Monthly Archives: April 2013

Atheism, Morality

Why Is God So Often Tied to Morality?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Theists are constantly claiming that without a personal, perfect, unchanging God, objective moral values and duties make no sense. I have written on this topic, myself, on numerous occasions. But is it only theists who recognize that God and morality go together? No. There are several prominent atheists thinkers who agree.

In their book Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, David Baggett and Jerry Walls cite some of these atheist thinkers. First, they quote the philosopher J. L. Mackie, who said, “Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the course of events without an all-powerful god to create them.”

Baggett and Walls comment about Mackie:

His idea was that moral facts, as traditionally conceived, particularly those pertaining to obligation, exhibit features so strange that their appearance in a naturalistic world seems nothing less than miraculous. And unfortunately, miracles do not sit well in a naturalistic world! For this reason, as an atheist, Mackie himself found the notion of their existence altogether dubious.

Baggett and Walls then mention the late German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s

confident proclamation that the “death of God” should have for one of its practical outcomes a Copernican revolution in ethics. According to this view, selfishness and pride, perhaps even ruthlessness rightly understood, should now eclipse traditionally exalted moral virtues like humility, altruism, and compassion. Upholding traditional morality after the death of God wasn’t Nietzsche’s concern. It was rather his agenda to effect his transvaluation of values, in an effort to infuse goodness again with strength and heroism.

Finally, Baggett and Walls quote one of the most famous atheists of the 20th century, Jean Paul Sartre. Here is Sartre in an extended passage:

Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavored to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God is a useless hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we are to have morality, a society and a law-abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are going to do a little work on the subject, which will enable us to show that these values exist all the same, inscribed in an intelligent heaven although, of course, there is no God. In other words . . . nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall discover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself.

The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men.

To summarize how these three atheist thinkers connect God to morality, Baggett and Walls write:

For these thinkers, atheism didn’t mean business as usual when it came to ethics. It meant fundamental rethinking of what ethics is all about, because they recognized the long history of a perceived connection between God and morality. They thus stand in contrast to those who think that eliminating God from the moral equation changes little or that including God adds nothing of consequence.

Atheism, Morality

Which Worldview Best Accounts for Morality?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

There are two major worldview contenders today, at least in western civilization: naturalism and theism.  As morality is central to the human experience, both worldviews owe us an account of where moral values and duties come from.

Bertrand Russell, one of the most famous naturalistic philosophers of the 20th century, described the world through naturalism’s eyes in his book Mysticism and Logic:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Cheerful words, I know.

If Russell is right, then from whence come moral values and obligations? Philosophers David Baggett and Jerry Walls, in their book Good God:The Theistic Foundations of Morality, argue that it is hard to see how moral values and moral obligation can come from mere matter:

The source of this moral obligation isn’t likely to be mere matter. An evolutionary account of feelings of or beliefs in, say, moral obligation is certainly possible, but how would naturalism explain obligation itself? How collections of atoms could generate and issue genuinely binding moral commands is altogether mysterious, if not absurd.

How might a Russellian naturalist make it less absurd?

Contemporary naturalistic ethicist Richard Boyd identifies goodness with a cluster of empirical properties, among them the satisfaction of mutually supportive social human needs. Choices are deemed moral to the extent that they satisfy such needs. Such an account might seem to make morality objective, yet it’s difficult to see how purely empirical properties could really account for binding obligation or intrinsic value.

The attempt to define morality in terms of the satisfaction of our desires tries to replace theism’s objective account of value and meaning with subjective satisfaction, but the exchange leaves us worse off. It remains a leap of blind faith to affirm that anything like objective obligation would emerge from such empirical properties. For that matter, persons themselves, especially persons with intrinsic value and dignity, seem much less likely to emerge from valueless impersonal stuff than from the intentional hand of a personal Creator.

Baggett and Walls then present C. S. Lewis’ reasoning about why a theistic universe better explains moral values and obligations:

A religious conception of reality, in contrast, holds that behind the physical world is something else, likely a mind of some sort. “That is to say,” as Lewis put it, “it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself . . . to the extent of having minds.”

. . . The Catholic thinker John Henry Newman, a century before Lewis, had similarly argued that our conscience, particularly our feelings of guilt, lead us to conclude God exists. Feelings of conscience are often directed toward fellow human beings, but sometimes our feelings of guilt or shame, which we take as evidence to suggest that we have offended someone, lack an appropriate human target. If such feelings are appropriate, they must then have a nonhuman one. Our feelings of responsibility, shame, and fear emanating from our conscience imply that “there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.”

In a similar vein, Lewis’s essential argument can be summarized like this: There are objective moral facts, among them guilt for wrongdoing and duties we are obliged to obey and are responsible for neglecting, and such objective facts are better explained by a religious understanding of reality than by a Russellian world.

The argumentation is not complex, but it is nonetheless compelling. Compare Russell’s world to a world where a perfect God exists. Instead of Russell’s world explaining the existence of moral values and obligations, it explains them away. Until naturalists can come up with a source of morality that has greater explanatory power than the theistic God, they will forever fail to win the battle of worldviews.

Morality

Who Has the Authority to Tell Us Right and Wrong?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If God does not exist, then who has the authority to provide normative moral evaluations and obligations? David Baggett and Jerry Walls wonder about this question in the introductory chapter of their book, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. Baggett and Walls cite an essay written by Yale law professor Arthur Allen Leff in 1979, in which Leff probes the “fragile foundations of postmodern morality.” Below is their analysis of his essay:

He began his essay by identifying “two contradictory impulses” that he thought were present in most people. On the one hand, we want to believe that there is a complete set of transcendent propositions that direct us how to live righteously, propositions that he characterizes as “findable” because they exist objectively and independently of us. On the other hand, we want to believe that there are no such rules, that we are completely free to decide and choose for ourselves what we ought to do and be. “What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.”

Parenthetically, I believe that Leff hit the proverbial nail on the head. I have found that the most socially liberal people who want to toss out traditional moral principles are the most vocal advocates of the moral principles they choose for themselves. They want, at the same time, to not be told how to live, but to also tell other people how to live.

Baggett and Walls continue:

It was Leff’s thesis that much of what was written about law that is mysterious and confusing could only be understood in light of these contradictory impulses toward both found law and created law. Indeed, it was his sense that this tension was “particularly evident in the growing, though desperately resisted, awareness that there may be, in fact, nothing to be found—that whenever we set out to find ‘the law,’ we are able to locate nothing more attractive, or more final, than ourselves.”

Of course, in traditional morality, there was something more attractive and more final than ourselves, and that ultimate reality was God himself. Leff goes on to show that coming up with a suitable moral substitute for God is no easy task. What is required is some convincing account of who, short of God, has the authority to provide normative moral evaluations and obligations. When finite, fallible beings attempt to take that role, they invariably invite “what is known in barrooms and schoolyards as ‘the grand sez who’?”

Leff’s article concludes on a memorable, if somewhat despairing note as he acknowledges the dismal prospects if we ourselves are all we have when it comes to morality. His final lines are as follows.

As things now stand, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved. Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot—and General Custer too—have earned salvation. Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned. There is in the world such a thing as evil. [All together now:] Sez who? God help us.

Evolution, Morality, Philosophy

Why Does the Denial of Moral Facts Undercut Knowledge of Any Kind?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Moral skeptics frequently argue that evolution has tricked us into thinking that our moral judgments are based on mind-independent moral facts. Even though it seems like our moral judgments are examples of authentic reasoning, they are not. Joshua Greene is a typical voice of moral skepticism:

Moral judgment is, for the most part, driven not by moral reasoning, but by moral intuitions of an emotional nature. Our capacity for moral judgment is a complex evolutionary adaptation to an intensely social life. We are, in fact, so well adapted to making moral judgments that our making them is, from our point of view, rather easy, a part of “common sense.” And like many of our common sense abilities, our ability to make moral judgments feels to us like a perceptual ability, an ability, in this case, to discern immediately and reliably mind-independent moral facts. As a result, we are naturally inclined toward a mistaken belief in moral realism. The psychological tendencies that encourage this false belief serve an important biological purpose, and that explains why we should find moral realism so attractive even though it is false. Moral realism is, once again, a mistake we were born to make.

Although we may think we are making moral judgments based on mind-independent moral facts, this is imply an illusion caused by evolution. We are simply mistaken to think that moral facts actually exist. According to “New Atheist” Sam Harris, “Greene alleges that moral realism assumes that ‘there is sufficient uniformity in people’s underlying moral outlooks to warrant speaking as if there is a fact of the matter about what’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ ‘just’ or ‘unjust.’’

Harris asks:

But do we really need to assume such uniformity for there to be right answers to moral questions? Is physical or biological realism predicated on “sufficient uniformity in people’s underlying [physical or biological] outlooks”? Taking humanity as a whole, I am quite certain that there is a greater consensus that cruelty is wrong (a common moral precept) than the passage of time varies with velocity (special relativity) or that humans and lobsters share a common ancestor (evolution). Should we doubt whether there is a “fact of the matter” with respect to these physical and biological truth claims?

Greene concludes that moral intuitions cannot be trusted, but that science can:

[M] oral theorizing fails because our intuitions do not reflect a coherent set of moral truths and were not designed by natural selection or anything else to behave as if they were … If you want to make sense of your moral sense, turn to biology, psychology, and sociology— not normative ethics.

Is this true? Did natural selection fail to design moral truth tracking, but succeed in designing biological, psychological, and sociological truth tracking? In other words, did evolution bequeath us the ability to discover mind-independent, objective facts about non-moral domains of knowledge? Harris argues that this is a dangerous move for the moral skeptic to make. The price to be paid is high. Harris explains:

This objection to moral realism may seem reasonable, until one notices that it can be applied, with the same leveling effect, to any domain of human knowledge. For instance, it is just as true to say that our logical, mathematical, and physical intuitions have not been designed by natural selection to track the Truth. Does this mean that we must cease to be realists with respect to physical reality?

Deny that moral facts exist and you end up having to deny that truths of any kind exist. There is no way, says Harris, to argue that evolution gave us the ability to know facts about logic, math, and physical reality, while at the same time fooling us about the existence of moral facts. It’s a package deal, like it or not.

Morality

Why Trust the Bible for Moral Guidance and Wisdom?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Turn on the TV nowadays, and for the most part we hear that the Bible is outdated and full of culturally irrelevant foolishness from the ancient near east. Nothing to be learned from it. No reason to study it. Every reason to ignore it.

Commentator Dennis Prager, though, recently wrote a piece at National Review Online where he claimed, shockingly enough, that he goes to the Bible for moral guidance and wisdom. How strange! Why does Prager take the Bible seriously? For beginners:

It was this book that guided every one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, including those described as “deists.” It is the book that formed the foundational values of every major American university. It is the book from which every morally great American from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to the Reverend (yes, “the Reverend,” almost always omitted today in favor of his secular credential, “Dr.”) Martin Luther King Jr. got his values.

It is this book that gave humanity the Ten Commandments, the greatest moral code ever devised. It not only codified the essential moral rules for society, it announced that the Creator of the universe stands behind them, demands them, and judges humans’ compliance with them.

It gave humanity the great moral rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

It taught humanity the unprecedented and unparalleled concept that all human beings are created equal because all human beings — of every race, ethnicity, nationality, and both male and female — are created in God’s image.

Prager offers several more reasons, and then sums up:

Without this book there would not have been Western civilization, or Western science, or Western human rights, or the abolitionist movement, or the United States of America, the freest, most prosperous, most opportunity-giving society ever formed.

This reminds me of Reg in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. As he was complaining bitterly about the Romans, his comrades kept reminding him of the good things the Romans had done. His response: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Indeed, aside from Western civilization, Western science, Western human rights, the abolitionist movement, and the United States of America, what has the Bible ever done for us?

For those who claim we should find our moral guidance somewhere else, Prager answers:

If not from the Bible, from where should people get their values and morals? The university? The New York Times editorial page? Those institutions have been wrong on virtually every great issue of good and evil in our generation. They mocked Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” More than any other group in the world, Western intellectuals supported Stalin, Mao, and other Communist monsters. They are utterly morally confused concerning one of the most morally clear conflicts of our time — the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and other Arabs. The universities and their media supporters have taught a generation of Americans the idiocy that men and women are basically the same. And they are the institutions that teach that America’s founders were essentially moral reprobates — sexist and racist rich white men.

We need clear moral teaching as much as ever, and secularists have utterly failed to provide it. With Prager, I stand firmly on the moral wisdom promulgated in the Bible. God’s word shines today as brightly as it ever did.

Evolution, Morality

Why Can’t Evolution Be the Source of Transcendent Moral Values?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

In two previous blog posts (here and here), I have called attention to the fact that human beings universally take for granted that our moral judgments transcend time, place, and species. We judge certain actions to be morally right or wrong regardless of when these actions occurred, where they occurred, and also regardless of which species of intelligent agent has acted. I take these truths to be indisputable, based on our common human experience.

Biological evolution is a group of many and varied processes which act on all organisms to produce the great diversity of life on earth. These processes have operated on life in dramatically different ways depending on the particular time in earth’s history, the particular places where life resides, and depending on the type of organic species.

I take it that when a person says, “Evolution is the source of moral values,” they are saying that the process of evolution has produced particular bio-chemical brain states in human beings that we identify as moral values and duties. So, here are the problems for those who want to claim that biological evolution is the ground or source of transcendent moral values.

With regard to time, the very word “evolution” entails change over time. A thing could not be said to evolve if it stayed exactly the same forever. Evolution, then, is working to modify and change all organisms all the time. It seems to me to be completely incoherent to claim that timeless, unchanging moral values have been produced by a process which, by its very nature, is changing everything on which it operates. If we are looking for a fixed, time-independent source of moral values, I cannot see how biological evolution even remotely fits the bill.

With regard to place, the results of evolutionary processes are quite dependent on geography. This was one of Darwin’s first insights about evolution, that geography is a major factor in the way that evolution produces biological diversity. No evolutionary biologist would claim that the effects of evolutionary processes are the same across our planet, or even on other planets (assuming life exists elsewhere). But if moral values are independent of place, then how can a process which produces completely different effects from place to place possibly produce moral values?

With regard to species, let’s first look at gods, angels, and demons. Evolutionary processes simply do not apply to immaterial beings. Even an atheist who does not believe that these beings exist, would at least grant that if they did exist, biological evolution would not operate on them. But if evolution is the source of moral values, then how is it coherent to apply evolved brain states in human beings to non-human agents who themselves never evolved?

What about intelligent aliens? An evolutionist would say that aliens, if they existed, did evolve through biological processes, but there is a different problem here. How in the world does it make sense to apply the evolved brain states of human beings to alien beings who evolved completely different brain states? It is inconceivable, given evolutionary processes alone, that alien brains would evolve the exact same moral values that human beings evolved.

As we’ve seen, though, human beings feel very natural in making moral judgments about spiritual beings and aliens alike. We all take for granted that all intelligent agents should be operating under the exact same moral principles. If evolution is the source  of moral values, then we are completely unjustified in morally judging non-human intelligent agents.

To summarize, evolutionary processes are totally and completely inadequate to ground moral values that transcend time, place, and species. If evolution were truly the ground of moral values, then we would only be justified in judging the actions of other members of our human species who live at the same time and place as we do. Since none of us restrict our moral judgments in that way, then clearly evolution cannot be the source of moral values.

Morality

Why Is a Transcendent Moral Standard Necessary? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Picking up the argument from part 1, let’s recap. When we make moral judgments, we just take for granted that our judgments apply regardless of time period, place, or even species. Another way to say this is that our moral judgments transcend time, place, and species.

If this is true, then it seems to follow that the moral values to which we appeal when we make moral judgments must also transcend time, place, and species. If not, then our moral judgments would be nonsensical.

If moral values are dependent upon time periods, then we could not possibly make moral judgments that cross time periods, for each time period would be characterized by a different set of moral values.

For example, perhaps a moral value of ancient Rome was that women do not have the same legal rights as men. But today, at least in western civilization, we believe that men and women should have the same legal rights. If moral values are time dependent, then we cannot rationally criticize ancient Rome’s mistreatment of women.

Likewise, if moral values are dependent on place, then I, as an American, could not possibly make moral judgments about the actions of people living in places outside the US. I cannot criticize China or North Korea for human rights abuses, because they possess a different set of moral values than mine. To compare American values to Chinese values would be comparing apples to oranges.

If moral values are based solely upon human nature, then we could not possibly make moral judgments about intelligent, non-human agents. For example, criticizing the God of the Bible for acting immorally would be totally irrational if moral values were tied solely to human nature.

If aliens ever populated the earth and forced humans to be involuntary slaves, we could not complain that they are acting immorally toward us, as they would be working with a different set of moral values than ours. We might claim that we don’t like the way they’re treating us, but we could not say that they are acting immorally.

It seems, then, that if we take our common, every-day moral judgments seriously, we must posit a set of moral values that transcends time, place, and species. Any ontological theory which claims that the source of moral values is tied to time, place, or the human species would fail to account for the way we make moral judgments, a serious problem that should cause us to abandon that theory.

Morality

Why Is a Transcendent Moral Standard Necessary? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

When we humans make moral judgments, when we call some activity morally good or bad, we think that our judgment is universal, that it transcends time, place, and even our own human species. Let me explain each one in turn.

With regard to time, we humans believe that it is perfectly reasonable and normal for us to judge moral actions that occurred in the past. In fact, we routinely criticize the moral actions of our ancestors.

We condemn the Nazis for what they did 70 years ago. We decry American slave owners who lived  200 years ago. We excoriate ancient Romans of 2000 years ago for the unequal treatment of women. We morally reject the killing of women and children in military campaigns led by Bronze Age armies (4000 years ago).

More examples could be given, but hopefully you see the point. Most of us just naturally criticize immoral behavior, regardless of when it occurred. We believe that our judgments are timeless.

With regard to place, we humans believe that it is perfectly reasonable and normal for us to judge moral actions that occur in different places than where we live. Institutions like the United Nations simply assume that moral judgments are applicable to all member nations. There are not generally different moral standards applied to each different nation; they are all expected to uphold the same human rights.

When I, as an American living in the state of North Carolina, read about actions committed in other places in the world, I don’t hesitate to make moral judgments. When China imprisons political dissidents, I condemn them. When North Korea starves its people, I react with moral outrage.

Where an immoral action occurs is simply not normally taken into consideration by most of us. Murder and rape are wrong no matter where they occur.

With regard to our species, we humans believe that it is perfectly reasonable and normal for us to judge the moral actions of creatures with intellect and free will, but which are not human – beings who do not share a human nature with us.

Throughout human history, gods, angels, demons, and spirits have all been subjected to moral rebuke. The ancient Greeks routinely judged the acts of their pantheon of gods as moral or immoral. Christians have always praised the moral activity of angels and condemned the moral activity of demons. Non-Christian skeptics routinely denounce the alleged immoral activity of the Christian God.

Leaving aside gods, it also seems natural that we would hold alien beings who are intelligent and possess free will to our moral standards. Imagine that an intelligent alien race landed on earth and began herding together humans so that they could be used as slaves. Would we not condemn this activity as immoral?

The sci-fi genre has played on this assumption for decades. There have been countless books and movies that portray hostile alien beings inflicting damage on human beings. When those aliens are portrayed as intelligent beings capable of exercising free will, the human characters almost always morally rebuke the actions of the alien beings.

It seems, then, that our human moral judgments are routinely applied to intelligent, free beings that are non-human.

In part 2, we will pick up the argument from here. We will look at how our every-day moral judgments demand a transcendent set of moral values.