Audio Lecture: Four Ways God Best Explains Morality

In this lecture, Dr. Baggett shows how theism provides a better explanation of morality than naturalism.

Atheism & Morality

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

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

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

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

Image: Dilemma by N. Sienaert. CC license. 

Worldview as Explanatory Hypothesis

In the town in which I live resides a Harvard-trained academic neurosurgeon who, in 2008, was struck by a rare illness that put him into a coma for seven days, during which his entire neo-cortex shut down. Evan Alexander had mysteriously contracted E-coli bacterial meningitis, which attacks the brain. Just recently I met Alexander, who was doing a local book signing. He has written up the remarkable story of his experience in a gripping book—Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife—that has been featured on the cover of Newsweek. That he survived and without permanent brain damage is amazing enough, but perhaps that is not the most surprising part of his story. For during his coma, when the part of his brain responsible for thought and emotion was not merely malfunctioning but turned off and off line, Alexander recounts that he experienced a hyper-vivid voyage to another realm of existence where he claims to have gleaned profound insight into the nature of reality and the human condition—most importantly that an all-powerful, infinitely loving God is real. Irrespective of how veridical are all the features of his experience and his various interpretations of the experience, what is remarkable is that in his condition he was able to experience any conscious states at all.

Nobody was more surprised at this than Alexander himself, who admits that for the seven years leading up to this life-changing event, he had been a card-carrying materialist. He had heard his share of near-death experiences, and he had retained the conviction that an adequate scientific explanation would be forthcoming, an explanation predicated on the axioms of materialist reductionism, a thoroughgoing naturalistic paradigm. As a neurosurgeon, though, once he regained consciousness and came to understand the severity of his condition during the coma, he became convinced that no naturalistic account would do. As a scientist, he entertained a range of hypotheses to explain his memories—from a primitive brainstream program to ease terminal pain and suffering to the distorted recall of memories from deeper parts of the limbic system relatively protected from the meningitis inflammation, and seven more hypotheses—none of which, in his studied estimation, can explain the nature of his conscious experience during that coma on the assumption of a materialist worldview’s account of consciousness. Needless to say, the event proved transformative for him, unraveling the naturalistic paradigm that he has so long adopted and assumed, a viewpoint that is arguably the prevailing worldview among most contemporary philosophers and scientists.

That naturalism is a worldview means, among other things, that it is an explanatory hypothesis. To say a worldview is an explanatory hypothesis is to identify one of its most important functions: the epistemic task of providing, in J. P. Moreland’s words, “an explanation of facts, of reality, the way it actually is. Indeed it is incumbent on a worldview that it explain what does and does not exist in ways that follow naturally from the core explanation commitments of that worldview.” Moreland argues that such explanations must range over causal, epistemic, and metaphysical issues. A worldview is an expansive way of looking at ourselves and the world. Worldviews offer answers to questions about God, meaning, knowledge, reality, the human condition, and values. Naturalism is certainly a worldview, but is naturalism a religion? Here’s what Alvin Plantinga has to say on that matter: "[Naturalism] isn’t clearly a religion: the term ‘religion’ is vague, and naturalism falls into the vague area of its application. Still, naturalism plays many of the same roles as a religion. In particular, it gives answers to the great human questions: Is there such a person as God? How should we live? Can we look forward to life after death? What is our place in the universe? How are we related to other creatures? Naturalism gives answers here: there is no God, and it makes no sense to hope for life after death. As to our place in the grand scheme of things, we human beings are just another animal with a peculiar way of making a living. Naturalism isn’t clearly a religion; but since it plays some of the same roles as a religion, we could properly call it a quasi-religion." As I ponder such issues, I can’t help but think of the students at the Christian university where I teach. Unless they are told they must, when they are asked about their own worldview, very few of them will say anything about why they believe what they do. Nor will they tend to have much if anything to say about what explanatory power their worldview possesses. If they do broach the issue of why they believe their worldview, they tend to privilege psychological over philosophical or evidential categories. What students tend to do is just give a litany or perhaps one or two of their core convictions—God exists, for example, unlike what those atheists believe. What is especially hard to take about this, for me, is that this doesn’t just explain their answers coming into my introductory philosophy course, but going out too.

It pains me to admit this, but perhaps this sad state of affairs gives me an opportunity. At present I administer a worldview pre-test and post-test to my students in this particular class. The course has for one of its major goals greater clarity on worldview—articulating it, defending it, etc. We cover quite a few ways in which they can do these things better, but the results at the end of the course are generally disappointing, revealing nominal improvement at most much of the time. What I intend to do to ameliorate the situation is to hold their feet to the proverbial fire. For whatever reason, they often do not seem to be connecting the dots, despite our encouragement for them to do so. I am less convinced they can’t than that they simply are not. And if they think they can get away with the bare minimum, sad to say, they usually try, which means the post-test tends not to show their best work. Students at this age—with their philosophy of education, their pragmatism, their time constraints, and their still-forming pre-frontal cortex—often need their hand to be forced. Formerly I would refrain from requiring a minimum word length on the post-test, reasoning optimistically that surely students would avail themselves in an “essay assignment” as part of the final exam to show what they know. I figured they would relish the chance to knock it out of the park. What I have found too often instead are a series of strikeouts or, at best, weak singles. The internal motivation I had assumed would animate them on such an assignment frequently fails to materialize. If am I right, the problem is more about this issue of motivation than that of competence. So, one obvious way to address this situation is to require the post-test essay to be at least a specified minimum length. That’s an easy fix.

The second change I’m planning to implement, though, will be far more important, I’m convinced. Once again, since students tend to focus on the content of their beliefs, the assignment needs explicitly to force their hand to consider questions of evidence. Students tend to be steeped in the lingo of social science, so it needs to be clarified to them that the issue is not the origin of their beliefs—culture, parents, church—but rather their truth and evidence. So what I intend to do is to follow Moreland’s characterization of worldview as explanatory hypothesis. I intend to leave behind saying a worldview is primarily a matter of one’s beliefs and convictions about God, the world, and the human condition—which invariably lends itself to superficial first-order analysis and mindless litanies. No, the function of a worldview is to explain. Talk about that, I intend to tell them, and then to remind them of the specific ways in which they can do so. What can better explain facts that most all of us—theists and atheists alike—believe in and common sense can apprehend? The human capacity for rational deliberation, free will, objective moral truths, real guilt, and moral responsibility? Arguments, philosophical and otherwise, for the ability of theism to explain such realities better than atheism are both cogent and compelling. This is the very stuff we spend so much time in class on all term long. One of the books I have my students read in the course is C. S. Lewis’s Miracles, the third chapter of which is the famous “argument from reason,” the topic of Lewis’s famous debate with famed Wittgenstein student Elizabeth Anscombe, and an argument that in recent years has been updated by the likes of Alvin Plantinga and Victor Reppert. The import of the chapter is the intrinsic problem naturalism has accounting for rationality. In a recent book by atheist Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, he makes a similar point; this is not just an argument only theists can see. In the fifth chapter of Miracles Lewis shows that naturalism has an equally hard time making sense of objective morality. Morality and rationality, however, are comfortable fits in a world created and sustained by a loving and personal God. Elsewhere in the course we spend time exploring how naturalists lack the resources to make sense of genuine free will in the world as they envision it—yet without free will, there can be no genuinely authoritative morality. For theists who believe that, as a prerequisite for loving relationship, God has conferred on human beings, made in his image, the capacity for free choice, it all makes excellent sense. Classical theism can simply explain free will, rationality, and morality better than can naturalism; the evidence is on the side of theism.

But today’s Christian students, starting well before college, are breathing the air of a culture that, each day in a myriad of ways, proclaims the irrationality of a life of faith. Even the locution “faith” has been co-opted to convey connotations of an Enlightenment-foisted distorted view of faith as bespeaking a lack of evidence. Biblically, faith is nothing of the kind, but rather principled trust in God’s faithfulness to do all he has promised to do, principled for being rooted in God’s track record of faithfulness. If we do not wish to lose a generation of Christian young people to the corrosive effects of skepticism and cynicism, postmodernism and the quasi-religion of naturalism, we need to help them know not just what they believe, but see why. They must, and fortunately they can, come to understand that they are eminently justified to hold a Christian worldview because, as an explanation of life’s most important and undeniable realities—from love to logic, from cognition to consciousness—it is second to none.

The Bonobo and the Atheist

The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, by Frans de Waal. Norton, NY, 2013. The well-known primatologist Frans de Waal, author of nearly a dozen books, has produced a new one. Very well written, full of memorable turns of phrase, and eminently accessible, one of the more interesting features of the book is its recurring use of art and literature, particularly the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. It also poses a challenge to the idea that morality needs God or religion. Much of the book assumes a tacit battle between science and religion, particularly fundamentalist Christianity, although he thinks the conflict is less a battle about what the truth is than what are going to do with it: appropriate it or avoid it. Much of what he seems to be battling involves trite repetitions of the Dostoyevsky-inspired Karamazov hypothesis, kneejerk religious rejections of widely supported scientific insights, and a 1970’s-styled characterization of social Darwinism as entailing an abrogation of ethics—what de Waal dubs the (Thomas) Huxley-inspired “veneer theory.”

His resistance to the religious hypothesis, though, is markedly different from the New Atheists. He finds arguments about whether God exists to be uninspiring and uninspired, and the New Atheists unoriginal, gratuitously acrimonious, and filled with unrealistic confidence in the outcomes and potential of science and with dogmatism rivaling the most rabid of fundamentalists. Mindful of the missteps science has made—from the eugenics movements to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments to handing the tools of mass destruction to advocates of genocide—he is reticent to invest in science the same sort of enthusiastic and unconditional support as do Dawkins and Harris. He shares with them, though, the conviction that morality needs neither God nor religion, although he sees that religious motivations can be ennobling; and he thinks that he and his secular cohorts need to realize the need to engage in more than religion-bashing. He would rather explore what makes religion so prominent, and he recognizes that efforts to replace it wholesale and emulate its inspiration-conferring role have generally failed. The aspect of religion to which he seems most averse is its reinforcement of a top-down understanding of morality. His preferred understanding of morality is, quite to the contrary, bottom-up.

Using a variety of examples, he argues that animal tendencies to prosociality, altruistic behaviors, community concern, and aversions to inequity suggest that the operation of such moral building blocks in primates reveal that morality is not as much of a human innovation as we like to think. He asks why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for a livable society, is built into us? Since social norms preceded religion, this is evidence to suggest that morality does not need religion. Religious motivations to conduct ourselves morally came after the tendencies were already there, reinforced by a long evolutionary process. As evidence for his contentions, he points to instances of animal empathy, even bird empathy—and the fact that mammals give affection, want affection, and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs. It is particularly the bonobos who show, especially in contrast with chimpanzees, that our lineage is marked not just by male dominance and xenophobia, but also by a love of harmony and sensitivity to others. He resists the depiction of animals as primarily vicious and self-centered; just like us, he writes, monkeys and apes strive for power, enjoy sex, want security and affection, kill over territory, and value trust and cooperation. We have a psychological makeup that remains that of a social primate.

So his effort to identify the foundations of morality differ not just from those of theistic ethicists who point to the commands or character of God, but also to rationalistic Kantian efforts to root morality in reason and to utilitarian principles admitting of all manner of counterintuitive implications and susceptible to a myriad of counterexamples. He thinks the weight of morality comes not from above, but from inside of us. Following Hume, he thinks reason to be but the slave of the passions; we start with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Sentiments alone are not enough, though; de Waal adds that what sets human morality apart is a move toward universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring, and punishment. To de Waal’s thinking, morality is created in day-to-day interaction, grounded in emotions, which often escape the neat categorizations of which science is fond. Such an approach to ethics comports, he argues, with what we know about how the human mind works, with visceral reactions arriving before rationalizations, and with the way evolution produces behavior.

The book marks a fundamental debate concerning what ethics is, and thus what is in need of explanation. He is hesitant to call apes or even bonobos moral creatures, but he definitely thinks what we call morality among human beings finds its origin in our evolutionary history. What distinguishes human morality from the prosociality, empathy, and altruism of other primates (traits that stand in contrast with a Hobbesian analysis of nature) is our capacity as humans to reflect about such things, build systems of justification, and generalize morality into a system of abstractions. But the question the book left me with was this nagging question: Hasn’t de Waal simply changed the subject? What he is referring to as “morality” does not seem to be any set of moral truths at all, but rather moral beliefs and practices. Although he identifies some necessary additions to animal behavior to arrive at “morality,” what he adds does not seem to be enough. What is left out of the picture is highly important to what most people mean when they talk about morality. Now, it’s true that “morality” sometimes is meant to refer exclusively to moral beliefs and practices, rendering on occasion issues of truth largely irrelevant. But in a book attempting to explain morality, disambiguating between truth and practice has got to be an important part of the analysis. Rather than disambiguating, however, de Waal seems, either intentionally or inadvertently, to exploit the ambiguity and thus conceal the potential equivocation and sidestep the most challenging and interesting aspects of ethical theory.

Consider moral obligations, which typically are thought to provide distinctive and authoritative reasons to perform an action or refrain from one. A moral obligation, particularly ultima facieones among them, ought to be obeyed; it has authority, punch, clout, prescriptive power. In an effort to account for moral obligations, de Waal employs one of the following strategies: he either (1) eschews their importance, arguing that moral feelings provide better moral reasons to act than do obligations; or (2) does not try to explain moral obligations at all, but merely our feelings or sense of moral obligations, exploiting equivocation on “obligations.” His first strategy goes hand in hand with his effort to hint at the emaciated nature of moral motivation when all that is motivating a person is a sense of moral obligation. He rightly sees, contra Kant, that in some sense it’s better to be motivated by higher moral impulses, like love. True enough, and nearly every virtue theorist would agree. But this provides no liberation from the need to explain the existence of moral obligations, which at least at this stage of our moral development are ineliminable and most certainly capture what most ordinary speakers believe. That we should often be motivated by something other than moral obligations is very likely true, but that does nothing to explain away moral obligations or the need of ethical theory to account for them. His second strategy explains how primates, and especially human beings, experience a feeling or sense of moral obligations. But evolutionary explanations of a feeling of obligation or a tendency to use the language of moral obligation do nothing to provide an explanation of moral obligations themselves. If a sense of obligations and the language of obligations are enough, then moral obligations themselves need not exist at all. De Waal has not provided anything a moral anti-realist or even hardened amoralist cannot already provide, and has instead fallaciously conflated feeling obligated with being obligated.

De Waal’s attempt to consign God to irrelevance in explaining morality is understandable in light of his watered-down account of what morality is all about. A thoroughly naturalistic effort to explain why we may well feel obligations or use the language of moral obligation seems eminently possible. But at what point is the move from “is” to “ought” effected? De Waal thinks this Humean concern is overblown and not the problem many think it is, so there’s hardly a need to invoke God to solve it. The move from is to ought, he argues, is something that animals living by a prescriptive code have already done. What he means to suggest, I think, is that oughtness should be construed in an instrumental way. Animals by nature want to mate and survive, and relative to such “desires” some behaviors are better than others, more conducive to meeting those goals than others. Likewise human beings, as social creatures, want to live in harmony with one another, which introduces prescriptive constraints and instrumental oughts, and it’s perfectly appropriate to call these moral constraints, and sometimes even moral obligations. Again, a naturalistic account can explain these mechanisms just fine, so no God required. (His interest in discussing the role of religion more than God may help explain why he never much broaches a role for God in explaining morality beyond that of a cosmic law enforcer. He seems blithely unaware of the vast philosophical literature on the subject, including that, since Locke, few divine command theorists have put the main focus on God as moral muscleman.)

Again, though, the fundamental question looms: What is morality? Expunged of categorical oughtness, is what is left over enough to qualify? Have we explained enough? Explanatory scope and power demand that all of the salient features of morality be explained, and explained well, by a theory before we dub the explanation a good one or the best. De Waal has simply left anything like categorical moral oughtness out of the picture without so much as an acknowledgement. Again, if he is content with an instrumental analysis of reasons to perform certain prosocial actions, then why use the language of morality at all? He is hard pressed to come up with anything more principled than an admission that traditional moral language carries with it more clout than prudential language. But this is disingenuous, to my thinking. He intentionally uses the thick language of morality, moral obligations, and the like while simultaneously emptying the relevant concepts of those distinctive features of morality that imbue moral language with its presumed force and binding authority. His concepts are thin, while his language remains thick and rich. Moral anti-realists can just as effectively speak in terms of behaviors that comport with prevailing preferences or even nearly universal human emotions. What has de Waal added to the case that such moral skeptics are unable to affirm, and thus what reason is there to think that the functionalist account he has provided has given a naturalist any reason to abandon moral anti-realism or even amoralism?

De Waal seems simultaneously underambitious and overambitious. He is underambitious in his characterization of morality, settling to cash presciptivity out in terms of prevailing expectations rather than objective authority, settling for an account of a sense of obligations rather than obligations themselves, and for empathic behavior rather than empathic motivations. He is overambitious, at the same same, and for related reasons, in characterizing advanced nonhuman primates as engaging in normative judgments that serve as precursors to morality. While it undoubtedly seems true we can use the language of oughtness for advanced primates in predictive and instrumental senses, the evidence to suggest that they have anything like a sense of categorical oughtness is a case yet to be made.

My biggest reservation of all of de Waal’s analysis and approach is his argumentative strategy that infers some weak form of moral realism from the findings of evolutionary moral psychology. If evolution can explain why we have some of the moral concepts we do, why we have a natural inclination to behave in certain prosocial or empathetic or altruistic ways, so the argument goes, then evolution has explained morality. To the contrary, however, naturalists need to take with much greater seriousness a challenge like that posed by Sharon Street or Richard Joyce: If evolution can explain why we have the moral concepts we do in a way that makes no reference to their truth, then what reasons do naturalists have to take morality seriously? Don’t they have all they need when they point to certain behaviors that stir in most human beings strong feelings, good or bad, and then letting nature run its course? Why the additional need to hold so tightly to distinctively moral language that carries bigger implications than they can explain? De Waal obviously thinks the question of God’s existence is uninteresting; what is even more surprising is that someone who writes whole books about morality seems uninterested in the objective truth of morality as well.

Image: Bonobos,  CC BY 4.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50736382

Review of Angus Ritchie's From Morality to Metaphysics

From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of our Ethical Commitments, by Angus Ritchie, Oxford University Press, 2012, 198 pages.

In this excellent and tightly argued book, Angus Ritchie offers a moral argument for theism, or at least a vital piece of a bigger argument to that effect. Theism, he argues cogently, explains the human capacity for moral cognition better than various secular rivals. For his pool of alternative candidates, he canvasses the field of meta-ethics. In this way he cuts to the heart of much of the contemporary ethical debate, and in so doing he highlights a serious and systemic problem facing secular positions that attempt to accommodate our pre-theoretical moral commitments. He also sketches a teleological and theistic alternative that he argues avoids such objections that prove intractable to the secular theories.

In my estimation Ritchie’s work is one of the more important books written in ethics in recent years. In terms of building a moral apologetic, it does three central tasks: it presses the distinction between justification and explanation of moral truths (a recurring and integrating motif of the book); it takes secular alternatives seriously enough to engage them with real seriousness (at sufficient length with arguments suitably generalizable); and spells out the theistic alternative (though a bit briefly, inviting others to extend the discussion). Despite its lamentable number of distracting typos that should have been fixed in editing, and its failure to discuss Railton, Joyce, or Parfit, I recommend this book with enthusiasm. I have every confidence it will be an important contributor to the resurgence of interest in moral arguments for God in both natural theology and popular apologetics.

Ritchie offers an inference to the best explanation (IBE); his argument is that classical theism better explains objective moral ontology and epistemology. His primary argument for the moral objectivism in need of explanation is its deliberative indispensability. Humans are committed to moral norms for much the same reason we believe norms underwrite practices indispensable to human thought and action in the arena of theoretical reasoning. It is impossible to engage in moral deliberation without taking oneself to be aiming at a normative truth that goes beyond personal preference or cultural custom.

Among the secular explanation candidates of moral cognition Ritchie considers are those provided by Blackburn, Gibbard, Korsgaard, and the early Scanlon, who argue that our fundamental moral convictions can be accommodated without objectivism; and those of Foot, Crisp, and the later Scanlon who seek to combine a fully objectivist account of moral norms with no purposive agent or force. What all of these secular accounts have in common is their systemic flaw. In the case of the less objectivist theories the concessions made to reductionism leave them unable to do justice to our most fundamental moral convictions; those that accommodate the pull of objectivism generate an ‘explanatory gap’. The book’s central contention is that all secular theories that do justice to our most fundamental moral convictions go on to generate an insoluble ‘explanatory gap’ that consists in their inability to answer the following question: How do human beings, developing in a physical universe which is not itself shaped by any purposive force, come to have the capacity to apprehend objective moral norms?

Secular (nonteleological) theories only escape the explanatory gap by failing to vindicate our pre-philosophical moral commitments. The gap arises when the following commitments are combined: (1) Robust moral objectivism, (2) secularism, and (3) the belief that humans, through the exercise of their normal belief-generating and belief-evaluating capacities, are able to apprehend the objective moral order. While secular theories can explain humans’ acquisition of moral sensibilities and practices of reasoning, this does not tell us why those practices and sensibilities have the property of tracking the truth.

Regarding cognitive capacities (perceptual, theoretical, practical), three questions can be asked about their genesis and justification: (1) What is the justification for our faith in their reliability? (2) What is the historical explanation of their development? And (3) what is theexplanation for their capacity for tracking truth? It is just because Ritchie takes the fundamental convictions that emerge from reflective equilibrium to be justified (to have non-accidental correlation with objective moral norms) that the third question arises. So Ritchie stresses the importance that we not confuse the demand for an explanation for the reliability of our moral beliefs with the demand for a justification of our trust in the human capacity to acquire and modify our moral beliefs in a way that tracks truth.

In terms of what sort of explanation is needed, what is most promising, he thinks, is a teleological form of explanation that explains a particular event or state of affairs by showing that it is either (1) part of the end-state which a system brings about or (2) part of the means by which a system brings about the end-state. To be an intelligible account, the teleological explanation will also have made it intelligible why the system yields the outcome and of the means by which the system is capable of generating those outcomes and why it tends to generate them.

Ritchie’s overall claim is that it is legitimate to raise questions of explanation with respect to the truth-tracking quality of humans’ moral faculties because we see in natural selection a way in which explanation can be answered for our truth-tracking capacities for theoretical reasoning and with respect to the physical world. The ability to track truth is selectively advantageous in those cases (unless Plantinga is right, which should prove no comfort to naturalists). Natural selection is the obvious candidate for an explanation of the development within humans of truth-tracking capacities regarding fundamental principles of deduction, IBE, and induction. It is highly probable that we will be better able to survive if we can come to true beliefs. So natural selection offers a story of how humans come to have truth-tracking capacities for theoretical reasoning; likewise for both physical perception and theoretical reasoning.

No such correlation is plausible in the moral case. On the account given by evolutionary biology, it is not the fact that moral beliefs are correct which leads to them being selected for. Rather, it is the fact that they are conducive to the flourishing of the collective. There is no guarantee that the qualities which lead to multiplication will have any other excellence about them. Any value system based on survival, replication, and pleasure alone is inadequate. If there is not a less obvious way in which moral valuations promote survival, replication, and pleasure, then they’re spandrels, lacking any direct connection with genetic survival and multiplication. Unless we have a wider teleological account, we have no reason to suppose that these valuations have any non-random connective with that moral order.

Beyond such a prima facie case, Ritchie turns to specific meta-ethical theories, beginning with quasi-realism (‘QR’). Gibbard respects what Blackburn calls the ‘realist-seeming grammar’ of practical deliberation, but they both seek to minimize its metaphysical implications. Both respond to an impulse to both reductionism and objectivism. They want to offer the best of both worlds while avoiding objections. Moral quasi-realism is designed to avoid the following kind of morally obnoxious counterfactuals:

(CF) If we approved of torturing the child it would be a good act,

while keeping the ontology to a minimum. In moral deliberations, we judge desires and the prevailing attitudes of our society by a standard which is independent of those desires and attitudes.

QR claims that (CF) should be read as a statement within ethics. They deny that it need be taken as a higher-order, metaethical assertion. When we consider counterfactuals, they insist, we cannot help but evaluate them from within our commitments. And as such, all decent people will obviously reject (CF). Blackburn insists that we have no conception of the nature of an independent order of reason. Ritchie disagrees, insisting that the existence of objective norms of theoretical reasoning shows that we do have a conception of what ‘an independent order of reason’ would be.

Ritchie thinks QR can answer various objections, but that it runs into difficulty when it has to account for the provisionality with which all human beings hold their ethical views. We simply do not regard moral truth as being fixed completely by our current views. In its efforts to accommodate such an objection, QR faces two challenges: tying morality too closely to current beliefs, precluding progress, or tying it to whatever we come to believe, thus introducing problematic counterfactuals.

The early Scanlon tried to accommodate the pull of reductionism by stressing rational procedures rather than an ontologically distinct moral reality, using the meta-ethics of Korsgaard.  Korsgaard says the procedural moral realist thinks there are correct answers to moral questions because there are correct procedures for arriving at them. Thus she tries to secure objectivity without ontological commitments. Ritchie responds that both Blackburn and Korsgaard locate moral value in a feature of the agent’s attitudes, but these only make sense as responses to an external order of value. Unlike Kant, Korsgaard says the way we choose between the different candidates for universalizable moral norms is an agent’s existential commitments. What, though, about someone who’s a member of the Mafiaso? In one sense this produces obligations, but Korsgaard says the Mafioso should, given sufficient reflection, come to see that obedience to the honor code is the wrong law to make for himself. Ritchie argues that agents’ valuations only have the wider implications her argument requires if they are understood as responses to an objective order of value. Korsgaard may disapprove of his existential choice, but it is hard to see why (on her account) the Mafiaso’s settled choice threatens his grip on himself as having any reason to do one thing rather than another, and with it his grip on himself as having any reason to live and act at all.

Later Scanlon moved toward a more objectivist position, describing himself as a ‘Reasons Fundamentalist’, contrasting the position with Korsgaard’s. Reasons Fundamentalism (RF) insists on the irreducible character of normativity. Scanlon has answered justification, but not of explanation of reliability. Once more, secular accounts fall foul of our most fundamental moral commitments, or in vindicating them they generate an explanatory gap.

Likewise Foot’s theory using ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ is trapped in this dilemma: we can define ‘good’ naturalistically, in which case it is reduced to that which enables the species to replicate and perhaps increase in complexity, but then what we call good we do not have good reason to promote. Or define ‘good’ to include evaluative judgments, but then we have gone far beyond anything those ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ could justify. To make this choice is to concede that the idea of ‘flourishing’ is itself heavily moralized, and there is no longer any sign of a purely biological story of natural normativity from which morality might emerge.

McDowell wants to defend moral realism. Instead of seeking to ground ethics in a non-moralized account of the natural world, McDowell urges Foot to acknowledge that ethical reasons are themselves part of any adequate account of nature. Ritchie insists, though, that there remains an explanatory question which McDowell is unwilling to answer, which is distinct from justificatory issues. Unless McDowell is urging a return to a fundamentally purposive account of the universe, the question of how we explain (rather than justify) the reliability of our belief-generating and belief-correcting processes will arise for him in a way it did not for Aristotle—who, incidentally, contrasted the natural not with the supernatural but the artificial.

Ritchie argues that theistic and teleological explanation is better than nomothetic explanation that is given in terms of causal laws. Natural selection has led to resistance of teleology. Natural selection can’t offer the explanation of our capacity for moral cognition, however, and nomothetic explanation is also unsuited to task. Teleological explanation accounts for an event or class of events by laws in terms of which an event’s occurring is held to be dependent on that event’s being required for some end. A paradigmatic teleological explanation involves a goal G of objective worth, the agent knows this to be so, the agent pursues G because of its value, and the agent has the power through X-ing to bring G about.

Theism explains the truth-tracking nature of human moral capacities by God’s understanding the value of such a state of affairs and intentionally bringing it about. Such an account avoids the explanatory gap, and the problems cited (raised by Rice and Hume) are far from intractable. A theistic explanation of the emergence of moral knowledge also need not conflict with a version of the theory of natural selection. All that the theist needs to add to the account given by evolutionary biology is the claim that the world is providentially ordered so that the interaction of the quasi-teleological process of natural selection and of the spandrel-like features it generates yield an outcome which enables human beings to apprehend that which is of objective value.

At this juncture the book left me slightly disappointed, but only because I had grown accustomed to seeing more. I could imagine a critic saying “God made it happen because he knew the value of its happening” does not so much explain as beg the question that God has or could. Although I might know that something happening in my head is making my hands type right now without my being able to explain that mechanism, the appeal to divine intentions to account for the truth-tracking ability of our moral faculties requires further analysis. It remains, in a sense, a promissory note and framework in need of fleshing out. If contemporary work on the moral argument is going to rival in quality the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, more articulation of theism’s epistemic narrative of moral cognition is essential—particularly to answer the challenge posed by Harman and Joyce. Joyce, for example, echoes the case that the success of evolutionary moral psychology provides a stiff challenge to naturalistic ethics by explaining the formation of our moral beliefs without reference to their truth. Unlike Ritchie, though, he adds that “if the naturalist cannot make her case, Harman’s challenge seems to make non-naturalism and supernaturalism obsolete. . . . if moral naturalism fails non-naturalism and supernaturalism are sunk. Thus non-naturalism and supernaturalism suffer most in this argumentative fray.”[1]Although it is not clear why Joyce insists on this, beyond an earlier reference to parsimony, what is clear is that positing the possibility and, even more so, plausibility of a teleological explanation rooted in divine intentionality—however hopeful such a move promises to safeguard what ordinary speakers believe about morality—remains in need of careful articulation and strong cumulative evidential support in this emerging dialectic.

Throughout his excellent book, Ritchie is at pains to stress that theism is the most satisfying explanation of the human capacity for moral cognition. Theism can explain it simply better than the rivals can. As such he’s been doing philosophy as an autonomous enterprise to show the power of apologetic argument. Our moral commitments pull us to a supernatural source for our knowledge of what is good and evil. Philosophy, he argues and demonstrates, has a significant part to play, in helping us respond to the important and legitimate worry that the faith journey may be an exercise in wish fulfillment rather than a response to a genuine reality. Philosophy can create the intellectual space for an encounter of the heart. Apologetic arguments can show that unless our thought is open to the supernatural there are a number of correlations which are, by its own lights, inexplicable. Such arguments remind us of our need for God; they call us to humility rather than hubris.

[1] Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 210

Sam Harris on Faith

I’m always interested to see, as I read a particular author, what he or she thinks about the nature of faith. Some think it’s a good thing, others think it’s bad, if not about the worst thing of all. Not to mention that people can have widely different views of what faith is. In the show “Once Upon a Time”—which I rather love, by the way—faith tends to be characterized as sheer belief. Belief, for example, that the good will win. I like that belief, although it’s not always clear what it entails. But my biggest problem with such belief in the show is that it seems largely unprincipled. More like faith in faith than anything—which, sadly, was also exhibited in Shepherd Book from Firefly—another show I loved. (I think I watch too much television.) I remember realizing this most clearly when, after Book made reference to the importance of faith, Mal said waiting for God is like waiting for a “train that don’t come,” or something like that; at that point Book asked why Mal thought a reference to faith required reference to God. The suggestion seemed to be that something like faith in faith was enough; that it didn’t matter what we have faith in, just as long as we have faith. I really liked the character of Shepherd Book, but that struck me as more than a little lame. But Joss Whedon can be forgiven; he rocks. And heck, he’s an atheist. And for an atheist says pretty cool things, like these words he gave to Captain America, after seeing Thor and Loki: “There’s just one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” So yes, Joss can be forgiven. ANYWAY, back to faith. I’ve suggested before that, largely owing to the influence of an Enlightenment-foisted definition, faith has often nowadays come to be understood along the lines of epistemic disadvantage. The idea is that faith makes up for lack of evidence. So much so, in fact, that—as I’ve heard more than one say—if we had evidence, we’d have no need for faith. This is, to my thinking, sheer faith as fideism. I have a dear friend who’s an atheist and a very smart guy who, though he’s not particularly open to faith, tells me the only faith he’d really consider is fideism. He’s drawn to the likes of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard quite a bit, and, especially in the latter, sees a picture of faith as essentially fideistic—a wild leap in the dark, something that goes contrary to the evidence, a counterintuitive staking of an ultimate claim on what may or may not be the right choice, something radical and outrageous and countercultural and even absurd. Yet somehow winsomely so. My atheist friend sometimes makes me laugh because, of all the variants of faith on offer, this is the one that he, a trained philosopher, might gravitate to.

For the record, I do think there’s something radical and countercultural about biblical faith rightly understood, but I don’t think this translates into fideism. God may challenge our assumptions and cultural convictions about what’s right and wrong, but ultimately, the only way we can love God with all of our minds is if God makes sense. It might take some work and hard thinking, and of course God ever in certain respects remains beyond our ken, but it’s either possible for us to reconcile God with our clearest apprehensions of the dictates of logic and morality or, if it’s not, God makes little to no sense and faith is thus irrational. When Donald Miller says, in Blue Like Jazz, that he wants a God who doesn’t make sense, I get a tad nervous. If he means God might challenge our convictions and help us realize that what we thought had been true in fact is false, that’s fine; surely we should retain a correctable and teachable worldview and theology; but the phrase “doesn’t make sense” could mean a whole lot more, none of which is the slightest bit appealing to me and all of which smacks of anti-intellectualism. I think biblical faith is clearly not fideistic. It’s rooted in evidence. The “not seeing” part of faith usually has more to do with our inability to see how God’s going to work things out than having no evidence to believe trust in God’s faithfulness is warranted. The more evidence we have, in fact, the stronger our faith can and should be, in my estimation, contrary to the fideistic perspective.

Recently I read the atheist Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape, and his view of faith—and of religious people generally—is a delight to read. His fiery rhetoric veritably drips with animus—so much so, I have to confess, it makes for incredibly fun reading. The dude is passionate. I don’t mean to mock his convictions; I really don’t. I found myself liking him more and more as I read his book, however much I disagreed with parts of it. And it seems to me, anyway, that he sincerely cares about people and would like to see the world become a better place. He’s understandably grieved at how some folks, in the name of their religion and faith, do hideous things, and though I think he’s radically mistaken thinking of all religious conviction as of a piece and equally dangerous and deleterious, the fact that he thinks religion is so big a detriment to human well-being renders it eminently understandable he argues so vociferously against it, particularly its harshest manifestations.

For now I’d like to point out his depiction of the nature of faith, as I think it’s informative, and it adds something to the discussion: The condition of faith itself, he writes, is “conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc." So here Harris identifies what he considers to be five salient features of faith:

1. Convictions without sufficient reason;

2. Hope mistaken for knowledge;

3. Bad ideas protected from good ones;

4, Good ideas obscured by bad ones; and

5. Wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation.

I think there’s little doubt as to why, if that’s his view of faith, he rejects it. I’d reject it, too!

But again, I don’t see biblical faith, rightly understood, as anything like this. Biblical faith is trust in the faithfulness of God to do what he’s promised to do. And such trust is predicated on, in my estimation, excellent reasons to think God is trustworthy—a long, established track record of showing himself to be faithful. Not in the sense of giving us everything we want, but in showing his love, fulfilling his promises, and offering his salvation. Whether biblical faith is lacking in evidence is a matter for dialogue and discussion, not dogmatism. It seems to me, in my own study of these questions, philosophical arguments for God’s existence and historical arguments for the truth of Christianity are strong—even if the evidence is not such as to compel the assent of every rational person. There’s both light and darkness, as folks like Paul Moser, C. Stephen Evans, and Pascal before them, have argued is likely to be the case if God wants to do more than enlighten the mind, like woo the heart. The bald assertion that biblical faith lacks evidence grows tiresome. I suggest that atheists find someone who can debate William Lane Craig without getting their clock cleaned before repeating that vacuous mantra ad nauseum. And whether biblical faith involves empty hope, bad ideas, or wishful thinking entirely depends on whether the claims on which such faith is based are true or not. Again, merely repeating such charges as if doing so accomplishes anything is a paradigmatic instance of question-begging assertion without argument. So, once more, this sort of uncharitable and knee-jerk characterization of the nature of faith, however fun it is to read, leaves me unimpressed, and does little to advance substantive discussion.

Why it Matters

In a blog yesterday I offered my critique of God’s Not Dead, the recent Christian movie containing a smattering of apologetic arguments, a cheesy storyline, farfetched caricatures, and a conspicuous absence of subtlety, nuance, and sophistication—however noble and well-intentioned were the motivations of the film-makers. Someone responded with this comment: “Psssst. It’s a movie. Movies are meant to entertain. Provoke feelings. Make you laugh. Make you cry. Maybe start a little thinking. What movie has believable characters?? Really?? Enjoy it! I cried. I got angry. I laughed. I praised my Lord and Savior. It made me think. It inspired God filled conversation with my husband. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do??? So what if a freshman outdid a professor. Doesn’t God lead the ones we least expect??? I for one enjoyed it. Completely.”  

I don’t count it my job or duty or even prerogative to dictate to people what they like or don’t like, but this response was troubling to me for several reasons. Besides its needless and gratuitous snarky tone, the individual is obviously convinced that the main or perhaps even sole purpose of movies is entertainment—to provoke feelings, make you laugh, cry, maybe start a little thinking. And the person appears to be a Christian. This reminds me of when I used to teach business ethics, and students, including Christian students, would inform me, most soberly, that the purpose of business is to make money—which usually was taken to entail that pretty much anything goes. It struck me then as an emaciated picture of the purpose of business—what about a more expansive picture of what business is about? How about serving others, meeting needs, building relationships, following your passion, weaving a fabric of healthy, harmonious relationships—and in the process making a living? A narrow view of movies and the arts, too, strikes me as sadly myopic and theologically deficient. Especially when we’re talking about a Christian movie, what about conveying truth, provoking deep thought, smartly challenging reigning secular plausibility structures, imbuing wisdom, embodying excellence? And in the process, it can also entertain. Assigning primacy to entertainment seems objectionably thin to me, and predicated on a lame worldview.

Besides which, isn’t it relevant what entertains us? What’s entertaining about a movie lacking subtlety, depth, texture, honesty? What’s moving about one-dimensional characters and farfetched storylines, cultivating victimization mentalities and demonizing those to whom we’re called to minister, insulting secularists and trivializing apologetics, confirming people’s worst suspicions about evangelicals and communicating to Hollywood that we care more about a conclusion or resolution we like than quality production values in a film, bolstering the perception that evangelicalism is tantamount to superficiality and shallowness? I can’t say I find any of that remotely entertaining. But the simple truth is that we’re not here to be entertained, at least not primarily; as Christians we have serious business to do, and being entertained by simplistic caricatures and contrived narratives, even if they contain a modicum of cursory apologetics, doesn’t cut it.

I responded to that critic by writing this: “We’re called to think on what’s lovely, beautiful, of good report, excellent. We can and should do better–not convey to Hollywood that we as Christians are content, indeed thrilled to be entertained by movies with bad plots and shallow caricatures. There really is such a thing as excellent movies; there are such things as textured, profound characters; we should strive for these.” Our being merely entertained isn’t the end of the story. We shouldn’t be so easily satisfied and mollified into mediocre acquiescence.

I hate to rain on the parade of my Christian friends who are excited by such a film. I respectfully submit they haven’t thought hard enough about this. Let’s take just one example of the apologetics in the movie—the best part of the movie gesturing in hopeful directions, but still altogether too simple. The student defender of faith argues that secularists can’t make any sense of objective morality, quoting the Dostoevsky line that “everything is permissible without God,” as if that does the trick and makes the point.

The philosopher who replaced me at my old school when I moved to Virginia—a thoroughgoing secularist and bright fellow—recently wrote a scathing critique of the movie for the online version of Psychology Today. This was one of his points: “The ‘everything is permissible without God’ argument is one of the worst arguments for God. Not only are there many secular ethical theories, but divine command theory—the idea that God grounds all ethical truths—is one of the most discredited positions in all of philosophy. Not only is it subject to the Euthyphro problem (which suggests that God determining morality makes morality arbitrary) but it's not clear that divine command theory is any better than a ‘God of the gaps’ argument: ‘What makes a good, good and the bad, bad? I don't know, God did it.’”

I don’t at all agree with his assessment here; in fact, I think it’s predicated on a number of mistakes. The existence of “many secular ethical theories” doesn’t show that such a list contains the best explanation of objective moral values and duties, or even a plausible one; divine command theory is but one way to try couching the locus of moral obligations in God; most divine command theories worth their salt do not entail that God grounds all ethical truths since most divine command theories are delimited to deontic matters of moral obligation; divine command theory has undergone a major resurgence in recent years, garnering defenses and articulations by some of the brightest philosophers alive today from John Hare to Robert Adams to C. Stephen Evans; the Euthyphro Dilemma has been, in my estimation and in that of many others, definitively answered in the recent literature; and a whole panoply of reasons has been offered to take theistic ethics and even divine command theory seriously beyond a “God of the gaps” approach.

But such stiff resistance to the apologetics on offer in the movie is implicitly encouraged. Simplicity breeds simplicity; caricature breeds caricature. This is why this matters. It’s not just about our entertainment. These issues are important, and need to be handled responsibly.

Despite all of the various efforts to answer the Euthyphro Dilemma in the last decade alone, secularists continue relishing pointing to it as an utterly efficacious refutation of theistic ethics. In a recently published book by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Plato at the Googleplex), she writes: “Socrates proceeds to formulate a line of reasoning that will prove to be of fundamental importance in the history of secularism, one that will be adapted by freethinkers from Spinoza to Bertrand Russell to the so-called new atheists of today, persuasively arguing that a belief in the gods—or God—cannot provide the philosophical grounding for morality…. What is still referred to as ‘the Euthyphro Dilemma’ or ‘the Euthyphro Argument’ remains one of the most frequently utilized arguments against the claim that morality can be grounded only in theology, that it is only the belief in God that stands between us and the moral abyss of nihilism. Dostoevsky may have declared that ‘without God all is permissible,’ but Plato’s preemptive riposte, sent out to us across the millennia, is that any act morally impermissible with God is morally impermissible without him, making clear how little the addition of God helps to clarify the ethical situation. The argument Plato has Socrates make in the Euthyphro is one of the most important in the history of moral philosophy. … We humans must reason our way to morality or we will not get there at all. Relying on fiats, even should they emanate from on high, will not allow us to achieve an understanding of virtue.”

Answering these objections is eminently possible, but requires that we develop more sophistication in defending our theistic convictions, not watering down and simplifying the complex matters at issue. It’s remarkable that Goldstein acts as if the capricious pantheon of Greek divinities are on a moral par with the God of Christianity in whom there’s no shadow of turning. This is a huge disanalogy that makes a great deal of difference defending an intelligent theistic ethic, and one she dispenses with by a wave of her hand.

Included in the most important biblical command is loving God with all of our minds; this means we need to stop assigning primacy to entertainment, stop settling for superficiality, stop being indifferent to excellence, and stop settling for pat answers. Or we’ll get the relegation to irrelevance we deserve. If we treat those with whom we disagree like benighted dolts unable to think their way out of a paper bag, driven by irrational impulses, we’ll receive such treatment ourselves.

The Big Ghost, Thor, and the Self

The fourth chapter of C. S. Lewis’s imaginative Great Divorce features the Big Ghost, formerly a man, now an insubstantial wisp of a ghost, a transparent phantom who’s pursued by one of the solid people under whose tread the earth seemed to shake. In contrast the Big Ghost and other inhabitants of the heaven-bound bus from hell had trouble walking at all, for to their feet the blades of grass in this strange land seemed sharp as diamonds. The Big Ghost had already been told he didn’t have to leave this place, but was free to stay as long as he pleased, and his pursuer confirms it by offering to accompany him on his journey into the high country. The Big Ghost is appalled when he recognizes the bright person following him, a solid spirit jocund and established in its youthfulness, for the spirit is none but Len, who as a man had murdered their mutual acquaintance Jack. To the Big Ghost Len is still nothing but a bloody murderer, while he himself had unjustly been relegated to haunt the filthy, macabre streets of Dark Town. The Ghost is incredulous that Len is in this place of light instead of him. Len deserves punishment and should be riddled with guilt and shame, and seems entirely delivered from them, which grates against the Ghost. Len the substantial spirit’s entire orientation contrasts with that of the self-consumed, paradoxically insubstantial Ghost. The bright spirit assures the Ghost, “I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began.” The event in Len’s life that had served as the catalyst for repentance and deliverance from self-consumption is, to the Ghost’s undiscerning eyes, a cause for nothing but perpetual condemnation.

The forgiven spirit isn’t interested in vindicating himself, whereas the Ghost is interested in nothing but trying to vindicate himself. “I done my best all my life, see? I done my best by everyone, that’s the sort of chap I was. I never asked for anything that wasn’t mine by rights.” The Ghost doesn’t see that his very effort at self-vindication is a manifestation of his focus on self that prevents him from the necessary process of losing his self in order to gain it. Comparing his behavior with those of others, he thinks he comes out smelling like a rose, and thus demands nothing but his rights, without realizing that, as the bright spirit says, “I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better. Never fear.” But it’s as if their frameworks of understanding are so different that the wisdom the bright spirit is trying to share doesn’t even register to the Ghost, smacking of inverted or perverted truth, as he remains caught up in indignation that he would be put below “a bloody murderer” like Len.

The irony is palpable that the insubstantial Ghost, unable to move a blade of grass even if he were to exert all his strength, continues puffing himself up. Refusing to give up his self-focus, he’s relegated to becoming ever less substantial, while insisting on the sort of chap he is, how he only wants his rights, and refusing anybody’s bleeding charity.

Elsewhere in Lewis’s writings he laments the diminution of meaning the word ‘charity’ has undergone. Traditionally it wasn’t merely benefits conferred on the less fortunate, but one of the theological virtues, an orientation toward others rather than oneself, putting the needs of others before one’s own, esteeming the other better than oneself. “Ask for the Bleeding Charity,” the spirit exhorts the Ghost. “Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.” But the Big Ghost will have none of it: “I don’t want charity. I’m a decent man and if I had my rights I’d have been here long ago and you can tell them I said so.”

Undeterred, with mirth dancing in his eyes rather than a log of judgmentalism lodged there, the bright spirit points out that the Big Ghost, as a man, didn’t do his best and wasn’t so decent after all. “We none of us were and none of us did,” but he assures the Ghost it doesn’t have to matter now. But once more, the offer of hope sounds to the Big Ghost like nothing but condemnation from a worse sinner, and he won’t countenance it.

In a sense the bright spirit admits it’s worse than that, that his murder of Jack wasn’t the worst thing he himself had done during his life—that he had murdered the Big Ghost in his heart for years while they lived as men. This is why he was sent to him—to ask for forgiveness and to be his servant as long as he needed one, longer if the Ghost pleased. The Ghost bristles at any suggestion of his own shortcomings, insisting they’re his own private affairs, to which the bright spirit replies, “There are no private affairs,” we’re all tied in an interlocking web of mutuality; an insight lost because of the Ghost’s inflated sense of self.

Relishing the chance to refuse the offer, content with his diminished state, insistent on his rights, the Big Ghost tragically chooses hell over heaven. Unwilling to give up his life, he loses it, still unable to bend a blade of grass for being so diminished and insubstantial.

And here I can’t help but contrast the Big Ghost with Thor. In the first movie, the initially brash and arrogant Thor is cast out of Asgard and stripped of his powers, and subsequently unable to lift his hammer, no matter how hard he tries. He’s like the Big Ghost, too weak and diminished to move a small stone or leaf after disembarking from the bus. When Thor was banished, his father, before casting the hammer to earth as well, had said, “Let him who is worthy possess the power of Thor.” And at the climax of the film, a matured, heroic Thor had now become willing to give up his life to save others. He offered his own life to spare the rest, and then, after a moment when it looked like his brother might relent, Thor is killed. And it was then that the hammer, miles away, took off and flew in a fiery trajectory into the hand of a revived Thor. Having given up his life, he found it. Having been unable to so much as move the hammer, now he could wield it with powerful force. It’s a great scene, resonating with a universal truth: life is found when we’re willing to lose it.

Of course Thor is no real god. As Captain America says, after all, “There’s only one God, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” The essence of salvation, on a Christian picture, is not about obtaining a ticket to heaven, saving your cosmic rear end from the flames, but about deliverance from the tyranny of self, from a hell locked from the inside, from sufferings intrinsically connected to the inevitable product of consumption with self. To be saved to the full is to be made able to love God and others with all of our hearts, to find deliverance from an inward orientation that forever blocks us from the life that only comes when we’re willing to give up our own. It’s not about being good enough, but realizing that we’re none of us very decent, and we can do nothing to purchase this life; only receive bloody charity from nail-pierced hands.

Image: By Mårten Eskil Winge - 3gGd_ynWqGjGfQ at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22007120

Foot on Nietzsche

Philippa Foot identifies three issues in Nietzsche and says a bit about each. Let me start by saying that I think she deserves credit for recognizing the need to address Nietzsche, something too often neglected by folks content to ignore him. She wishes to try answering Nietzsche with the resources of her own naturalistic account of moral evaluation.  

Before getting to Nietzsche, she mentions Thrasymachus in the Republic as an example of an immoralist; Thrasymachus argues that justice serves the interests of the stronger. Socrates sort of ties Thrasymachus up in knots, but Glaucon and Adeimantus push the immoralist point, saying the life of the strong unjust man is better than the life of the just man, so long as one can escape the consequences of being perceived as an unjust person. Socrates tries meeting the challenge by arguing that happiness is harmony of soul, and an unjust man has disorder there instead.

Foot doesn’t pursue that further, but asks how she would answer the challenge of immoralism on her own view. She begins with the idea of friendship, which she imagines that aliens coming down to watch humans could understand as something we choose to pursue because we need friendship despite the burdens it can sometimes impose. Aliens might, she suggests, see friendship much like the immoralist interlocutors of Socrates see justice: as the second best thing. What would be better, she imagines them thinking, would be not to need friendship at all—as some very rich people don’t, perhaps. But for most human beings, friendship is worth it because of the rewards. If one could get the rewards, though, by not being a friend but just projecting the impression of being a friend while avoiding the actual burdens, that would be preferable.

The point of the analogy for Foot is that she wishes to suggest that the Martians would not understand the true nature of friendship. A Thrasymachean view of friendship is something she thinks we can instantly recognize as wrong. Likewise with a view of parenting that hesitates to put the good of the child before one’s own—as if a parent’s care of his child is just to hedge his bets and provide security for himself in the future. Not all instances of doing justice are motivated by love, though; we also pay debts, say, to profligate creditors. Here Foot is drawn to a virtue ethic that involves love of justice and a character that recognizes the claim of any human being to a kind of respect.

At this point she skips ahead to Nietzsche. Here she identifies three theses in Nietzsche she thinks it’s good we separate out. First is his insistence that free will is an illusion. In many ways his convictions on this matter fueled his views about morality, because without meaningful free will (or a substantive self) morality can’t seem to get off the ground, and blaming people for wrongdoing seems particularly misguided. He was wholly skeptical of meaningful free will as he thought it needed to be predicated on something quite mysterious, perhaps something like Kant’s noumenal self of which Nietzsche was nothing but hostile.

Foot isn’t overly worried about this challenge, as she thinks there are other alternative and better ways of understanding the distinction between the voluntary and involuntary than what Nietzsche seems to have assumed, and that a bloodthirsty desire for vengeance need not be at the root of moral evaluation. I agree with her on the latter, though I think that’s a caricature of retributive justice, and though I don’t think we need to posit a Kantian picture of the will, I am inclined to something like substantive agency theory. On a deterministic picture, which seems the likely scenario on Foot’s naturalism, not only would we have an inability to do otherwise, the sufficient conditions to ensure our every action would be in place before we were born. This is the insight of the source theorists with whom I tend to agree. Foot seems content with a compatibilist account of freedom, which I think is just flat inadequate for the purposes of morality. It violates the deontic principle of ‘ought implies can’ and makes anything like strong ascriptions of moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness seem like utter mistakes. So I’m inclined to side with Nietzsche in thinking that without substantive libertarian free will morality is dead in the water, though I disagree with him on the question of whether we have it. I agree with Foot that we’re meaningfully free, but disagree with her that her analysis of what that looks like is the right picture.

Next Foot turns to a second thread in Nietzsche’s thought: the attack on specifically Christian morality, especially ‘pity morality’ and the ‘herd morality’ that is secretly cruel and resentful, encouraging acts of ‘kindness’ that demean the recipient and bolster the self-esteem of the person performing the action. Here she goes into Nietzsche’s views about the way morality often functions to reduce and harm us, and how the true human good would privilege individuality, spontaneity, daring, and creativity.

Foot takes on this charge that one has to see morality that stresses the humanness of sympathy as mistaken. Must compassion be driven by a sense of inferiority? Is charity most usually a sham? Surely it is sometimes, she thinks, but the idea that it always is strains her credulity and she doesn’t seem to think there are good reasons to take the charge seriously, though she acknowledges that depth psychology has plenty to offer us to disabuse us from thinking that our ostensible motivations are always our actual ones down deep.

Perhaps at this point I should clarify in broad outline what her moral theory says. She wants to make moral goodness of a piece with goodness per se, and wants to tear down the distinctions between animals and humans. So her story generally goes like this: Various species feature behaviors that ‘fit’ their species. Rabbits jump and tigers run and such; these are natural normativities. It’s (nonmorally) good for such species to engage in these fitting behaviors. Humans feature analogous behaviors too, in light of the sort of species we are. When certain of these natural normativities (she likes to call them ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ following Michael Thompson or ‘Aristotelian necessities’ following Anscombe) are relevant to the happiness of human beings—which in neo-Aristotelian fashion she spells out in terms of human flourishing—they’re teleologically significant natural normativities that are aptly understood as morally objective facts about us. In this way moral goodness flows naturally out of natural goodness. Contra Nietzsche she thinks something like, say, compassion, particularly a character of compassion, is an example of something morally objective (and good) as a result of being an instance of a built-in natural normativity—a kind of behavior that fits with who we are as human beings and conduces to our flourishing.

In one sense she thinks what Nietzsche is doing here is right. He’s attempting to ask if, say, pity is good for the one doing it and the one being pitied, and Nietzsche thought the answer was no. If indeed such pity was harmful, Foot would likely agree that putting a stop to pitying wouldn’t be a moral defect, and might be a morally good thing for us to do. She’s not convinced he was right in his analysis, though. For one thing, she thinks much of what he did was mixed together with overblown guesswork about hideous motives in people like resentment and hatred, which she thinks is in the main wrong. And though she confesses that perhaps nobody wants to be ‘pitied’, compassion seems something different and something that does play an important role in our species’ flourishing, so she’s not inclined to think his conclusions are right.

I tend to agree with Foot on this, though I harbor serious doubts her view is adequate to lay out the reasons why something like compassion is morally good. Here’s a reason why. She claims not to be a utilitarian. In fact she says that natural normativities in tigers and rabbits aren’t based on the assumption that the flourishing of such species is a good thing—one reason being that cancer cells too have their own natural normativities that pretty clearly don’t entail anything like moral objectivity or intrinsic goodness in their survival. But if the entailment doesn’t work for animals or pestilential creatures or cancer cells, why think it works for human beings? I don’t think she’s got enough resources to make the case that our flourishing is intrinsically good morally, nor that human Aristotelian categoricals even when teleologically significant to our flourishing constitute facts about moral objectivity. So though I agree with some of her conclusions in through here, I don’t think she’s provided good premises for them; I think classical theism much more plausibly might.

The third strand of Nietzsche’s thought she considers is this one: his denial of intrinsic badness in any acts at all. She attributes this view most ultimately to what she calls his ‘psychological individualism’, according to which the true nature of an action depends on the nature of the individual who did it. This led to his admiration for certain nobles of earlier times who plundered or raped or murdered. It’s true he spoke disparagingly of certain types of folks, like the merely licentious. All in all Foot thinks what largely led Nietzsche to his conclusions here was his invention of a generalizing theory of depth psychology for which there’s little empirical evidence. So she’s left thinking there’s just little reason to agree with his rejection of the idea that injury and oppression go contrary to justice. Indeed she wishes to dub such things irremediably wicked.

Again I tend to agree with her conclusion, but not the basis for it. I rather doubt she can generate the theory to undergird this sort of moral outrage with the resources of naturalism alone. Jerry Walls makes this case well in the second appendix of Good God.

What is Philosophy of Religion?

The philosophy of religion explores the Big Questions—the questions that philosophy at its best aims to answer. Philosophy should not rest content with merely verbal squabbles, technical debates among specialists, or games of intellectual gymnastics. Whether there’s a God, what God’s like if there is one, whether life persists beyond the grave, what life’s meaning is if one there be—these are the questions that often spur people to pursue the study of philosophy in the first place, and philosophy of religion indulges the chance to explore them. The questions are engaging even to children, but the difference between a child asking such questions and a philosopher is that the philosopher, in an effort to honor the wide-eyed childlike wonder of it all, has developed tools, strategies, and resources to answer such questions—or at least inch, however incrementally, toward answers. It does so by refining the questions themselves, ruling out certain answers, defending other answers against objections, revealing how various answers produce yet new questions. In the process it subjects various proposals to critical scrutiny every step of the way, separating the wheat from the chaff, in an effort to make progress. It’s exploration predicated on assuming that reason and rationality, properly exercised, make for progress.

Pascal once lamented indifference to and ignorance of the most existentially central questions of life; philosophy of religion, rightly done, is the cure for both, for it imbues and is motivated by passionate intellectual curiosity on the one hand, and a heartfelt desire not just to ask questions, but to find answers, on the other—and not for the sake of a false security or misleading assurance of certitude, but because the truth makes all the difference. To think otherwise is to forget the point of asking the questions; it would be a strange set of explorers indeed if they decided ahead of time, or in due course, to stop striving to arrive at their destination.

In C. S. Lewis’s wonderfully imaginative Great Divorce, the Solid Person of George MacDonald instructs the wispy protagonist (and great lover of books) about the danger of forgetting the point of intellectual investigation: “There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself . . . as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organizer of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares.”

The questions of philosophy of religion are not only inherently fascinating, but concerns of the most ultimate and practical significance. The fictional Sherlock Holmes, in “The Retired Colourman,” was “in a melancholy and philosophic mood” when he (echoing the writer of Ecclesiastes) asked the enduring question, “Is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not [Josiah Amberley’s] story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is life in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow—misery.”

Yet despite the challenges of life, the darkness of hearts, and ubiquity of suffering, Holmes at another juncture provided a glimpse into his remaining trust in the goodness of reality and the important role of reason. In “The Naval Treaty,” he held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose with its dainty blend of crimson and green before saying, “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for the existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

Oxford graduate John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, similarly warned believers and unbelievers alike against impugning the value of logic, hard thinking, and rationality, “the candle of the Lord”: “Of what unspeakable use is even a moderate share of reason in all our worldly employments, from the lowest and meanest offices of life, through all the intermediate branches of business; till we ascend to those that are of the highest importance and the greatest difficulty!”

Of course philosophers of religion don’t all think reason yields the same deliverances, which makes this great conversation so close to the heart of the human condition a vital and ongoing dialogue. Some think the evidence points to a reductive materialistic world, others toward a richly theistic one, and yet others something in between.

In my own explorations, my tentative conclusion is that philosophy remains a necessary and viable means of discovery that, though consistent with science, go beyond it. I would echo the grave concerns about scientism William James presciently shared a century ago—critiquing proponents of parsimony who, fearing superstition, risked desiccation—“This systematic denial on science’s part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be but the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own most boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.”

Etymologically and at its best philosophy is the love of wisdom—not a casual flirtation or weekend affair, but a passionate quest—and the philosophy of religion, it seems, resides at its culmination.

Trees, Values, and Sam Harris

People are fond of dismissing the relevance of philosophy by asking in a mocking tone, “So does a tree that falls in the forest make a sound?” The question is often asked in a derisive effort to show how uninteresting are the questions that occupy the attention of philosophers. However fun it might even be to think about, for some, surely nothing much rides on such a thing—this seems to be the implicit point anyway.

The original context of the question, of course, was Berkeley’s discussion of whether something like a noise takes place if nobody is there to hear it. There’s something a bit fishy about the idea there could be a noise absolutely nobody hears, but then again, there’s perhaps something even fishier about saying no noise could happen if nobody hears it. Most of us are inclined to think the noise would happen whether perceived or not. Berkeley’s solution was to say no unheard sounds ever happen because God’s always there to hear it, even if nobody else. This was his effort to spell out the dependence of the created order on the divine in a particularly strong sense.

Whatever you think about that particular conundrum, though, consider this question: Does value exist if nobody benefits from it? Suppose someone were to argue, as the famous atheist Sam Harris does in The Moral Landscape, that the only value we can meaningfully make sense of is the value of human flourishing, or the well-being of conscious creatures, something in that vicinity. On such a view, friendships, for example, are valuable exactly and only because they enhance well-being. And friendships of course do enhance our well-being, at least good friendships, at least most of the time. But is this the locus of their value? Harris would suggest it’s downright incoherent to argue its value could reside in anything else.

So what we have here is a Berkeleyan point, minus the God part, regarding value. Something’s value resides in its ability to enhance the well-being of conscious creatures, he wants to say. A falling tree in the forest only makes a sound if someone hears it. See the parallel? My question is: If we think it’s in some sense silly to insist on the latter, why isn’t it mistaken to insist on the former? In other words, why isn’t it perfectly coherent and indeed plausible to suggest that something like friendship has intrinsic value? Value, that is, apart from its consequences? That friendship produces wonderful consequences is undeniable, but does this fact alone commit us to having to say that the value of friendship resides exclusively in its benefits? Wouldn’t this be akin to saying that the only thing to say about a noise is how it’s perceived?

How about this picture instead of Harris’s? Friendship involves fellowship between two people, both of whom are valuable in and of themselves, and the fellowship between them is something of great intrinsic value and worth. It is something that is good, in some more-than-consequentialist sense. Experiencing something intrinsically good like that produces all manner of wonderful results, surely, but those results come about because the fellowship itself is a good thing. It’s not that the fellowship is a good thing merely because it produces those consequences. Friendship produces those consequences because it is beautiful and lovely in and of itself. Good things happen when we experience goodness.

If we live in a world in which the experience of great intrinsic goods inevitably produces healthy results—enhancements of our well-being or flourishing, let’s say—it’s going to be an ever-present and never entirely avoidable temptation to reduce the value of the good in question to its positive results—treating harshly any other sorts of suggestions. But the result, I think, is an emaciated caricature of reality. I think we do live in such a world, a world in which objective moral and even aesthetic values obtain, a world in which the love between a mother and her child or between friends yields the sweetest of fruit. But the enjoyment of that fruit is only possible because of a yet deeper reality: the value, dignity, and worth of the people in question, and the beauty and goodness of their loving relationships, motivated by something more than the good results those relationships produce.

I suppose, at bottom, Harris and I just have a very deep disagreement about the nature of reality. As an atheist, the good results that he notices things like friendships produce are about all he can point to as the locus of their goodness. I’m rather inclined to see those good results as a roadmap to a more ultimate source of value.

Podcast: Dr. Baggett on the Abductive Approach to the Moral Argument

  Hello!

On this podcast we hear from Dr. David Baggett about the approach to the moral argument he and Dr. Jerry Walls used in their book, Good God. We discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of abductive arguments in the context of moral apologetics.

Thanks for listening,

Jonathan Pruitt

Podcast: Website Introduction

Hello!

One of the features we are working for MoralApologetics.com is a weekly podcast. On this very first episode, we hear from Dr. David Baggett on his vision for the website.

Thanks for stopping by,

Jonathan Pruitt

The Obfuscations of Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish has written:

"In the period between the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the American response, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times called to ask me if the events of the past weeks meant 'the end of relativism.' (I had an immediate vision of a headline—RELATIVISM ENDS: MILLIONS CHEER—and of a photograph with the caption, 'At last, I can say what I believe and mean it.') Well, if by relativism one means a condition of mind in which you are unable to prefer your own convictions and causes to the convictions and causes of your adversary, then relativism could hardly end because it never began. Our convictions are by definition preferred; that’s what makes them our convictions, and relativizing them is neither an option nor a danger. (In the strong sense of the term, no one has ever been or could be a relativist for no one has the ability to hold at arm’s length the beliefs that are the very foundation of his thought and action.) But if by relativism one means the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else—in your view, a deluded someone—might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end because it is simply another name for serious thought."

  So the first way Fish envisions someone defining moral relativism is like this: “a condition of mind in which you are unable to prefer your own convictions and causes to the convictions and causes of your adversary, then relativism could hardly end because it never began. Our convictions are by definition preferred; that’s what makes them our convictions, and relativizing them is neither an option nor a danger.” Let’s call this the “preference” account of relativism. Fish rejects the idea that such relativism can or should go away because, after all, people holding beliefs means they take them seriously.

  And the second formulation of relativism goes like this: “the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else—in your view, a deluded someone—might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end because it is simply another name for serious thought.” Let’s call this the “empathy” variant of relativism. And again, Fish says this variant of relativism shouldn’t and can’t go away either.

  The problem here, as I see it, is that Fish has offered two highly idiosyncratic definitions of relativism. Ethical relativism is the view that says morality is relative—usually to culture, though some relativize it to subcultures or even individuals. It’s a subjective understanding of morality in the sense that there aren’t objectively true moral answers—instead the content of morality is a function of individual, subcultural, or cultural choice. The problems confronting ethical relativism are legion and well-rehearsed. What’s interesting to me about Fish is that he simply tries sidestepping all of that by offering two accounts of relativism that have nothing essentially to do with it.

  Consider the preference variant. Fish is of course entirely right to say people prefer their own beliefs. But if so, why would he think that anyone means by relativism the denial of such a thing? If a student did such a thing in a paper, I’d rake him over the coals. So why on earth is Fish, an established academic, doing such a thing?

  Take the empathy variant. There’s nothing indigenous to relativism that involves putting yourself into your enemy’s shoes to see things from his perspective. That may be a cultural or subcultural approach, but it equally well may not be, in which it would be, by relativistic lights, the wrong thing to do. If someone wants a principled reason to embrace judicious tolerance and a cultivated sense of empathy, he needs to look in direction other than relativism. In other words, any good reasons there are to cultivate such attitudes most assuredly don’t come from relativism. So why treat such a thing as relativism’s distinguishing or defining feature except to answer the easy question and avoid the hard ones?

  Fish is an academic who works with words. Remarkable to me how willing he is to bastardize them with such shameless and reckless abandon, and that an outfit like the New York Times accords space to such obfuscation while turning down so many pieces far more worthy but written by folks less well known. For he employed the same procedure in an October, 2001 NYT commentary on 9/11 when he reduced “postmodernism” to merely this: “The only thing postmodern thought argues against is the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies.”

  Postmodernism means lots of things, but surely what it doesn’t mean is the mere suggestion that we can’t persuade terrorists that their tactics are wrong—a recognition anyone has who’s spent more than an hour engaged in substantive debate. Postmodernism isn’t without its insights—the need to see other perspectives, recognize our own shortcomings, demonize opponents, etc. (though I hardly think we need postmodernism to grasp such truths). But I simply don’t see how discussion is advanced when, confronted with the flaws and fallacies of one’s approach, one simply reduces the view in question to an isolated, incidental, innocuous thread and argue it’s harmless, while overlooking the plethora of troublesome and profoundly counterintuitive implications of its more robust (and honest) versions. Serious academics should do a whole lot better.

A Universe That Makes Sense

My wife loves Kurt Vonnegut, and I suspect I would too if I spent more time reading him. What little of him I’ve read I’ve enjoyed immensely; his short story “Harrison Bergeron” simultaneously made me both want to take up my pen to write something myself and set my pen down and never try to write anything again, because it was that scary and bloody good. Vonnegut was, by his own admission, not at all conventionally religious, though he loved to say iconoclastic things for an atheist, agnostic, or whatever he was exactly, such as: music was all the evidence he needed to believe in God. For such reasons he really is a delight to read.

     “I am a humanist,” he said, “which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.” His characterization of humanism is that it’s distinguished by two things: a willingness to behave decently, and no hope for a reward. I’m sure there are other accounts of what constitutes humanism, perfectly consistent with religious conviction. Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic, is often identified as an example of a Christian humanist; Erasmus another. At any rate, orthodox Christians of pretty much any stripe will affirm that hope for a heavenly reward is misguided, since salvation isn’t something earned or deserved. If we got what we deserve, their idea is, it wouldn’t be pretty. So there’s a sense in which secular folks and many traditionally religious folks can agree that doing good shouldn’t be done for a reward or to avoid a punishment.

      Ethicists would suggest that this goes to show that Vonnegut seemed to have an appreciation for doing things for their own sakes—for reasons more intrinsic to those actions than instrumental, like rewards or punishments. I suspect atheists have the capacity to recognize intrinsic goods like love and friendship just as well as theists can—and I’ve argued to this effect, despite another conviction of mine, namely, that their worldview can’t sustain an account of why such intrinsic goods obtain in the first place as effectively as theism can. But I don’t think anyone has to believe in God to apprehend the goodness and value of people and relationships.

      The issue I’d like to consider a bit more in depth is this matter of rewards and punishments—or more broadly, the connection if any between morality and happiness. I suspect that, if this life is all there is, there are likely many instances where there’s a lack of correspondence between these. Henry Sidgwick, a 19th century ethicist, actually dubbed the disconnect between happiness and ethics the “dualism of the practical reason,” and considered it the biggest challenge ethicists had to face. He thought theism could solve it, but he wasn’t a theist, so he thought ethics irremediably saddled with the challenge. Immanuel Kant, before Sidgwick, saw that full rational commitment to morality required belief in ultimate resonance between holiness or virtue and happiness, and he used this as a way to argue for an afterlife, since he thought it obvious that we don’t see this correspondence in this life.

      Whenever the issue of this connection between happiness and holiness comes up, though, it smacks some of the mercenary—as if it shows that, down deep, what’s motivating the ostensibly moral behavior is self-interest and something prudential, rather than something genuinely ethical and other-regarding. A crass works righteousness model of soteriology, for example, would seem to be susceptible to this sort of criticism. But as mentioned, Christian theology classically understood doesn’t seem so obviously vulnerable to it. Good works are certainly important, on the model of classical Christian thought, but more as a reflection of a pre-existing state of justification rather than as a means to procure it.

      The bigger question for now is this one: Is it reasonable to believe in an ultimate correspondence between holiness and happiness? In a universe that makes sense, should we expect such correspondence? Remember that Vonnegut’s worldview was such that, though he valued hard thinking, he didn’t exactly always suspect it to yield fruit. Recall this line from one of his books: “You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.” See the comparison and contrast here between Vonnegut and Kant? Both would say do things for the right reasons, without hope of reward—but whereas Kant thought full rational commitment to morality required a universe that made sense and ultimately made happiness and holiness perfectly cohere, Vonnegut (maybe anyway—if that line adduced reflects his own convictions) simply wasn’t so sure the universe did make sense. Perhaps he considered it all the more heroic to be committed to morality despite the lack of confidence that all would come out well in the end.

      Atheist John Shook argues similarly: “The naturalist may not know how it all will turn out, but the naturalist can reasonably want morality to prevail right here and now. Helping the needy, promoting peace, and protecting the weak are always morally meaningful, regardless of what may happen tomorrow.” I have to confess that I find something about this to be compelling, despite my conviction that he is also wrong in an important sense. There is, undeniably, a case to be made for the heroic choice of morality in the face of potential defeat and loss of vindication. There seems to be an element of purity in such moral motivation, not even possibly spoiled by the undergirding conviction that nothing genuinely good ultimately will be lost or unredeemed.

      Interestingly enough, there are echoes of something in the close vicinity of such heroism and pure moral motivation in scripture. Consider Job’s words: “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15). Or consider Moses’s cry for the salvation of his people in Exodus 32, offering himself as a sacrifice for their sins. “But now, if You will, forgive their sin–and if not, please blot me out from Your book which You have written!” Notice the profundity of this: Moses, out of love for his people, offers to give up his own salvation, however Moses conceived of soteriology, to purchase theirs. One more example: In Romans 9:3, the apostle Paul wrote these words: “I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”

      What we find in these verses is at least the flavor of what Shook and Vonnegut are talking about: a willingness to sacrifice, pay a price, give up hope, do the right and loving thing with no guarantee it will work out. The implicit suggestion is that there is something profoundly right about the willingness to do this—the heroic, pure commitment to love and goodness.

      In none of these cases, of course, did God follow through; he didn’t slay Job, he didn’t allow Moses to sacrifice himself for the people of Israel, he didn’t cut Paul off from Christ. But the willingness of these men to remain committed to truth and goodness despite the risk that doing so might not be an ultimately vindicated and personally beneficial decision seems to be about the purest example of moral motivation imaginable. But, importantly, in each of these cases, theirs was the conviction that morality was real and that at the heart of reality was a God of unspeakable love and faithfulness. At the heart of Christianity is a paradox that resounds time and again: by being willing to lose our life we will find it. By caring about more than self-fulfillment, we will find it, and so much more. To find life we must undergo a dying process—not just a repression program or reprogramming exercise. Real death is called for before new life is possible. But the glorious news is that the death is not the end of the story, that just when things seem bleakest and darkest, there is hope and light.

     So personally I am left skeptical at the idea that there’s something sublime about committing ourselves to what the universe itself isn’t committed to; the “heroism” of such a thing strikes me as more appearance than reality. To me it simply makes more sense, if integrity and virtue and goodness are indeed things we think worthy of believing in—as I firmly believe they are—to believe in a universe that cares about these things too. This isn’t being mercenary; it’s following the evidence where it leads. It’s about believing in a universe that makes sense.