Atheism, Morality, Skeptics

If There Is No God, Why Be Good? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In Dawkins’s next chapter, “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist” he “exposes” the Bible’s moral commands to be largely immoral and hopelessly outdated.  What the reader will find in this chapter is Dawkins riffing on how morally backward the Bible is.  In fact, Dawkins concludes that “those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it.”  Scriptural moral teachings, “if followed through religiously . . . , encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern person, whether religious or not, would find—I can put it no more gently—obnoxious.”

What are these “obnoxious” biblical passages that Dawkins highlights?  If you’ve ever conversed with a skeptic before, the list is fairly standard.  He starts with the Noahic Flood, then moves to the story of Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah, the story of the Levite concubine in Judges 19, the stories of Abraham lying about Sarah being his wife, the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac, and so forth and so on.

Dawkins also makes sure that his readers understand that the unpleasantness of the Bible carries over to the New Testament as well.  Dawkins accuses Jesus of teaching poor family values and God of sado-masochism.  Why?  Because “God incarnated himself as a man, Jesus, in order that he should be tortured and executed in atonement for the hereditary sin of Adam.”

Dawkins chronicles several other flaws of biblical moral teaching with the overall purpose of proving the Bible to be a complete disaster for moral instruction.  Again, none of these accusations are new to Dawkins.  I had personally seen almost all of them before ever reading The God Delusion.

If you’ll recall, we started out with a question that we hoped Dawkins would answer (hint: the title of the blog post).  Now we finally get to the payoff.  At the end of his biblical shop of horrors, Dawkins finally concludes his analysis of the question, “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”  Here is his summary:

This chapter began by showing that we do not—even the religious among us—ground our morality in holy books, no matter what we may fondly imagine. How, then, do we decide what is right and what is wrong? No matter how we answer that question, there is a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong: a consensus that prevails surprisingly widely. The consensus has no obvious connection with religion. It extends, however, to most religious people, whether or not they think their morals come from scripture. With notable exceptions such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people pay lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles. The majority of us don’t cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said; we pay our taxes; we don’t cheat, don’t kill, don’t commit incest, don’t do things to others that we would not wish done to us. Some of these good principles can be found in holy books, but buried alongside much else that no decent person would wish to follow: and the holy books do not supply any rules for distinguishing the good principles from the bad.

There you have it.  Dawkins’ answer to the question, “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?” is to say that there just is a wide consensus on morality.  Based on that consensus, we can come up with our own morality and, even more importantly to Dawkins, we do not need a holy book to tell us what to do.  That’s pretty much it.

Do you feel cheated?  Do you feel like he didn’t answer the question at all?  Join the club.  In the third post of this series, I will analyze Dawkins’ arguments to see where he went wrong.

Atheism, Morality, Skeptics

If There Is No God, Why Be Good? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, there is a section entitled “If there is no God, why be good?”  I eagerly devoured this section as I sincerely wanted to see what answer Dawkins would give.  After all, he is the most prominent intellectual atheist in the world today, right?  What did he say?

First, he addressed the alleged Christian claim that the only reason anyone acts morally is for fear of divine retribution.  If you take God’s punishments away, everyone goes bad.  Dawkins points out to Christians: “If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good.”

By Dawkins’s understanding of the Christian view of morality, we need God to scare us into behaving, and if belief in God were to disappear, every person would immediately cease doing good.  Dawkins thinks this view is obviously wrong.  He explains:

It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness.

According to Dawkins, Christians assert that without a person actively believing in God, they would do nothing good.  He then provides some brief statistical evidence to illustrate that religious people don’t always act very morally (it’s only a couple paragraphs that are meant to get this simple point across).

After “proving” God isn’t needed to motivate moral behavior, Dawkins quickly moves to another alleged Christian argument.  He imagines a Christian apologist saying the following:

Wherever the motive to be good comes from, without God there would be no standard for deciding what is good. We could each make up our own definition of good, and behave accordingly. Moral principles that are based only upon religion (as opposed to, say, the ‘golden rule’, which is often associated with religions but can be derived from elsewhere) may be called absolutist. Good is good and bad is bad, and we don’t mess around deciding particular cases by whether, for example, somebody suffers. My religious apologist would claim that only religion can provide a basis for deciding what is good.

Dawkins is claiming that Christians believe that a person can only decide what is right or wrong by reading the Bible, a holy book which issues absolute moral commands.  Without a book like the Bible, there would be no way to decide between right and wrong.  Dawkins then wonders whether it is necessary for moral laws to be absolute.

To examine that question, Dawkins briefly introduces Immanuel Kant, a philosopher who tried to explain absolute moral duties without God.  Dawkins isn’t overly impressed with Kant’s attempt and admits that “it is tempting to agree with my hypothetical apologist that absolutist morals are usually driven by religion.”  Dawkins quickly adds, however, that “morals do not have to be absolute” and so ends the section of his book entitled “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”

Here is where Dawkins has taken the argument so far.  He has demonstrated that religious people are often immoral, which defeats the Christian claim that believing in God motivates morality.  He then stated that Christians believe that the only way a person can decide between right and wrong is by following the absolute moral commands of the Bible.  Dawkins leaves the argument at this point and invites the reader to continue to the next book chapter where he will address the subject of whether the Bible can be successfully used as a source of absolute moral commands.

In part 2 of this post, we will examine the next chapter, entitled “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist,” to see how Dawkins answers the question, “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”

Philosophy, Theology

Who Is God? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this post, we looked at Edward Feser’s first 2 gradations of conceptions of God.  In this second part, we will finish looking at the last three gradations and than talk about why this is important.

Grade 3: God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated.  The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops.

None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense.  Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He  is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person.  But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc.  Such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.

According to Feser, “Grade 3 is the conception of classical philosophical theology: of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other such thinkers.”  Grade 3 captures Aquinas’s doctrine of analogous language to describe God.  “God is not personal, or good, or powerful, or intelligent in the same sense in which a human being is, but He can nevertheless correctly be described in these terms if they are understood analogously.”

Grade 4: God as understood by someone who has had a mystical experience of the sort Aquinas had.

Here, Feser is referring to an experience that Aquinas reported late in life where he experienced God in a deeply profound way that made him feel like all his previous conceptions of God were totally inadequate.

Grade 5: God as [those in heaven] know him now, i.e., as known in the beatific vision attained by the blessed after death.

Feser adds that grades 4 and 5 are only attainable if “granted supernaturally by God,” while grade 3 is “about the best we can do with unaided reason.”

So where does this leave us?  I think I want to address two audiences.  First, since Grade 3 is the highest Christian conception of God without being granted a supernatural vision from God, it follows that Grade 3 is the conception that skeptics should address when they are challenging the attributes of the Christian God.  A skeptic who is constantly challenging grade 1 or grade 2 is not dealing with the best of Christian philosophy and theology; he is ducking the fight to score easy points.

Second, since Grade 3 is the highest Christian conception of God without being granted a supernatural vision from God, it follows that Grade 3 is the conception that every Christian adult should attempt to understand.  Merely stopping at grade 1 or grade 2 is an intellectual cop-out.  Grade 3 stretches human reason about as far as it can go and so it represents the apex of Christian theology.  That’s where all Christians should want to be, at the apex.

Philosophy, Theology

Who Is God? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Is God a bearded old man living in the sky somewhere or is he completely unknowable?  Both of these conceptions of God are held by various religious believers.  When presenting a Christian conception of God on this blog, we have striven to follow the traditional, mainstream views of the church as elucidated by Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, and similar thinkers.  If I were a skeptic of Christianity and wanted to critique the Christian conception of God, this is the conception I would address.

Edward Feser, in his book The Last Superstition, laments that very often skeptics do not even attempt to engage the traditional conception of God, but a much simpler conception.  To help readers understand his point, he offers five gradations of conceptions of God, from simple to more complete.

Grade 1: God is literally an old man with a white beard, a kind if stern wizard-like being with very human thoughts and motivations who lives in a place called Heaven, which is like the places we know except for being very far away and impossible to get to except through magical means.

Feser notes that Grade 1 “represents a child’s conception of God, and perhaps that of some uneducated adults.”  This does not mean that Grade 1 is totally without merit.  “Some individuals, and certainly young children, find it difficult to understand God in anything but grade 1 terms, and such imagery can be more or less useful in giving them at least a rudimentary idea of Him.”

Grade 2: God doesn’t really have a bodily form, and his thoughts and motivations are in many respects very different from ours.  He is an immaterial object or substance which has existed forever, and (perhaps) pervades all space.  Still, he is, somehow, a person like we are, only vastly more intelligent, powerful, and virtuous, and in particular without our physical and moral limitations.  He made the world the way a carpenter builds a house, as an independent object that would carry on even if he were to “go away” from it, but he nevertheless may decide to intervene in its operations from time to time.

Feser explains that “Grade 2 represents the conception of some educated religious believers, of popular apologetics, and of arguments like Paley’s ‘Design argument.'”  Grade 2 is better than Grade 1 because it eliminates the “limitations inherent in physical imagery, which cannot apply to God.”

There are are three more grades to go and we will cover them in part 2 of the post.

Difficult Bible Passages, Skeptics

How Do You Prove a Contradiction in the Bible?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

As I’ve corresponded with skeptics of Christianity over the years, I have been amazed at what I call hyper-skeptics.  These are people who throw the word “contradiction” around when they should really use the word “difference.”

A contradiction occurs between two statements when one statement is “A is B” and the other statement is “A is not B.”  A has to mean the exact same thing at the exact same time in the exact same sense in both statements for there to be a contradiction, and B has to mean the exact same thing at the exact same time in the exact same sense in both statements for there to be a contradiction.  If there is not total and complete identity between A in both statements and B in both statements, there is no contradiction.

Hyper-skeptics often, however, call two statements in the Bible contradictory without ever showing that A and B are identical in both statements, but this is what they must do before claiming a contradiction.  Or to put it another way, hyper-skeptics demand that if two witnesses report the same crime, they must report the facts of the crime in exactly the same way, down to the most minute detail.  Any deviation between the two reports at all renders a verdict of contradiction.  The problem is that two different reports about an event do not constitute a contradiction unless the two different reports make opposite claims (i.e., A is B and A is not B).  Most of the time, the hyper-skeptic fails to show this.

C. Michael Patton of the Parchment and Pen Blog has obviously seen hyper-skeptics in action; he wrote a blog post recently that shed much light on the issue for those of you who are interested.  It’s one of those posts that I wish I had written after I read it.  Take a look and see what you think.

 

 

Atheism

Why Talk So Much About Atheism?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you’ve probably noticed that there are quite a few blog posts dedicated to discussions of atheism (there is no god or gods) and the philosophy of naturalism (all that exists is found in the material universe).  Atheism and naturalism generally go together, although not always.

Some of you may wonder why I (Bill) should spend so much time talking about atheistic naturalism when less than 5% of the population explicitly subscribes to this worldview.  Most of us don’t personally know practicing, outspoken atheists, so why bother addressing this worldview so often?  That’s a good question and one that I’ve asked myself.

The answer is that although the general populations of Europe and North America (the areas of the world that impact American culture the most) are not explicitly atheist, the percentages go way up for those who inhabit the highest levels in academia.  The academic world’s embrace of atheistic naturalism is unique among all the challengers to Christianity.

This may just confirm for some of you that academics are “not right in the head” or “out in left field” and that we should just ignore them.  While some of them may be like that, we ignore them at our peril.  I firmly believe that the ideas that are imbibed in the universities among academics eventually make their way to the general population.  History has proven this out time and again.

The battle of worldviews is being fought at our western universities and the major contenders are Christian theism and atheistic naturalism.  As a Christian apologist, I feel drawn to this battle as I consider it to be the heavyweight bout.

Now, I am not saying that we should ignore other worldviews that attack Christianity.  On the contrary, on this blog we have addressed many other worldviews, especially Mormonism, as my co-blogger Darrell is a former Mormon and understands that worldview extremely well.  I am merely saying that atheistic naturalism deserves a lot of ink because of the devotion of many western intellectuals.

Even though our friends and neighbors are rarely hard core atheists, atheistic naturalism impacts our culture often in ways we don’t even realize.  There are more and more people who are practical atheists, even if they don’t call themselves atheists.  They live as if God does not exist, even though they would not say they don’t believe in God if they were asked.  Our friends and neighbors are taking in naturalistic ideas without even knowing it.

How are they taking in these ideas?  Through the pop culture.  How is pop culture picking up on these ideas?  From western intellectuals.  We cannot just ignore the academic world.  We owe it to our fellow man to counter atheistic naturalism.  C. S. Lewis, as always, is ready with a helpful bit of advice.  “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

Historical Christ, Resurrection

Was Individual Resurrection a Common Belief in the Ancient World? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this post, Tim Keller presented historian N. T. Wright’s analysis of Jewish and Greco-Roman attitudes toward an individual resurrection. Would the ancient world have accepted the story of Jesus’s resurrection without serious skepticism? According to Keller, Wright’s research indicates that the Greco-Roman world would not have been at all receptive.

But what about Jews in particular? Keller mines Wright’s historical research to further examine two skeptical theories which attempt to explain how the story of Jesus’s resurrection could have originated.

Over the years, skeptics about the resurrection have proposed that the followers of Jesus may have had hallucinations, that they may have imagined him appearing to them and speaking to them. This assumes that their master’s resurrection was imaginable for his Jewish followers, that it was an option in their worldview. It was not.

Others have put forth the conspiracy theory, that the disciples stole the body and claimed he was alive to others. This assumes that the disciples would expect other Jews to be open to the belief that an individual could be raised from the dead. But none of this is possible. The people of that time would have considered a bodily resurrection to be as impossible as the people of our own time, though for different reasons.

Keller notes that in the first century there were many other Jews who claimed to be the Messiah, and who were executed for those claims. What role did resurrection play in those cases? Here is Wright:

In not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew better. Resurrection was not a private event. Jewish revolutionaries whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest themselves, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was.

There is only one Jew who claimed to be Messiah and whose followers proclaimed that he rose from the dead after he was executed. Perhaps they proclaimed it because it actually happened.

Historical Christ, Resurrection

Was Individual Resurrection a Common Belief in the Ancient World? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

A common claim of resurrection skeptics is that the people who lived in first century Palestine and the surrounding Roman Empire would believe just about anything.  They would have easily embraced the story of Jesus’ resurrection without thinking twice.  So, for the early proponents of Christianity who thought they really saw Jesus alive after his crucifixion, it was relatively straightforward to spread the story.  After all, in the ancient world everything is believable.

Are the skeptics right?  Historian N. T. Wright has challenged the idea that the ancient world of Jesus’ day would have easily believed the story of Jesus’ resurrection.  Tim Keller, in The Reason for God, describes Wright’s research: “N. T. Wright does an extensive survey of the non-Jewish thought of the first-century Mediterranean world, both east and west, and reveals that the universal view of the people of that time was that a bodily resurrection was impossible.”

Wright first examines the dominant Greco-Roman worldview of the day.

In Greco-Roman thinking, the soul or spirit was good and the physical and material world was weak, corrupt, and defiling. To them the physical, by definition, was always falling apart and therefore salvation was conceived as liberation from the body. In this worldview resurrection was not only impossible, but totally undesirable. No soul, having gotten free from its body, would ever want it back. Even those who believed in reincarnation understood that the return to embodied life meant that the soul was not yet out of its prison. The goal was to get free of the body forever. Once your soul is free of its body, a return to re-embodied life was outlandish, unthinkable, and impossible.

But what about the Jews of Jesus’s day?  Were they expecting an individual resurrection, such as Jesus’s?

The report of Jesus’s resurrection would have also have been unthinkable to the Jews. Unlike the Greeks, the Jews saw the material and physical world as good. Death was not seen as liberation from the material world but as a tragedy. By Jesus’s day many Jews had come to hope that some day in the future there would be a bodily resurrection of all the righteous, when God renewed the entire world and removed all suffering and death.  The resurrection, however, was merely one part of the complete renewal of the whole world, according to Jewish teaching. The idea of an individual being resurrected, in the middle of history, while the rest of the world continued on burdened by sickness, decay, and death, was inconceivable.

How would a first century Jew have responded to the claims of Jesus’s resurrection?

If someone had said to any first-century Jew, “So-and-so has been resurrected from the dead!” the response would be, “Are you crazy? How could that be? Has disease and death ended? Is true justice established in the world? Has the wolf lain down with the lamb? Ridiculous!” The very idea of an individual resurrection would have been as impossible to imagine to a Jew as to a Greek.

Keller concludes his reporting of Wright’s historical analysis in part 2 of this post.  See you then!

Historical Christ, Resurrection

What Can Historians Tell Us About Jesus’ Resurrection?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Bart Ehrman and Mike Licona locked horns once again over the resurrection of Jesus on the Unbelievable? podcast last April.  The two scholars discussed various elements of the New Testament that historians could use to reconstruct the life of Jesus for much of the radio show.  In the final segment of the debate, however, Ehrman once again charged that historians cannot tell us whether Jesus was resurrected – the conclusion that Jesus was resurrected is simply not one that the methods of historical analysis will allow.

Ehrman has made this charge before.  I witnessed him say the same thing at a debate between him and Licona two years ago.  This time, though, some nuances of his position appeared.  When Ehrman argues that historians cannot conclude that the resurrection of Jesus occurred, we have to ask what he means by resurrection.  Ehrman seems to mean the following: Jesus died and then a few days later was supernaturally re-animated by the Christian God in a miraculous act.

Why does Ehman say that historians cannot draw this conclusion?  As far as I could tell, it is because of the words supernaturally, Christian God, and miraculous.  Ehrman seems to be saying that these are theological words, not historical words.  They are words used by people of faith, not by professional historians.

So how did Licona respond?  He agreed to define the resurrection of Jesus as follows: Jesus died and then a few days later came back to life.  Notice that Licona completely dropped the theological words that seemed to give Ehrman so much heartburn.  Now the two scholars could move on and talk about the historical evidence supporting the non-theological resurrection.  Unfortunately, and much to my disappointment, the show ran out of time and the new discussion was never pursued.

What’s the point in recounting their conversation?  First, it cleared up what Ehrman’s real beef was.  Second, it gives me an occasion to call for Ehrman and his admirers to drop this approach, as the point has been made.  I, like Licona, am glad to use the non-theological definition of the resurrection in order to advance the historical debate.  Let’s get on with it.

Atheism, Evolution, Philosophy

How Can We Trust Science in Richard Dawkins’ Middle World?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the last chapter of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, he introduces the metaphor of Middle World.  The idea of Middle World is that the human sensory organs have only evolved in order to help humans survive in a world of medium-sized objects moving at relatively slow speeds (compared to the speed of light).  Dawkins observes that “our brains are themselves evolved organs: on-board computers, evolved to help us survive in a world — I shall use the name Middle World — where the objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light.”

We are ill-equipped to deal with the vast distances to other galaxies or the sub-atomic world.  In fact, the way we perceive objects is misleading.

Science has taught us, against all evolved intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really composed almost entirely of empty space. The familiar illustration represents the nucleus of an atom as a fly in the middle of a sports stadium. The next atom is right outside the stadium. The hardest, solidest, densest rock, then, is ‘really’ almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so far apart that they shouldn’t count.

Our senses, then, do not give us an accurate picture of reality.  According to Dawkins, “Our brains are not equipped to imagine what it would be like to be a neutrino passing through a wall, in the vast interstices of which that wall ‘really’ consists. Nor can our understanding cope with what happens when things move at close to the speed of light.”

If Dawkins had stopped at this point, all would be well.  Nobody would argue that we are ill-equipped to see sub-atomic particles, that our sensory organs are limited.  Dawkins doesn’t stop here, though, because he wants to hammer home just how limited we are.  What we really perceive as reality, argues Dawkins, is only a mental model.

What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data—a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of that model depends on the kind of animal we are.

Once the mental model concept is introduced, it is my contention that Dawkins ends up eviscerating our very ability to know anything about reality.  He is arguing that we really don’t know what reality is like because we only have the mental models that our species has evolved, and those mental models have proven to be incomplete and inaccurate time and again. In fact, humans are constantly surprised by just how wrong our models are.

But wait!  There is a savior that will rescue us from our ignorance.  Dawkins elates, “Science flings open the narrow window [of Middle World] through which we are accustomed to viewing the spectrum of possibilities. We are liberated by calculation and reason to visit regions of possibility that had once seemed out of bounds or inhabited by dragons.”

How can this be, though?  On the atheist worldview, do not science, calculation, and reason all depend completely on the severely limited human brain which has consistently given us inaccurate mental models of reality?  How is it that the very organ which has constantly misled us about reality will be our savior?  Isn’t this the classic case of the blind leading the blind?

Dawkins, like most atheists, just assumes that human reason magically works, that science marches inexorably to the Truth. But on the atheist view, reason and the ability to do science, all comes from the evolved human brain, an organ that, according to Dawkins, can’t be trusted to see the world as it really is, an organ that fools us.  There is no soul, no rational God that guarantees that our reason actually works.  So, I ask, how can we trust science in Richard Dawkins’ Middle World?

A Christian Apologetics Blog