“A standard of right and wrong – good and evil – which superintends human actions. Moral facts which exist independently of human minds, to which we have a duty to conform our lives.”Believers have an intuition that something critical gets lost when you subtract God from a moral framework. And yet today it is becoming more common for Atheists to say this intuition is false – that a fully functioning moral framework is just as possible without God.
Today I want to begin taking a closer look. What is the Christian intuition pointing to? How do Christians explain (and defend) their foundations of morality?
Avoiding the Strawman:
The first thing one has to deal with when broaching this subject are the constant misunderstandings. Atheists and secularists almost always react as if the following is being said:
“Without putting faith in divine revelation, we’d have no idea how to be good, moral people. And indeed, non-believers can’t and won’t be good people.”(and you'll likely have to deal with an indignant response.)
While there are probably some Christians foolish enough to make that assertion… it isn’t the right argument. There are plenty of ways to discover moral truths which don’t depend on divine revelation. Atheists can be good neighbors like anyone else.
Here is how I phrase the real issue:
“If we were transported back time to the year 150BC, we'd find ourselves in a world in which slavery is a universally accepted practice. Yet we would both still say slavery is wrong. It’s wrong, even if the world thinks it is fine.
We both agree that there are moral facts. That regardless of what society says – there are objective truths about how we’re meant to live. Maybe you and I have discovered those truths in different ways, but the question is… why are there moral facts?
Why is there a true, mind-independent standard of good and evil human behavior? And why do we have the duty to conform our lives to it?"
How WE Account For It:
First, we owe it to our interlocutors to explain how we Christians conceive of a philosophical grounding of objective moral truths and duties.
Here is how I like to put it:
“God is the very essence of existence, rationality, personhood, bliss, and love. Suppose those metaphysical qualities are distilled from one source, like light being broken up by a prism*. That source is the divine nature. And in encountering this divine nature we recognize it as 'good'.
God imbues us creatures with rationality and intentionality. That is to say, there is a way God intends human beings to live which is consistent with our nature… and His nature. This is known as 'natural law', and it establishes the basis of 'good' human behavior.
Natural Law can be elaborated into more explicit laws by the use of reason. Plus, God can also reveal these things directly.”
From there a person may respond:
“Well, who says the divine nature – and all those things you described – is 'good'?"Answering that is very difficult because it’s like asking “who says water is wet?” Well... it just kinda is. The goodness of the divine nature is the end of the explanatory trail. There's nowhere else to go.
To which a person might say:
"Then isn't it sort of an arbitrary choice? Like how we decided North would be at the top of our maps?"Well... not really. It's not like there is a different self-existent source of all contingent reality to choose from. God is self-effusing existence itself. If we agree that existence is better than non-existence, or rationality is preferable to irrationality, then we can identify the divine nature as “good”.
And that’s that. It’s how we Christians ground morality.
The Old Euthyphro Dilemma:
That objection is called the “Euthyrphro Dilemma”. This dilemma is a question posed by Socrates. In its original polytheistic form, it goes like this:
"I will amend the definition so far as to say that what all the gods hate is impious, and what they love pious or holy; and what some of them love and others hate is both or neither. Shall this be our definition of piety and impiety?
The point which I should first wish to understand is whether (A) the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or (B) holy because it is beloved of the gods."
Taking Option A would mean there must be a standard of goodness that transcends the gods. If that is the case, the Theist hasn’t actually shown how the gods make a difference in grounding objective morality because even the gods have to point to something outside themselves.
Taking Option B gives you another problem. Morality would just the arbitrary decree of the consensus of the gods. Any notion of objective morality would be destroyed in this view because it all comes down to an arbitrary decree. The gods could have made it moral to steal from the poor and immoral to love your children.
It Doesn't Apply:
Now, let's look carefully at the two options in the Euthyphro Dilemma. Does either side of the dilemma defeat us?
The first path has "the Good" being standard resting outside of God. But that isn't the case with Monotheism because the standard is God's essence. "The Good" isn't a standard outside of God or independent of God. It is God.
The second option presents "the Good" as an arbitrary decision made on God's whim. However, that's not the case with Monotheism either. The divine nature may be mysterious and inscrutable, but it isn't an arbitrary divine decision. It's just what God is.
You see, the reason why Socrates could press the Euthyphro Dilemma so hard was because he was dealing with polytheism. Those "gods" were just fussy, immoral superheroes. But if one approaches philosophical monotheism with the dilemma, it fits about as well as a pair of pants on a fish.
Coming Up Next...
So that's a brief sketch of the moral philosophy of Christianity.
Next time we're going to examine the two most common naturalistic attempt to ground objective morality. See you then.
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*One weakness of the analogy is that white light is a composite of all the colors. It is not truly one thing. The divine nature really is one thing. The attributes I mentioned are different ways of experiencing that one thing.
That’s an easily understood piece that puts forward a succinct and well reasoned defence of Divine Command Theory. Nonetheless, I don’t think it removes some key problems with locating things like “good” and “rationality” in God’s nature.
ReplyDelete_“The goodness of the divine nature is the end of the explanatory trail.”_
The problem here is that there still seems to be more to explain. To say that goodness is God’s nature does not tell us anything substantive about ‘goodness’. It implies that the answer to the question, ‘Why is God’s nature good?’ is ‘Because God’s nature is like God’s nature’. While revelation can tell us something substantive about God’s nature it does not answer questions like why God is good, which Divine Command Theory seems to answer with no more than because God is like God.
_“If we agree that existence is better than non-existence, or rationality is preferable to irrationality, then we can identify the divine nature as ‘good’.”_
It’s not clear why this is sound. It is not obvious, for example, why an existence that is entirely miserable would be better than no existence at all. Similarly, it is not clear why a defense of rationality depends on the existence of God. The question, ‘Why be rational?’ is already self-defeating in that it asks for *reasons* to be *reasonable.*
_“The divine nature may be mysterious and inscrutable, but it isn't an arbitrary divine decision. It's just what God is.”_
As you’ve explained it, Divine Command Theory is not _“an arbitrary divine decision”,_ but that does not remove the problem that it makes ‘goodness’ _“mysterious and inscrutable”._ There are alternative interpretations of ‘goodness’ supported by theists and atheists alike that are less mysterious and more substantive. If we look to the great 19th century theologian and Christian apologist, William Paley, of the watchmaker argument for the existence of God, we find the idea of ‘goodness’ as ‘happiness’. Paley held that, “God Almighty wills and wishes the happiness of his creatures.” There is something to be said for the intuitions most people feel that (1) a happy world is better than a miserable one, and (2) that we have decisive reason (“ought”) to avoid misery if it serves no instrumental purpose.
Thing 1: I've heard the term "Divine Command Theory" before, but I don't use it myself. It seems there's lots of baggage attached to the phrase which gets imported into a discussion as soon as its used.
ReplyDeleteThing 2: As to the statement about locating rationality in the divine nature... I think it follows necessarily from God's essence being existence itself. I conceptualize rationality as the coherence and consistency of reality. Since all contingent things inhere in God, then rationality is an aspect of the divine essence because it literally is the coherence and consistency of reality.
Main thing: The core issue you seem to be pointing to is the question: "Who is to say the divine nature is rightly called 'good'?"
In the end, any moral framework is going to contain some axioms and definitions. Those will always be a sort of explanatory endpoint. There's just no avoiding it. So it seems to me that the pertinent question isn’t whether a system has an axiom, it’s whether the moral axiom is reasonable, non-arbitrary, and not just the product of human imagination.
Thomas Aquinas would say that "the good" is the divine nature because it is existence itself. I think that is self-evidently true. It is the most appropriate lodestone because any appreciation of goodness is the appreciation of something which exists. Existence is the precondition for anything good.
On the other hand, I freely admit there is no conclusive argument which proves you should say that the essence of existence and rationality is "good". One will either assent to that or not.
In a way, this plays into my meditation on the fall of the Devil which I wrote a few weeks back. In thinking to myself, "Why would Satan, who is/was a rational creature, turn away from God?", I've concluded the answer rests in the unresolvable nature of the question, "Who says God is good?"
An angel could say, "Because God is self-effusive source of all contingent reality! Who is like God? Of course God is good!"
To which Satan could reply, "Yes, but why must I say that is good? Why can't I define my own standard of good instead?" Even an angelic intellect would have to admit there is no logical syllogism which forces an answer.
So... you noted how my post does not remove the open ended nature to that question. I agree. Nor can it. The most I can say is that it is reasonable and not the arbitrary product of a human mind.