The true believers!
Faith can be a mindnumbing thing, especially to someone as atheist as I. What always makes me go daft is the way otherwise intelligent people can dredge up 'plausible' explanations in favour of one very specific dogma. It's as if they treasure the creation of absolute answers over sketchy world views based on observation and skepticism. Hmmm, I dunno, like the fact that so many different people think they worship the one true God (even within the same 'religion', eg the denominations of Islam or Christianity). Or the fact that religion almost always follows the historical geopolitical contours of the planet. Ever wondered why there are so many Hindus in India??? Take this for example (taken from a recent e-mail debate I had with a friend)...
Morality is law-like in nature. The context (the preconditional framework) in which objective morality is intelligible is one that includes ‘something’ that has the requisite authority (authority is a personal rather than impersonal attribute) to bind universally. For it to be objective and absolute, that ‘something’ must have existence independent of human minds and must be unchanging, otherwise morality would not be necessary at all, rather contingent (otherwise). The context also must provide for a way in which human minds are in contact with this ‘something’ so that they may know what is right and wrong. The superior context, it is suggested, would also be able to account for why humans frequently do the wrong thing and it would probably have that ‘binding something’ take morality seriously enough such that moral transgression is not going to go unpunished.
Already on the face of it, there is only one worldview, as far as I can see, that is as I just described. Let me knock off the contestants straight away…
Naturalistic worldviews don’t even begin to resemble anything like the above and cannot, for the reasons given above, account for morality.
Now to pagan worldviews… Pagan gods are typically conceived of as being capricious and often get up to much evil themselves. In pagan worldviews, the gods are thought of as not the ground of morality but subject to it. Since pagan gods are not absolute and are themselves under morality, they cannot be the source of it. Another reason to dismiss a pagan worldview as being the precondition of objective morality is that pagans typically have an array of gods, each with their own distinct personality and sometimes these gods are seen to be in conflict with one another. These differences, and particularly the conflict, mean that objective morality cannot be grounded in pagan gods.
Second, theistic worldviews that consider morality to be merely whatever God says it is cannot acccount for objective morality for then morality would depend on whatever God’s will might be and that could be subject to change. In such a case, God could say “X is good” one minute and “it is not the case that X is good” the next. Morality would be arbitrary and, for God, there would be no difference between right and wrong. Worldviews of this kind would include Islam. Why would Christianity be immune from such a criticism? The reason is that morality, in the Christian worldview is not merely what God says it is. Morality is grounded in the immutable nature of God which is perfectly good. His commands are not whims, but are expressions of His good, absolute, unchanging, immutable nature.
posted by Iqbal Khaldun @ 2:54 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
“I say the Christian worldview alone can account for objective morality because, as far as I can see, it alone can:
(1) Account for objective morality metaphysically – it is grounded in God’s immutable nature; and”
If I understand this correctly, the assertion is that the fact that god is “immutable” – that it is “… not subject or susceptible to change….” is compelling evidence that the “christian worldview” is correct? I will only point out that an “immutable” god would be, in the absence of clear metaphysical interventions (think miracles, which do not occur), indistinguishable from no god at all.
”(2) Account for humans being in contact with that ground – we are made in His image and He has revealed moral truths to us; and”
Nope, it does not, we are not, and it has not. Or at least these statements themselves are unproven. It’s not kosher to claim that mere assertions prove other assertions. For example, there is an entirely human explanation for morality: it is a survival mechanism. It does not make sense to harm others of your species, or to destroy their food and water sources, because the same could happen to you. If I don’t want to be eaten, raped or starved, it behooves me to participate in a mutual agreement with like-minded others to narrow the range of acceptable behaviors – voila: morality.
How is it that christians can claim simultaneously that “we” are made in “god’s image”, when their entire belief system is predicated on the precise opposite? None of the characteristics of christian god are present in humans, nor vice versa. Omniscience, omnipotence, error, original sin, mortality, morality, civic-mindedness, accountability…
I wonder what god would think of me if I was omnipotent, but just sat on my ass while hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were terrified and drowned in the recent tsunami…
‘God’ teaches absolutely no moral truths, other than that we are on our own. In stark contrast, people have taught me a whole lot of useful stuff. And some bullshit too, of course. But at least people try. Frankly, lazy-ass amoral “god” isn’t fit to shine the shoes of most humans I know.
”(3) Account for moral deficiency in humans’ moral compasses and the occurrence of immorality in the world – the doctrines of The Fall and Total Depravity;”
No again. “Immorality” can exist in the absence of god. Using my mutual assistance argument above, it its clear that morality involves the mutual limiting of behaviors in order to have others limit their behaviors which might harm you. “I won’t kill you, if you promise not to kill me…”. But not everyone accepts those limits. Nothing divine, just poor impulse control or selfishness.
”(4) Account for taking morality seriously – God must punish immorality and cannot merely sweep it under the carpet.”
I take morality seriously, but I am not a christian. If it were proved that no god existed, I would still behave morally. There is no correlation as far as I can tell between those who act morally, and the minutia of their religious beliefs (christian, other, or no religion). God, which creates children born with spina bifida and sits idly by while people die from natural disasters, is not a moral entity.
Although it feels quite natural for people who consider themselves intellectual and rational to dismiss the religeous it is important to understand the limits of logic and reason.
Thankfully this is made easier given the fact that these limits can be specified using reason and logic.
For example, Godel's incompleteness Theorum demonstrates that any sophisticated formalised system for deriving facts is either inconsistent (untruths can be proved) or incomplete (some truths cannot be proved).
The
Uncertainty principle argues there are some physical properties of the universe that cannot be known.
Not that we don't have the technology to know them, not that given current theory we can't know them, it's thought to be an actual property of the universe that these facts cannot be known.
There are a few other examples of where we may have hit the epistemological limit.
I think the relevance of this is to argue that reason and faith are both tools used to solve problems, completely different sorts of problems.
To try and use reason to attack the true issues of faith is just as muddle headed as to use faith to attack the true issues of reason.
Thanks for the posts.
Absolutely, reason and logic are inherently limited. Faith, on the other hand, is limitless. But that is not to say it provides any answers, merely subjective comfort.
I personally grapple with most moral questions, but I refuse to accept moral views based on unfalsifiable credos masquerading as something more considered (eg the Answers in Genesis mob, or the Nation of Islam's statement that white people were created by an evil black alchemist a few thousand years ago).
People have every right to believe what they want. But in any shared domain (eg a community) some rational standard of morality and justice has to be reached. Whether that is reached, and whether such standards ought to be imposed, is another important question. I’ll keep quiet on that for the time being.
I've been involved in a few debates with Christians who argue that rationally the evidence favours their theology. The strange thing is they often address some of the most uncertain areas of epistemology in an accurate fashion. Yet they somehow ‘manage’ to boil all that uncertainty down into simple, absolutist support for a very specific interpretation. Quite evidently, these are totally brainwashed individuals. Understanding them is important, however. Because it gives us an insight into other aspects of our society, such as the Christian right dynamic in the US.
I think every major religious movement is fundamentally the product of sociopolitical situations. There would be no modern Christianity or Islam (etc) without gunboats and swords.
That there are things which are unknown or unknowable merely allows for a space in which god might be, but does nothing to advance a proposition that it does in fact exist there.
In any event, if sam's comment is aimed at mine, I'm not poo-pooing "issues of faith" - I agree with Iqbal - people are more than welcome to believe whatever they want.
What I am po-pooing is any sophistry which claims to "prove" that god exists. For similar reasons, I reject any claim that religion is the source of human morality. This is because (i) it is not correct, and (ii) if left unchallenged, it inevitably morphs into an assertion by those who claim to 'know god' that they have special rights to determine what is 'moral' for others. On god's behalf, of course. And that is a slippery slope on which abortion bans, the burkha and gay marriage discrimination are just the beginning...
That is absolutely what it boils down. Not any of the subtleties of the universe and the difficulties humans face in trying to discern them. All the uncertainty serves as a pretext to impose dogma on people. In comparison, the law of gravity is relatively difficult to contest. Although I'm happy to hear people try and do so, preferably by jumping off a tall building!
Of course, none of this goes to personal whims. To be put it in an overly simple manner, everyone has the right to do pretty much anything they want behind closed doors.
That's a pretty naive statement Andrew. It's not about atheists dimissing non-atheistic worldviews. It's about dismissing your claim that your worldview is applicable to all of human kind! Of course anyone, any way of thinking can lend itself to fundamentalism. However, atheism doesn't posit a response to every moral issue on the basis of certain scripture. Christianity of the type you advocate does.
How does one ever work out any 'axioms' to an ultimate degree? All you have succeeded in doing is identifying the logical gaps in our understanding of morality and plugged those gaps with broad, unfalsifiable statements about the Christian god.
The irony is that in trying to work things out to the nth degree, impressing absolute, anthropocentric conclusions onto oneself on the way, we sit back idly and do not address the real problems human society faces. I think this is a problem a lot of atheists and other philosophers have too. Of course you can do whatever you want, it's a free country. It just seems ironic that people who are so obssessed with expressing 'accurate' statements on things like morality rarely have anything useful to contribute on issues of great moral weight - like wars, social issues, etc.
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