Over at the Tentative Apologist, you can listen to a discussion with Dr. Matthew Flannagan on what skeptics would call the "abhorrent" commands of God. Flannagan explains how to make sense of a good God and the testing of Abraham, Joshua's conquest, as well as how to respond to cases of people claiming to justify crimes by an appeal to a divine command. Click here to listen.
In a recent online debate with an atheist, I was arguing that folks involved in such debates need to work hard to maintain a respectful attitude with their dialogue partners. It is easy and tempting to fall into contention and animus, and so all the more important to guard against it. My atheist friend challenged me with Psalm 14:1, which declares that the fool says in his heart there is no God. His suggestion was that my commitment to be respectful in dialogue was at odds with this biblical revelation, which, as applied to him, an atheist, was rather less than respectful.
Faced with this challenge, I responded along such lines as these: Although it's true that the Bible features some verses to suggest that there's a serious issue going on with atheists, I don't think this means that in a discussion today with an atheist, a Christian is obliged to think his interlocutor a fool. The Bible features quite a number of teachings, after all, including to love one's neighbor as oneself. This seems to imply, among other things, giving them the benefit of the doubt, being patient, hoping for the best for them, building friendships with them, paying heed to their perspectives, interpreting them charitably, listening to understand and not just critique. This is where I think it makes great sense prima facie from a biblical perspective to treat atheists as intellectually honest and authentic, sincere searchers for truth. They may not all be, but surely many of them are, at least in my experience.
Beyond that, isolated verses need to be understood contextually, which can take some serious investment of time—and I’m far from an exegete. Nonetheless I might identify a few mitigating factors as we interpret and apply such verses. On a biblical perspective, God is thought of as the source of reality, the locus of value, life and light and more besides. The true "unbeliever" would be, I might suggest, in light of this, not one who simply entertains intellectual doubts about the existence of a personal God, but one who rejects all that the biblical writers thought God represented—and to do so at the level of the heart. To reject God would include rejecting light—deep convictions about rightness and wrongness, for example, issuing in corrupt actions. On the classical picture of God, aspects of which came into clarity later but were built on solidly biblical ideas, as opposed to the idea of a mere contingently existing demi-god or Demiurge, God is the Ground of Being; his being and goodness are interchangeable. To deny God's being is to deny goodness itself, both metaphysical and moral.
This is all obviously relevant to the question about how God and morality are related, and relevant in numerous senses—ontological, epistemic, performative. If one takes God as the foundation of moral truth, the locus of value, the Ground of Being, to deny God is naturally to be interpreted as rejecting foundational truths, axiomatic moral ones among them. As one commentator discussed Psalm 14:1: “This is hardly to be understood of a speculative denial of the existence of God; but rather of a practical belief in His moral government.” So to someone shaped by such an understanding, a worldview according to which God functioned thus foundationally, what would be the natural way to characterize, say, someone vicious and altogether corrupt who rejected moral strictures or constraints altogether? It might be natural, frankly, to dub such a person an "unbeliever." More than natural, it might be the most accurate way to put it, as part of what true atheism entails is just such moral corruption. This is, again, not to say all professing atheists are this way, or even will inevitably be this way; rather, quite to the contrary, it is to suggest that exactly because plenty of atheists are not this way, it may take more than intellectual metaphysical speculations of atheism to qualify as true unbelief.
The point is that this language about unbelief can't simply leap the huge hermeneutical gap and be applied today with complete casualness. I am not inclined to see such verses as applying to someone like my internet interlocutor: a self-professed humanist with a deep concern for others, a love for humanity, a passion for reducing suffering in the world. I could be wrong, but I see such values as rooted in God, and his embrace of such values as a disqualification for being a full-fledged unbeliever. That he wouldn’t agree isn’t relevant; if he’s right, I’m wrong, of course; but if I’m right, he’s wrong—and not the skeptic he thinks he is. Maybe being an unbeliever is less a binary question than a continuum; or maybe it is a binary issue, but the point of no return requires more than voicing intellectual doubts about God’s existence.
As another commentator put it, “We ought . . . carefully to mark the evidence on which the Psalmist comes to the conclusion that they have cast off all sense of religion, and it is this: that they have overthrown all order, so that they no longer make any distinction between right and wrong, and have no regard for honesty, nor love of humanity. David, therefore, does not speak of the hidden affection of the heart of the wicked, except in so far as they discover themselves by their external actions.”
So, from my perspective—and this is the argument I’m trying out—I don't see my friend as having fully "rejected God," as I see (rightly or wrongly) many of those values to which he remains adamantly committed as rooted in God. Likewise with the biblical writers, for whom God represented ultimate reality and, as such, true unbelief would include such a thing as rejection of moral light. The Bible needs to be read and interpreted and applied carefully and sensitively and with profound discernment, according to sound principles of exegesis and hermeneutics. Folks have misinterpreted it before, and if someone were to interpret it today to suggest that dismissing all professing atheists as evil and foolish (more so than the lot common to men), I would respectfully suggest that he is not being sufficiently attentive to sound principles of interpretation. Intellectual speculative denial of God’s existence may not be enough to make one a true unbeliever in the sense of Psalm 14:1.
Photo: "Cross section of a trees' roots" by A Escobar. CC License.
In this video, Christian philosopher Dr. Trent Dougherty and atheist moral realist Dr. Erik Wielenberg have an irenic and thoughtful discussion on the thought of C.S. Lewis. Topics covered include the moral argument, the problem of evil, and the argument from reason. The conversation was hosted by Baylor University.
This paper will make the case that attempts to explicate the concepts of ethics in essentially functional ways while retaining the traditional language and categories of morality is a mistake, confused at best, disingenuous at worst. The intention is not to take on all versions of naturalistic ethics, but just those that I am characterizing as functional in this delimited sense: secular analyses that cash out the significance of moral categories like moral freedom, responsibility, authority, intrinsic goods, categorical obligations, and objective truths with concepts distinctly thinner than such thick language connotes, concepts easily enough measureable, empirically analyzable, and consistent with naturalism and evolutionary moral psychology, but concepts, so I will argue, that simply do not capture what ordinary speakers tend to mean by moral discourse. I will begin with phenomenological reasons for this critique, and then move on to make a few metaphysical and epistemic points that bolster the analysis and that will enable me by the end to make a few remarks on moral motivation relevant to the matter of whether or not morality needs religion.
A word on that last point first. The notion that morality needs religion generally or God specifically might amount to the suggestion that without God there can be no objective morality, a premise that sounds quite a bit like one of the famous premises of William Lane Craig’s favored version of the moral argument for God’s existence: “If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.” I tend instead to favor an abductive variant of the moral argument, an inference to the best explanation, which begins with axiomatic moral facts, at least alleged ones, identifies a pool of explanation candidates, attempts to narrow the field by an application of principled criteria, and infers to the best explanation as the likely true explanation. Even if theism provides the best explanation of morality, however, best doesn’t mean only. So a successful abductive case does not provide warrant for so strong a claim as Craig’s that atheism implies the absence of moral values and duties.
Obviously it cannot be my intention to lay out the whole of this abductive argument, in part exactly because such an argument counsels patience. What is called for is that each individual explanation candidate, or at least each general approach, be carefully assessed to show how it stacks up to the theistic variant under consideration.[1] The only way anyone could try to level all the naturalistic explanations in one fell swoop is by offering quite general critiques of naturalism, some of which are quite powerful, but this is an attempt which often leaves more questions unanswered than answered. So my approach here is different: not to pretend to do anything so ambitious as that, but simply to scrutinize just one sort of version of naturalistic ethics, namely, these functional accounts of moral concepts and categories, paradigmatic examples including Frans de Waal’s take on moral obligations and John Shook’s analysis of moral truth.
An additional reason not to defend Craig’s more ambitious premise is that, if Anselmian theology is true, a world in which God does not exist is an intractably impossible world, for God’s existence is necessary—indeed, God is nothing less than the ground of being itself. So stipulating the features of such an atheistic world can on reflection seem just about as hopeful as identifying the features of a world in which twice two is five. But if we are going to give secularists the chance to construct a workable moral theory, we have to be willing to see them try to use the resources of this world alone in their efforts to build their case. If classical theists are right, and this indeed is a world that God created and inhabited with creatures made in his image, it would be unsurprising if naturalistic ethicists, using the resources of so remarkable a world, are able to make progress in moral theory; indeed it would be very surprising if they did not. Among the implications of this, in my estimation, is that secular and naturalistic ethicists seem well within their epistemic rights to show some tenacity in the matter when, as their efforts invariably will, they encounter challenges, as all moral efforts of explanations do. And the defender of theistic ethics as the better explanation than any and all naturalistic theories needs to take the work of secular ethicists with the utmost seriousness—but one at a time, which is my approach today.
Before beginning, allow me to say a word about moral phenomenology—construed as encompassing, among other things, both the logic, grammar, and semantics of morality on the one hand as well as the what-it-is-like features of moral experience on the other—which together give us excellent reasons to be open to the possibility of objective moral values and obligations. “Objective moral values and obligations” refer to moral values and duties that apply to rational human persons irrespective of whether they correspond with the felt desires or preferences of those persons. Such phenomenological deliverances are in principle defeasible, but if we take the logic and language of morality seriously, along with those features of moral phenomenology such as the felt requiredness or prohibitedness of certain actions, it is certainly no epistemic stretch to remain quite open to an objective morality.[2] In that case, though, what sort of objectivity is needed (1) to make substantial revision of our moral language unnecessary—to capture, in other words, at least the essential meaning of our inherited moral language to make its continuing use ingenuous—and (2) to warrant rational belief that our feelings of, say, moral obligation sufficiently correspond with actual obligations—in other words, that our sense of moral obligations reasonably tracks moral truth?
The Bonobo and the Atheist
Let us begin with the primatologist Frans de Waal’s recently published The Bonobo and the Atheist, subtitled “In Search of Humanism Among the Primates.”[3] De Waal’s preferred understanding of morality is bottom-up. Using a variety of examples, he argues that animal tendencies to prosociality, altruistic behaviors, community concern, and aversions to inequity suggest that the operation of such moral building blocks in primates reveal that morality is not as much of a human innovation as we like to think. As evidence for his contentions, he points to instances of animal empathy, even bird empathy—and the fact that mammals give and want affection and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs. It is particularly the bonobos who show, especially in contrast with chimpanzees, that our lineage is marked not just by male dominance and xenophobia, but also by a love of harmony and sensitivity to others. He resists the depiction of animals as primarily vicious and self-centered; just like us, he writes, monkeys and apes strive for power, enjoy sex, want security and affection, kill over territory, and value trust and cooperation. We have a psychological makeup, de Waal writes, that remains that of a social primate.
He thinks the weight of morality comes not from above, but from inside of us. In a Humean spirit he thinks reason to be but the slave of the passions; we start with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. To de Waal’s thinking, morality is created in day-to-day interaction, grounded in emotions, which often escape the neat categorizations of which science is fond. Such an approach to ethics comports, he argues, with what we know about how the human mind works, with visceral reactions arriving before rationalizations, and with the way evolution produces behavior. He is hesitant to call apes or even bonobos moral creatures, but he definitely thinks what we call morality among human beings finds its origin in our evolutionary history. What distinguishes human morality from the prosociality, empathy, and altruism of other primates (traits that stand in contrast with a Hobbesian analysis of nature) is our capacity as humans to reflect about such things, build systems of justification, and generalize morality into a system of abstractions. But the book leaves a nagging question hanging: Hasn’t de Waal completely, albeit deftly, changed the subject? What he is referring to as “morality” does not seem to be any set of moral truths at all, but rather moral beliefs and practices. Although he identifies some necessary additions to animal behavior to arrive at “morality,” what he adds does not seem to be even nearly enough.
Consider moral obligations, which typically are thought to provide distinctive and authoritative reasons to perform an action or refrain from one. A moral obligation, particularly ultima facie ones among them, ought to be obeyed; it has authority, punch, clout, prescriptive power. In an effort to account for moral obligations, de Waal employs one of the following strategies: he either (1) eschews their importance, arguing that moral feelings provide better moral reasons to act than do obligations; or (2) does not try to explain moral obligations at all, but merely our feelings or sense of moral obligations. His first strategy goes hand in hand with his effort to hint at the emaciated nature of moral motivation when all that is motivating a person is a sense of moral obligation. He rightly sees, contra Kant, that in some sense it is better to be motivated by higher moral impulses, like love. True enough, and nearly every virtue theorist would agree. This provides no liberation from the need to explain the existence of moral obligations themselves.
His second strategy explains how primates, and especially human beings, experience a feeling or sense of moral obligations. But evolutionary explanations of a feeling of obligation or a tendency to use the language of moral obligation do nothing to provide an explanation of moral obligations themselves. If a sense of obligations and the language of obligations are enough, then moral obligations themselves need not exist at all. De Waal has not provided anything a moral anti-realist or even hardened amoralist cannot already provide, and he has instead fallaciously conflated feeling obligated with being obligated.
A thoroughly naturalistic effort to explain why we may well feel obligations or use the language of moral obligation seems eminently possible. Expunged of categorical oughtness, though, is what is left over enough to qualify as morality? Have we explained enough? Explanatory scope and power demand that all of the salient features of morality be explained, and explained well, by a theory before we dub the explanation a good one or the best. De Waal has simply left anything like categorical moral oughtness out of the picture without so much as an acknowledgement. Again, if he is content with an instrumental analysis of reasons to perform certain prosocial actions, then why use the language of morality at all? He is hard pressed to come up with anything more principled than an admission that traditional moral language carries with it more clout than prudential language. Meanwhile he continues to use the thick language of morality, moral obligations, and the like while simultaneously emptying the relevant concepts of those distinctive features of morality that imbue moral language with its presumed force and binding authority. His concepts are thin, while his language remains thick and rich. Moral anti-realists can just as effectively speak in terms of behaviors that comport with prevailing preferences or even nearly universal human emotions. What has de Waal added to the case that such moral skeptics are unable to affirm, and thus what reason is there to think that the functionalist account he has provided has given a naturalist any reason to abandon moral anti-realism, be it the amoralism and abolitionism of Joel Marks or the moral fictionalism of Richard Joyce?[4]
De Waal seems simultaneously underambitious and overambitious. He is underambitious in his characterization of morality, settling to cash prescriptivity out in terms of prevailing expectations rather than objective authority, settling for an account of a sense of obligations rather than obligations themselves, and for empathic behavior rather than empathic motivations. He is overambitious, at the same time, and for related reasons, in characterizing advanced nonhuman primates as engaging in normative judgments that serve as precursors to morality. While it undoubtedly seems true we can use the language of oughtness for advanced primates in predictive and instrumental senses, the evidence to suggest that they have anything like a sense of categorical oughtness is a case yet to be made.
Finally, just because naturalistic evolution can explain why we have some of the moral concepts we do, why we have a natural inclination to behave in certain prosocial or empathetic or altruistic ways, how does it follow that evolution has explained morality? To the contrary, naturalists need to take with great seriousness a challenge like that posed by Sharon Street or Richard Joyce: If evolution can explain why we have the moral concepts we do in a way that makes no reference to their truth, then what reasons do naturalists have to take morality seriously?[5] If reproductive advantage accounted for the selection of those behaviors that issued from moral convictions rather than the truth of those convictions, naturalistic evolution gives us reason to think our moral beliefs lack truth, most likely, lack justification, most certainly. Besides, don’t they have all they need when they point to certain behaviors that stir in most human beings strong feelings, positive or negative, and then letting nature run its course? Why the additional need to hold so tightly to distinctively moral language that carries bigger implications than they can explain?
So to reiterate: a moral realist needs to render substantial revision of our ordinary moral language unnecessary, and to provide an account that warrants rational belief that our feelings of, say, moral obligation sufficiently correspond with actual obligations. De Waal’s study, intriguing at points as it is and as enjoyable a read as it is, fails on both scores.
John Shook’s Ethics
Unlike de Waal, John Shook is trained in philosophy. I had the privilege of dialoguing with him recently at the University at Buffalo on God and ethics; the topic of the dialogue was “Right, Wrong, and God: What Best Explains Morality?” At the event he gave me his book entitled The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists and Believers (and Everyone in Between), a Wiley-Blackwell publication from a few years ago. Philip Clayton says Shook’s book “lays out the questions, controversies, and schools of thought with amazing clarity, gradually building his case for a ‘staunchly naturalistic yet faithfully ethical humanism.’” When we turn to the pages of the book, however, and specifically his discussion of morality, we find little warrant for such a glowing commendation.
Shook’s naturalistic account of moral truth comes in the context of his response to a view he rejects, namely, that the truth of moral rules requires the existence of a supernatural reality to explain their truth. He offers his own analysis in terms of what naturalism proposes—as if all naturalists are on the same page, an obviously dubious assumption, but at any rate he writes, “According to naturalism, there are no absolute moral truths. But morality is not simply subjective, either; most of morality consists of culturally objective truths, and the rest is indeed subjective.”[6] He defines objectivity here in this way: “An objective moral truth is made true by the natural fact that a society of people share a common culture which includes that accepted truth among its social rules.”[7] Such objective truths, on his depiction, remain relative, but to societies, not to any individual person. “Because cultures make most moral truths true, these moral truths are only relatively true, even if some people within that culture actually believe that some moral truths are absolutely true.”[8] Shook affirms objectivity in this limited sense, but distinguishes it from absolutism, which is, as he puts it, objectivity plus infallibility, never possibly different or wrong. Shook thinks that, according to naturalism, there are no such infallible or unchangeable moral truths.
He adds that “Naturalistic accounts of morality presently emphasize the evolutionary origins of moral instincts and the cultural pressures guiding the moral development of humanity,” citing, among others, Richard Joyce’s 2006 book The Evolution of Morality.[9] Shook adds, “Like the capacity for other kinds of knowledge, the human capacity for moral feelings and knowledge is part of our species, but moral rules can take diverse complex forms across cultures.”[10]
Shook advances the case that culturally objective morality is objective because such morality is independent of whatever any individual person wishes morality to be; he cites as a good analogy a country’s laws. “Laws are valid because they are politically objective: the law is not whatever any person wants it to be.”[11] Culturally objective moral rules are never fixed, final, or perfect, moreover. “The people of a society can change their culture’s morality after ethical thinking. Individuals can disagree with a culture’s morality, of course, by appealing to a different morality or to a higher ethical standard,” such as an ethical ideal.[12] Although such ideals themselves are not absolute moral truths, the fact that there tends to be some convergence on certain moral truths in concentrated populations is no more surprising than the way that civilizations converged on a few principles of wise agriculture. The best explanation for such convergence, he additionally argues, is entirely naturalistic.
So Shook concludes that “since the theologian cannot provide any clear example of an actual absolute moral truth, and naturalism can explain why cultures have culturally objective moral truths, premise 1 of the argument from morality should not be accepted as true.”[13] What I propose to do is, first, discuss the issue of absolute moral truth, and, secondly, discuss the adequacy of Shook’s own functional account of morality.
By “objectivity” Shook means the opposite of “subjectivity,” so he considers himself qualified to use the phrase “objective moral truth” to refer to a reigning, widespread cultural moral conviction. He wishes to insist that what such objectivity rules out is assignment of primacy to personal whim when it comes to morality, but at the same time he is not suggesting that a particular culturally objective moral truth cannot be mistaken. There is a sense in which such a truth can be insufficiently enlightened or workable, and in time, owing to pressure exerted by individuals or groups within the society, such truths are liable to be replaced by other ones. What constitutes lack of enlightenment or workability has nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of morality. Rather, it is a matter of the extrinsic nature of morality. That is to say, moral truths are truths in virtue of fulfilling certain instrumental purposes—perhaps something along the lines of rules that serve to maximize social harmony or human flourishing.
“Objectivity” is multiply ambiguous, so Shook, having defined moral objectivity in the sense he does, may well be right that naturalism can account for “culturally objective moral truths” thus defined. The real tension has to do with whether his definition is preferable and justified, on the one hand, or misleading and unprincipled, on the other. Setting aside the charge of begging questions by his defining objectivity as he does, it is worth stressing that his particular way of using the term is, if not inappropriate, at least rather idiosyncratic. For someone who puts so much stock in avoiding the whim of personal preference when it comes to morality, he seems to have few qualms about privileging his highly personal definition of moral objectivity that, in truth, simply leaves behind most all of the connotations that people tend to associate with the term. One wonders why he continues to insist on using the phrase “objective truth” at all, when admitting that they can change, and one cannot help but conjecture that it is to project the impression of holding on more tightly to nonnegotiable moral convictions than his view actually allows. To treat moral objectivity in the sense he does, particularly while conjoining it with the category of truth, borders the disingenuous. For “culturally objective truths” on his view would be indistinct from “culturally objective beliefs.” But belief and truth are not the same, a point Shook readily concedes when it comes to whims of individual preference, and he even admits that some widespread cultural moral truths are or can be wrong. What is clear is that he is not talking about truth here at all, but simply belief. Beliefs can be false. Truths cannot. To borrow language because of its comforting implications and connotations without the ability to stand behind the language strikes me as an instance of bad faith.
If there are no objective moral truths, then the language of truth should be abandoned or treated as a useful fiction, not redefined or watered down to refer simply to beliefs while the language of truth is retained to project the impression that the account has more substance than it actually does. Now, Shook has done some work in pragmatism, and perhaps he wishes to depart from something like a correspondence theory of truth and opt instead for a pragmatist one. However American, there remains something deeply problematic about continuing to use “truth” language knowing it is likely that most people will interpret the locution along correspondence lines if in fact one means something very different.
On the issue of whether even pragmatists can rationally exclude considerations of correspondence altogether, consider this short passage from the great American pragmatist William James. When pressed on whether a belief in an existent could be rightly dubbed true if the entity in question did not exist, James wrote that the “pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensable for truth-building, but I have everywhere called them insufficient unless reality be also incidentally led to. If the reality assumed were canceled from the pragmatist’s universe of discourse, he would straightway give the name of falsehoods to the beliefs remaining, in spite of all their satisfactoriness. For him, as for his critic, there can be no truth if there is nothing to be true about. Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre.”[14]
Shook’s challenge to the advocate of moral apologetics is that she provide an example of an “absolute moral truth,” a universal, unchanging moral truth. So can the advocate of the moral argument adduce an example of a moral truth that is both objective in the more robust sense and necessarily true? It would certainly seem so. It is wrong for human beings, everywhere and for everyone, to rape women indiscriminately for the sake of providing a public spectacle. It is wrong for us, everywhere and for everyone, to torture children for the sheer fun and delight of it. In truth, the objectivity and necessity of such moral truths is so beyond debate that the burden here is on the person who would wish to posit the existence of an exception. Most naturalists still insist that they agree wholeheartedly, often adding indignantly, “And I don’t need God to tell me this.” Shook’s skepticism about necessary moral truths, in this sense, already shades in the direction of anti-realism in ethics. If someone is a moral anti-realist, or some sort of radical skeptic, then such a person, including Shook, should simply give up the language of objective moral truth. If someone is not willing to say that it is not possible that child torture for fun could become morally obligatory, such a person seems confused if he is unwilling to jettison language of moral objectivity. Equivocating on the language of objectivity is not enough. Perhaps the person should simply admit that he is a moral skeptic. For such a person to hold on to the language of morality is an expression of nostalgia, an example of Nietzsche’s prediction that atheists would take their time to come to terms with the radical implications of their view. It is a profoundly misguided maneuver to do what Sartre said atheists did too often: eliminate God from the equation and act like it is business as usual, when it is not.
In a discussion of what best explains morality, if a person cannot explain either that or why a moral truth like the wrongness of child torture for fun is necessarily and objectively wrong, then his worldview, or at least his particular variant of it, seems fatally flawed. It is lacking in explanatory scope and explanatory power. He needs to resort to ad hoc redefinitions of standard terms to avoid the unpalatable implications of his view. This is not a good explanation of morality. It is an evasion of what it is that needs explanation, and it is unprincipled.
Shook’s language of infallibility, absolutism, and eternality seems to be a thinly veiled effort to poison the well, as it were, to saddle believers in classically objective and authoritative morality with pejorative labels intended to repulse listeners and readers. But it does nothing to advance his case, “objectively” speaking. What is actually needed for the moral case is moral realism, the existence of objectively true moral principles that are binding, prescriptive, and authoritative across the board. The denial of such principles is tantamount to anti-realism. Shook is careful to avoid the charge of subjectivism in ethics, but the problem is worse than that. He is a skeptic, whether he realizes it or not, who cloaks his true identity with language designed to conceal it—from himself or others, it is unclear. In fact, more often than not, he uses language that obfuscates and misleads more than it illuminates and enlightens.[15]
A discussion of moral “rules” and watered-down moral “truths” has the actual effect of distracting the reader from aspects of morality that Shook is understandably lacking in resources to account for—such as the existence of genuine moral obligations. In an effort to explain morality, and particularly to best explain morality, all the major parts of morality need explanation. And most all of us are inclined to see as an ineliminable part of morality the existence of binding, prescriptive, authoritative obligations—which we morally ought to perform and are morally blameworthy for failing to do so. Even virtue ethicists who speak less in terms of obligation than character formation and the virtues still presumably think we ought to pursue a life of character, integrity, and virtue. Aristotle certainly did not seem to abandon the concept of moral obligations altogether, nor do most people; but moral obligations, if they exist, do not derive their authority from our taking a poll. If they exist, they obtain irrespective of our willingness to live by them or take them seriously—and this applies on both the level of the individual and culture. Torturing children for fun is something we have an obligation not to do, either individually or culturally, presumably. It is a moral fact, and what many would consider to be an ineliminable and nonnegotiable one at that.
So, like de Waal, Shook fails to satisfy either constraint imposed by moral language and phenomenology for a reasonably realist moral perspective; he equivocates on important moral categories like moral truth by talking about belief, avoids the language of moral obligations almost altogether, replaces moral authority with moral instincts; and, in the light of challenges to moral realism posed by the likes of Street, Marks, and Joyce, naturalists all, he says nothing at all. When pressed on this, he arrogates to the cause of naturalism the clarity of certain moral intuitions that all of us are able without any difficulty to apprehend, thereby conflating issues of epistemology and ontology. In truth he does nothing to account for moral obligations, moral authority, moral guilt, moral responsibility, or moral truth—all necessary ingredients that go into meaningful moral judgments. Nor does he so much as seem aware of the need to do so, attributing my dissatisfaction with his answers to my misguided quest for certainty. It is not certainty that is the goal, however, but rather explanatory sufficiency.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, we have seen, phenomenologically, that we have reason to take the possibility of moral realism seriously. But it would seem the concepts of morality need to be robust and thick enough to hold the weight of our moral experience and language, or else we should effect a revision in our use of language and our understanding of moral reality, for these are profoundly misleading if they are so radically nonveridical. Functional naturalistic accounts of morality from de Waal’s characterization of moral obligations as reducible to our sense of obligations to Shook’s equation of moral truth with widespread moral belief—and these are just the tip of the iceberg of such deflationary analyses that leave out the most interesting and important features of morality—fail to capture ideas rich enough to justify ongoing thick moral language. Their analyses are consistent with thoroughgoing moral anti-realism save for the nonfictional use of moral language, but it is just this that renders their language either confused or disingenuous. They appropriate with abandon the language while they, without explanation, jettison what is most interesting and instructive about morality. It is hard not to conjecture that fear of superstition has led to moral emaciation and desiccation; but the wild truth of morality is not so easily domesticated by such deflationary accounts.
Their biggest philosophical mistake, in my estimation, is an inference from the findings of evolutionary moral psychology to a weak version of moral realism, because this inference, rather than predicated on a reliable tracking mechanism, simply leaves out of the picture the need for any such tracking relation to be acknowledged, much less specified. My point could be taken as a specific application of a more general discursive strategy aimed at naturalism per se by the likes of Al Plantinga, J. P. Moreland, Vic Reppert, and others, notably the old Oxford don C. S. Lewis, to the effect that naturalism has a notoriously hard time accounting for such realities as cognition, deliberation, rationality, free will, consciousness, and the like.[16] I have intentionally delimited such a challenge to functional naturalisms with respect to morality in particular, where to my thinking the distinctive features of morality—its authority, its clout, its obligatoriness, intrinsic value—render these functional accounts doomed. Such deflationary analyses employing their thin concepts conjoined with traditional thick moral language obfuscate the fact that they by sleight-of-hand have simply bypassed the need to explain how it is our moral language tracks moral truth. Their thin concepts do justice neither to moral language nor moral experience, fail to correspond to the referents of ordinary moral language, and, finally, introduce a motivational problem that heretofore has gone unmentioned, and with this, after one penultimate point, I will finish because it bears most directly on the theme of this conference.
Both de Waal and Shook largely think that something like Christian faith at its best reflects with a fair degree of accuracy solid ethical content, but that, to one degree or another, it is possible to disentangle the moral content from religious foundations and see it stand on its own feet. Shook is more sanguine than de Waal about expressing such confidence. This is relevant at least to mention at this juncture because here the operative issue pertains to moral content—inalienable rights if such there be, essential human equality, and so on—as well as our access to such content, which are at least intriguing to consider for a moment. Without belaboring it or claiming this to be my own considered view, it is worth noting, in contrast with our confident functionalists, Nietzsche’s diametrically opposite view of the matter from Twilight of the Idols. Speaking of, appropriately enough in this context, the English, here is what he had to say:
Christian morality is a command, its origin is transcendental. . . . it is true only on condition that God is truth—it stands or falls with the belief in God. If the English really believe that they know intuitively, and of their own accord, what is good and evil; if, therefore, they assert that they no longer need Christianity as a guarantee of morality, this in itself is simply the outcome of the dominion of Christian valuations, and a proof of the strength and profundity of this dominion. It only shows that the origin of English morality has been forgotten and that is exceedingly relative right to exist is no longer felt. For Englishmen morality is not yet a problem.[17]
The motivational problem, in a nutshell, is this: such functional analyses water down moral categories while exploiting the authority-laden language of morality. Embedded at the heart of such analyses are seeds of its destruction. For invariably rationality will declare that the sturdy foundations of morality necessary for providing adequate reason and motive to be moral and to take morality with the seriousness it deserves have been lost. That plenty of such naturalists—like de Waal and Shook—remain wonderful people eminently better, in my estimation, than their worldview and faithful in their commitment to humanistic impulses with which many of us heartily concur and resonate is not in dispute. The question is whether such naturalists can sustain their moral commitments by anything more than sheer dint of effort, force of will, or personal predilection. Morality’s authority goes beyond preference, biological dispositions, and nostalgic sentimentalism. That functional naturalists can choose to be committed humanists psychologically is of course possible; that there is any intrinsic, binding, authoritative moral reason for us all so to live and to love our neighbor as ourselves is not something such naturalists have the resources by which to assure us—particularly, it would seem, when the dictates of self-interest and morality are at radical odds or, more broadly, when a commitment to morality appears prohibitively costly. Nietzsche’s prediction will likely prove right that such sentimental naturalists will be slow to come to this realization. I lament this, though, less than when they so steadfastly refuse to consider the possibility of a better explanation of classical morality and its authority robustly construed—an explanation involving not only the myriad resources of this enchanted world that they love to study with such passionate zeal and meticulous detail, but also its Creator who imbued it with its meaning and significance and to whom it points for those willing to discern its signals of transcendence.
[1] My own operative theology is an Anselmian and classical picture of theism.
[2] Classic historical works in moral phenomenology include Wolfgang Kohler’s Place of Value in a World of Facts (New York: Liveright, 1938), and Maurice Mandelbaum’s Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1955).
[3] Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: Norton, 2013).
[4] Shook even adduces Joyce as a shining example of a naturalistic ethicist, inexplicably enough.
[5] Sharon Street (2006), “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies, 127: 109-66.
[6] Ibid. 112.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 113. See Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). Also see Richard Joyce, The Myth of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). What makes Shook’s reference to Joyce so surprising is Shook’s apparent ignorance of the fact that Joyce is a moral anti-realist, or at least an agnostic on the question of whether there is objective moral truth.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 115.
[14] William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism,” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1909, 1975), 106.
[15] Here is another example of it. The universality of absolute morality that Shook eschews pertains to the issue of applying to all human moral agents, not just those in a particular culture or period of time. However, almost as soon as he broaches universality as a prerequisite for classically objective morality, he changes the topic to the issue of universal agreement, and he spends no small amount of time pointing out that we can find no such thing. Of course we cannot. That issue is not what is in dispute. If we asked people the world over to perform the calculation of multiplying two huge numbers, we would not find universal agreement on the answer to that question, either, but that does not give us cause for concern. Lack of universal agreement is completely unrelated to the issue of universal authority. Again, belief is one thing, and truth is another.
[16] See, for example, throw in Nagel, along with mention of review essay
[17] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, tr. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York: Barnes and Noble, (1888) 2008), 46-47.
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Within the pages of a literary text lies a cosmos, each chapter hosting a world citizened by people of faith and doubt. Here, authorial intention, cultural representation, imagination, characterization, and realism constellate in textual code and the symbol, in diction and device, in tropes of verisimilitude, and in themes of selfhood and otherness to generate a moral worldview. Twentieth-century modernist literature—to which I’m drawn and in which I specialize—marks both a seismic shift in worldviews as well as a kaleidoscope of worldview itself. In modernism, there are many moral paradigms, but common to them all is the centrality of the self. Among Modernism’s writers, Ernest Hemingway stands as one of the movement’s most exemplary figures, an author unparalleled in illustrating the absence of the spiritually other as the heart of the self’s plight. Hemingway’s works demonstrate the mores of modernism, those themes of self-isolation, spiritual laceration, and nihilistic morality that defined a “lost generation,” as Gertrude Stein labeled it. In Hemingway’s works, humanity struggles to find and recover itself from those emotionally fragmented relationships that populate a bleak existential reality.
As an interpreter of literature whose lens is utterly Christian, I find Hemingway’s writing a complexly fascinating representation of an unredeemed reality, a worldview that betrays its need for the very divine presence it resists. I’m stricken by Hemingway’s recreation of a refractory human condition defined by a morality that reaches for transcendent spiritual meaning with a closed fist. Yet, reach it does. While Hemingway’s fictive worlds are populated with the emotionally wounded, the physically derelict, and the spiritually lost, they promote a resistance to Christian truth that yet resonates with a profoundly apologetic acknowledgement of that truth’s reality. Here, I’ll take a brief glance at Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises to draw out that veiled apologetic.
This novel, Hemingway’s earliest and whose title is taken from Ecclesiastes 1:5, captures humanity’s perennial moral dilemma: man’s attempt to find purpose and meaning in a world seemingly bereft of absolute truth but full of fractured communities. The Sun Also Rises has no God to speak of—at least not an active, immanent, or apparent one—nor any other authority placed above man except that which derives from man. Yet it is precisely an absence of God that haunts the novel, creating a modernist apologetic of misplaced desire for greater life meaning. True to its titular source, The Sun Also Rises decries human longing without divine fulfillment. The novel’s world is that of the self in painful void of the theologically other. The reader sees no God, though feels the need for His presence.
Jake Barnes, the first-person narrator of the story, is written as a wounded individual—physically, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually—whose experience in the Great War has left him physically marred and desexualized. Jake loves Brett (Lady Ashley), who feigns reciprocated love for Jake but resists giving herself to him because of his sexual impotence, even refusing to live with him due to fear of her own infidelity. Both Jake and Brett are part of a larger social circle of morally flawed characters, caught in lives of debauchery. After a series of promiscuous affairs, Brett rejects Jake for another suitor, leaving him in a state of dejection. Through such a mercurial myriad of relational instabilities, the reader follows Jake, the novel’s self-referential “I,” as he approaches life significance with a mercenary understanding that moral meaning was a tradable commodity bought and sold in the market of experience. No higher good matters in Hemingway’s modernist morality. All one can do in life is live it, and there is no room for meaning beyond existence and experience.
In a particularly telling scene, Jake, while in an insomniac state, expresses his view of moral dealings with others as “[n]o idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values.” He continues,
You gave up something and got something else. Or worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. . . . Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what is was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it.
Jake’s practical existentialism exchanges any kind of spiritually underpinned or absolutist morality for a rather bleak pragmatism. Jake cares not for meaning but for social functionality. This passage immediately follows Jake’s bitter response to his relational despairs with Brett Ashley. Jakes says, “To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley.” Here Jake operates along the lines of his own isolation in which his relational distanced proximity to others determines, in part, his estimation of self-worth and morality.
In Jake’s melancholic world of self-enclosed morality—a virtual display of vanities upon vanities—beliefs do not shape man’s moral makeup. Instead, self-protection reigns. If Jake cannot have Brett, then he will damn her. And while the novel features sparse solitary acts of “rightness,” as in Jake’s compensating the prostitute for her wasted evening, each gesture proves to be of no real consequence—yet another dimension of the novel’s display of meaninglessness.
For Hemingway, moral positioning takes place in relation to the community, or lack of, as opposed to God or a higher authority. Pre-modern models of authority would have certainly shown the importance of understanding life in relation to transcendent meaning rather than an inward-turned existentialism as seen in The Sun Also Rises. Buried within the self, however, and twisted up with that inward turn rests a cautionary tale of life without the sacred. As a Hemingway-esque sun of moral emptiness rises on the novel’s broken characters, an apologetic from the absence of God appears. Modernist morality shores the fragments of wounded morality against the ruins of the human condition, revealing and arguing for the need for divine presence.
Absent any divine presence, characters futilely search for moral meaning in a murky society of modernist selves, a world of wounded egos in relationship with other wounded egos. It’s remarkable how often Hemingway’s common theme of broken relationships opens up into a consideration, albeit cynical, of existential virtue with an ever-present realization that life can, indeed, be wasted. Like many other early- to mid-twentieth-century modernist authors who lived through and wrote intently about death, Hemingway draws on this imagery to communicate the ecclesiastical futility of life, bringing this message to the forefront of the novel as death looms over the characters.
Jake is a wounded veteran who has seen and nearly experienced death. Romero, a matador, exemplifies death by characterization and vocation and embodies modern man’s nearness to death. Hemingway uses this character to overemphasize death, drawing on the metaphor of bullfighting to demonstrate its vitality and its symbolic significance of fully living life. “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters,” Jake says. Cohn, another example of modernist morality, is consistently portrayed as lifeless throughout the story: from his passive role in relationships, “I rather liked him and evidently she led him quite a life,” to his losing fight with Romero that essentially killed whatever spirit that remained in Cohn. The novel’s worldview of self-centered morality includes its characters’ perpetuating dismal fates, symbolic deaths, and self-destruction.
Cohn is a most interesting example of this bleak perpetuation. A product of both tradition and severe codependence on women with much stronger personalities than his own, Cohn admits what he sees as his existential problem to Jake, “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.” Cohn seeks adventure in traveling to foreign places in hopes to find meaning and fulfillment, to which Jake replies, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” Cohn is the quintessential modern man, lacking meaning and purpose in his world, and vainly searching for a “lived life.”
Highly impressionable, Cohn’s experiential and emotional capacity depends on his falsely constructed ideas of reality, primarily derived from books and the women who have ruled him. Jake observes, “Several women had put themselves out to be nice to him [Cohn], and his horizons had all shifted.” Jake even attributes to the writing of Mencken Cohn’s inability to enjoy Paris. Cohn’s easily swayed romantic notions of women and wandering are partly pursuits of “purification,” as Hemingway writes it. By fleeing to new places and experiencing new dynamics of community, Cohn seeks a kind of self-cleansing. Man’s search for higher meaning takes a thematic turn, when Jake warns Cohn to not seek new geographic places as a way to finding one’s meaning in life. In a conversation between the two about travel from France to Spain, Jake depicts France as a corrupt country, a place where value is determined by money, “Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. . . . If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money.” Jake contrasts this with Spain, where financial value and exchange are minimized in light of the celebratory mode of carefree living. In Spain, “[e]verything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.” Jake and his expatriate community move spatially in attempts to move meaningfully. In the end, their attempts to find meaning by experience and adventure are tainted by the presence of their “selves.” The idea that Jake initially set up of not getting away from self by going to different places still holds up; no matter where they go, there they are. The self is omnipresent.
What ties Cohn to Hemingway’s modernist presentation of morality is the character’s lack of perception concerning what is valuable and true. Cohn’s is a blind romantic sentimentality. Indeed, Cohn’s moral imperceptibility lends itself to the modern mold of meaning without an absolute point of reference, a fixed standard beyond the self. That self, ever sprawling out in empty relationships, simultaneously closes back in on itself in condemnation (cf. Charles Williams’s Descent into Hell). If there is one word spoken by the characters in The Sun Also Rises that define human relationships, it is the word “hell.” For Hemingway, “hell” becomes an anti-theology, both denying the possibility of and affirming a pitiful desire for a transcendent adverse reality. Jake Barnes, Cohn, Romero, Lady Brett—indeed, all of the novel’s characters—cast their lives and the lives of those around them into a damned state. Brett describes her love for Jake as “hell on earth.” Jake wishes women, Brett specifically, to go to hell. Another character, Bill Gorton says, “road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs.” Robert Cohn tells Mike Campbell to go to hell in a fit of jealousy and then says he feels “like hell, naturally.” Jake and Bill say of Cohn, “Oh, to hell with him! He spends a lot of time there. I want him stay there.” Brett tells Jake, “I feel like hell” as she confesses her love for Romero the matador. In a passage where Cohn hits Jake, “hell” is used six times, four of which in the form “go to hell.” After an apology to Jake, Cohn confesses, “I’ve been through hell. . . . It’s been simply hell.” When Cohn leaves Paris, Jake says, “[T]o hell with Cohn,” but goes on to say repeatedly, “I feel like hell.” Finally, at the novel’s end, in a final conversation between Brett and Jake, Brett exclaims, “I’ve had such a hell of a time.”
The great irony of modern morality is that the hellish, unfulfilling feast of relationships proves to be precisely the greatest desire of the modern man. Hell, a term used often in the context of community, spreads through the “herd” of wounded society. In a moment in the novel when Jake talks about steers and the vulnerability of a lone steer, Bill promptly exclaims to Mike, “Don’t you ever detach me from the herd.” Morality in modernism centers, if it can indeed truly be centered, on the herd, the community of the flawed. As impossible as it may be for Hemingway’s heroes to relate to one another in a healthy and fulfilling fashion, it is even more impossible for them to live without relating to one another. There is no room for true individualism in Hemingway’s moral prescription. The novel denies ultimate fulfillment of meaning and truth but assumes man’s innate desire for them through relationship. If higher life meaning exists, it must be sought, though vainly, in the herd.
Characters in The Sun Also Rises define themselves by their relationship to the herd, but as the herd is a mere extension of the self—the reflexive modernist “I”—engagement in the socio-relational ultimately terminates in the self. The frustrated attempt to move beyond the self is where the novel’s apologetic lies. The novel readily raises questions of God and His role in life meaning, indefinitely suspending those questions in its characters’ desire for, but disbelief in, the transcendent. In the closing dialogue between Jake and Brett, she says, “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. . . . It’s sort of what we have instead of God.” To which Jake replies, “Some people have God. . . . Quite a lot.”
The tumultuous love affair between Jake and Brett concludes with them sitting in a cab together. While “God” has been convincingly displaced in the novel, leaving only the self and other selves to regulate morality, His unaccepted presence haunts the world of the text. In fact, a rare acknowledgement of God hosts one of the novel’s most honestly intimate moments: “We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. . . . ‘Oh, Jake,’ Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned good time together.’ . . . ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” In the world of The Sun Also Rises, divinely authored moral meaning crumbles under the weight of broken life experience. Exemplified by a distinct displacement of transcendent meaning and the presence of fractured community, the meaning of morality proves as perishable as the self. The transparently dismal hope of a good life found in the wounded community of Hemingway’s world betrays a wantonly fraught human desire for the divine. Without God, the human condition remains bound to a hellish expression. Unless one ascends past the meaninglessness of selfed morality, like Solomon himself, one can’t live life “all the way up.” But isn’t it pretty to think so?
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Dr. Karen Swallow Prior has a new essay up at Think Christian. Using insights from literature, Dr. Prior provides thoughtful comments on suffering, the meaning of life, Brittany Maynard, and the Christian worldview.
There are few, if any, arguments that can answer the questions raised by Brittany Maynard’s decision. But perhaps literature, in embodying the paradoxes of human existence in the same way that human beings embody the paradox of decaying life, can go where law, logic and theology fear to tread. Literature shines light upon the mysteries of our humanity, and in so doing, shows how much more mystery lurks.
Mystery novels, taken as a whole, reflect at a deep level the truth of the Christian worldview. And yes, I mean mystery novels in general, not “mystery novels by Christian writers.”
Here’s why.
In any normal mystery novel (notice that I am omitting weird literary or experimental ones; those are the exceptions that prove the rule), certain ingredients are essential:
All three conditions point ineluctably toward a moral universe, one in which right and wrong, good and evil, have objective meaning. Let’s consider each point.
Murder is the gold standard, as it were, of mystery novels, because lethal violence against a human being means violence aimed at destroying a being made in the image of God, one who bears the imago Dei. Murder is objectively worse than, say, stealing the Crown Jewels. That is also why murder that includes torture or degradation of the victim is worse than simple murder.
However, murder seems to be losing some of its ability to shock and disturb in a culture that is saturated with visual images of violence and death, and that is losing its hold on the dignity of the human being. After all, the reason murder is murder, and not just killing, is that human beings have special dignity from being made in the imago Dei, the image of God. So if murder is losing its edge, how is a mystery writer to provoke that desired frisson of moral outrage, so that the reader will eagerly await the unmasking, capture, and punishment of the villain? My completely unsystematic and unscientific sampling of mystery novels suggests that child victims are ever more “popular.” In our jaded culture, we may not be moved by the death of an adult, but we are not so degraded (yet) as to be able to shrug off the death of a child. And in a culture that has become blasé about adultery and homosexuality, one of the few things left that can raise a genuine sense of moral outrage is child molestation. At least so far.
In some mystery novels, we desire mercy for the criminals – but even that points, again, toward a deep recognition of the moral structure of the universe. Only if justice is the basis for our relationships can mercy enter the equation, for mercy is precisely that which is not deserved but granted, setting the demands of justice aside. Without justice, there can be no mercy, only arbitrary decisions about who is punished and who is not.
In this way, any well done mystery novel points to the existence of a transcendent moral order, of good and evil, right and wrong, justice and mercy grounded not in the passing whims of a culture but in the eternal being of the Creator.
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In this week's podcast, we hear from Dr. Percer about the relationship of faith and reason in the context of the moral argument. Dr. Percer offers some tremendous insights on being made in the image of God and how we can have moral knowledge as well as how the Bible portrays the character and goodness of God.
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Samuel James offers a thoughtful discussion on how to make sense of pain and despair in a world created by a good God. To make his point, James shines a light on the thinking of Brittany Maynard, who has chosen to end her own life rather than die from terminal brain cancer, and Rachel Held Evans, who views the God of the Old Testament as diabolical. You can find the essay here.
If the life of faith is anything, it is the holding of two truths in tension. The first truth is that pain and suffering and are real and grievous. The second truth is that hope has the final word in history and must be held onto. Despair’s temptation lies in its promise to relieve the tension, to grant rest to the one weary of waiting on God. It’s a temptation not just in seasons of cancer, but in seasons of spiritual crisis too.
Photo: "Life" by Ragesh Ev. CC license.
Dr. Karen Swallow Prior discusses her book, Fierce Conviction: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More - Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist, in this insightful, four part video series. Dr. Prior explains how Hannah More's Christian convictions motivated her to care for animals. Because of her Christian worldview, More realized the value and worth of God's creation. In these short videos, Dr. Prior reminds us that a complete Christian ethic includes not only care for others, but care for of all creation. Dr. Prior's discussion of worldview also helps us see how Christianity makes sense out of the world.
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The epic poem Beowulf dates to around the 8th century AD. We don’t know the name of the poet; indeed we don’t even know for sure if the poet composed the entire poem himself, or adapted and Christianized an existing, pagan oral poem. (For the record, I hold with the first theory, of original composition by a thoroughly Christian poet.) Loosely, the poem recounts the adventures of Beowulf, a young hero who comes to the rescue of the Danish king Hrothgar, whose people are being terrorized by the murderous attacks of the monstrous Grendel. Subsequently, Beowulf deals with Grendel’s mother and then, after the passage of much time, with a dragon.
There’s so much rich material in Beowulf that I hardly know where to begin, so I’ll just say this: the poem provides rich material for reflection on sin and virtue, with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon serving as powerful images of envy, anger, and greed.
When I read Beowulf, I am reminded that within my heart lives a little Grendel; when I feel lonely, how easily that turns to envy. And Grendel shows that envy turns to violence, whether the violence is outward as in the poem, or inward in the form of vicious thoughts or self-loathing. And I recognize the wisdom of the Desert Fathers, who knew that the deadly thoughts, or what we call deadly sins, can only be successfully fought by the cultivation of the corresponding virtue, with God’s help. Just as Unferth in the poem redeems himself from his envy of Beowulf’s achievements by the generous act of giving Beowulf a sword to use in the fight with Grendel’s mother, so too I can turn away from envy by the acting out the virtue of kindness – having gentleness toward myself, acknowledging my own weakness, and toward those whom I love.
I’m also reminded of the danger of pride and the need for humility – a constant theme throughout the poem. Beowulf is not falsely humble: he recognizes and acknowledges that he has great gifts, and he uses them to do good work. I, too, can acknowledge that I have gifts, but like Beowulf I must always keep it very clearly in mind that these gifts come from God and are not my own. Beowulf keeps it real for me: he does pretty well with handling the temptation of pride, but he still slips up. He fails, and falls. And yet he’s still a hero.
For men, Beowulf has a particular value. The character of Beowulf is both virtuous and manly, which is a vision much needed today when our culture seems to send conflicting signals about manhood, including ambiguity about whether men are necessary at all, or about how men should behave toward women. Beowulf is confident, yet gracious; he is a man of action, and also one who freely shows his emotions.
In Beowulf, those attitudes of the heart that lead toward sin are shown for what they truly are: ugly, hateful, destructive things. And those attitudes of the heart that lead toward God are shown as attractive and desirable.
Beowulf shows that you can shout Christian truth loud and clear, even in a poem that never mentions the name of Christ, not even once. But even though the name of Christ doesn’t appear in the poem, I would say that the person of Christ certainly does: for Beowulf himself is a Christ-figure in many respects, for in the end we see that Beowulf lays down his life for his people.
A monster-fighting, sword-wielding Christ-figure? Now there’s an image of Christ that will resonate with different people, and on a totally different level, than “lowly Jesus, meek and mild” – and still be true to the Gospel. What a fruitful way to talk about virtue, and the imitation of Christ!
Three features of moral apologetics are particularly powerful means, individually and collectively, to make the case for God’s existence. The first is its cumulative potential. Cumulative case arguments in apologetics typically conjoin arguments like the teleological, cosmological, and historical arguments—or some such combination. Such cumulative cases are great, but here I mean a cumulative moral argument in and of itself. The most common sort of moral argument puts the focus on moral facts like moral values and duties, and perhaps under the penumbra of such concepts fall a constellation and cluster of other important moral dimensions in need of explanation like rights, agency, ascriptions of responsibility, human dignity, an human equality; but in addition to such facts, think also about something like moral knowledge. This expands the focus from metaphysics and ontology to moral epistemology, and thinkers like Mark Linville, Angus Ritchie, J. P. Moreland, and R. Scott Smith have done an admirable job fleshing out this aspect of moral apologetics.
What Kant referred to as “moral faith” broached two other features of morality: whether achieving the life of virtue is possible, and whether, even if it is, it’s consistent with happiness. John Hare puts a great deal of emphasis on these aspects of moral apologetics. The Moral Gap, for example, discusses both; the notion of the “gap” that God enables us to cross is all about our need for moral transformation and, especially, God’s grace and assistance to meet the moral demand, something we can’t do otherwise. The second part of moral faith, pertaining to the ultimate correspondence of happiness and virtue, has to do with nothing less than the ability to believe the moral life is a fully rational enterprise—a solution to what Sidgwick called the dualism of the practical reason. Classical Christian theism impeccably and best sustains both of these aspects of Kantian moral faith, and thus these additional aspects of morality allow for two additional variants of moral apologetics. Put all four parts together—moral facts, moral knowledge, moral transformation, and moral rationality—and the result is a powerful cumulative moral argument for God’s existence.
In addition to being a cumulative case, it’s arguably preferable for numerous reasons to advance an abductive moral argument. An abductive case is an inference to the best explanation. This form of argument need not deny that other alternative explanations of the range of moral facts (just discussed) are entirely deficient with nothing to add to the discussion. Numerous among them may well be able to do some measure of explanatory work. Consider the world in which we live. Especially if theists are right that this is a rich, fertile world imbued with all sorts of value and significance, and populated by creatures made in God’s image and invested with a range of powerful epistemic faculties, theism would predict that the resources of this world will provide powerful insights into its ubiquitous moral features. It would be altogether surprising if it were otherwise. The reason that morality provides evidence for God is not that the world alone can explain nothing about morality, but rather that the world and theism together can provide the considerably better explanation of those realities. An abductive case builds on the common ground shared by believers and unbelievers alike and invites a conversation about what can better explain the full range of moral facts and can explain them robustly, without domesticating them, watering them down, or subtly changing the subject.
My preferred approach to moral apologetics also features a strong recurring theme of teleology. If theism is true, and we have been created for a reason and purpose, we have been imbued and invested with a telos: a goal or aim. This makes excellent sense of the ontology of both goodness and oughtness. God as the ultimate Good, and the one in whose image we have been created, is both the source and goal of our lives and, ultimately, of any goods we enjoy.
Teleology also facilitates the acquisition of moral knowledge. So long as the operative meta-narrative of the human condition is that we’re pushed and pulled around by the ineluctable forces of the material world, we are hard pressed to maintain confidence in our belief-formation processes to reliably track the truth, moral or otherwise. But if God designed us in such a way that our cognitive apparatus puts us in touch with reality and makes real knowledge possible, then we can take the deliverances of our deliberations and reflective processes veridically.
Teleology functions at the foundation of Kantian moral faith as well, bolstering the two variants of moral apologetics resting on its foundation. If God created us for fellowship with him—to love God with all of our hearts and souls and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves—we simply have far better reason to think that total moral transformation is possible. If this world is all there is, and the resources of naturalism exhaust the tools at our disposal, morality seems to stir a desire within us that can’t be satisfied, a thirst that can never be quenched. For this life and world will end without anyone ever having achieved a state of moral perfection. But if Christianity is true, then our desire to be delivered entirely from every last vestige of sinfulness and selfishness is no futile pipe dream, but an intimation of things to come, an echo of eternity, when all is set right, all tears are wiped away, and we will be changed entirely to conform with the One who made it possible. And in that state, if Christianity is true, we will find our deepest joy—when holiness and happiness not merely conjoin or cohere, but kiss and consummate. This was God’s intention and our God-invested telos all along.
So, construct a powerful, patient abductive moral apologetic, wrapped with a robust teleology that encompasses every part of the cumulative case for God’s existence, and you’ve got the makings for a formidable argument indeed—one that can illumine the mind, stir the heart, and move the will.
Photo: "Construction" by A. Levers. CC License.
Introduction
A theodicy is an explanation of how God and evil can co-exist in the world. In order to build a theodicy, we will first see why there is such a thing as “the problem of evil.” Then we will see how Plantinga’s response to this problem provides useful guideposts in constructing a theodicy. With these guideposts in place, I will argue that one reason for supposedly gratuitous evils is that they are required to realize the human good.
The Logical Problem of Evil
One powerful way to show that a worldview is false is to show that it contains internal contradictions. If, for example, we could show that Buddhism teaches that there are no such things as unified, human selves, but we can show that a real and unified human self is everywhere presupposed by Buddhist teaching, this counts as an internal contradiction. Buddhists are committed to two beliefs that cannot be reconciled together. This is the kind of challenge that the problem of evil poses to Christian theism.
Let us call the person pressing the objection to the Christian the “atheologian.” Now, the first the step the atheologian needs to take to show a contradiction within Christianity is say what two beliefs are supposed to contradict one another. The two beliefs in question are the orthodox view of God and the existence of evil. The next step is to spell out how exactly these beliefs contradict each other. The orthodox view of God is that he is maximally great. That is, he possesses all great-making properties to the greatest degree possible. Among these great making properties are omnipotence and omnibenevolence. By omnipotence, we mean that God has the power to do anything that is possible to be done. Being omnipotent does not mean that God can do what is logically impossible, like make a married bachelor.[1] By omnibenevolence, we mean that God’s nature is fundamentally characterized by love and goodness. As the Apostle John wrote, “God is love.”[2] Richard Swinburne says that God is “morally perfectly good… he always does the morally best action (when there is one), and no morally bad action.”[3] To say that God is omnibenevolent entails some important things about God. Atheist J. L. Mackie writes that “good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can.”[4] God, being maximally good, will be necessarily committed to following this principle. However, God is also omnipotent. This means that God, being willing and able, should eliminate all cases of evil. But our everyday experience makes it plain to us that evil exists. Therefore, the Christian is faced with a problem. The dilemma is well expressed by David Hume. Concerning God, Hume writes, “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”[5] So the atheologian thinks he has shown that Christianity has an internal contradiction. God and evil cannot coexist, yet Christian teaching says they do. Therefore, Christians must be wrong about their view of God.
Certainly, if we Christians were to tweak our view of God, we could easily make this problem of evil go away. We can get rid of either omnipotence or omnibenevolence and escape the atheologian’s argument. If God is not omnibenevolent, then he will not always remove evil every chance he gets. But this solution fails. First, it contradicts clear biblical teaching. Second, a God who is not omnibenevolent is not worthy of worship. So, perhaps, we can get rid of omnipotence. This has been a more popular option among theologians. For example, Rabbi Harold Kushner says, “I would rather worship a God who is completely good but not totally powerful than a God who is completely powerful but not completely good.”[6] Some Christians could also be accused of making a similar move. The Open Theist movement takes a view of God as less powerful. Specifically, they say God (in at least some cases) could not know neither in advance nor for certain whether some particular evil would occur. Evil is out of his control in a way it is not on other views of God’s foreknowledge.[7] This solution fails, too. If God lacks omnipotence, then God is not maximally great. If not maximally great, then he could not properly be called “God.” So the Christian must find a way to preserve both God’s omnibenevolence and his omnipotence in the face of the existence of evil. Fortunately, Alvin Plantinga has provided a way out.
Plantinga’s Free Will Defense
Plantinga’s defense begins with this central insight: If an agent is free in the libertarian sense, then not even God could determine what she would do.[8] That is, it is logically impossible for God to determine what an agent does and for the agent’s actions to be self-determined.[9] This is not a threat to God’s omnipotence because, as mentioned earlier, being omnipotent just means being able to do whatever is logically possible. Given that this is the case, perhaps the reason that God and evil exist together has to do with human freedom. At least some humans chose to use their freedom for evil instead of good. Add to this thought about free will the idea that humans having free agency is an intrinsically valuable state of affairs. It is better for humans to be free and not automatons. In fact, human freedom has the kind of value that God would consider worth the risk of realizing even if it means some humans might do evil. Thus, this is at least possibly the source of evil in the world. This insight, by itself, does not get the Christian completely out of trouble with the atheologian’s argument. For one, the atheologian might argue that God could have created both free will and a world without evil. But this might not be possible. Perhaps, as Plantinga suggests, all humans (including all non-actual humans) suffer from trans-world depravity.[10] If a being is trans-world depraved, it means there is no possible world in which he does not commit at least one act of evil. Thus, possibly, there is no possible world in which free creatures exist and there is no evil. If this is even possibly right, then the Christian has escaped the logical problem of evil.
Guideposts for a Theodicy
One important aspect of Plantinga’s argument here is that it is a defense, not a theodicy. All he aims to do is show how, possibly, God and evil might co-exist.[11] Plantinga is not arguing that his view is true, only that it is possibly true. If what he said about free will and the kind of restrictions it places on the worlds God could actualize is even possibly true, this means that the Christian is not uttering a contradiction when she affirms that both God and evil exist. But what we are after here is not merely a defense, but a theodicy. We want a true explanation of why God allows evil. Despite the difference in my aim and Plantinga’s, his argument is still useful for a couple of reasons. First, he has turned back the atheologian’s first attempt at refuting the Christian position. The atheologian must now revise his argument and try again. Second, it is likely that something like Plantinga’s account is true. Or, at the very least, certain features of his account are likely true. In spelling out my theodicy, I intend to deal with both these points, but let us first look at the true (and not merely possibly true) features of Plantinga’s free will defense. These will provide the guideposts of my own theodicy.
The first true principle is this:
P1: God can justifiably allow some evil if it realizes some worthwhile good that would not otherwise be possible.
But should we think that P1 is true? To get at that, we first have to be specific about what P1 is committing us to. One idea that believing P1 commits us to is that there at least some goods that cannot be realized without allowing some evil. This is not a new idea. Virtues like courage, compassion, and empathy all require evil in order to be realized. How can one be courageous unless he has some menace to conquer? Or how can we be compassionate unless there is some wrong in need of righting? Another plausible idea is that the presence of good free moral agents requires at least the possibility of evil. It may be that, given a world with more than a handful of people and with genuine opportunity to do evil, all worlds like this would have at least some evil in them. Still further, as Plantinga argues, there is the tremendous good of the Atonement of Jesus which requires human evil as a precondition.[12] I take all of these as sufficient for establishing that some goods require evil to be realized.
Another idea P1 commits us to is that God will allow evil if the good it realizes is worthwhile. In Plantinga’s free will defense, he assumes P1 when he says, “A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.”[13] To this principle, someone might say that this makes God into a consequentialist of the worst kind. Anything God does is acceptable so long as it gets the right kind of results. Kirk MacGregor writes, “If God permits evils to bring about greater goods, then God operates according to the principle that the ends justify the means, despite that he explicitly denounces this principle as unethical in scripture and punishes humans who act in precisely the same way he presumably does.”[14] One way to respond to this objection is to point out that God’s status as creator gives him a wider range of morally good actions to choose from than his creatures. For example, it would be wrong for a mere human to decide another’s eternal fate. However, a human’s Creator would be within his rights to make such a weighty judgment. Similarly, there is nothing inconsistent in saying that God could act as a consequentialist while simultaneously commanding his creatures to be deontologists or virtue ethicists. The apparent contradiction regarding what counts as right action could be reconciled by an appeal to a deeper story about the nature of the good.[15] But another way to respond to MacGregor is to suggest that he has too narrow a view of the greater good.
MacGregor seems to think that a principle like P1 can only be understood in terms of cold, utilitarian calculation. The variables in the equation do not matter so long as in the end, the good outweighs the bad.[16] But there is another way to understand the “greater good.” For example, we could say that God follows a principle like this: It is always good to create worlds with free creatures. [17] Now, it may be, as Plantinga suggests, also true that no world with free creatures will be devoid of evil. But the deontologist is not primarily concerned with the consequences of an action, but with whether the act is good to do regardless of the consequences. In this case, God is like the man who tells the truth about who is living in his attic when the Nazis knock on the door. Protecting those under his care is important, but the “greater good” is fulfilling one’s duty by telling the truth, despite the consequences. God creates a world of free creatures even though he knows they will commit evil acts because the greater good is to create a world with free creatures. The upshot is that the truth of P1 is compatible with a wide array of ethical accounts. The compatibility derives from the fact that even the supposedly consequence-neutral, normative ethical theorist, like the deontologist, is committed to pursuing the greater good of fulfilling one’s duty instead of settling for the lesser good of happy consequence. The bottom line is that P1 is a likely true principle.
The second true principle is this:
P2: God cannot do the logically impossible.
Not much needs to be said in defense of P2. It is a widely accepted theological principle, even if there are a few Ockhamists who disagree. What is worth pointing out, though, is that there are real limitations on how God relates to evil. He cannot magically make evil go away and preserve the goods that necessitate it.
With these guideposts in mind, let us return to the atheologian’s argument. The logical problem has been turned aside, so the atheologian must regroup and try another tack. William Rowe presents just such an argument. His argument has two premises:
R1: There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
R2: An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.[18]
From this it follows that “there does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.”[19]This argument is logically valid. And R2 is a true principle. Therefore, the Christian must reject R1. However, Rowe has some evidence to present in favor of R1. First is the case of Bambi. The second is the case of Sue. The Bambi case is a hypothetical scenario in which a fawn (Bambi) is slowly burned alive in a forest fire.[20] Even though this is only an imagined scene, we know that cases as bad as or worse than Bambi’s must occur frequently. In the case of Sue, Rowe narrates the true story of a little girl (Sue) who was brutally raped and killed by her mother’s boyfriend.[21] Both cases are meant to show examples evil that are completely senseless, especially cruel, and that God could have easily prevented without “thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.”
Having now laid out the guideposts for a theodicy and the evidential version of the problem of evil, I can now give an argument that shows why God must allow some evils in order for the human good to be possible.
How can Christians give a theodicy in light of Rowe’s argument and the specific cases he presents? The first step is to get clear on what we mean by “evil.” What is meant by the term “evil”? One way to answer is by ostension. We point to Sue and Bambi cases and say, “Here is an example of evil.” But that does not do enough. We need to know what about the Sue and Bambi cases make them evil. Rowe will say that suffering is an intrinsic evil. The Bambi and Sue cases are evil because they involve gratuitous amounts of suffering.[1] But that just pushes the problem back a step. Why is suffering evil? What does it mean to say that suffering is evil? Perhaps Rowe could say that it is just self-evident that suffering is evil; we do not need to provide any explanation because we can just see it is the case. But this response confuses epistemology with ontology. What we want to know is not whether we are justified in taking suffering to be evil, but what makes suffering evil. Here, the naturalist faces a problem. As Mackie says, “Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the course of events without an all-powerful god to create them.”[2] The point here is that there is no worldview neutral way to talk about moral properties. Since evil is a moral property, it can only be meaningfully referred to from within a given worldview. Because the problem of evil is an objection aimed at Christian theism, the term evil must refer to something Christians will recognize as such.
So, then, what is the Christian view of evil? One well accepted definition comes from Augustine. Augustine says, “For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil.’”[3] In this case, evil is a privation of goodness. On the Christian view, then, evil is not a substance on par with goodness. Christianity is not dualistic in this way. Evil is parasitic on the good. But parasitic in what way? Here Augustine is again helpful. Hick points out that Augustine thought of all God’s creation as good; Augustine “lays the foundation for a Christian naturalism that rejoices in this world… seeks to share it in gratitude to God for His bountiful goodness.”[4] Included in God’s creation is a God given telos. God makes the world and everything in it for a reason so that there is a way the world should function.[5] Augustine thinks that man’s telos is “to enjoy God as the end of all, while he enjoys himself and his friend in God and for God.”[6] Evil occurs
in every case where a man loves for their own sake things which are desirable only as means to an end, and seeks for the sake of something else things which ought to be loved for themselves. For thus, as far as he can, he disturbs in himself the natural order which the eternal law requires us to observe.[7]
It is evil when man acts in a disordered way, when he acts contrary to God’s intention.[8] This principle can be broadened so that evil, generally speaking, can be understood as disorder and malfunction.
With this view of evil in mind, let us now consider the nature of the human good and how it might help shape a theodicy. Scripture teaches us that the good for humans has to do with how God made us. For example, when Jesus was asked whether it was lawful to get a divorce, he appealed to how God made humans to justify his answer.[9] The first chapter of Genesis also shines some light on this topic. In 1:26, we are told that humans are made, male and female, in God’s image and that we are supposed to take dominion over all the earth. The biblical anthropology is very rich and drawing out all that it has to say would take a very long time. But all that needs to be accepted here is that mankind has a telos and that telos includes three dimensions. First, being rightly related to God as his image bearers. Second, being rightly related to other humans in community, and third being rightly related to the earth as its rulers.[10] That this is the biblical view is not a controversial point.
Now I will introduce the principle that is at the heart of my theodicy. Here it is:
T1: For an agent to achieve its telos, it must do so with internal integrity.
What I mean by “internal integrity” must be specified. Achieving one’s telos is not a matter of simply getting certain inputs to generate the desired outputs. In other words, being a good human person is about more than just behaving the right way or doing the right thing. It is about being a certain kind of person. This involves a transformation of the individual from one state to another. This transformation takes place through an individual’s development of character, accomplished by habituation and the practice of the virtues. Part of the human good is that humans achieve it as humans. To see why this is so, we can run a thought experiment. Suppose that very technologically advanced aliens abducted a human named Dale. They implant into Dale’s brain a microchip that will override Dale’s normally disordered desires and give him good desires. The result will be that Dale will now live as an ideal human should. But it seems there is something deficient about Dale’s story. The good for Dale is not merely that he act like a good person, but that he would actually become a good person on his own volition. It would be better if Dale would live as good person, not because he was made to, but because he wanted to and thus, through a slow and difficult process, began forming his character to become a good person. The end matters, but so do the means to the end. C. S. Lewis makes a similar point in the Problem of Pain. Lewis points out that in the game of chess
...you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him - if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking - then you could not have a game at all.
There is an analogy between the integrity of a chess game and the integrity of the human pursuit of their good. Humans must "play the game" on their own if winning is going to mean anything. Humans as humans must achieve their good; there is no other possible way it could be. This is what I mean by “internal integrity.” For an agent to achieve its telos, it cannot be overridden by forces outside itself; it must pursue its telos by its own volition.
Another idea implicit in the notion of internal integrity is the reality of libertarian free will. This means our choices are, at bottom, self-determined and not determined by God. God is restricted by what libertarian agents would choose to do.[11] But what reason is there to think that we actually have this power? While this is not the place to develop a full argument, I will give at least one piece of evidence. Libertarian freedom is the commonsense view. We navigate our everyday lives under the assumption that we determine what we will do. Of course, our determinative powers are limited. For instance, I cannot will that I teleport to Mars and have it happen. But within the range of my natural powers (like the power to move my arm or not), I can will to do or not do certain things. It is only when we operate according to this presupposition that things like deliberation or weighing our options make sense. We deliberate because we think we will make an important choice, not that someone else has already made the choice for us. So we should accept that we really have libertarian freedom or pay the very high cost of saying our commonsense experience is completely mistaken.
Something very important follows from T1 and biblical view of the human good that will allow us to say something about Sue’s case. Given that the human good includes relations with other humans, it follows that God must, as a general policy, not intervene in human interactions. If he were to intervene too often, he would compromise humanity’s internal integrity and short circuit our ability to achieve our telos. And, given the reality of libertarian freedom, sometimes humans may do things God does not want them to do. All things considered, it is better for humans for God to allow us autonomy and the possibility of achieving our good, even if this means that we inflict terrible evils on one another.
In addition to this, there is a sense in which any case of human evil is the fault of all humans collectively. We have a God-given responsibility to one another that goes unmet when we allow each other to fall into sin. I do not mean to say that you or I as individuals are directly responsible somehow for the abuse of Sue. What I mean is that humanity in general is responsible. If I work for Acme Dog Food Company as a customer service representative and my company ships rancid dog food that poisons thousands of dogs, there’s a sense in which I am responsible for that even though I did not directly cause it. The degree of culpability is not the same as Jim's, the Quality Assurance Manager, but I am a part of the community that poisoned the dogs and that makes me responsible at some level. We can also see this idea at work in the context of citizens and nations. When a country commits an injustice, there is a sense in which each citizen is responsible even if they did not directly contribute to the injustice. A citizen may not be the one doing the bayonetting, but they participate in a society that makes it possible. Further, any given citizen could have done more to prevent it. The extent to which he did not do what he could to prevent it, he has failed. Here another thought. Aristotle taught us that being a truly virtuous person is impossible to do on our own. We must live in the right kind of society - a society aimed at realizing the human good. Here Lewis is again helpful. In Mere Christianity, Lewis suggests that the metaphor of a fleet of ships on a voyage toward a particular destination captures the essence of the moral life: "The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not collide and get in one another’s way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order." Later, Lewis adds a third part: the fleet must have a specific destination if the voyage is to be successful. Lewis concludes,
Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.
In our secular society, it often seems as the only real moral value is the first thing, staying out each other's way. So, on first glance, it may seem silly to think that we are somehow and to some degree responsible for Sue's abuse. Now, it ought to be made clear that I do not intend to say all of us are guilty of the same thing as Sue's abuser. That is obviously false. But, we humans are guilty of something with respect to Sue. To return to Lewis's metaphor: We have allowed other ships on the voyage to fall into severe disrepair and we have allowed other ships to wander off course. We can use the ideas of Aristotle to express the same concern. Aristotle thought part of being truly human is cultivating a society of excellence, a society where everyone practices the virtues. Cultivating this kind of society is the function of every human person, and it is a function that no one fulfills as fully as they ought. We fail both by not maximizing the virtue in ourselves and by not properly attending to the formation of virtue in others. In the sense that we all fail in this way is the sense in which we are all responsible for the creation of abusers - it is in this sense all of us humans have failed Sue. This does not lessen the seriousness of the abuser’s error, but it does show that we are all in this together and that we all have a responsibility to cultivate excellence in one another.
This is especially true in cases like Sue’s. If we consider the man who killed Sue, we will likely see a person who has a warped and distorted character (his ship is out of order and off course). Likely, this state of affairs is not solely the man’s fault. We know that abusers were often abused themselves; perhaps that is the case here. This chain of abuse could expand exponentially as we consider all the people who, in one way or another, contributed to the formation of Sue’s murderer into the kind of person who would rape and kill a little girl. Additionally, all of us humans fail to care for each other as we ought and so we create, together, the environment where acts like Sue’s murder can happen. Sue’s case is indicator not only of her killer’s depravity, but the depravity of humanity in general. To be clear, Sue's abuser still had the freedom to do otherwise and so he is still culpable for Sue's abuse. But, there is a sense in which humans in general are responsible for bringing about a world in which abusers exist.
Here is a possible objection. Even in the best case scenarios, some people will still choose to do evil. Even if humanity had fulfilled its duty and given Sue's abuser the right kind of care and made every effort to keep him on course, he could still choose to be an abuser. Now, why exactly might this be a problem for my account? The objector might say, "It is a problem because you have been saying that humans in general are responsible for the abuse of Sue. If our actions do not determine her abuser's actions, then we cannot be responsible. That is the problem." In response, I want to first highlight and recall a distinction I made earlier. We can offer to repair a person's ship and tell him where to go, but making the repairs and plotting the course are, in the end, up to him. This is true . We can only be responsible for cultivating an environment and offering direction, we cannot be responsible for what people do with those things. In the case of Sue's abuse, we are, at best, responsible for creating a context that made the abuse possible and not for the abuse itself. But this does not defeat my account because humans are still, albeit indirectly, responsible for Sue's abuse. That is, humanity is responsible for creating the environment in which abuse can take place.
That said, I want to give another caveat. Even though the idea of the human good and internal integrity might help us make sense of why God allows even terrible evils as a general rule, we should exercise epistemic humility here. I do not mean to suggest that this is the reason God allowed Sue’s case. Alston is right; in most cases we cannot know what the actual reason is for God allowing an evil to occur. But we can make some “theodical suggestions.”[12]
But how can T1 and the biblical notion of the human good help us make sense of a case like Bambi’s? Here we must remember that the human good includes care of the earth. Perhaps God’s intention for human care of the earth is that we were so meticulous that we would prevent cases like Bambi’s from ever occurring. At first, this might seem absurd, but that may be only because we humans have strayed so far from God’s intention for us. In a world in which every human properly exercised his or her responsibility to care for God’s creation, I suspect there would be vastly fewer Bambi-like cases. And, once humans actually achieved dominion on the earth, perhaps no Bambi-like cases would ever occur. So part of the answer for why there are Bambi-like cases may be that humans have failed in their responsibility as care-givers of the earth. Another part of the answer comes directly from Scripture. Paul says that nature itself is “subject to frustration”[13] because “humanity’s fall into sin marred the ‘goodness’ of God’s creation.”[14] Human sin, then is the cause of natural evil. And, given that the welfare of the earth is so closely connected with the human telos, God cannot, as a general rule, intervene in nature without compromising the internal integrity of humanity. Humans, if we ever hope to be what God intends, must willingly take on their responsibility as caretakers of the earth.
If what I have said is correct, then God has good reason to allow Bambi and Sue cases. This undermines Rowe’s R1 and thus his argument no longer goes through. But before moving to the conclusion, let me consider two objections.
First, the atheologian might say, “All this talk of the human good and human responsibility is very noble, but couldn't have God lessened the suffering of both Bambi and Sue and not compromise the internal integrity of humanity?” This objection presses on an ambiguity in my argument, specifically on the idea that God could not intervene as a “general rule.” If the rule is generally applied, then there is no reason God could not intervene in any particular case. But from this it also follows that God could intervene in Sue or Bambi’s case and not compromise human integrity. No particular case is essential to human integrity. However, if God intervenes too much, then human integrity will be compromised. So at least some evils must still be allowed. We can reason that those evils that occur must be allowed or else human integrity would be compromised.[15] So if God prevented Sue’s case or a Bambi-like case from occurring, there would be some evil equally bad or worse he would have to allow somewhere else. Therefore, this objection does not defeat the argument.
Second, the atheologian might object because, he says, I have described a morally hopeless situation. Humans, as they are now, will never develop to the point where we would prevent Sue and Bambi cases. A long list of gross human failures even from the past thirty days could be easily produced. If T1 is right, then the hope of ever realizing a just world is absurd. We are like a terminally ill cancer patient who suffers tremendous pain and who has no chance of recovery. Given the hopelessness of the situation, the only good we can reasonably hope for is that doctor would give us some drug to deaden the pain. So God should realize that since humans are in such a sad state, human integrity is not worth the suffering because it will never be realized. What is the point of allowing cases like Sue’s if it will never amount to anything? But, on this point the atheologian is mistaken. We Christians have yet more to say. Our plight is not hopeless because God himself has become one of us. God has done something dramatic and heroic on the part of creatures like Bambi, even more so for humans like Sue. In the person of Jesus, God has given humanity a way to be truly human and a way to end human and animal suffering. Through Jesus, God has acted to overcome human sin in a way that does not compromise the internal integrity of humanity because Jesus is fully human. And since Jesus is incarnate and fully human, he makes a way for humans to overcome the problem of sin as humans. Apart from him, humans are unable to achieve our God given telos. But with him, we can become what God intends. In every way, Jesus has redeemed humanity from our sin.
Conclusion
In this essay, we have seen a promising way for Christians to respond to the problem of evil. We saw that God can allow some evil if it realizes a worthwhile good and that he is limited by what is logically possible. Further, we saw that allowing humans autonomy to achieve their good is worthwhile and this entails that God cannot, as a general rule, intervene in areas of human responsibility. Finally, we saw that God, in Jesus, has acted in a way to solve the problem of evil while simultaneously preserving human integrity.
Notes
[1] Rowe. 3.
[2] J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism : Arguments for and against the Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 115.
[3] Augustine, The City of God, XI, CHAP. 9. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120111.htm
[4] John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1977). 45.
[5]See Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (New York: Octagon Books, 1983). 132.
[6] Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book 22, chapter 78.
[7] Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book 22, chapter 78.
[8] A similar point is made by N.T. Wright in N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2006). Kindle location 343. He says that evil is the OT is understood as “idolatry” or “dehumanization.” This is consistent with the idea that evil is disorder or malfunction.
[9] See Matt 19-1-6.
[10] These three relations are inspired by a similar list mentioned in John Randall Sachs, The Christian Vision of Humanity : Basic Christian Anthropology, Zacchaeus Studies Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991). 17.
[11] Sometimes, defenders of libertarian freedom are accused of improperly limiting God. But this accusation is wrong for two reasons. First, God is still fully omnipotent on the libertarian view. God can do whatever is logically possible for him to do. Second, to say that God chose to create agents with libertarian freedom does not mean that God has fewer options open to him at all. The opposite is true. The defender of libertarian freedom thinks that God could have determined everything; that is his prerogative. However, the defender also thinks God has the power to create finite, self-determining creatures. God has more options and not less on this view. It is the compatibilist that is, arguably, artificially limiting God’s power.
[12] William Alston, "The Inductive Argument from Evil," in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder(Bloomington, ID.: Indiana University Press, 1996).103.
[13] Romans 8:22
[14] Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 1996). 515.
[15] This response is inspired by a similar discussion in David Baggett and Walls Jerry L., Good God : The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 144. Here they discuss an analogy from Peter van Inwagen aimed at showing that if God intervenes too much, he will defeat the law like regularity in a world.
[1] Thomas Aquinas said something similar: “everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms, is numbered amongst those possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent: whereas whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility.” ST I Q 25 A 3. Available here: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1025.htm
[2] 1 John 4:8.
[3] Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, Rev. ed., Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 184.
[4] J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” in The Problem of Evil, ed. Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 26.
[5] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4583/4583-h/4583-h.htm#chap10
[6] Sarah Price Brown, “Q & a with Rabbi Harold S. Kushner,” Jewish Journal 2006.
[7] It is important to add here that many, if not most, Open Theists would not see their position as weakening of God’s omnipotence. God still has the power to do whatever is possible. But, on their view, it is not possible to know the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom in advance. Thus, God still is able to do whatever is logically possible to do. Further, Open Theism is often not a response to the problem of evil, but to problems created by human libertarian freedom and certain perceived problems with God’s knowing some agent’s action in advance and that agent being genuinely free with respect to that action. There is a good discussion of these issues in Jerry L. Walls’ Hell: The Logic of Damnation, Library of Religious Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). 33-56.
[8] Alvin Plantinga, “God, Evil, and the Metaphysics of Freedom,” in Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 85.
[9] This is similar to the definition of libertarian free will offered by Bruce R. Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982). 57. Reichenbach takes his definition from Anthony Flew.
[10] Plantinga. 101.
[11] If this were all Christians could say about the existence of God, that possibly he exists, Christian apologetics would be in a sad state. However, Plantinga’s free will defense provides a way out of the logical problem of evil so that Christians can now present a positive and cumulative case for the truth of Christianity.
[12] Alvin Plantinga, “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa’,” in Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil, ed. Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).
[13] Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977). Kindle location 337.
[14] Kirk R. MacGregor, “The Existence and Irrelevance of Gratuitous Evil,” Philosophia Christi 14, no. 1 (2012). 169.
[15] My own view would be that God is not really committed to a particular normative ethical theory. I think something like natural law theory is true. Whatever God does is good because God always acts in the appropriate way given the nature of the object he acts upon and his relation to that object.
[16] MacGregor, “The Existence and Irrelevance of Gratuitous Evil.” See especially his discussion on pages 170-171.
[17] MacGregor takes a similar view in the end. He wants to defend the idea that there are gratuitous evils (he wants to show that Rowe’s second premise is false), but that these pose no threat to the rationality of the theist’s position. The basic thought is that, following Augustine, evil is a privation. Because everything God creates is less than God, “it is logically impossible for God to create a world without evil,” says MacGregor. In this case, evils, even especially heinous ones, are not part of some very tight plan according to which, if a person refrained from a gratuitously evil act, some very great good would be lost. So some acts of evil happen just because an agent willed it to happen and no other reason. In some ways, I am inclined to agree with MacGregor on this point. However, I think it is a mistake to call these evils “gratuitous.” God does have some greater goods in view when he allows them. At least one would be the greater good of respecting human freedom. MacGregor may be right when he says that certain evil acts are not essential to God’s plan, but they might still be essential to the integrity of human autonomy. This does not need to be spelled out in terms of consequentialism. Perhaps God follows the maxim: It is good to respect human freedom without considering the consequences. In that case, the greater good is following the maxim instead of intervening.
[18] William Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington, ID.: Indiana University Press, 1996). 2.
[19] Ibid. 2.
[20] Ibid. 4.
[21] Rowe, William L. 1988. “Evil and Theodicy,” Philosophical Topics 16: 119-32.
In this week's episode, Dr. Baggett explains why he became interested in the moral argument and the role it has had in shaping his view of God.
One of the variants of moral apologetics is epistemic. Angus Ritchie’s From Morality to Metaphysics is one example; Mark Linville’s excellent work is another. Another is R. Scott Smith’s excellent recent book called In Search of Moral Knowledge. Here is an interview of him conducted by Joe Gorra and the Evangelical Philosophical Society.
Yoram Hazony, author of The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, recently wrote a provocative opinion article for the New York Times in which he summarized his skepticism toward the idea of a perfect God. Hazony suggests that there are two compelling reasons why the God of classical theism should be rejected: first, reconciling the existence of evil with God’s omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence is too great a challenge. Second, he says, such a picture fails to match the Old Testament portrayal of God.
Hazony insists that the problem of evil shows that God cannot be both all-good and all-powerful, for if he were we would not find the injustices in the world we do. He chalks up affirmation of such perfections more to the influence of Greek philosophy than to biblical thought. Regarding the God of the Old Testament, he writes:
The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he’s repeatedly surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot control Israel and get its people to do what he wants. And so on.
Consider the standard perfections of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. Hazony says forthrightly that the problem of evil renders reconciliation of omnipotence and omnibenevolence either highly unlikely or flatly impossible.
Hazony’s claims are predicated on an unrefined conception of omnipotence. Talk of perfection only makes sense in terms of achieving the right balance of properties, not by maximizing a thing’s constituent principles simultaneously. To speak of a “perfect bottle,” for example, is colloquial at best, confused at worst; how many drops of liquid are contained in the “perfect bottle” admits of no objective answer. God has as much power, knowledge, and goodness as are mutually compatible and compossible.
If God sovereignly chooses to confer on human beings libertarian freedom, that means that some logically possible worlds are not feasible ones, but it hardly shows that God is not omnipotent. Hazony also errs in taking the great “I am” declaration of God to be an indication of God’s incompleteness and changeability, rather than, as seems the more straightforward meaning, God’s uncreatedness and ontological independence.
One reason Hazony makes these claims is that he wishes to emphasize the need for tentativeness and provisionality in theology, and remind us that our knowledge of God remains fragmentary and partial. In Hazony’s view, “The belief that any human mind can grasp enough of God to begin recognizing perfections in him would have struck the biblical authors as a pagan conceit.”
According to the Hebrew Bible, Hazony insists, God represents the embodiment of life’s experiences and vicissitudes, from hardship to joy; although God is ultimately faithful and just, these aren’t perfections or qualities that obtain necessarily. “On the contrary, it is the hope that God is faithful and just that is the subject of ancient Israel’s faith.”
He concludes by arguing that his view is one that ought to appeal to people of faith today: “With theism rapidly losing ground across Europe and among Americans as well, we could stand to reconsider this point. Surely a more plausible conception of God couldn’t hurt.”
Is theism really losing ground, or are certain religious institutions? And what does it even mean to speak of the Hebraic depiction of God as more realistic than the idea of God as altogether perfect? It is certainly more anthropomorphic, or to put it more precisely, anthropopathic; portraying God as if he had human passions. But does that make it more “realistic”? And why does the fact that lines of Scripture do not read like a philosophical text compromise the philosophical work of evincing such a conception, or render the effort utterly artificial, or invalid?
The claim that a perfect God is a Greek convention incorporated into theology is an allegation that overlooks the role of what theologians refer to as “general revelation.” The Greeks had no corner on the market of reason. Plenty of Greeks—Euthyphro, for example—believed in all sorts of rather morally deficient gods. Indeed, we could return the favor and suggest that it’s actually Hazony’s conception of God which is more influenced by Greek ideas in this regard than by Scripture.
The fact remains, though, that in the New Testament itself we find ample indications of a morally perfect and perfectly loving God. This happy convergence of the a priori deliverances of reason and the a posteriori deliverances of Scripture should come as no surprise since one would expect resonance between the outcomes of special and general revelation. Nothing less than this view of God can answer our deepest hopes.
David Baggett is professor of philosophy at Liberty University and co-author, with Jerry Walls, of Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. Tom Morris taught philosophy for fifteen years at Notre Dame and writes for various outlets .
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Yoram Hazony, “ An Imperfect God ,” New York Times , November 25, 2012
Originally posted at First Things
Photo: "greek god" by Giovanni. CC license.
Review Essay* Thomas Nagel’s Rejection of Theism: A Critique
In his most recent book—Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False—and in numerous places in his previous work, Thomas Nagel wishes to suggest several reasons that theism is not a live option for him (to use a phrase made famous by William James).[1] He does not seem to intend many of his criticisms to be more than suggestive, much less decisive; nonetheless, in light of the strength of his conviction that theism is somehow too inherently outrageous an option to believe, I would like to spend a bit of time identifying and assessing the criticisms he mentions.
Nagel does not seem averse to characterizing his resistance to theism as something of a bias. He is rather transparent about theism simply not being a reasonable alternative for him. He seems to leave open the possibility that others may find it to be so, but he himself, he says, has not been blessed with the sensus divinitatis. Alvin Plantinga’s work in epistemology employs this notion, borrowing from the writings of John Calvin, to refer to the idea that God has made his reality known to people in a direct fashion apart from discursive inference.[2] Nagel, though, claims to have no such sense, however inchoate. The thesis of theism strikes him rather as a dead option—perhaps akin (this is my example, not his) to the difficulty if not impossibility for an evangelical Christian to endorse reincarnation or karma.
Important to emphasize is the irenic way in which Nagel conveys this impression. There is nothing overtly tendentious or dismissive about his view toward theists in general, despite his own rejection of theism and incredulity at some of its tenets. In fact, he goes out of his way to express gratitude for certain theistically motivated advocates of intelligent design—lauding them as iconoclasts—for raising important questions and pointing out salient limitations of naturalism. His recent review of Plantinga’s latest book is exceedingly fair.[3] And he admits that plenty of thinkers, on seeing the limitations of naturalism, might naturally gravitate toward theism as the superior explanation of various important aspects of the human experience—a few of which I shall mention below. Nagel’s fair-mindedness and collegial tone are laudable, refreshing, and a poignant contrast with the contentious animus of the New Atheists whose strident dismissiveness of their debate interlocutors bespeaks a troubling lack of intellectual accountability. Nagel’s is not a divisive, partisan voice, but rather the sincere effort of a great and scrupulously honest philosopher trying to understand reality in light of his atheism and the seemingly in-principle inability of naturalism to explain important phenomena that he is unwilling to renounce.
His book, to express it in broad outline, argues that various features of the human condition—value, meaning, cognition, consciousness, agency—reside beyond the ability of naturalism to account for. The thesis is not a new one, although what is most striking about Nagel’s book is that he is an atheist admitting the limitations of naturalism. Usually such criticisms are lodged by theists, like Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland, who, three years ago, published his book The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism.[4] Moreland argued specifically that consciousness, free will, rationality, personhood, objective morality, and intrinsic value are unable to be sustained by a naturalistic worldview. Ironically enough, in an appendix Moreland discusses Nagel at length, specifically the “dismissive strategy” Nagel employed in a 1997 book—a strategy that attempted to undercut, among other things, a theistic account of reason.[5] For present purposes, though, it is important to see that Nagel and Moreland agree that naturalism is ill-equipped to explain important features of reality.
Let us take value as a paradigmatic example to illustrate their point. The last chapter in Nagel’s (and Moreland’s) book treats the question of values generally, ethics more particularly. In seeking an adequate explanation of value (as he did for the other items on his list), Nagel divides the question into the constitutive issue concerning what value is all about and the historical question of how it could come about that creatures like us could recognize objective value and be motivated by it. Causal historical accounts, he argues, inevitably are problematically reductionist, leaving out important and ineliminable parts of the picture. Historical explanations, such as those offered by theists, could indeed help explain much of what needs explanation here, but Nagel nonetheless rejects it for reasons to be discussed below. Instead, he opts for a nonintentional teleological explanation, something in the vicinity of the ideas of Aristotle, he thinks. Although he admits he is not entirely sure such an explanation makes sense, it is the direction he thinks is most likely to prove fertile. What he remains adamant about is that subjectivist and eliminativist (anti-realist) accounts, though they may be explicable with the resources of naturalism alone, are beyond his ability to embrace psychologically, involving too prohibitive a price and too big an affront to common sense. “The teleological hypothesis,” he writes, in contrast, “is that these things may be determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but also by something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them.”[6] The question as to which alternative is best comes down, he thinks, to a matter of relative plausibility.
Nagel, of course, admits that his notions of nonintentional teleology—a universe coming to life, coming into an ability to recognize itself, a view that resonates in certain respects with C. D. Broad’s view of the mind in nature and with Bergson’s picture of creative evolution—may well, in today’s intellectual climate, strike many readers as implausible, in the same way that materialism and theism strike him.[7] At any rate, although much of what Nagel is suggesting here is not altogether new, in the contemporary discussion of, say, value and reality, it represents a fourth option after three well-rehearsed ones, which are as follows: naturalists confident in moral realism, like Nagel, but who, unlike Nagel, retain the hope that secular ethical theory will eventually suffice to capture what is distinctive about value; naturalists who, like Nagel, see naturalism as in principle unable to explain important aspects of value and who, unlike Nagel, thus reject moral realism; supernaturalists who remain staunch moral realists, like Nagel, but who, unlike Nagel, identify theistic foundations for morality. Nagel agrees and disagrees with all of these camps. Let us call his view “teleological emergentism.” With respect to value, this is (1) a realist perspective affirming objective value, (2) it sees that naturalism cannot account for such realism, and so (3) it rejects naturalism. In its place, though, (4) Nagel steadfastly resists the theistic hypothesis, gesturing instead in this other direction—a view of the universe as somehow having had this teleological direction latent within it, rendering the emergence of consciousness, value, and the like more than just wild coincidence.
Assessing the merits of his alternative proposal is a task for another day; for now, why is it that Nagel retains so strong a bias against theism, beyond his admission to not being blessed with a sense of God’s reality? On my reading, he identifies several reasons to explain his philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic aversion. It is worth noting what they are, because classical theists have some important points to emphasize in reply. If the discussion is to proceed by more than merely citing one’s biases, but rather by a genuine, careful assessment of relative plausibilities, it is important that Nagel’s concerns about theism be forthrightly addressed.
To this end, let us identify the reasons he adduces for skepticism about theism. His quest for adequate explanation functions with a few strictures, one of which is antireductionism. Others are that certain things cannot be explained as merely accidental, and “the ideal of discovering a single natural order that unified everything on the basis of a set of common elements and principles.”[8] Both Cartesian dualism and classical theism reject this second criterion or aspiration, thus departing from the single natural order to which Nagel aspires. Theists who appeal to the miraculous are attempting to explain features of the world by divine intervention. Since this is not part of the natural order, it is beyond where he is willing to go. Is this merely his bias, or a reason for rejecting the theistic hypothesis? If we were to attempt to make it into a reason, the logic seems to go something like this: divine interventions seem to represent a breakdown in explanation, an unnecessary ad hoc add-on, a theological addition to the picture that is indulgent and foreign. This is why Nagel’s earlier aversion seems aptly characterized as rooted in something aesthetic: he seems to be operating on the assumption that there is something explanatorily suspect about theism and the miraculous from the start. He at any rate is unable to countenance it, and he suspects in today’s intellectual milieu appeals to theism will largely be seen as troublesome.
Call it a mere bias if you will, but Nagel’s concern here seems to be that an adequate explanation, to avoid appearances of being ad hoc or ontologically indulgent or something else, needs to be integrated. Its parts cannot just be slapped together in haphazard and unprincipled fashion, but must truly inform each other and combine into an organic whole. God’s transcendence or the disruption of the natural order by miracles or something of the kind seems to strike him at a deep level as incongruent with this constraint imposed by integration. Although I do not share his reservations here, for reasons I shall explain below, I think I can empathize with his concern to a degree and can feel some of the force of his sentiment. It is this issue in particular, in fact, that I wish to explore further below, enlisting the assistance of C. S. Lewis to do so. First, though, let us briefly review some of Nagel’s other reasons for rejecting the supernatural.
A recurring theme of Nagel’s is that mind must somehow be central to the story of reality—not just an accidental product fortuitously arising billions of years into the narrative, but something that somehow guided the process from the start. Theism accomplishes such a feat impeccably, of course, but Nagel insists that this does not help. For he writes, “So long as the divine mind just has to be accepted as a stopping point in the pursuit of understanding, it leaves the process incomplete, just as the purely descriptive materialist account does.”[9] This then is another reason for his rejection of the theistic hypothesis: its alleged incompleteness in making God, in this case, a stopping point. At this point plenty of classical theists would be entitled to balk, of course, since God seems to be a natural stopping point indeed, a Being whose existence is necessary, the One who is, in fact, the very ground of all being. If anyone or anything is entitled to be a legitimate stopping point, is this not it? Nagel admits (or at least intimates) that, unlike the nomological laws of physics, God’s existence is more plausibly thought of as metaphysically necessary. And even though theism accommodates Nagel’s insistence that mental phenomena must be attributed to the working of a comprehensive mental source, he still finds theism no more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. But why?
According to Nagel, “Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one.”[10] The problem with naturalism construed reductionistically is that it fails to undergird our confidence in the deliverances of reason, since reason itself is explicated in a way that casts doubt on its ability to uncover the truth (an issue we will return to later). The problems identified here for theism are that it fails to provide an adequate explanation. It “amounts to the hypothesis that the highest-order explanation of how things hang together is of a certain type, namely, intentional or purposive, without having anything more to say about how that intention operates except what is found in the results to be explained.”[11] Nagel continues by writing that “a theistic explanation will inevitably bring in some idea of value, and a particular religion can make this much more specific, though it also poses the famous problem of evil.”[12] He then mentions the difficulty of believing in God, and then claims that the disadvantage of theism as an answer to the desire for comprehensive understanding is that it does not offer explanation “in the form of a comprehensive account of the natural order. Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world.”[13] Thus, a theistic self-understanding “would not be the kind of understanding that explains how beings like us fit into the world. The kind of intelligibility that would still be missing is intelligibility of the natural order—intelligibility from within. That kind of intelligibility may be compatible with some forms of theism—if God creates a self-contained natural order which he then leaves undisturbed. But it is not compatible with direct theistic explanation of systematic features of the world that would seem otherwise to be brute facts—such as the creation of life from dead matter, or the birth of consciousness, or reason. Such interventionist hypotheses amount to a denial that there is a comprehensive natural order.”[14]
How do we assess Nagel’s claims here? To begin with, let us identify and summarize the main sources of his concern. It is a bit challenging to unravel the cluster of inter-related concerns here, but let us give it a try. I suspect that the whole assortment of Nagel’s concerns is predicated on his reasonable assumption that metaphysics and epistemology tie together adequately. Among his foundational epistemic commitments is what can practically be dubbed an aesthetic preference: he is rather forthright about his psychological aversion to propositions that smack of being ad hoc, to overly pluralistic pictures of the world, to views he considers ontologically indulgent, positing unnecessary and extraneous entities. Even when such entities may accomplish work in explaining some of what is in need of explanation, Nagel is hesitant to affirm them if they do not seem to resonate and dovetail enough with a single natural order. His epistemology precludes theses like Cartesian dualism and interventionist variants of theism, because these would, in his estimation, amount to a denial that there is a comprehensive natural order. They push the quest for intelligibility outside the world, resulting in an inadequately integrated worldview. The epistemic strictures he maintains dictate that the right answer, the true view of reality, be a world involving an organic whole, and supernaturalism simply fails to satisfy such a constraint.
If this sort of summary is the gist of Nagel’s concern about theism, how might the classical theist, one who not only believes in the supernatural realm but even in a God who can and does intervene in the natural order, defend such theism against his criticisms? Can supernaturalists answer Nagel’s worries and nagging concerns? I think for the most part that they can, and where they cannot, I am inclined to say that this is so much the worse for some of Nagel’s epistemic strictures. This at least is the case that I am now going to argue for. In order to do so, I want to enlist the assistance of the great literary scholar and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, particularly some of the insights he shared in his book on miracles.
First let us dispense with a few preliminaries. Nagel writes that he lacks the sensus divinitatis. Even if such a reality exists, however, the fact that Nagel himself does not personally have much of an experience with it provides no evidence against theism generally or Christianity particularly. All sorts of potential obstacles can stand in the way of such religious experience. The wiser course here is to raise the relevant evidential questions about the truth of theism. Even Plantinga, a firm believer that we can be justified to be theists and indeed Christians while lacking discursive justification, remains convinced that several dozen arguments collectively provide a strong evidential case for the truth of classical theism. Let us for now simply set aside the notion of religious belief as a candidate for proper basicality, which would simply get us off track.
Nagel, recall, also mentions the problem of evil, a big discussion in its own right that we need to set aside for now as well. Writing on the problem of evil in recent years has ballooned into an enormous literature. In the estimation of many, it is the proponents and advocates of classical theism who have had the upper hand in the debate in recent years, as atheologians advancing arguments from evil have consistently had to keep changing their approach to find a workable version of the argument. Those convinced by the problem of evil that belief in classical theism is irrational, though, will need to look elsewhere for considerations aiming to disabuse them of this conviction. It will not be addressed directly here.
The particular crux of the issue on which I wish to focus is Nagel’s aesthetic bias in favor of an integrated picture of things, a constraint he is convinced interventionist (i.e. classical) theism cannot satisfy. By calling such a stricture “aesthetic” I do not mean to impugn its value; aesthetic considerations may well function in an important way in any right and properly expansive epistemic approach, especially as we attempt something so ambitious as identifying the true metaphysical worldview. No, rather than denying the need for the satisfaction of such a constraint, I would prefer to argue that classical theism is better at meeting such a constraint, or at least one in its close proximity, than Nagel seems to realize. Nagel’s view of theism, in certain respects, seems to be inadequately nuanced and sophisticated. Rejecting Sunday school versions of theism and Christianity may well be altogether appropriate; equating such variants with the real thing would be a mistake.
For a more sophisticated version of the theistic perspective, let us turn to the writings of C. S. Lewis; as we do so, it will be almost surprising to see the prescience with which Lewis anticipated just the sorts of worries that preoccupy Nagel. Recall Nagel’s concern that theism (by which I will mean, henceforth, classical and interventionist theism) would preclude the “organic whole” and “comprehensive natural order” Nagel desires. His own Aristotelian-like, emergentist, teleological account of mind, though not compatible with reductionist naturalism, does not preclude the sort of organic wholeness and comprehensively naturalistic explanation he is after. For this reason, despite the latter’s obscurity as an explanation, Nagel is more drawn to it than to classical theism with its notions of intelligent creation.
Now, by way of counterpoint, consider this passage from C. S. Lewis, from the eighth chapter of Miracles. It comes right after he speaks of the way some people find intolerable the notion of miraculous interventions in the world. “The reason they find it intolerable,” he writes, “is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent.”[15] He then says he agrees with them, but he thinks that “they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole.”[16] He then continues:
That being so, the miracle and the previous history of Nature may be interlocked after all but not in the way the Naturalist expected: rather in a much more roundabout fashion. The great complex event called Nature, and the new particular event introduced into it by the miracle, are related by their common origin in God, and doubtless, if we knew enough, most intricately related in His purpose and design, so that a Nature which had had a different history, and therefore been a different Nature, would have been invaded by different miracles or by none at all. In that way the miracles and the previous course of Nature are as well interlocked as any other two realities, but you must go back as far as their common Creator to find the interlocking. You will not find it within Nature.[17]
So Nagel and Lewis, we might say, entirely agree on the aesthetic constraint for an integrated worldview, but their views are diametrically opposite on the question of what such a constraint demands. Nagel’s insistence is that such integration be found within nature, and Lewis insists that, though it is to be found, it will not be found there. “Everything is connected with everything else: but not all things are connected by the short and straight roads we expected,” Lewis wrote.[18] They cannot both be right on this score. Nagel’s constraint would preclude taking seriously Lewis’s suggestion; and Lewis’s alternate suggestion means that Nagel’s effort would be bound to fail. In light of so fundamental a conflict of intuitions, argument and evidence would be useful, much more so than subjective epistemic biases. Unfortunately for Nagel, though, this is the precise point where his argument is the thinnest. Lewis, as we are about to see, is just getting started.
Nagel is no pantheist, but he definitely has resonance with panpsychism, according to which, via emergentism, the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties. This is how he is inclined to explain what needs explaining: that mind must somehow function centrally in the story of reality. Like pantheism, though, such an account is considerably more amorphous and simply vague than the account of classical theism. Nagel seems to consider this an advantage in practice over the crude and dualistic nature of theism, but Lewis would completely disagree. Speaking of pantheism, rather than panpsychism, but in a way that in salient respects could extend equally to both, Lewis writes that “at every point Christianity has to correct the natural expectations of the Pantheist and offer something more difficult, just as Schrodinger has to correct Democritus. At every moment he has to multiply distinctions and rule out false analogies. He has to substitute the mappings of something that has a positive, concrete, and highly articulated character for the formless generalities in which Pantheism is at home. . . . The ascertained nature of any real thing is always at first a nuisance to our natural fantasies—a wretched, pedantic, logic-chopping intruder upon a conversation which was getting on famously without it.”[19] Lewis notes that when people compare adult versions of other worldviews with a knowledge of Christianity acquired in childhood, they get the impression that the Christian account of God is the “obvious” one, the one too easy to be true, while its alternatives seem sublime and profound by comparison. Lewis thinks just the opposite is the case. Reality is hard and obstinate, and not at all what we might expect most of the time. Vague notions of spirituality or a diffused mind animating the universe is hardly a novel notion; it is arguably the native bent of mind and immemorial religion. “An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall?”[20]
Interesting to note is that Nagel’s problem with theism largely evaporates if it is a theism that does not involve intervention. Had God created the world in such a way that it was henceforth self-sustaining and self-regulating, then, Nagel thinks, there would be hope of reconciling such theism with the sort of worldview he is seeking. But a God who intervenes, who performs miracles, who upholds the universe by his power, who sent his Son into it to die for our sins—this sort of supernaturalism is beyond the pale, an unprincipled epistemic indulgence, an ontological foul. Interestingly, Lewis himself anticipated this very response. At the beginning of chapter twelve, Lewis captures the mentality of those who think a God who intervenes smacks of a petty and capricious tyrant who breaks his own laws. It is the good and wise kinds of gods who obey them. Even if miracles do not violate laws of nature, still the impression, in the minds of some, is that they “interrupt the orderly march of events, the steady development of Nature according to her own inherent genius or character. That regular march seems to such critics as I have in mind more impressive than any miracle.”[21]
Lewis himself seems to have entertained such a mentality as an atheist, but he would change his mind eventually. As a literary scholar, he offers an analogy to soften readers up to the propriety of God’s interventions. It is the stupid schoolboy, he says, who might think that the abnormal hexameters in Virgil or half-rhymes in English poets were due to incompetence. “In reality, of course, every one of them is there for a purpose and breaks the superficial regularity of the metre in obedience to a higher and subtler law: just as the irregularities in The Winter’s Tale do not impair, but embody and perfect, the inward unity of its spirit.”[22] Lewis’s point is that there are rules behind the rules, and “a unity which is deeper than uniformity.”
A supreme workman will never break by one note or one syllable or one stroke of the brush the living and inward law of the work he is producing. But he will break without scruple any number of those superficial regularities and orthodoxies which little, unimaginative critics mistake for its laws. The extent to which one can distinguish a just ‘license’ from a mere botch or failure of unity depends on the extent to which one has grasped the real and inward significance of the work as a whole.[23]
The analogy is even worse for the dogmatic anti-interventionist than this, though. In his insistence that miracles are improprieties unworthy of the Great Workman rather than expressions of the truest and deepest unity in His total work, he must be reminded that “the gap between God’s mind and ours must, on any view, be incalculably greater than the gap between Shakespeare’s mind and that of the most peddling critics of the old French school.”[24]
Employing yet another literary insight to drive home the point, Lewis highlights Dorothy Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker, whose thesis is based on the analogy between God’s relation to the world and an author’s relation to his book. “The ghost story is a legitimate form of art; but you must not bring a ghost into an ordinary novel to get over a difficulty in the plot.”[25] Doing the latter would be a blunder outside the realm of legitimate authorial prerogatives. Just such an analysis fuels many a suspicion that miracles are marvels of the wrong sort, involving an arbitrary interference with the organic whole of a story. Lewis admits that if he thought of miracles in such terms (as Nagel seems to), he would not believe in them either. But Lewis rests assured that if miracles have occurred, “they have occurred because they are the very thing this universal story is about. They are not exceptions (however rarely they occur), nor irrelevancies. They are precisely those chapters in this great story on which the plot turns.”[26] For those, like Nagel, who seem to think that atoms and time and space are the main plot of the story of the world, Lewis would respond by suggesting that the narrative God is weaving is a long one with a complicated plot. Lewis writes, “and we are not, perhaps, very attentive readers.”[27]
Again, Lewis and Nagel entirely agree on the epistemic preference that reality be integrated and a unity, even if they disagree on certain matters of uniformity. Lewis defends such subjective and admittedly aesthetic criteria, echoing Sir Arthur Eddington’s phrase that science progresses on convictions, perhaps unjustified but nonetheless cherished, about the “innate sense of the fitness of things.” A universe in which interventions were ubiquitous and irregularities omnipresent would be anathema; on this Lewis and Nagel agree. Lewis pushes this point a bit further, though, taking aim at naturalism. For we can ask, of what epistemic significance are such preferences? Lewis argues, and Nagel would likely agree, that if the true metaphysics is mindless naturalism, then such epistemic preferences we hold for order and unity are unlikely to be conducive to the truth. They would simply be facts about us. “If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform,” Lewis wrote.[28] But if theism is true, and the deepest reality is like us, the ultimate fact is a rational spirit in whose image we have been made, then our epistemic preferences are more plausibly thought to be reliable in pointing us toward the truth. This entirely turns on its head the notion that a desire for unity undermines belief in an interventionist God. Modern science, in fact, came about as a result of men believing in law in nature, expecting it because they believed in a legislator. “But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, ‘Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.’ The philosophy which forbids you to make uniformity absolute is also the philosophy which offers you solid grounds for believing it to be general, to be almost absolute.”[29]
Miracles, Lewis argues—at least from the perspective of Christianity—are not arbitrary, capricious interventions, ubiquitous ad hoc interruptions, but carefully orchestrated turning points in the plot, key chapters on which the whole plot of the novel turns, the main theme of the symphony, as it were. Whether specific alleged ones among them are inherently problematic cannot be answered a priori, but depends on how illuminating of the whole they prove to be. The incarnation, for example, is a picture of the divine condescending to take human flesh, one person both wholly divine and wholly human. No greater portrait of integration and rapprochement of the natural and supernatural is easy to envision. If God can so descend into a human spirit, the reality we inhabit is “more multifariously and subtly harmonious than we had suspected.”[30]
Lewis’s is a classical theistic picture, and his is not the strawman to which simplistic caricatures of religious views lend themselves. If Nagel wishes to defend his aversion to classical theism—despite its superior explanatory power over naturalism—opting instead for his much less evidenced and more obscure conjectures about unintentional teleological emergentism, not only does he have a lot of work to do to defend his own view: he also needs to do considerably more to subject classical theism to critical scrutiny.
*[1] Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
[2] See Plantinga’s trilogy on Warrant. Warrant: The Current Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[3] Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Nagel published his review of Plantinga’s book in “A Philosopher Defends Religion,” The New York Review of Books 59 September 27, 2012.
[4] J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (London: SCM Press, 2009).
[5] Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
[6] Nagel, Mind & Cosmos, 123.
[7] Nagel cites C. D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Routledge, 1925) 81–94, and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (trans. Arthur Mitchell; New York: Henry Holt, 1911).
[8] Nagel, Mind & Cosmos, 7.
[9] Ibid., 21.
[10] Ibid., 25.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 26.
[14] Ibid.
[15] C. S. Lewis, Miracles, in C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperOne, 2002), 354.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid., 376.
[20] Ibid., 383.
[21] Ibid., 385.
[22] Ibid., 386.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid., 387.
[25] Ibid., 388.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid., 389.
[28] Ibid., 395.
[29] Ibid., 395–396.
[30] Ibid., 401.
Photo: "Dendrons, Pisces and the Cosmos" by M. Flynn-Burhoe. CC licence.
John Hare is one of the most important philosophers in the area of theistic ethics. Hare has written many important books on moral philosophy including The Moral Gap and God and Morality. He has penned a mostly positive review of Good God which is available here.
Here's a short excerpt:
Having said all of this by way of criticism, I want to end by reaffirming that the book is, on the whole, a very good book. I do not want to give a predominantly negative impression. Making points of disagreement is usually more helpful and more interesting than simply agreeing. Nonetheless, the book does an excellent job of supporting the moral argument for belief in God, an argument that has been unjustly neglected in favor of other parts of natural theology, such as the arguments from the origin of the universe or fine-tuning.
Photo: ginnerobot/Flickr
There's a great interview with Dr. David Baggett and Dr. Jerry Walls by Joseph E. Gorra available at the blog of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Gorra's interview allows Walls and Baggett to go a little deeper on certain topics and explain the motivation of some of the positions taken in Good God. Gorra asks some great questions about the overall approach of the book, the objection to Calvinism, and the role of natural law, among other things. It's well worth the read. You can find the interview here.
Why does Christianity seem to have such a poor ability to resonate with people in modern Western countries? This has been an operative dynamic in Europe for a long time, but it is increasingly apparent that the United States too is finding it difficult to harmonize the basic tenets of the Christian worldview with the ideas and values that shape the culture at large. I find myself wondering whether there is a primary explanation of the situation, despite the many different and complex factors contributing to this situation, some unifying, fundamental catalyst at work here.
For example, nearly everyone in Western societies today who has thought much about Christianity knows that the three most difficult issues facing Christianity in the minds of most modern people are (1) the problem of evil, (2) the question of the origin of species, and (3) biblical criticism. Yet not one of these problems is even close to being insuperable. The problem of evil is of course ancient and has been a topic of discussion since the very beginnings of monotheistic religion. In spite of the fact that life for most people in premodern times was much more difficult than it is for us today, very few people living in areas under the sway of the different monotheistic faiths came to the conclusion that the problem of evil warranted disbelief in God. In recent times, work on the problem of evil by philosophers and theologians has only made it more evident that it is no real barrier to faith, which is not to say that it isn’t important, or should be blithely dismissed, but only that it should not prevent anyone from having faith in God. The question of the origin of species and the matter of biblical criticism are uniquely modern problems for Christianity, due to the fact that the theories and practices which led to their emergence did not exist in the Western world prior to modern times. But the amount of ink spilled in addressing these problems by Christians in the last two centuries is staggering. Today a plethora of varied and sophisticated strategies are available for answering the difficulties raised by Darwinian evolution and higher criticism of the Bible. My preferred strategy among these alternative solutions likely depends on what I understand to be precisely at stake, but many of these strategies mitigate the problems posed for the Christian faith. Simply thousands of Christian intellectuals today have found ways to maintain a rational grip on an orthodox version of the faith while forthrightly facing these issues in their research and writing. Suffice it to say then that I don’t believe the problem of evil, the question of the origin of species, or higher criticism of the Bible, on adequate reflection, constitutes a legitimate barrier to faith. So the question remains: why is the modern Western world such poor soil for Christian faith to flourish? Why is there such a great contrast between the reception of Christianity in modern times and the way it was received in premodern times? I think the answer has to do more with general mindset typical of modern Western people than it does with any specific problems having to do with particular doctrines of the Christian faith. What is this mindset?
In a word, I would say it is autonomy, or the mindset of autonomy. Autonomy is a word that means self-rule, and I believe that most modern Western people have become unable to think of autonomy as anything but a great and irrevocable good. This perspective that autonomy is a great good and represents the reality of the human situation has a long history. Old Testament scholar Victor Hamilton argues that it was the mentality behind original sin. More recently it reared its head in seventeenth century Europe, reaching full flower in the eighteenth century. Historians generally refer to this period as the age of the Enlightenment, because that is how many of the intellectuals of that era understood the times in which they lived. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who is considered by many to be the greatest mind of the era, described this new perspective as the achievement of a higher level of maturity than any human culture had previously attained. Some, like Jeff Murphy, have argued that Kant, contra the interpretation of James Rachels, wished to emphasize that moral autonomy should be analyzed in terms of the responsiveness of a moral agent to the best available moral reasons, and not autonomy more expansively construed. Many modern Europeans, though, went further and adopted the viewpoint that autonomy construed most expansively was a great good, a true fact about human existence, and that the celebration of it represented a true and objective advance for humanity. Not only were other cultures that did not see autonomy as a great good viewed as backwards and childlike, even European culture itself prior to the age of Enlightenment was regarded as similarly stuck in a period of embarrassing immaturity best left behind.
Our culture today tells us in myriad ways that our autonomy is real, something that naturally belongs to us, and something that is to be cherished and defended at all costs. Everyone thus is encouraged to think that their life belongs to them, that it is theirs to do with as they please. So we find vociferous advocates of everything from abortion to polygamy to assisted suicide, all in the name venerating sacrosanct autonomy. Most people in Europe and North America resistlessly succumb to the temptation to think about themselves and their lives in these terms, regarding the few around them who don’t do so as strange and benighted at best, even hostile to their self-understanding at worst. As such, there is often a certain animus that those who relish and revere autonomy feel towards those who do not.
Christians of course are an example. They are unable to regard autonomy as the great unqualified good it is extolled to be, because Christians simply don’t believe in autonomy such an ultimate or absolute sense. While Christians are typically quick to affirm personal responsibility and the right of people to make many of their own choices, they think that some of these choices are definitely misguided or wrong, involving acts contrary to the will of God, the true ruler of all. From the Christian point of view, people might be free to engage in such acts, but they certainly have no ultimate right to do so, because they violate natural law or divine law, and so are sinful.
For people who have accepted that autonomy is an unqualified good and a great truth, this view is difficult to conceive, much less tolerate, for it seems to bespeak sinister motives and a suspect character. This is because from the perspective of the true believer in autonomy, such people can only be regarded as being interested in controlling and limiting the rightful autonomy of others. And this is not just unfortunate or unhelpful in their eyes; rather, it is a perspective that constitutes a real threat to what is true and good. Christians, from this point of view, are either duped or dupers; in either case, they can hardly be regarded as a force for truth and goodness in the world.
So a rather stark conflict ensues. Advocates for autonomy and advocates for Jesus as Lord cannot ever truly make peace. They can, and ideally should, tolerate other views and even love each other as human beings, but any kind of genuine rapprochement between their perspectives is out of the question. A disconnect and incommensurability seems inevitable and intractable. Many people in our society are unaware of how deep this cleft goes, however, and many people who regard themselves as Christians give more credence to what is peddled under the banner of autonomy than they realize. As I said earlier, it promulgation is ubiquitous, perpetually inundating us in countless ways. For those who have come to revere autonomy, it really becomes a gospel, a source of good news, and such people will naturally want to share it with others, even if they are not fully aware of what they are doing. Sometimes, simply by telling people that they “need to be true to themselves,” for example, or by iterating similar statements which have taken on the character of axiomatic platitudes in our culture, is to proselytize the gospel of autonomy. The idea, though often not made explicit, is that each individual is the master of their fate, the captain of their soul, and this is an important reason why some ethicists still insist that any form of authoritative theistic ethic violates autonomy.
To return to the opening question, I think it clear that this conception of autonomy is the fundamental difficulty that Christianity faces in the West. It is this guiding belief in and reigning plausibility structure of autonomy, understood expansively, that often makes Christianity appear vulnerable, vapid, even vitiated. If one doesn’t want to lose her belief in her own autonomy, then it is perfectly natural to make every difficulty for Christianity seem as immense and insuperable in one’s mind as possible. It is even possible then to see Christianity not as a great buttress to morality (something that even most philosophers of the Enlightenment conceded), but as being in fact a threat to it. But by refusing to bend knee to autonomy, by resisting its sacred status, many of the ostensible difficulties with Christian faith and theistic ethics go away.
The assignment of primacy to autonomy may help explain why even sophisticated apologetic efforts so often have such little impact. It’s why people oftentimes don’t even seem to care much whether or not apologetic arguments are good. They already have their religion, and they think they’re satisfied with it.
Autonomy, though, can be seen by its adherents as a way of making available goods not otherwise achievable. Giving it up is not easy. This is why I am inclined to think that the gospel of autonomy will have to undermine itself and exhaust its own appeal by revealing its impotence to provide long-term human well-being. Not everyone can do or be whatever they want, and they certainly can’t do it and leave any kind of mutually beneficial social fabric intact. That seems rather self-evident to me, but I believe it is in fact becoming increasingly clear to everyone in the Western world as the decades pass. This is not to say that everyone is willing to admit it, even to themselves.
As is often the case, sometimes things need to get much worse before they can get better, and the people that are most deeply invested in the gospel of autonomy are most reluctant to acknowledge that it has any shortcomings. In such cases, things will likely have to “hit rock bottom” before they “see the light.” As Christians, however, knowing that our faith is intellectually in good order, and knowing that destructive patterns of thinking, such as the gospel of autonomy, will reveal themselves as such eventually, it is our job to be patient, to trust in God, and to remain faithful to the faith once delivered to the saints. Things can only get so bad before they get better. Idols such as human autonomy don’t answer any prayers, and they don’t truly provide anything of value for anyone. This always becomes clear eventually. The idols crack and crumble. The Living God remains forever. It is our duty to persevere.
In light of the trajectory rhetoric of autonomy has taken, Kant was wrong in thinking that we, in appropriating autonomy the way we did, had achieved maturity. What really transpired was that humanity entered a phase analogous to that of a rebellious teenager. We thought ourselves mature compared to our preteen selves, not realizing that many of the rules we followed as children were in place for good reason, a topic to which this site will devote great attention. But teens grow up, and often the teenager who has left the faith returns, humbled, to the wisdom and meaningfulness earlier left behind. That is my prayer. But it’s also my prediction. Freud famously predicted that religion was an illusion that time would dispel. He was right in thinking that falsehood can’t keep its nature a secret forever. But entirely wrong about what is false.
Photo: "Lonely Tree" by M. Moeller
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“The message of the gospel—God’s act of forgiveness and salvation in Jesus—is rooted in hesed. Hesed describes the disposition of God’s heart not only toward His people but to all humanity. The love of God extends far beyond duty or expectation. His forgiveness of sin fulfills a need that is basic to all other needs in the relationship between human beings and God—the restoration and continuation of fellowship with God in Jesus Christ. God’s hesed manifested in forgiveness makes a relationship with Him possible. That forgiveness comes to us freely as a gift from God based on the sacrificial act of Christ.”
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MoralApologetics.com is a function of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Christian University
