In this Article I will make a strong case for why God from all eternity decreed that Evil and Sin would come into existence. Too many people jump for easy answers or assume that human freedom release’s God from accountability for its existence. If one is to have a true understanding of God and his purposes we must find our authority in his word the “Bible”. To accuse the Bible of being wrong or that it must be interpreted differently by a standard coming out of Greek philosophy or the traditions of Man is to place a standard higher than the Bible. This is what the Apostle Paul warns us about in Colossians 2;8, that being “not to be cheated through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ.” Therefore my defense shall be from the Bible.
The Eternal God
God the creator has lived from eternity being eternal. He is the first uncaused cause of every finite entity that exists. Before anything else existed God existed. God from eternity under no compulsion or need chose to create a universe into being according to his will and purposes. God is a God of purpose and infuses meaning to all that he does. Ephesians 1;11 tells us that God works all things according to the counsel of his will. So God by his eternal freedom created a universe. He then created finite being’s Angels, Adam and then Eve. These beings were good as God created them in the capacity of being good. But then some Angels fell lead by Lucifer and after that from the Serpent’s temptation to Eve, Adam and Eve then fell in to sin.
The problem that this next raise’s is where did this sin come from? Some say because Angels and Humans abused their free will, but I think the question goes a little deeper. Is sin and evil all due to the abuse of finite creatures abusing their freewill. Yes finite creatures did abuse their free will, but the infused sin nature that Adam and the rest of humanity has must of come from some where. The capacity to feel pain which guides us back to the good must have come from some where. The curse on creation must of come from some where. Romans 8; 20 says that the creation was subjected to futility, not willing, but because of Him (God) who subjected it in hope. Therefore the cause of the curse on creation came from God and so does our capacities and talents, and so does the gift of freedom (free will). Therefore if God is the creator of all things he is the cause of our free will, he has shaped us and fashioned us to act in certain ways.
The three questions we will next need to look at is ‘What is the nature of free will”, “What is God’s foreknowledge” and “Where does evil come from”.
The Nature of Free Will
Any one who has done any theological study would have come across the battle of understanding God’s sovereignty and Man’s freewill. Many Christians struggle over understanding how these two opposing concepts could both be true. But the truth is that they are, but the concept of freedom is not Libertarianism from Greek philosophy. If God is the cause of all finite things then he is the cause of our freedom.
Let us first establish that God is the first cause of all things.
Rev 4;11 “Our Lord and Our God, you are worthy to receive glory and honor and power because you created all things and by your will they exist and were created.”
Col 1;15-17 “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible or invisible, weather thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things and in Him all things hold together.”
The concept of Libertarianism is the view that all our actions are absolutely free. Some how in this view God is the cause of every finite thing, but our freedom is independent of any relationship with God’s will. Some how the “will” just comes into being from nothing and runs on it own.
John Frame in his book “The Doctrine of God” says
“Libertarian’s emphasize that our choices are not determined in advance by God. On their view, God may be the first cause of the universe in general, but in the sphere of human decisions, we are the first causes of our actions. We have a godlike independence when we make free choices.”
R.K McGregor in his book “No place for Sovereignty” says that,
“Consider the doctrine of creation, which all evangelical Arminians presumably believe. If a freewill exists at all, it is necessarily a created aspect of our human nature. But if created, it must have a complex set of qualities that are collectively its nature. That is, in order to exist as a temporal entity, it must consist of a set of properties that distinguish it from other things. If it has no such characteristics, it has no discernible nature-it would not exist. If it does have such properties, they determine its nature and thus its behavior, which would mean that it is not random at all. But if the will acts according to its own previously existing properties, its actions are to some degree being caused. The problem can not be avoided by merely insisting that God created the will with the property of freedom.”
McGregor is right, when he says that if the will was created with properties according to its created nature, then the will’s action will have been caused in some way. It is God who has given us our natures, our gifts, our talents, and our weaknesses. It is God who makes the blind, mute and wise. All our characters come from God as he is the potter who shapes the clay.
Our actions are not self-caused, but are predestined by God’s will in to our natures so we act them out freely what God wants us to do. We are not independent of the creation. We are responsible creatures because were bound by God laws of judgment. If we find ourselves in a world we did not create and are a part of it, then when we feel the responsibility in us, it is because of God’s fixed reality of his moral laws. It is because of these laws that cause us to feel responsible. This is the cause off our actions and also our environment influences us too. It is because of other objects, that we make choices, so our choices have causes.
The freedom, which the bible gives us, is an ethical relationship, not an innate ontological attribute. How could the “will’ be free from the creators hand, if all things come from God and God is the sovereign writer of all history. Freedom is a property created and shaped and we act out freely what we have been predestined to do by the will of God. The finite can not complain to the eternal God, as the finite could not get started without God’s plan of reality (Romans 9; 18-24).
Total freedom is in the hands of God. Does not the potter have the power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor. The creature is never on the same level as the Creator.
What is God’s foreknowledge
In this section we will look at does scripture teach that God is sovereign over our actions. Then we will look at the objection that God’s sovereignty knows what we will do because of his foreknowledge. He has foreseen what free creatures are going to do.
But first I want to deal with the word “Foreknown” as many try to convert this word to mean “Foreseen”. The easiest way to study this is to answer these two questions,
1. Does God’s foreknowledge determine what he decrees or does God’s decree determines what he foreknows?
2. Does God foreknow because he foreordains or does he foreordain because he foreknows?
The answer is quite simple, if all who has existed from eternity was God, then everything created has been made and planned according to how God has decreed it (Willed it to be).
To often is the “God looked into the future and saw who would choose him statement made. But this is false as this would portray God as passively taking in knowledge from an out side source. Romans 9;11 tells us that election has been done before anyone had done anything good or bad or were even born.
But in eternity God was all there was, he was not influenced in his will. God decrees what he wants. Also the word foreknow does not mean to foresee. The verb speaks of a personal choice on the part of the subject. It refers to the choice to enter into a relationship with someone.
James White in his book “The Potters Freedom” says,
“It has always been recognized that God either bases his election and decrees on what he foresees in free actions of creatures or his decrees and election determines what takes place in time. In the first scenario, the creatures are by default the sovereigns of the universe, since their wills and actions are ultimate. God becomes a mere servant of the creatures, reacting rather than reigning.”
John Feinberg in his book “The many Faces of Evil” says that the word foreknowledge does not mean to for-see what will be done independently from God’s will.
“If incompatibilists claim that God knows the future, they must explain how God could know it. Hence with incompatiblism, there is no future to know, because knowledge requires true belief, but prior to an act’s occurrence, there is no true belief about it. Foreknowledge can be thought of along the lines of ordinary perception of an object. The difference here of course is that the object is a future, which doesn’t yet exist. Simple foreknowledge portrays God as making his decisions about what to do in our world after viewing the future.”
How God knows what will come to pass before it happen is because He has ordained them to come to pass according to his eternal will. The rejection of this understanding is why many have embraced Open Theism. This view holds that God cannot know what will happen until it has happened and then he must chose if he will step in. This is not the God of the Bible. Some try and get around it by saying God permits free creatures to sin to escape the charge for God ordaining the willing of sin. But this does not work either.
Robert Raymond quotes Gordon Clark as saying,
“Gordon H. Clark has noted that bare permission to do evil, as opposed to positive causality does not relive God of involvement in some sense in man’s sin, inasmuch as it was God, after all who made the world and man with the ability to sin in the first place …The idea of permission is possible only where there is an independent force (beyond the permitter’s control). But this is not the situation in the case of God and the universe. Nothing in the universe can be independent of the Omnipotent Creator, for in him we live and move and have our being. Therefore the idea of permission makes no sense when applied to God.”
Robert Raymond goes on to quote John Calvin,
“They have recourse to the distinction between will and permission. By this they would maintain that the wicked perish because God permits it, not because he so will’s. But why say “permission” unless it is because God so will’s? Still it is not likely that man brought destruction upon himself through himself, by God’s mere permission and without any ordaining. As if God did not establish the conditions in which he wills the chief of his creatures to be.”
The truth from these two thinkers is ‘what is the difference between permission and willing. Doesn’t God still have to will to permit or is that out of his control as well.
Can a Good God bring Evil into existence?
Some may object that if God is the cause of all things then we have no free will and God must be evil if he is the cause of it. The question of do we really have free will I will answer latter in this article. So can God who is good bring evil into existence? The answer is that yes he can. If God is all good then he has a morally good reason for evil’s existence. Now that does not mean “evil’ is good in it self. But if God can use evil for a higher manifestation of his goodness and glory then he is morally good.
Is God to be blamed for Evil?
Some may be quick to say then, So God must be the author of sin, who is responsible for it. But as Jay Adams says in his book “The Grand Demonstration”
“Decreeing the existence of sin makes God neither. God decreed water, dry land, mountains, birds of the air, but God is none of the above. Decreeing sin does not make him a sinner. He decreed the entire creation, but must be distinguished from it.”
God has decreed the existence of sin in such away that men themselves freely uncoered and in accord with their own natures become the author of their sin. Some might say that if God has predestined all men’s actions, he would be responsible for their sin. But God is not responsible for what they do, They are. That is the kind of people that God created; persons who would be responsible for their actions.
Jay Adams say’s again,
“To whom could God be held responsible? The thought is absurd. There is no one but himself, to whom God must answer, which means that he answers to no one. To be responsible to one’s self totally defeats the concept of accountability inherent in the word. There is no one who can call God on the carpet. He does as he pleases, and he is pleased with what he does. Surely God is not responsible to us!”
Because God is the highest standard and the only reference to what can be good and perfect (God’s nature). If this is what God has willed, that second causes be established by his first cause, then this is not evil. We have to get it in to our heads that the Creator is not on the same level as the creature. It is God’s sovereignty that establishes human freedom.
“Is God the cause of Evil”?
If we mean by “Did God decree that evil would exist in humans and in nature” the answer is “YES”. The Bible gives many verses that clearly detail this point.
The LORD said to him, "Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the LORD?" (Exodus 4:11)
Who can speak and have it happen if the Lord has not decreed it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come? (Lamentations 3:37-38)
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things. (Isaiah 45:7)
When a trumpet sounds in a city, do not the people tremble? When disaster comes to a city, has not the LORD caused it? (Amos 3:6)
“Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity (Job 2; 10)
The Biblical notion of Freedom
The Bible nowhere suggests that men are free from God’s decretive will or providential governance. It teaches that God’s purposes and his providential execution of his eternal purpose determine all things. As scriptures reveals,
The LORD works out everything for his own ends – even the wicked for a day of disaster. (Proverbs 16:4)
In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps
. (Proverbs 16:9)
A man's steps are directed by the LORD. How then can anyone understand his own way? (Proverbs 20:24)
The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases. (Proverbs 21:1)
Man's days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed. (Job 14:5)
All the peoples of the earth are regarded as nothing. He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth. No one can hold back his hand or say to him: "What have you done?" (Daniel 4:35)
For it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. (Philippians 2:13)
Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that." (James 4:13-15)
If God has decreed all that comes to pass, and if God, by his most holy, and powerful providence, governs all his creatures and all their actions in order to accomplish his own holy ends, how is one to understand all this so that God is not made the author of sin and man is left responsible?
For us to be biblical, it is important first to say again that God has ordained whatever comes to pass. God is the sole ultimate “First cause” of all things. The reason why God is not to blame for evil is because God has decreed that all things will come to pass according to the nature of second causes. This means that God is the cause of the second cause, but he has decreed that his judgments will be charged to the second cause.
Far from God’s decree violating the will of the creature or taking away his liberty or contingency, God’s decree establishes that what they do they do freely.
Some may not like this, but it is biblical and it is what Paul meant in Romans 9 when he said about the second cause being established by the first cause (God). The Apostle Paul was answering the question that people were asking, that being, Why God would blame Pharaoh if he was doing what God willed him to do,
Paul replied,
“You will say to me then, Why does he still find fault? For who has resisted his Will? . But indeed O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, Why have you made me like this? Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor.” (Rom. 9;18-21)
The fact is, God finds fault with Pharaoh because as a created creature he is responsible for his actions, Pharaoh acted out freely what he was created to do according to God’s will. The simple logic is that there has to be a cause for the creation and a plan and destiny for this formed matter to act out. Rational matter has to come into being following a rational plan!
We may not like the concept, because it is to close to thinking we are robots, but scripture compares us to simple potter’s clay,
“Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker, to him who is but a potsherd among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, What are you making? Does your work say, He has no hands? Woe to him who says to his father, What have you begotten? Or to his Mother, What have you brought to birth? This is what the Lord says, the Holy One of Israel, and its Maker; Concerning things to come, do you question me about my children, or give me orders about the work of my hands.” (Isa 45;9-11)
“But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, Why have you made me like this? Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor” (Rom 9;21-22)
“But now, O Lord, You are our Father, we are the clay, and you our potter and all of us are the work of your hand.” (Isa 64;8)
Can Compatilbilism answer the objection from the book of James, which says God, tempts know one to do evil?
“Let no one say when he is tempted, I am tempted by God; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full grown brings forth death.” (James 1;13-15)
I believe Compatilbilism can correspond to this objection,
1. God is the first cause of all things according to the counsel of his will (Eph 1;11).
2. Once God has created his creatures, they act out their own desires, as long as there is no force outside their will forcing them against their desires, they are acting freely.
3. God does not tempt anyone, as his causing was down outside the reality of the created world play. The Creator must bring the creation into existence!
4. God cannot be tempted by evil, God works all things for good, even acts that are evil in them selves (Gen 50;20). Also God cannot be tempted by evil as he is eternally perfect and Holy.
The Bible makes it very clear that God is sovereign and has created all things and owns all things, and causes all things. By his eternal power and providence God sustains all things, this includes his creation, human history, human, lives, human decisions and human sins.
Is creation a mockery, No but it is a creation!
If God is the first cause of all things because he is the only eternal uncaused being and creator does that mean that creation is a mockery. The answer to this is No! But it is a creation. A creation is a story told by an author who some how stands out side of it and also comes into his own story. Creation is a shadow of ultimate reality.
Are we just meaningless robots. The person who makes this charge must demonstrate that there is a robot that is like humans, that is conscious, rational, has a soul that feels and is moved by deep emotions of love and sorrow. Humanity is the one thing that science will never be able to reduce to just being computers. Science will never take impersonal chemicals and produce humans, therefore the charge that we are robots fails. We do have freedom but it is not an irrational uncaused fate driven by chance.
Why God decreed evil?
Before we answer this question I want us to understand what sin is. Sin is a corrupting power. The Bible says that the wages of sin is death. Sin is wrong choice, but it is also a power that possesses humans and creation. If it is a power or an entity or a relationship with a standard it is something. Therefore it has to be created and Col 1;15-17 says clearly that as God, Christ, he created all things by Him and through Him and for Him. So if sin and evil are something, then God decreed it and created it into being… it came through Him and for Him. That fact that it says “For Him” shows that God has a purpose for it. The reason why God decreed the existence of evil into being was that its existence would manifest the fullness of God’s attributes. His creation is a canvass for him to manifest his full nature to reflect his glory. That is manifesting and demonstrating his unconditional Love, Mercy, Patience, Forgiveness and Justice and Wrath. But the ultimate reason why God decreed sin was that the manifestation of “Grace” is greater than a love that just loves love. Creation exists to display his infinite beauty and immeasurable worth. He created the universe good but human freedom missed the mark and fell. It is only in our weaknesses and tribulations that we can experience and demonstrate God’s loving attributes back to people and taste their power.
The manifestation of Christ’s Grace and Glory is worth more, treating people infinitely better than they deserve, giving himself for the everlasting joy of the worst sinner who will have him as their highest treasure.
Why didn’t God Wipe out Satan the day he fell?
If half our problems in this world are due to Satan inflicting us and tempting us to sin, why didn’t God wipe him out the day he fell. I mean God has the power to tell the wind what to do and calm storms by a word and also to drive out demons, why didn’t he just bind Satan up and throw him in the lake of fire. That because God’s waits with his longsuffering holding Satan on his leash to display the fullness of Christ’s Glory. The reason why God is longsuffering is He will be honored and more deeply appreciated and loved in the end because he defeats Satan and all evil powers through his longsuffering, patience, humility, servanthood, suffering and decisively through his own death. A single sudden and infinitely holy display of power to destroy Satan immediately after his fall would have been a glorious display of power and righteousness. But it would not have been the fullest possible display of all the glories in the Son and the Father. The Death of Christ on the cross was the greatest murder, but it served to show the greatest glory of Christ and obtain the sin conquering gift of God’s grace. God did not just over come evil at the cross. He made evil serve the overcoming of evil. He made evil commit suicide in doing its worst to evil.
As Christ’s church is his body, so does his church have to demonstrate to the universe the defeating of evil through grace and love to others, bearing all things.
An undeserved love (grace) which counts no wrongs against those who hate is greater to manifest than a love that just loves those that love.
Heaven and Hell
There is a time coming when final judgement will come to the earth. It will be a time of ultimate Glory and Justice. For those who have endured their redemption struggle’s and sufferings, to grow in wisdom and character to manifest God loving heart. There reward of holding on to their faith though Gods’ grace will be completed and they will shine in perfection in the unconditional love of eternal Love, where there is no pain and suffering or tears or death. God will have demonstrated his glory through a body of people who have overcome, through humbleness and serving for the love of other.
Either way we look at the subject of Hell it does not make it any easier to understand it. Even if we look at Hell from a libertarianism view. Hell is still real and eternal. It is a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth and disgrace and everlasting contempt. The best good is to be with God, but the worst evil is to have to accept the absence of God.
Marilyn Adams says, that the unbelievers of this world find it hard to accept that the absence of God can be so bad, but that is because,
“The whole earth is full of the glory of God. When we appreciate a beautiful mountain scene or immerse ourselves in Mozart or are lost in a Cezanne painting, we are experiencing God shining through the mask of his creatures. When humans share deep, satisfying intimacy, part of the joy they taste is God in the middle of it. And this is so whether or not he is recognized there. Since ordinary human experience is thus “God infested”, we are in no position to imagine the horror of a creation in which he was entirely hidden from view”
Hell is the absence of God’s loving attributes, it is a place where evil and sin will serve under God’s Justice and Wrath for eternity. God ultimate Justice will shine from eternity to eternity. Some may say how can finite creatures suffer an eternal punishment. The answer is because in Hell they don’t stop sinning, they still have their sinful nature. The only good thing that I can see (if I can even call it good) for a sinner in Hell is that The Bible does teach that there are degrees of punishments. So maybe for many their punishment may be bad, but not as bad as others.
Some May Reject This
For many and even for my self thinking about Hell spins my mind and soul around, but God the creator is the Judge of the earth. We must remember that everything that exists from the moment of creation exists by Grace. God owes know one anything and the fact that we are in heaven is because of his Grace. Some might say well why didn’t God give people real choices, he did (Biblical Freedom). But even if Libertarianism was true and people believed because the truth was that obvious, people would still complain that God made some with minds that could not understand it. If God had then created people with the same mind power so that all people understood, would people have a true choice? If I was to hold a gun to your head (symbolizing an offer) and say come or you will be in pain for eternity, what will you do? Most rational people would come, they would have no other choice. It is a choice that is imposed so strongly, that many would just take it, there is no motive of love, but just safety. This universe has been set up to neutralize any pride or deception in the hearts of people. But then again who say’s that I have the final word or answer to the problem!
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Friday, October 3, 2008
Part Six
The Necessity of Pain and Freedom
Have you ever look out into the world and reflected on how much suffering there is. Whether its millions starving or millions struggle with emotional pain or physical pain. Have you ever thought about God and said that if this is your world I don’t want to know you? If you are so good why is there so much pain and suffering.
The problem is that we have a faith knowledge that God is good, but we also have an awareness that the good we know doesn’t fit with what we see in the world. This is what is usually called “the problem of evil” there seems to be a contradiction some where.
Adding to the problem of judging God’s goodness is the fact that whatever we know of goodness is due to God’s enablement. As our creator, all our abilities come from him even our ability to judge goodness.
God cannot be mentally inconsistent
That God cannot and does not do what is contradictory has important implications for the problem of evil. To create is a good thing and to create humans with free will is a good power as well. But God cannot grant free will and also guarantee that no one ever uses it to sin. One thing I hope to prove in this article is that freedom and pain are very valuable to this world and are in fact good in the sense that they have a good purpose. Not that pain gives us pleasure, but that it has a moral reason for existing. Without true freedom you do not have an existence.
When God created Adam and Eve they had freedom and they used this good power to chose against what God had commanded them not to do. Once one has chosen to walk away from the good, the only way to bring one back before they destroy them selves is to give a sensation that leads one back if one is willing to the good and that sensation is pain. Pain guides us to back to the good and teaches us many things. That does not mean pain is good in itself, but can be used for a good purpose. For some the doctrine of original sin will be troubling but the bible does say that when they sinned there character was from then on flawed and ever human being born from them was born with this imperfect sin nature. From that one act God cursed the earth and mankind with pain and this environment we now live in is a more difficult environment than the one Adam and Eve first had before they sinned. This pain and environment has it purposes.
God cannot be morally inconsistent
Because Good is perfectly good we should never expect that God would compromise his righteous character to do “good”. When we expect that God always overlooks evil to show kindness we are demanding that he give up the good of justice for the good of kindness (God’s justice is pretty sharp, if you trash goodness you will die).
But such a demand overlooks the fact that justice is it self a form of goodness. Bringing consequences upon the serial rapist or genocidal dictator is a good thing. Bringing consequences for lesser sins is also good and we cannot accuse God of failing to be good when he causes or allows pain as a just consequence. Either God takes some one’s life out because of their evil deeds or he looks over them with his kindness, which lets pain come, which can be used for good to transform people back to the good. This way lets people exist longer and gives freedom the power to change for the good.
Does God have a duty to do good
The idea that a good God ought to have made the world differently or at least managed it differently is largely based on notions about his duties. But our ideas about duties are based on our knowledge of human duties and we cannot necessarily transfer them to God since he is unique. Our duties are based on what is owed. We owe God obedience to his commands and his commands are based on his character. We ought to love for example because God does. But what “ought” God have to do? God doesn’t owe any one anything in fact if he hadn’t created every finite thing it wouldn’t exist. Every thing created owes its existence to God and this is due to his Grace. Everything we have, all our talents, and awareness of love and goodness in all our different thing we do come from him. The one thing about Grace is that it is undeserved. We must remember that God is the highest standard for goodness, he is eternal goodness. We may be tempted to think that God had a duty to make a different world, but he doesn’t. Our life is a gift and if one person lives only to 5 years old instead of 95 it is solely from his grace that this person has had the gift of life for 5 years. No age limit is a right due to them. All goodness comes to us from pure Grace.
Is this the best possible world?
Have you ever wondered if this world is the best it could be, or if it could be better in some way. The first thing we must ask is “best for what?” Best for realizing our personal ambitions? Best for revealing truth to us? Best for punishing moral evil? What most people really mean is the best for promoting happiness for them self. But is that the highest purpose? The best world should be one, which accomplishes the best end and does it using the best methods. As for humans trying to define what would be a better world it is very difficult. We know we need freedom and we know that pain leads us back to the good. But also tragedies in life can bring out a lot of greater good at times. Good can come out of bad situations. So it is not all that obvious how one is to measure what would be a better world. Its not easy to determine if this world would be better if a particular tragedy had never happened or if only 5 people died instead of 50 as one cant measure the total goodness gained and experienced until one see it from the end or from Gods perspective from the beginning to the end. If this is the best world to get to the perfect world, then both realms are part of God’s perfect plan.
Why pain is necessary for physical life
Imagine a world with no pain, would it be the greater place? The reason a harmless world is not a better place is because we are fallen and need it to restrain and shape our characters. Without pain in a fallen world there would be nothing to stop us from doing evil or even caring about it. Look what happens to people who become dictators and have nothing to restrain their behavior. The second reason we need it is that without it we would damage our physical bodies. One only has to read story’s of people who suffer from congenital insensitivity to pain. One baby could feel no pain and at night would eat her fingers off and paint the crib with her blood. As the child got older her parents tried smacking her to stop her eating her fingers off, but she could feel no pain and just laughed at them. Eventually the father left as the child was just like a monster. As this child got older and older she did more and more damage to her self and in the end her legs had to be amputated and she spent the rest of her life in an institution. Pain is vital to tell us our bodies are being damaged and prevent further damage. Pain is a gift that warns us of dangers. One can only think what life would be like if we had no emotional pain, we would kill everything in sight that got in our way.
Why we need pain to grow to maturity
A world safe enough to be painless would be a place with few possibilities for our development. For us to live in a world with no pain God would have to directly intervene in our world constantly. It would have to extend down to minute details of the way things happen. It would be a world that was so frustrating that we would learn nothing from our experiences or achieve much. For example imagine we wanted to build a house, the tools you would work with could not be sharp enough to cut anything because then they would be sharp enough to cut you. The materials could not be to stiff as this could give it edges that could hurt some one. Do we want to live in a world where we achieve nothing and God makes and provides everything, sounds rather boring to me. We could never learn from our mistakes, as we would be stopped before we could even attempt something. What we personally suffer as well as what we see and hear in others comprises a great bank of knowledge that helps us make the most of this worlds possibilities while avoiding its troubles.
Why we need painful predictability
Some bad things happen in life because the world’s physical processes have to operate regularly. Gravity works this way, electricity and chemicals are all good but if we get in the wrong relationship with them we will get hurt. These laws of nature are fairly predictable and if we use them right we will not get hurt. Our ability of pain is what guards us from abusing these laws as experiences will teach us to stay away from them.
Why we need unwanted consequences
Another problem with a world in which God ensures that no one gets hurt is that we would never see evil for what it is. If there were no unwanted consequences we would spend our lives doing evil. God could again intervene every time and block these deeds but then there would be no awareness of the difference of sin or righteousness. The great value of love, joy, pleasure and goodness would not stand out as any value at all. It is the sting of pain that seems to intensify the qualities of the good that make us love them.
How our world keeps us from Selfishness
There is a further problem with a world in which God would prevent all physical pain. As imperfect beings abusing our freedom we are continually tempted to be self-centered. Have you ever meet some one who has always got what they wanted, while always being loving and self-sacrificing for others? No. In this world we can not always get what we want. There are delays, frustrations and disappointments. The worlds natural processes do not bend to our will rather we have to accommodate ourselves to our environment. After the fall God told Adam that life world be hard, it might have been a hard judgement on him, but it keeps the human race in line to think of others and show love, respect, forgiveness, patience, tolerance and joy for other peoples happiness.
So while the world is not deigned to cater to our whims it is a place that can build our moral character.
Living the good prevents much pain
Much suffering is due to foolishness of character. People getting drunk having car crashes, beating their wives and so on. Most people figure out how to avoid physical dangers, but few go on to learn deeper knowledge of the moral dimension of our world. The reasons of so much suffering seem to remain hidden to most people. They lack simple wisdom and show no respect for the good. This does not mean that good people will never suffer, as we know pain has it purposes. But the way of the wicked and foolish is darkness and they do not know why they stumble.
Is any pain pointless?
Is there any pain physical or emotional that has no purpose at all? Even if we cannot understand every reason why something happens, it could just be the way love and compassion is drawn out of others to serve peoples needs. Maybe some people are suffering servants in the hands of God. Their life and troubles are the only things that would shape you and your character to demonstrate love to them. Its one thing to say you care and love others, but can you live it out? Chronic pain can have a ripple effect far beyond one life. Those immediately around the person can become more compassionate, sensitive, and grateful. It can produce compassion even in strangers. It can motivate some in society to develop cures and preventative measures. All suffering has an opportunity to shape our characters in doing good to others. This world is the training ground for heaven.
What good are disasters?
Natural disasters are the most spectacular of natural evils. A lot of natural disasters are due to human failure to do what they ought to. The 2004 Asian tsunami killed 270,000 people yet it was predicted by a geologist at the California Institute of Technology who had studied the region for over a decade. When it came clear that government officials would not listen to his warnings he went directly to the people distributing 5,000 posters and flyers and speaking to churches and schools. Moments after the quake hit, most of the nations around found out that their governments had failed to take warnings and upgrade their warning systems. Though tragedy blinds us to them they often bind people together and force them to work together, breaking barriers of race, class and national origin. Also our abuse of our environment distorts the way it should function.
Have you ever look out into the world and reflected on how much suffering there is. Whether its millions starving or millions struggle with emotional pain or physical pain. Have you ever thought about God and said that if this is your world I don’t want to know you? If you are so good why is there so much pain and suffering.
The problem is that we have a faith knowledge that God is good, but we also have an awareness that the good we know doesn’t fit with what we see in the world. This is what is usually called “the problem of evil” there seems to be a contradiction some where.
Adding to the problem of judging God’s goodness is the fact that whatever we know of goodness is due to God’s enablement. As our creator, all our abilities come from him even our ability to judge goodness.
God cannot be mentally inconsistent
That God cannot and does not do what is contradictory has important implications for the problem of evil. To create is a good thing and to create humans with free will is a good power as well. But God cannot grant free will and also guarantee that no one ever uses it to sin. One thing I hope to prove in this article is that freedom and pain are very valuable to this world and are in fact good in the sense that they have a good purpose. Not that pain gives us pleasure, but that it has a moral reason for existing. Without true freedom you do not have an existence.
When God created Adam and Eve they had freedom and they used this good power to chose against what God had commanded them not to do. Once one has chosen to walk away from the good, the only way to bring one back before they destroy them selves is to give a sensation that leads one back if one is willing to the good and that sensation is pain. Pain guides us to back to the good and teaches us many things. That does not mean pain is good in itself, but can be used for a good purpose. For some the doctrine of original sin will be troubling but the bible does say that when they sinned there character was from then on flawed and ever human being born from them was born with this imperfect sin nature. From that one act God cursed the earth and mankind with pain and this environment we now live in is a more difficult environment than the one Adam and Eve first had before they sinned. This pain and environment has it purposes.
God cannot be morally inconsistent
Because Good is perfectly good we should never expect that God would compromise his righteous character to do “good”. When we expect that God always overlooks evil to show kindness we are demanding that he give up the good of justice for the good of kindness (God’s justice is pretty sharp, if you trash goodness you will die).
But such a demand overlooks the fact that justice is it self a form of goodness. Bringing consequences upon the serial rapist or genocidal dictator is a good thing. Bringing consequences for lesser sins is also good and we cannot accuse God of failing to be good when he causes or allows pain as a just consequence. Either God takes some one’s life out because of their evil deeds or he looks over them with his kindness, which lets pain come, which can be used for good to transform people back to the good. This way lets people exist longer and gives freedom the power to change for the good.
Does God have a duty to do good
The idea that a good God ought to have made the world differently or at least managed it differently is largely based on notions about his duties. But our ideas about duties are based on our knowledge of human duties and we cannot necessarily transfer them to God since he is unique. Our duties are based on what is owed. We owe God obedience to his commands and his commands are based on his character. We ought to love for example because God does. But what “ought” God have to do? God doesn’t owe any one anything in fact if he hadn’t created every finite thing it wouldn’t exist. Every thing created owes its existence to God and this is due to his Grace. Everything we have, all our talents, and awareness of love and goodness in all our different thing we do come from him. The one thing about Grace is that it is undeserved. We must remember that God is the highest standard for goodness, he is eternal goodness. We may be tempted to think that God had a duty to make a different world, but he doesn’t. Our life is a gift and if one person lives only to 5 years old instead of 95 it is solely from his grace that this person has had the gift of life for 5 years. No age limit is a right due to them. All goodness comes to us from pure Grace.
Is this the best possible world?
Have you ever wondered if this world is the best it could be, or if it could be better in some way. The first thing we must ask is “best for what?” Best for realizing our personal ambitions? Best for revealing truth to us? Best for punishing moral evil? What most people really mean is the best for promoting happiness for them self. But is that the highest purpose? The best world should be one, which accomplishes the best end and does it using the best methods. As for humans trying to define what would be a better world it is very difficult. We know we need freedom and we know that pain leads us back to the good. But also tragedies in life can bring out a lot of greater good at times. Good can come out of bad situations. So it is not all that obvious how one is to measure what would be a better world. Its not easy to determine if this world would be better if a particular tragedy had never happened or if only 5 people died instead of 50 as one cant measure the total goodness gained and experienced until one see it from the end or from Gods perspective from the beginning to the end. If this is the best world to get to the perfect world, then both realms are part of God’s perfect plan.
Why pain is necessary for physical life
Imagine a world with no pain, would it be the greater place? The reason a harmless world is not a better place is because we are fallen and need it to restrain and shape our characters. Without pain in a fallen world there would be nothing to stop us from doing evil or even caring about it. Look what happens to people who become dictators and have nothing to restrain their behavior. The second reason we need it is that without it we would damage our physical bodies. One only has to read story’s of people who suffer from congenital insensitivity to pain. One baby could feel no pain and at night would eat her fingers off and paint the crib with her blood. As the child got older her parents tried smacking her to stop her eating her fingers off, but she could feel no pain and just laughed at them. Eventually the father left as the child was just like a monster. As this child got older and older she did more and more damage to her self and in the end her legs had to be amputated and she spent the rest of her life in an institution. Pain is vital to tell us our bodies are being damaged and prevent further damage. Pain is a gift that warns us of dangers. One can only think what life would be like if we had no emotional pain, we would kill everything in sight that got in our way.
Why we need pain to grow to maturity
A world safe enough to be painless would be a place with few possibilities for our development. For us to live in a world with no pain God would have to directly intervene in our world constantly. It would have to extend down to minute details of the way things happen. It would be a world that was so frustrating that we would learn nothing from our experiences or achieve much. For example imagine we wanted to build a house, the tools you would work with could not be sharp enough to cut anything because then they would be sharp enough to cut you. The materials could not be to stiff as this could give it edges that could hurt some one. Do we want to live in a world where we achieve nothing and God makes and provides everything, sounds rather boring to me. We could never learn from our mistakes, as we would be stopped before we could even attempt something. What we personally suffer as well as what we see and hear in others comprises a great bank of knowledge that helps us make the most of this worlds possibilities while avoiding its troubles.
Why we need painful predictability
Some bad things happen in life because the world’s physical processes have to operate regularly. Gravity works this way, electricity and chemicals are all good but if we get in the wrong relationship with them we will get hurt. These laws of nature are fairly predictable and if we use them right we will not get hurt. Our ability of pain is what guards us from abusing these laws as experiences will teach us to stay away from them.
Why we need unwanted consequences
Another problem with a world in which God ensures that no one gets hurt is that we would never see evil for what it is. If there were no unwanted consequences we would spend our lives doing evil. God could again intervene every time and block these deeds but then there would be no awareness of the difference of sin or righteousness. The great value of love, joy, pleasure and goodness would not stand out as any value at all. It is the sting of pain that seems to intensify the qualities of the good that make us love them.
How our world keeps us from Selfishness
There is a further problem with a world in which God would prevent all physical pain. As imperfect beings abusing our freedom we are continually tempted to be self-centered. Have you ever meet some one who has always got what they wanted, while always being loving and self-sacrificing for others? No. In this world we can not always get what we want. There are delays, frustrations and disappointments. The worlds natural processes do not bend to our will rather we have to accommodate ourselves to our environment. After the fall God told Adam that life world be hard, it might have been a hard judgement on him, but it keeps the human race in line to think of others and show love, respect, forgiveness, patience, tolerance and joy for other peoples happiness.
So while the world is not deigned to cater to our whims it is a place that can build our moral character.
Living the good prevents much pain
Much suffering is due to foolishness of character. People getting drunk having car crashes, beating their wives and so on. Most people figure out how to avoid physical dangers, but few go on to learn deeper knowledge of the moral dimension of our world. The reasons of so much suffering seem to remain hidden to most people. They lack simple wisdom and show no respect for the good. This does not mean that good people will never suffer, as we know pain has it purposes. But the way of the wicked and foolish is darkness and they do not know why they stumble.
Is any pain pointless?
Is there any pain physical or emotional that has no purpose at all? Even if we cannot understand every reason why something happens, it could just be the way love and compassion is drawn out of others to serve peoples needs. Maybe some people are suffering servants in the hands of God. Their life and troubles are the only things that would shape you and your character to demonstrate love to them. Its one thing to say you care and love others, but can you live it out? Chronic pain can have a ripple effect far beyond one life. Those immediately around the person can become more compassionate, sensitive, and grateful. It can produce compassion even in strangers. It can motivate some in society to develop cures and preventative measures. All suffering has an opportunity to shape our characters in doing good to others. This world is the training ground for heaven.
What good are disasters?
Natural disasters are the most spectacular of natural evils. A lot of natural disasters are due to human failure to do what they ought to. The 2004 Asian tsunami killed 270,000 people yet it was predicted by a geologist at the California Institute of Technology who had studied the region for over a decade. When it came clear that government officials would not listen to his warnings he went directly to the people distributing 5,000 posters and flyers and speaking to churches and schools. Moments after the quake hit, most of the nations around found out that their governments had failed to take warnings and upgrade their warning systems. Though tragedy blinds us to them they often bind people together and force them to work together, breaking barriers of race, class and national origin. Also our abuse of our environment distorts the way it should function.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Part Five
True Tolerance
We live in a world where every body thinks they can live by one virtue and not the rest that being the virtue of Tolerance. We hear the claim all the time from many different groups, lifestyles or personal passions “You’re so intolerant of people views”. But do we have to tolerate everything and what “ought” we have to tolerate? Also what is a Virtue?
Our culture has distorted the understanding of what virtues are of which tolerance is one of them. For now we are told that the meaning of tolerance is ethical neutrality. We must accept that indifferences are good and if we do then we are call “tolerant” and if we don’t approve we are labeled as being “intolerant”. But is the purpose of tolerance to by pass our ethical judgements and accept everything? This we know cant work and the fatal flaw in this understanding of tolerance is not hard to find. Suppose that tolerance really were nothing but a kind of indifference. Shouldn’t we at least be consistent in our difference? And if we are consistently indifferent, then we must be indifferent about tolerance itself. Which means tolerance can mean anything we like and if there is no objective standard of right and wrong the claim that one is not being intolerant is an irrational statement. The fact that they don’t tolerate that person view which they dislike show that they are not being very tolerant. So it just seems to be that tolerance means something a little different than moral neutrality.
Virtues are not just rules, they are built in character dispositions, and they are objective and aid and inform moral choices. It is an objective good to for us, towards a right relationship with other goods. True tolerance is not an art of tolerating, it is the art of knowing when and how to tolerate. It is not forbearance from judgement, but the fruit of judgment. We may disapprove something for the love of some moral good, the key is practical wisdom. Like every virtue, true tolerance interacts with all of the other virtues.
If tolerance is an objective good virtue then there must be an objective moral standard to guide our judgment virtues. This objective standard of right and wrong is Gods moral law. There is an objective standard and we must tolerate those who fall in error or make mistakes in their learning due to their development of good character. Evils and human weakness must be tolerated in just those cases where their suppression would involve equal or greater hindrance to goods of the same order or any hindrance at all to goods of higher order. As J. Budziszewski says “Consider a father who values nothing but kindness. There will be something lacking in his kindness as well; utterly unable to give his children pain for any reason, he will never allow them enough responsibility to fail in any undertaking”. If there is not an objective standard of right and wrong in ethical matters, not preferences or tastes on what ice cream you like, then tolerance is meaningless.
Some times true tolerance will deny oneself things that are innocent in them selves if others can’t bear them. It is about looking for the highest Good for the development of moral character. The question must be asked, “what kinds of life are good?” they are good when lower order goods are judged according to intrinsic goodness that meaning the higher good. Some things that are of the lower type can be good, but if use wrongly are not good.
A Government fails when it declares that all must treat people with equal concern and respect in a neutral way. If this is good for society then the Government is not being neutral about the good life. Neutrality is a meaningless law and some may say that “more than one way of life is good” implying the diversity of good makes it relative. But just because there are more ways then one way does not follow that no way of life is bad. Does the diversity of good melodies refute the principle of harmony, and confirm the pleasure of noise? What about the skeptic who denies the objective standard and says “No one can know what is really good for human beings, you cant impose this standard on us”. Well if the skeptic cant know what is bad for humans then he cant be so sure that anything the state does is bad and if you cant be sure how can you object to the objective standard.
Our culture struggles so hard to make rational moral statements because it rejects’s the existence of an objective moral standard. Some acts may give us pleasure, but that does not mean all acts are good for us. Having compelling desires does not make something right. I mean people use this argument to allow the acts of sadism, masochism, cacophagy and so on, but you never hear it proposed as an argument against heart felt murder. If free will is an objective good thing to have then it must work according to the intrinsic objective moral standard. That being a lower good working towards a higher good. The above argument is what ground’s human rights, humans are intrinsically valuable because of the objective standard of goodness and value which is grounded in the metaphysical necessity of Gods nature and image.
When if comes down to the breaking up of the family unit and gender confusion and a culture that is driven by pleasure rather than commitment or seeking higher goods it is not wise to shout at those who don’t tolerate these acts of unfaithfulness and confusion.
All pleasure if it is “objective normal pleasure” that strives to develop a higher moral character, which is good for society as a whole is what we should be openly tolerate about and promote. Pornography and graphic sex dehumanizes people to mere objects or commodities that can be brought and thrown away as pleased. This does not seek the development of objective goodness for all people. Again this is neutrality without any care for the common good of mankind. The same with abortions, it takes no concern to be tolerate of others peoples right to live and prosper.
We live in a world where every body thinks they can live by one virtue and not the rest that being the virtue of Tolerance. We hear the claim all the time from many different groups, lifestyles or personal passions “You’re so intolerant of people views”. But do we have to tolerate everything and what “ought” we have to tolerate? Also what is a Virtue?
Our culture has distorted the understanding of what virtues are of which tolerance is one of them. For now we are told that the meaning of tolerance is ethical neutrality. We must accept that indifferences are good and if we do then we are call “tolerant” and if we don’t approve we are labeled as being “intolerant”. But is the purpose of tolerance to by pass our ethical judgements and accept everything? This we know cant work and the fatal flaw in this understanding of tolerance is not hard to find. Suppose that tolerance really were nothing but a kind of indifference. Shouldn’t we at least be consistent in our difference? And if we are consistently indifferent, then we must be indifferent about tolerance itself. Which means tolerance can mean anything we like and if there is no objective standard of right and wrong the claim that one is not being intolerant is an irrational statement. The fact that they don’t tolerate that person view which they dislike show that they are not being very tolerant. So it just seems to be that tolerance means something a little different than moral neutrality.
Virtues are not just rules, they are built in character dispositions, and they are objective and aid and inform moral choices. It is an objective good to for us, towards a right relationship with other goods. True tolerance is not an art of tolerating, it is the art of knowing when and how to tolerate. It is not forbearance from judgement, but the fruit of judgment. We may disapprove something for the love of some moral good, the key is practical wisdom. Like every virtue, true tolerance interacts with all of the other virtues.
If tolerance is an objective good virtue then there must be an objective moral standard to guide our judgment virtues. This objective standard of right and wrong is Gods moral law. There is an objective standard and we must tolerate those who fall in error or make mistakes in their learning due to their development of good character. Evils and human weakness must be tolerated in just those cases where their suppression would involve equal or greater hindrance to goods of the same order or any hindrance at all to goods of higher order. As J. Budziszewski says “Consider a father who values nothing but kindness. There will be something lacking in his kindness as well; utterly unable to give his children pain for any reason, he will never allow them enough responsibility to fail in any undertaking”. If there is not an objective standard of right and wrong in ethical matters, not preferences or tastes on what ice cream you like, then tolerance is meaningless.
Some times true tolerance will deny oneself things that are innocent in them selves if others can’t bear them. It is about looking for the highest Good for the development of moral character. The question must be asked, “what kinds of life are good?” they are good when lower order goods are judged according to intrinsic goodness that meaning the higher good. Some things that are of the lower type can be good, but if use wrongly are not good.
A Government fails when it declares that all must treat people with equal concern and respect in a neutral way. If this is good for society then the Government is not being neutral about the good life. Neutrality is a meaningless law and some may say that “more than one way of life is good” implying the diversity of good makes it relative. But just because there are more ways then one way does not follow that no way of life is bad. Does the diversity of good melodies refute the principle of harmony, and confirm the pleasure of noise? What about the skeptic who denies the objective standard and says “No one can know what is really good for human beings, you cant impose this standard on us”. Well if the skeptic cant know what is bad for humans then he cant be so sure that anything the state does is bad and if you cant be sure how can you object to the objective standard.
Our culture struggles so hard to make rational moral statements because it rejects’s the existence of an objective moral standard. Some acts may give us pleasure, but that does not mean all acts are good for us. Having compelling desires does not make something right. I mean people use this argument to allow the acts of sadism, masochism, cacophagy and so on, but you never hear it proposed as an argument against heart felt murder. If free will is an objective good thing to have then it must work according to the intrinsic objective moral standard. That being a lower good working towards a higher good. The above argument is what ground’s human rights, humans are intrinsically valuable because of the objective standard of goodness and value which is grounded in the metaphysical necessity of Gods nature and image.
When if comes down to the breaking up of the family unit and gender confusion and a culture that is driven by pleasure rather than commitment or seeking higher goods it is not wise to shout at those who don’t tolerate these acts of unfaithfulness and confusion.
All pleasure if it is “objective normal pleasure” that strives to develop a higher moral character, which is good for society as a whole is what we should be openly tolerate about and promote. Pornography and graphic sex dehumanizes people to mere objects or commodities that can be brought and thrown away as pleased. This does not seek the development of objective goodness for all people. Again this is neutrality without any care for the common good of mankind. The same with abortions, it takes no concern to be tolerate of others peoples right to live and prosper.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Part Four
Ought implies Can?
The only way our world is going to have peace is if we can have a moral system where we ought to be good in a way that is consistent with our own and others happiness. If this is what the world wants and this is what we ought to do, then it must be rational that we can do it. This moral principle is that “ought” implies we “can” achieve it. If we Cant achieve what we ought to do then we are believing in something that is rationally unstable and irrational. I take the notion that happiness for morality to work must be “achieving enough of our own goals to avoid frustration.” But for many happiness is based on pleasure and all pleasure is good.
Second morality requires us not to rank our own advantages above that of others, just because they are ours; this is because morality requires us to treat all human beings as having the same worth. Humans have a double motivation towards our happiness and towards what is good in itself regardless of its connection with our happiness.
So morality requires us to believe that it is possible for people affected by our actions, including ourselves to be happy in a way that is consistent with each other’s happiness. We ought to try to increase each other’s happiness, and so we must be able to believe this is possible. The general union of happiness would be called the highest good.
If we were all morally good we would be trying to make each other happy, and we would have to believe we could or there would be no rational reason to even try.
The problem is that all people don’t come across as morally good and for many what come across first as the strongest desire is self-advantage, not the happiness of others. What makes people miserable is the way we treat each other, because we don’t share each other’s morally permissible ends. Also we need this moral system to hold in the present and in the future. The question arises, if we are not morally good how are we to achieve this state of goodness. The problem gets worse when we affirm that many people don’t even think there is moral virtues or a basic principle of goodness other than relative preferences. The problem doesn’t just ask for how we define and enforce this standard of the highest good, but also can the human nature be able to become good internally.
One atheist philosopher says that each person has the ability to determine his or her own meaning to life fully, we just need to be educated on moral principles.
But John Hare in his chapter in the book “Is Goodness Without God Good Enough” says, “But it is doubtful whether we know how to make people good through moral education, and the optimism of the late nineteenth century did not survive the twentieth, in particular the Second World War, in which the people who carried out the massacres and Holocaust were the most educated people in the world’s history to that point.”
Is it possible that the human heart can change and become fashioned to seeking the happiness of others, once the problem of defining what the highest good would be is found.
If on an atheistic worldview this is not possible, that is,
1 (Ought) We “ought” to be good in a way that is consistent with our own and others happiness. And that we “ought” to become good internally.
2. (Can) It is possible for us to be good in a way that is consistent with our own and others happiness. Also that we can become good internally.
Then it can’t be achieved,
If we can not come up with a definition of what is the highest good and live it out and fashion other’s to be good internally, then it is not rational to hold that world peace or happiness can be achieved. Also it is wrong to hold that we “ought” to try and seek the happiness of our own and of the happiness of others as it can not be achieved. This would imply that we are not obligated to do it, because we can’t do it, and only what we can do is what we ought to do. I see no way that an atheist can achieve this quest in seeking for universal peace, it just becomes an abstract illusion. Therefore in an atheistic worldview we do not have to seek the happiness of all people for the highest good. Therefore there is no standard of goodness and the act of self-sacrifice becomes a meaningless action. If all that exists is the present life and there is no objective good why would anyone give up his or her life or pleasures for another? You would be dying for no gain at all and even if you did do it, it would not be because it was the right thing to do. Also there is no basis for moral accountability on atheism. The important thing about moral accountability is that it makes our moral choices significant. In the absence of moral accountability, our choices become trivialized because they make no ultimate contribution to either the betterment of the universe or to the moral good in general because everyone ends up the same dead in the grave. Without God death is the great leveler, all acts end in nothing, worthless.
It is only if God exists that we can have objective value that all humans have equal worth. That is because we are created in the image of the greatest necessary being God.
God is the greatest metaphysical value, which is based on his objective eternal Good nature, which is the norm for all people to live by. His goodness flows out to bring the happiness to our selves and for others. Because we are all created in his image we all have the same value and should all be respected. Our obligation (or our ought-ness) to seek the happiness of all other’s stems from God’s commands, which are based on his good nature and the ontological value of each person. We are accountable to him to do what we ought to do and if we place our faith in him, he will change our sinful hearts by his spirit so that we can internalize the good. Therefore what we ‘ought’ to do is what we “can’ do. Human experience has shown that this works and people lives can be chnaged.
As for our actions having no significance, God makes sense to our self-sacrifices, as no act of self-sacrifice will go ultimately uncompensated. For God is not unjust as to overlook your work and love which you have showed (Heb 6;10). When God brings all finite days to an end he will bring ultimate justice, and not some meaningless empty finite relative fleeting justice. He will reward us for our action’s and judge our wicked deeds and deliver divine justice to the universe.
The only way our world is going to have peace is if we can have a moral system where we ought to be good in a way that is consistent with our own and others happiness. If this is what the world wants and this is what we ought to do, then it must be rational that we can do it. This moral principle is that “ought” implies we “can” achieve it. If we Cant achieve what we ought to do then we are believing in something that is rationally unstable and irrational. I take the notion that happiness for morality to work must be “achieving enough of our own goals to avoid frustration.” But for many happiness is based on pleasure and all pleasure is good.
Second morality requires us not to rank our own advantages above that of others, just because they are ours; this is because morality requires us to treat all human beings as having the same worth. Humans have a double motivation towards our happiness and towards what is good in itself regardless of its connection with our happiness.
So morality requires us to believe that it is possible for people affected by our actions, including ourselves to be happy in a way that is consistent with each other’s happiness. We ought to try to increase each other’s happiness, and so we must be able to believe this is possible. The general union of happiness would be called the highest good.
If we were all morally good we would be trying to make each other happy, and we would have to believe we could or there would be no rational reason to even try.
The problem is that all people don’t come across as morally good and for many what come across first as the strongest desire is self-advantage, not the happiness of others. What makes people miserable is the way we treat each other, because we don’t share each other’s morally permissible ends. Also we need this moral system to hold in the present and in the future. The question arises, if we are not morally good how are we to achieve this state of goodness. The problem gets worse when we affirm that many people don’t even think there is moral virtues or a basic principle of goodness other than relative preferences. The problem doesn’t just ask for how we define and enforce this standard of the highest good, but also can the human nature be able to become good internally.
One atheist philosopher says that each person has the ability to determine his or her own meaning to life fully, we just need to be educated on moral principles.
But John Hare in his chapter in the book “Is Goodness Without God Good Enough” says, “But it is doubtful whether we know how to make people good through moral education, and the optimism of the late nineteenth century did not survive the twentieth, in particular the Second World War, in which the people who carried out the massacres and Holocaust were the most educated people in the world’s history to that point.”
Is it possible that the human heart can change and become fashioned to seeking the happiness of others, once the problem of defining what the highest good would be is found.
If on an atheistic worldview this is not possible, that is,
1 (Ought) We “ought” to be good in a way that is consistent with our own and others happiness. And that we “ought” to become good internally.
2. (Can) It is possible for us to be good in a way that is consistent with our own and others happiness. Also that we can become good internally.
Then it can’t be achieved,
If we can not come up with a definition of what is the highest good and live it out and fashion other’s to be good internally, then it is not rational to hold that world peace or happiness can be achieved. Also it is wrong to hold that we “ought” to try and seek the happiness of our own and of the happiness of others as it can not be achieved. This would imply that we are not obligated to do it, because we can’t do it, and only what we can do is what we ought to do. I see no way that an atheist can achieve this quest in seeking for universal peace, it just becomes an abstract illusion. Therefore in an atheistic worldview we do not have to seek the happiness of all people for the highest good. Therefore there is no standard of goodness and the act of self-sacrifice becomes a meaningless action. If all that exists is the present life and there is no objective good why would anyone give up his or her life or pleasures for another? You would be dying for no gain at all and even if you did do it, it would not be because it was the right thing to do. Also there is no basis for moral accountability on atheism. The important thing about moral accountability is that it makes our moral choices significant. In the absence of moral accountability, our choices become trivialized because they make no ultimate contribution to either the betterment of the universe or to the moral good in general because everyone ends up the same dead in the grave. Without God death is the great leveler, all acts end in nothing, worthless.
It is only if God exists that we can have objective value that all humans have equal worth. That is because we are created in the image of the greatest necessary being God.
God is the greatest metaphysical value, which is based on his objective eternal Good nature, which is the norm for all people to live by. His goodness flows out to bring the happiness to our selves and for others. Because we are all created in his image we all have the same value and should all be respected. Our obligation (or our ought-ness) to seek the happiness of all other’s stems from God’s commands, which are based on his good nature and the ontological value of each person. We are accountable to him to do what we ought to do and if we place our faith in him, he will change our sinful hearts by his spirit so that we can internalize the good. Therefore what we ‘ought’ to do is what we “can’ do. Human experience has shown that this works and people lives can be chnaged.
As for our actions having no significance, God makes sense to our self-sacrifices, as no act of self-sacrifice will go ultimately uncompensated. For God is not unjust as to overlook your work and love which you have showed (Heb 6;10). When God brings all finite days to an end he will bring ultimate justice, and not some meaningless empty finite relative fleeting justice. He will reward us for our action’s and judge our wicked deeds and deliver divine justice to the universe.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Part Three
Relativism and the Atheist’s moral charge against God
The second objection that is usually hurled against God’s existence is the Atheists problem that evil exists and there is just too much suffering in the world for a loving God to be real. The question “why does a loving God stand back and let people suffering, let kids get raped and abused, and so forth” is a honest question. But it does not bring into question God’s existence but his character. But before we look at the reason’s why God could pass these things to happen, I want us to revisit the logic of the charge.
First problem; The atheist is being inconsistent with his own worldview. The atheist with his moral relativism steps out to charge God as doing something objectively wrong. The question must be asked “By what objective standard has God done something wrong”.
I mean in the atheistic worldview what is good is what each individual subjectively prefers. And as we have seen atheism has no answer how to even determine what is “good” as reason can not answer the question. Simple logic shows that the atheist can not make an intelligible judgement on what is objectively good and evil and loses the power to make a charge against God.
Second problem; The idea that there is just to much evil in the world fails as well to refute God’s existence, as how can a finite subjective being judge how much evil or suffering is to much? One can not make absolute statements based on ones personal feelings on a matter. Has the atheist measured the amount of goodness that has been done on earth as well? Also the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil are meaningless if God does not exist. Their existence implies there is a moral order to the world and that people are doing something wrong against this standard. This is why a moral lawgiver must exist (God). The atheist Sam Harris asks “Why is a moral law-giver necessary in order to recognize good and evil?” The reason is that a moral affirmation cannot remain an abstraction. The only ground the atheist can get is to say he believes in God, but his subjective feelings are different to God’s.
Yes the claim goes “God is evil because he stands by and watches young children getting raped, torture and murdered?” But haven’t atheist ever realized that they exist too and abuse their free will which includes disturbing the environment.
If one wishes to talk about suffering he must talk about autonomy versus God’s story of why we are the way we are. Though the sacred is offered to us, the will is arrogant and refuses to submit to God’s authority. No one of us is any different from or better than any other, some just mask his or her true nature better.
Are atheist’s demanding that God create in us the ability to love without giving us the option to reject that love, the desire to trust and to be trusted without the freedom to doubt, the privilege of making a choice without the responsibility of accepting the ramifications of that choice?
Ravi Zacharias quotes the atheist, Sam Harris as saying “God if he exists is the most prolific abortionist of all” saying that even one death at God’s hand is unacceptable, while he (Harris) himself looks the other way as millions of unborn children are aborted.
As Zacharias says, Can you explain something to me? When a plane crashes and some die while others live, a skeptic calls into question God’s moral character, saying that he has chosen some to live and others to die a whim, yet you say it is your moral right to chose whether the child within you should live or die. Does that not sound odd to you? When God decides who should live or die, he is immoral. When you decide who should live or die, its your moral right?”
There is one difference between God allowing a death to take place and me taking another life; God has to the power to restore life, I don’t. If God is the sovereign creator of all creation does he not have the right to deal with wickedness, or take some home to heaven to be with him, even if it messes our lives up. This world is our training ground to shape and fashion our hearts to be manifestations of pure goodness. The unborn are innocent, most of us are not in any way of fashion.
Because God is absolutely good his acts are always ended for good, ultimate Justice, not fleeting pleasures, not letting people like Hitler or Stalin or even us win the day. The atheist’s who try’s to condemn God are in fact implying that humans have intrinsic value and worth, which can only be justified if God exists and also the atheist uses a universal absolute moral law to judge God which is again God’s moral law. The fact is we cannot remove pain from the earth until evil is solved, as it is pain that gives the felt reality of evil in this world, which we course. That does not mean we are responsible for everything that happens to us in our lives
Zacharias says “Psychiatry in fact is wrestling with the ramifications of a drug that removes guilt and remorse. What kind of world will we have when a rapist can take a morning after pill” for his guilt?…”If it is possible in our finite world with our limited knowledge to be able to appreciate just one benefit of pain, is it not possible that God has designed this awareness within us to remind us of what is good for us and what is destructive? Can we not see the moral framework that detects atrocities and resists tragedies? Could there be a greater, deeper answer than saying there is no God?”
The Human Heart is bent towards Evil
Do you think there is not one empirical evidence that each us of us has clearly experienced in our lives that shows God (I would say there are many more). Have we never seen evil or experienced it and known that it lives just as much in your bent heart than in another. To deny this reality is to class your self as a Sociopath. If there is evil in this world then some actions have gone against a moral standard that the universe should be following. The problem with this sin nature is (and its effect will hit you now) that it will suppress any evidence that relates to God, as we prefer that our inner motives where kept hidden.
We say, no I’m not a sinner, I’m not that bad, I don’t have a nature that seems to go against what I know is right. I’m not having this condemnation thing, Who are you Judge? I just make random mistakes connected to know moral law, I live for my self.
God, Love and Free Will
The charge has been made against God many times that “If God is all-powerful and all loving why is there evil. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not all-powerful. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is not all loving. Is he both able and willing? Then why is there evil?
Before I answer this question I want to deal with the problem of evil/suffering if there is no God. If there is no God the simple truth is there is no evil in this world and suffering is meaningless. If all that exists is nature then nature just “is” running by blind fate. No action or event is right or wrong, they just are. To say that an action or an event in this world is evil or wrong is to judge it against a moral standard the universe should be following. This implies a moral lawgiver behind the universe as moral standards are only held in minds. Atheist have always had trouble with the Naturalistic Fallacy of trying to get an “ought” from and “is’. The laws of nature (without God) produce what “is”, but morality is what we “ought” to do. But what every happens in nature is what it is and one cannot say this “ought” to have not happened and that it is wrong in a Godless universe. If all that exists is nature (the material world of matter) then we are a part of nature and follow its laws too. Without God suffering become meaningless and those who experience it have no hope for their pain or illusion. The Atheists problem is that he has a belief in evil, and objective right and wrong most of the time, but if there is no God this is just a belief that is an illusion trapped in ones mind that doesn’t correspond to reality.
C.S.Lewis once said,
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A Man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of straight line. What was I comparing the universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I , who was supposed to be part of the show find myself in such violent reaction against it?”
Pain and suffering is real, but atheism does not give any answer to the problem. It in fact turns us into being insane. The question must be asked, can God explain it? I think all of us can look out into the world and see something is wrong. This world is not perfect which implies some thing has gone wrong.
C.S.Lewis also said,
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world”
Just maybe this world of pain and suffering is a sign for us to look up to the standard we wish this universe were following. Maybe the sting of pain cracks our conscience to search for the good (God). I want to make it clear here, not everything thing that goes wrong in our lives is our fault.
As for the charge that an all-loving God must be evil if people suffer in this world is not a very strong case. I don’t have all the answers, but it is more than atheism can give.
One argument can be stated to answer this charge,
1. An all-good God will create the best world that is possible for perfection
2. An all-powerful God can create only what is logically possible
3. An all-knowing God knows what is all-good and creates humans with the gift of freewill.
4. The gift of freedom (which evolution denies) is a good power, but if abused by free creatures produces moral evil.
5. It was not within Gods logical power to create a world containing moral goodness, but no moral evil.
6. Therefore God is not evil and evil is not inconstant with the existence of God.
Now if true goodness or love has any value at all it must be done freely and humans have been given the gift of freedom. Forced love is rape! No one values love from a spouse or a lover, which is not from a pure motive.
One must also define and brake down evil and suffering, as it is not only felt from the abuse of free will.
Moral Evil
Moral evil looks at the relationship of free creatures with God. It covers the subject of moral responsibility as free agents, as the cause of evil. When we abuse our freewill and reject God’s moral standards, evil is produced. Even mental deficiencies can result from something one person does to another. God can heal people instantly, but most of these occurrences that I have seen have been when God saves some one radically.
Natural Evil
Because of the fall creation has also suffered and has been cursed. But natural evil looks at acts that are produced by physical pain or acts of nature. Some times fires or earthquakes can cause human suffering, misshapen limbs, blindness. Some times human actions again can cause genetic malfunctions which can result in birth defects resulting from evil done by the parents during pregnancy (Expectant mother using drugs or alcohol heavily can negatively affect the developing fetus). We must take responsibility for our actions. Some times we do everything right, but others inflict suffering on us!
Our freedom for greed and lust could also be the cause of the brake down of the environment, with our pollution and extreme life-style. Maybe God is not the one to blame for everything as all the good we experiences comes from him too.
Can anything come out of suffering?
The sting of suffering seems to bring out true love out of us. It draws love out of us which probable would never be manifested unless suffering was he. We can talk about love, kindness, but it’s only under suffering that we can really see how we act to others. It test’s our heart and motives to see if they are real.
1. obedience is learnt from suffering
2. suffering produces character
3. Suffering can bring us closer in love to a greater bond.
4. True love suffer long, thinks of others and is selfless
5. Biological pain warns us of danger
6. The virtue of compassion, patience and mercy can not be produced without tribulation, or mercy without tragedy.
7. God can bring good out of evil
8. Maybe the sting of pain leads us to the road of goodness and love for others.
9. The Nazi’s showed the world what happens when you de-value the dignity and value of human life created in the image of God. It has made a powerful stamp on the world that humans are worth more.
10 Temptation, through they make us do dumb things, show us what is really in us and who we really are inside. It’s almost like a gift if used right.
11. Even Jesus had do suffer for the whole world to demonstrate true love.
Religion is the cause of all wars!
A third objection that is raised again God and Christianity is that the belief in God has caused more suffering and wars on earth then non-belief. This is a favorite argument from some of the popular atheist spokesmen. You may want to look at Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod in their massive 1502 page 3-volume encyclopedia of war. It is compiled by nine reputable professors of history, including the director of the Centre of Military history and the former head of the Centre for Defence studies. They conclude that from what we know from history there have been about 1763 wars and only 123 have been over religion. This makes religion 6.98 percent accountable. If you take away the wars from ‘Muslim’s it drops down to 3.23 percent.
I dont think the evidence proves that religion is the cause of war or mass murdering.
Here is another source from “Stand to Reason”
A blight on Christianity? Certainty, Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religion criminals have committed.
My point is not that Christians or religious people aren’t vulnerable to committing terrible crimes. Certainly they are. But it is not religion that produces these things; it is the denial of Biblical religion that generally leads to these kinds of things. The statistics that are the result of irreligious genocide stagger the imagination.
My source is The Guinness Book of World Records . Look up the category “Judicial” and under the subject of “Crimes: Mass Killings,” the greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign against the government of another is 26.3 million Chinese during the regime of Mao Tse Tung between the years of 1949 and May 1965. The Walker Report published by the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed the parameters of the total death toll in China since 1949 between 32 and 61.7 million people. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by Figaro magazine on November 5, 1978.
In the U.S.S.R. the Nobel Prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimates the loss of life from state repression and terrorism from October 1917 to December 1959 under Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev at 66.7 million.
Finally, in Cambodia (and this was close to me because I lived in Thailand in 1982 working with the broken pieces of the Cambodian holocaust from 1975 to 1979) “as a percentage of a nation’s total population, the worst genocide appears to be that in Cambodia, formerly Kampuchea. According to the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, more than one third of the eight million Khmer were killed between April 17, 1975 and January 1979. One third of the entire country was put to death under the rule of Pol Pot, the founder of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. During that time, towns, money and property were abolished. Economic execution by bayonet and club was introduced for such offenses as falling asleep during the day, asking too many questions, playing non-communist music, being old and feeble, being the offspring of an undesirable, or being too well educated. In fact, deaths in the Tuol Sleng interrogation center in Phnom Penh, which is the capitol of Kampuchea, reached 582 in a day.”
Then in Chinese history of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries there were three periods of wholesale massacre. The numbers of victims attributed to these events are assertions rather than reliable estimates. The figures put on the Mongolian invasion of northern China form 1210 to 1219 and from 1311 to 1340 are both on the order of 35 million people. While the number of victims of bandit leader Chang Hsien-Chung, known as the Yellow Tiger, from 1643 to 1647 in the Szechwan province has been put at 40 million people.
China under Mao Tse Tung, 26.3 million Chinese. According the Walker Report, 63.7 million over the whole period of time of the Communist revolution in China. Solzhenitsyn says the Soviet Union put to death 66.7 million people. Kampuchea destroyed one third of their entire population of eight million Cambodians. The Chinese at two different times in medieval history, somewhere in the vicinity of 35 million and 40 million people. Ladies and gentlemen, make note that these deaths were the result of organizations or points of view or ideologies that had left God out of the equation. None of these involve religion. And all but the very last actually assert atheism.
Hitler
Then we have the millions killed by Hitler and his men. Many people try and make the claim that Hitler was a Christian but this is not true. As I have said before its one thing to call yourself a Christian and another thing to be a Christian.
Atheists charge that Christianity was the course of anti-Semitism, which led to the Holocaust. But this is clearly false. Has no one read that Hitler dabbled in the occult, that he presented the writings of Nietzsche (The most atheistic philosophy ever written) to Stalin and Mussolini. That Hitler also slaughtered many other races apart from Jews. Many Russian atheists were killed too and Hitler’s words written on one of the gas ovens in Auschwitz states “I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of a conscience, imperious relentless and cruel.” Hitler believed in evolution that the strong must wipe out the inferior races. This is very different from Jesus who spent all his time with the poor and broken. He even said “ I have not come for the righteous, but for the unrighteous.”
The second objection that is usually hurled against God’s existence is the Atheists problem that evil exists and there is just too much suffering in the world for a loving God to be real. The question “why does a loving God stand back and let people suffering, let kids get raped and abused, and so forth” is a honest question. But it does not bring into question God’s existence but his character. But before we look at the reason’s why God could pass these things to happen, I want us to revisit the logic of the charge.
First problem; The atheist is being inconsistent with his own worldview. The atheist with his moral relativism steps out to charge God as doing something objectively wrong. The question must be asked “By what objective standard has God done something wrong”.
I mean in the atheistic worldview what is good is what each individual subjectively prefers. And as we have seen atheism has no answer how to even determine what is “good” as reason can not answer the question. Simple logic shows that the atheist can not make an intelligible judgement on what is objectively good and evil and loses the power to make a charge against God.
Second problem; The idea that there is just to much evil in the world fails as well to refute God’s existence, as how can a finite subjective being judge how much evil or suffering is to much? One can not make absolute statements based on ones personal feelings on a matter. Has the atheist measured the amount of goodness that has been done on earth as well? Also the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil are meaningless if God does not exist. Their existence implies there is a moral order to the world and that people are doing something wrong against this standard. This is why a moral lawgiver must exist (God). The atheist Sam Harris asks “Why is a moral law-giver necessary in order to recognize good and evil?” The reason is that a moral affirmation cannot remain an abstraction. The only ground the atheist can get is to say he believes in God, but his subjective feelings are different to God’s.
Yes the claim goes “God is evil because he stands by and watches young children getting raped, torture and murdered?” But haven’t atheist ever realized that they exist too and abuse their free will which includes disturbing the environment.
If one wishes to talk about suffering he must talk about autonomy versus God’s story of why we are the way we are. Though the sacred is offered to us, the will is arrogant and refuses to submit to God’s authority. No one of us is any different from or better than any other, some just mask his or her true nature better.
Are atheist’s demanding that God create in us the ability to love without giving us the option to reject that love, the desire to trust and to be trusted without the freedom to doubt, the privilege of making a choice without the responsibility of accepting the ramifications of that choice?
Ravi Zacharias quotes the atheist, Sam Harris as saying “God if he exists is the most prolific abortionist of all” saying that even one death at God’s hand is unacceptable, while he (Harris) himself looks the other way as millions of unborn children are aborted.
As Zacharias says, Can you explain something to me? When a plane crashes and some die while others live, a skeptic calls into question God’s moral character, saying that he has chosen some to live and others to die a whim, yet you say it is your moral right to chose whether the child within you should live or die. Does that not sound odd to you? When God decides who should live or die, he is immoral. When you decide who should live or die, its your moral right?”
There is one difference between God allowing a death to take place and me taking another life; God has to the power to restore life, I don’t. If God is the sovereign creator of all creation does he not have the right to deal with wickedness, or take some home to heaven to be with him, even if it messes our lives up. This world is our training ground to shape and fashion our hearts to be manifestations of pure goodness. The unborn are innocent, most of us are not in any way of fashion.
Because God is absolutely good his acts are always ended for good, ultimate Justice, not fleeting pleasures, not letting people like Hitler or Stalin or even us win the day. The atheist’s who try’s to condemn God are in fact implying that humans have intrinsic value and worth, which can only be justified if God exists and also the atheist uses a universal absolute moral law to judge God which is again God’s moral law. The fact is we cannot remove pain from the earth until evil is solved, as it is pain that gives the felt reality of evil in this world, which we course. That does not mean we are responsible for everything that happens to us in our lives
Zacharias says “Psychiatry in fact is wrestling with the ramifications of a drug that removes guilt and remorse. What kind of world will we have when a rapist can take a morning after pill” for his guilt?…”If it is possible in our finite world with our limited knowledge to be able to appreciate just one benefit of pain, is it not possible that God has designed this awareness within us to remind us of what is good for us and what is destructive? Can we not see the moral framework that detects atrocities and resists tragedies? Could there be a greater, deeper answer than saying there is no God?”
The Human Heart is bent towards Evil
Do you think there is not one empirical evidence that each us of us has clearly experienced in our lives that shows God (I would say there are many more). Have we never seen evil or experienced it and known that it lives just as much in your bent heart than in another. To deny this reality is to class your self as a Sociopath. If there is evil in this world then some actions have gone against a moral standard that the universe should be following. The problem with this sin nature is (and its effect will hit you now) that it will suppress any evidence that relates to God, as we prefer that our inner motives where kept hidden.
We say, no I’m not a sinner, I’m not that bad, I don’t have a nature that seems to go against what I know is right. I’m not having this condemnation thing, Who are you Judge? I just make random mistakes connected to know moral law, I live for my self.
God, Love and Free Will
The charge has been made against God many times that “If God is all-powerful and all loving why is there evil. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not all-powerful. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is not all loving. Is he both able and willing? Then why is there evil?
Before I answer this question I want to deal with the problem of evil/suffering if there is no God. If there is no God the simple truth is there is no evil in this world and suffering is meaningless. If all that exists is nature then nature just “is” running by blind fate. No action or event is right or wrong, they just are. To say that an action or an event in this world is evil or wrong is to judge it against a moral standard the universe should be following. This implies a moral lawgiver behind the universe as moral standards are only held in minds. Atheist have always had trouble with the Naturalistic Fallacy of trying to get an “ought” from and “is’. The laws of nature (without God) produce what “is”, but morality is what we “ought” to do. But what every happens in nature is what it is and one cannot say this “ought” to have not happened and that it is wrong in a Godless universe. If all that exists is nature (the material world of matter) then we are a part of nature and follow its laws too. Without God suffering become meaningless and those who experience it have no hope for their pain or illusion. The Atheists problem is that he has a belief in evil, and objective right and wrong most of the time, but if there is no God this is just a belief that is an illusion trapped in ones mind that doesn’t correspond to reality.
C.S.Lewis once said,
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A Man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of straight line. What was I comparing the universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I , who was supposed to be part of the show find myself in such violent reaction against it?”
Pain and suffering is real, but atheism does not give any answer to the problem. It in fact turns us into being insane. The question must be asked, can God explain it? I think all of us can look out into the world and see something is wrong. This world is not perfect which implies some thing has gone wrong.
C.S.Lewis also said,
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world”
Just maybe this world of pain and suffering is a sign for us to look up to the standard we wish this universe were following. Maybe the sting of pain cracks our conscience to search for the good (God). I want to make it clear here, not everything thing that goes wrong in our lives is our fault.
As for the charge that an all-loving God must be evil if people suffer in this world is not a very strong case. I don’t have all the answers, but it is more than atheism can give.
One argument can be stated to answer this charge,
1. An all-good God will create the best world that is possible for perfection
2. An all-powerful God can create only what is logically possible
3. An all-knowing God knows what is all-good and creates humans with the gift of freewill.
4. The gift of freedom (which evolution denies) is a good power, but if abused by free creatures produces moral evil.
5. It was not within Gods logical power to create a world containing moral goodness, but no moral evil.
6. Therefore God is not evil and evil is not inconstant with the existence of God.
Now if true goodness or love has any value at all it must be done freely and humans have been given the gift of freedom. Forced love is rape! No one values love from a spouse or a lover, which is not from a pure motive.
One must also define and brake down evil and suffering, as it is not only felt from the abuse of free will.
Moral Evil
Moral evil looks at the relationship of free creatures with God. It covers the subject of moral responsibility as free agents, as the cause of evil. When we abuse our freewill and reject God’s moral standards, evil is produced. Even mental deficiencies can result from something one person does to another. God can heal people instantly, but most of these occurrences that I have seen have been when God saves some one radically.
Natural Evil
Because of the fall creation has also suffered and has been cursed. But natural evil looks at acts that are produced by physical pain or acts of nature. Some times fires or earthquakes can cause human suffering, misshapen limbs, blindness. Some times human actions again can cause genetic malfunctions which can result in birth defects resulting from evil done by the parents during pregnancy (Expectant mother using drugs or alcohol heavily can negatively affect the developing fetus). We must take responsibility for our actions. Some times we do everything right, but others inflict suffering on us!
Our freedom for greed and lust could also be the cause of the brake down of the environment, with our pollution and extreme life-style. Maybe God is not the one to blame for everything as all the good we experiences comes from him too.
Can anything come out of suffering?
The sting of suffering seems to bring out true love out of us. It draws love out of us which probable would never be manifested unless suffering was he. We can talk about love, kindness, but it’s only under suffering that we can really see how we act to others. It test’s our heart and motives to see if they are real.
1. obedience is learnt from suffering
2. suffering produces character
3. Suffering can bring us closer in love to a greater bond.
4. True love suffer long, thinks of others and is selfless
5. Biological pain warns us of danger
6. The virtue of compassion, patience and mercy can not be produced without tribulation, or mercy without tragedy.
7. God can bring good out of evil
8. Maybe the sting of pain leads us to the road of goodness and love for others.
9. The Nazi’s showed the world what happens when you de-value the dignity and value of human life created in the image of God. It has made a powerful stamp on the world that humans are worth more.
10 Temptation, through they make us do dumb things, show us what is really in us and who we really are inside. It’s almost like a gift if used right.
11. Even Jesus had do suffer for the whole world to demonstrate true love.
Religion is the cause of all wars!
A third objection that is raised again God and Christianity is that the belief in God has caused more suffering and wars on earth then non-belief. This is a favorite argument from some of the popular atheist spokesmen. You may want to look at Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod in their massive 1502 page 3-volume encyclopedia of war. It is compiled by nine reputable professors of history, including the director of the Centre of Military history and the former head of the Centre for Defence studies. They conclude that from what we know from history there have been about 1763 wars and only 123 have been over religion. This makes religion 6.98 percent accountable. If you take away the wars from ‘Muslim’s it drops down to 3.23 percent.
I dont think the evidence proves that religion is the cause of war or mass murdering.
Here is another source from “Stand to Reason”
A blight on Christianity? Certainty, Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religion criminals have committed.
My point is not that Christians or religious people aren’t vulnerable to committing terrible crimes. Certainly they are. But it is not religion that produces these things; it is the denial of Biblical religion that generally leads to these kinds of things. The statistics that are the result of irreligious genocide stagger the imagination.
My source is The Guinness Book of World Records . Look up the category “Judicial” and under the subject of “Crimes: Mass Killings,” the greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign against the government of another is 26.3 million Chinese during the regime of Mao Tse Tung between the years of 1949 and May 1965. The Walker Report published by the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed the parameters of the total death toll in China since 1949 between 32 and 61.7 million people. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by Figaro magazine on November 5, 1978.
In the U.S.S.R. the Nobel Prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimates the loss of life from state repression and terrorism from October 1917 to December 1959 under Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev at 66.7 million.
Finally, in Cambodia (and this was close to me because I lived in Thailand in 1982 working with the broken pieces of the Cambodian holocaust from 1975 to 1979) “as a percentage of a nation’s total population, the worst genocide appears to be that in Cambodia, formerly Kampuchea. According to the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, more than one third of the eight million Khmer were killed between April 17, 1975 and January 1979. One third of the entire country was put to death under the rule of Pol Pot, the founder of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. During that time, towns, money and property were abolished. Economic execution by bayonet and club was introduced for such offenses as falling asleep during the day, asking too many questions, playing non-communist music, being old and feeble, being the offspring of an undesirable, or being too well educated. In fact, deaths in the Tuol Sleng interrogation center in Phnom Penh, which is the capitol of Kampuchea, reached 582 in a day.”
Then in Chinese history of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries there were three periods of wholesale massacre. The numbers of victims attributed to these events are assertions rather than reliable estimates. The figures put on the Mongolian invasion of northern China form 1210 to 1219 and from 1311 to 1340 are both on the order of 35 million people. While the number of victims of bandit leader Chang Hsien-Chung, known as the Yellow Tiger, from 1643 to 1647 in the Szechwan province has been put at 40 million people.
China under Mao Tse Tung, 26.3 million Chinese. According the Walker Report, 63.7 million over the whole period of time of the Communist revolution in China. Solzhenitsyn says the Soviet Union put to death 66.7 million people. Kampuchea destroyed one third of their entire population of eight million Cambodians. The Chinese at two different times in medieval history, somewhere in the vicinity of 35 million and 40 million people. Ladies and gentlemen, make note that these deaths were the result of organizations or points of view or ideologies that had left God out of the equation. None of these involve religion. And all but the very last actually assert atheism.
Hitler
Then we have the millions killed by Hitler and his men. Many people try and make the claim that Hitler was a Christian but this is not true. As I have said before its one thing to call yourself a Christian and another thing to be a Christian.
Atheists charge that Christianity was the course of anti-Semitism, which led to the Holocaust. But this is clearly false. Has no one read that Hitler dabbled in the occult, that he presented the writings of Nietzsche (The most atheistic philosophy ever written) to Stalin and Mussolini. That Hitler also slaughtered many other races apart from Jews. Many Russian atheists were killed too and Hitler’s words written on one of the gas ovens in Auschwitz states “I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of a conscience, imperious relentless and cruel.” Hitler believed in evolution that the strong must wipe out the inferior races. This is very different from Jesus who spent all his time with the poor and broken. He even said “ I have not come for the righteous, but for the unrighteous.”
Friday, September 12, 2008
Part Two
God and Morality
So far in our study we have seen that the question of what goodness is and how one is to find a reference point to draw the conclusion has been fruitless. I hope I have shown in some way the almost impossibility of morality linked to goodness from an atheistic worldview. In this section we will see where God’s existence plays in the grounding of morality and goodness.
Reality exists
When we reflect on life we soon come to the conclusion that we exist and that we are part of some reality. Did this reality always exist or did it come into existence? If the world which we find our-selves in has always existed then the world is eternal, self-existent. But if the world has not existed forever and has come into existence then there must be another source for its existence. Some where in the chain of cause and effect there has to be an eternal ultimate starting point, an uncaused entity.
Reality exists, so there must be an eternal foundation for its existence. As reality can not come into existence from nothing. Nothing has no power and from nothing, nothing comes. To explain it simple there has to be a starting point, which does not need a cause for its existence.
This foundation is either rational or impersonal, God or the universe. If it is God and science is correct, the universe had a beginning then God is the eternal foundation for all finite reality. If it is not God then the universe is impersonal (irrational) with no meaning to it or behind it. Also this universe would have to of had existed forever, being eternal.
The universe is not eternal
That fact that science has proved the universe came into beginning from the Big Bang means that it is not eternal and needs a cause for its existence. There are only two options to chose form. The source is a rational eternal God who projects his thoughts into reality or the universe comes into being by chance. Ether the universe is governed by a rational mind or it is governed by irrational chance.
The Nature of the First Cause
It therefore follows that the universe has an external cause. Conceptual analysis enables us to recover a number of striking properties, which must be possessed by such an entity.
For as the cause of space and time in to existence, this entity must transcend space and time and therefore exist atemporally and non-spatially. This transcendent cause must therefore be changeless and immaterial, since timelessness entails changelessness, and changelessness implies immateriality. Such a cause must be beginningless and uncaused. This entity must also be unimaginably powerful since it created the universe without any material cause.
Such a transcendent cause is also personal. Reasons for this imply that there are only two types of causal explanations. The first being scientific explanation in terms of laws and initial conditions and personal explanations in terms of agents and their wills. Now the first is impossible as a first state of the universe cannot be a scientific explanation, since there is nothing before it and cannot be accounted for in terms of laws operating on initial conditions (as in the universe). It can only be accounted for in terms of agent and his volition’s, a personal explanation. Second the personhood of the cause of the universe is implied by its timelessness and immateriality. This being is a personal mind who has a sufficient reason for the universe and cause for it. Giving the universe complete meaning and purpose and rational, moral order in relationship.
The cause of the universe’s beginning is a personal agent who freely chooses to create a universe in time. This is what is called “agent causation” and this free choice does not need a material cause, as it is a mental choice, being “of” or “about” something.
John Frame says in his book “The Doctrine of the Christian Life”
“As Lord, God is, first of all personal, for Lord is proper name. Thus the Bible proclaims that ultimate reality, the Supreme Being, is not an impersonal force like gravity or electromagnetism, or even a set of super-strings, but a person; one who thinks, speaks, feels, loves, and acts with purpose. As a purpose, he uses the impersonal realities of the universe for his own purposes and to his own glory. Modern secular thought is profoundly impersonalistic, holding that persons are ultimately reducible to things and forces, to matter, motion, time, and chance. Scripture denies this impersonalism, insisting that all reality, including all value comes from a supreme personal being”.
Because God is eternal he is eternal value and the highest standard and original source of all value that we find in the finite universe. His being and nature is Holy and is the norm of all goodness. Without God’s existence nothing in the universe has any distinct value at all.
For the Christian all the facts of the universe and all facts of value are part of God’s personal plan and serve his personal purpose; all of the laws by which we relate the facts (weather conceptually, logically, or causally) are a reflection of God’s personal mind and his ordering of reality. Man’s mind was created to imitate God’s thinking with respect to those personally qualified facts and personally qualified laws. God’s personal influence over all the objects of knowledge as well as the mind of man, and his purpose to have man understand and control the facts of his environment, provide for the possibility of the mind accurately apprehending the extramental world. Everything and every event must by ultimately related to God (who controls the relations between things and between events) in order to be part of a coherent and intelligible system.
Objectivity and Inwardness
Because God is morally good and is bound by his good nature his sovereignty governs over all our ethical lives. First by his control, God plans and rules nature and history, second by his authority, he speaks to us clearly, telling us what norms govern our behavior, and third, by his covenant presence. This is where God commits himself to walk with us in our conscience, and speak to us from the moral law which guide’s us to keep his commandments.
The Bible teaches that the law of God is objective in the sense that its meaning does not depend on us. It comes from God’s authoritative word.
William Lane Craig makes the point,
“So what do we mean by an Objective moral Value, well to say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or evil independently of whether any human being believes it to be so. That is if a bomb hit the world and all that was left were pedophiles or rapists would there actions still be objectively wrong? Similarly to say that we have objective moral duties is to say that certain actions are right or wrong for us independently of whether any human being believes them to be so.
For example to say that the Holocaust was objectively wrong is to say that it was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still be wrong even if they brain washed every body else to think it was right.”
But God is not pleased with merely external obedience. He wants his word to be written on the human heart, where it motivates us from within. God writes his moral law on the hearts of his people. In the Christian worldview, moral standards are both objective and inward.
John Frame says,
“Those who deny that worldview must seek objectivity in an unknowable realm, where the moral standard cannot be known at all, let alone objective. They seek inwardness by making each person his own moral standard. But that dispenses with all objectivity and leaves us with nothing to internalize.”
It is God who arranges nature and history so that good act’s have beneficial consequences, to himself, to the ethical agent, and to other persons. The God of scripture is the author of the situation, the Word, and the moral self, so that the three are fully consistent with one another. He ordains history, so that people will find their ultimate blessings in doing their duty. He makes us in his image, so that our greatest personal fulfillment occurs in seeking his glory in history.
Without God it is impossible to have a system of ethics that brings ultimate fulfillment and blessings to all people, as each individual is constantly lost in his own subjectivity.
God is not only the chief norm and chief fact, but also the chief person (personality). He is not only our law and our situation, but also our example of holiness, righteousness and love. He is good, as only a person can be and he is good because that is an attribute of his nature, God is eternal goodness. The first objection that is given by Atheist Philosophers is “Is what God commands good because he says it is or because it corresponds to a standard of goodness independent of his own choices, which implies another standard”. To most people the answer is obvious, God’s commandments are good because they flow from his eternal nature which is good.
The Euthyphro Argument Fails
When it comes to establishing absolute moral standards in God, atheists continue to use the Euthuphro argument to try and trap God and discredit his standard for goodness. The Euthyphro dilemma raised by Socrates was: "Is what is holy, holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?" Atheist are quick to see that if what is good is based on what God commands then anything that God commands even if it was rape would by logic be good. So atheist imply that for God to be good there must be an independent moral standard of “Goodness” that judges God actions.
John Frame says in his book “The Doctrine of God”
“So Plato, in Euthyphro, poses the question of whether piety is what the gods say it is, or whether the gods command piety because of its intrinsic nature, apart from their own wishes. In Plato’s mind, the former makes the nature of piety arbitrary, one that could change on the whim of a god. But the second alternative, which Plato certainly prefers, means that piety is independent of the will of the gods, something to which the gods opinions are subject.”
Atheists like this so called trap because to stop God having relative standards there must be an eternal abstract standard that judges God’s acts. They like it because even if there were no God, there would still be an objective standard by which atheists can establish objective morality.
The Atheist Philosopher Michael Martin says,
“For example, suppose God condemns rape because of his just and merciful character. According to this independent standard of goodness, being merciful and just is precisely what a good character involves. In this case, even if God did not exist, one could say that a merciful and just character is good. Human beings could use this standard to evaluate peoples' character and action based on this character. They could do this whether or not God exists.”
So Martin wonders why the non-existence of God would adversely affect the goodness of mercy, compassion, and justice.
The problem with this argument is that ‘goodness” is not based on what ever God says. Goodness is the eternal nature of God and God is bound by his perfect nature to act “good”. God would not command people to rape or torture people because it is against his perfect nature. If God is the eternal uncaused cause of everything else that exist then he is the eternal source for moral goodness, which everything else takes its existence from.
Paul Copan makes a good point when he says,
“The "reasons" Martin offers for why rape is wrong already assume the dignity of human beings, the existence of universal human rights, an objective purpose/end for human existence, moral obligation, and moral responsibility. Thus Martin needs to offer a more robust explanation for these assumptions, but we have seen that the atheistic worldview lacks such resources while the theistic perspective anticipates a moral universe.”
In fact the very argument can be reversed back on to the atheist, for if objective moral properties just exist out in the universe independent of humans, then are they good because they are good or is there some independent standard of good to which they conform?" Thus the alleged dilemma Martin claims the theist faces is the very same one the atheist does. So there is no actual advantage for the atheist in presenting this challenge. The same potential charges of arbitrariness or the existence of some autonomous moral standard (such as platonic Forms) still apply. If the atheist claims that he is not being arbitrary, then why should the theist's viewpoint be considered any less arbitrary? The sword cuts both ways. It is more intelligence to place the moral law’s existence in a perfect moral being, then floating in impersonal irrational matter/Atoms independent of a mind.
Paul Copan concludes with,
“The theist has a plausible basis for this: human beings have value by virtue of their personhood, which is derived from the personhood of God? The ultimately valuable Being. Having been created in the image of God gives human beings their value. Their nature? with its moral, rational, and spiritual capacities? resemble God's. So to assume morality without God seems to miss the ontological implications of the question. That is, if there is no personal God to bestow personhood? And its attendant intrinsic dignity and moral responsibility, then we can't rightly say, "I can be a person with intrinsic dignity and moral responsibility even if God doesn't exist."
God’s Image and Human Goodness
God has made human beings to be his image and this intention is for his own union of goodness and being to be reflected in us. This image is never quite the same as God’s. As we are finite and stuck in our fallen nature and he is sinless and God. But God is the ultimate norm for all things. God’s very nature is normative and is our source of ethical obligation. There are three necessary conditions for human good works; right motive, right standard, and right goal, Gods’ glory.
The Three Transcendentals
Truth, Goodness and Beauty are three attributes of God and they are the source for our norms and experiences of them. God is the eternal interpretation of all finite existence.
These attributes are part of God’s being and are ontological founded.
Peter Kreeft says in his Essay in the book C. S. Lewis as Philosopher; Truth, Goodness and Beauty,
“The order of these three transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty is ontologically founded. Truth is defined by Being, for truth is the effulgence of Being, the revelation of Being, the Word of Being. Truth is not defined by consciousness, which conforms to Being in knowing it. Goodness is defined by truth, not by will, which is good only when it conforms to the truth of Being. And beauty is defined by goodness, objectively real goodness, not by subjective desire or pleasure or feeling or imagination, all of which should conform to it.”
When we reflect God’s image we will walk in his truth, manifest his goodness and see the beauty of his ways as we experience the fullness of his nature.
As Psalm 19;7-9 says,
“The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul, the testimony of the Lord is sure making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right rejoicing the heart, the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean enduring forever, the rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
God is our truth and light for our guidance, his word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. This is why Jesus said “I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
So far in our study we have seen that the question of what goodness is and how one is to find a reference point to draw the conclusion has been fruitless. I hope I have shown in some way the almost impossibility of morality linked to goodness from an atheistic worldview. In this section we will see where God’s existence plays in the grounding of morality and goodness.
Reality exists
When we reflect on life we soon come to the conclusion that we exist and that we are part of some reality. Did this reality always exist or did it come into existence? If the world which we find our-selves in has always existed then the world is eternal, self-existent. But if the world has not existed forever and has come into existence then there must be another source for its existence. Some where in the chain of cause and effect there has to be an eternal ultimate starting point, an uncaused entity.
Reality exists, so there must be an eternal foundation for its existence. As reality can not come into existence from nothing. Nothing has no power and from nothing, nothing comes. To explain it simple there has to be a starting point, which does not need a cause for its existence.
This foundation is either rational or impersonal, God or the universe. If it is God and science is correct, the universe had a beginning then God is the eternal foundation for all finite reality. If it is not God then the universe is impersonal (irrational) with no meaning to it or behind it. Also this universe would have to of had existed forever, being eternal.
The universe is not eternal
That fact that science has proved the universe came into beginning from the Big Bang means that it is not eternal and needs a cause for its existence. There are only two options to chose form. The source is a rational eternal God who projects his thoughts into reality or the universe comes into being by chance. Ether the universe is governed by a rational mind or it is governed by irrational chance.
The Nature of the First Cause
It therefore follows that the universe has an external cause. Conceptual analysis enables us to recover a number of striking properties, which must be possessed by such an entity.
For as the cause of space and time in to existence, this entity must transcend space and time and therefore exist atemporally and non-spatially. This transcendent cause must therefore be changeless and immaterial, since timelessness entails changelessness, and changelessness implies immateriality. Such a cause must be beginningless and uncaused. This entity must also be unimaginably powerful since it created the universe without any material cause.
Such a transcendent cause is also personal. Reasons for this imply that there are only two types of causal explanations. The first being scientific explanation in terms of laws and initial conditions and personal explanations in terms of agents and their wills. Now the first is impossible as a first state of the universe cannot be a scientific explanation, since there is nothing before it and cannot be accounted for in terms of laws operating on initial conditions (as in the universe). It can only be accounted for in terms of agent and his volition’s, a personal explanation. Second the personhood of the cause of the universe is implied by its timelessness and immateriality. This being is a personal mind who has a sufficient reason for the universe and cause for it. Giving the universe complete meaning and purpose and rational, moral order in relationship.
The cause of the universe’s beginning is a personal agent who freely chooses to create a universe in time. This is what is called “agent causation” and this free choice does not need a material cause, as it is a mental choice, being “of” or “about” something.
John Frame says in his book “The Doctrine of the Christian Life”
“As Lord, God is, first of all personal, for Lord is proper name. Thus the Bible proclaims that ultimate reality, the Supreme Being, is not an impersonal force like gravity or electromagnetism, or even a set of super-strings, but a person; one who thinks, speaks, feels, loves, and acts with purpose. As a purpose, he uses the impersonal realities of the universe for his own purposes and to his own glory. Modern secular thought is profoundly impersonalistic, holding that persons are ultimately reducible to things and forces, to matter, motion, time, and chance. Scripture denies this impersonalism, insisting that all reality, including all value comes from a supreme personal being”.
Because God is eternal he is eternal value and the highest standard and original source of all value that we find in the finite universe. His being and nature is Holy and is the norm of all goodness. Without God’s existence nothing in the universe has any distinct value at all.
For the Christian all the facts of the universe and all facts of value are part of God’s personal plan and serve his personal purpose; all of the laws by which we relate the facts (weather conceptually, logically, or causally) are a reflection of God’s personal mind and his ordering of reality. Man’s mind was created to imitate God’s thinking with respect to those personally qualified facts and personally qualified laws. God’s personal influence over all the objects of knowledge as well as the mind of man, and his purpose to have man understand and control the facts of his environment, provide for the possibility of the mind accurately apprehending the extramental world. Everything and every event must by ultimately related to God (who controls the relations between things and between events) in order to be part of a coherent and intelligible system.
Objectivity and Inwardness
Because God is morally good and is bound by his good nature his sovereignty governs over all our ethical lives. First by his control, God plans and rules nature and history, second by his authority, he speaks to us clearly, telling us what norms govern our behavior, and third, by his covenant presence. This is where God commits himself to walk with us in our conscience, and speak to us from the moral law which guide’s us to keep his commandments.
The Bible teaches that the law of God is objective in the sense that its meaning does not depend on us. It comes from God’s authoritative word.
William Lane Craig makes the point,
“So what do we mean by an Objective moral Value, well to say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or evil independently of whether any human being believes it to be so. That is if a bomb hit the world and all that was left were pedophiles or rapists would there actions still be objectively wrong? Similarly to say that we have objective moral duties is to say that certain actions are right or wrong for us independently of whether any human being believes them to be so.
For example to say that the Holocaust was objectively wrong is to say that it was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still be wrong even if they brain washed every body else to think it was right.”
But God is not pleased with merely external obedience. He wants his word to be written on the human heart, where it motivates us from within. God writes his moral law on the hearts of his people. In the Christian worldview, moral standards are both objective and inward.
John Frame says,
“Those who deny that worldview must seek objectivity in an unknowable realm, where the moral standard cannot be known at all, let alone objective. They seek inwardness by making each person his own moral standard. But that dispenses with all objectivity and leaves us with nothing to internalize.”
It is God who arranges nature and history so that good act’s have beneficial consequences, to himself, to the ethical agent, and to other persons. The God of scripture is the author of the situation, the Word, and the moral self, so that the three are fully consistent with one another. He ordains history, so that people will find their ultimate blessings in doing their duty. He makes us in his image, so that our greatest personal fulfillment occurs in seeking his glory in history.
Without God it is impossible to have a system of ethics that brings ultimate fulfillment and blessings to all people, as each individual is constantly lost in his own subjectivity.
God is not only the chief norm and chief fact, but also the chief person (personality). He is not only our law and our situation, but also our example of holiness, righteousness and love. He is good, as only a person can be and he is good because that is an attribute of his nature, God is eternal goodness. The first objection that is given by Atheist Philosophers is “Is what God commands good because he says it is or because it corresponds to a standard of goodness independent of his own choices, which implies another standard”. To most people the answer is obvious, God’s commandments are good because they flow from his eternal nature which is good.
The Euthyphro Argument Fails
When it comes to establishing absolute moral standards in God, atheists continue to use the Euthuphro argument to try and trap God and discredit his standard for goodness. The Euthyphro dilemma raised by Socrates was: "Is what is holy, holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?" Atheist are quick to see that if what is good is based on what God commands then anything that God commands even if it was rape would by logic be good. So atheist imply that for God to be good there must be an independent moral standard of “Goodness” that judges God actions.
John Frame says in his book “The Doctrine of God”
“So Plato, in Euthyphro, poses the question of whether piety is what the gods say it is, or whether the gods command piety because of its intrinsic nature, apart from their own wishes. In Plato’s mind, the former makes the nature of piety arbitrary, one that could change on the whim of a god. But the second alternative, which Plato certainly prefers, means that piety is independent of the will of the gods, something to which the gods opinions are subject.”
Atheists like this so called trap because to stop God having relative standards there must be an eternal abstract standard that judges God’s acts. They like it because even if there were no God, there would still be an objective standard by which atheists can establish objective morality.
The Atheist Philosopher Michael Martin says,
“For example, suppose God condemns rape because of his just and merciful character. According to this independent standard of goodness, being merciful and just is precisely what a good character involves. In this case, even if God did not exist, one could say that a merciful and just character is good. Human beings could use this standard to evaluate peoples' character and action based on this character. They could do this whether or not God exists.”
So Martin wonders why the non-existence of God would adversely affect the goodness of mercy, compassion, and justice.
The problem with this argument is that ‘goodness” is not based on what ever God says. Goodness is the eternal nature of God and God is bound by his perfect nature to act “good”. God would not command people to rape or torture people because it is against his perfect nature. If God is the eternal uncaused cause of everything else that exist then he is the eternal source for moral goodness, which everything else takes its existence from.
Paul Copan makes a good point when he says,
“The "reasons" Martin offers for why rape is wrong already assume the dignity of human beings, the existence of universal human rights, an objective purpose/end for human existence, moral obligation, and moral responsibility. Thus Martin needs to offer a more robust explanation for these assumptions, but we have seen that the atheistic worldview lacks such resources while the theistic perspective anticipates a moral universe.”
In fact the very argument can be reversed back on to the atheist, for if objective moral properties just exist out in the universe independent of humans, then are they good because they are good or is there some independent standard of good to which they conform?" Thus the alleged dilemma Martin claims the theist faces is the very same one the atheist does. So there is no actual advantage for the atheist in presenting this challenge. The same potential charges of arbitrariness or the existence of some autonomous moral standard (such as platonic Forms) still apply. If the atheist claims that he is not being arbitrary, then why should the theist's viewpoint be considered any less arbitrary? The sword cuts both ways. It is more intelligence to place the moral law’s existence in a perfect moral being, then floating in impersonal irrational matter/Atoms independent of a mind.
Paul Copan concludes with,
“The theist has a plausible basis for this: human beings have value by virtue of their personhood, which is derived from the personhood of God? The ultimately valuable Being. Having been created in the image of God gives human beings their value. Their nature? with its moral, rational, and spiritual capacities? resemble God's. So to assume morality without God seems to miss the ontological implications of the question. That is, if there is no personal God to bestow personhood? And its attendant intrinsic dignity and moral responsibility, then we can't rightly say, "I can be a person with intrinsic dignity and moral responsibility even if God doesn't exist."
God’s Image and Human Goodness
God has made human beings to be his image and this intention is for his own union of goodness and being to be reflected in us. This image is never quite the same as God’s. As we are finite and stuck in our fallen nature and he is sinless and God. But God is the ultimate norm for all things. God’s very nature is normative and is our source of ethical obligation. There are three necessary conditions for human good works; right motive, right standard, and right goal, Gods’ glory.
The Three Transcendentals
Truth, Goodness and Beauty are three attributes of God and they are the source for our norms and experiences of them. God is the eternal interpretation of all finite existence.
These attributes are part of God’s being and are ontological founded.
Peter Kreeft says in his Essay in the book C. S. Lewis as Philosopher; Truth, Goodness and Beauty,
“The order of these three transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty is ontologically founded. Truth is defined by Being, for truth is the effulgence of Being, the revelation of Being, the Word of Being. Truth is not defined by consciousness, which conforms to Being in knowing it. Goodness is defined by truth, not by will, which is good only when it conforms to the truth of Being. And beauty is defined by goodness, objectively real goodness, not by subjective desire or pleasure or feeling or imagination, all of which should conform to it.”
When we reflect God’s image we will walk in his truth, manifest his goodness and see the beauty of his ways as we experience the fullness of his nature.
As Psalm 19;7-9 says,
“The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul, the testimony of the Lord is sure making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right rejoicing the heart, the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean enduring forever, the rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
God is our truth and light for our guidance, his word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. This is why Jesus said “I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Sunday, September 7, 2008
The Moral Question (Part 1)
Here is the start of me putting my notes into course notes...This is part 1
In our present age the idea of morality has become an individual thing. People these days want freedom and liberty to express their own true image. This image representing their own personal choices, one that has not been imposed on them or is part of societies conditioning from the majority. Instead of holding the traditional view that morality is what we ought to do, it has evolved in to what we prefer or what we desire to do. The problem with this definition is that it confuses the question of what morality is? I will never forget a professor who once asked the question “What is the difference between some one who chooses their own morality and some one who has no morality?” The answer was “that there is no different as they both do what ever they want to do”. So is morality what we want to do or is it what we ought/should do? I mean is there anything that no one should ever do because it is just off the list as being objectively wrong.
These kinds of definitions is what drives society into the world of relativism where no one really knows where they stand with each other as everybody has there own morality. It used to be held that the majority of people had a moral sense that something’s were just wrong independent of whether some ones feelings disagreed with the ruling.
This makes us have to reflect on what is the justification for making these claims, where does one get the idea that something’s are just wrong or is that from just being conditioned by earlier generations opinions to think that some acts are objectively wrong.
Is the question of God’s existence relevant to the question of morality or can it be completely explained by a naturalistic theory. It is these questions that we will be looking at as we search for a foundation for morality. The first question we will look at is “Correct function and Reason”.
Correct Function and Reason
Have you ever asked your self “what is the good life”. What is a good person and what is the standard of goodness. Because the question is obviously very important, for how is one to guide their life morally if one has no idea of what goodness is.
What is a good person? The answer comes forth at once, A good person is one who performs efficiently or well the function of a human being. And this at once invites the further question “What is the function of a human being? Now this question is not asking what is the function of this or that person, but what is the function of a person, just as a human being might be. This is a difficult question to answer as if God is rejected then nature is left to explain reality and human nature by pure fate. If humans have not been created to function in a particular correct way then it is hard to know how a human should act. As humans can do many actions and desire many things, are all these free options because we are able to perform them or do some actions go against a moral norm.
If God is taken out of the picture, the idea of a person functioning correctly while avoiding other actions destroys any foundation of a designed morality. That humans are inherently good manifesting this designed character which seeks to express these moral standards is not an option.
Now if humans are not created for a correct function then it is nonsense to talk about people doing good and evil. It is also nonsense to say that humans are inherently good, as this implies they have been created good to act good, which implies they have been created according to a moral absolute standard that transcends them. If evolution is true then humans have no correct function and the idea of acting good is meaningless. All humans are, are machines who struggle over desires. If humans are not inherently good and created in the image of God with a moral law written on their hearts, reason driven by blind will has no hope in finding what goodness is in itself.
So if there is no created moral law in humans can we still understand right and wrong by using human reason. Can the power of rational thought tell us how we should act?
The Power of Reasoning
How is one to define what “good” is by using their faculties of reasoning. Plato some how thought that reason could some-how transcend into the eternal realm of forms and see the form of goodness. For Plato this was his reference point to know the good, but the problem was the form had no contents.
Can one see what is “good” by watching the empirical world of physical actions?
The Atheist Philosopher Richard Taylor says in his book “Good and Evil”,
“A thing is not seen to be good by the bodily eye, this was perfectly obvious to Plato, as it has been to all-moral rationalists. We can with our eyes see things, but we cannot in that way see that they are good. So it must be by our reason that we somehow apprehend goodness.”
But Taylor goes on to say,
“Reason by itself can make no distinction whatsoever between what is good and what is not. Reason can only and within limits see what is, and can never declare whether it ought to be so”
Taylor is correct in his thinking and it has become known today as the naturalistic fallacy. This is trying to look at nature which is a description of what “is’ and conclude an “ought” in the process. Looking at nature tells us what “is’ happening, but it doesn’t tell us what we “ought” or “ought not” to do. You can not get an “ought” from an “is”.
As John Frame says “One can not draw moral conclusions from non-moral acts”. The problem is that observing facts of nature of which we are a part of does not reveal to us moral facts. The attempt to derive moral principles from impersonal realities is also a violation of logic. Facts can be learned through observation and the scientific method. But moral obligations cannot be seen and heard. They cannot be observed. So all we are doing is labeling impersonal matter with abstract concepts and what is the relationship between the rational and the irrational, nothing! They don’t connect in any rational way. Without a “norm” our concepts are just subjective thoughts floating in our heads relating to nothing.
One may deduce moral conclusions from moral facts, but not from non-moral facts.
I quote another thinker who I think puts an end to this question of whether “reason” can justify being moral or is able to find what is good without God,
"Any reason for being moral must be either a moral or a nonmoral reason. If it is moral, then it cannot really be a reason for being moral, since you would have to be already inside morality in order to accept it. A nonmoral reason, on the other hand, cannot be a reason for being moral; morality requires a purity of motive, a basically moral intentionality, and that is destroyed by any nonmoral inducement. Hence there can be no reason for being moral, and morality presents itself as an unmediated demand, a categorical imperative."
It seems that if we reject that we have been created inherently good and that reason can not find a reference point for defining the good, goodness must be subjective.
If morality become subjective to personal tastes and preferences then we are left with any of these options,
Subjectivism; the subjectivity of goodness and badness.
Emotivism; the reduction of goodness and badness to emotion.
Positivism; the idea that man posits values with his will, invents goodness and badness.
Cultural relativism, or conventionalism, the relativity of goodness and badness.
Historicism; the relativity of goodness and badness to time.
Utilitarianism; the reduction of goodness to utility, or efficiency.
Instinctualism; the reduction of goodness to biological instinct.
Hedonism; the reduction of goodness to pleasure.
Egotism; the reduction of goodness to enlightened selfishness.
Pragmatism; the weakness of goodness and the power of badness.
Intuitionalsim; based on ones gut feelings.
Rationalism; reduction to reasoning upon ones own reasons for his desires
Are we restricted in having to make goodness a subjective entity. Is goodness just an empty word that means this is what I feel and want? The Atheist Richard Dawkins says,
“There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference”.
Why be Moral at All?
Another question must be asked, if morality is reduced to the subjective and reason has no way of defining what is right or wrong “Why should we be moral at all?” Some might think because without it we can’t gain anything from this world, as our environment would be too dangerous for us to seek our desires. So it pays to live in an agreed upon social contract so that we can gain more than if we didn’t. But why should we be concerned about this? If there is no purpose for us being here or no correct way to function why should we care about others or whether we live or die. Why not live the ethics of the survival of the fittest and wipe every body else off the planet. In the end there really is no reason why we should be moral or why we have an obligation to respect others.
Moral systems
Some atheist have tried to come up with moral systems that respects peoples different views, but still bind each other to a moral system of principles. Its like being a moral relativist, but bound by an absolute ethical principle. But these principles fail because there is no definition of what “goodness” is. Some atheists like to think that the golden rule from the Bible can be easily adopted without holding on to a belief in God or in an objective standard.
But I don’t think it is possible. The golden rule being “Do unto others, what you would have done unto you”.
Vox Day makes a good point in his book “The Irrational Atheist”
The problem is that Christianity’s morality is not just based on the golden rule, which states that man should not do to others what he would not have them do to him. It is based on doing the Fathers perfect (God’s) objective, absolute moral will. And this standard seems to promote the highest ethical blessing to all people. But just stating the above cannot provide us with a functional moral system.
Obviously a moral system based on loving the Lord your God and obediently submitting your will to his is a very different moral system and far more objective one than the Golden rule, which is not only entirely subjective, but incapable of accounting for either rational calculation or human psychopathy. It provides no moral basis to criticize a man for crawling into Adriana’s bed unannounced so long as he harbors no desire to bar her from doing the same to him, and sanctions a thief to steal on the grounds of a belief that he wouldn’t miss that which was stolen were the thief himself the prospective victim. The Golden rule is also to easily transformed into the idea of doing unto others as you believe they wish to do unto you.
Do what you want just as long as you don’t hurt anyone?
Have you every heard the saying which tries to establish an ethical foundation that “You can do what you want just as long as you don’t hurt anyone.” I used to think that this claim was pretty hard to fault until I looked at the deeper motivations of those who proclaim this ethical stance. The first question that has always jumped into my mind has been “How does one define hurt”. Is morality just based on what reactions happen with physical actions or is morality a little deeper. Is the “hurt” defined from the physical, emotional or motive or all three? And who defines here?
In our society today many hold on to the ethical system of relativism. That there is no absolute moral standard that exists for all people. For many if this did exist it would imply God’s existence. So ethical relativism with its claim that nothing is ultimately good or evil has tried to make a moral system that is livable in a community of people.
But the problem seems to be that every time a relativist tries to live as if they have absolute freedom they slip in some universal moral standards refuting there relativism.
For example, look at the universal, which is implied at the end of these claims,
“People can do what they want, just as long as they don’t hurt anyone.”
“You can do whatever you want, as long as its between two consenting adults”
“You can do whatever you want, as long as its in the privacy of your own home.”
“People can believe and do whatever they want, they should just be tolerant of others views.”
The problem with all these statements is that they start of giving every one absolute freedom, due to their relativism. But because relativism is unlivable they impose an absolute universal claim that every one must abide by, as if it was a universal moral claim independent of any one’s subjective views. We see again that when you try and tinkle with reality, you will be brought back to it. This is the same with rejecting God, try and deny him, you will affirm him. Let’s try this standard and see if it works,
“A man slips a drug in to a women’s drink and she falls a sleep (date rape). He takes precautions so that there are no consequences to his violating her. He does all this without hurting her or even without her knowing what has taken place. Hasn’t the man been able to do what he wants without harming the women. Is this act ok with us? While the man does not physical hurt the women or psychologically harm her because he is gone before she wakes up, we all know this is wrong!” We know that her universal rights which cant be grounded from relativism have been violated. Rape is universally wrong!
Another example, if we were to work in a mental ward with patients who have lost their minds, would we consider it ok to mock them even if they couldn’t understand or relate to reality. To most of us we know our words wouldn’t physical hurt them or mentally hurt them, but it would still be wrong to degrade some ones universal rights of dignity and worth. In our conscious we just seem to know that is wrong and mean.
Another example, you can do whatever you like, between two consenting people. So would we agree to having pedophiles play with your kids?
My last example is if absolute freedom is ok, can one commit suicide? They would not be hurting any body else, but they would be hurting themselves and their friends. I think bringing harm to us is just as bad. We are killing life and a person, ourselves.
Some may object to my claim that rape is universally wrong, but does not the human heart seem even if it can’t justify why, feel that something’s are just objectively wrong.
Would raping or torturing a six-week-old baby for fun ever be right?
Would setting people on fire and gassing them because of their race ever be right?
If there is no such thing as an inherent moral order shaped in us the concept of a moral conscience is an illusion. The acts of nature and the power of reason are just indifferent as Richard Dawkins says. There is no ontological value to any of the actions they are just different. Also if one were to hold to an evolutionary theory of life, rape would have been a normal act along the process of survival. In fact if we are just an evolved animal we are no different from the instincts of the lower animal kingdom.
Is morality even a free rational choice?
Another problem that a rises from a naturalistic explanation of all reality with the story of evolution is that the concept of freewill is an illusion. Do you control your brain or does your brain control you? And what shaped your brain before you become the conscious you? The problem of determinism and randomize has been a major problem for atheistic philosophers.
When one denies that man has a soul and is just part of this materialistic world of matter, that being random atoms colliding together by impersonal forces (The process of evolving by cause and effect mutations) freewill soon vanishes. The idea of responsibility also becomes an illusion and also does the concept of good and evil, right and wrong. One is left stuck in the impersonal, irrational void of chance.
Determinism
The naturalistic view sees human beings as part of the machinery of the universe. In such a world every event is caused by preceding events, which in turn were caused by still earlier events, ad infinitum. Since man is part of this causal chain, his actions are also determined by antecedent causes. Some of these causes are the environment and man's genetic make - up. These are so determinative of what man does that no one could rightly say that a given human action could have been performed otherwise than it in fact was performed. Thus, according to determinism, Bob's sitting on the brown chair rather than the blue sofa is not a free choice but is fully determined by previous factors.
A contemporary example of naturalistic determinism is B F Skinner, the author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity and About Behaviorism. Skinner believes that all human behavior is completely controlled by genetic and environmental factors. These factors do not rule out the fact that human beings make choices; however, they do rule out the possibility that human choices are free. For Skinner, all human choices are determined by antecedent physical causes. Hence, man is viewed as an instrumental cause of his behavior. He is like a knife in the hands of a butcher or a hammer in the grip of a carpenter; he does not originate action but is the instrument through which some other agent performs the action.
A philosophical argument often given for determinism can be stated as follows. All human behavior is either completely uncaused, selfcaused, or caused by something external. Now human behavior cannot be uncaused, for nothing can happen without a cause, nothing cannot cause something. Human behavior cannot be self - caused either, for each act would have to exist prior to itself to cause itself, which is impossible. Thus the only alternative is that all human behavior must be completely caused by something external. Naturalistic determinists maintain that such things as heredity and environment are the external causes, whereas theistic determinists believe that God is the external cause of all human behavior.
There are several problems with this argument. First, the argument misinterprets self determinism as teaching that human acts cause themselves. Self determinists, for example, do not believe that the plays in a football game cause themselves. Rather they maintain that the players execute the plays in a football game. Indeed it is the players that choose to play the game. Thus the cause of a football game being played is to be found within the players of the game. Self determinists would not deny that outside factors, such as heredity, environment, or God, had any influence. However, they would maintain that any one of the people involved in the game could have decided not to play if they had chosen to do so.
Second, the argument for determinisim is self defeating. A determinist must contend that both he and the nondeterminist are determined to believe what they believe. Yet the determinist attempts to convince the nondeterminist that determinism is true and thus ought to be believed. However, on the basis of pure determinism "ought" has no meaning. For "ought" means "could have and should have done otherwise." But this is impossible according to determinism. A way around this objection is for the determinist to argue that he was determined to say that one ought to accept his view. However, his opponent can respond by saying that he was determined to accept a contrary view. Thus determinism cannot eliminate an opposing position. This allows the possibility for a free will position.
Third, and finally, if naturalistic determinism were true, it would be self defeating, false, or be no view at all. For in order to determine whether determinism was true there would need to be a rational basis for thought, otherwise no one could know what was true or false. But naturalistic determinists believe that all thought is the product of nonrational causes, such as the environment, thus making all thought nonrational. On this basis no one could ever know if determinism were true or not. And if one argued that determinism was true, then the position would be self defeating, for a truth claim is being made to the effect that no truth claims can be made. Now if determinism is false, then it can be rationally rejected and other positions considered. But if it is neither true or false, then it is no view at all, since no claim to truth is being made. In either case, naturalistic determinism could not reasonably be held to be true.
Indeterminism
This view contends that human behavior is totally uncaused. There are no antecedent or simultaneous causes of man's actions. Hence, all of man's acts are uncaused; hence, any given human act could have been otherwise. Some indeterminists extend their view beyond human affairs to the entire universe. In support of the indeterminacy of all events Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty is often invoked. This principle states that it is impossible to predict where a subatomic particle is and how fast it is moving at any given moment. Thus, it is argued, since subatomic events are inherently unpredictable, how much more so are complex human acts. From this they conclude that human and nonhuman events are uncaused. Two noted exponents of indeterminism are William James and Charles Peirce.
There are at least three problems with this view. First, Heisenberg's principle does not deal with causality but with predictability. Heisenberg maintained that the movement of subatomic particles was unpredictable and unmeasurable; he did not maintain that their movement was uncaused. Thus this principle cannot be used to support indeterminism. Second, indeterminism unreasonably denies the principle of causality, namely, that every event has a cause. Simply because one does not know what the cause is, is not proof that an event is not caused. Such lack of knowledge only reflects our ignorance. Third, indeterminism strips man of any responsible behavior. If human behavior is uncaused, then no one could be praised or blamed for anything he did. All human acts would be nonrational and nonmoral, thus no act could ever be a reasonable or responsible one.
Is value a property in matter?
The tittle of this section is asking the question “If all that exist is the world of physical matter (atoms and molecules in random motion), what then is value and instinct worth?” Does matter contain the property or quality, of value in it. I guess most people will answer no, value is a concept we give to something. I mean if all that exist is the material world of matter evolved from thousands of years for no objective reason, then all is matter. I can’t see why one piece of matter should have any more value than any other bit. Why should a human be more valuable than a tree if we are all part of the same thing? If things just have value because we vote that it does from conceptual changing views, how is this different than any other fantasy we invent. Do humans have a right to life, do they have instinct worth just because we think they do? Nature doesn’t seem to teach us this! If human are just evolved animals why cant we behavior like them?
Its important to answer these questions as the evils of the past will continue until people understand what humans are.
I would also add there is another problem with saying that concepts or thoughts are reducible to matter, atoms in motion. As thoughts and concepts are “of” or “about” things, which matter is not. And know one can find or see thoughts even if they could find a correspondence to brain patterns, they are different things. Another example is trying to work out how non-consciousness evolved into consciousness!
I would say that if humans have instinct value making them stand out from the rest of nature, then the human “form” must be imposed with intrinsic value. An eternal universal unchanging standard of value and worth that has been imposed into the form of “Personhood” which is seen in its fullness in it’s manifestation in the material body. Plato said “if matter has no form, it is meaningless matter”. I would agree with Plato and say that personhood has value and worth which is binding on all humans because we are made in the image of God. Therefore humans are valuable independent of peoples opinions.
Objective Morality
Any one who has spent some time at a University will have come across ethical discussion about Moral absolutes, Relativism and Postmodernism. For the rest of us relativism will be the ethical system that is the most held to in our society today, but not lived out very well. That’s because it is impossible to live it out when one person say’s what’s true for you is not true for me. But when that same person gets there wallet stolen they complain and want it back and cry it’s not fair, or just or right, implying by using those words that the other person is obligated to respond as they have they same morals.
Its one thing to think that we all make up our own ethical rights, but the truth is I believe we have awareness that there is objective morality. That being something’s are just right and wrong independent of people views on the matter.
The Philosopher William Lane Craig says,
“Every one of us guides his life, however inconsistently by a certain set of values. But are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by mere social conventions akin to driving on the left versus right hand side of the road or mere expressions of personal preferences akin to having a taste for certain foods rather than others? Or are they valid independently of our apprehension of them and if so, what is their foundation? Are there things, which I ought not to do, and other things, which I ought to do? Or is the sense of obligation a mere illusion due to sociological and psychological conditioning.”
What is your foundation for the existence of your ethical reasons? Are they social conventions, personal preferences or objective binding values.
Lets just try a few examples, If we lived in Germany backed by science and a large amount of people, would we agree that it was right for Hitler is burn and torture millions because they were considered to be inferior races? If that society said yes, would you agree to it?
Is what the majority says always right? The law may say abortion is ok, but does that make it right? What about personal expressions would you agree if some old man loved young boys or animals to sleep with that it would be ok? That if some people enjoy raping people, or killing innocent lives it’s ok to. Or that torturing babies for fun is ok.
Most of us who are not demented seem to have some understanding that something’s just seem that they are wrong and have nothing to do with personal preferences. Would you agree that touring babies for fun or raping them was ok ever? I would hope your answer is no. Some may say that it just goes against common sense, but what is common sense. Common sense is an agreed upon opinion, unless you want to affirm that there is an absolute moral law on our hearts that knows right from wrong.
Now some people will say, but people can do what ever they like as long as they don’t hurt others but that’s not the case as I shown. It just seems that we have some inner standard that we all have deep down that we use to judge our acts and choices by. But what is this foundation? One cannot just reject all God talks because you don’t like the idea that a God could exist. That just shows that you hold an absolute bias before rational evidence is given.
So what do we mean by an Objective moral Value, well to say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or evil independently of whether any human being believes it to be so. That is if a bomb hit the world and all that was left were pedophiles or rapists would there actions still be objectively wrong? Similarly to say that we have objective moral duties is to say that certain actions are right or wrong for us independently of whether any human being believes them to be so.
For example to say that the Holocaust was objectively wrong is to say that it was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still be wrong even if they brain washed every body else to think it was right.
My question is again “If you believe that objective morality exists, what is its foundation?" Is it to hard to think about, that we have to throw it on the too hard shelf? And walk back in to our contradictions of relativism. I don’t think so that’s why I push the challenge.
Ok, if God does not exist why do we think that every human being has objective moral value (human rights) Is this held from social conventions, human preferences?
As William Lane Craig says, On the naturalistic view, there’s nothing special about human beings. They’re just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called planet earth doomed to perish”
The Atheist Richard Dawkins say’s of human worth “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference…We are machines for propagating DNA. From an atheist worldview to think that beings are special is to be guilty of specie-ism, an unjustified bias toward ones own species. From an evolution point of view all values are just by products of social biological evolution. Just adoption’s for survival. From an evolution point of view we have evolved by chance, all our thoughts and actions have been predetermined by prior causes, free-will is an illusion. In fact at times for the story of evolution rape and incest would have been the only options for survival and so also would have been killing off weaker inferior sick beings or animals. So how can we claim that there are objective morals? A naturalistic history of life does not seem to show the example.
Even if we could show that rape and incest and torture were not advantageous to us anymore, nothing from an atheist worldview can really say these acts are objectively wrong. Such behaviors go on all the time in the animal kingdom. From naturalism all our beliefs, not just our moral beliefs have been selected for survival, not for there truth-value.
Some Atheist philosophers try and say that objective moral properties just live in matter. But even if they did, there is no obligation why one must follow one or the other as they are there by chance and nature just “is’ there is no reason why we “ought” to have to follow on path and not the other. If nature is all there is we are free to have any of it and morality seems to be held in personal beings not impersonal matter.
If God does not exist why should we think that we have any moral obligations to do anything. Who or what imposes these moral duties upon us?
The question arises can we recognize the existence of objective moral values without reference to God? Is all life just an illusion of beliefs that we hold without any justification. Maybe the inner sense that we feel that there are acts that are absolutely wrong are because we have a moral law written from God on our hearts. This law is one mind who has put his laws in our subjective minds and hearts. And it’s justification that it is objective stands because it is independent of what any human being believes. It is also objective and true because it stands also outside of every human being in the mind of God requiring our obligation to follow it. It is also objective as this standard is eternal and does not change. Much pain and suffering comes when we chose to deny this norm. Deny the norm, and objective right and wrong vanish, human right’s vanish, and human dignity vanish. If you hold on to any of these but reject God you are basically holding on to an illusion.
Therefore,
1.If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2.Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore God exist.
In our present age the idea of morality has become an individual thing. People these days want freedom and liberty to express their own true image. This image representing their own personal choices, one that has not been imposed on them or is part of societies conditioning from the majority. Instead of holding the traditional view that morality is what we ought to do, it has evolved in to what we prefer or what we desire to do. The problem with this definition is that it confuses the question of what morality is? I will never forget a professor who once asked the question “What is the difference between some one who chooses their own morality and some one who has no morality?” The answer was “that there is no different as they both do what ever they want to do”. So is morality what we want to do or is it what we ought/should do? I mean is there anything that no one should ever do because it is just off the list as being objectively wrong.
These kinds of definitions is what drives society into the world of relativism where no one really knows where they stand with each other as everybody has there own morality. It used to be held that the majority of people had a moral sense that something’s were just wrong independent of whether some ones feelings disagreed with the ruling.
This makes us have to reflect on what is the justification for making these claims, where does one get the idea that something’s are just wrong or is that from just being conditioned by earlier generations opinions to think that some acts are objectively wrong.
Is the question of God’s existence relevant to the question of morality or can it be completely explained by a naturalistic theory. It is these questions that we will be looking at as we search for a foundation for morality. The first question we will look at is “Correct function and Reason”.
Correct Function and Reason
Have you ever asked your self “what is the good life”. What is a good person and what is the standard of goodness. Because the question is obviously very important, for how is one to guide their life morally if one has no idea of what goodness is.
What is a good person? The answer comes forth at once, A good person is one who performs efficiently or well the function of a human being. And this at once invites the further question “What is the function of a human being? Now this question is not asking what is the function of this or that person, but what is the function of a person, just as a human being might be. This is a difficult question to answer as if God is rejected then nature is left to explain reality and human nature by pure fate. If humans have not been created to function in a particular correct way then it is hard to know how a human should act. As humans can do many actions and desire many things, are all these free options because we are able to perform them or do some actions go against a moral norm.
If God is taken out of the picture, the idea of a person functioning correctly while avoiding other actions destroys any foundation of a designed morality. That humans are inherently good manifesting this designed character which seeks to express these moral standards is not an option.
Now if humans are not created for a correct function then it is nonsense to talk about people doing good and evil. It is also nonsense to say that humans are inherently good, as this implies they have been created good to act good, which implies they have been created according to a moral absolute standard that transcends them. If evolution is true then humans have no correct function and the idea of acting good is meaningless. All humans are, are machines who struggle over desires. If humans are not inherently good and created in the image of God with a moral law written on their hearts, reason driven by blind will has no hope in finding what goodness is in itself.
So if there is no created moral law in humans can we still understand right and wrong by using human reason. Can the power of rational thought tell us how we should act?
The Power of Reasoning
How is one to define what “good” is by using their faculties of reasoning. Plato some how thought that reason could some-how transcend into the eternal realm of forms and see the form of goodness. For Plato this was his reference point to know the good, but the problem was the form had no contents.
Can one see what is “good” by watching the empirical world of physical actions?
The Atheist Philosopher Richard Taylor says in his book “Good and Evil”,
“A thing is not seen to be good by the bodily eye, this was perfectly obvious to Plato, as it has been to all-moral rationalists. We can with our eyes see things, but we cannot in that way see that they are good. So it must be by our reason that we somehow apprehend goodness.”
But Taylor goes on to say,
“Reason by itself can make no distinction whatsoever between what is good and what is not. Reason can only and within limits see what is, and can never declare whether it ought to be so”
Taylor is correct in his thinking and it has become known today as the naturalistic fallacy. This is trying to look at nature which is a description of what “is’ and conclude an “ought” in the process. Looking at nature tells us what “is’ happening, but it doesn’t tell us what we “ought” or “ought not” to do. You can not get an “ought” from an “is”.
As John Frame says “One can not draw moral conclusions from non-moral acts”. The problem is that observing facts of nature of which we are a part of does not reveal to us moral facts. The attempt to derive moral principles from impersonal realities is also a violation of logic. Facts can be learned through observation and the scientific method. But moral obligations cannot be seen and heard. They cannot be observed. So all we are doing is labeling impersonal matter with abstract concepts and what is the relationship between the rational and the irrational, nothing! They don’t connect in any rational way. Without a “norm” our concepts are just subjective thoughts floating in our heads relating to nothing.
One may deduce moral conclusions from moral facts, but not from non-moral facts.
I quote another thinker who I think puts an end to this question of whether “reason” can justify being moral or is able to find what is good without God,
"Any reason for being moral must be either a moral or a nonmoral reason. If it is moral, then it cannot really be a reason for being moral, since you would have to be already inside morality in order to accept it. A nonmoral reason, on the other hand, cannot be a reason for being moral; morality requires a purity of motive, a basically moral intentionality, and that is destroyed by any nonmoral inducement. Hence there can be no reason for being moral, and morality presents itself as an unmediated demand, a categorical imperative."
It seems that if we reject that we have been created inherently good and that reason can not find a reference point for defining the good, goodness must be subjective.
If morality become subjective to personal tastes and preferences then we are left with any of these options,
Subjectivism; the subjectivity of goodness and badness.
Emotivism; the reduction of goodness and badness to emotion.
Positivism; the idea that man posits values with his will, invents goodness and badness.
Cultural relativism, or conventionalism, the relativity of goodness and badness.
Historicism; the relativity of goodness and badness to time.
Utilitarianism; the reduction of goodness to utility, or efficiency.
Instinctualism; the reduction of goodness to biological instinct.
Hedonism; the reduction of goodness to pleasure.
Egotism; the reduction of goodness to enlightened selfishness.
Pragmatism; the weakness of goodness and the power of badness.
Intuitionalsim; based on ones gut feelings.
Rationalism; reduction to reasoning upon ones own reasons for his desires
Are we restricted in having to make goodness a subjective entity. Is goodness just an empty word that means this is what I feel and want? The Atheist Richard Dawkins says,
“There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference”.
Why be Moral at All?
Another question must be asked, if morality is reduced to the subjective and reason has no way of defining what is right or wrong “Why should we be moral at all?” Some might think because without it we can’t gain anything from this world, as our environment would be too dangerous for us to seek our desires. So it pays to live in an agreed upon social contract so that we can gain more than if we didn’t. But why should we be concerned about this? If there is no purpose for us being here or no correct way to function why should we care about others or whether we live or die. Why not live the ethics of the survival of the fittest and wipe every body else off the planet. In the end there really is no reason why we should be moral or why we have an obligation to respect others.
Moral systems
Some atheist have tried to come up with moral systems that respects peoples different views, but still bind each other to a moral system of principles. Its like being a moral relativist, but bound by an absolute ethical principle. But these principles fail because there is no definition of what “goodness” is. Some atheists like to think that the golden rule from the Bible can be easily adopted without holding on to a belief in God or in an objective standard.
But I don’t think it is possible. The golden rule being “Do unto others, what you would have done unto you”.
Vox Day makes a good point in his book “The Irrational Atheist”
The problem is that Christianity’s morality is not just based on the golden rule, which states that man should not do to others what he would not have them do to him. It is based on doing the Fathers perfect (God’s) objective, absolute moral will. And this standard seems to promote the highest ethical blessing to all people. But just stating the above cannot provide us with a functional moral system.
Obviously a moral system based on loving the Lord your God and obediently submitting your will to his is a very different moral system and far more objective one than the Golden rule, which is not only entirely subjective, but incapable of accounting for either rational calculation or human psychopathy. It provides no moral basis to criticize a man for crawling into Adriana’s bed unannounced so long as he harbors no desire to bar her from doing the same to him, and sanctions a thief to steal on the grounds of a belief that he wouldn’t miss that which was stolen were the thief himself the prospective victim. The Golden rule is also to easily transformed into the idea of doing unto others as you believe they wish to do unto you.
Do what you want just as long as you don’t hurt anyone?
Have you every heard the saying which tries to establish an ethical foundation that “You can do what you want just as long as you don’t hurt anyone.” I used to think that this claim was pretty hard to fault until I looked at the deeper motivations of those who proclaim this ethical stance. The first question that has always jumped into my mind has been “How does one define hurt”. Is morality just based on what reactions happen with physical actions or is morality a little deeper. Is the “hurt” defined from the physical, emotional or motive or all three? And who defines here?
In our society today many hold on to the ethical system of relativism. That there is no absolute moral standard that exists for all people. For many if this did exist it would imply God’s existence. So ethical relativism with its claim that nothing is ultimately good or evil has tried to make a moral system that is livable in a community of people.
But the problem seems to be that every time a relativist tries to live as if they have absolute freedom they slip in some universal moral standards refuting there relativism.
For example, look at the universal, which is implied at the end of these claims,
“People can do what they want, just as long as they don’t hurt anyone.”
“You can do whatever you want, as long as its between two consenting adults”
“You can do whatever you want, as long as its in the privacy of your own home.”
“People can believe and do whatever they want, they should just be tolerant of others views.”
The problem with all these statements is that they start of giving every one absolute freedom, due to their relativism. But because relativism is unlivable they impose an absolute universal claim that every one must abide by, as if it was a universal moral claim independent of any one’s subjective views. We see again that when you try and tinkle with reality, you will be brought back to it. This is the same with rejecting God, try and deny him, you will affirm him. Let’s try this standard and see if it works,
“A man slips a drug in to a women’s drink and she falls a sleep (date rape). He takes precautions so that there are no consequences to his violating her. He does all this without hurting her or even without her knowing what has taken place. Hasn’t the man been able to do what he wants without harming the women. Is this act ok with us? While the man does not physical hurt the women or psychologically harm her because he is gone before she wakes up, we all know this is wrong!” We know that her universal rights which cant be grounded from relativism have been violated. Rape is universally wrong!
Another example, if we were to work in a mental ward with patients who have lost their minds, would we consider it ok to mock them even if they couldn’t understand or relate to reality. To most of us we know our words wouldn’t physical hurt them or mentally hurt them, but it would still be wrong to degrade some ones universal rights of dignity and worth. In our conscious we just seem to know that is wrong and mean.
Another example, you can do whatever you like, between two consenting people. So would we agree to having pedophiles play with your kids?
My last example is if absolute freedom is ok, can one commit suicide? They would not be hurting any body else, but they would be hurting themselves and their friends. I think bringing harm to us is just as bad. We are killing life and a person, ourselves.
Some may object to my claim that rape is universally wrong, but does not the human heart seem even if it can’t justify why, feel that something’s are just objectively wrong.
Would raping or torturing a six-week-old baby for fun ever be right?
Would setting people on fire and gassing them because of their race ever be right?
If there is no such thing as an inherent moral order shaped in us the concept of a moral conscience is an illusion. The acts of nature and the power of reason are just indifferent as Richard Dawkins says. There is no ontological value to any of the actions they are just different. Also if one were to hold to an evolutionary theory of life, rape would have been a normal act along the process of survival. In fact if we are just an evolved animal we are no different from the instincts of the lower animal kingdom.
Is morality even a free rational choice?
Another problem that a rises from a naturalistic explanation of all reality with the story of evolution is that the concept of freewill is an illusion. Do you control your brain or does your brain control you? And what shaped your brain before you become the conscious you? The problem of determinism and randomize has been a major problem for atheistic philosophers.
When one denies that man has a soul and is just part of this materialistic world of matter, that being random atoms colliding together by impersonal forces (The process of evolving by cause and effect mutations) freewill soon vanishes. The idea of responsibility also becomes an illusion and also does the concept of good and evil, right and wrong. One is left stuck in the impersonal, irrational void of chance.
Determinism
The naturalistic view sees human beings as part of the machinery of the universe. In such a world every event is caused by preceding events, which in turn were caused by still earlier events, ad infinitum. Since man is part of this causal chain, his actions are also determined by antecedent causes. Some of these causes are the environment and man's genetic make - up. These are so determinative of what man does that no one could rightly say that a given human action could have been performed otherwise than it in fact was performed. Thus, according to determinism, Bob's sitting on the brown chair rather than the blue sofa is not a free choice but is fully determined by previous factors.
A contemporary example of naturalistic determinism is B F Skinner, the author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity and About Behaviorism. Skinner believes that all human behavior is completely controlled by genetic and environmental factors. These factors do not rule out the fact that human beings make choices; however, they do rule out the possibility that human choices are free. For Skinner, all human choices are determined by antecedent physical causes. Hence, man is viewed as an instrumental cause of his behavior. He is like a knife in the hands of a butcher or a hammer in the grip of a carpenter; he does not originate action but is the instrument through which some other agent performs the action.
A philosophical argument often given for determinism can be stated as follows. All human behavior is either completely uncaused, selfcaused, or caused by something external. Now human behavior cannot be uncaused, for nothing can happen without a cause, nothing cannot cause something. Human behavior cannot be self - caused either, for each act would have to exist prior to itself to cause itself, which is impossible. Thus the only alternative is that all human behavior must be completely caused by something external. Naturalistic determinists maintain that such things as heredity and environment are the external causes, whereas theistic determinists believe that God is the external cause of all human behavior.
There are several problems with this argument. First, the argument misinterprets self determinism as teaching that human acts cause themselves. Self determinists, for example, do not believe that the plays in a football game cause themselves. Rather they maintain that the players execute the plays in a football game. Indeed it is the players that choose to play the game. Thus the cause of a football game being played is to be found within the players of the game. Self determinists would not deny that outside factors, such as heredity, environment, or God, had any influence. However, they would maintain that any one of the people involved in the game could have decided not to play if they had chosen to do so.
Second, the argument for determinisim is self defeating. A determinist must contend that both he and the nondeterminist are determined to believe what they believe. Yet the determinist attempts to convince the nondeterminist that determinism is true and thus ought to be believed. However, on the basis of pure determinism "ought" has no meaning. For "ought" means "could have and should have done otherwise." But this is impossible according to determinism. A way around this objection is for the determinist to argue that he was determined to say that one ought to accept his view. However, his opponent can respond by saying that he was determined to accept a contrary view. Thus determinism cannot eliminate an opposing position. This allows the possibility for a free will position.
Third, and finally, if naturalistic determinism were true, it would be self defeating, false, or be no view at all. For in order to determine whether determinism was true there would need to be a rational basis for thought, otherwise no one could know what was true or false. But naturalistic determinists believe that all thought is the product of nonrational causes, such as the environment, thus making all thought nonrational. On this basis no one could ever know if determinism were true or not. And if one argued that determinism was true, then the position would be self defeating, for a truth claim is being made to the effect that no truth claims can be made. Now if determinism is false, then it can be rationally rejected and other positions considered. But if it is neither true or false, then it is no view at all, since no claim to truth is being made. In either case, naturalistic determinism could not reasonably be held to be true.
Indeterminism
This view contends that human behavior is totally uncaused. There are no antecedent or simultaneous causes of man's actions. Hence, all of man's acts are uncaused; hence, any given human act could have been otherwise. Some indeterminists extend their view beyond human affairs to the entire universe. In support of the indeterminacy of all events Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty is often invoked. This principle states that it is impossible to predict where a subatomic particle is and how fast it is moving at any given moment. Thus, it is argued, since subatomic events are inherently unpredictable, how much more so are complex human acts. From this they conclude that human and nonhuman events are uncaused. Two noted exponents of indeterminism are William James and Charles Peirce.
There are at least three problems with this view. First, Heisenberg's principle does not deal with causality but with predictability. Heisenberg maintained that the movement of subatomic particles was unpredictable and unmeasurable; he did not maintain that their movement was uncaused. Thus this principle cannot be used to support indeterminism. Second, indeterminism unreasonably denies the principle of causality, namely, that every event has a cause. Simply because one does not know what the cause is, is not proof that an event is not caused. Such lack of knowledge only reflects our ignorance. Third, indeterminism strips man of any responsible behavior. If human behavior is uncaused, then no one could be praised or blamed for anything he did. All human acts would be nonrational and nonmoral, thus no act could ever be a reasonable or responsible one.
Is value a property in matter?
The tittle of this section is asking the question “If all that exist is the world of physical matter (atoms and molecules in random motion), what then is value and instinct worth?” Does matter contain the property or quality, of value in it. I guess most people will answer no, value is a concept we give to something. I mean if all that exist is the material world of matter evolved from thousands of years for no objective reason, then all is matter. I can’t see why one piece of matter should have any more value than any other bit. Why should a human be more valuable than a tree if we are all part of the same thing? If things just have value because we vote that it does from conceptual changing views, how is this different than any other fantasy we invent. Do humans have a right to life, do they have instinct worth just because we think they do? Nature doesn’t seem to teach us this! If human are just evolved animals why cant we behavior like them?
Its important to answer these questions as the evils of the past will continue until people understand what humans are.
I would also add there is another problem with saying that concepts or thoughts are reducible to matter, atoms in motion. As thoughts and concepts are “of” or “about” things, which matter is not. And know one can find or see thoughts even if they could find a correspondence to brain patterns, they are different things. Another example is trying to work out how non-consciousness evolved into consciousness!
I would say that if humans have instinct value making them stand out from the rest of nature, then the human “form” must be imposed with intrinsic value. An eternal universal unchanging standard of value and worth that has been imposed into the form of “Personhood” which is seen in its fullness in it’s manifestation in the material body. Plato said “if matter has no form, it is meaningless matter”. I would agree with Plato and say that personhood has value and worth which is binding on all humans because we are made in the image of God. Therefore humans are valuable independent of peoples opinions.
Objective Morality
Any one who has spent some time at a University will have come across ethical discussion about Moral absolutes, Relativism and Postmodernism. For the rest of us relativism will be the ethical system that is the most held to in our society today, but not lived out very well. That’s because it is impossible to live it out when one person say’s what’s true for you is not true for me. But when that same person gets there wallet stolen they complain and want it back and cry it’s not fair, or just or right, implying by using those words that the other person is obligated to respond as they have they same morals.
Its one thing to think that we all make up our own ethical rights, but the truth is I believe we have awareness that there is objective morality. That being something’s are just right and wrong independent of people views on the matter.
The Philosopher William Lane Craig says,
“Every one of us guides his life, however inconsistently by a certain set of values. But are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by mere social conventions akin to driving on the left versus right hand side of the road or mere expressions of personal preferences akin to having a taste for certain foods rather than others? Or are they valid independently of our apprehension of them and if so, what is their foundation? Are there things, which I ought not to do, and other things, which I ought to do? Or is the sense of obligation a mere illusion due to sociological and psychological conditioning.”
What is your foundation for the existence of your ethical reasons? Are they social conventions, personal preferences or objective binding values.
Lets just try a few examples, If we lived in Germany backed by science and a large amount of people, would we agree that it was right for Hitler is burn and torture millions because they were considered to be inferior races? If that society said yes, would you agree to it?
Is what the majority says always right? The law may say abortion is ok, but does that make it right? What about personal expressions would you agree if some old man loved young boys or animals to sleep with that it would be ok? That if some people enjoy raping people, or killing innocent lives it’s ok to. Or that torturing babies for fun is ok.
Most of us who are not demented seem to have some understanding that something’s just seem that they are wrong and have nothing to do with personal preferences. Would you agree that touring babies for fun or raping them was ok ever? I would hope your answer is no. Some may say that it just goes against common sense, but what is common sense. Common sense is an agreed upon opinion, unless you want to affirm that there is an absolute moral law on our hearts that knows right from wrong.
Now some people will say, but people can do what ever they like as long as they don’t hurt others but that’s not the case as I shown. It just seems that we have some inner standard that we all have deep down that we use to judge our acts and choices by. But what is this foundation? One cannot just reject all God talks because you don’t like the idea that a God could exist. That just shows that you hold an absolute bias before rational evidence is given.
So what do we mean by an Objective moral Value, well to say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or evil independently of whether any human being believes it to be so. That is if a bomb hit the world and all that was left were pedophiles or rapists would there actions still be objectively wrong? Similarly to say that we have objective moral duties is to say that certain actions are right or wrong for us independently of whether any human being believes them to be so.
For example to say that the Holocaust was objectively wrong is to say that it was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still be wrong even if they brain washed every body else to think it was right.
My question is again “If you believe that objective morality exists, what is its foundation?" Is it to hard to think about, that we have to throw it on the too hard shelf? And walk back in to our contradictions of relativism. I don’t think so that’s why I push the challenge.
Ok, if God does not exist why do we think that every human being has objective moral value (human rights) Is this held from social conventions, human preferences?
As William Lane Craig says, On the naturalistic view, there’s nothing special about human beings. They’re just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called planet earth doomed to perish”
The Atheist Richard Dawkins say’s of human worth “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference…We are machines for propagating DNA. From an atheist worldview to think that beings are special is to be guilty of specie-ism, an unjustified bias toward ones own species. From an evolution point of view all values are just by products of social biological evolution. Just adoption’s for survival. From an evolution point of view we have evolved by chance, all our thoughts and actions have been predetermined by prior causes, free-will is an illusion. In fact at times for the story of evolution rape and incest would have been the only options for survival and so also would have been killing off weaker inferior sick beings or animals. So how can we claim that there are objective morals? A naturalistic history of life does not seem to show the example.
Even if we could show that rape and incest and torture were not advantageous to us anymore, nothing from an atheist worldview can really say these acts are objectively wrong. Such behaviors go on all the time in the animal kingdom. From naturalism all our beliefs, not just our moral beliefs have been selected for survival, not for there truth-value.
Some Atheist philosophers try and say that objective moral properties just live in matter. But even if they did, there is no obligation why one must follow one or the other as they are there by chance and nature just “is’ there is no reason why we “ought” to have to follow on path and not the other. If nature is all there is we are free to have any of it and morality seems to be held in personal beings not impersonal matter.
If God does not exist why should we think that we have any moral obligations to do anything. Who or what imposes these moral duties upon us?
The question arises can we recognize the existence of objective moral values without reference to God? Is all life just an illusion of beliefs that we hold without any justification. Maybe the inner sense that we feel that there are acts that are absolutely wrong are because we have a moral law written from God on our hearts. This law is one mind who has put his laws in our subjective minds and hearts. And it’s justification that it is objective stands because it is independent of what any human being believes. It is also objective and true because it stands also outside of every human being in the mind of God requiring our obligation to follow it. It is also objective as this standard is eternal and does not change. Much pain and suffering comes when we chose to deny this norm. Deny the norm, and objective right and wrong vanish, human right’s vanish, and human dignity vanish. If you hold on to any of these but reject God you are basically holding on to an illusion.
Therefore,
1.If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2.Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore God exist.
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