust man is better than the life of the just man, so long as one can escape the consequences of being perceived as an unjust person. Socrates tries meeting the challenge by arguing that happiness is harmony of soul, and an unjust man has disorder there instead.

Foot doesn’t pursue that further, but asks how she would answer the challenge of immoralism on her own view. She begins with the idea of friendship, which she imagines that aliens coming down to watch humans could understand as something we choose to pursue because we need friendship despite the burdens it can sometimes impose. Aliens might, she suggests, see friendship much like the immoralist interlocutors of Socrates see justice: as the second best thing. What would be better, she imagines them thinking, would be not to need friendship at all—as some very rich people don’t, perhaps. But for most human beings, friendship is worth it because of the rewards. If one could get the rewards, though, by not being a friend but just projecting the impression of being a friend while avoiding the actual burdens, that would be preferable.

The point of the analogy for Foot is that she wishes to suggest that the Martians would not understand the true nature of friendship. A Thrasymachean view of friendship is something she thinks we can instantly recognize as wrong. Likewise with a view of parenting that hesitates to put the good of the child before one’s own—as if a parent’s care of his child is just to hedge his bets and provide security for himself in the future. Not all instances of doing justice are motivated by love, though; we also pay debts, say, to profligate creditors. Here Foot is drawn to a virtue ethic that involves love of justice and a character that recognizes the claim of any human being to a kind of respect.

At this point she skips ahead to Nietzsche. Here she identifies three theses in Nietzsche she thinks it’s good we separate out. First is his insistence that free will is an illusion. In many ways his convictions on this matter fueled his views about morality, because without meaningful free will (or a substantive self) morality can’t seem to get off the ground, and blaming people for wrongdoing seems particularly misguided. He was wholly skeptical of meaningful free will as he thought it needed to be predicated on something quite mysterious, perhaps something like Kant’s noumenal self of which Nietzsche was nothing but hostile.

Foot isn’t overly worried about this challenge, as she thinks there are other alternative and better ways of understanding the distinction between the voluntary and involuntary than what Nietzsche seems to have assumed, and that a bloodthirsty desire for vengeance need not be at the root of moral evaluation. I agree with her on the latter, though I think that’s a caricature of retributive justice, and though I don’t think we need to posit a Kantian picture of the will, I am inclined to something like substantive agency theory. On a deterministic picture, which seems the likely scenario on Foot’s naturalism, not only would we have an inability to do otherwise, the sufficient conditions to ensure our every action would be in place before we were born. This is the insight of the source theorists with whom I tend to agree. Foot seems content with a compatibilist account of freedom, which I think is just flat inadequate for the purposes of morality. It violates the deontic principle of ‘ought implies can’ and makes anything like strong ascriptions of moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness seem like utter mistakes. So I’m inclined to side with Nietzsche in thinking that without substantive libertarian free will morality is dead in the water, though I disagree with him on the question of whether we have it. I agree with Foot that we’re meaningfully free, but disagree with her that her analysis of what that looks like is the right picture.

Next Foot turns to a second thread in Nietzsche’s thought: the attack on specifically Christian morality, especially ‘pity morality’ and the ‘herd morality’ that is secretly cruel and resentful, encouraging acts of ‘kindness’ that demean the recipient and bolster the self-esteem of the person performing the action. Here she goes into Nietzsche’s views about the way morality often functions to reduce and harm us, and how the true human good would privilege individuality, spontaneity, daring, and creativity.

Foot takes on this charge that one has to see morality that stresses the humanness of sympathy as mistaken. Must compassion be driven by a sense of inferiority? Is charity most usually a sham? Surely it is sometimes, she thinks, but the idea that it always is strains her credulity and she doesn’t seem to think there are good reasons to take the charge seriously, though she acknowledges that depth psychology has plenty to offer us to disabuse us from thinking that our ostensible motivations are always our actual ones down deep.

Perhaps at this point I should clarify in broad outline what her moral theory says. She wants to make moral goodness of a piece with goodness per se, and wants to tear down the distinctions between animals and humans. So her story generally goes like this: Various species feature behaviors that ‘fit’ their species. Rabbits jump and tigers run and such; these are natural normativities. It’s (nonmorally) good for such species to engage in these fitting behaviors. Humans feature analogous behaviors too, in light of the sort of species we are. When certain of these natural normativities (she likes to call them ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ following Michael Thompson or ‘Aristotelian necessities’ following Anscombe) are relevant to the happiness of human beings—which in neo-Aristotelian fashion she spells out in terms of human flourishing—they’re teleologically significant natural normativities that are aptly understood as morally objective facts about us. In this way moral goodness flows naturally out of natural goodness. Contra Nietzsche she thinks something like, say, compassion, particularly a character of compassion, is an example of something morally objective (and good) as a result of being an instance of a built-in natural normativity—a kind of behavior that fits with who we are as human beings and conduces to our flourishing.

In one sense she thinks what Nietzsche is doing here is right. He’s attempting to ask if, say, pity is good for the one doing it and the one being pitied, and Nietzsche thought the answer was no. If indeed such pity was harmful, Foot would likely agree that putting a stop to pitying wouldn’t be a moral defect, and might be a morally good thing for us to do. She’s not convinced he was right in his analysis, though. For one thing, she thinks much of what he did was mixed together with overblown guesswork about hideous motives in people like resentment and hatred, which she thinks is in the main wrong. And though she confesses that perhaps nobody wants to be ‘pitied’, compassion seems something different and something that does play an important role in our species’ flourishing, so she’s not inclined to think his conclusions are right.

I tend to agree with Foot on this, though I harbor serious doubts her view is adequate to lay out the reasons why something like compassion is morally good. Here’s a reason why. She claims not to be a utilitarian. In fact she says that natural normativities in tigers and rabbits aren’t based on the assumption that the flourishing of such species is a good thing—one reason being that cancer cells too have their own natural normativities that pretty clearly don’t entail anything like moral objectivity or intrinsic goodness in their survival. But if the entailment doesn’t work for animals or pestilential creatures or cancer cells, why think it works for human beings? I don’t think she’s got enough resources to make the case that our flourishing is intrinsically good morally, nor that human Aristotelian categoricals even when teleologically significant to our flourishing constitute facts about moral objectivity. So though I agree with some of her conclusions in through here, I don’t think she’s provided good premises for them; I think classical theism much more plausibly might.

The third strand of Nietzsche’s thought she considers is this one: his denial of intrinsic badness in any acts at all. She attributes this view most ultimately to what she calls his ‘psychological individualism’, according to which the true nature of an action depends on the nature of the individual who did it. This led to his admiration for certain nobles of earlier times who plundered or raped or murdered. It’s true he spoke disparagingly of certain types of folks, like the merely licentious. All in all Foot thinks what largely led Nietzsche to his conclusions here was his invention of a generalizing theory of depth psychology for which there’s little empirical evidence. So she’s left thinking there’s just little reason to agree with his rejection of the idea that injury and oppression go contrary to justice. Indeed she wishes to dub such things irremediably wicked.

Again I tend to agree with her conclusion, but not the basis for it. I rather doubt she can generate the theory to undergird this sort of moral outrage with the resources of naturalism alone. Jerry Walls makes this case well in the second appendix of Good God.

What is Philosophy of Religion?

The philosophy of religion explores the Big Questions—the questions that philosophy at its best aims to answer. Philosophy should not rest content with merely verbal squabbles, technical debates among specialists, or games of intellectual gymnastics. Whether there’s a God, what God’s like if there is one, whether life persists beyond the grave, what life’s meaning is if one there be—these are the questions that often spur people to pursue the study of philosophy in the first place, and philosophy of religion indulges the chance to explore them. The questions are engaging even to children, but the difference between a child asking such questions and a philosopher is that the philosopher, in an effort to honor the wide-eyed childlike wonder of it all, has developed tools, strategies, and resources to answer such questions—or at least inch, however incrementally, toward answers. It does so by refining the questions themselves, ruling out certain answers, defending other answers against objections, revealing how various answers produce yet new questions. In the process it subjects various proposals to critical scrutiny every step of the way, separating the wheat from the chaff, in an effort to make progress. It’s exploration predicated on assuming that reason and rationality, properly exercised, make for progress.

Pascal once lamented indifference to and ignorance of the most existentially central questions of life; philosophy of religion, rightly done, is the cure for both, for it imbues and is motivated by passionate intellectual curiosity on the one hand, and a heartfelt desire not just to ask questions, but to find answers, on the other—and not for the sake of a false security or misleading assurance of certitude, but because the truth makes all the difference. To think otherwise is to forget the point of asking the questions; it would be a strange set of explorers indeed if they decided ahead of time, or in due course, to stop striving to arrive at their destination.

In C. S. Lewis’s wonderfully imaginative Great Divorce, the Solid Person of George MacDonald instructs the wispy protagonist (and great lover of books) about the danger of forgetting the point of intellectual investigation: “There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself . . . as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organizer of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares.”

The questions of philosophy of religion are not only inherently fascinating, but concerns of the most ultimate and practical significance. The fictional Sherlock Holmes, in “The Retired Colourman,” was “in a melancholy and philosophic mood” when he (echoing the writer of Ecclesiastes) asked the enduring question, “Is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not [Josiah Amberley’s] story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is life in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow—misery.”

Yet despite the challenges of life, the darkness of hearts, and ubiquity of suffering, Holmes at another juncture provided a glimpse into his remaining trust in the goodness of reality and the important role of reason. In “The Naval Treaty,” he held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose with its dainty blend of crimson and green before saying, “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for the existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

Oxford graduate John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, similarly warned believers and unbelievers alike against impugning the value of logic, hard thinking, and rationality, “the candle of the Lord”: “Of what unspeakable use is even a moderate share of reason in all our worldly employments, from the lowest and meanest offices of life, through all the intermediate branches of business; till we ascend to those that are of the highest importance and the greatest difficulty!”

Of course philosophers of religion don’t all think reason yields the same deliverances, which makes this great conversation so close to the heart of the human condition a vital and ongoing dialogue. Some think the evidence points to a reductive materialistic world, others toward a richly theistic one, and yet others something in between.

In my own explorations, my tentative conclusion is that philosophy remains a necessary and viable means of discovery that, though consistent with science, go beyond it. I would echo the grave concerns about scientism William James presciently shared a century ago—critiquing proponents of parsimony who, fearing superstition, risked desiccation—“This systematic denial on science’s part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be but the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own most boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.”

Etymologically and at its best philosophy is the love of wisdom—not a casual flirtation or weekend affair, but a passionate quest—and the philosophy of religion, it seems, resides at its culmination.

Trees, Values, and Sam Harris

People are fond of dismissing the relevance of philosophy by asking in a mocking tone, “So does a tree that falls in the forest make a sound?” The question is often asked in a derisive effort to show how uninteresting are the questions that occupy the attention of philosophers. However fun it might even be to think about, for some, surely nothing much rides on such a thing—this seems to be the implicit point anyway.

The original context of the question, of course, was Berkeley’s discussion of whether something like a noise takes place if nobody is there to hear it. There’s something a bit fishy about the idea there could be a noise absolutely nobody hears, but then again, there’s perhaps something even fishier about saying no noise could happen if nobody hears it. Most of us are inclined to think the noise would happen whether perceived or not. Berkeley’s solution was to say no unheard sounds ever happen because God’s always there to hear it, even if nobody else. This was his effort to spell out the dependence of the created order on the divine in a particularly strong sense.

Whatever you think about that particular conundrum, though, consider this question: Does value exist if nobody benefits from it? Suppose someone were to argue, as the famous atheist Sam Harris does in The Moral Landscape, that the only value we can meaningfully make sense of is the value of human flourishing, or the well-being of conscious creatures, something in that vicinity. On such a view, friendships, for example, are valuable exactly and only because they enhance well-being. And friendships of course do enhance our well-being, at least good friendships, at least most of the time. But is this the locus of their value? Harris would suggest it’s downright incoherent to argue its value could reside in anything else.

So what we have here is a Berkeleyan point, minus the God part, regarding value. Something’s value resides in its ability to enhance the well-being of conscious creatures, he wants to say. A falling tree in the forest only makes a sound if someone hears it. See the parallel? My question is: If we think it’s in some sense silly to insist on the latter, why isn’t it mistaken to insist on the former? In other words, why isn’t it perfectly coherent and indeed plausible to suggest that something like friendship has intrinsic value? Value, that is, apart from its consequences? That friendship produces wonderful consequences is undeniable, but does this fact alone commit us to having to say that the value of friendship resides exclusively in its benefits? Wouldn’t this be akin to saying that the only thing to say about a noise is how it’s perceived?

How about this picture instead of Harris’s? Friendship involves fellowship between two people, both of whom are valuable in and of themselves, and the fellowship between them is something of great intrinsic value and worth. It is something that is good, in some more-than-consequentialist sense. Experiencing something intrinsically good like that produces all manner of wonderful results, surely, but those results come about because the fellowship itself is a good thing. It’s not that the fellowship is a good thing merely because it produces those consequences. Friendship produces those consequences because it is beautiful and lovely in and of itself. Good things happen when we experience goodness.

If we live in a world in which the experience of great intrinsic goods inevitably produces healthy results—enhancements of our well-being or flourishing, let’s say—it’s going to be an ever-present and never entirely avoidable temptation to reduce the value of the good in question to its positive results—treating harshly any other sorts of suggestions. But the result, I think, is an emaciated caricature of reality. I think we do live in such a world, a world in which objective moral and even aesthetic values obtain, a world in which the love between a mother and her child or between friends yields the sweetest of fruit. But the enjoyment of that fruit is only possible because of a yet deeper reality: the value, dignity, and worth of the people in question, and the beauty and goodness of their loving relationships, motivated by something more than the good results those relationships produce.

I suppose, at bottom, Harris and I just have a very deep disagreement about the nature of reality. As an atheist, the good results that he notices things like friendships produce are about all he can point to as the locus of their goodness. I’m rather inclined to see those good results as a roadmap to a more ultimate source of value.

Podcast: Dr. Baggett on the Abductive Approach to the Moral Argument

  Hello!

On this podcast we hear from Dr. David Baggett about the approach to the moral argument he and Dr. Jerry Walls used in their book, Good God. We discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of abductive arguments in the context of moral apologetics.

Thanks for listening,

Jonathan Pruitt

Podcast: Website Introduction

Hello!

One of the features we are working for MoralApologetics.com is a weekly podcast. On this very first episode, we hear from Dr. David Baggett on his vision for the website.

Thanks for stopping by,

Jonathan Pruitt

The Obfuscations of Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish has written:

"In the period between the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the American response, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times called to ask me if the events of the past weeks meant 'the end of relativism.' (I had an immediate vision of a headline—RELATIVISM ENDS: MILLIONS CHEER—and of a photograph with the caption, 'At last, I can say what I believe and mean it.') Well, if by relativism one means a condition of mind in which you are unable to prefer your own convictions and causes to the convictions and causes of your adversary, then relativism could hardly end because it never began. Our convictions are by definition preferred; that’s what makes them our convictions, and relativizing them is neither an option nor a danger. (In the strong sense of the term, no one has ever been or could be a relativist for no one has the ability to hold at arm’s length the beliefs that are the very foundation of his thought and action.) But if by relativism one means the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else—in your view, a deluded someone—might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end because it is simply another name for serious thought."

  So the first way Fish envisions someone defining moral relativism is like this: “a condition of mind in which you are unable to prefer your own convictions and causes to the convictions and causes of your adversary, then relativism could hardly end because it never began. Our convictions are by definition preferred; that’s what makes them our convictions, and relativizing them is neither an option nor a danger.” Let’s call this the “preference” account of relativism. Fish rejects the idea that such relativism can or should go away because, after all, people holding beliefs means they take them seriously.

  And the second formulation of relativism goes like this: “the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else—in your view, a deluded someone—might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end because it is simply another name for serious thought.” Let’s call this the “empathy” variant of relativism. And again, Fish says this variant of relativism shouldn’t and can’t go away either.

  The problem here, as I see it, is that Fish has offered two highly idiosyncratic definitions of relativism. Ethical relativism is the view that says morality is relative—usually to culture, though some relativize it to subcultures or even individuals. It’s a subjective understanding of morality in the sense that there aren’t objectively true moral answers—instead the content of morality is a function of individual, subcultural, or cultural choice. The problems confronting ethical relativism are legion and well-rehearsed. What’s interesting to me about Fish is that he simply tries sidestepping all of that by offering two accounts of relativism that have nothing essentially to do with it.

  Consider the preference variant. Fish is of course entirely right to say people prefer their own beliefs. But if so, why would he think that anyone means by relativism the denial of such a thing? If a student did such a thing in a paper, I’d rake him over the coals. So why on earth is Fish, an established academic, doing such a thing?

  Take the empathy variant. There’s nothing indigenous to relativism that involves putting yourself into your enemy’s shoes to see things from his perspective. That may be a cultural or subcultural approach, but it equally well may not be, in which it would be, by relativistic lights, the wrong thing to do. If someone wants a principled reason to embrace judicious tolerance and a cultivated sense of empathy, he needs to look in direction other than relativism. In other words, any good reasons there are to cultivate such attitudes most assuredly don’t come from relativism. So why treat such a thing as relativism’s distinguishing or defining feature except to answer the easy question and avoid the hard ones?

  Fish is an academic who works with words. Remarkable to me how willing he is to bastardize them with such shameless and reckless abandon, and that an outfit like the New York Times accords space to such obfuscation while turning down so many pieces far more worthy but written by folks less well known. For he employed the same procedure in an October, 2001 NYT commentary on 9/11 when he reduced “postmodernism” to merely this: “The only thing postmodern thought argues against is the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies.”

  Postmodernism means lots of things, but surely what it doesn’t mean is the mere suggestion that we can’t persuade terrorists that their tactics are wrong—a recognition anyone has who’s spent more than an hour engaged in substantive debate. Postmodernism isn’t without its insights—the need to see other perspectives, recognize our own shortcomings, demonize opponents, etc. (though I hardly think we need postmodernism to grasp such truths). But I simply don’t see how discussion is advanced when, confronted with the flaws and fallacies of one’s approach, one simply reduces the view in question to an isolated, incidental, innocuous thread and argue it’s harmless, while overlooking the plethora of troublesome and profoundly counterintuitive implications of its more robust (and honest) versions. Serious academics should do a whole lot better.

A Universe That Makes Sense

My wife loves Kurt Vonnegut, and I suspect I would too if I spent more time reading him. What little of him I’ve read I’ve enjoyed immensely; his short story “Harrison Bergeron” simultaneously made me both want to take up my pen to write something myself and set my pen down and never try to write anything again, because it was that scary and bloody good. Vonnegut was, by his own admission, not at all conventionally religious, though he loved to say iconoclastic things for an atheist, agnostic, or whatever he was exactly, such as: music was all the evidence he needed to believe in God. For such reasons he really is a delight to read.

     “I am a humanist,” he said, “which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.” His characterization of humanism is that it’s distinguished by two things: a willingness to behave decently, and no hope for a reward. I’m sure there are other accounts of what constitutes humanism, perfectly consistent with religious conviction. Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic, is often identified as an example of a Christian humanist; Erasmus another. At any rate, orthodox Christians of pretty much any stripe will affirm that hope for a heavenly reward is misguided, since salvation isn’t something earned or deserved. If we got what we deserve, their idea is, it wouldn’t be pretty. So there’s a sense in which secular folks and many traditionally religious folks can agree that doing good shouldn’t be done for a reward or to avoid a punishment.

      Ethicists would suggest that this goes to show that Vonnegut seemed to have an appreciation for doing things for their own sakes—for reasons more intrinsic to those actions than instrumental, like rewards or punishments. I suspect atheists have the capacity to recognize intrinsic goods like love and friendship just as well as theists can—and I’ve argued to this effect, despite another conviction of mine, namely, that their worldview can’t sustain an account of why such intrinsic goods obtain in the first place as effectively as theism can. But I don’t think anyone has to believe in God to apprehend the goodness and value of people and relationships.

      The issue I’d like to consider a bit more in depth is this matter of rewards and punishments—or more broadly, the connection if any between morality and happiness. I suspect that, if this life is all there is, there are likely many instances where there’s a lack of correspondence between these. Henry Sidgwick, a 19th century ethicist, actually dubbed the disconnect between happiness and ethics the “dualism of the practical reason,” and considered it the biggest challenge ethicists had to face. He thought theism could solve it, but he wasn’t a theist, so he thought ethics irremediably saddled with the challenge. Immanuel Kant, before Sidgwick, saw that full rational commitment to morality required belief in ultimate resonance between holiness or virtue and happiness, and he used this as a way to argue for an afterlife, since he thought it obvious that we don’t see this correspondence in this life.

      Whenever the issue of this connection between happiness and holiness comes up, though, it smacks some of the mercenary—as if it shows that, down deep, what’s motivating the ostensibly moral behavior is self-interest and something prudential, rather than something genuinely ethical and other-regarding. A crass works righteousness model of soteriology, for example, would seem to be susceptible to this sort of criticism. But as mentioned, Christian theology classically understood doesn’t seem so obviously vulnerable to it. Good works are certainly important, on the model of classical Christian thought, but more as a reflection of a pre-existing state of justification rather than as a means to procure it.

      The bigger question for now is this one: Is it reasonable to believe in an ultimate correspondence between holiness and happiness? In a universe that makes sense, should we expect such correspondence? Remember that Vonnegut’s worldview was such that, though he valued hard thinking, he didn’t exactly always suspect it to yield fruit. Recall this line from one of his books: “You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.” See the comparison and contrast here between Vonnegut and Kant? Both would say do things for the right reasons, without hope of reward—but whereas Kant thought full rational commitment to morality required a universe that made sense and ultimately made happiness and holiness perfectly cohere, Vonnegut (maybe anyway—if that line adduced reflects his own convictions) simply wasn’t so sure the universe did make sense. Perhaps he considered it all the more heroic to be committed to morality despite the lack of confidence that all would come out well in the end.

      Atheist John Shook argues similarly: “The naturalist may not know how it all will turn out, but the naturalist can reasonably want morality to prevail right here and now. Helping the needy, promoting peace, and protecting the weak are always morally meaningful, regardless of what may happen tomorrow.” I have to confess that I find something about this to be compelling, despite my conviction that he is also wrong in an important sense. There is, undeniably, a case to be made for the heroic choice of morality in the face of potential defeat and loss of vindication. There seems to be an element of purity in such moral motivation, not even possibly spoiled by the undergirding conviction that nothing genuinely good ultimately will be lost or unredeemed.

      Interestingly enough, there are echoes of something in the close vicinity of such heroism and pure moral motivation in scripture. Consider Job’s words: “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15). Or consider Moses’s cry for the salvation of his people in Exodus 32, offering himself as a sacrifice for their sins. “But now, if You will, forgive their sin–and if not, please blot me out from Your book which You have written!” Notice the profundity of this: Moses, out of love for his people, offers to give up his own salvation, however Moses conceived of soteriology, to purchase theirs. One more example: In Romans 9:3, the apostle Paul wrote these words: “I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”

      What we find in these verses is at least the flavor of what Shook and Vonnegut are talking about: a willingness to sacrifice, pay a price, give up hope, do the right and loving thing with no guarantee it will work out. The implicit suggestion is that there is something profoundly right about the willingness to do this—the heroic, pure commitment to love and goodness.

      In none of these cases, of course, did God follow through; he didn’t slay Job, he didn’t allow Moses to sacrifice himself for the people of Israel, he didn’t cut Paul off from Christ. But the willingness of these men to remain committed to truth and goodness despite the risk that doing so might not be an ultimately vindicated and personally beneficial decision seems to be about the purest example of moral motivation imaginable. But, importantly, in each of these cases, theirs was the conviction that morality was real and that at the heart of reality was a God of unspeakable love and faithfulness. At the heart of Christianity is a paradox that resounds time and again: by being willing to lose our life we will find it. By caring about more than self-fulfillment, we will find it, and so much more. To find life we must undergo a dying process—not just a repression program or reprogramming exercise. Real death is called for before new life is possible. But the glorious news is that the death is not the end of the story, that just when things seem bleakest and darkest, there is hope and light.

     So personally I am left skeptical at the idea that there’s something sublime about committing ourselves to what the universe itself isn’t committed to; the “heroism” of such a thing strikes me as more appearance than reality. To me it simply makes more sense, if integrity and virtue and goodness are indeed things we think worthy of believing in—as I firmly believe they are—to believe in a universe that cares about these things too. This isn’t being mercenary; it’s following the evidence where it leads. It’s about believing in a universe that makes sense.