Assessing Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (Crash Course Apologetics Interview with Dr. Tomas Bogardus)

From Crash Course Apologetics:

In this interview, Dr. Tomas Bogardus joins me to discuss his paper "Only All Naturalists Should Worry About Only One Evolutionary Debunking Argument." The pdf of the paper is linked below. In the paper, he presents three versions of evolutionary debunking arguments (EDA's) against moral knowledge and shows why each fails. He then presents a fourth version of an EDA that is successful, but explains why it should only concern naturalists.

https://philpapers.org/archive/BOGOAN...

Introducing a Thomist Moral Argument

Editor’s note:

Here at MoralApologetics.com, we are really excited at younger scholars turning their attention and directing their considerable talents to variations on the moral argument. Moral apologetics can come in lots of stripes and shades, depending on the particular moral phenomena in need of explanation, the methodology involved in argumentation, the alleged tightness of the relationship between evidence and conclusion, and the operative variant of theistic ethic employed. Here Suan Sonna shares some highlights of his ongoing research project in which he proposes a moral argument predicated on natural law. We suspect that Suan’s voice will a prominent one indeed in this discussion for many years to come, and we are delighted to showcase his perspicacious work today.

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My moral argument took form while studying Judith Jarvis Thomson’s defense of abortion. As a Thomist, I wanted to tackle her thought experiments and whatever metaethical foundations prevented her from accepting my view. I read her paper “The Right and the Good” and was positively shocked. Thomson appealed to teleology, except she used the words “design functions”, to ground her approach to ethics. Rather than embracing teleological realism, however, she settled for teleological nominalism. I was curious thereafter and wondered if other philosophers were borrowing ideas from the Aristotelian-Thomist (AT) synthesis for their theories. As I began combing through the literature, I noticed a subtle pattern emerge – when moral philosophers contemplated the metaethical commitments of their theories, they all depended upon some idea of teleology, some notion of “fulfillment” as goodness, and deployed concepts that sounded awfully familiar to me as a Thomist – consider Moore’s understanding of the simplicity and indefinability of the good which rubs right into the classical theist conception of God! Over time, I decided to develop a moral argument for God’s existence from these observations.

Here is the argument:

(1)   Moral realism is true.

(2)   Moral realism requires a foundation that yields (A) objective moral truths, (B) is comprehensive, and (C) is compelling.

(3)   Either theistic or nontheistic moral realism is true.

(4)   Nontheistic moral realism fails to meet at least one of the three requirements.

(5)   Therefore, nontheistic moral realism is necessarily false.

(6)   Therefore, theistic moral realism is true.

(7)   If theistic moral realism is true, then God exists.

(8)   Therefore, God exists.

I divide versions of moral realism into those that imply the existence of God (theistic moral realism) and those that do not (nontheistic moral realism). Nontheistic versions of moral realism simply might have nothing to say about God’s existence or perhaps depend upon foundations incompatible with His existence. And, by “foundation” here I mean the ultimate explanation or grounding of moral facts whether it be our intuitions, some evolutionary norm, reason, or God. Theistic moral realism must say that the foundation of moral facts is God, while nontheistic moral realism need not.  

I then present in (2) three overarching standards for testing which of the two moral realisms is true. I maintain that moral realism requires a source that yields objective moral truths, is itself comprehensive and compelling.

By “objectivity” I mean the nature of the foundation or explanans must itself be consistent with the explanandum. It would be strange to get an objective theory of ethics from a purely subjective, mind-dependent foundation.

“Comprehensiveness” means that the foundation in question must tackle the most relevant metaphysical and epistemological questions for a proper account of moral realism. For instance, the foundation should help us understand the nature of normativity, it should yield an account of moral knowledge, and ensure we have reliable faculties for moral comprehension. Here, I narrow the debate down to five fundamental explananda – normativity, semantics, causation, cognition, and ontology.

In other words, the foundation should explain both the nature and origin of normativity. Regarding semantics, it should avoid making the world unintelligible but render its information content accessible to our intellects. Even the causal order itself requires an explanation such that we demystify the connection between facts about the world and our actions, the behavior of objects and persons in our unfolding moral drama. The foundation should not simply take for granted that we have reliable cognitive faculties for moral reasoning but explain the origin and reliability of those faculties. Finally, this foundation should illumine us on who or what counts as a moral subject, what is the good, the bad, the right and the wrong? This is the most demanding requirement of the three. And, I propose it in order to avoid moral realisms that are simply constructed to suit our ends or attempt to avoid the ultimate question. We are seeking the version of moral realism that actually covers the relevant and required explananda.

Of course, we also need a way of discerning which foundation most compellingly explains the explananda. I propose here several standards:

1)     Intuitive Fit

2)     Empirical Adequacy - “consistency with what we know about the world, including our best scientific knowledge.”1

3)     Epistemic Access - “the theory should include some account of how we could come to know its truth.”2

4)     Metaphysical Fecundity - “the theory should shed light on a variety of metaphysical issues.”3

5)     Unification - “We should not accept a bifurcated, disjunctive account of thought and of knowledge as long as a unified account is possible.”4

6)     Simplicity - “A good metaphysical theory should not be in need of ad hoc rescues or endless epicyclic tinkering.”5

The standard of unification staves off the objection that the comprehensiveness standard is too demanding. If there is a unified explanation that can explain all of the explananda and do it well, then that unified theory is to be strongly preferred. In other words, comprehensiveness is not too demanding since it is a burden that can be carried by other approaches and perhaps not the objector’s.         

Over the course of my research, I found that the AT synthesis simply bests its competitors. It provides an objective, comprehensive, and compelling foundation of moral realism in the very existence of God.

AT moral realism is founded upon six highly plausible metaphysical theses that simultaneously yield a comprehensive moral theory and proofs of the existence of God. The theses are the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), the causal principle (CP), the principle of proportionate causality (PPC), real essentialism (RE), the convertibility principle (TCP), and the principle of finality (PF).

The PSR means that, “Everything that is the case must have a reason why it is the case. Necessarily, every true or at least every contingent true proposition has an explanation. Every event has a cause.”6 Aside from the PSR being highly intuitive, I think Alexander Pruss and Robert C. Koons have provided powerful reasons for suggesting that its denial simply costs too much, including the intelligibility of the universe itself.7

The CP is inspired by Aristotle’s response to Zeno’s denial of change. Zeno argued that true change requires non-being to produce being, since what was not there before must suddenly emerge. Aristotle unraveled the paradox by proposing the CP: change is the actualization of an object’s potential by an already actual actualizer, meaning that being can be divided into being-in-act and being-in-potency. It also appears that denying the CP eviscerates the intelligibility of the universe and the reality of change.

The PPC simply follows from the PSR and CP, since there is an explanation for why events occur and this explanation must preserve the transaction of being. St. Thomas Aquinas defines the PPC as “effects must be proportionate to their causes and principles”8 so that “whatever perfections exist in the effect must be found in the effective cause.”9 To put it more straightforwardly, “a cause cannot give what it does not first have.”10 Consider for instance how materialists argue that consciousness cannot be immaterial, since our origins are purely material and so too is the fundamental nature of the universe. Like things beget like things.

RE is “... the metaphysical position that everything in the world has an essence or nature that fixes its identity.”11 and “The essence of a thing is its nature, that whereby it is what it is. It is what we grasp intellectually when we identify a thing’s genus and specific difference.”12 Things have a real definition of what they are, which makes possible our distinguishing one kind of thing from another kind. It is not that we are inventing the difference between a mushroom and a human but there really is something different about the two, and this difference is ultimately due to the nature of human beings and other plants. To deny this point seems to place a huge hole in evolutionary theory and the project of speciation, or even the trustworthiness of our perception since it seems to really be the case that humans, horses, and fish are not absolutely the same kind of thing and one can identify their differences.

TCP states, “... goodness is the same as being itself, but considered from a particular point of view - that of fulfillment of appetite.”13 In other words, goodness is the actualization of potential, a kind of fullness. For example, we say that one thing is better than another when said thing is more as it should be. A triangle drawn with a radiograph pen is better than one etched into the seat of a shaky bus. The instantiated triangles are obviously aiming towards triangularity and are hence held to that standard. Likewise, human beings are ordered towards “humanity,” and humans are better when they are more in harmony with and fulfillment of their human nature. The fullness of triangularity is the measure of goodness for a triangle. The fullness of humanity is the measure of goodness for a human.

Finally, the PF sates that “... every nature is ordered to an end; that nature does not act in vain; that the end is the first principle of activity; and that the end is the reason for all movement.”14 and “In short, if A is by nature an efficient cause of B, then generating B must be the final cause of A.”15 Another way of framing this is that nature behaves with intentionality or directedness. For instance, the laws of nature do not describe mere accidental regularities but they reveal the natures of the objects in question and how they act under certain conditions. This activity is intrinsic to the objects themselves, meaning they are acting as they should. For instance, an electron is a negatively charged particle that orbits the nucleus. Such a description gives us the nature and activity of the entity in question – even the “negative” charge label is connected to activity. Or, consider even how horses are tetrapods but some are obviously born with more or less legs than they should have. The nature of the horse provides us the norm and allows us to identify deviations and when things are not as they should be.

Two significant consequences follow from these theses. The first is that a comprehensive moral theory known as classical natural law theory follows. Classical natural law theory states that ethics is the science of how to fulfill one’s nature. Just as scientists discover laws of nature through observing the tendencies of objects and what should happen under normal circumstances, the same sort of study is done on human activity in order to unveil the natural law.  

The second consequence is that any properly constructed argument for the existence of God dependent upon any of the theses is given a significant plausibility boost. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, famously developed six ways to demonstrate the existence of God. The first is known as the argument from motion; the second is the argument from efficient causality; the third is a contingency argument of sorts; the fourth is an argument from the gradation of being; the fifth is a teleological argument; and the sixth is his lesser known De Ente argument.

The PSR makes the first, second, third, and sixth ways eminently plausible. For example, the first way begins with the CP and argues that there must be a purely actual actualizer in order to prevent an infinite causal regress. There must be a causal agent who is the source of all change but is not itself subject to change.

De Ente rightly observes that since beings are composites of essence and existence, meaning a real distinction exists between the two and not merely a logical or conceptual one, there must be an explanation for why they exist despite their essences not securing or entailing their existence. This can be viewed as a more precise contingency argument. St. Thomas located this ultimate explanation in a being whose very essence is existence itself lest there be another endless causal regress. In tandem with TCP, RE, and PPC, we arrive at a being who is essentially perfect and the source of all beings - of their essence and existence included! Since human beings are by nature rational animals, meaning our specific difference from the rest of the animal kingdom is our rationality, our cause must also possess something like an intellect in order for it “contain” and “impart” our intellects to us.

Furthermore, we know that this being has an intellect due to the fifth way, the teleological argument, where St. Thomas noted that even beings without minds are drawn or attracted towards their final ends just like an arrow is directed towards its target by an intellect. The PF and PPC get us a creator who must have something like an intellect or mind in order for its creation to have this feature of intentionality or directedness.

If St. Thomas’ arguments hold, then we arrive at one and in principle only one supreme being who is the essentially omnibenevolent or perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent reality.

This is my longwinded way of saying that nontheistic moral realisms have an incredible challenge to face, since theistic moral realism has a foundation that yields objective moral truths (since moral truths are fixed truths about being which emanate from God), a comprehensive explanation, and one that is indeed compelling. Robert C. Koons has demonstrated in his work Realism Regained how the AT synthesis can yield not only a moral theory but also an exact theory of causation, mind, and metaphysics. Significant work has been done in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science to demonstrate the plausibility of the AT synthesis and its relevance to quantum mechanics, biology, physics, and psychology. Theists have the theory of everything!

My moral argument attempts to leave no stone unturned and forces everyone to examine the foundations of morality. I conclude that God is the best and most comprehensive explanation, while nontheistic moral realism fails to provide what is required for a complete and compelling account of moral realism. Of course, further research needs to be done in order to secure this conclusion, but I think the argument has plausible foundations and deserves more attention.

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1. Koons, Robert C. Realism Regained an Exact Theory of Causation, Teleology, and the Mind. Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 3.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Pruss, Alexander R. The Principle of Sufficient Reason: a Reassessment. Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 3.

7. See Pruss’ The Principle of Sufficient Reason and my dialogue with Robert C. Koons here.

8. Aquinas, Thomas. “Of the Causes of Virtue.” Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Coyote Canyon Press, 2018, pg. 391. I-II. Q. 63. Art. 3.

9. Aquinas, Thomas. “The Perfection of God.” Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Coyote Canyon Press, 2018, pg. 34. I. Q. 4. Art. 2.

10. Feser, Edward. Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Ignatius Press., pg. 170.

11. See the opening page of Oderberg, S. David Real Essentialism (2007).

12. Feser, Edward. Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction. Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, p. 211.

13. Oderberg, David S. The Metaphysics of Good and Evil. Routledge, 2020, p. 14.

14. Ibid, p. 28.

15. Feser, Edward. Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction. Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, p. 92.

Mailbag: Which Books on the Moral Argument Do You Recommend?

Hello, 

I am an aspiring philosopher/theologian with a graduate degree in and passion for apologetics, and I was hoping you could help me out. I'm looking for your personal list of books that someone who wants an advanced understanding moral argument needs to read.

For context, I'm looking to develop a list containing between 20 and 30 books dedicated to the moral argument. Ideally I'd have 15-20 books that provide support for and at least 5-10 books that challenge the argument. Ideally these texts would be mostly at the advanced level, or minimally, intermediate. 

The reason I'd like to do this is so that in the future I could dedicate a year to working through the best resources related to the argument. Ultimately, I'm looking to have advanced understanding of the argument.

I appreciate any recommendations you can give. 

Sincerely, 

Lucas

Hi, Lucas! Love that you want to spend time sinking into the moral argument. I think that too often nowadays arguments like this are treated as just a tool in the arsenal, rather than the rich resource they are for reflection, enjoyment, beauty, insight, spiritual formation, etc. The moral argument has it all going on.

There are five major components to the moral argument as I think about it. One is the history of the argument; another is a critique of secular ethics; another is a defense of theistic ethics; another is a defense of the moral realism on which it is all based; and another is an extension of the argument beyond theism to Christianity.

Regarding its history, Jerry Walls and I wrote The Moral Argument: A History, which directs you to folks like Kant, Newman, Taylor, Sorley, Rashdall, and others. Some of that’s really rich reading—especially Newman’s Grammar of Assent and Taylor’s Faith of a Moralist. Classics. Anyway, lots of recommendations in that book.

In terms of a critique of secular ethics, we wrote God and Cosmos, but just a start and promissory note. Linville’s piece on the moral argument, easily accessible online, is well worth reading. The debate between Craig and Wielenberg is coming out this year; that’s quite good. Edited by Adam Johnson. In terms of defending theistic ethics, that was the main goal of our Good God. But there are lots of possibilities here, including Zagzebski’s Divine Motivation Theory, Evans’ God and Moral Obligations, Hare’s Moral Gap, Adams’ Finite and Infinite Goods, Ritchie’s From Morality to Metaphysics. Most of these cover more than just one aspect of the moral argument—both defending theistic ethics and critiquing alternatives, for example. Wielenberg’s Robust Ethics offers criticisms of theistic ethics and an effort at a more secular account of ethics. Wielenberg and I have a written debate on Lewis’s moral argument in a book edited by Greg Bassham.

In terms of defending moral realism, see Cuneo’s The Normative Web, Shafer-Landau’s Moral Realism, and Enoch’s Taking Morality Seriously; all are important. Jerry and I aim to write our fourth book on the moral argument on this topic, finishing our planned tetralogy.

For extending the moral argument to Christianity, that is cutting-edge stuff. We need to see more books on this—especially using, say, Trinitarian resources. Adam Johnson wrote his dissertation on this recently at Southeastern, and Brian Trapp did about a decade ago at Southern. There may be more resources along such lines but I’m not as familiar with this literature. I have some doctoral students working on such topics in their dissertations. My guess is great work is coming here as the community of moral apologists builds and the momentum of the movement grows.

Incidentally, several of the folks mentioned—Hare, Adams, Evans, etc.—have done more than one book that’s important for the moral argument.

Important folks who are more secular to consider can be found when you look at rival ethical accounts. I mentioned Wielenberg, Enoch, and Shafer-Landau (though he aims for more neutrality on the God question than most), but as you get into error theory, expressivism, constructivism, sensibility, theory, and nontheistic moral realism (either natural or non-natural), you run into a host of thinkers: McDowell, Blackburn, Wiggins, Mackie, R. M. Hare (John’s father), Joyce, Korsgaard, Brink, Harman, Boyd, Foot, Parfit, etc.

There’s a four views book on God and morality edited by Loftin, and a nice anthology on God and ethics edited by Garcia and King called Is Goodness without God Good Enough? that’s eminently worth reading.

Of course avail yourself of this website, MoralApologetics.com, for a host of resources related to the moral argument from a wide array of disciplines. (The site will soon come under the auspices of the Center for Moral Apologetics we get to start at Houston Baptist this fall, as we are joining all the exciting things already happening there.) Recently the site’s begun a new series about recent developments in the moral argument—which reminds me, I have hardly mentioned contemporaries working on the moral argument; we’ve seen a real resurgence of work and interest on the topic over the last several decades.

Mark Murphy is an important thinker who has written some serious books on ethics from a theistic perspective although he is more reticent than many to make it into an apologetic matter. Still, though, quite worth reading, rife with trenchant insight and philosophical rigor. Kevin Kinghorn is a friend and good philosopher who studied with Swinburne and has written some important and germane books: A Framework of the Good, & (with Travis) But What About God’s Wrath? Much recommended.

In taking on alternative moral theories, of which there are a plethora, one might also be interested in taking on not just nonreligious alternatives, but non-Christian religious perspectives. Brian Scalise has done nice work using the Trinity to contrast an Islamic conception of love with that of Christianity’s; Ronnie Campbell has contrasted a Christian perspective on the problem of evil with those of several worldviews (pantheism, panentheism, etc.); TJ Gentry is finishing up a dissertation at North-Western using resources from moral apologetics to critique Mormonism; etc.

Paul Copan has penned a widely anthologized piece on the moral argument, and my wife and I have done a more popular level book that incorporated elements of Good God, God and Cosmos, and the history of the moral argument called Morals of the Story.

Sorry I can’t give you a more exhaustive list for now, but this is at least suggestive. You can find more resources in the notes and bibliographies of these books. I encourage you in your study! I am excited you have the interest; please keep in touch and let me know how it goes.

Blessings,

djb

Mailbag: How do you define the good?

Hi. I had a quick morality question for you. I hope that’s okay. I’ve been working with students at the local college campus, discussing morality. I’m wondering how do you define “the Good”? I’ll usually say something like “the Good is that which conforms to the nature and will of God.” What do you think?

Dave

Hi Dave! Thanks for the note. Your question is of course such a great one, and it is one of the hardest ones. Let me say a bit why I find it so devilishly difficult. Of course folks use “good” in nonmoral evaluative ways all the time—like "my computer is good." Thomists though want to put this sort of teleological consideration into the center of their ethical theory. Something is good to the extent it fulfills its function, or something like that, they will say.

Likewise with human beings, though morality enters the picture more explicitly with us, and if we are made by God and for intimacy with Him and others, then loving God and neighbor is what our purpose is. Thus, to the extent we do such things, we are (morally) good.

I don’t think that’s terrible. It probably has a lot going for it. But there has to be more, it seems to me, because of an example I think Wolterstorff comes up with: a serial killer’s “purpose” is to kill lots of people. So he’s a good serial killer if he does. But there is nothing moral about such goodness. So we have to ask not just whether someone or something performs his or her or its function or purpose, but whether the function or purpose is itself good. At that point a purely teleological account of the good seems to require something more deontological.

So regarding moral goodness in particular, what constitutes the standard or ground of moral value? To me the best account we have is the Christian God, owing to his nature. Of course our naturalist friends who are objectivists on such matters usually point to something like human flourishing. And there is some truth in that, it seems to me. This is what makes disambiguating these partially divergent/overlapping views onerous. As a Christian I’m convinced we were meant for flourishing, eudaimonia, shalom, joy, etc. But the question then becomes, what does that look like for us as humans? And the answer to that query invariably rides on what is ultimately real. If we are mere collocations of atoms and nothing else, our highest fulfillments are likely reducible to naturalistic items. But moral langauge and logic and phenomenology, to my thinking, all point beyond categories that naturalism alone can manage.

So I’m inclined to think the joy and telos for which we were designed requires more than that. So even if I were to agree that what's “good” for us is our flourishing (or something in that vicinity), it still points to something likely transcendent—something, I suspect, like the beatific vision. It seems to me the point is this: we cannot simply speak of what’s good for us and think we’re done; that very question drives us to ask what is good in and of itself.

Now, certain of our experiences are good intrinsically—like our friendships. But what is the ground of such intrinsic goods? Again, I don’t see how we avoid metaphysics if we really want to be thoughtful about it, and to me the best explanation seems likely to be classical theism. The nature of such a God seems to be at the front and center of what “the Good” is. This puts me in the theistic Platonist camp, but of course one can be a Christian without buying that. But it’s where I tend to go. Like you, I’m inclined to say that things are good to the extent they partake in or resemble the ultimate good. That is what makes sense of the value of friendship—it resembles God’s loving nature. At least that’s how I see it.

Christian theology makes even more fine-grained the analysis, since we know God’s nature to be Trinitarian—an eternal dance of other-regarding love. So this makes great sense of love being at the center of things, and of loving God and neighbor capturing all the laws and prophets. We are invited to participate in the love that functions at the foundation of reality and always has.

Ultimately I suspect we can effect a sort of rapprochement between Platonic and Thomistic accounts of the good, since we have been made in God’s image. What is best for us (loving relationships with God and others) and most conduces to our joy depends on what is most ultimately real and good in and of itself (God himself, indeed Trinitarian love).

Note, though, that this isn’t so much a “definition” of goodness as something else. I agree with Moore that we can’t define it. I still suspect, and think there’s good reason to believe, God is in some sense constitutive of it. That is more analysis than definition. And since God’s ineffable, this account has the advantage of rendering ultimate goodness, too, beyond our ken in ineliminable respects, necessitating what Adams calls a “critical stance” toward any other (likely deflationary) rival account of the good.

So, yes, hard question!! But in a nutshell that’s what I’m inclined to say. Thanks for the question.

djb

Critiquing Arguments for Moral Nihilism

From Crash Course Apologetics:

The moral error theorist does not believe in such things as moral values and moral obligations. John Mackie offered two arguments for this view that have come to be held with high regard among moral nihilists. The first is the argument from disagreement. The second is the argument from queerness. In this interview, Eric Sampson critiques both arguments. Eric Sampson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

The two papers linked below are the topic of this interview.

https://philpapers.org/rec/SAMTSA-6

https://philpapers.org/rec/MORPAT-23

Critiquing Dr. Eric Wielenberg's Metaethical Model (Interview with Adam Johnson)

Photo by James Sullivan on Unsplash

From Crash Course Apologetics:

Adam Lloyd Johnson is a PhD candidate at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary specializing in metaethics. He teaches philosophy at Theologisches Seminar Rhineland in Wölmerson, Germany. He is also a campus missionary with Ratio Christi.

In 2015 he published a paper in the journal Philosophia Christi titled, “Debunking Nontheistic Moral Realism: A Critique of Eric Wielenberg's Attempt to Deflect the Lucky Coincidence Objection.” The paper is linked below. Adam summarizes the paper in this interview.

https://www.pdcnet.org/pc/content/pc_...

A NEW Moral Argument for the Christian God

From Crash Course Apologetics

Dr. Bobby Conway runs an apologetics YouTube ministry called “The One Minute Apologist.” He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham. The topic of his dissertation is a moral argument for the existence of the Christian God from the existence of objective guilt. The link to his channel is below along with a livestream he did outlining some of the major points of his argument. You should definitely subscribe to his channel!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXkg...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDTNj...

A Case for Objective Moral Facts (Interview with Dr. Terence Cuneo)

From Crash Course Apologetics:

Professor Terence Cuneo is an analytic philosopher at the University of Vermont. He's published two books (The Normative Web, and Speech and Morality) with Oxford University Press arguing for moral realism. In this interview, he summarizes those arguments and offers responses to objections against moral realism.

Problems in Value Theory An Introduction to Contemporary Debates: Matt Flannagan's Chapter with Graham Oppy is finally published

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at MandM.org.nz.

Problems in Value Theory: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates

Bloomsbury Academic

Yesterday, I was informed that the book Problems in Value Theory An Introduction to Contemporary Debates has finally been published. The book is now available both on amazon on Bloomsbury’s website. Chapter 3 of this book “Does Morality Depend on God?” is co-authored by myself and Graham Oppy (Monash University). Both Graham and I each wrote an article (around 5000 words) spelling out our respective answers to the question, and then wrote a shorter piece (1500 words) where we responded to the other’s original essay. 

Problems in Value Theory is edited by Steve Cowan (Lincoln Memorial University). The table of contents is as follows:

  Introduction, Steven B. Cowan

  Part I: Problems in Ethics and Aesthetics

 Introduction to Part I, Steven B. Cowan

  1. Is Morality Relative?

 Morality Is Relative, Michael Ruse

 Morality Is Objective, Francis J. Beckwith

 Responses:

 Beckwith’s Response to Ruse

 Ruse’s Response to Beckwith

  2. What Makes Actions Right or Wrong?

 Consequences Make Actions Right, Alastair Norcross

 Respect for Persons Makes Actions Right, Mark Linville

 Responses:

 Linville’s Response to Norcross

 Norcross’s Response to Linville

  3. Does Morality Depend on God?

 Morality Depends on God, Matthew Flannagan

 Morality Does Not Depend on God, Graham Oppy

 Responses:

 Oppy’s Response to Flannagan

 Flannagan’s Response to Oppy

  4. Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?

 Beauty is Relative, James Mock

 Beauty is Objective, Carol S. Gould

 Responses:

 Gould’s Response to Mock

 Mock’s Response to Gould

  5. What Is the Meaning of Life?

 The Meaning of Life Is Found in God, Douglas Groothuis

 The Meaning of Life Can Be Found without God, Christine Vitrano

 Responses:

 Vitrano’s Response to Groothuis

 Groothuis” s Response to Vitrano

  Essay Suggestions

 For Further Reading

  Part II: Problems in Political Philosophy

 Introduction to Part II, Steven B. Cowan

  6. Do We Need Government?

 We Do Not Need Government, Roderick T. Long

 We Need Some Government, Alex Tuckness

 Responses:

 Tuckness’s Response to Long

 Long’s Response to Tuckness

  7. Should Wealth Be Redistributed?

 Wealth Should Be Redistributed, Jon Mandle

 Wealth Should Not Be Redistributed, Jan Narveson

 Responses:

 Narveson’s Response to Mandle

 Mandle’s Response to Narveson

 8. When May the Government Wage War?

 The Government Should Never Wage War, Andrew Alexandra

 The Government May Sometimes Wage War, Nathan L. Cartagena

 Responses:

 Cartagena’s Response to Alexandra

 Alexandra’s Response to Cartagena

  Essay Suggestions

 For Further Reading

 Index

 The blurb from Bloomberry is as follows:

Problems in Value Theory takes a pro and con approach to central topics in aesthetics, ethics and political theory.

 Each chapter begins with a question: What Makes Actions Right or Wrong? Does Morality Depend on God? Do We Need Government? Contemporary philosophers with opposing viewpoints are then paired together to argue their position and raise problems with conflicting standpoints. Alongside an up-to-date introduction to a core philosophical stance, each contributor provides a critical response to their opponent and clear explanation of their view.

 Discussion questions are included at the end of each chapter to guide further discussion.

 With chapters ranging from why the government should never wage war to what is art and does morality depend on God, this introduction covers questions lying at the heart of debates about what does and does not have value.

Get your copy now, read it, and let me know what you think both here and on Amazon. I am sure there is much more both Graham and I could say on this topic. Graham Oppy is one the best Philosophers of Religion in the world, and it was a real privilege being part of this project with him.  

An Abductive Moral Argument for a Good God (Interview with Dr. David Baggett)

From Crash Course Apologetics:

Dr. David Baggett earned his Ph.D. from Wayne State University and he is currently professor of philosophy at Liberty University School of Divinity. There are various moral arguments for the existence of God, but Dr. Baggett's is intriguing because his moral argument points uniquely combines the others in a way that points specifically to the Christian God. If this interests you, check out his book called The Morals of the Story: Good News About a Good God published by IVP in 2018.

Divine Command Theory: Answering Classic and Contemporary Objections (Interview with Matthew Flannagan)

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

Last week Jordan Hampton from Crash Course Apologetics interviewed me about chapters 12-13 of my book Did God Really Command Genocide. In this is the section of the book, I discuss divine command metaethics and critique some of the most important objections raised against divine command theories. The interview is nearly two and a half hours long. We go over every objection I respond to in the book. Enjoy

---

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is a Theologian with proficiency in contemporary analytic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of Otago, a Masters (with First Class Honours) and a Bachelors in Philosophy from the University of Waikato; he also holds a post-graduate diploma in secondary teaching from Bethlehem Tertiary Institute and a Graduate Diploma in history from Massey University

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 2)

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 2)

Michael Mendoza

NIETZSCHE MISUNDERSTOOD CHRISTIANITY

Admittedly, the Christendom of Europe that Nietzsche observed was at a low point spiritually. The German Enlightenment grew out of rationalism in conjunction with German Idealism. Nineteenth-century German theologians personified the barren Apollonian culture against which Nietzsche rebelled. Christianity had become sterile and arid. Theological Liberalism, left with nothing miraculous or authoritative, emphasized ethics over doctrine. The higher critical method of interpretation chipped away at the biblical standard for morality leaving moral issues up to individuals, the church, or the state. In the words of the Old Testament, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”[i] Thus, Nietzsche called Christianity Nihilism. The culprits were the priestcraft that included ministers, theologians, and philosophers.

 Concerning the philosophical cognoscenti of the previous two centuries, Nietzsche wrote, “German intellect is my foul air: I breathe with difficulty in the neighborhood of this psychological uncleanliness that has now become instinctive – an uncleanliness which in every word and expression betrays a German.”[ii] He had no sympathy for philosophers such as Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, or even Schopenhauer, calling them “unconscious swindlers.”[iii] Nietzsche attacked David Friedrich Strauss, for example, as a “type of German Philistine of Culture and a man of smug self-content.”[iv] Yet, he accepts without question the fundamental presuppositions of German theologians that deny the historicity and authority of the New Testament. Because of this Nietzsche completely misinterpreted Jesus and Paul. Though he despised Strauss, Nietzsche acceded to Strauss’ rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Walter Kaufmann obsequiously defended Nietzsche’s atheism as “a corollary of his basic commitment to question all premises and to reject them unless they are for some reason inescapable.”[v] However, Nietzsche did not challenge the theological premise that created the European Christendom he opposed so passionately. If Nietzsche had questioned the underlying rationalistic presuppositions of the German Enlightenment concerning the nature and authority of the Bible, he might still have rejected Christianity; however, he would at least have had a clearer understanding of what it meant to have an existential encounter with the risen Christ. From Nietzsche onward, modernism and postmodernism have seen Christianity as a “bad fiction”[vi] based on a set of bad ideas. Nietzsche’s fatal flaw was that he had no concept of Christianity as a relationship with the Creator of the universe. He could not conceive of any Dionysian aspects of the genuine Christian life. An encounter with the risen Christ fills the follower with a joy that passes understanding and overflows with music and dance.

DIONYSIAN ASPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY

            The metaphor of Dionysian ecstasy in music and dance can easily be seen in the lives of those who have encountered Christ. The Christian’s Holy Scripture is replete with examples of people who experience a joyous encountered with, as Francis Schaeffer put it, “the God who is there.”[vii] Though the Bible does present a Christian philosophy, it is not primarily a philosophical book. Evangelical Christians believe the Bible is divine revelation from God in propositional form. In any case, it is a written record of people’s experience with God. Believers throughout history lived the Dionysian life-affirmation Nietzsche hoped to achieve. Examples from the Old Testament and the New Testament demonstrate the positive aspects of Dionysian enthusiasm.

            The book of Exodus records the historical events of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel through the Red Sea. Once safely across the sea, Moses and the people broke out into ecstatic celebration.

I will sing to the Lord,

For He has triumphed gloriously!

The horse and its rider

He has thrown into the sea!

The Lord is my strength and song,

And He has become my salvation.[viii]

Immediately after the Song of Moses, Miriam could not contain her enthusiasm. “Then Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took the timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.” In a truly Dionysian life-affirming style of celebration, she danced and sang. Nietzsche’s experience at Bayreuth in 1876 convinced him that Wagner’s attempt to make a religion of the art of music could not work. Safranski explained that Nietzsche “experienced firsthand how a hallowed art event could deteriorate into banality.”[ix] Miriam’s dance, however, was a spontaneous improvisation.[x] Music welled up from within the crowd and compelled the women into a unifying dance. The jubilation was not drug or wine induced. The people experienced Dionysian ecstasy in its purest and most positive form.

2 Samuel 6:1-17 provides another example of exuberance resulting in an encounter with the Living God. King David brought the Ark of the Covenant into the City of Jerusalem. The Scripture understates his delight saying he brought, the “ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with gladness.”[xi] He took six steps and then overcome with euphoria, the Bible says, ““Then David danced before the Lord with all his might.”[xii] David’s Dionysian fête had an Apollonian effect on his wife. “Michal, Saul’s daughter, looked through a window and saw King David leaping and whirling before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.”[xiii] She called his display of passionate merriment “shameless” (נִגְל֖וֹת). As indicated earlier, Apollonian art is sterile and represents restraint. Michal’s response left her barren for the rest of her life. She represents the somatophobia that Nietzsche observed in nineteenth-century European Christendom. In simple terms, European church goers believed the spiritual is good, and the physical is bad because it left nature “bloodless and passionless.”[xiv] Nietzsche wrote, “The Christian is an example of exaggerated self-control: in order to tame his passions, he seems to find it necessary to extirpate or crucify them.”[xv] David responded with Dionysian passion in music and dance, “I will play music before the Lord. And I will be even more undignified than this.”[xvi] Iselin and Meteyard express the duality as an epistemic clash. “When reflecting on their personal epistemology, or individual ways of knowing God and his truth, many Christians today distinguish between so-called head-knowledge and heart-knowledge.”[xvii] David blended both Apollonian and Dionysian culture. His rational and experiential understanding of God led him to coin the phrase praise the Lord.

The Apostle Paul, whom Nietzsche called “that pernicious blockhead,”[xviii] demonstrated a Dionysian exuberance which Nietzsche completely overlooked. Suffering from a severe beating and shackled hand and foot to a prison wall, Paul and Silas jubilantly sang.[xix] They did not sing out of a lack of hope or from despair over an eternally repeating tragedy. Their music was not a desperate attempt to embrace their fate – amor fati. They sang because they had a genuine relationship with the God of creation. Saints like Paul did not need to reject this world. They did not merely look toward the next world for hope. They lived a life of joy embracing the present world. They said yea to life as an existential encounter with the God who exists which included both this world and the next. The metaphor of Dionysian – Apollonian duality can be seen in other passages in the Bible. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus told about two sons. The younger son squanders his inheritance and in desperation returns home to his father who greeted the wayward son with a jubilant celebration of music and dance. The older son, representing the Apollonian attitude, responded in anger toward the revelry. His life was spent in self-denial desperately hoping for some future inheritance.

From the creation narrative in Genesis to the last chapters of the book of Revelation, history is portrayed as a great dance performed by the Creator. Genesis chapter one is written in poetic form, perhaps as an ancient Hebrew song of creation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Spirit moved across the water. I might paraphrase it as the Spirit danced across the waters. The book of John chapter one tells us that Jesus, the Word, was there in the beginning participating in the dance of the Triune God.

According to Jerry Walls, the doctrine of the Trinity explains the eternal nature of love. God is one in three persons. He did not need to create in order to express his love. Yet, he created “us out of love, and his choice to create us is an overflow of who he is in his eternal nature.”[xx] Walls invoked the words of C.S. Lewis to explain what this means. God is not a static thing, but rather a “dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”[xxi] The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existed from all eternity in a relationship of mutual love, joy, and delight. God wants us to join him in “the dance of joy that energizes the three persons of the Trinity.”[xxii] In the final chapters of the Bible, George Frederic Handel heard the music of the angelic hosts at the culmination of history when he penned the Hallelujah Chorus. From before the beginning of time and throughout eternity, God desires for us to share in the Triune dance. Walls concluded that some, like Nietzsche, rather than embracing the opportunity to dance, “choose to reject the offer and attempt to construct their own substitute for joy... In so doing, they reject the only possible source of deep and lasting happiness, and thereby consign themselves to frustration, misery and suffering.”[xxiii] Nietzsche personified the results of choosing not to dance with the Creator. He manufactured a hopeless eternal recurrence whereas God offers a joyous eternal dance.

CONCLUSION

            Nietzsche’s philosophy was not a radical departure from the dry, lifeless dogma of German intellectualism. He represents the culmination of all Enlightenment thinking. If the atheists are correct and God does not exist, then Nietzsche’s conclusions follow naturally. Life is meaningless leading to a worldview of despair. If Nietzsche’s fundamental assumption that God is dead, however, is not the case, then the entire structure of his philosophy falls like the house built upon the sand. Nietzsche’s understanding of Christianity, according to Horton, is “insipid” and a “caricature.”[xxiv] If God exists, Nihilism will not be the result of genuine Christianity as Nietzsche predicted. Francis Schaeffer concluded that Christianity “differs from Nihilism, for Nihilism, though it is correctly realistic, nevertheless can give neither a proper diagnosis nor the proper treatment for its own ills.”[xxv]

Ultimately, Michael Horton correctly concluded that “the definitive power for the Christian community is neither Apollo (resignation to defeat) nor Dionysus (the will to power) but the Lamb who was slain for others but now is alive.”[xxvi] Christianity is not Romanticism, Mysticism, or an Existentialist leap of faith which have abandoned the authenticity and authority of Scripture. Experiencing the life-affirming God revolves around God communicating in propositional statements that are true. St. Jerome wrote, “For if, according to the Apostle Paul, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, and the one who does not know the Scriptures does not know the power of God and his wisdom, [then] ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”[xxvii] As I apply the metaphor of Apollo and Dionysus, I see no tension between the existential encounter with the risen Christ and the propositional truth found in his Word. Christianity provides the reason for tragedy in the world but also allows access to the One who can bring joy in this world and the next. Those in despair need only to embrace the God who is there. In the words of Zarathustra, “I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.”[xxviii] As Walls concluded, “that God wants to dance with Nietzsche, and he will do everything he can to get Nietzsche... in the dance.”[xxix] Even the death of Jesus Christ on the cross is “God’s ultimate statement that he wants us to come home to him and learn to dance.”[xxx] Since Nietzsche is wrong about the non-existence of God, it is possible to embrace a relationship with the God who is there. Jesus does more than know how to dance. He is the Lord of the Dance.

notes:

[i] Judges 17:6, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+17:6&version=NKJV

[ii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Thoughts Out of Season, translator: Anthony M. Ludovici, Horace B. Samuel, John McFarland Kennedy, Paul V. Cohen, Francis Bickly, Herman Scheffauer, and G.T. Wrench, (The Modern Philosophy Series, http://www.e-artnow.org/, 2017), 661. Digital version.

[iii] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 661.

[iv] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 661.

[v] Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 134.

[vi] Brian Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology, (UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2.

[vii] Francis Schaeffer, The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossways Books, 1990), 47.

[viii] Exodus 15:1-2 NKJV.

[ix] Safranski, 140.

[x] Exodus 15:20-21 NKJV.

[xi] 2 Samuel 6:12 NKJV.

[xii] 2 Samuel 6:14-15 NKJV.

[xiii] 2 Samuel 6:16 NKJV.

[xiv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 133.

[xv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 133.

[xvi] 2 Samuel 6:21-22 NKJV.

[xvii] Darren Iselin and John D. Meteyard, The ‘Beyond in the Midst’: An Incarnational Response to the Dynamic Dance of Christian Worldview, Faith and Learning, Journal of Education & Christian Belief 14, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 33–46. doi:10.1177/205699711001400105.

[xviii] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 105.

[xix] Acts 16 NKJV.

[xx] Walls, 160.

[xxi] Walls, 160. Quoted from C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (San Francisco: Harper, 2001), 175.

[xxii] Walls, 161.

[xxiii] Walls, 162.

[xxiv] Michael Horton, “Eschatology After Nietzsche: Apollonian, Dionysian or Pauline?” International Journal of Systematic Theology, vol. 2, number 1, March 2000, 59. 29-62.

[xxv] Schaeffer, 46.

[xxvi] Horton, 59.

[xxvii] The Commentary on Isaiah By St. Jerome,1. Ancient Christian Writers, The Works of The Fathers in Translation, Translated and Introduction by Thomas P. Scheck, (New York: The Newman Press, 2015). https://biblia.com/api/plugins/embeddedpreview?resourceName=LLS:JEROMECOMMIS&layout=minimal&historybuttons=false&navigationbox=false&sharebutton=false#

[xxviii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Dover Thrift Edition, Translated by Thomas Common, (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999), 24.

[xxix] Walls, 164.

[xxx] Walls, 163.

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 1)

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 1)

Michael Mendoza

            Friedrich Nietzsche introduced his philological study of the Ancient Greek’s Apollonian and Dionysian duality in 1872 with his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music.  His interpretation of the two Greek gods underpinned his philosophy of the will to power, the Übermensch, and eternal recurrence throughout his career. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy would have some merit as a metaphor for Greek culture and the German society in which he lived if his underlying assumption about atheism is correct. His explicit rejection of Christianity, however, led to a fatal flaw in his reasoning because the existence of the Christian God can be rationally defended as the inference to the best explanation[i] in an Apollonian manner. Anyone can also experience a Dionysian life-affirming existential encounter with the Living God. Jesus declared, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”[ii]

Nietzsche’s assessment of Christendom in late nineteenth-century Europe was essentially correct. Christianity in Europe had become stale and spiritless. German Protestantism, especially, gave in to the temptations of anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny. Nietzsche even showed some of these traits. Because of the failures of German religiosity, Nietzsche felt Christianity represented the negative aspects of the Apollonian denial of life. He held that Christianity would necessarily lead to Nihilism, and “the Christian doctrine is the counter-doctrine to the Dionysian.”[iii] Jerry Walls described Nietzsche’s view of the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell as “a way for weak, dishonest people to get vengeance on their powerful enemies.”[iv] The German philosopher could not conceive of any Dionysian aspects of the Christian life. An encounter with the risen Christ fills the follower with a joy that passes understanding and overflows with music and dance. A genuine existential experience with the God of the Bible, however, fulfills the positive elements of Dionysian life-affirmation Nietzsche sought.

Others have taken up the question of whether Nietzsche’s evaluation of Apollos and his brother Dionysus is accurate;[v] therefore, I will not delve into the matter. I also do not suggest that the genuine Christian experience is Dionysian in the sense of chaotic or uncontrolled frenzy. Nor is Christianity solely an intellectual assent to a set of philosophical ideas. Instead, I use the Apollonian and Dionysian duality as a metaphor not only for Greek culture but as a foundation for understanding modern Christianity. I will demonstrate how embracing Christianity is both an intelligent and life-affirming choice – a true will to power. I begin with a summary of Nietzschean Apollonian and Dionysian duality focusing on the so-called life-affirming aspects of Dionysus. Next, I examine the fatal flaw in his understanding of Christianity. I provide examples of Dionysian Christians in the Old and New Testament as well as current trends in Christendom. I conclude with Dionysian elements of Christianity by defending the claim that the positive aspects of Nietzsche’s Dionysian life-affirmation are found in a genuine relationship with the God of the New Testament. A balance of Apollonian and Dionysian elements brings music, art, science, and Christian faith into a joyful dance.

NIETZSCHE’S APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN DUALITY

            Nietzsche described Apollo and Dionysus as the “two art deities of the Greeks.”[vi] Anne-Marie Schultz summed up Nietzsche’s view of the Apollonian aspect of human experience. She wrote, “the Apollonian is associated with reason and rationality, intellectual vision, healing, and dreams.”[vii] He is the god of calm stability and self-control. Apollonian art represents the motionless aspect of the Platonic ideal. Apollonian art is symbolic. Walter Kaufmann pointed out that Nietzsche used Apollo as a symbol for the aspect of Greek culture that “found superb expression in classical Greek temples and sculptures: the genius of restraint, measure, and harmony.”[viii] Thus, paintings and sculptures in Apollo’s domain represented the static or motionlessness endurance of life. Nietzsche held that the colorless marble of Greek statues and architecture characterized Apollonian culture as sterile and dreamlike. He is the god of the “beautiful illusion.” In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote, “This joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies [bildnerischen Kraefte], is at the same time the soothsaying god.”[ix] Thus, he is also the god of the inner world of fantasy, “ruler over the beautiful illusion.”[x] Apollonian art is a denial of this world. Nietzsche compares this to the Christian focus on the next life. Apollonian and Christianity are life-denying.

On the other side of Greek culture, Nietzsche understood that the Dionysian art of music and dance referred to the world of frenzied intoxication. According to Ulfers in his introduction to Nietzsche’s The Dionysian Vision of the World, this intoxication is not a narcotic stupor, but an exhilarating “rush,” a Rausch “that spells unboundedness.”[xi] Ulfers further explained that “Speech – conceptual language (the Begriff) – is replaced by singing, and the measured steps of walking are overtaken by dancing.”[xii] Dionysus is the liberator, and the intoxicating ecstasy tears down the boundaries of the Apollonian. Schultz explained that the Dionysian “resides in the disruption of everyday experience” and “in ecstatic moments where one loses a sense of self in communal experience.”[xiii] In the Dionysian festival the individual’s self-control is lost. The euphoric experience of this side of Greek culture in its ritualistic music and dance was, as Kaufmann pointed out, “barbarous by comparison and found expression in the Dionysian festivals.”[xiv] According to Nietzsche, Greek Dionysian festivals happened under the influence of a narcotic draught or the “potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy.”[xv] The emotions intensify, and in the frenzied state everything is subjective; for example, the Apollonian principium individuationis disappears into “complete self-forgetfulness.”[xvi]

Regarding Dionysian music, Nietzsche held that other cultures such as Egypt and Babylon celebrated similar festivals which centered around “sexual licentiousness, the annihilation of all familiarity through an unbounded hetaerism.”[xvii] The Greek celebration of Dionysus, as seen in Euripides’ The Bacchae, differed from them in that “from it flows that same charm, the same musically transfiguring intoxication, that Skopas and Praxiteles concretized in statues.”[xviii] Nietzsche’s focus was on the euphoric experience of the music and dance rather than the orgiastic nature of the Dionysian ritual. The point of the ceremony was for people to join as a unified whole. Safranski describes Nietzsche’s view of Dionysian music as the ecstasy that “melts away the masks representing specific characters to expose an emphatic sense of unity.”[xix] The music draws people into a oneness that communicates more fundamentally and profoundly than words. Safranski explained that music was, “the oldest universal language, intelligible to all people, and yet impossible to translate into any other idiom.”[xx] Music is the voice of the cosmos. The Christian parallel for the cosmic voice is Λόγος (Logos).  The cosmic language is the Word and the cosmic activity is the dance. Sokel added, “It is the union of universal energy and individuated form or shape which the Dionysian orgiastic dance triumphantly enacts by projecting as an individual image the force that binds all together.”[xxi]

In his essay Attempt at Self-Criticism, Nietzsche urges Christians to learn the art of this worldly comfort and laugh to “dispatch all metaphysical comforts to the devil.” Then he adjures Christians in the words of Zarathustra, “Rise up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs! Rise up your legs, too, good dancers; and still better, stand on your heads.”[xxii] Dance is an expression of Dionysian life-affirmation. In the book The Birth of Tragedy, he wrote, “In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing.”[xxiii] Enthusiasm in pure rapturous music compels the Dionysian to dance and embrace life. Dionysian art “gives us the power of grand attitudes, of passion, of song, and of dance.”[xxiv]

Yet, Nietzsche saw how Dionysian drama turns into tragedy. It is through the Dionysian tragedy that hope is abandoned, and the will must intercede. Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power, as well as eternal recurrence, is born out of the symbolism of the Dionysian Greek tragedy. The Dionysian must accept the fact that life is meaningless and painful. Sorrow and suffering are inevitable. Nietzsche’s formula for embracing life’s pain is amor fati. “The Dionysian affirmation of the world, as it is, without subtraction, exception, or choice – it would have eternal circular motion.”[xxv] Nietzsche insisted the tragedy of the world is that even though nothing matters because everything is doomed to recur, the superior man will say yea rather than nay. Nietzsche concluded his discussion of Dionysus in The Will to Power with these words:

The tragic man says yea even to the most excruciating suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying, to be able to do this; the Christian denies even the happy lots on earth: he is weak, poor and disinherited enough to suffer from life in any form. God on the Cross is a curse upon Life, a signpost directing people to deliver themselves from it.[xxvi]

Only through tragedy can the will to power be exercised. For Nietzsche, the greatest tragedy is that life repeats itself in the eternal recurrence. Since there is no hope, the will to power must seize life and embrace the tragedy.

Nietzsche, however, did not intend for Apollonian and Dionysian duality to be considered antithetical. They are not opposites in a Hegelian sense of thesis and antithesis. In Section 1 of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche looked back at his earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy, and said it “smells offensively Hegelian.”[xxvii] Nietzsche’s position is that both the Apollonian and Dionysian are “conditions in which art manifests itself in man as a force of nature... Both of these states let loose all manner artistic powers within us, but each unfetters powers of a different kind.”[xxviii]  Apollonian art produces the power of vision and poetry. Nietzsche held that Socrates sprang from Apollonian intellectualism and thereby developed into all philosophers who devise the fiction of an unseen world or thing-in-itself.

Christopher Cox pointed out that although Nietzsche’s duality looks like a dialectic in the sense of Hegel or Socrates, it is not. “Were it so,” Cox explained, “the Dionysian would be sublated in a higher form. But tragedy does no such thing. Rather it thoroughly affirms the Dionysian.”[xxix] In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, tragic pessimism is superior to the optimism of Socratic and Hegelian dialectic, and thus it is preferred to Apollonian culture.

Years after he published The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche added an essay titled, An Attempt at Self-Criticism. He made it clear that even though he did not mention Christianity, it was nevertheless written as an attack on the Christian faith. He wrote, “Perhaps the depth of this anti-moral propensity is best inferred from the careful and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the whole book – Christianity as the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has ever been subjected.”[xxx] His atheism and antipathy toward Christianity is well documented in many of his works. In The Will to Power, for example, he railed against the “falsehood and fictitiousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and its history.”[xxxi]

At this point, Nietzsche’s fatal flaw about Christianity must be examined.

Notes:

[i] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[ii] John 10:10. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10%3A10&version=KJV.

[iii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Including Autobiography and Selected Personal Letters, translator: Anthony M. Ludovici, Horace B. Samuel, John McFarland Kennedy, Paul V. Cohen, Francis Bickly, Herman Scheffauer, and G.T. Wrench, (The Modern Philosophy Series, http://www.e-artnow.org/, 2017), 554.. Digital version.

[iv] Jerry Walls, “How Could God Create Hell?” God is Great, God is Good: Why Believing in God is Reasonable, Edited by William Lane Craig & Chad Meister, (Downers Grove, Il: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 158.

[v] Silk, M., & Stern, J. (2016). Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge Philosophy Classics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316534786. See also, Nickolas Pappas, “Nietzsche’s Apollo,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 45, No.1 (Spring 2014), pp.43-53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.45.1.0043.

[vi] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, Translated and Edited, with Commentaries, by Walter Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: The Modern Library Edition, 1992), 4.

[vii] Anne-Marie Schultz, “Nietzsche and the Socratic Art of Narrative Self-Care: An Apollonian and Dionysian Synthesis,” Socrates and Dionysus: Philosophy and Art in Dialogue, Edited by Ann Ward, (UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 139.

[viii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, Translated and Edited with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1992), 8.

[ix] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 35. Bildnerischen Kraefte is better translated, artistic energies. The word plastic was first coined in 1907. Nietzsche would not have had that in mind.

[x] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy,35.

[xi] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, Translated by Ira J. Allen, Introduction by Friedrich Ulfers, (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013), 9.

[xii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 9.

[xiii] Schultz, 140.

[xiv] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 35.

[xv] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 36.

[xvi] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 36.

[xvii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 31.

[xviii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 31.

[xix] Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Translated by Shelley Frisch, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 100.

[xx] Safranski, 101.

[xxi] Walter H. Sokel, “On the Dionysian in Nietzsche,” New Literary History, Autumn 2005, 36, 4; ProQuest, page 501.

[xxii] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 26.

[xxiii] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 34.

[xxiv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.

[xxv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 540.

[xxvi] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.

[xxvii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Translated and Edited with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1992), 726.

[xxviii] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 432.

[xxix] Christopher Cox, “Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the Ontology of Music,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson, (UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 498.

[xxx] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 23.

[xxxi] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 17.

Editor's Recommendation: The Layman’s Manual on Christian Apologetics by Brian Chilton

Editor's Recommendation: The Layman’s Manual on Christian Apologetics by Brian Chilton

Recommended by David Baggett

“Chilton’s Manual delivers on its promise to make accessible to the local church the powerful resources of apologetics. Providing an aerial view of the apologetic landscape at once refreshing and required, written with winsomeness and good humor, it shows the author’s pastoral heart, practitioner’s spirit, and rigorous mind. This book can and will equip readers to answer honest questions and gain confidence and boldness in sharing, explaining, and defending the good news of the gospel.”

— David Baggett, Executive Editor

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More Recommendations

Gratitude, Thankfulness, and the Existence of God

Gratitude, Thankfulness, and the Existence of God

Stephen S. Jordan

Every year around Thanksgiving Day, and also throughout the Christmas season, we pause to reflect on all that we have for which to be grateful. There are other times throughout the year when we sense the need to say thanks, and we realize we ought to be more grateful than we presently are—but do we ever stop and think about how the very nature of gratitude and thankfulness actually point to the existence of God?

Gratitude is the awareness of goodness in one’s life and the understanding that the sources of this goodness lie, at least partly, outside oneself. It is not a self-contained or self-sufficient emotion but rather a human person’s inner response to another person or group of persons for benefits, gifts, or favors obtained from them. For example, consider the gratitude one experiences as a result of loving family members, thoughtful friends, and devoted teachers or mentors. The duty of gratitude is to honor these persons by thanking them for the benefits they have provided. Similarly, when gratitude is felt due to a country, school, or some other collective body, it is owed to them not as impersonal establishments, but as communities of human persons. Therefore, gratitude is a deeply personal emotion directed toward persons or groups of persons.[1]

Thankfulness occurs when one outwardly expresses the inner gratitude that is felt. Like gratitude, thankfulness is personal in nature. The difference between the two lies in that being grateful is a state, whereas thanking is an action.[2] With thankfulness, a personal object is in view when someone receives a special gift from a friend or family member and responds by saying “thank you” or writing a “thank you” card or note. In every expression of thanks, the verb “thank” is used in conjunction with an object—typically with the word “you.” Without an object of thanks, there can be no thankfulness. This means that every time one utters the words “thank you,” it is directed toward someone. Thus, thankfulness is an outward personal response directed toward individual persons or communities of persons.[3]

On a deeper level, when one experiences the richness of life which culminates in a deep sense of gratitude and a profound desire to express thankfulness, to whom is this gratitude, this desire to offer thanks, to be directed? G. K. Chesterton once stated, “The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels thankful and has no one to thank.”[4] Of course, it is easy to understand how an atheist or agnostic feels gratitude toward human persons who have made positive differences in their lives, but what about the blessings that cannot be ascribed to human agency? For example, when one considers the overwhelming immensity of a galaxy or the dynamic intricacy of a single living cell and feels as if they are a part of something special, of something bigger than themselves—to what or whom is this sense of gratitude due? While looking at things like a galaxy or cell, the well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, admits that he is overcome with an immense feeling of gratitude: “It’s a feeling of sort of an abstract gratitude that I am alive to appreciate these wonders. When I look down a microscope it’s the same feeling. I am grateful to be alive to appreciate these wonders.”[5] An atheist or agnostic finding himself or herself in a situation like that of Dawkins, where gratitude arises and there is no personal being to thank, is presented with a difficult conundrum that is difficult to overcome.

There are a number of other examples that illustrate this same point. For instance, when one drinks a cool glass of mountain spring water after a long hike and experiences refreshment not only of the body but seemingly of the soul, or when one is lying on the beach and enjoys the warmth of the sun beaming down on their skin—to what or whom should this person offer their thanks? In moments like these, is one’s gratitude directed toward impersonal things like galaxies, cells, water or the sun—or is this gratitude more appropriately directed toward a personal God who cares deeply for human persons and makes possible their enjoyment and overall well-being? Does it make sense to offer thanks to a galaxy, a cell, water or the sun for the good gifts of life—or does it make more sense to thank God as the personal Creator and transcendent Giver of all good gifts that we enjoy in life?[6]

In his book Thanks!, Robert Emmons shares a story involving Stephen King, the most successful horror novelist of all-time, where King’s survival of a serious automobile accident causes his heart to become flooded with a deep-seated gratitude that King directs toward God. As Emmons explains,

“In 1999, the renowned writer Stephen King was the victim of a serious automobile accident. While King was walking on a country road not far from his summer home in rural Maine, the driver of a van, distracted by his rottweiler, veered off the road and struck King, throwing him over the van’s windshield and into a ditch. He just missed falling against a rocky ledge. King was hospitalized with multiple fractures to his right leg and hip, a collapsed lung, broken ribs, and a scalp laceration. When later asked what he was thinking when told he could have died, his one-word answer: ‘Gratitude.’ An avowedly nonreligious individual in his personal life, he nonetheless on this occasion perceived the goodness of divine influence in the outcome. In discussing the issue of culpability for the accident, King said, ‘It’s God’s grace that he [the driver of the van] isn’t responsible for my death.’”[7]

Interestingly, as a result of his life being spared, King directs the gratitude that arises in his heart to God. Even though there was another human in view, it would have been odd for King to thank the driver of the van who nearly killed him. If it did not make sense for King to thank the driver of the van, then who else could he thank if not God, who was responsible (in King’s own words) for saving his life on a day when he probably should have died?

The examples above illustrate that there are times when it does not make sense to direct gratitude and offer thanks to human persons. Even those who deny God’s existence and believe that the world is the result of blind, purposeless forces still agree that there are instances of gratitude that reach beyond a human benefactor. One’s sense of gratitude and desire to give thanks does not go away on an atheistic worldview—it is only frustrated.

In these instances (when it doesn’t make sense to thank a human person), we ought to direct our gratitude and thankfulness, even our praise, to God. Indeed, in every moment of every day, in all circumstances (1 Thess. 5:18), our hearts and minds ought to be characterized by gratitude and thankfulness; nothing less is appropriate considering God’s wonderful blessings upon our lives (James 1:17). Our prayer to God ought to be that of the Welsh poet and priest of the Church of England, George Herbert, who wrote,

“Thou that hast given so much to me,

Give one thing more, a grateful heart.”[8]

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Stephen S. Jordan currently serves as a high school Bible teacher at Liberty Christian Academy in Lynchburg, Virginia. He is also a Bible teacher, curriculum developer, and curriculum editor at Liberty University Online Academy, as well as a PhD student at Liberty University. Prior to his current positions, Stephen served as youth pastor at Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church in State Road, North Carolina. He and his wife, along with their three children and German shepherd, reside in Goode, Virginia.

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Notes:

[1] According to Robert Emmons, a leading scholar on the science of gratitude, “[G]ratitude is more than a feeling. It requires a willingness to recognize (a) that one has been the beneficiary of someone’s kindness, (b) that the benefactor has intentionally provided a benefit, often incurring some personal cost, and (c) that the benefit has value in the eyes of the beneficiary.” Robert A Emmons, Thanks!: How the Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 5. Many of the ideas from this section on gratitude come from Alma Acevedo, “Gratitude: An Atheist’s Dissonance,” First Things, published April 14, 2011, accessed November 23, 2019, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/04/gratitude-an-atheists-dissonance.

[2] For example, when I feel grateful for a friend, this inner gratitude motivates me to display thankfulness for my friend by doing something kind for them (e.g., purchasing them a Starbucks gift card). Emmons and McCullough explain the difference between gratitude and thankfulness in this way: “Being grateful is a state; thanking is an action.” Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, The Psychology of Gratitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 286.

[3] Can gratefulness be directed toward something material (i.e., something other than a person)? Does it make sense to offer thanks to a material item, such as a coffeemaker? As Emmons notes, “If we subscribe to a standard conception of gratitude, then the answer must be no. My Technivorm Moccamaster coffee brewer does not intentionally provide me with a kindness every morning. But there might be another way to see it. In a blog essay entitled Gratitude as a Measure of Technology, Michael Sacasas suggests that there is nothing bizarre about feeling grateful for technological advances. We could in fact be grateful for material goods…So we can think of gratitude as a measure of what lends genuine value to our lives…So although I am not grateful to my coffeemaker I could legitimately be grateful for it…Thinking about gratitude and technology this way verified what I have believed for some time. We are not grateful for the object itself. Rather, we are grateful for the role the object plays within the complex dynamic of everyday experience. That is what triggers a sense of gratefulness. When it comes to happiness, material goods are not evil in and of themselves. Our ability to feel grateful is not compromised each time we leave home to go shopping or with each click of the ‘add-to-cart’ button. When we are grateful, we can realize that happiness is not contingent on materialistic happenings in our lives but rather comes from our being embedded in caring networks of giving and receiving.” Robert A. Emmons, Gratitude Works!: A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 92-93.

[4] Actually, this is a quote of Dante Rossetti that Chesterton cites. Many people often attribute it to Chesterton, which is why it appears that way in this article, but it is actually a statement by Rossetti.

[5] This was stated by Dawkins in a November 2009 debate at Wellington College in England. The debate was sponsored by a rationalist group known as Intelligence Squared.

[6] Why is a personal God necessary here? Can a person not direct gratitude or offer thanks to an impersonal god (i.e., a force)? Due to the intrinsically personal nature of gratitude and thankfulness, it seems odd to direct these feelings and actions toward anything less than a God who is personal himself. What about other religions, besides Christianity, that claim that God is personal? Although this discussion needs more time and space in order to hash out all of the details, a few brief things need to be mentioned. Because Christianity is the only religion that offers a Trinitarian conception of God, it is the only religion that can claim that God is intrinsically personal. The circulatory character of the triune God (i.e., the doctrine of perichoresis), the mutual giving and receiving of love among the three Persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—serves as a solid ground for maintaining God’s essentially personal nature. Other religions may claim that God is personal, but only in the sense that humans are able to relate to him. Thus, in non-Christian religions, God may be called “personal,” but he is dependent upon humans for his personality and is therefore not intrinsically personal.

[7] Emmons, Thanks!

[8] A special thanks to two of my close friends, Jay Hamilton and Chris Rocco, for proofreading an earlier version of this article and offering helpful feedback. I am so grateful for your friendship!

Editor's Recommendation: Doing What's Right by Gooding and Lennox

By David Gooding, John Lennox

“Navigating the enduring questions about the good and the right, justice and value, scrutinizing their goal, guidance, and ground, David Gooding and John Lennox—with characteristic clarity, courage, and common sense—adroitly unveil both what’s timely and timeless along the moral terrain. The rigorous honesty of their relentless pursuit of a moral account sufficient for both theoretical and practical purposes yields important dividends: insights not just into the human condition and the manifest limitations of materialism, but how morality objectively and robustly construed points beyond itself, intimating of promise and potential we can scarcely imagine.”

— David Baggett, Executive Editor

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A Few Reflections on Schopenhauer

A Few Reflections on Schopenhauer

David Baggett

Arthur Schopenhauer’s work had a big influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, especially the latter’s Birth of Tragedy. The similarities between them are numerous, not least the parallel between Schopenhauer’s will and representation, on the one hand, and Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollinian, on the other. Both also saw suffering residing at the heart of the human condition, and art as the key to whatever redemption of which we’re capable as human beings. Both came, it would seem, to reject the existence of God; Nietzsche’s bold proclamation of Schopenhauer’s atheism (in The Gay Science) has been critiqued by some for lack of evidence, but it’s generally agreed that many of the implications of Schopenhauer’s depictions of reality are atheistic. At the least God would have been rendered, to paraphrase Laplace, an unnecessary hypothesis.

Much of Schopenhauer’s training in philosophy focused on Plato and Kant in particular, and the latter provided the tools for his metaphysical position, the first of the two big ideas of his magnum opus. Kant’s so-called transcendental idealism wielded a huge influence on Schopenhauer, who was born the same year Kant published his Second Critique. The world and our existence poses a riddle, Schopenhauer thought, in light of the human subjectivity in which we’re trapped. The world as it is in itself is not the world as it appears to us; as a result, everything we experience is mediated by the perceiving subject. We can’t know things as they are in themselves; rather, we can know only our transcendental cognitive framework and the representations it makes possible.

Rather than directing his attention, like Kant did, to what the subject imposes on experience, Schopenhauer instead sought to observe more closely how the subject may be tied intimately with the underlying nature of the world. He looked for an essential homogeneity between the subject and object, and thought the body provided such a link between the inner and outer. The body is not just a spatio-temporal object (something experienced outwardly), but also something we experience inwardly, subjectively, namely, the will. The actions of our bodies are manifestations of our wills.

Schopenhauer even thought that the world as a whole is fundamentally will, offering examples like the following: “The one-year-old bird has no notion of the eggs for which it builds its nest; the young spider has no idea of the prey for which it spins its web; the ant-lion has no notion of the ant for which it digs its cavity for the first time. The larva of the stag-beetle gnaws a hole in the wood, where it will undergo its metamorphosis, twice as large if it is to become a male beetle as if it is to become a female, in order in the former case to have room for the horns, though as yet it has no idea of these. In the actions of such animals the will is obviously at work as in the rest of their activities, but is in blind activity.”

Interestingly, such obviously goal-directed tendencies interwoven throughout nature don’t lead Schopenhauer to affirm teleology in the world, but to deny it. The will in question is characterized as “will without a subject.” Such an interpretation is possible, but it by no means strikes me as obvious or the best explanation. A clear alternative is presupposed in Proverbs 6:6-8: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provides her meat in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest.” The Bible in fact is replete with lessons about moral or metaphysical truth drawn from garden-variety features and operations of the world. Examples of seemingly teleological instances of the world are an odd choice to drive home a point denying its reality.

Here’s another example Schopenhauer offered: “Let us consider attentively and observe the powerful, irresistible impulse with which masses of water rush downwards, the persistence and determination with which the magnet always turns back to the North Pole, the keen desire with which iron flies to the magnet, the vehemence with which the poles of the electric current strive for reunion, and which, like the vehemence of human desires, is increased by obstacles.” Here he seems to adduce examples of stable natural laws, which, I suppose, can be thought of as evidence of God as a needless hypothesis; but I’m not convinced it’s a good inference. The sort of argument that can be teased out here conspicuously and presciently resembles the suspicion of many today that science and faith are fundamentally at odds, but this seems to be a mistake. Let’s consider just one reason why this is so.

Brian Cutter notes that there are two sides to the human capacity for science: “The first is the fact that the universe is intrinsically intelligible—that nature is structured in a way that admits of rational comprehension…. The second … is that our actual cognitive equipment, such as it is, allows us to discern the broad lineaments of nature, to plumb the deep structure of reality at levels well outside those relevant to life on the savannah. Both of these facts seem much more like what we should expect if Christian theism were true than if naturalism were true. The first fact fits comfortably with the theistic idea that the universe has its source in a Rational Mind, and is really quite surprising on the opposite assumption. And the second fact accords nicely with the Christian doctrine that human beings are made in the image of God, where bearing the image of God has traditionally been supposed to involve, among other things, the possession of an intellectual nature by which we partake in the divine reason.” (See his chapter in Besong and Fuqua’s Faith and Reason.)

On such a view both the existence of stable natural laws and our ability epistemically to access them count evidentially more in favor of theism than atheism, a personal universe rather than an impersonal one. Although an atheist, Schopenhauer may not have altogether been a naturalist, though, because he thought that through art, and music in particular, we can in some sense gain a measure of equanimity in face of the invariable suffering and futility of our lives. Suffering is the norm, he thought, and despite our subjective feelings of willing, we’re not actually free; the sense that we are free is mere appearance.

But rather than leaving us there, Schopenhauer’s second big idea pertained to what we can do in the face of such pessimism. We shouldn’t abandon life itself, but willing in general. Denying the will is the cornerstone of his ethics and aesthetics, and Nietzsche was most struck by Schopenhauer’s aesthetic deliverance from willing. It would seem that Schopenhauer’s notion of will was inextricably tied to notions of futility, of striving, of deficiency, and of suffering. With aesthetic contemplation, he thought, the subject is no longer regarding the object—a beautiful song, for example—in relation to its will. Rather, the object enchants the subject by virtue of its beauty, and as long as it does so the subject’s will is annulled.

In such a situation we find the object beautiful for what it is rather than for its functional capacity, what it does, so willing isn’t needed. The subject thus transcends time and space to realize the eternal realm of a Platonic Idea, and has himself thereby realized his own eternity.

Leaving aside how on earth this shows our “eternity,” two thoughts occur to me here, and with these I’ll end this short analysis. First, his understanding of willing seems flawed, if not idiosyncratic. I don’t feel unfree when I can’t help but recognize objective beauty, or feel the force of a lovely argument whose conclusion is inescapable, or at least eminently reasonable. I rather seem to feel at my most free in such cases. Attentiveness to evidence, apprehension of the lovely, feeling the force of the good—none of these annul my freedom. My freedom most consists in my capacity for just such things!

Just as I don’t see the most salient feature of faith, rightly understood, to be epistemic deficiency, I don’t see the most distinguishing feature of freedom, rightly understood, as existential deficiency. Long before Enlightenment construals of such concepts foisted themselves on us there were traditional understandings of them expressed in quite different terms. The truest freedom, on those more ancient foundations, is to live as we were meant to live; to love the true, the good, and the beautiful because they’re worth loving; freedom from the shackles that would preclude us from becoming fully humanized. So it seems the right goal is not the annulment of our freedom, but its fulfillment, its maximization, which is consistent with constraints to prevent expressions of agency that vitiate rather than conduce to abundant living.

And second, Schopenhauer’s openness to a Platonic paradigm is tantamount to a tacit admission of the inadequacy of naturalism to account for his intuitions here. A personal God strikes me as a better explanation than impersonal Platonic Forms floating in metaphysical limbo; but, while not Christian, Platonism remains eminently congenial to a traditionally theistic understanding of the world. “A Platonic man,” George Mavrodes once wrote, “who sets himself to live in accordance with the Good aligns himself with what is deepest and most basic in existence.”  

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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 developed two subsequent books with Walls. The second book, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning, critiques naturalistic ethics. The third book, The Moral Argument: A History, chronicles the history of moral arguments for God’s existence. It releases October 1, 2019. 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.

Ecological Apologetics

Ecological Apologetics

Caleb Brown

Air travel cultivates appreciation for nature. That I am sitting in a metal tube, bumping elbows with strangers and developing neck strain all fade as I open my window to the blinding beauty outside. Trans-Pacific flights reveal lonely cargo ships, barely visible in the vast blueness that swallows the world. Trans-continental flights survey the barren crags and mesas of the southwestern deserts. From this high up, patterns sifted from the soil by flowing water draw the eye with artistic precision.

Shorter, lower flights allow intimate interaction with aerial terrain. On a hopper from Dallas to Colorado Springs, my propeller plane banked and wove its way through glowering thunder banks. On the way from Charlotte to Gainesville miles of farmland sprouted plumes of smoke that rose and then flattened upon encountering wind. They seemed to be gargantuan, flagged pins on the only real map.

But what did these pins mark? Was the farmers’ attempt to clear their land and produce food harmful as well as efficient and artful? What are the consequences of vaporizing tons of carbon-based plant life through combustion? What, for that matter, is the ecological impact of the flight that enabled me to see what these farmers were doing?

We revel in the beauty of nature, and we must use nature to survive. Both of these truths will not let us leave it alone; they will not let us leave nature natural. Even to experience nature, a pleasure that makes us feel more alive and more human, we must enter it and thereby change it.

There is whimsy and power in human smallness before nature—the gentle curve of a foot-path enhances the grandeur of a mountain. The orange streak of a fragile jetstream lit by a dying sun deepens the purple cast over the Blueridge Mountains. But frail footpaths and ephemeral jetstreams breed the sterile flatness of parking lots and runways.

Perhaps parking lots have their place. But the intuition that the natural world is something good, and therefore is something that must be treated carefully, is undeniable. It strikes us at 32,000 feet and when looking into the eyes of a puppy, when contemplating the cruelty of some humans to that sweet nose and those clumsy paws.

While people differ over where, precisely, this intuition points, and what, exactly, it should lead us to do, members of nearly every demographic and tradition acknowledge that the natural world is good and that our treatment of it is not a neutral matter. Regardless of what is felt to be the right way to treat nature, the conviction that wrong ways exist and have been practiced is nearly universal.

This moral intuition is deep and widespread, but how it meshes with other widespread beliefs is not clear.

If we all got here through the survival of the fittest, why should we be concerned about the wellbeing of non-human species? Certainly, the general wellbeing of the biosphere is important for the wellbeing of humans, but cruelty towards domesticated pets does not impact the survival of humanity. If anything, nurturing these pets diverts resources that could be used by humans. To say that caring for these pets increases our psychological wellbeing is simply to restate in psychological terms our moral intuition that the wellbeing of animals is important.

If mass-extinction events are part and parcel of evolution, then why do we have a moral duty to avoid them? Perhaps, by avoiding mass-extinction events, we are preventing evolutionary progress. How would we feel if primates had thwarted our emergence?

Naturalistic evolutionary attempts to explain our moral intuitions generally attribute them, like everything else about us, to a highly sophisticated sense of self-interest. Our moral intuitions towards nature developed because they are, in the end, best for our own survival, or at least for the propagation of our genes. But even if a sufficiently nuanced evolutionary mechanism could produce these instincts, it cannot explain why it would be wrong for us to act contrary to them. We regularly engage in activities, from eating Oreos to choosing Netflix over exercise, that reduce our health and, through epigenetics, reduce the fitness of our descendants. But if reducing our evolutionary fitness in these ways is not wrong, why would disregarding our survival-driven instincts towards nature be wrong?

It seems that naturalism can only explain the psychological phenomena of our moral intuitions towards the natural world by reducing them to mere instincts. It cannot give these instincts the moral weight we know they possess. Pure naturalism cannot explain our knowledge that the natural world is valuable and that abuse of this world is wrong. It takes something more than naturalism to explain what we know about nature.  

But not any type of supernaturalism will do. The trick is to find a way of explaining the value of nature without reducing it, as naturalism does, to something that is unable to ground our moral intuitions. Supernaturalisms that link the spiritual world too closely to the natural world risk reducing the value of the natural world to the worth and power of the spirits that inhabit nature: “The tree is the home of the god, so it is sacred,” or, “I will treat this tree carefully because the spirit that lives in it will make my children sick if I don’t.” Viewpoints like these do not reflect a feeling that the natural world has value in and of itself. Rather, they render it valuable merely by association.

But I think Classical Theism might be a type of supernaturalism that can ground our moral intuitions. Because Classical Theism posits a God who is distinct from nature, it does not reduce the value of nature to that of spirits who inhabit it. Under Classical Theism, to say that the value of the natural world comes from God does not reduce nature’s value to something else, because everything comes from God. God-given value is as inherent, as intrinsic, as real in and of itself as anything in the world. God-given value is not a reality that we can, like our genetic instincts, transcend and ignore.

Many portray our treatment of the natural world as the moral issue of our day. It is certainly one of them. But why is it a moral issue? It seems that naturalism cannot explain the moral significance of nature. Something more is needed. Classical Theism might be this something.