Humans of New York and Philosophy: How to See a Face

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at AndPhilosophy.com.

By Roberto Sirvent and Duncan Reyburn

Even in our image-saturated world, the face remains the primary signal of identity. From infancy, the face initiates that all-important moment of genuine recognition. We find ourselves mirrored in the lives of others as they welcome us into the world. “Meaning is a physiognomy,” says Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations; which is to say that the face is a gateway not only to understanding people but to actually understanding anything at all. Even our idioms express this: we face up to the truth or even face the music; we can put on a brave face, lose face, or save face; and we consider the face of things even while we recognize that there is more to everything than what the face on its own reveals.

The face is a challenge to quite a lot of the philosophy that can be overly preoccupied with the communion of mind and mind and of thought with thought. The face is a stark reminder of our raw materiality. Those of us who would like to live in a bubble detached from our flesh and blood have only to look at the faces of others to discover that life in a bubble simply will not work. We have to face the facts.

Read the full article at AndPhilosophy.com.

Apologetics and the Fulfillment of Prophecies

Now a certain Jew named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things of the Lord, though he knew only the baptism of John. So he began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Aquila and Priscilla heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. And when he desired to cross to Achaia, the brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to receive him; and when he arrived, he greatly helped those who had believed through grace; for he vigorously refuted the Jews publicly, showing from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ. – Acts 18:24-28

There’s a debate about apologetic methodology between evidentialists and presuppositionalists concerning the role of scripture in arguing for the faith. Although my proclivities run more in the direction of evidentialism, I concede there’s something of an important exception—a case where explicit appeal to scripture is altogether appropriate and not at all problematically circular. Normally the problem with this approach, in trying to convince someone that God exists, is that the person would obviously be skeptical of scripture as authoritative revelation. But the assumption this is always the case is largely because apologetics today is usually thought of in terms of convincing the skeptic, the unbeliever. Early Christians, however, were rarely confronted with that particular challenge. Atheists were rare. In fact, it was common that they themselves were called atheists because, in their exclusivism, they vociferously denied any and all of the state-sanctioned divinities in affirming the one true God. It would have been more than a little ironic if they were additionally tasked with taking on atheists!

Almost all of the earliest Christians were Jews, and initially their outreach was mainly to Jews. This would change in due course, but their audience early on was most often a Jewish one, and, for quite a while, they were wildly successful. Such outreach typically took the form of appealing to scripture—specifically, the Old Testament. (The New Testament hadn’t yet been written.) And quite often this took the form of early Christian witnesses, evangelists, and apologists trying to show that Jesus was the promised Messiah. The Jews had the expectation of a coming Messiah, and the Old Testament featured quite a number of prophecies about this figure. Steeped in the Old Testament themselves, the early apologists constructed their case for Christ by arguing that Jesus was the promised one, the expected Messiah.

After Saul’s conversion, for example, we’re told that he “increased the more in strength, and confounded the Jews which dwelt at Damascus, proving that this is the very Christ” (Acts 9:22). Luke tells us that after his resurrection Jesus appeared to a few disciples on their way to Emmaus, saying, “’O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken, ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter his glory?’ And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:26-27). Note in the epigraph that Apollos vigorously “showed from the scriptures that Jesus is the Christ” (Acts 18:28).

Those for whom the Old Testament little matters are usually and understandably unpersuaded by appealing to it, but the world contains billions of people from the Abrahamic faiths who claim to take the Old Testament seriously indeed. This may not exactly be an instance of presuppositionalist apologetics, but pointing to fulfillment of prophecies is an entirely legitimate and demonstrably effective apologetic, especially for those who claim to believe the Old Testament.

To this end, here’s just a smattering of examples for those who’d like to become better equipped to do just this.

Micah 5:2 says, “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.” The Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem. According to the New Testament account of the apostle Matthew, Joseph and Mary were living in Bethlehem in the southern region of Judea at the time of Jesus’ birth and later moved to Nazareth in the northern Galilee region.

Genesis 49:10 says, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” The Messiah would be from the tribe of Judah. In Matthew 1:1–6 and Luke 3:31–34 of the New Testament, Jesus is described as a member of the tribe of Judah by lineage. Revelation 5:5 also mentions an apocalyptic vision of the Lion of the tribe of Judah.

Zechariah 9:9 says, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.” The Messiah would present himself by riding on an ass. Matthew 21:6-7, for one example, says the disciples did as Jesus commanded them, and “brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon,” as Jesus then entered Jerusalem.

Psalm 22 describes how the Messiah would be tortured. Numerous vivid passages are uncanny in their similarities to sufferings Christ endured. Among them, “they pierced my hands and my feet” (16b) and “they part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture” (18). John 19:23-24 relates what happened after the crucifixion of Christ: “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his coat: now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout. They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did.” Luke 24:39 features the resurrected Jesus saying, “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see—for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have."

Daniel 9:24-27 says the Messiah would arrive before the destruction of the (Second) Temple. In 66 CE the Jewish population rebelled against the Roman Empire. Four years later, in 70 CE, Roman legions under Titus retook and destroyed much of Jerusalem and the Second Temple.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12 says the Messiah’s life would include suffering, silence at his arrest and trial, and death and burial in a rich man’s tomb. Origen recounted using Isaiah 53 in a discussion with some rabbis, who responded that the prophecies referred to the whole people as though of a single individual, since they were scattered in the dispersion and smitten. So Origen asked which person could be referred to in the texts: “This man bears our sins and suffers pain for us,” and “but he was wounded for our transgressions and he was made sick for our iniquities,” and “by his stripe we were healed.”

This is just a small sample. Passages from Ezekiel (37:26-27), Haggai (2:6-9), and Hosea (11:1) could be adduced, not to mention other passages from Isaiah (7:14; 8:23-9:2; 9:5-6; 11:12), Jeremiah (31:15), and the Psalms (2, 16, 34, 69, 110), and more besides. In his book Choosing Your Faith, Mark Mittelberg writes that there’s no less than something on the order of 48 messianic prophecies that were fulfilled in the person of Jesus, some with terrific specificity that defies naturalistic explanation.

Michael Green, Anglican theologian and priest, prolific author, and Senior Research Fellow and Head of Evangelism and Apologetics at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, recalls talking to an intelligent Jewish woman interested in discussing Christianity. “I showed her from the Old Testament Scriptures how closely Jesus had fulfilled the varied hopes of the prophets. She believed, and was baptized. . . . the zeal of my friend to reach others with the good news she had come to recognize for herself was no less reminiscent of the Acts of the Apostles. She studied Greek and Hebrew, with the intention of working full time among Jews.”

Green quotes her as writing him, “You know, it is so blatantly clear that Jesus died for our sins on the cross and rose from the grave—I just long to get it across to others, especially to my own people. I am longing to work among them and show them their Messiah.” [Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 120.]

Jesus, the Bible, and Moral Knowledge

Introduction

Humanity can have some moral knowledge without encountering the written Word of God. People throughout the world know that the proposition, “it always wrong to torture children for fun” is true. The Bible itself says that at least some moral knowledge is available through general revelation (Romans 1:18; 2:14). However, this moral knowledge is deficient in several ways and requires the Bible for completion. I will argue that though there is natural moral knowledge, that it is deficient in its scope and authority and that the Bible, as the written Word of God, meets the conditions required for moral knowledge. And finally, I will specify how the Bible supplements the moral knowledge available through general revelation. My suggestion is that the Bible confirms what is properly known by nature and “pure’ reason, it corrects moral misunderstandings in moral knowledge, and it calls humanity to go beyond what can be naturally known to a complete vision of the moral life in Christ. The moral knowledge available in the Bible has the power it does precisely because it is the written Word of God under Jesus Christ for he is Lord and thus has the power to impose upon us moral duties and because as man he reveals, enacts, and makes possible eudaimonia or the good life. So why is the Bible necessary to compete our knowledge of the human good and human moral obligations?

Epistemology and Moral Knowledge

Though this question seems straightforward, it raises difficult and complex issues in epistemology. The question assumes that the Bible is a source of a particular kind of knowledge, moral knowledge, and that it is a superior source than any other available to humankind. This claim is controversial because many doubt the Bible’s credibility as a source of knowledge in general (the claim is that it is merely the work of men or that is has been severely compromised in its transmission), but many more doubt that adopting the ethics of the Bible would count as a gain in human moral knowledge. For example, Peter Enns argues that the morality of the Old Testament does not reflect the will of a good God, but merely adapts the “accepted cultural norms of the day.”[1] The Bible teaches a Bronze Age ethic which should be discarded in light of human moral progress. Not only is the Bible merely the work of men, it is the work of morally unenlightened ones; that is the idea. I will return to assess this claim later, but Enns’ view serves as an important and popular foil for the thesis I am proposing. What sort of argument can be given to support the idea that the Bible is a source of moral knowledge? Here the work of Karl Barth will provide some illumination.

Karl Barth argued that the “The Bible is the Word of God.”[2] Often, Barth is interpreted as meaning that the Bible becomes the Word of God only when God elects to use it as it is proclaimed in the Church. Further, the Bible itself does not communicate the Word of God, but rather, it is merely the vehicle by which divine encounter occurs (a view called “occasionalism”). However, John Morrison suggests that this view fundamentally misunderstands Barth. According to Morrison, Barth holds that the Word of God “always has the character of an event, and Scripture thus ‘becomes’ in/as an event.”[3] The “event” is God’s decision to speak in and through the Bible; this speaking is the result of divine decision and is “ever present.”[4] It is in this way that Barth identifies the Bible with the Word of God. But why should we think Barth’s account is correct?

Barth does not think that the veracity of the Bible can be established on the basis of authority external to it. Man does not grasp the Bible, “the Bible has grasped at man.”[5] What Barth is proposing is a Trinitarian worldview where God the Father speaks through his Son, the Word, and this Word is applied or realized by the power of the Holy Spirit. Man is a finite and limited creature and so knowledge of God comes only by divine grace. If this worldview is assumed, it does not make sense to try to establish the authority and veracity of the Bible as the Word of God on the basis on anything outside of the Bible.[6] Any endeavor like this would be contradictory to Barth’s view. More specifically, Barth’s answer to the question of how can know that the Bible is the Word of God is that he can know this because it is actually the case: “The possibility of revelation is actually to be read off from its reality in Jesus Christ. Therefore at bottom the individual explanation to which we now proceed can be only a reading and exegesis of this reality.”[7]

A superficial reading of Barth might lead to his dismissal as a fideist, but this would be a mistake. Showing why this would be a mistake will require the defense of another contentious thesis: all epistemological positions are inherently theological. If, for example, we adopt a view like Cartesian foundationalism, then we have made certain assumptions that have theological significance. Anthropologically, we have made assumptions about the kinds of things we are, along with the limits of our cognitive powers, and our relation to the world. Cosmologically, we have assumed that world is the sort place that is knowable and comprehensible, even if the comprehensibility extends only to our own thoughts. Morally, we have assumed that we have certain intellectual duties that must be fulfilled, namely we must establish all our beliefs on the basis of what can be deductively ascertained from within the mind of a human individual. In other words, epistemological methods imply a worldview or a view about ultimate reality and human nature. This is perhaps why Calvin argues that “Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.”[8] These issues are inherently theological and so one cannot help but beg the question for a worldview to some extent. Considering this, Barth should not be understood as a fideist, but as person who takes seriously the connection of epistemology and worldview. Barth has an honesty and clarity about his assumptions and their implications that few alternative views could claim.

But if epistemology and worldview share this deep connection, then how can we discern what account of our moral knowledge is correct in light of the challenges coming from scholars like Peter Enns? What I propose, then, is that the way to determine whether the Bible is necessary to complete our knowledge of the good and the right, is to apply two kinds of tests. First, is the worldview which claims to account for moral knowledge internally coherent? Does it make any assumptions that conflict with each other or its conclusions? Second, what account of moral knowledge best explains our most deeply held moral intuitions? If, for example, we find that the biblical vision of shalom more deeply resonates with us than Aristotle’s vision of the polis, then that is a reason to think that the biblical account is more likely the correct one.

Non-Trinitarian Accounts of Moral Knowledge

There are a variety of non-Trinitarian accounts of moral knowledge, but perhaps the most popular and viable are Aristotelian and Kantian accounts. Before briefly laying out these accounts and showing some of their short comings, we should note that Aristotelian and Kantian accounts have different targets. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle is not primarily concerned with spelling out the conditions for right action or the framework for moral duties. Rather, his aim is to provide an explanation of the human good.[1] What will make human beings happy; what realizes eudaimonia? Kant, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with accounting for the existence of the moral law  and its applicability to us.[2] A rough way of seeing the difference is this: Aristotle is concerned with the good and Kant is concerned with the right.[3]

Aristotle's Ethics

Aristotle begins with the a priori premise “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.”[4] Any rational endeavor seeks some good. If human beings want to live rationally, they ought to seek after the good. But what is the human good? Whatever it is, it must be something chosen for its own sake and not for the sake of something else. Aristotle thinks that only happiness (eudaimonia) meets this requirement; “happiness is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.”[5] But saying simply that “happiness is the chief good seems a platitude.”[6] Therefore, Aristotle seeks to specify exactly what characterizes happiness. Aristotle suggests that the human good consists in proper function according to a telos. What a human being is will determine what counts as proper function as well as the conditions and nature of happiness.

Aristotle thinks that the essential nature of human beings can be discerned by empirical means. Through observation, Aristotle thinks he can detect two kinds of proper function or virtue. First, one can see the difference between man and lower animals. Man possesses a rational element which beasts do not.[7] Aristotle argues that a life of contemplation is the highest good because it is “the best thing in us” and reason is either “itself divine or only the most divine element in us.”[8] The virtues that allow for full utilization of the rational faculty (contemplation) are the intellectual virtues. But in addition to these, Aristotle says there are also the ethical virtues, or virtues of character.[9] Traditionally, the Greek virtues include, according to Thomas Aquinas, “temperance, justice, prudence, and fortitude.”[10] Aristotle thinks that these virtues of character can be discerned through the “doctrine of the mean.” A virtue is the balance between two vices. Temperance, for example, is the mean between self-indulgence and insensibility.[11]  Aristotle further thinks that the human good needs the right environment. Aristotle holds that it can be observed that man flourishes best when he lives in the Greek polis. The human good also requires certain material conditions, like physical health and monetary wealth. Happiness is not merely a matter of inward reflection and self-discipline; it also requires the right physical setting.

The upshot of Aristotle’s ethic for our purposes is this: Aristotle thinks that a full account of moral knowledge is available to us through the use of common sense and empirical observation. By considering the nature of human beings and their endeavors, and by observing how humans flourish, we can determine what the human good is.

Even in this brief sketch of Aristotle’s ethic, one can see how rich and multi-valent Aristotle’s account of the human good is. It strives to include all dimensions of embodied human life, and in this way, has some advantages over more Platonic accounts. The substantial nature of Aristotle’s conclusions along with his seemingly modest epistemological commitments may be why Aristotle’s model of ethics continues to be utilized. Philippa Foot, for example, argues for a naturalistic virtue ethic that attempts to justify moral realism and moral knowledge along Aristotelian lines.[12] Erik Wielenberg in his attempt to justify value and virtue in a Godless universe, suggests that Aristotle’s ethic provides “the most powerful response” to Christian morality.[13]  For many, an Aristotelian strategy provides a promising way to account for moral knowledge outside of the Bible.

While there is much to be commended in Aristotle’s approach, like his belief in the connection of facts and values, there are still some problems. One concern is whether Aristotle’s account of virtue actually follows from his insight about human beings. Kraut suggests that Aristotle’s argument in the Nicomachean Ethics may not establish the virtues, but merely shows a reason to be virtuous: “We may conclude that Aristotle proposes flourishing as the ‘ultimate justification of morality [why we ought to be moral].’”[14] In other words, Aristotle begins with the assumption that humans ought to be moral and his project, despite his intentions, only provides motivation to be moral rather than an explanation of morality itself.  Further, Aristotle’s project begs the question about the nature of the human good and the associated virtues; these values are assumed rather than demonstrated.

John Hare brings a similar charge against eudaemonist or Aristotelian ethics.[15] His contention, following Scotus, is that the moral law, or what humans ought to do, cannot be deduced from facts about human nature. Hare’s basic contention is that Aristotle’s account of moral goodness is too narrow. One piece of evidence Hare supplies comes in the contrast of Jesus and Aristotle’s view of “competitive goods.” Aristotle often thinks of the human good as requiring wealth and power; honor and magnanimity. For one to possess these qualities, others most have them in lesser degrees; they are competitive goods. Jesus, on the other hand, advocates for the virtue of humility. This is the inversion of Aristotle’s vision of the ideal man. As MacIntyre puts it, “Aristotle would certainly not have admired Jesus Christ and he would have been horrified by St. Paul.”[16] This deep disagreement about the nature of the human good, argues Hare, highlights the inscrutability of ethical virtue from human nature.[17] What facts about human nature and how we flourish could be produced to settle the disagreement? This is one reason why Hare thinks special revelation with specific divine commands is necessary for justified moral beliefs. While Hare does not take his conclusion explicitly in this direction, one could extend his argument to say that the Word of God is necessary to supplement what we can know about the human good by reason.[18] For if divine commands are required, then the Bible would be a good place to look for those commands.

Another concern with Aristotle’s approach comes from his view of God. As mentioned above, Aristotle thought that greatest possible ways of human flourishing were intimately connected with the divine. It is not altogether clear how Aristotle conceives of this relation, however. Is contemplation the highest good simply because it is the full realization of the highest element in humanity, or because it resembles the activity of God? In support of the latter possibility, Aristotle says that the value of all things is judged by reference to “God and the good.”[19] Aristotle frames this dilemma rather directly:

It is reasonable that happiness should be god-given, and most surely god-given of all human things inasmuch as it is the best. But this question would perhaps be more appropriate to another inquiry; happiness seems, however, even if it is not god-sent but comes as a result of virtue and some process of learning or training, to be among the most godlike things; for that which is the prize and end of virtue seems to be the best thing in the world, and something godlike and blessed.[20]

Aristotle seemingly wants to gloss over the relation of God and the human good, but this relation is critical to his theory in at least two ways. First, it raises the question of the nature of goodness itself to human goodness. If God is the highest good, then should not he be the telos of humanity? If all rational endeavors pursue the good, then this question is not trivial. Second, if the human good is God-given, then what does this imply about the connection of the human telos and God’s intentions for human beings? If God is both the standard of the good and the one who gives goodness or happiness to humanity, then it would seem that the question of human virtue would be primarily theological and not philosophical (assuming there is a sharp distinction between these disciplines). Investigation into morality would be a question of who God is, what he is like, and whether or not he has revealed himself and his intentions for human beings.[21] In sum, Aristotle’s approach to ethics does not actually succeed at what it sets out to do and it leaves important theoretical questions about the nature of the good, specifically the relation of the good to God and the human telos, unanswered.

Kantian Ethics

Kant’s approach to moral knowledge is different both in its method and its goal. Kant’s epistemology assumes a split between the phenomenal and the noumenal. There is a way that things appear to us which is determined by the mind and there is a way things actually are. We do not know external objects as they are, but only as they appear to us, as they are shaped by the categories of the mind. On the other hand, Kant says, “other possible things, which are not objects of our senses, but are cogitated by the understanding alone, and call them intelligible existences (noumena).”[22] God exists in the noumenal realm and is not directly accessible to us. Considering our epistemic situation, Kant thinks that the basis of moral knowledge must be established based on “pure reason.” Moral knowledge would not be knowledge of the Platonic forms, but knowledge of the entailments of reason. Pure reason operates only the analytic and a priori; it utilizes only those things known prior to experience and that are internal to the person. Kant thinks that one can postulate the existence of noumenal objects on the basis of practical reason. If some concept known analytically requires the postulation of some noumenal object to explain its existence, then this postulation is warranted. Seemingly, Kant thinks that the notion of the moral law is an a priori concept for in The Critique of Practical Reason, it is on the assumption of existence of the moral law that Kant, by use of practical reason, establishes the reality of human free will.[23]

Kant, like Aristotle, has an important role for God. But also like Aristotle, Kant’s search for moral knowledge does not begin with God. Rather, since God is in the realm of the noumenal, Kant says he “must, therefore, abolish knowledge [of noumenal objects like God], to make room for belief [in these objects]. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the presumption that it is possible to advance in metaphysics without previous criticism, is the true source of the unbelief (always dogmatic) which militates against morality.”[24] Despite this move, Hare rightly argues that for Kant, God has three specific roles, the legislative, executive, and judicial so that for Kant “God gives us the assistance required to live according to the law. And God sees our hearts, as we do not, knows whether we are committed to obedience, and rewards us accordingly.”[25] It is based on God’s necessary judicial function that Kant develops a moral argument for God by means of practical reason. Kant held that a person was always obliged to keep the moral law. However, one’s self-interest or happiness and keeping the moral demand can seemingly conflict so that it would not be rational to follow the law. To keep this seeming contradiction from becoming actual, Kant, as a postulate of practical reason, thought that God must exist to make sure that the moral law and happiness coincide.

Kant’s understanding of human epistemological limitations shapes how he thinks of morality in general and moral knowledge in particular. The full extent of our moral obligations must be discovered a priori, without appeal to any external authority or empirical observation. According to Johnson, Kant’s method is to begin with analyzing our moral concepts, like “good will,” “moral agent,” and “obligation” and their logical relationship to one another.[26] Since the moral law should be necessary and absolute, it cannot consider any contingent features. It is these analytic considerations that lead Kant to his second formulation of the Categorical Imperative: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”[27]

This brief sketch of Kant’s account of moral knowledge does create some concern. One problem has to do with Kant’s understanding of the epistemic starting point. Hume may have awoken Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, but Kant seems to have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. Hume’s skeptical challenge leads Kant to embrace epistemological and ontological dualism, when he should have rejected the skepticism.[28] The result is the Kant believes an implicit contradiction. He says he cannot have knowledge of God, except by practical reason. But this is an a priori theological belief which is no better established than the alternative. A better response can be found in the work of Alvin Plantinga, which takes seriously the implications of the Christian worldview.[29] Kevin Diller suggests that Plantinga and Barth have similar positions on this front. When faced with the problem of skepticism, Diller argues that traditionally philosophers have seen the problem as a dilemma. Either one can embrace the skepticism or change the definition of truth and knowledge (anti-realism). Diller argues that both Barth and Plantinga “chart an escape through the horns of this dilemma by rejecting certain core epistemological assumptions of modernity. Plantinga identifies its origins in the unreasonable deontology associated with classical foundationalism. Barth heralds the pre-engaged givenness and self-grounding of divine self-revelation."[30] They, instead of buckling under the weight of modernism, opt for a critical realist position of knowledge that “strongly affirms the possibility of theological knowledge.”[31]

Here is a related problem to Kant’s view. If his ethical theory ends up affirming the necessity of God, then why would God be left out of the epistemic story? Surely, if God exists and he is personal in the way that Kant’s view requires, then perhaps he might, as Plantinga suggests, create us to know him, perhaps even in a properly basic way. Considering the earlier argument that all epistemology is inherently theological, it would seem to make Barthian and Plantingian accounts at least prima facie more plausible because they at least acknowledge the determinate relation of epistemology to worldview.

A Trinitarian Account of Moral Knowledge

Having now shown some reasons to be skeptical of Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of moral knowledge, we will now see how a Trinitarian and biblical account is superior. But first we must sketch out this Trinitarian account. A significant difference between a Trinitarian account and the other accounts concerns their respective starting points. We begin with theology rather than epistemological method (particularism over methodism). The first theological assumption relevant to moral knowledge is that God is the good and that, therefore, any moral knowledge we might have will in some way be dependent on him. That God ought to be identified with the good is widely held Christian belief shared among theologians from Augustine to Robert Adams.[32] If goodness is identified with God, then the goodness of all other things must be explained in terms of resemblance to God. Moral knowledge, then is a kind of knowledge of God, either of himself directly or derivatively in his creation. That moral knowledge would be available to us given the existence of God is internally coherent and plausible. Plantinga, in a discussion of the availability of knowledge of God in general says this: “[If it is true that God exists, then] the natural thing to think is that he created us in such a way that we would come to hold true beliefs as that there is such a person as God, that he is our creator, that we owe him obedience and worship, that he is worthy of worship, that he loves us, and so on. And if that is so, then the natural thing to think is that the cognitive processes that do produce belief in God are aimed by their designer at producing that belief.”[33]  The other assumption is that the God in view is the Trinitarian God of the Bible who is revealed primarily by his Word, Jesus Christ.

Considering these assumptions, the obvious concern given our aim is to say what moral knowledge God has revealed in his Word and how he has done this. God’s modes of revelation can be divided into two categories: general and special and God has made moral knowledge available through both means, though to varying degrees. God the Father, through his Word, who made all things, reveals some of morality in his creation (Col. 1:15-16; Rom. 1:18; 2:14). However, this moral knowledge is suppressed because of sin. Some limited amount of moral knowledge is available by this route, but it is fragmentary and clouded by what Plantinga calls “the noetic effects of sin.”[34] This means that the only ultimately reliable and full source of moral knowledge must come by way of divine grace and special revelation.

If special revelation is required for this sort of moral knowledge, which is a species of the genus “knowledge of God,” then written Word of God, the Bible, would be the place to turn. But if God primarily reveals himself in and through his Word, who is Jesus Christ, then this could create a problem. The problem arises if there is a disconnect between God’s primary and supreme mode of revelation, his Son, who is the Word, and the Bible, for as John writes, “No one has ever seen God. The only one [Who is the Word of God], himself God, who is in closest fellowship with the Father, has made God known” (John 1:18, NET). Carson concludes from this text that “the Word was simultaneously God and with God—has broken the barrier that made it impossible for human beings to see God, and has made him known.”[35] If this separation between written Word and Word of God were actual, then the implication would be that the only special revelation to which we have ready access would be inferior to the ideal revelation of God in Jesus Christ. To put the problem another way: If in the Bible we do not encounter the Word of God, who is the only one to make the Father known, then the Bible cannot be a reliable or full source of moral knowledge. The only sure source of moral knowledge is encounter with the Living Word, who is Jesus Christ. Therefore, if our moral knowledge is going to be the best kind possible for us, it must find its source in the Word of God; the Bible must be a revelation of Jesus Christ. Fortunately, Barth shows us the way to understand the Written Word and the Word as intimately connected.

Barth contends that Holy Scripture is composed of the prophetic and apostolic witness to Christ. In the Written Word, the Church is given “the promise of God's mercy which is uttered in the person of Him who is very God and very Man and which takes up our cause when we could not help ourselves at all because of our enmity against God.”[36] The promise of the Written Word is “Immanuel;” it is the working out of John 1:18. Barth adds that the Bible is the word of men “who yearned, waited and hoped for this Immanuel and who finally saw, heard and handled it in Jesus Christ. Holy Scripture declares, attests and proclaims it. And by its declaration, attestation and proclamation it promises that it applies to us also and to us specifically.”[37] For Barth, then, the Bible functions on two levels. First, its subject is Jesus Christ. All of the Bible either looks forward or back to the revelation of God in his Son. Second, God is at work in the Bible. The Bible is not a static object, but has the character of “event.” God speaks in and through the Written Word and what he speaks is his Word, who is the Son. Thus, the content of the Written Word points to the Son, and in the Written Word, we encounter the Word of God. In this way, the Bible can serve as the best possible ground for moral knowledge. It is this sure ground that allows the Bible to not only supplement the limited moral knowledge available via general revelation, but also to correct misunderstandings. What is implicit in creation, is made explicit in Jesus Christ and his Written Word.

Barth’s comment about the person of Christ being “very God and very man” also shows why the Bible is especially fit to be our source of moral knowledge. Jesus as “very God,” possesses the right kind of authority to place upon us binding moral obligations for, plausibly, God as the creator of humanity would ipso facto have moral authority over them.[38] If Jesus were not God himself, then God’s revelation of himself in Christ would be deficient and not self-authenticating. On the other hand, the fact that Jesus is “very man” is also relevant, for in the life and person of Jesus, we find the ideal moral exemplar.[39] Jesus authoritatively as God not only tells us what we ought to do, but he also shows how humans ought to function. He gives us a clear picture of the human good. It is Jesus’ status as both “very God and very man” that puts him in a position to set forth authoritatively and completely moral knowledge with respect to the right and the good. And the fact that he communicates through and encounters us in the Written Word means this knowledge is accessible to us. The Written Word, as Barth says, is the concrete realization of Immanuel.

What the Written Word says about the right and the good also provide reason to prefer the Trinitarian account over the alternatives considered. With respect to the good, Aristotle’s virtue ethic is deficient in two ways when compared with the ethic of the Bible. First, Aristotle’s account of the virtues is both incomplete and in error at certain points. The cardinal virtues, discoverable by general revelation according to Thomas Aquinas, are supplemented by the Written Word. The theological virtues are beyond “the capacity of human nature” to apprehend and therefore it is “necessary for man to receive [knowledge of them] from God.”[40] Second, Aristotle’s vision of the good life is inferior to the biblical vision. Aristotle’s conception of life in in the polis is based on a truncated view of the good for man. Fully realized human flourishing only occurs in shalom, where God and man live in love with one another and harmony with the whole of the created order (cf. Zeph 3:15;19-20; 8:3-12). With respect to the right, we also see that Kant’s account is inferior. While Kant argues that one ought to always treat others as ends and never merely as means, Jesus commands that we “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk. 12:31). While Kant may have intended to arrive at a conclusion like Jesus’, his insistence on basing moral knowledge of the deliverances of pure reason deemphasizes the central role that love ought to play in the working out of our moral obligations. One advantage of a Trinitarian account should already be evident: a Trinitarian account takes seriously the finitude of man and the inescapabilty of making theological assumptions (either implicitly or explicitly) in our quest for moral knowledge, but the other primary advantage is this: The central place of love in the Christian ethic and its deep, natural connection with the Trinity shows that the biblical ethic is both internally coherent and that it confirms our highest possible vision of what the ethical life  should be. This should count as evidence in favor of the credibility of the Bible as the source of moral knowledge for us.

However, we must not forget the kind of objection raised by Peter Enns at the beginning. Throughout Christian history, readers of the Bible have found certain elements of its moral vision to be abhorrent and incompatible with their understanding of a loving God. Some have seen the picture of God in the Old Testament to be the opposite of loving; they instead seem him as violent and vindictive. If the Bible presents an ultimately incoherent vision of ethics, then this would count as a defeater for thinking of the Bible as the source for moral knowledge. Therefore, some response to this charge must be made. Here are two suggestions. First, it may be that many of the objections to the ethics of the OT are simply based on hermeneutical error. For example, Copan and Flanagan argue that texts claiming the complete destruction of the Canaanites are hyperbolic and that all that God actually commands is that Israel drive them from the land.[41] The language of “total extermination” is an ancient idiom that should not be read literally. Second, we should not expect that our moral beliefs match univocally with what is actually the case about morality. There is also no reason to think our natural moral knowledge should be totally equivocal, either. Rather, we should expect that our knowledge of the good and the right is analogical and open to revision, but not that it would be totally overturned.[42] Lewis argues this view:

Divine "goodness" differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning. This doctrine is presupposed in Scripture. Christ calls men to repent - a call which would be meaningless if God's standard were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practice.[43]

If the Bible did not challenge, expand, and correct our moral beliefs, then would it would be superfluous to moral knowledge, but as we have seen, there are good reasons to think it is necessary. So, while this objection should be taken seriously, there are at least two promising ways of responding that will preserve the coherence of the Bible as our source of moral knowledge.

Conclusion

The aim was to show why the Bible is necessary for moral knowledge. It was shown that two of the most popular alternative accounts for moral knowledge beg theological questions, have internal inconsistencies, and present a relatively truncated vision of the ethical life. For this reason, these alternate accounts do not provide the best explanation of moral knowledge. However, the Trinitarian account is internally coherent, has considerable explanatory power, and presents an ethical vision that exceeds our highest expectations. This vision is communicated to us by the Word of God in and through the Written Word, which means that moral knowledge is readily accessible to us. In view of the possibilities considered, the Bible as the source for moral knowledge for us is the best explanation available.

[1] Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation : Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005). Kindle location 601.

[2] Karl Barth, The Church Dogmatics (I,1), ed. Geoffrey William & Torrance Bromiley, Thomas Forsyth and Geoffrey William Translator: Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975). 513.

[3] John Douglas Morrison, Has God Said?, The Evangelical Monograph Series (Eugene: Pickwick, 2006). 155.

[4] Ibid. 156.

[5] Barth. 110.

[6]Though this does not mean that one could not confirm the veracity of the Bible in other ways. The point is that the Bible has its own authority as a source of knowledge; its has this authority both ontologically and epistemically. Ontologically, that authority cannot be supplemented by anything else. Epistemically, nothing else is required, but arguments that corroborate the Bible would be appropriate.

[7] Karl Barth, The Church Dogmatics (I,2), ed. Geoffrey William & Torrance Bromiley, Thomas Forsyth and Geoffrey William Translator: Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975). 31.

[8] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Christian Classics Ethereal Library 1845). Chapter 1, section 1.

Image: "Grandma's Bible" by Andrew Seaman. CC License. 

Intuiting the Beauty of the Infinite: Ramanujan and Hardy’s Friendship and Collaboration

The Man Who Knew Infinity, a recent movie based on a book of the same name by Robert Kanigel, recounts the short but remarkable life story of India’s great mathematical prodigy Srivivasa Ramanujan (henceforth SR). Although what follows is a response to the film, the book is well-worth reading, filled with luscious prose such as in this sample: “The Cauvery was a familiar, recurrent constant of Ramanujan’s life. At some places along its length, palm trees, their trunks heavy with fruit, leaned over the river at rakish angles. At others, leafy trees formed a canopy of green over it, their gnarled, knotted roots snaking along the riverbank.”

The movie begins by quoting Bertrand Russell (a character in the movie itself): “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.” It then shows SR in India, doing his mathematics (without much formal training) while trying to eke out a living for his family. His passion and talent for math are obvious; trying to describe maths (the preferred British abbreviation) to his wife, he says it’s like a painting, but with colors you can’t see. There are patterns everywhere in mathematics, he adds, revealed in the most incredible forms. Finding himself in need of someone who could understand and appreciate his ground-breaking work, SR wrote G. H. Hardy, legendary professor at Cambridge, and eventually Hardy invited SR to traverse the ocean and come work with him there.

This incredible opportunity required SR to leave his wife behind and endure the long journey and culture shock of moving to England, which contributes to a compelling narrative, with many twists and turns I’m not discussing but that make for a terrific, sometimes heart-wrenching tale. Despite the trials and challenges (including a war), what’s amazing was how much work SR and Hardy were able to do over the next five years—publishing dozens of groundbreaking articles.

The divergent worldviews of the two men make the dynamics of their friendship particularly fascinating to chronicle. SR was a devout Hindu whereas Hardy was a committed atheist—though the first time Hardy says this to SR in the movie (“I’m what’s called an ‘atheist’”), SR replies, “You believe in God. You just don’t think he likes you.” Incidentally, this is a key structuring question in C. S. Lewis’s moving novel Till We Have Faces: whereas both Psyche and Orual believe in the gods, Psyche believed they were marvelous and loving, but Orual thought they were only dark, unkind, and mysterious. In Rudolph Otto’s terminology, Orual was familiar with the tremendum aspect of the Numinous, but Psyche with both the tremendum (the awe-inspiring mystery) and the fascinans aspect of the Numinous. Fascinans is the aspect of the Divine involving consuming attraction, rapturous longing—and is often connected to the imagination, beauty, even poetry.

The diametric difference in SR’s and Hardy’s ultimate worldviews proves to be related to a central aspect of the plot. Hardy is adamant about the need to show step-by-step proofs of SR’s conclusions, while SR is depicted as functioning on a much more intuitive level. I’m not concerned for now what artistic liberties the moviemakers might have taken in this regard, but it is true that SR would often write down the conclusions of his work and not all the intervening steps. There may be at least a partial explanation of this which is fairly prosaic: paper tended to be in short supply for SR in India. But it’s at least intriguing to consider the explanation advanced in the movie: SR possessed incredibly strong intuitive skills. Mystifying Hardy, SR could just see things that few others could and felt little need to offer the proofs.

Hardy—though incredibly impressed with SR’s abilities, likening him to an artist like Mozart, who could write a whole symphony in his head—repeatedly says that intuition is not enough. Intuition must be “held accountable.” Proofs mattered, to avoid projecting the appearance of SR’s mathematical dance or art as on a par with conjuring.

It isn’t that SR’s intuitions were infallible. His theory of primes, however intuitively obvious, turned out to be wrong. Still, though, many of his intuitions were eventually vindicated and proved right. One among other interesting questions that SR’s reliance on intuitions raises is how much discursive analysis they involve. It’s a vexed question among epistemologists whether intuitions are a lightning quick series of inferences, or something more immediately and directly apprehended. The quickness with which they come naturally lends itself to the latter analysis, but perhaps there’s something to the former option—particularly if much of the analysis is done beneath the level of conscious awareness. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, Sherlock’s inferences would come so quickly that Watson characterized them as resembling intuitions; likewise, realizing it’s sometimes easier to know something than to explain the justification for it, Sherlock himself recognized the way knowledge can have features that resemble more immediate apprehendings than just the deliverances of the discursive intellect. A couple of real-life Sherlocks, Al Plantinga and Phil Quinn had a dust up some years back on whether basic beliefs are formed inferentially or not.

The difference in Hardy’s and SR’s styles, we come to see, is related to their divergent worldviews. Exasperated at Hardy’s recurring disparagement of intuition as lacking in substance, SR finally blurts out, “You say this word as if it is nothing. Is that all it is to you? All that I am? You’ve never even seen me. You are a man of no faith. . . . Who are you, Mr. Hardy?” The underlying dynamic that brought this exchange to a head was the way SR connected his own identity to those intuitions. Hardy had asked SR before how he got his ideas. Now SR gives his answer: “By my god. She speaks to me, puts formulas on my tongue when I sleep, sometimes when I pray.”

SR asks Hardy if he believes him, and adds, “Because if you are my friend, you will know that I am telling you the truth. If you are truly my friend.”

In Till We Have Faces, we find a similar scene. Orual can’t see the gold-and-amber castle that Psyche tells her of, but Orual also knows that Psyche had never told her a lie. One issue here is testimony, and the conditions that need to be in place to take it as reliable. Of course someone could be telling the truth, the best they understand it, and still be unreliable—for perhaps they’ve unwittingly made a mistake, or they’re delusional or confused.

At any rate, Hardy’s reply is transparent: “But I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in anything I can’t prove.”

“Then you don’t believe in me,” SR responded. “Now do you see? An equation has no meaning to me unless it expresses the thought of God.”

Hardy remained skeptical of SR’s theology, but couldn’t dispute with the results. He would go to bat for SR to get him a fellowship at Cambridge, and in his impassioned defense of SR’s accomplishments he extolled his incredible originality, by which SR could apprehend so much truth otherwise missed. On Hardy’s view, the creativity and originality, though they provided SR a lens through which to see, didn’t subjectivize SR’s findings; rather, they were a tool for seeing farther and seeing more.

This contrasts with, say, Simon Critchley’s interpretation of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. On (Critchley’s) Stevens’s view, the only reality we experience is mediated through categories furnished by the poetic imagination, rendering our perspectives products of the imagination and, thus, subjective—yet still able to be believed despite their fictive nature. This is what some might call a more “postmodern” perspective than Hardy’s more traditional view that there’s an objective reality we’re able to discern, however imperfectly and through a glass darkly.

In real life, when Hardy died, one mourner spoke of his “profound conviction that the truths of mathematics described a bright and clear universe, exquisite and beautiful in its structure, in comparison with which the physical world was turbid and confused. It was this which made his friends . . . think that in his attitude to mathematics there was something which, being essentially spiritual, was near to religion.”

Hardy didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in SR and in the objectivity of mathematical truth. He wrote of his Platonism in his Mathematician’s Apology, and the movie captures this too. In one of his defenses of SR, he related the story of the way SR said mathematical truths are thoughts of God—a view parallel to, say, Plantinga’s view that modal and necessary moral truths are also thoughts in the mind of God. Then Hardy added, “Despite everything in my being set to the contrary, perhaps he’s right. For isn’t this exactly our justification for pure mathematics? We are merely the explorers of infinity in the pursuit of absolute perfection. We do not invent these formulae—they already exist and lie in wait for only the brightest minds to divine and prove. In the end, who are we to question Ramanujan—let alone God?”

Though math, on Hardy’s view, is discovered, not invented, it may take those with prodigious talents to uncover its deepest truths. Speaking of which, near the start of the film Hardy had said, “I didn’t invent Ramanujan. I discovered him.” Even more than the math, this is a movie about men and their remarkable friendship and fertile partnership across radically divergent and conflicting paradigms. The humanity of the film is its best feature of all.

After five years of collaboration between these unlikely friends, SR returned to India, having contracted a fatal disease—likely tuberculosis. Within a year he died, at the age of just 32. Hardy was crestfallen when he heard the news, and grieved the loss deeply. Near the end of the movie, he reflected on his collaboration with both SR and another colleague, Littlewood, saying he’d done something special indeed: “I have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.”

Paraphrasing Hardy, he once commented that out of 100 points, he would give himself 30 as a mathematician, 45 to Littlewood, 70 to Hilbert. And 100 to Ramanujan. In the year SR spent in India before his death, he poured his brilliant findings into another notebook. It was lost for a while, but when found, the importance of its discovery was likened to that of Beethoven’s “10th Symphony.” A century later, these formulas are being used to understand the behavior of black holes.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 4, “Can We Deduce Morality from Human Nature?” Introduction & Section 4.1.1: The Non-Deducibility of the Law from our Nature:

Introduction: Hare has been arguing that eudaemonism (in the four forms discussed) does not have a proper place for what Scotus calls, following Anselm, the affection for justice. The present chapter is about a different dividing question in moral theory: can morality be deduced from “natural” facts, or from statements about the “natural” properties possessed by people and actions? The term “natural” here is problematic. The first section of the chapter discusses Scotus’s view that the moral law can’t be deduced from human nature, but is exceedingly fitting to it. In the second and fourth sections the denial of deducibility from “natural facts” will extend to a dispute with contemporary theorists. The third section examines RMH’s take on natural facts. The second section looks at Adams’ attempt to deduce a way to fix the reference of “good” from facts about what most humans most of the time think is good. Hare calls this “consensus deductivism.” The fourth section looks at the attempt by Foot and Hursthouse to deduce conclusions about moral goodness from facts about the characteristic human form of life. Hare calls this “form-of-life deductivism.” No entirely neat separation between these two kinds of view is possible.

4.1 SCOTUS.

4.1.1: The Non-Deducibility of the Law from our Nature

Scotus rightly denies that the moral law can be deduced from human nature. Note, first, it is deducibility that is denied, rather than some weaker relation such as fittingness. Scotus accepts that the moral law, such as the second table of the Ten Commandments, fits human nature exceedingly well, but he insists nonetheless that this is natural law only in an extended sense, not in the strict sense, because God is free to command creatures with human nature otherwise. Natural law in the strict sense is “known from its terms” or deducible from what is known in this way.

Second, it is moral law that is denied to be deducible from human nature, and not goodness. His examples of moral law are from the second table of the Ten Commandments, though we should not assume that he intends this list to be exhaustive. Third, the term from which deducibility is denied is human nature. But this has to be understood in a way that is not already conceptually subsumed under moral law. If we define “human being” as “a being under moral law,” or if we make being under moral law essential to the kind “human being” (as Kant does), then there will be a trivial deduction from the premise that a being is human to the conclusion that it’s under the moral law. On the other hand, if we deny that humans are by nature under the moral law, then we have simply denied deductivism from the beginning and begged the question.

Here’s a third alternative. We can grant that human beings are by nature such that they are fulfilled, or they reach their end, by loving God. Scotus says our end is to be condiligentes, co-lovers, which is to say that we enter into the love that is between the three persons of the Trinity. This human love of God, however, is distinct from the way angels love God or God loves Godself; humans love God as rational animals. We can ask whether we can deduce the moral law from our end specified as being condiligentes.

One prominent case Scotus gives is the commandment “You shall not steal.” Private property, he points out, is presupposed by the commandment but is not essential to human beings. There is no deduction of the proscription of theft just from human nature, and the divine command is to that extent contingent; there is no necessity here binding the divine will.

But stealing is not the most difficult case for someone who wants to maintain the contingency of the second table. What about killing? God could bring a killed person back to life, but perhaps more needs to be said. The question of whether the command not to kill is contingent tout court is not settled by the question of whether God could command otherwise given merely human nature. We can ask, “Could God command the killing of the innocent if not just human nature, but our circumstances stayed the same; in particular, if we stayed dead once killed?” In a later section Hare will take this up.

Mailbag: Why Do You Think Christianity is True?

Letter: Hello professor, I was just wanting to reach out to you and ask you for some guidance. I recently came across a post of the computer that stated this. Do you identife with a specific religion? If you do, ask yourself these questions: 1. Why did so many Gods and beliefs predate your own?   2. Why didn't your God choose a global revelation instead of a culture specific one? 3. Why were you born in the "right religion"? Now I am kind of stumped by these questions. Do you think, if you have time, could you give me your thoughts on them? Thanks, Billy

Response by Jonathan Pruitt

Hi Billy,

Thanks for writing to us at Moral Apologetics! Dr. Baggett has just left on vacation and so I’ll be responding to your letter. Let’s take these one at a time. The first question is “Why did so many Gods and beliefs predate your own?” The question as stated is imprecise, but I think the heart of the question is something like this: “As a Christian, what do you say about the fact that there are religions older than yours?” That’s a fair question and one we can offer several responses to.

First, we might ask what the problem is supposed to be. If there are religions older than Christianity, does that suggest Christianity is not true? I am not sure how an argument for that position might go. The age of the religion has little to do with the likelihood of it being true; what’s more important is the sort of evidence that gives credibility to the claims of the religion. Say, for example, that tomorrow all the stars moved in space so that from earth they spelled out, “Scientology is true.” That would make Scientology much more plausible than, say, Baal worship, even though the Baal religions are much older.

Second, if what the Bible teaches about God’s interactions with mankind is true, then the Christian God has been revealing himself to mankind since the beginning. Worship of the Christian God was the original religion, according to the Bible.  So the first question presumes a certain view of the development of religion and of world history in general that Christians deny. Worship of the Christian God is as old as mankind itself and so, in a sense, Christianity is the oldest religion.

The second question concerns the kind of revelation that the Christian God provides. The questioner seems to think that if a religion were true, then it ought to have “global revelation” pointing to its truth. I take it that this is a critique of the resurrection of Jesus, which happened at a specific time and place in history. This sort of revelation is what I suspect the questioner means by “local” revelation—sometimes this goes by the name “the scandal of particularity.”

In response, I will first say that I share the questioner’s concern. If God exists and he is good, then we should expect that he provides everyone with adequate reasons for believing in him. Of course, what the skeptic thinks are adequate reasons and what actually are adequate reasons are not always the same. As Paul Moser points out, we are often presumptuous when considering the evidence for God. We ask, “What evidence would satisfy me?” And we expect God to personally tailor the evidence to fit our expectations. We do not usually ask, “If God exists, how would he like me to know him?”

That said, I think God has given universally accessible reasons to believe in him. Let me give some examples. First, even if we take the resurrection which is supposed to be an example of a “local” revelation, the fact of the matter is that most people in the world are aware of the Christian claim to the resurrection of Jesus. Most people in the Western world even have the resources to conduct serious investigation into the veracity of these claims. So even though the resurrection is a localized event, it is open to investigation by a very large number of people.

The Bible also teaches that God does reveal himself universally. For example, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin, God’s righteousness, and the coming judgment (John 16:8). Paul says, “For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). In his speech in Athens, Paul proclaims,

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ (Acts 17:24-28).

So the Bible clearly teaches that God reveals himself on a global scale and that he specifically arranged the world so that people would have the best chance at knowing him. The Bible teaches that God is intimately concerned with the salvation of the whole world and that he has actually revealed himself to every human being.

We also have highly intuitive theistic arguments which are universally accessible. If there is a moral law, there must be a moral law giver. If there is a universe, there must be a cause to the universe. If the universe appears intelligently designed, then likely there is a designer. Those are just very brief and rough summaries of only three of the theistic arguments, but the point is that they rely on common sense and basic empirical observations; they are open to investigation by any human person. In that way, they provide a kind of universal (or global) revelation of God.

The third and final question is “How do you know you were born in the right religion?” Clearly, if a person inherits their beliefs from their parents, this does not make them true. But the fact that I learned Christianity from my parents does not make it not true, either. If the questioner intends to say that, he would be committing the genetic fallacy. But if we answer the question as asked, we can provide two kinds of responses. The first answer is that I know that Christianity is true on the basis of my encounters with the Christian God. The Holy Spirit has provided the conviction of the truth of the gospel to me. And I have direct awareness and relationship with the Jesus of the Bible. These provide good reasons for me to believe in Jesus. But I also know that Christianity is true on the basis of critical thinking and the use of evidence. I mentioned some of the theistic arguments earlier, but there are also good arguments that Christianity in particular is true. There are philosophical arguments, like the one provided by Moral Apologetics contributor Brian Scalise that says a Trinitarian (and therefore Christian) conception of God makes the most rational sense. And there are empirical and historical arguments, like the minimal facts case for the resurrection employed by scholars like Gary Habermas and Mike Licona. So I know that I was born in the right religion because I have encountered the living Jesus myself and because careful and fair analysis of the evidence leads me to that conclusion.

In sum, it seems that the questioner is concerned about why we should think Christianity is true given the many religions in the world. The bottom line is that Christianity is better evidenced and more plausible than any other worldview.

Summary of Robert Adams’ chapter on Moral Faith, Part III, from Finite and Infinite Goods: The Cognitive Aspect of Moral Faith

Is it really correct to speak of believing in these contexts, or is something less cognitive demanded in moral faith? Adams chooses to concentrate on some of the concrete features of moral faith that incline him to speak of “belief” here. For no theory on metaethical issues is likely to attain a very high degree of certainty. Moral faith is therefore a stance we will have to take, if we are reasonable, in the face of the recognition that any metaethical theory we may hold could rather easily be mistaken. So it would be good to have an understanding of the stance that does not presuppose very much metaethics.

Adams thinks both will and feeling are involved in moral faith, but he does not think that moral faith is merely will and feeling, or that believing another person’s life is worth living is merely caring about that life. It’s not just a volitional matter; an intention central to moral faith is an intention of respecting something more commanding, more external to the self than mere personal preference and feeling.

This is the most important reason for speaking of moral faith as a sort of “belief,” and it is connected with the possibility of error. Faith confronts a temptation to doubt precisely because such possibilities of error must be recognized, and in a way respected.

Emotions too can be mistaken, but it’s far from clear that we can understand how an emotion of faith in the value of life can be inappropriately related to reality if we can’t understand how faith can be, or involve, a false belief that life is worth living. In any event, the possibility of an objectively appropriate or inappropriate relation to reality is precisely the aspect of moral belief most subject to metaethical doubts, and also the aspect that seems to Adams most important to the nonegocentric character of moral faith.

Connected with the possibility of error is the giving of reasons for and against beliefs. In thinking about items of moral faith one uses logic, one aims at consistency and at coherence with one’s beliefs on other subjects, and one is responsive to one’s sense of “plausibility,” as we sometimes put it. All of that provides grounds for classifying moral faith as a sort of belief.

Particular interest attaches to the question of responsiveness or unresponsiveness of moral faith to the evidence of experience. Our faith in the value of particular human lives, in the value and the possibility of a moral life, and in the possibility of a common good, can be put under strain by particular experiences. Indeed, adverse experience is precisely what gives rise, as Adams has argued, to a problem of evil for moral faith.

There is thus a considerable empirical element in faith in moral ends. But Adams does not believe that science, or social science, could devise a definitive empirical test of the truth of faith in any moral end. Objects of faith have vaguer contours that permit reformulation in the face of adverse experience, so we can’t identify experiences that are unequivocally predicted or excluded by such items of faith as that so-and-so’s life is worth living. So faith is not normally subject to definitive proof or refutation by any specifiable finite set of experiences. And from the perspective of moral faith, this is as it should be, for moral faith is supposed to be resistant to adverse evidence.

Empiricists may take offense at this feature of faith. Faith as such is indeed resistant to adverse experience, and is apt to revise itself before simply accepting refutation. Flew is right that faith is in danger of evacuating itself of content if its resistance is undiscriminating or absolutely unconditional. Nonetheless, Adams believes that resistance to adverse experience, and to refutation in general, is an appropriate feature of faith; and he will argue this with specific reference to moral faith.

Our interest in items of faith is importantly different from our interest in scientific hypotheses. Conclusive falsification of a hypothesis is progress in science. But falsification of an item of faith is not progress—at least not from the perspective within which it is an item of faith. To think that falsification of the belief in morality itself, or of the belief that a moral life is worth living, might be pure progress is already to hold an amoral view, a morally bad view. A loss of moral faith would be the loss of something precious.

When we resist refutation of an item of moral faith, we may, and should, be thinking of the danger of being misled into giving it up while it is true. From a moral point of view that would be a worse mistake to make than the mistake of clinging to moral faith while it is false. Even if an item of moral faith is false, moreover, we are not likely in abandoning it to attain anything corresponding to the moral value of believing it if it is true. This is an important asymmetry.

The balance of potential payoffs is much more equal when it is a question of revising moral faith, rather than abandoning it. We can hope that revision of moral faith will be progress from a moral point of view. This is a further reason for thinking it is good for moral faith to combine a variable, revisable form with a vaguer but more enduring core, so that self-critical growth and development may be combined with constancy of commitment.

Items of faith are not hypotheses to be tested by experience, though we may well want their formulations to be tested by experience. Items of faith may in fact be tested by experience, but we are not trying to refute them. We are trying to live by them. It’s not that moral faith is wholly unempirical, let alone noncognitive, but that it involves a different way of accommodating thought to experience.

Maybe this suggests too stark a contrast between morality and science. Notoriously, the reliability of induction and more broadly of empirical scientific methods has been doubted by reasonable persons and it may not be possible to set the doubts to rest in a completely satisfying way. Yet a refutation of the reliability of induction would not be scientific progress in the same way that a refutation of the meteorite explanation of the extinction of dinosaurs might be. So perhaps there is a place, or even a need, for faith in the highest level beliefs of science, but for now Adams is content to make a point just about moral faith.

Believing and Hoping

A Twilight Musing

Two related contrasts came up in my devotional times this week:

1. the distinction between optimism and hope (particularly Christian hope); and
2. the profound difference between the popular saying, “Seeing is believing,” and the reverse of that, “Believing is seeing.”

The first of each pair is an expression of a secular, humanistic interpretation of reality, and latter of each pair embodies reality seen through the eyes of faith.  I would like to expound a bit on both pairs.

Optimism and Hope

Both optimism and hope go beyond the visible facts of the situation to which they are applied, but whereas optimism is a chosen attitude, hope is the embracing of confidence in what somebody has said.  Optimism can be merely the expression of a sunny disposition, or perhaps of a kind of naiveté; but hope is the conviction, based on a reliable source, that things are being engineered in a certain direction.  We can choose to be optimistic that the stock market will go up and the economy will prosper, but we can have hope for these developments only if we have inside information that we trust.  Optimism is subjective, whereas hope is grounded in the assurance that a promise will be fulfilled.

When the Bible speaks of hope, it is always connected with faith, and it is never merely a subjective choice to see things in the most positive light.  The Psalms are full of references to hope based on trusting God.  (All biblical passages are from the NIV.)

  Ps 33:20-21

 We wait in hope for the Lord ;

he is our help and our shield.

 In him our hearts rejoice,

for we trust in his holy name.

Isa 40:31

 but those who hope in the Lord

will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles;

they will run and not grow weary,

they will walk and not be faint.

Rom. 4: 18-22 shows the extreme of hope that perseveres because of belief in God’s faithfulness and the surety of His promise:

 Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, "So shall your offspring be."  Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead — since he was about a hundred years old — and that Sarah's womb was also dead.  Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.

Heb. 6:17-19 makes clear that our hope in God’s promises is anchored in the Absolute Truth of Yahweh Himself:

Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath.  God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged.   We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.

Seeing is believing/Believing is seeing

All of us have encountered, at some time or another, the practical skepticism of someone who says, “Well, seeing is believing” (or some expression of that sentiment).  Applied to some situations, such as hearing the promises of someone who has proven himself to be untrustworthy, this response is appropriate and understandable.  But for some people, it becomes the expression of a materialistic epistemology, based on the assumption that the only questions worth asking (or answering) are those subject to rational, scientific investigation.

For a person of active faith, this aphorism has to be inverted: “Believing is seeing.”   The contrast between the two statements is very instructive about what is involved in living a life of faith.  At the center of this contrast is the implicit assertion in the first that only seeing can validate and inform believing, while the inverted statement affirms that believing is the foundation for truly seeing.  Augustine articulated the contrast by saying, “I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand.”  Later, Anselm reinforced this idea with his maxim, “Credo ut intelligam,” which is a reflection of the scriptural statement that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7).  The core meaning of the biblical idea is that one must go beyond the narrow boundaries of what can be established merely by human observation and analysis and accept that the Source of all knowledge is the God Who gave us the power to think.  If we are to have a deep understanding of Truth, we must be grounded in a simple act of faith that accepts possibilities beyond what we can see.

As Paul says in Rom. 8:23-25, we “groan inwardly” in hope of “the redemption of our bodies.   For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?   But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”

Image: "Hope" by P. Herjolf. CC License. 

Video: Too Good Not to Be True: The Shape of Moral Apologetics - David Horner

Dr. David Horner  is Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Talbot School of Theology. Today we are excited to feature the video version of his essay, "Too Good Not to Be True." Here is the blurb describing the video from the Forum of Christian Leader's YouTube page:

Apologetics is about communicating, not merely talking. It requires that we understand those with whom we speak: what they think, the questions they’re asking (and not asking), the assumptions they’re making; and the misconceptions that keep them from listening to what we have to say. If we don’t understand the soil, we may be scattering seeds in vain – talking but not communicating, making noise but not making progress. Perhaps the deepest, soil-hardening challenges to the apologetic task in our time are moral objections to Christianity – to the (perceived) immorality of Christian attitudes and behavior in history and the present. In this talk we think about apologetics and its relation to “soil management,” consider the apologetic role and importance of moral goodness, and suggest some ways to help people come to see the gospel as too good not to be true.

If you haven't yet had the chance to read Horner's essay, this lecture will be well worth your time.

Apologetics is about communicating, not merely talking. It requires that we understand those with whom we speak: what they think, the questions they're asking (and not asking), the assumptions they're making; and the misconceptions that keep them from listening to what we have to say.

Image: "What a beautiful day - Bavaria today" by digital cat. CC license.

Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 19: “The Role of Miracles and the Command to Kill Canaanites.”

Morriston raises this question: If God decrees something at variance with universal commands by special revelation through a human representative, then how can the commandee know that this mouthpiece accurately speaks for God and that this command is neither a delusion nor a demon? This chapter will give a further response to Morriston’s worry. Imagine you’re a skeptical soldier in Moses’s or Joshua’s army and that you ask yourself the question, “Why should I obey Moses’s call to war against the Canaanites?” How would one know that a good, just God is behind such a command? And could one find warrant for condemning violence done in the name of God in the present?

The concern is that in very unusual circumstances in the past, God commanded people to kill the innocent, exempting them from a moral principle that otherwise binds them. But if God did this in the past, why not now? But if awareness of such an exemption comes through one’s mere inner (subjective) sensing, there would be no way to verify this is God’s will. So there would be no way to know whether or not the individual was really commanded by God to kill innocent people.

Miracles and the Will of God

Matthew Rowley has written an essay on sacralized violence in the exodus under Moses and during the conquest under Joshua. His argument addresses this concern. His key argument is that the biblical narrative suggests that in those situations, God desired to safeguard against the misunderstanding of his will; so he chose to validate this new knowledge with clear displays of miracles. When a new revelation issues the extraordinary command of taking another’s life, it does not come through one’s mere inner subjective sensing. Rather, God chooses to unite this new knowledge with miracles, in such a way that the individual or onlooker can validate the message. (See Josh. 3:7.)

Miracles in the Old Testament Narrative

Rowley identifies several different categories of miracles. Category 1: Miracle of creation, showing God’s power, intelligence, and creativity. Category 2: 2L (lesser), 2M (moderate), and 2G (greater)—on an epistemic spectrum. 2L miracles are visions, dreams, or small-scale events like a burning bush. 2M are smaller miracles that go against the normal pattern of nature, meriting skepticism. These experiences should be held loosely. 2G miracles are harder to misinterpret and are impossible to fake, like God feeding Israelites for decades with bread from heaven.

Unlike private revelation claims made by Muhammad or Joseph Smith, Moses’s prophetic message is authenticated by Category 2G miracles. See Exod. 9:15-16; cf. Rom. 9:17.

Evidence, Miracles, and Moses’s and Joshua’s Believability

Imagine a skeptical soldier in Israel under Moses or Joshua who wonders whether a harsh command is truly from Yahweh. The Israelites, soldiers included, were to learn two chief lessons from the miracles surrounding the exodus out of Egypt: first, that Yahweh is supreme above all gods in power and authority and, second, that Moses was “like God”—God’s representative—before Egypt and Israel (Exod. 7:1; cf. 4:16). The narrative suggests that they should have been believed because of the confirming miracles God performed through them. No wonder that at the exodus itself, the people “believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses” (14:30-31).

Moses’s unique role further confirmed in the dreadful direct revelation at Sinai (Deut. 5:23-27), which the Israelites could see, hear, and feel. The Ten Commandments begin with the affirmation of the exodus miracle to confirm both Yahweh’s and Moses’s believability. A large number of the commands in the Mosaic law are grounded in the exodus event. The questioning Israelite solder doesn’t simply have to take Moses’s word for it; he is in a position to see firsthand God’s miraculous actions.

As for believing Joshua’s commands, scripture uses the same language as it does of Moses. And the Israelites themselves and their enemies knew that Yahweh was truly with Joshua. Remember these two points: God’s presence was highly visible—ever “in the sight” of Israel whether on the move or settled. And second, the tabernacle would continue to move until a more permanent house of God—the temple—was established where God would cause his name to dwell and where the glory of God would be visibly manifested. Not only did the Canaanites and Philistines hear reports of Yahweh’s miraculous activity, but they also could see the manifestation of Yahweh’s presence as Israel camped or moved about.

The Storehouse of Divine Validation

Unlike any person today who advocates violence in the name of God, the Israelites who engaged in life-taking obedience had a storehouse of indicators of miraculous divine validation. The large cluster of weighty miracles performed while Moses led Israel would reinforce the believability of the less-weighty miracles like the burning bush. The shock and awe 2G miracles gave more credibility to the 2L miracles. Looking back, the soldier can come to trust Moses’s testimony about the burning bush because he is gazing at the pillar of fire in front of him.

Moses, Miracles, and the Ancient Near East

The miracles recorded in Exodus through Joshua uniquely single out Moses and Joshua. It is the difference between saying, “I speak for God,” and “I speak for the God who just dried up the sea, who is leading you by a pillar of fire, and who is feeding you daily with bread from heaven.”

Prophetic Punctuated Equilibrium and Inheriting Ripples

The biblical narrative suggests a pattern—namely, large-scale miraculous activity and increased prophetic utterances are connected to a call to restore order from chaos through destruction. F&C see a connection between evidentially weighty miracles and sacralized violence—what Rowley calls prophetic punctuated equilibrium: spurts of miraculous “mutations” occurring within a short time—clustered around the old covenant and new covenant—followed by longer periods when relatively fewer miracles take place.

The conquest narratives serve as a reminder of God’s clear and inimitable workings in the course of salvation history and a call to remember his faithfulness in bringing his purposes to fruition.

Conclusion

In a post 9/11 environment, Morriston’s arguments strike a significant chord. But F&C have made several points here. First, Morriston’s argument wrongly assumes that prophetic utterances like those recorded in scripture continue after the closing of the biblical canon. Second, one can rationally attribute to God a command that under ordinary circumstances would be immoral to carry out only on two conditions: (1) that the command does not contradict a nonnegotiable moral principle, and (2) that, on the background evidence accepted by a biblical theist, the claim that God issued the command is more likely than the claim that the action is wrong. Third, even if the command meets these criteria, further tests must be passed—tests not met by contemporaries who claim God told them to kill: alleged prophets must have a track record of true predictions and have proved themselves authentic; their message must not contradict previous revelation or commands recorded in scripture; their character must show fruit of the Spirit in their life, and must have a lifestyle of sincere obedience to God’s commands; and if prophets announce an exemption from the normal rules against killing, this message will be authenticated by Category 2G miracles.

Image: "Andrea Previtali 005" by Andrea Previtali - Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andrea_Previtali_005.jpg#/media/File:Andrea_Previtali_005.jpg

Paul and Socrates: What Athens Has to Do with Jerusalem

Pursuing a simultaneous, side-by-side comparison and contrast of the early Socratic dialogue Euthyphro and the apostle Paul’s speech at Mars Hill in Acts 17 affords the chance for a fascinating and instructive exploration. The most obvious similarity is geographical. Separated by time but linked in space, ground zero for both epic events was Athens, the intellectual cradle of the western world, the birthplace of philosophy. Presocratics like Thales and Heraclitus hailing from Ionia were the warm-up act; Socrates and his student Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle, were the main actors in bringing philosophy to life, and Athens, at the edge of the fabled Aegean, was center stage.

In Paul’s case, the speech before the Areopagus took place at Mars Hill, carved into the rocky hillside containing, at its zenith, the Acropolis—prominently featuring the Parthenon and other temples and shrines—and overlooking the agora, the marketplace, further down. In that marketplace, Socrates, in whose lifetime the Parthenon was completed, tried out his ideas, engaging people in conversation and needling them with questions whose effect was far from effective at ingratiating himself to his unfortunate interlocutors.

The apostle Paul, too, nearly five centuries later, took it to the streets of the agora—“When In Athens.” The Areopagus—the name for both the Athenian council and the meeting place of the council—was known as Mars Hill because it was the place where Ares, the son of Zeus, was thought to have been tried for having killed his uncle Poseidon’s son. When the Romans co-opted the Greek pantheon of gods, Zeus became Jupiter, Artemis Diana, and Ares Mars, the Roman god of war. Thus Mars Hill.

The setting of the Euthyphro is the porch of the King Archon, one of nine Athenian magistrates whose quasi-religious functions included presiding over cases involving impiety and homicide. Socrates is there to inquire further into the accusations levied against him by Meletus of corrupting the youth, denying the existence of the old gods, and inventing new ones.

Paul and Socrates had started in the agora, but both ended up in trouble, answerable to reigning Greek authorities, for a surprising number of overlapping reasons. Paul was on his second missionary journey when he stopped at Athens, whereas Socrates, who had spent his whole life in Athens, was nearing the end of his earthly pilgrimage. Socrates had gained a following, especially among the young men of Athens. The core of his followers, including his star student and biographer extraordinaire Plato, was devoted and loyal. Paul, too, while at Athens, garnered a following— in the sense of converts to the faith he was proclaiming. This happened in most of the places he went, Athens no exception. The two examples of new “followers” the passage adduces are Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, “and others with them” who go unnamed.

In addition to gaining enthusiastic followers and new adherents, both also generated quite a bit of opposition. This is hardly surprising, since each of them made points that challenged prevailing convictions, including longstanding views and customs considered largely sacrosanct. Opposition was something to which they had both grown accustomed. Again, in the immediate context, each was in a state of being challenged to defend his ideas. Socrates was accused by Meletus (and Anytus and Lycon, we find out in the Apology) of corrupting the youth and impiety regarding the gods, and would soon face those charges in court. Euthyphro initially thought that Socrates had nothing to worry about regarding such charges, but of course he would turn out to be quite tragically wrong about this matter. Paul was brought before the Areopagus after having argued in the synagogue with the Jews and God fearers—those Gentile sympathizers with monotheism and with second temple Judaism—and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. The latter methodology was a bit new for Paul, who more typically preached, proclaimed, and dialogued in the synagogue. To venture into the agora is a clear parallel with Socrates, whose common practice this was—for no charge, unlike the Sophists who taught rhetoric for a fee. Euthyphro’s first question to Socrates in Euthyphro is why he’d left the Lyceum—a public meeting place in a grove of trees in classical Athens. In Athens both Paul and Socrates were very public philosophers indeed. For those who think Paul wasn’t much of a philosopher, it might be instructive to know that Antony Flew said of Paul numerous times that, in his own estimation, Paul had a first-rate philosophical mind. His ability at Mars Hill to engage in informed and insightful discourse with the reigning philosophies of his day provides partial evidence of this.

Paul was brought before the Areopagus because this was the protocol when someone wished to introduce new gods to be revered and worshiped, and this was what Paul was thought by the Athenians to be doing. The new gods they took Paul to be proclaiming were Jesus and Anastasis—resurrection. Since the category of resurrection was so foreign to Greek ears, they naturally took his reference to it—transliterated anastasis—as a reference to a new goddess; and now Jesus and Anastasis needed to be defended—their existence, their credentials, their benefits. The protocol for introducing new deities required Paul to address the Areopagus, so his address had for its ostensible purpose to answer questions posed to him, specifically, who were these new gods, and why did they deserve a place among the gods recognized in Athens? Some of the philosophers present, Stoics and Epicureans, had impugned the quality and caliber of Paul’s proclamations, accusing him being a babbler, cobbling together bits and pieces of a variety of worldview and religious perspectives. If such were the case, his new ideas would hardly be worthy of recognition, but rather of categorical exclusion if not downright derision.

Socrates also did something thought problematically “new.” In his career he had made it clear that he was following what he took to be a divine directive—an inner voice that he assumed had come from God—to inquire more fully into the revelation from the Oracle of Delphi that there was no one in Athens wiser than him. He had been incredulous to hear this, because he claimed to be ignorant of nearly everything. To disprove the thesis he was the wisest, he sought wisdom from others, but had discovered through a process of searching questions that his interlocutors were just as ignorant of him. The only difference he thought he could find was that, while they claimed to be wise and were ignorant, he disavowed having wisdom himself. In this sense, he finally concluded, perhaps the Oracle was right—he was the wisest after all for knowing of his own ignorance, unlike others. Socrates saw ignorance as the epistemically humble path the judicious trod. If the evidence wasn’t there or wasn’t strong enough for a view, he remained skeptical about it, carefully apportioning belief to the evidence.

Introducing the Apology, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns wrote about Socrates in these rhetorically glowing terms: “Great spiritual leaders and great saints adorn the pages of history, but Socrates is not like any of them. He is, indeed, the servant of the divine power, living in complete obedience to God; yet he always views the world of men with a bit of humor, a touch of irony. He spends his life in the effort to kindle into a flame the spark of good in every man, but when he fails, when he comes up against blind obstinacy or stupid conceit or the indifference of egotism, or when he draw down on himself bitter enmity, then along with his regret—because he cares for everyone—is mingled a little amusement, a feeling, as it were, of rueful sympathy, as if he said to himself, ‘What silly children we are.’”[1]

To what are they referring when they write of Socrates as the “servant of the divine power” and “living in complete obedience to God”? The dialogue itself provides the answer about this Socratic innovation. Despite his skepticism about the Greek pantheon of manmade gods, references to the divine recur time and again. “However, let that turn out as God wills. I  must obey the law and make my defense” (19a); “real wisdom is the property of God” (23b); “That is why I still go about seeking and searching in obedience to the divine command…” (23b); “…when God appointed me, as I supposed and believed, to the duty of leading the philosophical life, examining myself and others…” (28e); “…I owe a greater obedience to God than to you, and so long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet” (29d); “I shall reprove him for neglecting what is of supreme importance, and giving his attention to trivialities…. This, I do assure you is what my God commands, and it is my belief that no greater good has ever befallen you in this city than my service to my God” (30a); “I do not believe that the law of God permits a better man to be harmed by a worse” (30d); “It is literally true, even if it sounds rather comical, that God has specially appointed me to this city, as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of some stinging fly” (30e); “I am subject to a divine or supernatural experience…. It began in my early childhood—a sort of voice which comes to me, and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on” (31d); “This duty I have accepted, as I said, in obedience to God’s commands given in oracles and dreams and in every other way that any other divine dispensation has ever impressed a duty upon man. This is a true statement, gentlemen, and easy to verify” (33c); “Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God” (42a).

When Socrates, however ingenuously, offered to become Euthyphro’s disciple, it was perhaps in part motivated to underscore something ironic. Euthyphro was there at court not defending himself, but pressing charges against another, specifically, his own father. His father had bound a slave who had murdered a house servant. While awaiting directions as to how to proceed, the father allowed the slave to die from hunger and exposure, having had him tossed in a ditch while awaiting further instructions. Athenian custom would dictate Euthyphro to assign primacy to loyalty to his father, and his revisionism in suing his father for wrongdoing was a real departure from normal customs. Socrates’ own innovations, though, in heeding what he thought was a divine mandate while being skeptical of the capricious, finite, and feuding deities of the Greek pantheon was the reason he was in trouble. With some justification, Socrates’ gesture toward taking on the younger and confident Euthyphro as his mentor—relegating himself to the role of protégé—accentuated the irony that Euthyphro’s radical departure from custom was unquestioned while his own innovations were cast as objectionably problematic. The Socratic subtext was that this state of affairs betrayed a real inconsistency that ought to be rectified.

This is both an interesting point of comparison and contrast with Paul. Paul believed in the importance of evidence, too, and what he considered the most important evidential factor to consider will be discussed momentarily. But his view concerning ignorance was quite a bit less sanguine than that of Socrates. Far from wearing ignorance as a proverbial badge of honor, or celebrating as sufficient an altar to an unknown god, Paul explicitly said, “While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent…” (Acts 17:30). Paul thought that, with the resurrection, a vitally important truth about God had been revealed, the surprising piece of the puzzle that, now that it’s shown up, makes possible the puzzle’s solution. Theology was no mere exercise of blind faith or empty conjecture, but of definitive truth now made clear. Among what had been revealed was something that the philosophers in Paul’s audience would find anathema: that there was a judgment to come. The world would be judged in righteousness, by a man whose credentials have been established.

On this issue of judgment for wrongdoing, incidentally, Paul echoed a theme that both Socrates and Euthyphro seemed to agree on entirely, namely, that a wrongdoer deserves punishment. The shared nature of this belief might suggest that this insight is part of what some might call “general revelation.” In Summa contra Gentiles Aquinas wrote that the knowledge of God accessible independent of specific revelation pertained to (1) what may be asserted of God in Himself, (2) what may be asserted about the procession of the creatures of God, and (3) about the ordination of the creatures towards God as their ends. A particularly poignant piece of natural theology is morality; there is something morally instinctive, deeply intuitive, wildly instructive, and patently obvious about the idea that justice demands that wrongs be addressed. The failure to effect such justice leaves an injustice in place and not properly fixed—which would be in intractably irrational feature of reality. In one sense or another, human beings are morally accountable for their actions. The famous Boyle Lectures of Samuel Clarke deal, in this order, with the existence of God, the attributes of God as Creator and Moral Governor of the world, the certainty of a “state of rewards and punishments,” as truths assumed to be capable of formal demonstration.

To the contrary of questioning an assumption about moral justice, Socrates gave it his wholehearted endorsement. His claim of ignorance didn’t include claims about moral responsibility; he never disavowed the category of moral accountability. He acknowledged the difficulty on occasion of identifying which actions were instances of wrongdoing; for example, he was much less confident than Euthyphro that Euthyphro’s suing of his own father was morally right. Rather, he entertained grave doubts about its piety or holiness. But an actually impious or unholy action was an action he thought merited punishment for the wrongdoer. This is clear, among other junctures in the dialogue, when Socrates discussed the alleged enmities and contentions among the gods. He wrote, concerning the gods, that they don’t venture to argue that the guilty are to be unpunished, even if they do argue that they aren’t actually guilty. Like Euthyphro and Socrates, there is both agreement and disagreement among the gods; they disagree on whether particular instances of alleged wrongdoing are actual ones; they agree, though, that genuine examples of wrongdoing deserve punishment.

“Paul thought that, with the resurrection, a vitally important truth about God had been revealed, the surprising piece of the puzzle that, now that it’s shown up, makes possible the puzzle’s solution.”

Paul’s later assertion, then, that there is righteous judgment to come would correspond with at least a dimension of Socrates’ convictions, for Socrates agreed that justice demands punishment for wrongdoing. And this is a rather intuitive conviction for most. Few today can hear of atrocities committed by members of ISIS like roasting people alive or public beheadings without feeling a strong conviction that justice demands such horrors to be judged—though rather inexplicably some seem rather more exorcised by relatively trivial indignities, a failure of the moral imagination reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’s “men without chests.” After witnessing unspeakable and horrific injustices perpetrated on innocent people in his homeland, Miroslav Volf wrote, “Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.”

Of course Socrates didn’t have Paul’s rich theology, but the parallel in pointing to the moral appropriateness of judgment and punishment for wrongdoing is a conspicuous one. Socrates wasn’t responsible for fully anticipating all the details of additional special revelation to come; but by Paul’s context, in the fullness of time, the hour of ignorance was over. Socrates pointed to the lack of evidence for the Athenian gods; Paul agreed, but Paul was the new gadfly, extending the point in a positive direction: the evidence for the right theology was now available. The finite, fallible gods were dead; the God who is the Ground of Being, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, the God in whom there’s no shadow of turning, is alive and well.

Others have pointed out germane overlaps and salient similarities between Paul and Socrates. Some of the early Christian apologists pointed out similarities between Socrates and Jesus, in fact, and others have pointed out the similar structure of Paul’s address at Mars Hill and that of Socrates in the Apology: Dialogue, accusation, explanation. As noted, they were both profoundly skeptical of the gods worshiped all around them. Socrates had heard the myths of the gods inherited from playwrights and poets, legends and lore. Homer and Hesiod had fired the Greek imagination, populating it with an array of capricious and contentious gods, and reinforcing a view of the world according to which fate was the ultimate determinant. Socrates sought a better way, a world of reason, regulated by structure, a cosmos rather than a chaos. For him the legends strained credulity, for they revealed a world full of fallible gods filled with foibles, gods pretty clearly made in the image of men. He admitted that he found such legends hard to believe, whereas Euthyphro, credulously embracing all the stories with nothing but the most wooden literalness, affirmed his assent to their veracity, despite their inherent tensions, conflicting claims, and warring gods. Deity, for Socrates, if it exists at all, must be free of such imperfections and flaws.

Paul of course would concur, and his Jewishness alone would no doubt suffice to make him grieved and distressed at all the idolatry in Athens. The most axiomatic Jewish conviction was that there is one God alone; this is why Jews would each day repeat the “Shema,” taken from Deut 6:4: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is one.” The Hebrew verb for “hear” is shema.

The mentality of the Athenians seemed to be one of “covering bases,” as it were; after all, devotion and payments of homage to the gods was the surefire way of securing divine blessing on the city. So they must have figured better to be safe than sorry; worshiping the full panoply of gods, the full pantheon of deities, an expansive range of divinities, could maximize the likelihood of securing desired blessings. Euthyphro, similarly, had thought that a religious orientation called for such credulity. There was little fear of holding wrong beliefs among these who had adopted (what we can call) the Homeric spirit; it was rather a picture of an expansive range of beliefs in order to be on the safe side. This way there was less chance that some capricious god or goddess would withhold their blessing.

Paul’s contrasting approach is rather in the Socratic spirit. It wasn’t about covering one’s bases or being safe rather than sorry; it was a matter of caring about the truth. And Paul was adamantly committed to the truth that one God exists, not a plethora, not a panoply, not a pantheon, but one God. And rather than arguing that this one God deserved a place among the temples and shrines in Athens, Paul’s point was radically subversive, startling his audience. This one God was the only true God, and all the other alleged gods and goddesses were a sham, unreal, nonexistent, powerless, mere idols. Moreover, this one God was the Creator and Sustainer of all, and hardly able to be contained within a man-made temple or booth or building. He was the God of all creation, and whatever the cosmology of his audience, they knew the world was a big place. This God was bigger and greater yet, and not afflicted with the limitations or weaknesses or flaws of the gods of Athenian lore. As much as Socrates, Paul was skeptical both of the legends and of the Homeric spirit that privileges an ambitious range of beliefs to cover one’s bases over a serious examination of where the evidence points.

This leads to an important insight of contemporary relevance. Although cooperation, dialogue, and shared missions between those of divergent religious traditions is surely a worthwhile goal, there remain irremediable theological differences that can’t be simply discounted and ignored, as if they were easily eliminable and unimportant. Those core convictions are at the heart of those groups’ essential identities. Paul was little interested in forging a working relationship with those he thought were missing the truth, setting aside as trivial their worldview differences. It was exactly a focus on those differences that led to his faithful and uncompromising proclamation. Ignoring the differences—even when they show diametrically opposite worldview convictions—is to privilege a Homeric spirit; retaining the proper place for objective truth claims that matter and for which we’re responsible is to privilege the Socratic spirit. Paul is a paradigmatic example of the latter camp.

Perhaps most fundamentally, Paul and Socrates agreed that people ought to be skeptical of the right things, and convinced by the right things. Where evidence is lacking, suspension of belief is appropriate; Socrates was skeptical of the pantheon of old gods and the traditional myths, and he should have been. Paul was likewise convinced that the gods worshiped in Athens were mere idols.

Socrates also, however, hearkened to what he considered a veridical divine voice—emanating from a source other than the traditional gods whose imperfections and contentions were legend. It was a voice that would dissuade him from courses of actions he would consider, and a voice that made him think he was on a divine mission for which he would be held responsible. “When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all” (Rom 2:14-16).

Paul, too, had received a special and personal divine revelation of Christ, but, interestingly, his appeal to others was not based on that experience, but on the resurrection itself, which provided evidence for everyone. God “has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31; emphasis added). With a Jewish audience Paul made the case for the necessity of the resurrection from the scriptures; in the heart of Athens, he instead used Gentile and Stoic poets to make connections before pointing to the resurrection, often coopting the words and categories of those writers for his own purposes of proclamation. Like Socrates, Paul was skeptical of the pantheon of gods, but equally insistent that his listeners be willing to follow the evidence where it leads. Paul started where his audience was, but took them to where he knew they needed to go; as foreign as reference to a resurrection was, this was the pivotal event and confirming evidence that the God of whom he spoke was real.

Paul Copan writes that “the fact that people can recognize evil in the world suggests a moral compass that is not arbitrary. Kant spoke not only of the starry heavens above but also of ‘the moral law within.’ If real evils exist in the world—evils we associate with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao Tse-Tung—then we are assuming an objective design plan of sorts: there is a way things ought to be, and evil is a departure from that. But if there is no design plan and nature is all there is, then why think things should be any different from the way they are? And maybe the evils in the world, especially when they directly affect us, can serve as something of a wake-up call for us. The familiar cry for justice—as old as humanity itself—suggests a transcendent moral standard above national laws and social contracts. Not only does evil remind us that things ought to be different from the way that they are; it also reminds us of the need for outside assistance to address profound evils both outside of us and within our own hearts. We all have a deep longing that evil will not have the last word.”

Or as the other Paul might put it: the hour of ignorance is over; the truth has been made manifest; and there will be a reckoning.

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With his co-author, Jerry Walls, Dr. Baggett authored Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. The book won Christianity Today’s 2012 apologetics book of the year of the award. He recently published a sequel with Walls that critiques naturalistic ethics, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. They recently completed a third book in the series, a book which chronicles the history of moral arguments for God’s existence. Dr. Baggett has also co-edited a collection of essays exploring the philosophy of C.S. Lewis, and edited the third debate between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew on the resurrection of Jesus. Dr. Baggett currently is a professor at the Rawlings School of Divinity in Lynchburg, VA.  

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Notes: 

[1] Plato: The Collected Dialogues (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, p. 3.

Too Good Not to be True: A Call to Moral Apologetics as a Mode of Civil Discourse

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. 

                                                                                                          Blaise Pascal[1]

Introduction[2]

I once attended an atheist parade, where hundreds of atheists marched through downtown Denver, carrying signs and chanting anti-Christian slogans. It was an unusual group, but stranger still were some of the Christians who lined the parade route. A particular image that continues to haunt me is of the representative of Jesus wearing a yellow construction hard hat with a large, battery-operated speaker mounted on top, and a cable connected to a hand-held microphone. Glaring in evident hatred at the marchers passing by, he screamed repeatedly into the microphone, at the top of his lungs, “Jesus loves you!!!  Jesus loves you!!!”

As one would expect, the parade immediately stopped at this point, as the atheists, grasping the truth that Jesus loved them, dropped their placards and joined Mr. Hard Hat in grateful praise to God. Well, not exactly. Instead, the march continued, the marchers all the more firmly established in their convictions. This episode represents, shall we say, a “failure to communicate.” Certainly, nothing was amiss in the proposition asserted; Jesus loves you was both true and important for the audience to understand. And it was articulated clearly; competent speakers of English had no trouble understanding the words. Yet I warrant that none in the audience came, as a result of this speech act, to see the proposition to be true – to believe it. If anything, the communicative result was the opposite. (“You’re with Jesus, you hate me, therefore Jesus hates me.”) Although Jesus loves you is true, it was not believable to those who heard it.

This scenario may serve as a metaphor for what believers now face in much of American and European culture with respect to communicating the gospel. To a growing extent, when we assert Jesus loves you (i.e., when we declare the gospel or articulate the Christian worldview), people do not find it believable. As with the atheists in Denver, this is not so much a function of the content of what we say as the context in which we say it. In some cases, it may be the way we say it; in most cases, it is the hearers’ perception (whether accurate or not) of who we are, as we say it. That is, what makes the gospel unbelievable to many today is their perception of Christians and Christianity. This is a reality that followers of Jesus, as they consider the task and importance of civil discourse, particularly in relation to representing the gospel, must recognize.

Once Christian moral teaching was widely regarded in western culture as the highest expression of ethical thought. Indeed, Christians were seen by some to set the moral bar too high, that Christianity was, as it were, "too good" to be true—a criticism, but one that rests upon an underlying moral admiration. Times have changed. According to Richard Harries, former Anglican Bishop of Oxford,

For 1,500 years, it has been assumed that to be good and to be Christian were synonymous. That is simply not true now . . . One of the churches’ great, unacknowledged failures is their reluctance to face this. They like to assume that they hold the high moral ground. If they ever did, they certainly do not now, at least in the minds of the liberal intelligentsia. People often find Christianity’s picture of God unattractive . . . I believe that, beneath people’s alleged philosophical or scientific objections, there is often a gut feeling, at once both psychological, moral and spiritual, that they do not like what has been put before them—and they do not like it not just because of their temperament, or because they are wicked, but because it feels psychologically oppressive, morally suspect and spiritually unattractive . . . I believe that the Christian understanding of God is the most morally and spiritually beautiful picture of the divine that has been put before human beings. But if we want people to feel the persuasive power of this, we have first to hear how people find it morally and spiritually unpersuasive.[3]

Arguably, the central objections to Christianity these days, from Dawkins to the editorial pages, are moral objections: Christianity is "too bad" to be true. Engaging such objections adequately—"moral apologetics"—is, in my view, the chief apologetic challenge of our time. However, Christian apologists have given comparatively little attention to diagnosing, understanding, and strategically responding to it.[4] As Harries suggests, we need to consider how people find our understanding of God “morally and spiritually unpersuasive,” and work together to address it. In this paper I hope to encourage further, strategic work by many of us in the area of moral apologetics, toward the end that people would come increasingly to see Christianity and the gospel as too good not to be true.

Arguably, the central objections to Christianity these days, from Dawkins to the editorial pages, are moral objections: Christianity is "too bad" to be true. Engaging such objections adequately—"moral apologetics"—is, in my view, the chief apologetic challenge of our time.

My purpose here is to contribute to the beginning of a conversation about these matters, by suggesting some ways to think about the project and where it fits into the apologetic and moral terrain, specifically in relation to the believability of the gospel. More particularly, I attempt to sketch a conception of the apologetic task and its relation to moral goodness that is informed by considerations from epistemology, philosophical theology, and broadly Aristotelian moral psychology, which I hope will help clarify the need for moral apologetics, as well as its nature and general shape. What I say is more suggestive than definitive; each of these areas needs to be developed much further. It will also be more diagnostic than prescriptive; developing a strategic plan for addressing these issues is something, I hope, that some of us can work on together. The challenge is much bigger than all of us. I hope that what I say here will be helpful in thinking about the broad shape of the project, but my chief aim is to cast a vision: to sound a call to moral apologetics.

The term moral apologetics is ambiguous. It can refer either to being “moral” (i.e., morally good) as we do apologetics, or to doing apologetics in relation to (matters of) moral goodness and evil. In my view, the ambiguity is appropriate, as both aspects are implicated in the problem and required for the solution. My central intuition is that apologists must take seriously the role of goodness in how people are drawn to the gospel. Doing so implies both negative and positive apologetic tasks: that we respond to moral objections raised against Christianity and the gospel and that we point to the goodness of God, both in the content of our apologetic arguments and—most especially—in our lives. Each of these elements is essential, I maintain, if we are to say Jesus loves you in such a way that people actually believe it.

1 A brief sketch of apologetics

I understand apologetics as the art and science of explaining and defending the truth-claims of the Christian worldview.[5] As a science, doing apologetics involves mastering information and arguments. As an art, it involves developing skills in understanding one’s “audience” and tuning what one knows toward engaging them in real communication. While the science of apologetics focuses solely on questions of truth and validity, the art of apologetics is concerned with understanding how people come to believe what is true, or matters of “believability.” Moral apologetics, as I describe it here, reflects concerns that particularly emerge from the “art” side.

Positive apologetics involves “playing offense”: pointing to the truth of the gospel by offering reasons and positive pointers on its behalf. Negative apologetics involves “playing defense”: answering objections and clearing away obstacles that obstruct someone’s vision of the truth of the gospel. Moral apologetics includes both orientations. It involves thinking strategically about how to point to the goodness of God, on the one hand, and about how to respond effectively to moral objections mounted against God’s goodness, on the other.

Beyond these basic distinctions, I will make two further suggestions about apologetics that are, perhaps, less obvious. I will introduce the second in the section 3, but the first here. An important concern related to the art of apologetics, I have suggested, is “believability.” Apologists should be concerned, not only to defend the claim that a proposition like Jesus loves you is true, but to do so in such a way that others will see it to be true, to believe it. What does it mean, to come to believe such a proposition—in a way that is appropriate to the sort of proposition it is and to the kind of response that it properly calls forth? Deep theological waters glisten before me, which I hope to leap with a single bound. For my purposes here, I make two assumptions. I assume, first, that a necessary condition for one’s coming to believe that p, where p is a proposition that is part of the essential content of the gospel, such as Jesus loves you or Jesus died on the cross for my sins, is that the Holy Spirit is at work in one’s heart, drawing one to himself—however we undertand the details of this, theologically. Second, I assume (again, however one spells out the details) that the Holy Spirit uses human agents such as evangelists and apologists in the process of drawing someone to himself. The first assumption is simply a given in this discussion; my focus is related to the second. That assumption implies that we should approach our role as apologists both prayerfully and intelligently, and I suggest that this means we should think carefully and strategically about both the science and the art of apologetics. With respect to the latter, I suggest further that we should reflect, among other things, on how people form beliefs, and specifically, how they find them to be believable.

This leads us into deep epistemological waters as well, and here I just want to dip my toe in enough to appeal to a distinction I find quite helpful in envisioning the apologetic task, one adapted from sociologists of knowledge: the distinction between credibility and plausibility.[6] Both, on my understanding, are constituents of believability. As I describe them briefly, what I mean by believability should become reasonably clear as well. (“Reasonably clear” is all I aspire to here.)

            Credibility has to do with having reasons to believe something is true. The credibility question with respect to some matter is: Is it true? Where p is a proposition, for subject S to believe that p (i.e., to hold p to be true, or to assent to p as true), S needs to think that p is true—S needs to have reasons to believe that p. That is, p must be credible to S; credibility is a necessary condition for believability. Put differently, there is, as it were, a credibility filter in S’s mind through which S’s considerations of p must successfully pass, before S believes that p.

The gospel, as they see it, is (therefore) implausible—it couldn’t be true; it’s too bad to be true. Thus, although there is important work for moral apologetics to do at the levels of both credibility and plausibility, the need for making plausible (“plausibilizing”) the Christian worldview morally is particularly exigent at this time: softening the moral soil so that the seeds of the gospel may be able to penetrate.

Traditional apologetic strategies focus on the credibility of Christianity, providing evidence or reasons that, in its constituents (e.g., the resurrection of Jesus) or in its totality, the Christian worldview is true. This is a crucial task, as credibility is necessary for believability. But it is not sufficient. There is a prior filter in S’s mind through which S’s considerations must successfully pass before S will even entertain the question whether p is true, and, thus, actually consider evidence that it is. This is a plausibility filter. The plausibility question with respect to p is: Could p be true? Only if S sees p as plausible will S seriously consider whether p is credible. To use agricultural language, plausibility has to do with the kinds or conditions of “soil” in which propositional seeds can grow. Misconceptions about the gospel, faulty assumptions about science, or bad experiences with Christians do not (yet) function as reasons or arguments against the existence of God or explicit defeaters for belief in things like the resurrection of Jesus. What they do is to harden the ground against entertaining such reasons, or seriously considering the truth of the gospel. Plausibility factors like these render Christianity unattractive, even unthinkable for people, who may simply write it off from consideration entirely (“It couldn’t be true”) and so never seriously consider evidence that it is true.

Credibility and plausibility both constitute necessary conditions for S’s coming to believe p to be true. If p is already plausible to S, credibility considerations may be all that is needed for p’s becoming believable to S. But if p is not plausible to S, S will not seriously attend to those considerations, and the communicative focus must shift to plausibility. Such is the situation to an increasing extent, I believe, with respect to the gospel, which has become implausible to many. While this is due to a number of factors,[7] our subject here is at the heart of it: Christians and Christianity seem to increasing numbers of people to be bad. The gospel, as they see it, is (therefore) implausible—it couldn’t be true; it’s too bad to be true. Thus, although there is important work for moral apologetics to do at the levels of both credibility and plausibility, the need for making plausible (“plausibilizing”) the Christian worldview morally is particularly exigent at this time: softening the moral soil so that the seeds of the gospel may be able to penetrate.

2 The goodness of God and why it matters

The Psalmist invites us to “Taste and see that the LORD is good.” (Psalm 34.8)[1] Peter draws upon this image, as he invites his readers to grow in Christ: “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” (1 Peter 2.2-3) What Peter sees as the result of his readers’ tasting of God’s goodness is suggested in his immediately subsequent phrase: “As you come to him . . .” (4a).[2] The picture suggested here is one that is reflected throughout Scripture and the history of Christian thought, viz. that God is good, and we are—and should be—drawn to him for precisely that reason: as good. Such an understanding also fits the classical philosophical conception of goodness as essentially desirable.[3] On this view, we as rational agents are drawn to what we take to be good, and, whether we are reflectively aware of it or not, we in fact order our lives in relation to what we conceive to be our ultimate good, our summum bonum. Such is the basic shape of moral psychology in the classical, especially the broadly Aristotelian tradition.[4]

Although I can’t defend these claims in any remotely complete way here, I will fill in the contours of this biblical and classical picture a bit more fully in what follows. The biblical story emphasizes God’s goodness and people being drawn to him in that light. Examples of passages and contexts could be multiplied. I’ll briefly note two, the first reflecting a general pattern, the second a particular instance. Arguably, the most common worship chorus in the Old Testament, appearing in different Psalms and appealed to in a range of circumstances and worship contexts, from dedicating the Temple to facing enemies in battle, is the familiar refrain: “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.”[5] The worship pattern of the people of God was consistently to face joys and challenges by focusing their attention on God’s goodness, expressed in his steadfast love (hesed) toward them.

A vivid particular instance of reflecting on God’s goodness and being drawn to it is found in Psalm 73. In this strikingly honest meditation, the worship leader, Asaph, struggles with the problem of evil: the unjust suffering of those who are good and the unjust flourishing of those who do evil. Resolution for Asaph comes when, in the Temple (v. 17), he sees the bigger, eternal perspective, and comes to understand in a fuller and deeper way that God is good – indeed, that God is his good (“But as for me, the nearness of God is my good,” v. 28, NASB) – and Asaph is drawn back to God as a result. Charles Spurgeon comments on this Psalm:

The greater our nearness to God, the less we are affected by the attractions and distractions of earth. Access into the most holy place is a great privilege, and a cure for a multitude of ills. It is good for all saints, it is good for me in particular; it is always good, and always will be good for me to approach the greatest good, the source of all good, even God himself.[6]

What I want to emphasize from both of these contexts is not only the centrality of God’s goodness to the biblical understanding of God, but also the role that one’s awareness of God’s goodness plays in one’s being drawn to him, coming to him in order to worship him, trust him, and love him. Responding properly to Jesus loves you, I suggest, involves a kind of conviction of Jesus’ goodness.

God’s goodness plays a central role in the historical tradition of Christian thought about God as well. According to Boethius, for example, God is identical in his substance to true or supreme goodness,[7] by which “He rules all things.” God’s goodness “is the helm and rudder, so to speak, by which the fabric of the universe is kept constant and unimpaired.”[8] The goodness of God is a central (perhaps the central) feature of Augustine’s thought. Augustine endorses the classical moral psychology, according to which we do all that we do in relation to what we take to be our summum bonum.

Here the supreme good is sought, the good to which we refer everything that we do, desiring it not for the sake of something else, but for its very own sake. Obtaining it, we require nothing further in order to be happy. It is truly called the “end,” because we want everything else for the sake of this, but this we want only for itself.[9]

The highest good, Augustine argues, which everyone is ultimately seeking, is in fact God himself.[10] Augustine’s famous words at the beginning of his Confessions should be understood in that light: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”[11] God is our good, the good we ultimately seek.

In Thomas Aquinas the classical understanding of good as desirable is at the heart both of his moral psychology and his metaphysical teleology.

 [W]hatever man desires, he desires it under the aspect of good. And if he desire it, not as his perfect good, which is the last end, he must, of necessity, desire it as tending to the perfect good, because the beginning of anything is always ordained to its completion; as is clearly the case in effects both of nature and of art. Wherefore every beginning of perfection is ordained to complete perfection which is achieved through the last end.[12]

The “perfect good” toward which all human desires ultimately point, for Aquinas, even beyond the full realization of the specific potentialities of human nature, is God himself. God is the ground or “Supreme Fount” of goodness[13] and its true fulfillment, as “the vision of the Divine Essence fills the soul with all good things, since it unites it to the source of all goodness.”[14] Like Augustine, Aquinas sees the universal human hunger for goodness as an expression, most fundamentally, of the longing to know God. “There is but one Sovereign Good, namely, God, by enjoying Whom, men are made happy.”[15] The deep connection between goodness and God also shapes Aquinas’s natural theology. Near the beginning of his initial metaphysical reflections on the nature of God, prior to his arguing for God’s infinity or even unpacking the nature of God’s existence, Aquinas devotes two full questions (Ia.5-6) to the nature of goodness and God’s goodness, developing a rich metaphysical account of goodness that underwrites the metaphysical teleology and moral psychology noted above.[16] At the heart of Aquinas’s thought is seeing God as good, as the supreme good.

John Calvin also firmly and evocatively points to the role of understanding God’s goodness in one’s coming to worship him properly. In the first paragraph of his Institutes, noting the relationship between knowledge of God and knowledge of oneself, Calvin observes that our recognizing “the blessings which unceasingly distil to us from heaven” naturally leads us to the “infinitude of good which resides in God,” that is, to the Lord, in whom “dwell the true light of wisdom, solid virtue, exuberant goodness.”[17] To be sure, for Calvin, it is “one thing to perceive that God our Maker supports us by his power, rules us by his providence, fosters us by his goodness, and visits us with all kinds of blessings, and another thing to embrace the grace of reconciliation offered to us in Christ.” Still, to worship God properly, “it will not . . . be sufficient simply to hold that he is the only being whom all ought to worship and adore, unless we are also persuaded that he is the fountain of all goodness.”[18] It is not enough even to recognize God as creator, the one to whom we must give reverent obedience, for “your idea of his nature is not clear unless you acknowledge him to be the origin and fountain of all goodness, and that we seek everything in him and in none but him.”[19] The fact that God created solely out of his goodness[20] has implications for natural theology. According to Calvin, the most direct path toward natural knowledge of God is to “contemplate his works” – to which Calvin adds: “and so refresh ourselves with his goodness.”[21]

What I hope is salient from this incomplete survey is the recognition, from Scripture and the Christian tradition, of the essential connection between coming to God and seeing God as good. Although recognizing God’s goodness may not be sufficient for coming to him, i.e. for believing in him and embracing the gospel, it does appear to be not only necessary but central.

3 Anselmian apologetics

In his Proslogion, St. Anselm famously articulated what has come to be called the ontological argument for God’s existence.[22] The success of that argument, or even whether Anselm intended it as an argument for theistic belief, continues to be debated. His pattern of reasoning, however—drawing out the implications of understanding God as the maximally perfect Being, or “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”—has proved fruitful in the field of philosophical theology for analyzing the concept and attributes of God. Unlike Mary Poppins, who was “practically perfect in every way,” God is completely perfect in every way. Thomas V. Morris describes our intuitions of God’s being supremely perfect as “Anselmian intuitions,” and he calls this approach to theology, “Perfect Being Theology.”[23] In his introduction to philosophical theology, Morris begins with an analysis of God’s goodness, and underscores the centrality we have seen it enjoy in earlier thinkers:

For the religious believer, trust, praise and worship all focus on this one property, whose importance in the religious life thus cannot be overestimated. In fact, earlier in this century, the British philosopher A. C. Ewing once stated that the most important thing about religion is its claim that the being on whom everything depends is absolutely and supremely good.[24]

I can now fulfill my earlier promise to introduce a second suggestion for apologetics that I find helpful in marking out the conceptual terrain for moral apologetics, by drawing upon the distinctions we have made so far, and by applying a broadly Anselmian approach to the apologetic task. I will call this, “Anselmian apologetics.”[25]

Classical philosophers and theologians identified the supreme or ultimate values in the moral, cognitive, and aesthetic realms as goodness, truth, and beauty (or: the good, the true, and the beautiful). As ultimate values, goodness, truth, and beauty constitute the ends or what is ultimately desired and sought for in these different domains. Moreover, classical thinkers understood goodness, truth, and beauty as bound together in a dynamic unity; indeed, as being ultimately one: truth is good, goodness is beautiful, beauty is good and true, and so on. This picture was easily amenable to early Christian thinkers, who saw these values as ultimately bound together in the nature of God. God is the good, the true, and the beautiful—the ultimate ground, source, and end of all cognitive, moral, and aesthetic value. On this view, as we have already seen with goodness, desires for truth and beauty ultimately reflect a desire for God.

Anselmian apologetics not only appeals to a richer and more balanced understanding of humans as bearers God’s image, but also follows the broader pattern of biblical examples of apologetics found, for example, in the Psalms—where psalmists, using vivid poetry (set to music), declare and describe God’s manifold greatness (beauty, goodness, power, majesty, truth, etc.) as being supremely worthy of worship, and call the nations, on that basis, to respond with such worship.

Traditional apologetics is concerned chiefly with truth; its appeal is to the cognitive domain. The aim of traditional apologetics is to show, with reasons and arguments, that Christian truth claims are in fact true—true to facts about the natural order, the origin of the universe, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and so on. Some people, however, are drawn to God more through reflections of his goodness or beauty in the world than through reasoning about such matters. Given the variety of pointers to God and the complexity of human psychology (and epistemology), I suggest that our understanding of apologetics should be broad enough to include each of these (and perhaps more) kinds of considerations in pointing to God. Anselmian apologetics not only appeals to a richer and more balanced understanding of humans as bearers God’s image, but also follows the broader pattern of biblical examples of apologetics found, for example, in the Psalms—where psalmists, using vivid poetry (set to music), declare and describe God’s manifold greatness (beauty, goodness, power, majesty, truth, etc.) as being supremely worthy of worship, and call the nations, on that basis, to respond with such worship.[26] God is the ultimate ground of goodness, truth, and beauty; he is their origin, their source, their end, their fullest actuality, and he is to be worshiped as such. God is not just an inferred entity or the best explanation of certain phenomena, but the ultimate to-be-worshiped. This broader picture, it seems to me, should be reflected in our apologetics.

For some people and in some circumstances, goodness and beauty play a particularly important role in plausibilizing the gospel. These values (to anticipate where I’m headed next) engage experiential and desiderative aspects of the epistemic “soil,” beyond the merely cognitive, and those aspects are often deeply important in determining what one takes to be plausible. Consider Psalm 27, for example, where David, in the midst of ugly, fearful conflict, longs for beauty—and turns to God as the satisfaction of that longing.

One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple. (Psalm 27.4)

David’s deepest longing, he saw, was for God himself. This fits the general picture we’ve seen. But note that this longing for God was beauty-shaped, an experience, I suspect, that is echoed in the lives of many others. C. S. Lewis stands, for many of us, as a model for truth-oriented traditional apologetics, and rightly so. But Lewis also developed pointers to God based on goodness and beauty, expressed both in arguments and in imaginative literature. To many readers, the latter represent Lewis’s most powerful apologetic work. In Lewis’s own journey to faith, moreover, beauty was arguably the most important factor.[27]

Putting these considerations together with what we’ve already seen, we can rough out an initial picture of moral apologetics: Within a broad conception of apologetics as pointing to all that is true of God, including his goodness, truth, and beauty, and recognizing the centrality of seeing God as good in coming to believe in God, the focus of moral apologetics will be on pointing to God’s goodness. This could take a number of forms, beyond (but including) traditional forms of argument. A further line of thought suggests the importance of broadening our approach, however, and it is crucial for understanding how moral apologetics relates particularly to plausibility considerations and for illustrating the devastating power of moral objections to Christianity.

4 Grasping that God is good

Concern with God’s goodness plays at least two roles in traditional apologetics. First, a very important line of apologetic argumentation, a negative one (“playing defense”), is to respond to the perennial “problem of evil” (POE). The POE constitutes a moral objection to the Christian worldview. For many objectors, moreover, it is not merely a rational puzzle about the formal consistency of evil and divine great-making properties, but (also) an expression of their existential struggle about believing in God in the midst of suffering and pain. Part of the negative task of moral apologetics, then, will be continued work on the POE—supplemented with an emphasis, I suggest, on giving attention to the plausibility-relevant, real-life experiences of suffering that often lie behind this objection for some who object.

Second, concern with God’s goodness has also played a positive role in traditional apologetics. Moral arguments for theistic belief appeal to moral considerations that point to the existence of God.[28] Probably the most famous of such arguments is C. S. Lewis’s line of reasoning in the first few chapters of Mere Christianity.[29] The basic intuition driving moral arguments is that the existence of objective moral values or moral obligations, properties that impinge upon us, bind us, and obligate us point beyond themselves—and beyond us imperfect moral agents—to a perfect moral agent who made us and who reveals his character and will to us in these ways. They point to a supreme moral authority who holds us responsible to live up to them. In short, the best explanation of a moral order is that there is a Moral Orderer. It is notoriously difficult, at best, to account for these pervasive and central features of moral reality in terms of alternative worldviews such as naturalism or pantheism.

Although moral arguments like this are often difficult to spell out in their specifics, they capture what is for many people one of the most powerful pointers to the existence of God. This is because, I suggest, it reflects the Anselmian intuition that God is the final, ultimate locus or ground of value. Moral arguments touch our desire for goodness, which is central to our being drawn to God. What motivates moral arguments for theistic belief, then, is what is at the heart of moral apologetics. Developing such arguments, then,  is part of moral apologetics.

But it would be a mistake to confuse the part with the whole. Traditional moral arguments play a crucial role, but they function primarily at the level of credibility; their fruitfulness in pointing God’s goodness presupposes the existence of plausible soil, where God’s goodness is already plausible. But what is particularly exigent at this time with respect to God’s goodness is at the level of plausiblility: the need to soften and enrich the soil. The chief objection today is that Christianity is too bad to be true. Traditional moral arguments do not address this directly, either in their content or, more importantly, in the level at which they function. This is not to say that traditional moral arguments play no role in plausibilizing the Christian worldview. Any considerations that point to God’s goodness will contribute. But what I wish to stress here is the importance of other, more experiential aspects of grasping goodness that need to be taken into account.

It is helpful to appeal here to a final classical perspective that I think gives us specific insight into the relation between goodness and believability: in this case, the rich virtue-oriented moral psychology and epistemology of the classical tradition. The insight I want to draw from it here is that moral knowledge, specifically grasping something as good, involves qualitatively more than grasping something as true. One’s grasping x as good necessarily involves a kind of affective experience, an engagement with one’s affections. (I use “affections” to refer to one’s desiderative-motivational complex.)[30]

Consider an analogue from another side of Anselmian apologetics, beauty. Aesthetic pointers to God must be expressed aesthetically, as it were; a certain kind of experience is involved in grasping beauty, which is not merely cognitive. Actual aesthetic pointers to God could hardly be sufficiently captured in formulating “aesthetic arguments” for theistic belief. There may be such arguments, and some may be very good ones, but—as Lewis describes in his own experience—it is the experience of beauty that draws one to the ground of Beauty. Arguments about or from beauty presuppose such an experience.

Something similar, I suggest, is the case with goodness. The phenomenology of moral experience is that moral properties essentially engage one’s feelings, desires, and will. The rational intuition of a logical truth like modus ponens is different in this way from the moral intuition that cruelty is bad, or that it is wrong to torture babies for fun. Philosopher John Hare describes the phenomenology of a moral property as its having a kind of “call” upon one—it elicits a response, obliges one, binds one, presses in upon one, draws one.[31] Because of this affective aspect of morality some philosophers have mistakenly inferred that moral judgments are “nothing but” expressions of desire or feelings or intentions. To rebut metaethical noncognitivism would take us too far afield here. My short response, however, is that moral experience is more than merely cognitive—but it’s not less. In any case, because grasping something as good or bad involves a kind of experience, it goes beyond merely grasping it to be true or false. As C. S. Lewis points out in The Abolition of Man, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas all hold this view—Lewis concurring—and apply it to the task of moral education: one’s being able to engage in higher-order reflection about goodness presupposes one’s actual experience of goodness, and that kind of experience involves the engagement of one’s affections, desires, and will. Classical moral education is about learning to be good, the shaping of one’s feelings and desires, about one’s developing a “taste” for what is good. And this begins with one’s learning to experience pleasure and pain rightly in relation to what is good and bad, through, particularly, parental discipline.[32] “That,” says Aristotle, “is why we need to have had the appropriate upbringing—right from early youth, as Plato says—to make us find enjoyment or pain in the right things; for this is the correct education.”[33]

This is where I think that traditional moral arguments can fall short for many people: not as good philosophy but as fully persuasive apologetics, given current epistemic soil conditions. Where the moral evidence for God is most important in this respect is prior to argument: it is seen, rather than heard, as it were. Grasping that God is good—believing that God is good, that the gospel is good—requires an experience of goodness associated with God and the gospel. Bad experience in this regard, or no experience, will derail credibilizing moral arguments from reaching their mark.

So I suggest that it is in the experience of goodness associated with God and the gospel, that the goodness and badness of Christians and Christianity, whether actual or merely perceived, is relevant to the goodness of God. We are, as is often noted, the tangible hands and feet of God. We are what people do see of the God they do not see. This sensory, experiential imagery, it seems to me, is important. Thankfully, my first assumption is true – the Holy Spirit’s work in people’s hearts limits how badly we can mess things up in this process. Still, if grasping good essentially involves a kind of tangible experience of goodness, the experiences people have with God’s people will be hugely significant in relation to their seeing God as good. This is why, as with Mr. Hard Hat, if the context conflicts with the content—if who we are conflicts with what we say, however true—people will go with the context. Jesus loves you is not believable.

5 The power of embodied moral arguments

The project of moral apologetics, then, should be full-orbed and holistic. The genus of moral apolostics is: pointing to the goodness of God. Its species reflect the different approaches that may be taken to point to God’s goodness, including traditional moral arguments and responses to the POE but also a variety of more experiential, embodied approaches. Along Anselmian lines, we build on the strong sense that we as humans have that goodness is not merely or ultimately self-explanatory or self-grounding. Tastes of goodness are themselves hints or clues or reflections of something much bigger and better: “the way it’s supposed to be,”[34] which we can grasp only provisionally now, and is often reflected in our experience in twisted and distorted ways. As moral creatures we desire to make sense of our experience of moral value and we long for a worldview that does so in a coherent, explanatory, livable way; one that connects our experience and our aspirations, but also can provide a solution for our guilt in falling short of what we know to be good. We want and need to know the truth of these things, but we also deeply want and need to experience them—to experience goodness, forgiveness, cleansing.

In the second to last page of his book exploring the implications of Life After God, Douglas Coupland makes a startling turn. He acknowledges his longing to be good, and he recognizes that that hunger points to God:

Now—here is my secret:

I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God – that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.[35]

The hunger for goodness that Coupland describes is a reflection of the Anselmian intuition that goodness ultimately points to and can only be finally grounded in God. It is an expression of the classical picture of the nature and role of goodness in relation to God that we saw in Augustine and Aquinas, not to mention Scripture.

Jewish moral philosopher, Philip Hallie, having completed an extensive analysis of cruelty, was driven to despair. But his perspective radically changed when he happened to read the story of a French village of about 3,500 people, who, during World War II, rescued some 6,000 Jews from the Nazi Holocaust. Hallie writes:

Then one gray April afternoon I found a brief article on the French Village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. I shall not analyze here the tears of amazement and gladness and release from despair—in short, of joy—that I shed when I first read that story . . . at last I had discovered an embodiment of goodness in opposition to cruelty. I had discovered in the flesh and blood of history, in people with definite names in a definite place at a definite time in the nightmare of history, what [no one] could deny was goodness.[36]

Hallie discovered people living the way people are supposed to live, morally—embodying goodness. And he was drawn to them and the kind of life they represented. Moreover, what he and others discovered as they dug deeper is that the people of this village were, in fact, Christians—people who lived as they did, doing what they did, as Christians, as a reflection of their simple, non-scholarly yet deeply, irreducibly biblical understanding of reality. Today, in the field of ethics, the village of Le Chambon is well known, and is widely regarded as the chief example of moral altruism or self-sacrificial goodness in the twentieth century. The power of their example and its Christian basis are undeniable, and they elicit universal admiration. The people of Le Chambon constitute an embodied moral argument for the gospel, one that makes Christianity immensely more plausible to those who are aware of them and what they did.[37]

6 Moral objections

The understanding we have developed here not only makes sense of the positive power of such examples, but it also reveals the devastating power of moral objections to belief in God, why they make the gospel unbelievable to so many. Bad Christian behavior, whether real or merely perceived, hardens the soil and makes the gospel implausible. Beyond the essential connection between experiencing good and grasping good, the effect of bad Christian behavior is exacerbated by its collision with the basic Anselmian intuition that the human hunger for goodness ultimately points to and can only be finally grounded in God. This, in my view, is an important explanation for why Christians, as those who represent God, are expected to be good, even by those who adamantly disagree with them, and why it is so devastating for all concerned when Christians are not. Many different moral systems and religions commend high standards of morality, but Christians are typically held to a higher standard. Part of the reason for this is that Christianity has historically been seen, rightly in my view, to represent the highest of moral standards, and so there is understandable revulsion at the hypocrisy of Christians making high moral pronouncements but not living up to them. But that’s not all there is to it; Christianity also, after all, teaches that all humans fall short of the glory of God, that all are sinners and are in need of God’s grace and divine intervention. The gospel is not a reward for moral perfection, but rescue, forgiveness, healing and hope for those who admit they need it.

When Christians are bad, I suggest, people experience a kind of existential disillusionment. Related to the Anselmian intuition that God is the ultimate ground of goodness, there is a deep sense that Christians who represent him should be good, and that their goodness really does point to the ultimate source of goodness—that their being good is essentially related to their message being believable. So when they’re not, it’s not just that they are inconsistent, or even just that they are bad people. They’ve committed a kind of cosmic treason; they’ve betrayed a much bigger story. They’ve made the gospel unbelievable.

Sadly, examples here may also be multiplied. I will cite only a few. An evangelical journalist who lost his faith after years of covering news of religion attributes his disillusionment to bad Christian behavior.

If the Lord is real, it would make sense for the people of God, on average, to be superior morally and ethically to the rest of society. Statistically, they aren’t. . . . It’s hard to believe in God when it’s impossible to tell the difference between His people and atheists.[38]

More extravagantly (as usual), in “Why I am Not a Christian,” Bertrand Russell points to what he sees as overwhelming evidence that Christians and Christianity are morally bad.

That is the idea—that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.[39]

Similar charges are stock in trade of “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.

Moral objections to the goodness of God range from the problem of evil and suffering to charges that the “God of the Old Testament” is wicked, petty, and genocidal; to examples of (perceived) shameful Christian misbehavior in history (the Inquisition, Crusades, witch hunts, opposition to science, colonialism, slavery, intolerance toward women and gays, etc.); to bad personal experiences with Christians that some people have had.

Sometimes moral objections are based on actual wrongs Christians have done, or at least to those that people have done in the name of Christ. Sometimes they’re based on misinformation or misunderstandings. Sometimes they’re based on questionable assumptions—as when Christians may have done nothing wrong at all, but their actions (e.g., proclaiming Jesus as Savior) conflict with relativistic assumptions about tolerance and truth, and deemed evil as a result. And sometimes the objections just reflect irreducible conflicts between Christianity and cultural values (chastity vs. sexual freedom, for example).

In any case, real or merely perceived, moral objections that lead someone to see Christianity as bad make the Christian worldview unbelievable to them. Christianity couldn’t be true; it’s too bad to be true. The important negative task of moral apologetics, then, is to respond to those objections.

7 Moral apologetics

In conclusion, I summarize the nature and role of moral apologetics, as it has emerged here. The aim of moral apologetics is to point to the goodness of God in ways that are appropriate to that aim, including—and emphasizing—being good as believers, exemplifying God’s goodness in relation to those to whom we seek to share the message that Jesus loves you. Moral apologetics is one aspect (not the only one) of an Anselmian approach to engaging others with, and pointing toward, God’s goodness, truth, and beauty, and doing so in ways that are appropriate to each of those values.

Negatively, moral apologetics involves engaging and responding to moral objections to the goodness of God and his people. Because moral objections proliferate, we as apologists need to think them through strategically and sensitively, and begin to address them. I suggest that we do this in community, collaborating with each other about how to engage different groups and generations effectively concerning different questions. Some objections will require significant, specialized study in order to address them adequately. Others may require less effort. Working in community, dividing the labor, can make this possible. In all of this, we should be particularly sensitive to the role of plausibility considerations in these objections, and so we need to approach them prayerfully, humbly, and usually dialogically. Again, we can help each other in these ways.

Positively, moral apologetics involves “making the case” that God is good and is the ultimate ground of all goodness. This can take a variety of forms, including traditional moral arguments. My emphasis in this account has been the positive task of moral apologetics in a fundamentally experiential or incarnational sense: being good, as Christians, as representative of God’s goodness—making the gospel plausible, by enabling people to grasp the goodness of God through experienced goodness with his people.

Obviously, the scope of this project goes far beyond traditional understandings of the science of apologetics or even the art of apologetics. It is the task, not only of apologists, but of the entire body of Christ. In fact, that is exactly as it should be, since Jesus described what makes the gospel believable in just these terms: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13.34-35) “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” (Mathew 5.16) These famous passages are pictures of plausibility, and, according to Jesus, apparently, they represent the chief pointers to God. Notice particularly, in the latter passage (from Matthew) the connection between our good deeds and those who see them coming to worship God. As we have seen, one’s worshiping God is essentially, perhaps chiefly dependent on one’s coming to see God as good.

May we be able to say Jesus loves you so that those who hear us believe it. May they see Christianity as too good not to be true.

Image: "vying from the gutter" by blueskyjunction photography. CC License. 

Notes: 

[1] Pascal, Blaise, Pensées 12, A. J. Krailsheimer ed. and trans. (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 4.

[2] The term, “moral apologetics,” was first suggested to me, I believe, by Greg Pritchard of the European Leadership Forum, when he invited me to address these issues in a series of lectures given in Hungary in 2006. This paper is a more thorough development of those and subsequent talks on moral apologetics I have subsequently given in various popular-level contexts. I presented an initial draft at the Evangelical Philosophical Society national meeting November 17, 2011. Recent efforts by other scholars include Mark Coppenger’s Moral Apologetics for Contemporary Christians (Nashville, Tenn.: B&H Publishing Group, 2011) and David Baggett’s website, moralapologetics.com.

[3] “Listening Church,” The Guardian, October 14, 2002.

[4] This is changing. See note 2, and especially the resources featured at moralapologetics.com.

[5] I also describe apologetics in Mind Your Faith: A Student’s Guide to Thinking and Living Well (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2011), pp. 189-193. I first came to think of apologetics along these lines through the writings and teaching of my esteemed mentor and friend, Gordon Lewis. The definitive work on apologetics today is Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2011).

[6] For a related introduction to this distinction and literature, see Dennis Hollinger, "The Church as Apologetic: A Sociology of Knowledge Perspective," in Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm, eds, Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1995), pp. 182-193. My characterization here is provisional and draws substantially from Hollinger’s account. I discuss these matters further in Mind Your Faith, pp. 177-180 and 238-244.

[7] I do not deal here with two other powerful “plausibility” assumptions that tend to derail serious consideration of the Christian worldview: scientism (the assumption that all that is real, true, or knowable is what science is able to establish) and the commonly accepted view of tolerance, according to which all propositions (at least in matters of religion and ethics) should be considered equally true, and it would be immoral (“intolerant”) to think otherwise. I address these briefly in Mind Your Faith, pp. 112-114, 136-137.

[1] Unless otherwise indicated, Scriptural quotations are from the New International Version (2011).

[2] Proserchomai—Peter uses the present participle, suggesting behavior that is active and regular.

[3] See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (NE) 1.1.1094a2-3; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (ST) Ia.5.1c; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy (CP) 3.11;ß Dionysius Div. Nom. iv.

[4] See Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[5] See 1 Chr 16.34, 41; 2 Chr 5.13; 2 Chr 7.3; 2 Chr 20.21; Ezra 3.11; Ps 100.4-5; Ps 106.1; Ps 107.1; Ps 118.1, 29; Ps 136.1 (and passim).

[6] C. H. Spurgeon, Treasury of David: Volume Two: Psalm LVIII to CX (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1988), p. 253.

[7] Consolation of Philosophy, 3.10.

[8] Ibid., 3.12. Cited from Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, V. E. Watts trans., (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969), p. 115.

[9] City of God, 8.8. Cited from Augustine, Political Writings, Michael W. Tkacz and Douglas Kries, eds. and trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), pp. 63-64.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Cited from Augustine, Confessions, Henry Chadwick, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), i (1), p. 3.

[12] ST IaIIae.1.6c. Citations from Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Fathers of the English Dominican Province, trans. (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1981).

[13] IaIIae.4.7 ad 2.

[14] IaIIae.5.4c.

[15] IaIIae.5.2c. Following Augustine and the tradition, Aquinas understands “enjoying” to refer to seeing something as intrinsically good, desiring it for its own sake and not “using” it as a means to some other end or for the sake of some other good.

[16] On the metaphysics of goodness in classical and Christian thinking, see Scott MacDonald, ed., Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

[17] I.1. Citation from John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Henry Beveridge, trans. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2008), p. 4.

[18] 2.1. Beveridge, p. 7.

[19] 2.2. Beveridge, p. 8.

[20] 1.5.6. Beveridge, p. 20.

[21] 1.5.9. Beveridge, pp. 21-22.

[22] See Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, Brian Davies and G. R. Evans, eds. and trans. with Introduction (Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

[23] Thomas V. Morris, Anselmian Explorations: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); and Our Idea of God: An Introduction to Philosophical Theology (Vancouver, B.C.: Regent College Publishing, 2002).

[24] Our Idea of God, p. 47.

[25] What follows depends closely upon my discussion in Mind Your Faith, pp. 190-192.

[26] See, e.g., Psalm 96.

[27] See C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Orlando, Flo.: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955); and "The Weight of Glory," in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, Walter Hooper, ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 25-40.

[28] See Robert M. Adams, “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; Robert Gay, "Moral Arguments for the Existence of God," Modern Theology 3 (1987): pp. 117-36; Stuart C. Hacket, "The Value Dimension of the Cosmos: A Moral Argument," in Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide, William Lane Craig, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. 149-54; John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

[29] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2000; reprint of 1952 edition). Moral arguments were more popular during the early to mid-twentieth century. Besides Lewis, see, e.g., W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1918, and A. E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist (London: Macmillan, 1937). A recent moral argument is David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[30] Cf. the role of desire in relation to goodness and virtue noted in part 2 and notes.

[31] John Hare, God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001).

[32] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: How Education Develops Man's Sense of Morality (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), pp. 16-17.

[33] NE 2.3.1104b13. Citation from Irwin trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999). For a very helpful analysis of Aristotle’s view here, see Miles F. Burnyeat, "Aristotle on Learning to Be Good," in A. O. Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley, Calif.; University of California Press, 1980), pp. 69-72.

[34] See Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995), chapter 1.

[35] Douglas Coupland, Life without God (New York: Pocket Books, 1994), p. 359.

[36] Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1979), p. 93. I tell the story of Le Chambon in detail in Mind Your Faith, chapter 13.

[37] In Mind Your Faith I suggest the possibility that Albert Camus’ reported turn toward Christianity shortly before he died may have been the product of his living in Le Chambon during this time (see pp. 243-244).

[38] William Lobdell, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America - and Found Unexpected Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 271. Cited in Jonathan Lunde, Following Jesus, the Servant King: A Biblical Theology of Covenantal Discipleship (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2010), 25.

[39] Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” online: http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html, accessed 23 February 2015.

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From Biola.edu

David Horner has taught at the University of Oxford, Denver Seminary, and served as a Visiting Scholar and Research Associate at the University of Colorado. He has lectured in numerous classrooms and university forums nationally and in Europe, and he has written numerous articles and book chapters on ethics, apologetics and ancient and medieval philosophy. Horner serves as Research Scholar for Centers for Christian Study, International, an effort to develop intellectual Christian communities within secular university contexts. He also serves as Executive Director of The Illuminatio Project, whose aim is to bring the light of a classical biblical vision of goodness, truth and beauty into the thinking of the church and culture through strategic research and communication.

Platonic Ethics and Classical Theism, Part I

Why bring Plato into a modern discussion of ethics and classical theism? While moderns might nostalgically refer to him in their works, his theological and ethical teachings, especially in the form he presented them, are usually not considered serious contenders in today’s theologies and texts on the metaphisics of morals.  There are of course some notable exceptions, like Robert Adams, but even Adams admits Plato gets relatively little attention. In light of this, several key reasons can be adduced to show that Plato is very important—especially for the Christian community. One important reason is that early theologians like Ambrose and Augustine saw value in his work and Platonic thought helped shape their theologies. Another reason—one that should be particularly interesting to Christians—is that Plato provides evidence of the power of general revelation. As you read through his works, you will notice many things that align nicely with Christian theology. Most importantly, Plato was an amazing philosopher and many of his philosophical insights still have value today. My hope is to mine some of these insights (e.g., the foundations of objective morals, levels of moral motivation, etc.) over a series of posts. Hopefully you will enjoy the ride.

In The Republic, Plato’s Socrates faces his most difficult—and most important—challenge: the battle for objective morality. In Book 1 of the dialogue, immediately after Socrates defeats Polemarchus and removes convention as a possible foundation for justice, Thrasymachus attacks Socrates like a beast with his wild opinion that “the just is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger” (338c). In other words, true justice (or morality) does not exist—powerful men create morality to ensure that others will do as they wish. Thrasymachus is brash, but he is not a trained philosopher, and Socrates quickly shows his assertion to be inconsistent.[1] However, Glaucon and Adeimantus come to Thrasymachus’s aid (or at least his argument’s aid), presenting a more philosophically sound version of his nihilism, and together they press Socrates to show what justice truly is and why it is good in and of itself. At this point Plato’s Socrates claims to be at a loss, for his dialog partners would not accept the “proof” he offered to Thrasymachus that justice was better than injustice. However, he is willing to investigate the matter with their assistance to see if he can save objective morality.

In his investigation, Socrates discovers defeating Thrasymachus requires four things: 1) a transcendent standard; 2) a standard that is recognizably good; 3) a standard people can know; and 4) a standard people are able to adhere to. Without any one of these items, nihilism wins.

1. The Transcendent Standard

The foundational insight that Plato provides in The Republic is that for objective value to exist it must have a foundation that is not merely an invention of some group—or even unanimously of all persons. An invention is merely convention, and Plato had forcefully removed that as a possible foundation for morality in Book 1 with his master’s discussion with Polemarchus. Any mere invention can always be reinvented and therefore cannot provide the unchanging foundation that true values require. For a standard to apply to all persons at all times, it must be transcendent.

The main vehicle Plato posits for this type of standard is the Forms, and the Form of the Good is his metaphysical and epistemic foundation for all transcendent value. An early intimation of the Form as this transcendent moral standard was arguably explored by Plato in Euthyphro where Plato’s Socrates asserts that the gods love the pious because it is pious—both gods and men were subject to the standard, the Form.  Later, in The Republic, Plato establishes the Form of the Good as the foundational form:

Therefore, say that not only being known is present in the things known as a consequence of the good, but also existence and being are in them besides as a result of it, although the good isn’t being but is still beyond being, exceeding it in dignity and power. (509b)

An important aspect of Plato’s assertion is that, since the Good is the source of the knowability, existence, and being of the other Forms (and everything else), it is ontologically prior to them. This is a critical insight: if something else—call it X—were ontologically prior to the Good, then X would possibly be the foundation of values. When you descend to the bedrock foundation of some value, you come discover the essential nature of that value; the buck stops there. The Form of the Good defines goodness simply because it exists and because of its nature—it is the type of thing that can possibly ground goodness—not for any reason outside its nature.

1. The (Recognizable) Goodness of the Standard

Since (for Plato) the Form of the Good is the standard for goodness itself, it cannot be measured against anything to show that it is good; however, we need some way to know that it is in fact good. Plato provides for this by telling us that, if we could see the Good as it is, we would immediately recognize its goodness. When you eat chocolate peanut butter ice cream, no one needs to tell you it is delicious; you experience its deliciousness directly. Plato tells us that if we could also experience the Good directly, we would immediately know not only that it is good (like the ice cream being delicious), but that it is the foundation for—and source of—all goodness (unlike the ice cream which only partakes in deliciousness). He says,

In the knowable the last thing to be seen, and that with considerable effort, is the idea of the good; but once seen, it must be concluded that this in fact is the cause of all that is right and fair in everything…and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it (517c).

There is no external way to judge the goodness of the standard; it must be experienced directly. Once this is done, it will be obvious that all of the terms we try to use to judge the goodness of things owe their existence to the Good itself—they have no other source.

1. Knowledge of the Standard

As you can see from the quote above, Plato tells us it is difficult to know the Good. His cave metaphor helps us to understand why. When an inhabitant of the cave, who is only used to seeing dim shadows cast on the inner wall of the cave, emerges into the brightness of the sun, he cannot perceive it directly.

At first, he’d most easily make out the shadows; and after that the phantom of human beings and the other things in water; and, later, the things themselves. And from there he could turn to beholding the things in heaven and heaven itself, more easily at night—looking at the light of the stars and the moon—then by day—looking at the sun and sunlight. (516a)

The difficulty of knowing the Good, and the training it will take to make true philosophers who can actually achieve this (through the use of the dialectic), occupies most of Plato’s time in Books 5, 6, and 7, detailing the education of the Guardians (and true philosophers). Although it is difficult, and perhaps no man has done it well so far, in Plato’s economy it is possible to come to know the Good. But knowledge of the Good is indispensable: if you cannot know it, you cannot intentionally do it.

1. Adherence to the Standard

The final piece of the Platonic puzzle is that of being able to live according to the standard once one knows it (what contemporary philosopher John Hare calls the “performative” question)—Plato’s view of the soul plays the key role here. For Plato, the soul has three components: the calculating part (the head), the spirited part (the chest), and the desiring part (the belly). By default, through nature and poor training, Thrasymachean order exists in the soul where the belly rules and the chest drives one to fulfill desires—the head is used only to calculate how best to get what one wants. Plato tells us, however, that if these three are in harmony—the head ruling the belly through the chest—then we can overcome our passions with knowledge (of the Good) and do the things that we should truly desire to do if we want justice. When properly cultivated, our knowledge of the Good can lead us to live just lives.

With these four items in place, Socrates was able to convince his friends that justice does exist and that it is worth pursuing independent of any practical benefits it might bring. While I believe Plato was wrong in many of the details of his stories describing the Good and how we can know it, I believe he was right philosophically on what is required to have objective morality. If any of the four items above is missing, the moral world risks becoming Thrasymachean. And these criteria have proven difficult for modern philosophers to find in their worldview. G. E. M. Anscombe highlights this in her influential paper Modern Moral Philosophy when she asserts that, while they may sound very different, modern ethical systems all struggle with such foundational issues:

Such discussions generate an appearance of significant diversity of views where what is really significant is an overall similarity. The overall similarity is made clear if you consider that every one of the best known English academic moral philosophers has put out a philosophy according to which, e.g., it is not possible to hold that it cannot be right to kill the innocent as a means to any end whatsoever and that someone who thinks otherwise is in error.

If your ethical system cannot confidently state that murder for fun is wrong, difficult work still lies ahead, work eminently worth the effort. Modern (naturalistic) moral philosophy is faced with the significant challenge of finding a stable foundation for ethics that does not produce unpalatable implications, yet still does justice to our pre-theoretical and nonnegotiable moral insights and apprehensions.

In my next post I’ll look at how classical theism generally and specifically Judeo-Christian ethics can meet Plato’s four requirements, thereby providing an adequate foundation for objective morality.

Notes:

[1] Thrasymachus makes the assertion that the unjust man, inventing morality to gain advantage, is virtuous and wise. However, in his nihilism, Thrasymachus does not realize that when he dispatched the foundation for justice he actually destroyed all value. Unfortunately for him, he still held to a conventional view of virtue (in particular, wisdom in the crafts) and Socrates used this to show an inconsistency in his view of justice. Socrates uses conventional ideas of wisdom to show that unjust men cannot be virtuous and wise, and uses this to defeat Thrasymachus.

Image: "Platon, painted portrait"  by thierry ehrmann. CC license. 

Podcast: David Baggett on Moral Knowledge

On this week's episode, we hear from Dr. David Baggett. Dr. Baggett and co-author Dr. Jerry Walls have just sent in their manuscript of God and Cosmos to the publisher. And in these next few podcasts, we get a little bit of preview of the book! God and Cosmos is a sequel to Christianity Today's 2012 Apologetics Book of the Year, Good God. In Good God, Walls and Baggett offer an abductive moral argument for the existence of God. In God and Cosmos, they focus their attention on various secular ethical theories and show why these theories do not provide as robust an explanation of morality as theism. One of the chapters in the book is "Moral Knowledge" and its that chapter we will be discussing today. This is a substantive topic, so we will be dividing the conversation up into two parts. The first part lays out some of the basic issues related to moral knowledge, including what exactly moral knowledge is, the kinds of moral knowledge available, and the general problems associated with saying we have moral knowledge. The second part aims to answer the question, "How do we have moral knowledge?" Dr. Baggett will discuss and critique some atheist explanations of how we have moral knowledge before offering his own theistic account.

Mark Linville’s Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism, Part IV

Darwinian counterfactuals, ethical nonnaturalism, and theism

The nonnaturalist has a ready reply to the argument from Darwinian counterfactuals. For he might wish to maintain that certain natural properties bear a necessary relation to the moral properties that they exemplify, regardless of any evolutionary possibilities. But nonnaturalists who are also metaphysical naturalists seem to have problems of their own in the face of such Darwinian counterfactuals. How is it that unguided human evolution on earth has resulted in just those moral beliefs that accord with moral verities? As Gould has argued, everything about us, even our very existence, is radically contingent. If we were to rewind the reel, it’s highly unlikely evolution would again attempt the experiment called Homo sapiens. The Dependence Thesis in the hands of the nonnaturalist seems highly improbable. A sort of moral fine tuning argument is suggested. The theist may have an advantage just here. For, on theism, as Santayana put it, the Good is also nature’s Creator.

The theist, like the nonnaturalist, is in a position to say why there is a necessary connection between certain natural properties and their supervenient moral properties. Adams, for example, suggests theistic Platonism, so can account for why nobody could exhibit Hitler’s qualities without being depraved and an affront to God’s nature. But the theist also has an account of the development of human moral faculties—a theistic genealogy of morals—that allows for something akin to Street’s “tracking relation”: we have the basic moral beliefs we do because they are true, and this is because the mechanisms responsible for those moral beliefs are truth-aimed. The theist is thus in a position to explain the general reliability of those considered judgments from which reflective equilibrium takes its cue. Certain of our moral beliefs—in particular, those that are presupposed in all moral reflection—are truth-aimed because human moral faculties are designed to guide human conduct in light of moral truth.

Humean skepticism or Reidean externalism?

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Linville reads Hume as a skeptic across the board, not just in ethics. His ethical views were part of a seamless whole that includes his discussion of the beliefs of common life. In each discussion—causality, substance, personal identity—he aims to show both that the belief in question is without any epistemic credentials and that relevant human propensities explain the belief without making any assumptions about the truth of the belief. From a Humean perspective, we lack positive reasons to accept either the dependence or independence thesis. His is a variety of epistemological moral skepticism, so it resembles AEN.

Reid countered Hume by common sense. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher but casting out a devil, as Chesterton put it. There is no set of premises more certainly known from which such beliefs follow. Hume is right: the beliefs of common life are not endorsed by reason, but, instead, are the inevitable by-products of our constitution. But Hume is mistaken in inferring from this that such beliefs are, therefore, without warrant. Why, after all, trust the rational faculties to which Hume appeals, but not trust the faculties responsible for our commonsense beliefs? Both come from the same shop, and Reid thought the shop was God’s creation.

Reid thought the commonsense beliefs that arise spontaneously and noninferentially given our constitution are warranted even though they fail to measure up to the exacting standards of epistemic justification assumed by foundationalists after the Cartesian fashion. These days we say such beliefs are properly basic. A belief is properly basic just in case the faculty through which it is acquired is functioning as it ought. Plantinga puts it this way: a belief is warranted just in case it is the product of a belief-producing mechanism that is truth-aimed and functioning properly in the environment for which it was designed. This account accommodates those perceptual, memorial, testimonial, and even metaphysical beliefs that are the guides of common life and, closer to our purposes, are among the fund of native beliefs with which we begin in theory assessment. Even closer to our purposes, such an account accommodates those moral beliefs employed in reflective equilibrium.

Reid appealed to a set of “first, or ‘self-evident’ principles” of morality discerned through faculties that he thought were wrought in the same shop as reason and perception. Just as there is no reasoning with the man who, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, is convinced that his head is a gourd, neither is there advantage in engaging in moral argument with a man who fails to recognize self-evident principles of morality.

There are moral principles to which we should “pay homage,” as Norman Daniels puts it. We pay such homage when we utilize them as data for the construction of moral theories or as a kind of court of appeal in assessing them. But our confidence in these constitutional beliefs is wisely invested only in the event that we have reason to believe the faculties responsible for them to be truth-aimed. Reid’s theism provided him with such a reason; the moral faculties were forged in the same shop as our other cognitive faculties. They are designed by God for the purpose of discerning moral truth. “That conscience which is in every man’s breast, is the law of God written in his heart, which he cannot disobey without acting unnaturally, and being self-condemned.”

Podcast: David Baggett on 7 Important Distinctions for the Moral Argument

On this special IHOP (yes, as in "International House of Pancakes!") edition of the podcast, we sit down with David Baggett who helps us understand seven important distinctions to make when articulating and defending the moral argument. There's a lot going on in this podcast, so here is a handy chart from Good God that will help make it more clear:

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.

Podcast: Dr. Leo Percer on Moral Epistemology and the Character of God

In this week's podcast, we hear from Dr. Percer about the relationship of faith and reason in the context of the moral argument. Dr. Percer offers some tremendous insights on being made in the image of God and how we can have moral knowledge as well as how the Bible portrays the character and goodness of God.  

Photo: "Bible" by C. Zlelecki. CC License

Atheism & Morality

Plenty of people have now heard about Leah Libresco, an atheist blogger who recently converted to Christianity. The ostensible reason for the conversion was her nagging moral commitments that she finally decided made better sense on a theistic than atheistic worldview. In contrast with Libresco is Joel Marks, a Kantian-ethicist-turned-moral-antirealist. He used to be a firm believer in moral truths, and, like Libresco, he used to think that an atheistic picture of reality is adequate to undergird such facts. He was quite sure about the wrongness of torturing animals or massacring innocents. They were, as he put it in an op-ed piece from August 2011 in The New York Times, “wrong, wrong, wrong.” Not anymore. He came to think that such moral convictions are mere preferences. Whereas he had been sure of their wrongness, suddenly he knew it no more. “I was not merely skeptical or agnostic about it; I had come to believe, and do still, that these things are not wrong.” Marks didn’t run out to engage in such practices; he simply came to think that the whole category of morality is misguided. What drives human actions anyway, he writes, is desire; and his desires subsequent to what he dubbed his anti-epiphany didn’t much change. So he still strives to make the world more to his liking—a world of less brutality and more compassion—but he doesn’t think morality has anything to do with it. He tries to educate people about facts of suffering and exploitation and abuse in an effort naturally to elicit within them a desire to see and effect change, and he thinks the liberation from conducting such discourse with moral terminology is actually helpful.

Marks had earlier rejected the view that morality could find its foundation in God on the basis of the Euthyphro Dilemma. The famous Dilemma traces to an early Socratic dialogue, and today we would express the challenge it poses like this: Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command it because it is moral? If the former, morality seems arbitrary; if the latter, God seems irrelevant to morality. Although commonly repeated by ethicists, this objection to religious ethics has been thoroughly discredited. In our recent book, Jerry Walls and I made such a case, as have numerous others. Setting that objection aside, Libresco and Marks both found themselves with this insight: an atheistic world can’t make morality anything more than sentiment and preference. At present this view remains a minority view among most secularists, but it’s increasingly common; Nietzsche predicted that the implications of the death of God would take a few generations. They then found themselves with this further question: What then do we do with our moral convictions? Libresco took her nonnegotiable and inviolable convictions as serious evidence that the world isn’t atheistic; Marks in diametric opposition bit the bullet and gave morality up.

Both Marks and Libresco were basing their thinking on this sort of insight, which we can call their “shared premise”: If there’s no God, then there’s no morality. But then their ways parted. Libresco added this additional proposition: There is morality—binding, authoritative, objective morality. Therefore (by what philosophers call modus tollens), God exists. Marks in contrast added to their shared premise this premise: There’s no God. And (by what philosophers call modus ponens) he concluded that there is no morality.

Both arguments are logically impeccable in terms of their structure. The question boils down to which of the following claims is more obvious: that there is binding, authoritative, objective morality, or that God does not exist. Plenty of analysts, theists and atheists alike, readily affirm that most people can clearly apprehend moral facts of which we can be quite sure—torturing children for fun is wrong, mocking homosexuals is cruel and bad, and the like—so rejecting such a proposition strikes most people as wrong. In fact, such truths may be more obvious than God’s existence; but that doesn’t mean that God isn’t needed as the foundation of such truths. (To think otherwise confuses what philosophers call ontology and epistemology.) The question here is whether the alleged fact of God’s not existing is more obvious than the affirmation of moral facts. I see no compelling reason to think so, and have not heard any reasons to think so; in fact, the obvious nature of moral facts bolsters my belief that faith in God as the best explanation of such facts is eminently logical. So by my lights, Libresco’s response to the premise she shares with Marks seems the more rational way to go.

Image: Dilemma by N. Sienaert. CC license.