Humility, Naturalism, and Virtue

Can we make sense of the virtues in a world without God? Let’s consider the virtue of humility as a way of addressing this question. In his Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, Erik Wielenberg develops a naturalized account of humility.[i] This account is worth considering given Wielenberg’s explicit aim of constructing a naturalized version of a virtue that is commonly thought to be uniquely Christian. Wielenberg constructs an account of humility grounded in the assumption that we know that naturalism is true. In order to do this, he first discusses a Christian account of humility. He then explores some of the similarities and differences of such an account with a naturalistic version of this virtue. After discussing these points, I offer several criticisms of Wielenberg’s view.

On a Christian analysis, according to Wielenberg, the humble person neither underestimates nor overestimates her own value or abilities, but instead recognizes that these are gifts from God. She also acknowledges her dependence on God, and knows that much of what contributes to her flourishing is not within her control, but God’s. Hence, the humble theist is grateful for her flourishing in light of this dependence, and gives credit to God. On naturalism, however, Wielenberg claims that there is also room for an acknowledgment of dependence on something outside of ourselves, because so much of what contributes to our success—psychological constitution, physical health, family background, where and when we are born, and economic factors—is outside of our control. On naturalism, these factors are not under God’s control; they are under no one’s control. Given this, no one gets the credit. Sheer chance and good fortune should receive the majority of the credit. As Wielenberg puts it, “It is the dependence of human beings and their actions on factors beyond their control—dependence that is present whether God exists or not—that makes humility in some form an appropriate attitude to have.”[ii]  In either kind of universe, naturalistic or theistic, “...taking the balance of credit for one’s accomplishments is foolish.”[iii] Like the humble theist, the humble naturalist can and should acknowledge her dependence on something outside of herself, substituting good fortune for God.

Wielenberg may be right that there is space within a naturalistic view of the universe for an attitude of humility. Perhaps we should generally expect that there will be somewhat plausible naturalistic versions of many particular virtues if Christianity is true. This is because according to Christianity, the structure of reality reflects aspects of God’s nature. Given this, even if one seeks to remove God from the picture, as it were, there will still be latent theistic features of reality which can make sense of the virtues. However, if Christianity is true then a Christian account of the virtues will be superior to any account available to naturalists, and the virtues themselves will ultimately possess better metaphysical fit with our understanding of the rest of reality, both of which we should expect if Christian theism is true.

For example, and as a way to compare naturalistic humility with theistic humility, consider the relationship between humility and gratitude. Of course the Christian can be humbly grateful to God and other people, for what he and they have done on her behalf. But the naturalist, given that dumb luck and blind chance are the ultimate causes of most of the factors contributing to his success—psychological constitution, physical health, family background, where and when he was born, and economic factors—has no good reason to be grateful for these things because there is no one to be grateful towards. Even the other human beings who have benefitted our fortunate naturalist only do so primarily and perhaps solely because of dumb luck and blind chance. On naturalism, no person, human (or, of course, divine), is ultimately responsible for anything, and so it becomes very difficult to see what reasons exist for gratitude towards persons, at least. Moreover, what it means for one to be grateful towards dumb luck or blind chance is at best quite mysterious, and at worst incoherent.

As a second way to critically compare naturalistic humility with theistic humility, consider the following thought experiment. Imagine you have suffered from a serious illness for many years. The treatments are quite expensive, and your insurance company will no longer cover the treatments because the policy’s coverage has been exhausted. Consider two distinct scenarios:

Scenario 1:  You are desperate to come up with the money to pay for continued treatment, and by sheer luck you find a large diamond buried in your back yard, worth enough to pay for your treatment indefinitely.

Scenario 2:  A wealthy benefactor gives you the money you need to pay for your treatments indefinitely. You know this benefactor because you cheated her in a business deal many years ago.

Which scenario is more conducive to humility?

In the first scenario you are very happy and feel very fortunate at such a stroke of luck. And of course you would have no reason to be proud of what occurred, because you would deserve none of the credit for finding the diamond or for being able to pay your medical bills. Perhaps the whole situation engenders some humility, because you realize you are receiving a great benefit that you did nothing to earn. On scenario 2 you again have no reason to be proud of being able to pay for your treatment, nor do you deserve the credit for being able to pay your bills. On this scenario, however, there are reasons to be more—and more deeply—humbled. First, not only is it the case that you did nothing to deserve the money given to you, but you actually deserve not to receive the money, given the fact that you wronged your benefactor in the past and owe her money because of your own wrongdoing. Second, the action of your benefactor is magnanimous, and simply witnessing and benefiting from the act should foster humility. Third, there is the presence of rational gratitude in scenario 2, but not in scenario 1. In scenario 1, there is no one to direct gratitude towards, because no one gets the credit for your newfound wealth. However, in the second scenario you should feel deep gratitude towards your benefactor, because of what she has done for you in spite of the debt you owe her. Gratitude seems to both deepen the humility you have and provides more reason to be humble.

It will be helpful to make explicit the lessons from the above thought experiment. On theism, humans rely on a personal being who provides constant and intentional support in all aspects of our existence. In contrast to this, on naturalism we rely on mere chance and the laws of nature (or perhaps just the latter). Many of the contributing factors to individual success that are outside of our control are present because of mere good fortune. It might seem that this fact should engender humility, because we realize that we are mere recipients of good luck, so to speak. Granting this to the naturalist, the theist still has reason for a deeper appreciation of her dependence and so for a deeper humility, given her belief that we do not deserve the assistance that God gives to us. This makes the humility deeper and more profound, because while both the naturalist and the theist can accept that there are many factors that contribute to our success in life that lie outside of our control, only the theist can say that she is undeserving of this aid and deserves not to receive it because of her rebellion against God. The upshot is that while the naturalist may be able to give an account of humility, the theistic account is superior because everything that we accomplish is done with God’s active assistance. This assistance is not only undeserved, but is given even though we deserve something quite different. This in turn gives the theist a reason to be more deeply humble, even if the need and justification for this humility too often go unrecognized.

Lastly, I would like to emphasize that in a universe where the majority of the credit for any human accomplishment goes to “blind chance,”[iv] it becomes more difficult to give a sound and comprehensive analysis of any virtue and its connections to human accomplishments. It is not clear to me that any sense can be made of attributing credit to chance in this way.[v] What does it actually mean to ascribe credit to blind chance? In contrast to this, we have a clear understanding of ascribing credit to God, and there are several theistic accounts of moral development that are both coherent and cogent.

[i] Erik Wielenberg, Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 102-116.

[ii] Wielenberg, p. 112.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Wielenberg, p. 110.

[v] I owe this point to Doug Geivett.

---

Michael Austin is professor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University. His research focuses on applied ethics, the virtues, and philosophy of religion. He has published numerous journal articles and ten books, including Being Good: Christian Virtues for Everyday Life, with Doug Geivett (Eerdmans 2012) and Wise Stewards: Philosophical Foundations of Christian Parenting (Kregel Academic, 2009). He is currently working on a book dealing with the virtue of humility. He also blogs at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ethics-everyone and is on Twitter @michaelwaustin. You can see more from Dr. Austin at his website: http://www.michaelwaustin.com.

The Inability of Naturalism to Explain Moral Knowledge

© By R Scott Smith, PhD, Biola University, scott.smith@biola.edu  

There are various positions taken amongst naturalists in metaethics, and these have implications for whether or not a particular naturalist would believe we can have moral knowledge. In this short paper, first I will survey options in metaethics that various naturalists have taken and draw out those implications. Though they may differ in their metaethical standpoints, all these theorists are united around a common ontological claim – real, intrinsic, moral facts do not exist. Yet, they also think we can (and often do) know much about morality. For example, following the fact-value split, we know not only that science (i.e., today’s orthodox science, which is naturalistic) gives us knowledge of the facts of reality, but we also know that ethics and religion give us opinions, preferences, and our own constructs. But in the second section, I will take up a broader question: can we really have knowledge on naturalism? If not, then it seems naturalism would be false, for there are many things it seems we do know, including in morality. If so, then naturalism should be rejected.

I. Various Metaethical Positions for Naturalists

I. Noncognitivism: On a traditional, linguistic understanding, noncognitivists believe that moral judgments are neither true nor false. This would include two main positions, i.e., prescriptivism and emotivism (which A.J. Ayer supported). But this depiction has been criticized for at least a couple reasons by Richard Joyce, who first challenges just what a moral judgment is.[1] On his view, noncognitivism could be (1) a denial of the existence of beliefs (as mental states which could be true or false); (2) the lack of expression of a proposition (which would eliminate beliefs, which are propositions); or (3) the denial of the assertion of a belief. Overall, beliefs have no place metaethically, so there is no moral knowledge (understood as a justified true moral belief) available on this view.

Now, Simon Blackburn nuances his noncognitivism by appealing to projectivism and quasi-realism.[2] The latter is a linguistic thesis which seeks to “‘earn the right’ for moral discourse to enjoy all the trappings of realist talk,” including truth predicates in moral sentences.[3] For the noncognitivist, “stealing is wrong” really means something like “stealing – ugh!” However, for the quasi-realist, judging by the surface grammar of the sentence, it may be considered to be (or, treated as) true or false. Such sentences mimic moral realist assertions, yet do not really mean the same thing. The focus here is completely on moral discourse (a linguistic emphasis) and not about a moral property being instanced in some action (which would be a metaphysical focus) - for such things are not real. Blackburn is quite clear why: “The problem is one of finding room for ethics, or placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part.”[4]

But whether on Blackburn’s views, or the more traditional noncognitivist ones, there is no moral knowledge. There are no moral facts or moral judgments that can be known to be true or false. Still, that does not mean that someone like Blackburn or Ayer does not claim to know much about morality.

2. Moral Cognitivism - Subjectivist Theories: In general, cognitivists believe that moral statements are truth-apt yet disagree about the object of such statements. Of course, within this position, there has been the traditional distinction between private subjectivism and cultural relativism.

Here are two subjectivist examples. While Gilbert Harman seems to reduce moral facts to natural ones, nonetheless that does not mean that there are no moral facts. He affirms the theory-ladenness of beliefs, so that any moral beliefs we may have from making empirical observations are not due to some self-presenting, intrinsically moral property, but rather our interaction (which is conditioned by our upbringing and psychology) with just natural facts. Moral facts are mind-dependent, or our constructs; that is, in terms of a broader issue of moral realism versus anti-realism, he seems to be a subjectivist about morals (i.e., metaphysically).[5] So, we can know what moral facts are (i.e., human constructs), but we cannot know a moral reality independent of nature, for there is none.

Consider also Michael Ruse’s subjectivist ethics. For him, “the meaning of morality is that it is objective.”[6] Ruse embraces sociobiology: morality (in particular, social cooperation) just is a shared, biological adaptation. He draws upon Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene” view, and he suggests that we may speak of genes as selfish or altruistic. Yet, that is just to employ a biological metaphor, on which “altruistic” behavior is cooperative. Further, we objectify morality, but that is an illusion that has been thrust upon us by our genes, for there is no foundation for morality independent of biology. Yet Ruse also stands strongly against behaviors such as rape, female circumcision, or Hitler’s atrocities.[7] Evidently, then, Ruse believes we can know various acts to be morally right or wrong, yet he also seems to have special access to the truth about morality itself – that it is not objective but just a biological adaptation.

3. Moral Cognitivism - Error Theory: J.L. Mackie argued that, descriptively, there are widespread differences in moral views, and their best explanation is that moral judgments “reflect adherence to and participation in different ways of life.”[8] He also argued that if there exist objective moral properties, they would be entities of a very queer sort, utterly unlike anything else that exists in the physical universe, and they would require some atypical means to know them.

But the error theorist also claims that our moral discourse trades upon institutional (and thus socially constructed) facts, not brute, physical facts. Institutional rules guide our actions and speech, so moral judgments (which are beliefs) that profess to be real and institution-independent instead are infected with error. Why? There are no intrinsic moral facts. So for the error theorist, there is no room for moral knowledge, for there is nothing truly moral to be known. Yet, we may know much about moral discourse, that such talk does not reflect a predication of real moral properties.

4. Moral Cognitivism - Ethical Naturalism: On this last set of views, moral statements are about moral acts, or objects thought to have moral value. But here, moral facts can be reduced to natural ones which can be studied by science. On such a view, we can infer that such naturalists think we can have “moral” knowledge, since we can have knowledge of natural facts via science. Yet, of course, such knowledge would not be of intrinsically moral facts.

The Cornell Realists (Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink) offer a variation. For them, all our observations (scientific, ethical, etc.) are theory-laden and are justified in light of their coherence with one’s whole web of beliefs. But this need not result in thoroughgoing anti-realism. For them, there are moral explanations of natural facts, and when we do this, we bring to bear our presupposition-laden background beliefs. So, for these realists, claiming that there are no moral facts lacks independent rational force against a realist’s web of beliefs. Thus, it seems we could have moral knowledge on this view, but again, it would not be of some intrinsically moral facts.

In sum, there is a spectrum of positions amongst naturalists in metaethics, resulting in different answers to the question, can we have moral knowledge? Some are confident that we can, while others are not. Yet they all seem to think there is much we can know about morality and moral discourse. Now, let us turn to examine the prospects for these (and other) knowledge claims on naturalism.

II. The Prospects for Knowledge on Naturalism

In general, given naturalism’s ontology, it seems that since only real natural facts exist in a mind-independent way, all other facts are human constructs. This line of thought fits with John Searle’s distinction between the brute facts of the physical world and the constructed facts of social reality.[9] Similarly, when addressing the reality of intentionality, Michael Tye avers to the reality of physical facts, yet explains the mental as a way of describing, or conceiving of, the physical.[10] Others seem to follow this same kind of pattern, such as David Papineau, Fred Dretske, and William Lycan.[11] Indeed, it seems to be a reasonable move, for on naturalism, the only intrinsic facts are physical ones. All else that we experience in reality (whether involving relationships, social life, economics, politics, business, sports, ethics, entertainment, or more) are due to how we conceive of, or talk about, the physical.

Daniel Dennett takes a similar line of argumentation. If we are consistent as naturalists, it means that while real brains and real physical patterns of forces exist, nonetheless things like mental states, intentions, and meanings are just attributions, or interpretations, we make from having adopted the intentional stance.[12] That stance is merely a tactic we adopt to help us predict behavior, and not to posit the “existence” of a variety of other “real” entities. For instance, consider the examples from Star Trek™, where Mr. Spock plays chess with the Enterprise’s computer.[13] For Dennett, both Spock and the computer are mechanisms, without any real intentions. Still, to help us predict what move Spock will make at a given stage in the game, we adopt the intentional stance, in which we attribute to him the intention to checkmate his opponent; thus, likely, he will make a given move. We treat the computer similarly, in that it “intends” to checkmate Spock and thus we predict it will make such-and-such a move.

For Dennett, these attributions of intentional states (and beliefs, desires, intentions, thoughts, etc.) are useful, shorthand ways of talking. They enable us to predict efficiently and reliably the behavior of intentional systems, which are systems that are amenable to treatment from this tactic.[14] It is more efficient than developing a lengthy, cumbersome description using the language of neuroscience.[15]

Now, while Dennett denies the reality of mental entities and their content, he does affirm the objective reality of physical patterns in the real world that we can detect.[16] However, Dennett also realizes that though these objective patterns are real, they always fall short of perfection. Therefore, there always will be uninterpretable gaps. Why? Here, Dennett draws upon Quine’s indeterminacy of radical translation[17] and extends it to the “‘translation’ of not only the patterns in subjects’ dispositions to engage in external behavior (Quine’s ‘stimulus meanings’), but also the further patterns in dispositions to ‘behave’ internally.”[18] Dennett realizes that there always will be such gaps entails that it is “always possible in principle for rival intentional stance interpretations of those patterns to tie for first place, so that no further fact could settle what the intentional system in question really believed.”[19]

Besides Quine, Dennett also appeals to Donald Davidson, who explains this principle in terms of its application to belief: “If there is indeterminacy [of meaning or translation], it is because when all the evidence is in, alternative ways of stating the facts remain open.”[20] Now, Dennett sees that Quine demonstrated the indispensability of intentionalistic discourse, yet for them such talk is not grounded in real mental states. So, Dennett uses Quine to support his own denial of the reality of mental entities and content: “Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation is thus of a piece with his attack on essentialism; if things had real, intrinsic essences, they could have real, intrinsic meanings.”[21]

So, if there were such essences, then meanings (along with other intentional states) could be determinate. There could be a single, correct answer to questions such as, What was Spock really intending to do when he made that move in chess? Or, what does Spock really believe about the moral status of Starfleet’s “prime directive”?[22] But Dennett thinks it is futile to think we can match up “mental” entities with their physical correlates. In principle, these patterns are capable of being interpreted variously from the intentional stance, and those interpretations could tie for first place. There are no deeper facts (i.e., essences) to give a determinate answer to the question, “What does it mean?”

Yet, with the language we use to describe the physical and behavioral traits of living things and other objects,[23] we take as real the entities referred to by that language. This is because we believe there are brute facts in the real world, something which can be described accurately from the standpoint of the Darwinian, materialistic story.

However, let us consider a comment Dennett makes in passing about his own views’ implications. He observes that Samuel C. Wheeler draws insightful connections between Derrida, Quine, and Davidson. Per Wheeler, Derrida provides “important, if dangerous, supplementary arguments and considerations” to the ones that Davidson and other Quinians have put forth.[24] As Wheeler notes, “For Quinians, of course, it is obvious already that speech and thought are brain-writing, some kind of tokenings which are as much subject to interpretation as any other.”[25]

Since there are no essences, there are no representations that are intrinsically about anything. Moreover, since natural selection itself is unrepresenting, there cannot be any “natural signs,” something that intrinsically would represent something else. Now, this means that for Dennett, we are left with events of “taking as,” in which we take (interpret, conceive of) some input as something else.[26] There is no room, it seems, for any aspect of the world as it is in itself to come before us and be known as it is, apart from how that input has been conceptualized.

Likewise, if any event of “taking as” cannot intrinsically represent something, then it too must be taken to be something else. Of course, that taking also must be taken as something else, and so on to infinity, it would seem, without any way to get started with these takings. As Willard argues, “Either there is going to be at some point a ‘taking as’ which does not itself represent anything (even what is ‘taken’) – which certainly sounds like a self-contradiction and is at best unlike the instances of ‘taking’ featured in Dennett’s explanations – or there is going to be an infinite regress of takings.”[27]

Now, clearly, this conclusion would apply to those things we would consider on naturalism to be our constructs, such as mental entities, morality, religion, and much more. But it also would hold for those aspects of the materialistic, real world Dennett takes to be objective. If everything that can be known (or even thought about, processed, etc.) by the brain is the result of a process with nothing but takings, since nothing is immediately given to us, then it seems there is no room for Dennett’s “brute facts” to be exempt from Derrida’s point: everything is a “text” which needs interpretation. The so-called “brute facts” also are conceptualizations, the result of the “raw stimulus” having been “cooked” by the brain’s distributed processes. Even the so-called “raw stimulus” is a taking (of something, but what we do not seem to know) as something else.

Now, it makes sense that there must be some raw stimulus; no one who takes the need for interpretation seriously, at least whom I know, denies that there is a real world. But, like all else, the raw stimulus, and even the so-called “objective” patterns, also must be takings of some things as such. They too are conceptualizations, every bit as much as anything else. Even the so-called “facts” of the objective, materialistic world of the natural sciences, would be just interpretations.

If so, then on what rational justification can Dennett privilege the third-person, objective, materialistic, Darwinian view of the real world? On his view, the language of materialism, cognitive science, etc., would be just as subject to Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation as the language of folk psychology. This is because the language of materialism is a brain-writing, which is a token, and therefore would be as much in need of interpretation as any other facet of existence.

Thus, when all the “facts” are in, there still will be alternative ways of stating them, in addition to the language of materialism and cognitive science. And, since there are no essences, there will be no deeper facts to settle any disputes that would arise. Therefore, applying Dennett’s own logic, in principle, it will always be possible for rival interpretations to tie for first place.

Now, this issue seems to arise not just for Dennett, but also for other naturalists as well, for the problem surfaces precisely because there are no essences to determine the facts of the matter. And it is not a problem just for in the areas of ethics or religion; it seems to be a problem in principle for naturalism. Without essences, it seems there would be an endless series of interpretations, without any way to get started, even with the so-called “brute facts.”

Now, this regress of interpretations may not seem problematic to some. After all, we do experience real trees, brains, moral situations, and the like. So, perhaps the ubiquity of interpretation may simply imply that while we do experience objects in reality, our access always is interpreted access.

At first glance, this reply may seem to alleviate the problem. For when we make observations of, say, a gas at a certain temperature and pressure, we still do need to interpret those observations. This is all well and fine; I have no desire to underestimate the importance of interpretation. However, that is not my point; rather, it is that without essences, there is no way to gain any “foothold” onto reality and begin to know it. An interpretation always is of something, but here, at every step, it seems that “something” ends up being another interpretation, without a way to access reality itself and even start.

III. Implications

Without essences, there are no intrinsic constraints on what is intentional or mental. Thus, we seem utterly unable to have any knowledge if the ontology of naturalism were true. The same implication applies to morality; at best we are left with a beginningless series of interpretations, such that there is no way to gain any foothold on reality, to even begin to conceive of something as moral. This means that there is no place for knowledge about morality, or of moral discourse, or even whether a particular action is moral or immoral. Also, on the fact-value split, we think we can know the facts of reality through naturalistic science, and that the deliverances of ethics and religion are just opinions. But these claims also become impossible to know on naturalism.

Indeed, every claim to knowledge becomes impossible to know, for there is no way to escape the relentless regress of interpretations. This condition simply is the natural result of rejecting the existence of essences, and it applies in morality because of the specific rejection of intrinsic moral properties, or facts. Without them, naturalism is unable to give us any moral knowledge, or knowledge about morality, despite the contentions of its expositors.

Yet, descriptively, the fact remains that many people who are naturalists do know several things, including in the field of ethics. For instance, Ruse contends vigorously that rape is wrong. Peter Singer knows it is wrong to treat animals cruelly. Those who appeal to the problem of moral evil as evidence against God’s existence know that injustice and genocide are wrong.

But these cases of moral knowledge should make us pause, for if naturalism were true, we could not them. So, it seems that a different ontology, which includes the reality of essences, must be true.

Notes 

[1] Richard Joyce, “Moral Anti-Realism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism, accessed March 21, 2013.

[2] E.g., see his Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Spreading the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

[3] Richard Joyce, “Projectivism and quasi-realism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism, accessed March 21, 2013 (emphasis in original).

[4] Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 49.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Michael Ruse, “Evolution and Ethics: The Sociobiological Approach,” in Ethical Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Louis Pojman, 4th ed. (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2002), 661.

[7] Ibid.

[8] J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 36.

[9] John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

[10] Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA.: Bradford Books, 1995).

[11] For Papineau, see his Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), and Thinking about Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). See also Dretske’s Naturalizing the Mind: The 1994 Jean Nicod Lectures (Cambridge, MA.: Bradford Books, 1995). For Lycan, see Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA.: Bradford Books, 1996).

[12] These attributions “are interpretations of the phenomena,” and they serve as a “heuristic overlay.” See his Daniel C. Dennett, “Dennett, Daniel C.,” A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 239.

[13] Star Trek and related marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc.

[14] See Dennett, “Dennett, Daniel C.,” 239.

[15] Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 3rd printing (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1990), 233-34. Even in a “golden age” of neuroscience, we still will need the language of folk psychology.

[16] Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40 (emphasis in original).

[17] Quine explains: “To expect a distinctive physical mechanism behind every genuinely distinct mental state is one thing; to expect a distinctive mechanism for every purported distinction that can be phrased in traditional mentalistic language is another. The question whether … the foreigner really believes A or believes rather B, is a question whose very significance I would put in doubt. This is what I am getting at in arguing for the indeterminacy of translation.” See his “On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation,” Journal of Philosophy LXVII (1970), 180-81, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40.

 [18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid. (emphasis in original).

[20] Donald Davidson, “Belief and the Basis of Meaning,” Synthese Vol. 27 (1974): 322, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 41(bracketed insert mine).

[21] Ibid., 319, note 8 (emphasis mine).

[22] The prime directive is Starfleet’s order to not interfere with the internal development of an alien planet’s culture. Often, it is treated as absolute, yet episodes explore if it could be overridden in certain cases.

[23] For example, see W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1960), 221, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 342.

[24] Samuel C. Wheeler III, “Indeterminacy of French Interpretation: Derrida and Davidson,” in E. Lepore, ed., Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 477, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40, note 2.

[25] Wheeler, 492, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40, note 2.

[26] Compare Dallas Willard, “Knowledge and naturalism,” in Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, ed. J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig (New York: Routledge, 1999), 40.

[27] Ibid., 41.

Photo: "Brown Skua flies over wary Gentoo Penguins" by L. Quinn. CC License. 

Podcast: David Baggett on Hell and the Moral Argument

On this week's episode, we return to the topic of hell. If you haven't had the chance yet, check out Dr. Leo Percer's episode on a similar subject. This time, we hear some great insights from Dr. David Baggett and how to respond to objections raised to the moral argument in light of the doctrine of hell.

Looking Back at the Mount

Looking Back at the Mount

(II Pet 1:16-18; Matt. 17:1-9)

Stunned we stood upon the Mount,

As echoes of Heaven's Voice

Resounded in our ears.

This Man Who shared the stage

With God's great voices of the past

Was not merely one of three,

As it appeared to me,

But One Alone, the Father's Son,

More than Law and Prophets both.

How little I understood

The words that God had made me say

When the Master asked us who we thought He was;

For before my words were cold,

I rebuked Him

For walking toward the cross

That was His goal

As sole, obedient Son—

The only One Who could embrace

Such pain for all of us.

Only later did I know

What had to be endured

Before the Glory of the Mount

Could be told to all the world.

Who would have believed

That Heaven's Glory could stoop so low,

Or love so much?

                                                                  Elton D. Higgs

                                                                  Sept. 14, 2002

Photo: "CHURCH OF TRANSFIGURATION - MOSAIC" by IsraelTourism. CC License. 

The (Social and Political) Wages of Naturalism

Author’s note to readers: This paper was written for a panel presentation, “Finding the Theistic Foundations of Morality,” at the 2014 American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting. Because my presentation is the last of the panel—allowing me to elide a number technical issues and nuances already covered and, instead, to focus on ending the panel on a provocative note—I have opted to write in a manner more punchy and less technical than normal.

In this paper, I argue that naturalists cannot defensibly affirm as objectively good or superior any social or political desiderata. They also cannot defensibly condemn any social or political harms as objectively bad or inferior.[1] In addition, I contend that practically living out naturalism may be classicist and corrosive, especially with respect to the vulnerable members of society.

Before turning to the body of the paper, a few definitions are in order. While naturalism isn’t the easiest view to define,[2] I think it is safe to distinguish between ‘narrow naturalism’ and ‘broad naturalism.’[3] Narrow naturalism holds that (a) nature is all that exists and (b) nature itself is whatever will be disclosed by the ideal natural sciences, especially physics. Broad naturalism also holds that nature is all that exists but that nature itself is whatever will be disclosed by the natural and human sciences—not just physics but psychology, sociology, and the like as well. It thus affirms the emergent reality of consciousness, intentionality, valuing, and so on.

Ontological foundations

Having established some basic definitions, I now turn to the body of the paper. I’ll first focus on the ontological resources of naturalism. Since my colleagues have already done the heavy lifting, I’ll limit myself to a summary of some main ideas from my point of view. While there are a variety of ways to think about the matter, one way is to observe that, on narrow naturalism, nature itself is typically regarded as amoral because there are no ‘goodness’ or ‘rightness’ particles or forces (or groups of particles or forces). There are no ‘oughtness’ particles or forces (or groups) either. There are just brute particles and forces—fermions and bosons—describable by physics. As one narrow naturalist puts it, “In a world where physics fixes all the facts, it’s hard to see how there could be room for moral facts.”[4] As such, there are no objective moral facts (or ‘moral values,’ as I will call them). That is, there are no real, intrinsic, mind-independent moral values—about fairness, justice, equality, etc.—which are irreducible to, or not identical with, physical facts.

Broad naturalism, on the other hand, affirms the emergent reality of values, including moral values like fairness, justice, social stability, and the like. As such, humans’ subjective experience of good, moral, and right values are not reducible to, or identical with, say, the complex biochemical and structural features of the human brain. On typical formulations of this view, the human mind is something qualitatively different than the human brain. The human mind emerges from the complexity of the brain; one emergent complexity is the ability to form, maintain, communicate, and apply values. However, on this view such values are not ontologically independent of the human brain. In a real sense, their existence depends upon the existence of a physical brain. If human brains ceased to exist,[5] so would moral values. Thus, on this view moral values are not objective—that is, they do not exist independently of human brains and minds. While subjective experiences of valuing are real enough, objective moral values themselves are not. I might be passionate about a state that protects civil liberties, but the value of liberty is itself no more real than the tooth fairy.

Political Implications

In light of this result, it follows that naturalists cannot defensibly affirm any political state or political philosophy as objectively good (or superior), nor can they defensibly condemn any political state or political philosophy as objectively bad (or inferior). For example, naturalists cannot reject Hitler’s Third Reich as objectively wrong and affirm representative democracy as objectively superior. Recall that according to narrow naturalism, there are only physical particles and forces, all of which are amoral. So, one elaborate arrangement of fermions and bosons—say, a social and political system organized according to Nazi principles—is no more or less moral than another array of fermions and bosons, including one arranged according to the principles of democracy. These two (collective) states of affairs are distinguished exhaustively and exclusively by the spatio-temporal differences of their constituent particles and forces. Neither is ‘good’ and neither is ‘bad.’ Neither is ‘morally better’ nor ‘morally worse.’ Fermions and bosons just are.

In the case of broad naturalism, on the other hand, persons may value representative democracy more than Nazism. Nonetheless, democracy is no more objectively good than Nazism. On broad naturalism, it’s true that people’s experience of valuing democracy is qualitatively different than the corresponding subvenient physicality of their brains. But without any mind-independent status to morality, their experience of valuing democracy is no more objectively correct than someone else’s experience of valuing Nazism. Even if every person past, present, and future valued democracy over tyranny, this valuing would not count one iota toward the objective moral superiority of democracy over tyranny. Quite simply, there are no objective values. Accordingly, broad naturalists, like narrow naturalists, cannot affirm a ‘good’ political order as objectively superior to a brutal order.

The implications of this result are troubling. For example, naturalists who lean towards political conservatism, such as political scientist Larry Arnhart, have no real basis to affirm universal human desires—for things like friendship and justice—as the objectively correct basis for social and political order.[6] So, too, naturalists who favor a Rawlsian approach have no real basis to affirm the objectivity of the “principle of equal liberty” or “the principle of difference” nor the legitimacy of the veil of ignorance or the original position.[7] The same is true about negative judgments: Rawlsians have no grounds to attack conservatives, and vice versa. Something similar can be said for any naturalist who wishes to affirm the objective correctness (or objective wrongness) of the core normative principles of Locke’s Second Treatise or Hobbes’ Leviathan or Rousseau’s Social Contract or even James Carville’s It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! Thus, from the right to the left, naturalism decimates the objective moral status, positive or negative, of any political system or philosophy.

This result holds not just at a macro-level of political states or philosophies, but also at the micro-level of particular social and moral causes. Narrow and broad naturalists cannot affirm that women have reproductive rights, the rich ought to pay higher taxes, gays and lesbians have the right to marry, and that climate change ought to be countered. Likewise, naturalists cannot condemn rapacious capitalism, marriage inequality, pro-life legislative coercion, systemic racism, and so on. Naturalist Alex Rosenberg drives this point home: “We have to acknowledge…that many questions we want the ‘right’ answers to just don’t have any. These are questions about the morality of stem-cell research or abortion or affirmative action or gay marriage or our obligations to future generations.” We may want answers but, as Rosenberg concludes flatly, “There are none.”[8] In the end, none of a naturalist’s favored positions are objectively correct or superior to their opposites. And no views are objectively bad or inferior, either. All that’s left standing are either particles and forces or subjective experiences.

An Objection

Of course a critic might point out that broad naturalists, at least, can still affirm, say, democracy over fascism as a matter preference. As long as this is true, they can live out meaningful, good lives supportive of democratic principles even if they have no objective basis to regard democracy as (in fact) superior.

By way of reply, it is true that any naturalist can live a certain lifestyle that most of us would regard as good and virtuous, say, one supportive of democracy. But so can a person who thinks he’s an eggplant but that all eggplants have special abilities as well as moral obligations to support representative government. Nearly anyone can live a good life in the limited sense of consistently acting in ‘good’ ways. But that’s not the issue.

The issue is whether naturalists have—on their own grounds—any ability to hold that, say, one political system is objectively better (or worse) than another, and that people ought to support the superior system. They do not have such grounds. Indeed, even a broad naturalist (who has more resources than a narrow naturalist) is in a pickle when he says he can live a good life. He can’t coherently call his life “a good life” in any objective sense. All he can really say is that he lives a certain way that he prefers, and this way happens to be preferred by a number of others.[9] That’s it. Like turtles, it’s just preferences all the way down.

Before closing, I have two more brief notes about living out naturalism in a practical way. The first is an observation; the second, a criticism. First, it is arguable that living this worldview may be a classist luxury, by and large. That is, this lifestyle is viable only for those of privilege. Because naturalism does away with objective moral values, living this view means that one must not take traditional moral and social norms as given but rather substitute one’s own personal perspective (or the prospective of one’s self-identified group). Doing so generally includes complex assessments of social expectations (not obligatory norms), combined with personal introspection and discovery of “what I really want” (or what my group “really wants”), which are negotiated and re-negotiated with one’s friends, peers, colleagues, associates, sub-cultures, and culture. All of this requires leisure time, wealth, verbal ability, education, and the like. But those who lack wealth, education, leisure time, and so on often do not have the wherewithal to engage in such negotiations. A single mom working two jobs, taking care of two kids, slaving through housework, struggling to parent, and collapsing on the couch at night simply doesn’t have the bourgeois luxury to spend two hours over cocktails with a cadre of professional friends discussing just how to maintain her “independence” in the face of archaic social expectations. Practically living out naturalism is, by and large, a plaything of the wealthy and privileged. Again, this is not a criticism per se but an observation. It is noteworthy because some naturalists who see themselves as marginalized or as fighting established powers—“check your privilege,” they tell us—don’t seem to realize just how fortunate they are.

Second, by way of a criticism: practically living a naturalistic view may be corrosive, primarily to the vulnerable. (By ‘the vulnerable,’ I mean those in the bottom tier educationally, economically, politically, socially, professionally, and/or psychologically—individuals, say, who never finished high school, are poor, come from deeply dysfunctional families, have drug addictions, ongoing depression, or the like.) Naturalists who constantly chip away at traditional social and moral norms end up helping to erode the very moral and social capital that traditionally help the disadvantaged. For example, in part under a ‘progressive’ assault, the sacred bond of marriage has become weaker (or less valued) over time. But marriage not only helps single, poor women, it also helps children.[10] Kids who are born out of wedlock, victims of divorce, or raised in single-parent homes are more likely to suffer from a range of difficulties than kids raised in two parent homes.[11] In trying to fight ‘those on top,’ naturalists inadvertently harm ‘those on bottom.’

In conclusion, then, narrow and broad naturalists cannot defensibly affirm or deny the objective goodness or superiority (or the objective badness or inferiority) of any political state, political philosophy, or position on any social or moral topic. And, as I have just noted, living out this view seems to be a classicist privilege and a corrosive stance against the vulnerable. None of this is to say naturalism is false, of course, but only that it comes at a very high cost indeed. Thank you.

Endnotes

[1] I assume throughout the paper that, for a person (or persons) to defensibly affirm social or political desiderata as ‘objectively good or superior’ or to defensibly condemn social or political harms as ‘objectively bad or inferior,’ there must be actual (or real) objectively good or superior (or objectively bad or inferior) social and political desiderata (or harms). (See below for my informal definition of ‘objective.’) But for those who disagree with this assumption, I can make a similar argument easily enough—namely, that, on naturalism, there simply are no objectively good or superior social or political desiderata nor are there any objectively bad or inferior social or political harms. The end result is much the same. My fundamental claim is metaphysical (there are no objective moral values given naturalism) although for stylistic reasons, I highlight epistemological elements (naturalists cannot defensibly affirm social or political desiderata as ‘objectively good or superior,’ etc.). I trust the reader will understand my (metaphysical) meaning throughout the paper.

[2] In fact, Michael Rea claims that “there is no clear answer to the question of what it means to be a naturalist.” Michael Rea, “Naturalism and Material Objects,” in Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, ed. William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland (New York: Routledge, 2000), 110.

[3] Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 2008). Cf. David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

[4] Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (New York: Norton, 2011), 94-95.

[5] Or, the brains of some other physical creature of sufficient cognitive complexity.

[6] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1998). Larry Arnhart & Ken Blanchard (ed.), Darwinian Conservatism, second edition (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009).

[7] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Belknap Press, 2005). “The principle of equality” holds that each person is to be granted the greatest degree of liberty harmonious with a  similar level of liberty for everyone. “The principle of difference” holds that practices producing inequality among individuals are acceptable only if they work to the advantage of disadvantaged people, and that positions of privilege must be open to everyone.

[8] Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide, 96, emphasis added.

[9] Undoubtedly, a number of others disagree with his preferences. All that’s left to settle the matter is force, fraud, or moving away.

[10] For example, Emma Green, “Wealthy Women can Afford to Reject Marriage, but Poor Women Can’t,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2014. As for children: Hyun Sik Kim, “Consequences of Parental Divorce for Child Development,” American Sociological Review, vol. 76, no. 3 (June 2011): 487-511. Toby L. Parcel, Lori Ann Campbell, and Wenxuan Zhong, “Children’s Behavior Problems in the United States and Great Britain,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 53 no. 2 (June 2012): 165-182. Toby L. Parcel, Lori Ann Campbell, and Wenxuan Zhong, “Children’s Behavior Problems in the United States and Great Britain,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 53 no. 2 (June 2012): 165-182. N. Glenn, S. Nock, and L. J. Waite, “Why marriage matters: Twenty-one conclusions from the social sciences,” American Experiment Quarterly 5 (2002): 34–44. G. E. Weisfeld, D. M. Muczenski, C. C. Weisfeld, and D. R. Omark, “Stability of Boys’ Social Success among Peers over an Eleven-year Period,” In Interpersonal Relations: Family, Peers, Friends, edited by J. A. Meacham (New York, NY: Karger, 1987). B. Defoe, Why There Are No Good Men Left (New York: Broadway Books, 2003). G. R. Weitoft, A. Hjern, B. Haglund, and M. Rosen, “Mortality, severe mortality, and injury in children living with single parents in Sweden: A population based study,” Lancet 361 (2003): 289–95. S. Rhoads, Taking sex differences seriously (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004). W. B. Wilcox, Why Marriage Matters: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences. A Study from a Team of Family Scholars Chaired by W. Bradford Wilcox (New York: Institute for American Values, 2011). P. Wilcox Rountree and B. D. Warner, The State of Our Unions 2011: Marriage in America (Charlottesville, VA: The National Marriage Project, 2011). M. Parke, Are Married Parents Really Better for Children? (Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy, 2003). S. R. Aronson and A. C. Huston, “The mother-infant relationship in single, cohabiting, and married families: A case for marriage?” Journal of Family Psychology 18 (2004): 5–18. P. Fomby and A. J. Cherlin, “Family instability and child well-being,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 181–204. M. Gallagher and L. Waite, The Case for Marriage (New York: Random House, 2000). J. T. Cookston, “Parental supervision and family structure,” Journal of Divorce and Remarriage 31 (1999): 107–27. Some of the data: “Children from divorced homes suffer academically. They experience high levels of behavioral problems. Their grades suffer, and they are less likely to graduate from high school. Kids whose parent’s divorce are substantially more likely to be incarcerated for committing a crime as a juvenile. Because the custodial parent's income drops substantially after a divorce, children in divorced homes are almost five times more likely to live in poverty than are children with married parents. Teens from divorced homes are much more likely to engage in drug and alcohol use, as well as sexual intercourse than are those from intact families…. They are also more likely to suffer child abuse. Children of divorced parents suffer more frequently from symptoms of psychological distress. And the emotional scars of divorce last into adulthood.” See Amy Desai, “How Could Divorce Affect My Kids?” available at http://www.focusonthefamily.com. See also Jann Gumbiner, “Divorce Hurts Children, Even Grown Ones,” Psychology Today, October 31, 2011. For an opposite view, see Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld, “Is Divorce Bad for Children?” Scientific American, vol. 24, no. 1. Yet even Arkowitz and Lilienfeld conceded that kids of divorce are more likely to suffer a range of difficulties than kids raised in two-parent homes. LaVar Young reports on children born out of wedlock: “Fragile families [in which parents are not marriage at the time of the child’s birth] are shown to have harsher parenting practices and fewer literacy activities, and children of such families produce lower cognitive test scores and a have a higher incidence of aggressive behavior. Furthermore, previous research demonstrates that children who live apart from one of their parents at some point in their childhood are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to have a child before age 20, and one and a half times as likely to be out of school or work by their late teens or early 20s.” LaVar Young, “Fragile Families: Most Children Born Out of Wedlock Aren't OK,” Huffington Post, June 6, 2011.

[11] Ibid.

Photo: "Dachau Nazi concentration camp's main gates reading "arbeit Macht Frei" meaning "through work one will be free". Dachau, Germany" by Zoriah. CC License. 

Summary of Chapter 3 John Hare's The Moral Gap

Chapter 2 dealt with one sort of moral faith—that virtue is possible—and Chapter 3 now deals with another: that virtue and happiness are deeply consistent. This is another moral gap that needs to be closed. This faith makes it possible for a person to combine her built-in desire for her own happiness with a commitment to morality. It requires that we postulate the existence of a being “who assigns not only the proper outcome to our good conduct, but also to our good dispositions whatever reward seems adequate to His good pleasure.” Hare notes there are two parts to this idea.

First, we believe that this being orders the world in such a way that we are often enough successful in our attempts to do good to make it worthwhile persevering in the attempt. Second, we believe that this being rewards our fundamental orientation to the good with happiness, so that we do not have to do evil in order to be happy.

This introduces the antinomy of practical reason—the apparent contradiction that the highest good is possible and that it isn’t. But what is the highest good? Happiness proportional to virtue; the more virtue, the more happiness, and the less virtue, the less happiness. What is virtue? For Kant, it is “the firmly grounded disposition strictly to fulfill our duty.” What is happiness? For Kant it’s lives as wholes that are happy or unhappy. Happiness for Kant is the maximum satisfaction as a whole of our needs and desires as rational but finite beings, creatures of need and not merely rational or moral agents.

Hare notes two interpretations of the highest good. The first, the less ambitious sense, is a world with a system in place in which virtue results in happiness. The second, the more ambitious sense, is a world in which everyone is virtuous and everyone is happy. Hare will try to argue that living morally requires believing in the possibility of the highest good in the more ambitious sense, and the actuality of the highest good in the less ambitious sense.

Is the highest good even coherent? If the good is to be motivated solely by respect for the moral law, why should happiness come in at all? If our end is not just virtue, but virtue conjoined with happiness, is not the purity of our respect for the moral law corrupted? Here Hare suggests a parallel in the Christian life, where following Christ should be done for its own sake, even though doing so is also recognized as conducing to our deepest joy.

Hare’s supposition is that it’s possible that some things can be pursued both for their own sakes and for their beneficial consequences. Perhaps I need to be able to foresee my own happiness as consistent with everything I desire, but not that I have to desire everything else at least partly as a means to my own happiness.

What is all-important to Kantian morality is whether the incentive provided by the agent’s happiness is subordinate to the incentive provided by the moral law, or vice versa. It’s okay for an incentive for happiness to be there, but it must take a back seat to the primary call of duty. (It may well be unavoidable that an incentive for happiness is there, emotional and finite creatures that we are.)

Hare thinks that the moral life requires believing in the possibility of the highest good. Hare think this follows from a number of assumptions necessary for a fully reflective living of the moral life.

Assumption #1: The moral good aimed at by action is possible.

Assumption #2: The moral good I am aiming at is a possible result of my attempt to produce it.

Assumption #3: It is possible for me know that the moral good I am aiming at is produced, when it is produced, by the means I have planned.

Assumption #4: I myself can will what is morally good.

Assumption #5: (Concerning everyone else) The moral good they aim at is possible. (social analogue of #1)

Assumption #6: The moral good they are aiming at is a possible result of their efforts to produce it. (social analogue of #2)

#7: It is possible for them to know that the moral good they are aiming at has been produced by the means they have planned. (social analogue of #3)

#8: It is possible for them to will what is morally good. (social analogue of #4)

Hare notes three ways to derive the social analogues:

1. Assume that what makes things reasonable for me makes them reasonable for everyone.

2. Morality requires equal respect, and equal respect requires the assumption that all other human beings are capable of willing the good.

3. Because of the social obstacles to virtue, there are social conditions for the attainment and maintenance of virtue. Possibility of individual virtue requires the possibility of virtue-building and virtue-sustaining congregation.

From 1-8 Hare infers Assumption #9: Possibility of what Kant calls “the Idea of self-rewarding morality,” which says morality does its own rewarding. A world filled with people pursuing virtue and concerned with the welfare of others would be a world filled with happiness.

The highest good in the ambitious sense is a possibility, Hare argues: A world in which righteousness and peace kiss and people are not merely happy, but desirous of things consistent with the moral law.

What about the highest good in the less ambitious sense? Here the new assumption is simply that the virtue of a person results in that person’s happiness. Believing in the actuality of the highest good in the less ambitious sense requires me to believe that my virtue will be rewarded whether (roughly) everyone else is virtuous or not.

Hare wants to argue that we do ordinarily think that we will be happiest if we try to be moral; or that we at least think that being moral has a higher chance than any other strategy. Does this require others to be moral? No, Hare says. For the belief that being morally good is consistent with long-term happiness has been held by people who lived in societies in which they were persecuted and exploited.

Whatever else I desire, as a human being I am bound to desire my own happiness, and I will need to be able to foresee this happiness as consistent with my basic choices. As a human moral agent I have to believe that my continued well-being is consistent with my living a moral life as best I can.

If we are to endorse wholeheartedly the long-term shape of our lives, we have to see this shape as consistent with our own happiness. In a world in which there are many rational agents who have willed not to live by the moral law, I can’t rely on the virtue of others to get me from my virtue to my happiness. So I have to believe that there is in operation a system in which my virtue is rewarded without it.

The antithesis says the highest good in both senses is inachievable. Why might we think the highest good in the less ambitious sense is not rationally thought to be true? One reason: consider that experience suggests that the world seems not to reflect in any way the good man’s striving to bring about goodness in it. Another reason: lack of fit between virtue and happiness is not something we could confirm or disconfirm by experience. (So not knowable a priori.)

Because of so many people trying to be virtuous and yet overwhelmed by evil, a case can be made that life is tragic and human life just is vulnerable to evil. What’s Kant’s solution? He brings in the possibility that the relation between virtue and happiness is mediated by an intelligible Author of nature. Our failures to understand what is happening to us do not license the conclusion that the impact of chance is uncontrollable. Kant rejects the inference from our limitations to the denial of a moral order. He’s “limiting knowledge to make room for faith.”

Hare suggests that belief in moral order is needed; whether this requires moral orderer is another question. A moral argument for the existence of God needs to examine whether there are other ways to back up a moral order.

Those who think the problem of evil is intractable often lose moral faith. But Hare notes that many go through painful ordeals without losing faith in either morality or God. Hare: “The structure of the moral argument is that as long as reason in its theoretical employment cannot rule out the legitimacy of moral faith, reason in its practical employment requires it. If moral faith is possible, then it is necessary.”

Hare wraps the chapter up with these two points: (1) Moral faith is consistent with some doubt about whether your continued well-being is consistent with your trying to live a morally good life; and (2) Moral faith does not require believing that all your present preferences for the future will be secured if you try to live a good life.

Battle of the Angi

Angus Ritchie versus Angus Menuge. They both have awesome accents, and they’re both brilliant Christian philosophers. But they take interestingly different positions on the question of moral knowledge for naturalists. Let me briefly explain why, then lay out a third possibility that relies a little on both. Any way you slice it, naturalism loses.

Angus Ritchie is the author of From Morality to Metaphysics. In that book, he affirms that moral knowledge is possible, even for naturalists. Knowledge, he assumes, requires justification, good reasons to consider the propositions in question to be true. Justification for moral claims comes, he thinks (roughly following David Enoch), from their “deliberative indispensability.” We can’t help but assume certain moral assumptions as reliable in the inevitable process of our moral deliberations. Ritchie resonates with the approach of those employing a method of reflective equilibrium by which we take our moral starting points not as infallible, but as innocent until proven guilty. So Ritchie doesn’t infer that on naturalism there is a lack of justification for moral convictions; to the contrary, he affirms that moral beliefs, on naturalism, at least on occasion, are adequately justified. Perhaps he would even think, then, that on naturalism there is moral knowledge. If we construe of knowledge claims as justified true beliefs, it would seem likely that Ritchie would affirm moral knowledge on naturalism.

The problem for naturalistic moral ethics, as Ritchie sees it, is not a lack of moral knowledge, but lack of an explanation for how we can have knowledge. In light of the limited resources at their disposal as naturalists, what they can’t provide is an explanation for how moral knowledge is possible. On the assumption that the naturalists in question embrace a sufficiently robust moral ontology, their doing so introduces an explanatory gap between those truths and what they can explain about our ability as human beings to grasp those truths. Their naturalism is epistemically deficient when it comes to morality—not in virtue of naturalism entailing a lack of moral knowledge, but rather in terms of a naturalistic explanation of such knowledge. He writes, “We must not confuse an anti-sceptical [sic] argument which justifies the trust we place in our faculties with one which explains their accuracy.”

Angus Menuge, in contrast, after identifying prima facie reasons to be skeptical of naturalism explaining objective moral truth, distinguishes between two sorts of evolutionary ethics (EE). Strong EE dictates that moral ontology itself would be different had evolution played out differently. If, for example, we had been raised to kill our brothers and sisters or children, then such behaviors would have been morally right. Weak EE, in contrast, says it’s only moral psychology (our moral beliefs) that would be different if we had been raised like hive bees. Let’s set aside Strong EE as it holds no realistic hope of sustaining objective moral facts. Let’s direct our attention to Weak EE instead.

Menuge suggests that Weak EE faces an intractable epistemic challenge. It gives us no grounds to think our moral beliefs are true. For they would be formed for reasons potentially quite unrelated to their truth. To make his point, he uses an example of looking at what turns out to be a broken clock, unknown to you. It reads 7 p.m., and suppose that it’s indeed, by sheer coincidence, 7 p.m. No knowledge results, though, since your reason for thinking it’s 7 o’clock has nothing to do with its actually being 7 o’clock.

Menuge writes, “Unfortunately for Weak EE, if it is true, then we are in a precisely similar situation regarding our moral beliefs. For on that view, natural history is causally relevant to our moral beliefs, but does not account for moral reality. So if we had been raised like hive bees we would think fratricide and infanticide were right even if they were not. And, it could be that we think fratricide and infanticide are wrong (because we were not raised like hive bees) even though they are right. But now suppose that our belief that fratricide and infanticide are wrong happens to be true. Still, it is not knowledge, because what made us believe this has nothing to do with why our belief is true.”

Whereas Ritchie seems to affirm the consistency of naturalism and moral knowledge, Menuge denies it. Both think that naturalism faces intractable challenges to account for moral knowledge. Whereas Menuge thinks naturalism is simply inconsistent with moral knowledge (at least in the case cited), Ritchie thinks naturalism is consistent with it, but deficient in explaining how such knowledge is possible.

On the assumption that Menuge, like J. P. Moreland and Scott Smith, is denying that naturalism is consistent with objective moral knowledge claims by taking naturalism to be a rebutting defeater of moral knowledge, perhaps the reason for his doing so is that he is skeptical that naturalism is consistent with moral justification. When he writes that “Weak EE gives us no grounds to think our moral beliefs are true,” it sounds as if he’s denying that moral justification is consistent with Weak EE. He acknowledges the possibility of moral truth claims, but thinks that on naturalism we would believe in them only accidentally—like the person who forms a true belief on the basis of seeing a faulty clock. If Menuge’s suggestion is that, in either case, it’s the requirement of justification that goes unsatisfied, then Menuge and Ritchie part company. Ritchie would be affirming the possibility of moral justification and knowledge on naturalism, whereas Menuge would be denying both, despite that they agree that naturalism is in trouble here.

And there is yet a third way naturalism makes mischief, which we can see by splitting the difference. Suppose that Ritchie is right that naturalism is consistent with moral justification, but that Menuge is right that moral knowledge is precluded by naturalism. This confluence of conditions would yield yet another possibility: something like a Gettier Moral Counterexample. For on naturalism we could have a justified true moral belief, but not moral knowledge. Think again of the clock case, which, incidentally, is much like Bertrand Russell’s prescient Gettier-like counterexample predating Gettier. Suppose the clock in question is a clock that, in your experience, has always been reliable in the past. You look up and see the time, form the belief that’s the right time, and suppose indeed it is. But unknown to you, the clock is broken. So you arguably have a justified true belief, but presumably not knowledge. Might there be something analogous for naturalism and moral knowledge? Justified true moral belief without knowledge? Perhaps.

Why think moral knowledge would be precluded, despite the justified true belief? For this reason: just as in the clock case, the reasons for the beliefs being true would be a coincidence. Even if this isn’t enough to preclude at least some form or measure of justification—a matter on which perhaps there’s legitimate room for rational disagreement—it is clearly enough to preclude knowledge. So even if we assume this is a naturalistic world in which objective moral truths obtain (a big assumption, but not my current target), and even if justified true moral beliefs obtain on naturalism, moral knowledge could well still be beyond our reach.

What we have seen here, then, are three different ways naturalism seems to face a challenge from the direction of moral knowledge. Naturalism (a) is consistent with moral knowledge but can’t explain it with its resources (if Ritchie is right); or (b) is inconsistent with moral justification and thus moral knowledge (if Menuge is right); or, even if it’s consistent with both moral realism and justified true belief, is nonetheless (c) inconsistent with  moral knowledge because of a Gettier-like moral counterexample. What naturalism seems confronted with is the charge of either failing to be consistent with moral knowledge or, even if it’s consistent with moral knowledge, explaining moral knowledge with the resources at its disposal.

The Battle of the Angi over moral knowledge inevitably results in another loss for naturalism.

Photo: "chess game" by L. West. CC License. 

“You Must Change Your Life”: An Apologetic of Conversion in Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”

“Archaic Torso of Apollo”

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1908

Turn of the twentieth-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s verse often exists on the margins of both modernist abstraction--that strained reach for meaning in the seemingly meaningless material world--and the spirituality of Christian theism. Infused with the transcendent, poems like “The Panther” and “The Swan” and “Autumn,” to name a very few, present the reader with the converted quotidian, a paradoxical reality that leads the reader through the world-that-is into the world-beyond. This poetic world-beyond’s laws are constituted by beauty, truth, and the morally good. And without the presence of a spiritual reality within and beyond their empirical worlds, Rilke’s poems lose a vitally important interpretive key, namely, artistically-derived, theologically-animated morality.

The suffusion of artistically-generative morality--an absolute morality produced by art that speaks authoritatively into the moral life of the partaker--is at the heart of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Here, through the marbled chest of ancient deity, Rilke exhibits a broken statue of Apollo, god of music, poetry, art, and religious oracle. The statue sits broken, an amputee of decaying time. The poem begins in a sort of agnosticism, with onlookers refusing the god’s glorious head. The fruitful life of Apollo’s eyes is cut off, and the old god sits in blind decapitation.

And yet, the poem declares, the dismembered god’s power is but dimmed, not diminished. The headless Apollo’s is now a lamp turned low, but a lamp all the same. To see the statue--and by extension, to read the poem--is to bask in the dimmed divinity of broken beauty. The quadriplegic torso presents a paradigm of an emptied beauty that imposes a transformative power on the expectations of viewer. If, Rilke intimates, the statue were whole, if it kept head and arms and legs, then observers would miss the dazzling curved breast, the grinning placid hips, and its thighs like inroads to the god’s life giving center. It’s not the god himself that need be seen, but the beauty housed within his now shattered frame. The reader now finds himself before an incarnation. The self and the god’s otherness meet in an encounter of artistic beauty and mortal life.

The second stanza’s “otherwise,” refrained in the third, calls our attention back to what is, not to what is not. What faces the onlooker is the “translucent cascade of the shoulders” wildly glistening from borders that “burst like a star.” Here art, and theology, and morality collide in fragmented form of broken marble an apologetic emerges from the incarnation of the divine. In the artistically inanimate, Rilke gives us a form for animate morality. The amputation of the god’s members paradoxically proves the regeneration of the onlooker, and an omniscient affinity bursts forth in the star of moral awareness. Here, before the marbled god, you are seen and known and revealed. It is not the statue that stands exposed, but you. It’s not the broken bust being watched, but your very morality. And the apologetic conclusion of the matter, the poet’s argument from the torso’s beauty, is that “you must change your life.”

Rilke reminds us of what other writers have testified to: that when truly known, artistic truth and beauty birth the good. Irish writer Iris Murdoch explored the connection between art and morality, concluding along with Rilke, that, “Art and morality are, with certain provisos . . . one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.” So in calling readers out of themselves and into a state of awful love of the beautiful, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” calls us into moral change. One can’t stand in the gleam of beauty long before seeing the good.

Photo: "Apollo" by N. Thompson. CC License

Link: Matthew Flannagan on the Arbitrariness Objection

Over at Matthew Flannagan's website, Flannagan provides some great interaction with a writer from The Secular Outpost, Jason Thibodeau. Thibodeau raises a classic objection to Divine Command Theory, the "arbitrariness objection." Put simply, the objection is that if what is right is determined by God's commands, then God could command morally repulsive acts and we would be obligated to do what seems morally repulsive. Flanagan does an excellent job responding to Thibodeau's formulation of the objection. Also, there are a number of helpful links to some of Flannagan's other works if you're interested in digging a little deeper.  

Podcast: David Baggett on the Nature of Moral Facts

In this week's episode, we sit down with Dr. David Baggett to discuss the nature of moral facts. Moral facts play an important role in all moral arguments, but they are especially important in Baggett's abductive approach since he suggests that these facts are best explained by the existence of God.

Moral Apologetics Writing Contest

MoralApologetics.com is excited to announce that its first annual Writing Contest is now underway. Selected entries will be featured on the website, and the writers of the winning entries will each receive one hundred dollars and an invitation to be a regular monthly contributor to the site. (It’s in principle possible but not rather likely that one person could win in more than one category.) Entries are to be 1000 words (maximum) on a topic pertaining to moral resources for apologetics (please read the site's Vision Statement for what sorts of topics this involves). Submissions will be judged on both their insight and literary merits. There are three categories: Bible, Philosophy, and Literature. Clearly specify which category your entry falls under; no entry can be entered into more than one category (though entries can include content that encompasses more than one category).

Along with each entry please include a short bio and picture, though entries will be judged anonymously by the editors at the site. Multiple entries by an individual are allowed, but no more than three total entries per person (in whatever categories you'd like). Each category will feature a winner and runner up (runner ups will receive a copy of Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality autographed by both authors).

The due date for submissions is March 1, 2015. E-mail your entry, depending on the category, to one of the following addresses:

Bible: jpruitt@liberty.edu Philosophy: dbaggett@liberty.edu Literature: mdavis@liberty.edu

Quills at the ready? Begin!

Photo: "I wish I could write a beautiful book ......." by TempusVolat

5 Common Objections to the Moral Argument

By Paul Rezkalla   The Moral Argument for the existence of God has enjoyed a long tradition of defense from theistic philosophers and thinkers throughout the history of Western thought…and a long tradition of misunderstandings and objections from even some of the most brilliant minds. In its abductive form, the moral argument seeks to infer God as the best explanation for the moral facts about the universe. One popular formulation is as follows:

1. Moral facts are best explained by God’s existence.

2. Moral facts exist.

3. Therefore, God exists.

Here are five of the most common objections to the argument and why, in my view, they are not insuperable.

 1. “But I’m a moral person and I don’t believe in God. Are you saying that atheists can’t be moral?”

The moral argument is not about belief in God. Rather, the argument usually deals with grounding and substantiating objective morality. If God does not exist, then objective morality becomes much more difficult to explain. Sure, atheists can be moral. In fact, I know several atheists who are more moral than some theists! Religious leaders in the New Testament were among the biggest detractors and critics of Jesus. The issue of belief is not pertinent. The argument instead highlights the fact that there must be a sufficient basis for there to be objective morality. God, in light of the distinctive features of morality, can be argued to be their best explanation.

2. “But what if you needed to lie in order to save someone’s life? It seems that morality is not absolute as you say it is.”

We need not talk about absolute morality here. There is an important difference between absolute and objective. Absolutism requires that something will or must always be the case. For the record, such moral facts exist—like the inherent badness of torturing children for fun. But nothing so strong is called for here. Objectivity simply means (human) ‘mind-independent’ or ‘judgment-independent’. When I argue for objective morality, I need not argue that it is always the case that lying and killing are wrong; the moral argument I’m sketching does not defend absolute morality. Rather, it contends that there is a standard of morality that transcends human opinions, judgments, biases, and proclivities.

Suppose that some nation today decreed that every one of its brunette citizens would be tortured to death simply for being brunette; it would still be the case that it is wrong to torture brunettes to death simply for being brunette.

The statement, “It is wrong to torture brunettes to death simply for being brunette” is true, regardless of whether or not anyone believes it to be true. This is what is meant by objective.

3. "Where’s your evidence for objective morality? I won’t believe in anything unless I have evidence for it." Well, many would suggest that the evidence for objective morality is ubiquitous. If by ‘evidence’ you mean incontrovertible proof beyond any shadow of doubt, such an evidential standard is simply unrealistic and beyond our ken for nearly everything except a few beliefs internal to our own heads. After all, how do you know with absolute certainty that you are not a brain in a vat being electrically stimulated by a crazy scientist who wants you to think that all of this is real? You could be in the matrix, for all you know (take the blue pill)! How do you know with complete assurance that you weren’t created a couple minutes ago and implanted with memories of your entire past life? How could you possibly prove otherwise?

See where this is going? Denying the existence of something on the basis of, “I will not believe unless I have completely sure evidence for it” leaves you with solipsism, at best. We believe in the reality of the external world on the basis of our sense experience of the external world. And we are justified in believing that the external world is real unless we have good evidence to think otherwise. There is no way to prove with utter certainty that the external world is real, or that the past wasn’t created 2 minutes ago and given the appearance of age. Similarly we have no good noncircular evidence for the reliability of testimony or the reliability of induction, and these are just a few examples we could adduce. And yet we all believe that the external world and the past are real. In the absence of defeating evidence, we are justified in trusting our experience of the external world. In the same way, I think it’s plausible to suggest by parity in reasoning that we can know that objective morality exists on the basis of our moral experience. We have access to moral facts about the universe through our moral experience. Unless we have good reason to distrust such experience, we are justified in accepting the reality of the objective moral framework that it presents us with.

Despite how resistant we might be to accepting the truth of moral objectivity, no one really denies that there are some moral facts (except psychopaths and some sociopaths). Take the following scenario: In 1978 a fifteen year old girl was walking to her grandfather’s house when a man offered to give her a ride. She got in the car with him. He then kidnapped her, raped her repeatedly, hacked off her arms at the elbows with an axe, and left her to die. Although she survived, she was terrorized by this traumatic event. Her attacker served only eight years in prison and told her during the trial that one day he would be back to finish the job.

Now answer the following question: Was this act wrong?

If yes, you believe that there is at least one moral fact in the world.

If no, you face a fairly formidable burden of proof. There’s theoretical space for skepticism, but it’s hardly the obvious position to take.

4. "If morality is objective, then why do some cultures practice female genital mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and other atrocities which we deem unacceptable?’

There can be two responses given here:

The first response is that even though not all cultures share the exact same moral facts, most embrace the same, underlying moral values. For example, there are certain tribes that practice senicide (authorized killing of the elderly) due to their belief that everyone in the afterlife will continue living on in the same body that they died with. Thus, in order to ensure that those in the afterlife are capable of hunting, swimming, building houses, etc., the elderly are killed before they become too old to take care of themselves. This act is done with the well-being of the elderly in mind. The moral value that most of us hold would suggest that “the elderly are valuable and must be taken care of,” is also accepted by these tribes, even though their construal of the nonmoral facts diverges from our own.

The second response is that some cultures do, in fact, practice certain things that are straight up morally abominable. Cultures that practice infanticide, female circumcision, widow burning, child prostitution, and the like are practicing acts that are repulsive and morally abhorrent. The fact that we realize the difference in how certain cultures treat their women, children, and elderly and are outraged at immoral practices is evidence that we believe in objective morality. A man’s decision to have his 6-year old daughter circumcised or sold into prostitution is no mere cultural or traditional difference that we should respect, uphold, or praise, or even cultivate an attitude of impartiality toward; rather these are atrocities that need to be advocated against and ended. The existence of multiple moral codes does not negate the existence of objective morality. Are we to condone slavery and segregation simply because they were once allowed under our country’s moral code? Of course not. We condemn those actions, and rightly so.

Take the example of Nazi Germany: the Nazi ideology consented to the slaughter of millions, but their actions were wrong despite their convictions to the contrary. Tim Keller summarizes this point succinctly:

The Nazis who exterminated Jews may have claimed that they didn’t feel it was immoral at all. We don’t care. We don’t care if they sincerely felt they were doing a service to humanity. They ought not to have done it. We do not only have moral feelings, but we also have an ineradicable belief that moral standards exist, outside of us, by which our internal moral feelings are evaluated.

Simply because a society practices acts that are contrary to what is moral does not mean that all moral codes are equal. Moral disagreements do not nullify moral truths, any more than people disagreeing on a mathematical calculation negates an objectively right answer.

5. "But God carried out many atrocities in the Old Testament. He ordered the genocide of the Canaanites." For starters, this isn’t really an objection to the moral argument since it does not attack either premise of the argument. It’s of course an interesting issue regarding the moral character of the God of the Bible, and for those interested, this site recently posted a new book by Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan; we encourage you to take a look. Beyond that, we can say this: by making a judgment on God’s actions and deeming them immoral, the objector is appealing to a standard of morality that holds true outside of herself and transcends barriers of culture, context, time period, and social norms. By doing this, she affirms the existence of objective morality! But if the skeptic wants to affirm objective morality after throwing God out the window, then there needs to be an alternate explanation for its basis. If not God, then what is it? The burden is now on the skeptic to provide a naturalistic explanation for the objective moral framework—an explanation that explains all that needs to be explained without changing the topic, watering down the categories, or reducing the significance of morality.

Summary of Chapter 2 of John Hare’s The Moral Gap

This chapter is entitled “God’s Supplement,” and Kant will appeal to God’s assistance to close the gap between the high moral demand and our limited natural capacities. As a pure rationalist, Kant uses Christian doctrines, but tries to translate them within the “pure religion of reason.” Hare will eventually argue that this translation project fails.

Kant thought revelation can be held to include the pure religion of reason, but at least the historical part of revelation can’t be included in the pure religion of reason. Hare sees a parallel with Kant’s treatment of ethics here: the pure religion of reason, because it is universal like the pure principles of morality, has to be shorn of all reference to individuals and particular times and places.

Kant himself was not closed to special revelation; the pure rationalist can accept special revelation; nevertheless Kant did not think its acceptance is without qualification necessary to religion. We can and should believe various religious propositions, Kant thought; we just can’t claim to know these things. It wasn’t that Kant was, in the ordinary sense, an agnostic about God. He thought there are good moral grounds for theistic belief—Kant had a narrow sense of knowledge as “grasping the infinite through the senses.”

Kant thought a person who already understands the claims of duty will find the teachings of Christianity worthy of love, even though they are not objectively necessary. “[Christianity] is able to win itself the hearts of men whose understanding is already illuminated by the conception of the law of their duty.”

Perhaps owing to his Pietistic background, Kant shows in his work a primacy on practice over theory in the life of faith, a distrust in natural inclinations, and a vision of a world-wide moral and spiritual renewal. In this light, perhaps his polemic was against what he saw as a corruption of Christianity rather than against Christianity itself. Hare counsels to avoid hearing Nietzsche in Kant’s work louder than Luther.

For Kant a “mystery” was an object of reason that can be known from within adequately for practical use, and yet not for theoretical use. Theoretical reason can’t give him what he needs in order to make sense of the moral life, and the central Christian doctrines in their traditional forms are beyond his reach as a philosopher, in his estimation. Among things inscrutable are the original predisposition to do good, the subsequent cause of the propensity to evil, our re-ascent from evil to good, the divine assistance which makes this possible, and how the ethical commonwealth is translated into actuality. There’s thus inscrutability in creation, fall, redemption, and the second coming.

Kant tried an experiment of seeing whether he could use the doctrines about these focal points as mysteries, that is, as capable of being known from within adequately for practical use. It’s an experiment of translating items in the outer circle of revelation into the language of the moral concepts. The overall aim is to make ‘scrutable’ as much as he can the core of the traditional faith. We may have to believe that supernatural assistance is available, even though we can’t use this belief in theoretical or practical maxims.

Why is belief in divine assistance necessary? The problem is this that we encounter: how can be become other men and not merely better men—as if we were already good but only negligent about the degree of our goodness? Kant was profoundly skeptical we can do away with out sinful inclinations on our own. The problem is too deep.

A revelation of the will is called for. All of us, on Kant’s view, start off with our wills subordinate to the evil maxim which tells us to put our happiness first and our duty second. We are thus corrupt in the very ground of our more specific maxims, all of which take their fundamental moral character from this one. Our happiness comes first, duty second; this needs reversal, which we can’t effect on our own.

If such a revolution is our duty, it must be possible, since ‘ought implies can’. But it’s not possible on our own, since a propensity to evil is radical and inextirpable by human powers, “since extirpation could occur only through good maxims, and cannot take place when the ultimate subjective ground of all maxims is postulated as corrupt.” The result is an antinomy, an apparent contradiction, which is solved by appeal to a “higher, and for us inscrutable, assistance.”

Kant divides divine assistance into work of the Father, Spirit, and Son. Each person of the Trinity answers to a different difficulty arising within practical philosophy. Singular reference is removed by thinking of God the Son as humanity in its moral perfection, the Holy Spirit as the good disposition which is our comforter, and God the Father as the Idea of Holiness within us.

Regarding God the Father, three things must be held together: first, God is just and not indulgent; second, rational but finite beings never reach, at any point in their infinite progress, to holiness of the will; and third, God gives us (rational finite beings) a share in the highest good which is only justly given as a reward for holiness. How can they hold together?

Kant appeals to the world of experiences versus the world of things in themselves. After the birth of the new man, the heart, as seen by God, is “essentially well-pleasing to him”—even though all we can ever experience is gradual improvement, infinitely extended. God judges us as a completed whole “through a purely intellectual intuition.” Intellectual intuition in Kant’s doctrine is productive—God isn’t passive, he makes it so. When God looks at us, he sees his Son, because he is imputing to us his Son’s righteousness. Luther’s influence on Kant on such scores is obvious.

God the Son is translated as humanity in its moral perfection and God the Father as the Idea of holiness (the idea of a morally perfect life). The work of God the Spirit concerns primarily our present experience, while the work of God the Father concerns our fitness for future reward. Hare thinks Kant was attempting to provide a doctrine of the assurance of salvation. As we can’t see our disposition directly, we can see it only indirectly via actions. If there’s an improvement in those, we can hope there has been a revolution in our inner disposition.

Another troublesome triad arises; consider the tension between these three propositions: (1) God is just, not indulgent; (2) We humans have all lived under the evil maxim; and (3) God gives us a share in the highest good which is justly given only as a reward for holiness in an entire life.

Kant’s solution maintains all three, once more, by means of the distinction between the world of experience and the world of things in themselves. Vicarious atonement plays an important role in the Christian account, but two problems attend it before it can enter the domain of reason. The first is the objection to historical reference, and the second is that there is no transmissible liability for evil, which could be handed over to another person like a financial indebtedness. Hare will take up the second point in a later chapter.

What Kant does is translate God the Son as the new man, humanity in its complete moral perfection. The new man suffers sacrifices (remorse, self-discipline, reparation) vicariously, on behalf of the old man, who properly deserves them. It is thus, as in the traditional doctrine, the innocent who suffers. What God sees (by intellectual intuition) is revolution; what we experience is reform. We can’t see by introspection into our own hearts. We experience merely the outworking of the revolution in a gradual process of reformation which, Kant thought, we will not at any time experience as complete. We are still sinners so we’re still capable of subordinating duty to the inclinations, even though we’re moving in the direction of not being able to do so (which is holiness).

Hare considers Kant’s translation project a failure overall. Hare thinks it doesn’t give Kant “mysteries” which allow him to solve the antinomy within practical reason produced by the moral gap. In large part Kant’s failure pertains to his affirmation of the Stoic Maxim, which says a person must make or have made herself into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil, she is to become. But this stands in rather obvious tension if not patent contradiction with the other part of Kant’s moral system that said supernatural assistance is needed. His failure was to show how we can appeal to such assistance given the rest of his theory, and in particular given the Stoic maxim. He had to show that he can appeal to such assistance given the rest of his theory. This is what he failed to do.

One illustration of the failure can be seen considering the work of God the Father. If the notion of extra-human assistance is retained, now Kant has additional resources to show the possibility of a revolution of the will, but can’t continue to insist on the Stoic maxim. If divine assistance is rejected, how can our fundamental disposition come to be characterized by the Idea of holiness as instantiating humanity in its moral perfection? How is this possible given the radical evil of our nature?

The reason for Kant’s failure? When he came to the project of seeing whether the doctrines of Christianity lead back within pure rational religion he carried this out in a way that does not make reference to extra-human assistance. This was true of all of these things: election, call, atonement, justification, assurance, and sanctification.

The incoherent result? Kant’s own account within the pure religion of reason assumed that we can by our own devices reach an upright disposition; but Kant was not justified, in his own terms, in supposing that we can do so. What produces this result is that Kant has subtracted from the traditional understanding of God’s work in salvation any mediating role for anything that is not already human.

Shadows

Shadows lengthen, deepen, merge.

Darkness is all, and I am there.

No thought of shadows when

The sun is full, for then

They merely accent the brightness.

When all is shadow, love may thrive,

Though hope be dim; when all is bright,

Shallow bliss holds sway.

Even the Arctic is both night and day.

Darkness gives more to defining light

Than light to the understanding of dark.

I will see the shadow grow,

And dwell in it even, to know

That light is its own verity,

And darkness but an island in its midst.

                              --Elton D. Higgs

                                (Dec. 31, 1974)

Photo: "Shadow" by E. Sandstad. CC License. 

God & Moral Ontology: It’s not Me, It’s You

by David Baggett What is the connection if any between God and moral ontology and truth? In this brief talk I will do my best to flesh out some of the contours of this question, beginning with a distinction between explicating a view and defending or justifying it. With our time limits in place, I cannot do justice to either in much detail, let alone both, so I will rest content with saying a few things about both.

Moral ontology is also a broad field of discourse, so I will delimit what I want to say to topics of the good and the right, which are already much more than can be handled adequately, much less fully, in such short compass, yet they are but two of many parts of moral ontology. Concerning moral rightness, I will direct my attention in particular to moral obligations. So, again, I will be talking about moral goodness and moral obligations, and will offer a few considerations in favor of their dependence on God and reasons to think such a dependence relation obtains.

With respect to issues of moral goodness, or value, matters axiological, how might value depend on or be rooted in God? In the history of Christian thought, two important respects in which such dependence has been suggested can be understood, broadly speaking, in terms of a theistic adaptation of a Platonic model, on the one hand, and a theistic adaptation of a more Aristotelian model, on the other. What is interesting to me about these two kinds of views, even more than their differences I’ll discuss momentarily, are their similarities. In each case, as a modicum of Plato and Aristotle exegesis reveals, relevant resemblance to, or partaking in, or contemplation of the divine is seen as residing at the heart of ultimate value. The commonly construed and much vaunted differences between such views, though, are usually accorded pride of place and emphasized more adamantly—namely, to put it with considerable crassness and oversimplicity, the Platonist looks to heaven for his values and the Aristotelian to the earth. The theistic Platonist looks to God’s nature, the theistic Aristotelean, or natural lawyer, to human nature.

To my lights, however, and for present purposes, what strikes me as obvious, even in the face of such a supposed parting of ways, is their potential rapprochement. God construed as the ultimate Good, the locus of value, makes wonderful sense to many classical theists. The sorts of qualities attributed by Plato to the Good and the Beautiful are just the sorts of qualities that the classical Anselmian theist or thoughtful Christian believer would attribute to God. The source and goal of reality that draws us to itself, or himself, and which constitutes the highest perfection and reality, the paradigmatic good—to identify the person of God with the Good thus construed is a very natural move, eminently understandable, and consistent with robust theism. It’s to render the ultimate exemplar and source of moral truth in a Personal matrix, rather than in, say, causally inert principles whose relevance to our lives is far from clear. In God’s unchanging character, on the view I’m sketching instead, can be found those eternal truths, moral and otherwise, upheld and sustained by God in this and all possible worlds. This is, like Platonism, a deep account of moral value in the basic structure of reality, a view that says the truths of morality penetrate to the foundation of reality, in radical contrast with a naturalistic understanding of moral values that, owing to its inherent limitation of resources, relegates the status of such moral truths to rather superficial qualities of reality at best.

Classical theism and Christianity also holds that we have been made in God’s image. What this teaching plausibly entails is that we as human beings have a nature and essence, and what conduces to our nature—which is made after God’s, remember—is that what is good for us in the deepest possible ways is morally good. In which direction does this causal relation go? From being good for us to being morally good, or from being good in itself to being good for us? Here theistic ethicists can reasonably disagree, and hold fruitul discussions. As for me, I am inclined to argue for this minimal thesis: that both paradigms are possible, since, owing to the aforementioned possibility of integration, I don’t see an irremediable parting of the ways between theistic Platonic and Aristotelian portrayals. It seems to me that we can speak of God’s nature and our nature, made after God’s image, and speak both about what is good in and of itself, and what is good in virtue of being good for us. As the ultimate locus of value, God, on my view, is at the center of the picture; but as beings made by God in his image—given the nature we have, made for divine purposes, imbued with a telos, invested with significance by the one who is goodness itself—in such a system, on such a model, that which conduces to our deepest joy, fulfillment, satisfaction, and flourishing is also morally good. It is good for us, and, most if not all the time, it is also good in and of itself, in virtue, most likely, of relevantly resembling an aspect of God, partaking of his nature, or in some other way asymmetrically depending on God.

Take friendship, for example. What makes it morally good? I don’t doubt, incidentally, that naturalists can see that it’s such a good, but here I am broaching the question of the relative adequacy of a naturalist and theistic ontology to account for the moral goodness. I suspect we have excellent reason to think that part of the story of friendship’s value is that it is good for us—it makes life rich and rewarding and delightful. To such traits naturalists can imply, which means they’re not without some resources here—remember if theism is true, this is a richly teleological world inhabited by created made in God’s image, so this all utterly unsurprising and quite explainable on a theistic picture. But now consider God and the world, a rich theistic context instead of a merely naturalistic one. In light of who we are as God’s creations, the satisfactions of friendship are far more than relatively shallow phenomenal or psychological features that don’t penetrate much beneath the surface. No, rather, friendship satisfies us in the ways God intended us to be satisfied, fulfills us in the way we were designed to be fulfilled. Friendship is two creatures of infinite worth living in loving relationship. It helps satisfy our God-given telos to love God and neighbor. And at the same time, and intimately related to this—not so much as in tension with it, but rather bolstering the picture and fleshing out the story—friendship is good in and of itself, reflective of an aspect of the Triune nature of God. It features a relevant resemblance of or partaking in the perichoretic relationship of the Persons of the Godhead, the God who is, as a result, essentially loving. What is good for us, on this integrated theistic story, is also what is good in itself. At any rate, this is all too brief, but that’s one kind of story of how God and the Good are related, and it’s the one to which I’m most strongly drawn for a variety of reasons, philosophical and theological.

What of moral rightness, matters deontic, and particularly moral obligations? As I write this, I am on a plane coming home from a conference at Baylor centered on some lecture notes of Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s on a couple dozen arguments for God’s existence. I was delighted—as the one slated in the forthcoming book to write on the moral argument from the list—to hear Plantinga’s answer to a question posed him. Trent Dougherty, the main conference organizer, asked him which, of the couple dozen arguments, does he consider the best and most compelling? Plantinga’s answer? The moral argument, and, particularly, God as the best account of moral obligations. Why does Plantinga, along with many others, think that God and, in Plantinga’s case, God’s commands, provide such a comparatively solid account of moral obligations?

In brief, I think because moral obligations are a special brand of normative constraints. After all, we speak of aesthetic or epistemic norms and strictures, and undoubtedly there are interesting parallels between those and moral obligations, but in addition to the similarities and resonances, there are also interesting differences and disanalogies. Moral obligations carry a distinctive sort of authority, a particular prescriptivity, an overriding oughtness. Moral obligations have a kind of verdict-like clout, and our failure to discharge them properly, many think, results, at least generally and normatively, in a kind of objective guilt. C. Stephen Evans refers here to the “Anscombe intuition” as recognition of this set of features unique to moral duties—based on the logic, language, and phenomenology of our moral experience.

I have not done much more than hint at justifying a theistic account of moral ontology, so let me do that here by talking about the challenge naturalists face in accounting for the Anscombe intuition, challenges many think insuperable. As noted atheist J. L. Mackie, and plenty of others, naturalists and nonnaturalists alike, have recognized, moral properties and relations—and perhaps especially something like moral obligations in particular, as George Mavrodes has pointed out—seem to be a strange fit in a thoroughgoing naturalistic world. Where would their authority come from? Their lawlike verdict? Their overridingness and clout and punch?

Divine commands issued by a loving Creator who knows what is best and what is best for us  and wishes for our deepest good would carry the requisite authority to sustain binding moral obligations, but naturalists have a notoriously hard time coming up with a suitable secular substitute. Angus Ritchie in his From Morality to Metaphysics argues that naturalistic ethical theories invariably either fail to do justice to our objectivist pre-theoretical moral commitments or they face an explanatory gap in their moral account.  Where naturalists find themselves impoverished, theists find themselves with an abundance of both Platonic and Aristotelian riches – our most deeply held moral beliefs find ample explanation.  

Naturalists can and should of course continue to try making good sense of moral obligations, but let me finish by making two general observations about recurring patterns I see as they go about such a task. Increasingly vocal naturalists are emerging, from Sharon Street to Joel Marks to Richard Joyce, who are admitting that naturalism and robust moral realism are, if not bad for each other, at least in a very strained relationship. That some naturalists, facing invariable prospects of a definitive breakup looming, gravitate to error theory, moral skepticism, or moral anti-realism is, to my thinking, as telling as it’s sad. They remain, I think, at least half right: moral realism and naturalism are not very compatible. At the least moral realism stands in a much healthier relationship to theism. I think a theistic home is the considerably more congenial home to objective moral facts.

Secondly, concerning naturalists who, despite the writing on the wall, assiduously strive to salvage the relationship and remain moral realists, I suggest that you listen carefully to their accounts of morality because, at least in my experience, almost inevitably there’s some subtle sleight of hand going on. Obligations are replaced by rules, objective guilt with subjective guilt, intrinsic goods with instrumental ones, moral goals bereft of sufficient teleology are foisted on hapless and unsuspecting listeners. Their beloved gets toppled from her throne, stripped of her riches, and in reductive fashion domesticated to perform lowly chores alone—like helping us merely “get along.” The result is a watered down, emaciated, deflationary account of morality, a shell of her former glorious self, emptied and divested of her most enchanting distinctives and winsome charms. Authority, the Anscombe intuition, binding and overriding moral obligations all get left behind.

It’s a fun metaphor but my point is a serious one: For those unwilling to jettison pre-theoretical commitments and intuitions about moral realism, I respectfully suggest they at least remain open to finding a better explanation of moral ontology in the theistic fold—a partner finally worthy of a fine lady. Perhaps it’s time she refuse to settle, say they should see other people, and suggest to naturalism, “It’s not me. It’s you.”

Photo: "She's Leaving Home" by S. Drummond. CC License. 

Podcast: Dr. Leo Percer on the Exclusivity of Christianity and the Problem of Hell

On this week's podcast, we hear from Dr. Leo Percer. Dr. Percer provides some excellent and honest responses to objections skeptics raise to the moral argument in light of the exclusive  nature of Christianity and the reality of hell.

Plantinga's "Advice to Christian Philosophers" and Moral Philosophy

In a famous essay by Alvin Plantinga, he argues that Christian philosophers should do philosophy as Christians. Christian philosophers have their own concerns, problems, and methods, and they need not run on the tracks the rest of the philosophical community has laid. This is not to say, of course, that Christian philosophy happens in a vacuum. Plantinga suggests Christian philosophers engage and take seriously the philosophy and ideas of others, but not at the expense of developing and defending a truly Christian philosophy. Christian philosophers ought to be breaking new ground and moving both the Christian and philosophical world along  in the process. As an example of an area where Christian philosophers could be working on their project, Plantinga suggests the area of ethics:

These, then, are my examples; I could have chosen others. In ethics, for example: perhaps the chief theoretical concern, from the theistic perspective, is the question how are right and wrong, good and bad, duty, permission and obligation related to God and to his will and to his creative activity? This question doesn't arise, naturally enough, from a non--theistic perspective; and so, naturally enough, non-theist ethicists do not address it. But it is perhaps the most important question for a Christian ethicist to tackle.

Plantinga's point is that when doing moral philosophy, Christian philosophers should not confine themselves to working within the paradigm given to them by their peers. That paradigm is not even asking the right questions in the first place.  Instead, they should seek to develop a moral philosophy that arises from Christian commitments.

At the end of his essay, Plantinga says,

We who are Christians and propose to be philosophers must not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians; we must strive to be Christian philosophers. We must therefore pursue our projects with integrity, independence, and Christian boldness.

Plantinga's incredible work in epistemology and the problem of evil have demonstrated that Plantinga is in no way a hypocrite;  he has taken his own advice. Plantinga's work is not only distinctively Christian, it is also just excellent philosophy by anyone's lights. For example, in his work on the logical problem of evil, Plantinga has done what few philosophers have ever done: persuade almost all those who started out disagreeing with him that they were wrong. Because of his excellent Christian philosophy, Plnatinga has been a major contributor to the revival of Christian philosophy so that now Christian philosophers have a greater opportunity to follow his advice. As Christian ethicists and moral philosophers do their work, they too ought to take Plantinga's advice and perhaps they can continue to turn the philosophical world upside down. Or, perhaps it best to say that when Christian philosophers really act like Christian philosophers, they won't so much as turn the world upside down as right-side up.

If you'd like, you can read all of Plantinga's "Advice to Christian Philosophers" here. 

Photo: "St. Paul Preaching in Athens" by Lawrence OP. CC License. 

Story and Truth

Holly Ordway is Professor of English and Director of the MA in Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, and the author of Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms (Ignatius Press, 2014). She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; her academic work focuses on imagination in apologetics, with special attention to the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

Why Story Matters

We are all storytellers.

Our lives have a beginning, a middle, and – one day – an end. Birth announcements connect the new baby with the lives of the parents; later, graduation, wedding, and retirement announcements flag important plot points; the obituary will be a final summing-up.

Couples recount the story of how they met and fell in love. Travelers regale us with the stories of their adventures. Frustrating events become good stories when the sting has passed.

We need story. Imagine encountering a friend who seems distraught. Our first question will likely be “What happened?” We know intuitively that we must know something of the narrative to understand and sympathize properly. It’s the same when we encounter a joyful friend: we want to be drawn into the story, to be able to rejoice!

We understand our lives in terms of story, and thus story can help us understand our lives.

Stories are necessary for presenting truth in other contexts as well. In a court of law, we don’t just have a set of facts, we have the testimony of witnesses, individual stories about motives and events that make part of the larger narrative of “What really happened?” In job interviews, every candidate has a narrative of past jobs and experience, a story that is more than just items on a resume, but includes what that person has learned from those experiences.

Yet, in our increasingly post-Christian culture, the idea of story has become divorced from the idea of truth. Even though we live our lives in a context where true stories are vitally important, the connection of story with objective truth is obscured at best, obliterated at worst.

In the secular world, story is often treated as morally insignificant. Movies, books, television, and video games are all built around narrative - that's what makes them powerful - but the idea that these forms of story be challenged as to their truth seems odd at best. “It’s just a story, just a game, it’s not real” - these are the stock responses to any who express concern about what falsehoods or bad influences might be presented in entertainment media.

Paradoxically, however, our culture encourages us to consider own stories about morality and the meaning of our lives to be authoritative. Our modern culture encourages a cafeteria spirituality, in which we pick and choose our values, with personal preference having ultimate authority. “This is what’s true for me. It might not be true for you, but it is for me.” It’s impossible to argue with, and isn't that the point? Splendidly free from anything that might challenge our carefully constructed citadels of individual truth, we carry on untroubled by any suggestion that self-sacrifice rather than self-indulgence is called for.

Sadly, Christians have contributed to the marginalizing of story as a means of telling truth. Although the Scriptures are largely composed of story - narrative and poetry - many Christians, especially Protestants, view story with suspicion, as a form of lying, and have thus impovershed their imaginative lives. A few crucial figures over the past century have kept the connection between story and truth alive for Christians: most notably the Protestant George MacDonald, the Anglican C.S. Lewis, and the Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton. Their work, especially that of Lewis and Chesterton, has had a profound effect on many individuals, and is becoming more and more on the forefront of apologetics - the defense of the faith - and evangelization today. We need to carry on that good work, as a way of bringing the light of Christ to a culture in desperate need.

Story, Adrift

In order to understand what has happened to story as a mode of telling truth, and how we can reclaim story, we first need to consider what has happened to the Western worldview over the past few centuries.

In a slow process that began with the Enlightenment and has continued to the present day, the human faculties of reason and imagination have been separated, to the detriment of both.

On the one hand, reason has been given free rein, and the pursuit of knowledge using our God-given intellect has become scientism and materialism, the idea that only those things that can be empirically measured and logically figured out can be considered “true” or “real.” In the world of science, truth is held to be only that which is measurable and testable. Intangible things like emotions and spiritual truths are decidedly second-class citizens. After all, souls can’t be detected with an MRI, and love can’t be weighed and measured!

This adulation of reason without the counterbalance of imagination leads to an inevitable diminishment of the vision of what it means to be human. Our culture is showing many signs of this part of the reason / imagination divide. For instance, in a culture that embraces “scientific” ways of thinking, it becomes difficult to justify spending any extra time or money in promoting the arts, or making buildings beautiful. In older cities like Boston or Philadelphia, the public buildings from the 18th or 19th centuries – the town hall, the courthouse, the banks – have elegant, inspiring architecture. Contrast that to your local 20th century Department of Motor Vehicles.

More seriously, the fact that the human soul cannot be weighed, measured, or detected with scientific instruments has led to a creeping tendency to define human beings by what they can do, not by their innate dignity as men and women made in the image of God. The elderly and disabled, who cannot define themselves in terms of what they can accomplish, can very easily be considered a burden on society.

Narrowing the definition of truth to what reason alone can determine makes it possible for people to design functional buildings that depress the soul, and for people to talk about the suitability of ending one’s life simply because one is old and tired. With the use of reason alone, it is too easy to make categorical distinctions; a person can be a statistic, not recognized as one of the human beings that the scientist or bureaucrat interacts with on a daily basis. It is Imagination that would reveal the truth: the true connection between the imago Dei, the image of God in human beings, and each individual, unique human being.

Yet in the broader culture, unchecked imagination goes its own route to error. Ungrounded and undisciplined, a de-Christianized imagination has not led to more beauty, but to less. When less is left to the imagination, storytelling becomes shallow and limited. In order to get some sort of response, art, literature, music, and film move toward  the breaking of standards for the sake of destruction, and the rejection of limits of any kind.

Sexuality and violence, ever more of it, and ever more corrosive, become the norm for entertainment. In movies, we have gone from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho to the gore-fest of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with the same trend appearing in books. The popular young-adult series The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, is full of graphic depictions of violent injuries and gruesome death. Peter Jackson’s film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit adds violence at every turn.

The high level of sexuality in books and film, including books for younger readers, has become so much the norm that one of the things that makes the Harry Potter series distinctive is its refreshing lack of explicit sexuality and its depiction of chaste dating behavior – in other words, J.K. Rowling is notable for holding to standards that were normal up to a few decades ago.

Criticism of these trends is muzzled, however, because all of these excesses are claimed to be for the sake of art or fun, with no “meaning” behind them whatsoever. “It’s just a book” or “It’s just a movie” are the most common retorts to any expressed concern about the ideas and behavior being presented (and implicitly promoted) in the media.

We need to recover the connection between imagination and truth. Without the recognition that our values are objectively grounded in the living God, and that our flourishing as whole human beings depends on a right relationship with Him, the imaginative impulse will lead us to destruction as surely as unchecked reason.

But we are all storytellers, and the human need for story pops up wherever we look, even where we would not expect to find Story at all. In the realm of unchecked reason, skeptics tell just-so stories to explain every aspect of our lives in terms of biology and evolution. In the realm of unchecked imagination, celebrity culture allows people to participate in drama, and to have heroes and villains (if only for a fleeting moment). Even when we’re completely wrong about the way the world works, with our lives completely out of touch with the living God, we are drawn to narrative, imagery, characters – story. Such is the power of storytelling.

Story, when it is rightly used in the service of truth, can help connect reason and imagination into a healthy, God-focused whole.

A Dangerous Dead End

Redeeming story for the cause of truth means more than just slapping a Christian label on the idea of storytelling. Portions of the Christian church – most notably those that describe themselves as the Emerging or Emergent Church movement – have wholeheartedly affirmed a postmodern understanding of story. In this view, Christians have a wonderful story, one that brings meaning and joy and purpose to those who accept it, but it is a story that makes no claims, or sharply limited claims, about objective reality and objective truth.

The Emergent movement has been reacting against extremes in both the secular and Christian world. On one hand, the Emergents are rightly reacting against the harsh extreme of scientism, which has no room for human spiritual needs. On the other, they are also reacting against the extreme of cold literalism in the church, which strips Scripture of its beauty and reduces our relationship with the living God to a set of detailed doctrinal principles to affirm. The postmodern reaction against these extremes is not surprising, and indeed in many ways the postmodern Christians serve as a canary in the coal mine: the reason / imagination split can't be ignored as something in secular culture alone.

The postmodern view of story can be very appealing at first, but it fails because it does not firmly connect story to truth. If our narratives are generated and sustained by our communities, eventually differences in beliefs will fragment those communities down to the individual: my truth, my story. Either we will be trapped in the particular story we happen to be in, or we will shop around for a story we like better. Ultimately the postmodern Christian view of story disintegrates, because it acknowledges no transcendent Author of the story, and offers no way to determine if a given story is true.

Such a view is deadly, for it saps all the urgency to find the truth about spiritual matters. If Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life only for those who find that particular faith flavor appealing, then Buddhism or transcendental meditation or indulging in unlimited sex is equally valid for those who prefer those alternatives. Why pay attention to the Gospel if it is just one story among many?

Even in ordinary life, story without truth fails to satisfy. When I hear a story of my friend's life, I expect it to be true, that is, corresponding to the way things actually are. When I read a poem, I expect it to show me something true about the world, to illuminate some aspect of my experiences, or help me appreciate real beauty better. When I read a novel, I expect it to make sense, for it to add to my enjoyment of the world, or help me understand things better, even if those things are sad or terrible (since we live in a fallen world, much of what is true is rather painful to hear). Even a story read for pure escapism needs to have some connection to truth in character, setting, or plot (not necessarily all three!). Surrealist fiction does not make for good beach reading; adventure and romance stories do, because they connect with things that we do recognize as true, namely that people can have adventures and do fall in love.

On a day to day basis, we flourish when the stories we tell about ourselves and the world, including our inner narratives, are true. The self-esteem movement attempted to help children live better, happier lives by telling them stories about their own greatness. But such stories were fabricated: kids were praised even when there were no objective grounds for praise. As a result, we have an entire generation of young people who have been trained in narcissism and brought up to believe that what matters is how they feel - the story they tell about themselves - not their actual accomplishments or character.

Simply telling oneself a new story is appealing. Americans are constantly reinventing themselves. It is good to have the freedom to make a course correction in life, but it is burdensome to think that one’s identity is one’s own responsibility. Our culture produces tremendous pressure to define oneself according to other stories: workplace success, or physical beauty, or social conformity. These are powerful alternate stories, and a Christian "story" that is simply one more feel-good option among many does not stand up as a viable alternative.

We must reclaim and redeem story, for the Church and for the world to which we minister in the name of Christ. If imagination gives us story without truth, and reason gives us truth without story, what we need is Christ who is Truth in story, the living Word.

The Christian Story

Christians are the only ones who can truly reclaim story. We do not offer just one more story, but the true story that is grounded in reality.

Reason and imagination are not separate, but are two sides of the same coin – two aspects of being made in the image of the Creator God. In Holy Scripture, we see no such false division between reason and imagination.

Consider Genesis: we can make propositional statements about the truths expressed in Genesis, but the way in which  God chose to reveal these truths is in narrative. Out of nothing, God created everything that is, and He gives us a story about it: then, and then, and next, and then. Genesis is the truth behind every “once upon a time,” the reason that we thrill to a story. We make, we create, because of who God is. God Himself is the ultimate Maker, the ultimate creative artist, whose creative stamp is impressed on us.

Holy Scripture is largely composed of poetry, narrative, parables. It is filled with beautiful imagery and communicates profound truth through metaphors: consider the description of the New Jerusalem, in Revelation, or the gentle imagery of Jesus as the Shepherd.

And, pre-eminently, the Word became flesh came and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. We who follow Christ do not just know about him (with our reason), though our reason tells us many true things about him, such as the fact of his Resurrection, and the nature of his claim to be our only Lord and Savior. We also know him, directly and experientially, most deeply in the Eucharist. Such an experience cannot be fully conveyed through words, but only experienced, but the faculty of imagination helps in the process. Imagination opens the doors of our hearts, so that the Spirit may more fully enter in.

The beauty of the true Christian story is that it works at every point on the scale - as you would expect from a story that corresponds with truth.

The Christian story accounts for creation, for why there is something rather than nothing.

The Christian story accounts for the existence and nature of human beings, of rationality, of thought and language, logic and art.

The Christian story means that each of us has an absolutely secure part in the great Story, as adopted children of God the Father, an adopted brothers and sisters of God the Son, and as temples of God the Holy Spirit.

Reclaiming Story for Christ

For the Christian, the created world, which God made and called good, is full of beauty that points toward the living God. We do not create the meaning in the world, but rather discover it. We each have our own story, but it has meaning because it is part of a grand narrative that has an Author.

As Christians, we have the best story of all: the fairy tale to cap all fairy tales, the epic to top all epics, the romance of all romances, the bitterest of tragedies and the most joyful of happy endings – we have the story of a Creator God who so loved the world that He sent His only-begotten Son to die on a cross to save us. It is the best story of all – utterly captivating, thrilling, and satisfying – and also absolutely, completely true.

We need to reclaim story from those who would separate story from truth, making the one into meaningless reverie and the other into sterile ‘facts.’ It is one of the great lies of the Enemy in this day and age that storytelling is nothing but entertainment. Oh, no. The power of story is the power to tell the truth in ways that reach deep into both heart and mind; to draw the reader into the experience of knowing truth.

The account of God’s plan for the redemption of the heavens and the earth, our glorious future in the new creation, is often shrugged off by skeptics as just a story. Such a dismissal leaves us, however, with an intriguing opening. Indeed, we can say, the Christian story does sound like a fairy tale, but we have it reversed: in fact, it is fairy tales that sound like the Christian story.

Reading Redemptively

We need to recover the ability to read redemptively: to find and cultivate truth and beauty in the stories we read, watch, and share. Fiction, fantasy, poetry – too often we either disregard the power of storytelling or fear it as deception, but for human beings made in the image of the Creator God, storytelling is a profound means by which the Spirit can move and transform us.

Given that I have been talking about story, it may surprise readers to realize that most of the essays that follow focus on poetry. There is no mistake! Poetry offers us story just as much as novels do, though sometimes in different ways or in smaller, tantalizing glimpses. Above all, good poetry can help us to connect to the larger story that is our God’s work in the world. If we can read rightly, treasures await.

How can we read redemptively? The process includes recovering an understanding of how:

Literature can both reveal and reinforce worldview (one’s basic understanding of how the world works).

Imagery and symbols both communicate truth and deepen its impact on the heart and mind.

Immersion in the right kind of literary experience can refresh and renew our vision, enabling us to see the world in the light of Christ.

Reading redemptively will help us in discipleship, providing more ways in which we can grow in heart and mind in our relationship with Christ.

Photo: "old book" by T. Carvalho. CC License. 

Link: Glenn Peoples on "Why a Christian should accept a Divine Command Theory, part 1"

Over at Glenn Peoples's website, Right Reason, you can find an excellent post explaining why Christians should accept a divine command theory of ethics. In this essay, Peoples discusses the phenomenology of moral obligations and  suggests that our most clearly held moral beliefs are best explained by a divine command theory. It's a sharp and engaging piece of writing— well worth your time. Photo: "Ten Commandments, St. John's College, Cambridge" by Steve Day. CC License. 

New Book by Paul Copan and Matt Flannagan: Did God Really Command Genocide?

Over at Baker Publishing's website, you can pick up a copy of  Paul Copan and Matt Flannagan's new book, Did God Really Command Genocide?.  Copan and Flannagan are leading the way in providing substantive responses to objections raised against the goodness of God in light of the Old Testament conquest narratives. While you wait for the book to arrive, you can listen to lectures by Flannagan!

Matthew Flannagan,  "Can God Command Evil? The Problem of Apparently Immoral Commands"