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John Adams and Alexander Solzhenitsyn Were Right
A huge reason for the success of Western Civilization is that our Judeo-Christian faith focuses on improving yourself. You are made in God’s image. Act like it. Look inside yourself. Are there improvements that you could make in your soul? Well sure, but that’s really hard. But with God – the creator and master of the entire universe – watching you and taking a personal interest in your soul, perhaps you might give it a try. So we work at it. With varying degrees of success, to be sure, but we work at it. Our religious leaders are constantly imploring us to study the lessons of the Bible, and take them to heart. Don’t criticize others when you are so flawed. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and so on. Fix yourself first. A society full of Jews and Christians who truly believe in their God and seek to please him; that society is generally a pretty nice place.
John Adams was characteristically insightful when he observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” I would argue that this is true not only of our Constitution but also of any other government ever conceived.
Adams’ point is that if the behavior of people is not governed by their religion, then it must be governed by their government. He was a student of history. He knew that that does not end well.
In Matthew 22:21 Jesus said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.” He understood that government was necessary to manage the affairs of men, but when it comes to managing really important things, like our souls, only God could do that. I would presume that students of the 20th century could reach no other conclusion.
Because government, understandably, takes a different approach. The government manages citizens and things, not souls. So it is essentially in the business of telling people what to do, and what not to do. What else could the government do? There is no other way.
In Christianity, you seek to improve yourself. In government, you seek to improve others. Modern progressives and others who have a great deal of faith in the power of government to improve our lives should stop and consider this very important distinction. And they should consider how well this has worked in the past.
Over the course of history, this has been tried in many different ways. Tribes governed by chiefs. Kingdoms governed by royal families. Socialist systems. Communist systems. And so on and so forth. They all look different on the outside, but on the inside, they’re all the same. They involve telling other people what to do. And for whatever reason, this doesn’t seem to work very well. In fact, these systems seem to rapidly, and consistently, devolve from ineffective to catastrophic. Every time. There is no other way.
It would appear that the only way to improve a society full of people is to improve the actual people. One at a time. From the inside out.
Teachers recognize this phenomenon. A kid from a good family is easy to teach. A kid from a horrible home will be either very difficult or impossible to improve, no matter how talented and dedicated his teachers are. The damage is done. There’s nothing to work with. And good teachers can recognize which kid is which by the end of the first week of school. They know which kids will be in college prep courses, and which will be in detention. They do their best with everybody, of course. But they know how things will turn out. They’ve seen it before.
So as we abandon our religious faith as individuals, we hope that improved government can maintain this very nice society to which we have been accustomed. And despite its flaws, our government is certainly one of the best in the world.
But it doesn’t matter. The damage is done. There’s nothing to work with. Teachers would understand. John Adams was right.
Viktor Frankl felt that freedom was a negative aspect (a lack of something – a lack of oppressive government), and that the corresponding positive aspect was responsibility. He said, “I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” He didn’t understand how one could exist without the other.
The government can’t create 300 million responsible, moral individuals, by fiat. That is the work of parents, and of the church. There is no other way.
We’ve tried other ways. Those who believe that morality and ethics can be created by pure reason should stop and think about that if they study the history of the 20th century. Or even studied the history of any era, if you think about it.
To look deep into oneself, and critically judge what one sees, and then undertake to improve upon it to the very best of your ability – that is agonizingly difficult. The government cannot encourage us to do that. Only religion can.
On the contrary, if our behavior is governed by a system of laws, then it is only natural to work around and within those laws as effectively as possible. Most people are reasonable, and that is a reasonable thing to do. But even if your behavior is reasonable, and even legal, it may not be ethical. Which seems harmless. But as it turns out, it’s not harmless. Thousands of years worth of brilliant men, from Moses to Solzhenitsyn, have spent their lives explaining to us why this is so incredibly dangerous.
We pursue wealth and technological advancements to make our lives easier. And it works. I don’t walk to work. I drive a car. With air conditioning. It’s nice. Much easier than walking. And I like easy. We all hope to avoid things that are difficult. That effort to make difficult things easier is human nature, and it leads to many of the things that make our modern lives so pleasant. We prefer easy things over difficult things.
So we naturally prefer the government to religion. Religion is hard. Improving myself is really hard. It’d be so much easier for me to just tell other people what to do. Would I rather seek out the worst flaws of my character and endure the agony of brutal self-criticism and go through difficult work needed to improve them? Or would I rather put a political bumper sticker on my car and go vote? One can understand why so many people choose the bumper sticker.
Who will get more votes? The 1700’s theologian Jonathan Edwards, whose stump speech is “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?” Or Bernie Sanders, who says you can do whatever you like, and he’ll give you whatever you want? Actually, forget Jonathan Edwards. A nice, unthreatening Republican can’t win elections if he simply suggests that someone has to pay for all of Bernie’s programs. That sounds hard. We, naturally, prefer easy.
Some will choose the bumper sticker. They always have. Understandably. But what happens when a quarter of us do that? Or half? That’s when things get dicey. And then, inevitably, violent.
Choosing the easy path makes things difficult, eventually. It always does.
There is no other way.
When I have an idea for a post, I often just write it as it appears in my head – just dump it onto the page, with little concern for quality. I type fast. This part generally takes 20-30 minutes. No more, because I get bored as quickly as I type.
Once my thoughts are on the page, I save it, and come back to it in a week or a month, when I feel like posting something. At that point, I’ll generally reorganize it, cut its length by half or so, and clean it up in an effort to achieve, well, coherence, at least. This part takes another 20-30 minutes, usually, unless my original version was total garbage. If this part takes more than 30 minutes, I’ll generally consider that post hopeless, dump it, and try another old first draft to work on, if I’m still in the mood.
I came back to this post today to clean it up, and thought, “Eh, whatever.” I’ve been doing that more and more recently. Sorry about that.
So to paraphrase somebody famous that I’m too lazy too look up, “Sorry this is so long, because I was too lazy to make it short.” Or something like that. It’s easier to just post it.
Again, we often choose the easy way. And that leads to sloppy essays and deadly government.
You’re lucky I’m just writing an essay, and not writing policy.
Published in General
An ex-Muslim discusses his former faith.
It’s called “A Brief Return to Islam.“
Indeed. Many do.
Ah. So your list of “a few options” was not meant to be thorough. There is also the traditional option of the Abrahamic religions.
We agree.
We disagree.
Yes, that is definitely one option. However, it is more a matter of explaining away moral obligation than of explaining it. In other words, on this account it is not easy to say that it is true that there any any moral obligations such as we have been discussing. Certainly nothing absolute.
This particular option sits very poorly with your remark in # 135: “But all non-sociopaths instinctively believe that human beings have moral obligations to other human beings.”
On this option, the sociopaths are right and the rest of us are delusional.
There is William James’ intriguing alternative theory, however.
It looks like you’re using the word “objective” in two very different ways here. The theory you’re describing is that there is no moral principle which is true independent of human perception. But the clause “Perhaps . . . objective morality is much like objective journalism, something to be strived for but never achieved” means something quite different: objectivity as a lack of personal preference or personal interest or bias.
No amount of this kind of objectivity could achieve objectivity of the other kind.
And, very importantly, Heavy Water: You’ve pointed to precisely zero possible explanations of the reality of moral law other than a divine reality, and we have identified three religious explanations of moral law.
To be fair, when using religious arguments, it’s easy to just make things up.
It would mean that morality is built from the bottom up rather than the top down.
Instead of having a God provide human beings morality, human beings would derive morality based on their instincts, perspectives, experiences, desires and reflections.
I don’t think this is correct. All of those human beings who insist that murder, theft and assault be prohibited by law are simply motivated differently than the sociopath. The non-sociopaths perceive a long-term problem with murder, theft and assault in terms of human well-being.
If “objective” simply means “impartial” and “not biased,” than objective morality is simply the setting down of rules that apply to everyone. But if “objective” means human mind independent, then there is no objective morality without God. However, if God is defined as having a mind and “objective” means “mind independent” (and not merely human mind independent) then there is no objective morality even if God exists.
Morality would be “subjective,” subject to the will of God.
So, sometimes when believers in God speak of “objective morality,” they are really speaking of “God-based morality.”
But as a practical matter, even if there is God based morality, human beings still have to argue among themselves as to the content of this God based morality. For example, did God actually authorize or inspire the Bible, in part or in whole? And even if we all agreed on this point, there would still be the matter of translation and interpretation.
I don’t think those who believe in God do a very good job of explaining moral law either.
William Lane Craig says that the moral law was written on all of our hearts by God because deep in our hearts we all know right from wrong. But this is simply an assertion without evidence. When people disagree over whether the death penalty should be applied to people who perform work on the sabbath, this seems to indicate that no such moral law was written on the hearts of human beings.
But let’s assume for the sake of argument that all human beings do have the moral law written on each of their hearts. Perhaps this moral law was written on the hearts of all human beings by nature, not any God.
William Lane Craig doesn’t just say that God is the source or grounding of objective morality. He is saying that God has provided to human beings a clear understanding of objective morality. This is an assertion. But I don’t see evidence supporting this.
When a human being suffers an injury to the brain, this human being’s behavior can change radically. This human being can change from being a very kind person to being a very cruel person simply by having part of his brain damaged by a stroke or a car accident. So, it seems that our best science has demonstrated that William Lane Craig is wrong to indicate that the moral law is written on all of our hearts and that, deep down, we all know right from wrong.
Anyone can make things up with arguments for anything. But so what?
The proper way to handle arguments is, first, to see whether the premises support the conclusion and, after that, to see if the premises are true. (And if their truth is controversial, we can at least check to see whether they are plausible, whether they are likely, whether they can be rationally believed, or whether they have sub-arguments supporting them.)
None of which comes anywhere close to producing the sort of moral obligation we were talking about–absolute moral law by violating which we incur guilt.
Bottom-up morality is not necessarily an unworkable idea. I have too much respect for William James, who proposed such a thing (cartoon version linked above), to dismiss such an idea out of hand. But it’s not at all the same kind of moral law I thought we were talking about.
You’re suggesting that “human beings have moral obligations to other human beings” and that “There is no source of objective morality”?
How does that work?
When you suggest that “objective morality is something that many human beings believe exists because they believe that certain human actions are right/wrong, desirable/not-desirable” do you mean that their beliefs create reality?
Yes! This is splendid. I do believe we agree on a lot.
Except I think this is only true of moral law. Mere moral facts existing objectively is easily possible without a G-d, as I’ve said–with Aristotelian ethics.
Continued:
Yes, but keep in mind what I said about classical theism: The will of G-d is identical to the love of G-d, both are identical to the other attributes of G-d, and so on.
Of course.
That depends on what is required to explain things. Skyler’s eventual answer (best I could understand it) was to use the reality of moral law as explanation for other things while positing no explanation for it. That is precisely the way to handle the question of ultimate explanations. With respect to moral law, it’s only one step less far than Kant could go.
Not bad at all.
But there are two reasons we can sometimes do more.
First, sometimes an explanation is only penultimate or ante-penultimate. Kant went one step further and said that the value of human beings was the explanation for moral law, and Locke went one step deeper and said that G-d is the explanation for the value of human beings.
Second, even when we reach the ultimate explanation, we can sometimes say something about it to understand why it makes sense. E.g, on traditional classical theism (think Anselm, Aquinas, Boethius, Augustine, and probably Maimonides and Averroes though I ain’t studied them properly), G-d’s goodness is one with his will.
Continued:
I ain’t really studied Craig either, but it appears you are attacking a straw man. The claim that “the moral law was written on all of our hearts by God because deep in our hearts we all know right from wrong” does not mean that everyone knows every aspect of morality. It only means that everyone knows some aspect of it.
Yes, that is one theory to be taken very seriously. (Some great thinkers there too! Some Mencius in the east, maybe a little Aristotle or Locke in the west.)
You have to look at the claim he’s actually making. Like I said, I ain’t studied him. But it certainly appears that Craig is saying that G-d gave to human beings a clear understanding of the fact that moral truth exists.
How much evidence for that do we need? Why, even the critics of religion in this very thread seem nearly to concur! You only make exceptions for sociopaths:
In the beginning was the word.
I’m trending: yes.
Sorry; I don’t follow.
It’s possible that guilt is an emotion human beings evolved to feel when they do something that either violates others’ expectations of them or their own expectations of themselves.
So, if you are asking “could there be guilt without God,” I think most certainly “Yes.”
I have been influenced by Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Also, Pinker’s earlier book, “The Blank Slate: Our Modern Denial of Human Nature” expresses Pinker’s views on the nature of human beings.
Sure, if human morality simply emerged out of human nature this is “not at all the same kind of moral law” you thought we were talking about. But one question that many conservatives have is this: Will the Western World fall apart if it continues to be less religious, specifically less Christian.
The original post essentially makes this argument. I think that the Europe and Japan since 1945 have demonstrated that non-Judeo-Christian societies can be peaceful and happy. Europe probably took its Christian beliefs more seriously in the 1st half of the 20th Century. But this was also a time when Europe engaged in 2 destructive world wars. I am not saying that Christianity causes world wars and violence. But it does indicate that Christianity doesn’t necessarily prevent wars and violence and non-religious belief doesn’t also lead to wars violence.
Though the example of Stalin and Mao can’t be overlooked either, Stalin and Mao were [a] dictators and [b] tried to run a non-market oriented economy.
The main difference between the non-religious nations of Europe and Japan on the one hand and Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China on the other is that Europe and Japan are representative democracies and market oriented. Europe and Japan face huge challenges.
Europe and Japan face huge challenges, but they are far from the squalor and tyranny of the now defunct Soviet Union and Communist China.
My reality is a function of what I believe it to be. And I cannot believe something until I can name it. Be that a concrete object or a concept. It may be something else entirely, and it may affect me in ways I don’t perceive, but that’s just not that relevant to what I understand as reality.
We are the only animal, so far as we know, that names things. We are the only animal that uses this to define and understand reality. The word, spoken or signed, is what makes us human.
What is the source of morality? What is the source of mathematics? The answer is the same. Math exists whether or not we perceive math. It is an idea that we have gradually come to understand through the ages, and will continue to understand more and more. There is no limit to the complexity of math.
So it is with morality. Morality was not given to us. We have come to understand it. Just as some people rebel at understanding some types of math, or use math for the nefarious purposes (such as statistics, which are voodoo math :) ), so can morality be misunderstood and misapplied.
To say that we rely on a source for the existence of morality would be similar to saying we rely on a source for the creation of math. There is no source. Morality is.
Putting my moral subjectivist hat on for a second, I’m tempted to say that morality is something that happens when a person or a group of people think about whether or not they ought to do something. Perhaps this only happens when you have two or more people sharing space. Maybe if I am alone on a desert island, there is no such thing as morality. But one could argue that I might think about the morality of chopping down a tree for fire wood or killing a bird for food.
Or is morality objective, not merely subjective? I think one reason why many people are attracted to the idea of a God, regardless of which particular religion they subscribe to, is that they see God acting as a referee, an umpire, an impartial observer. We know that human beings have their biases. So, we are much more comfortable letting God make the rules. Presumably, God doesn’t have “skin in the game” and for that reason God will be fair.
But what does God say about the speed limit on the highway? Years ago, a friend of mine who had worked in Saudi Arabia for a few years told me that there is no speed limit in Saudi Arabia. This is because Saudi Arabia’s law is based entirely on the Koran and the Koran doesn’t mention speed limits.
Some Christians have told me that they believe that the only reason why a woman should be allowed to obtain a divorce, instead of merely a separation, from her husband is due to sexual infidelity. Even if the woman is being beaten up by her husband, many Christians have told me that separation, not divorce, is all that the Bible allows.
Now, I don’t know if God exists and if God does exist, I don’t know if God authorized or inspired either the Bible or the Koran. So, despite my concerns about the biases that we human beings have, I prefer we leave God out of our deliberations over speed limits, divorce and even issues like working on the sabbath, same sex marriage, slavery and gasoline taxes.
Maybe there is no moral law written on our hearts or anywhere else. Maybe we human beings are simply winging it.
Speed limits are not about morality. Speed limits are simply standards of behavior, and unrelated (directly) to standards of morality. Once a speed limit is enacted, however, it might be a matter of morality as to whether to obey that socially constructed standard of behavior.
There may be less reason to examine morality, but it exists nonetheless.
I do. :)
Not written in our hearts, nor are we winging it. We need to understand them, much as we understand math or gravity. Where is the source of gravity?
Like I said in # 163, I think that’s not a bad way of thinking through explanations. But there are still those two reasons I listed (also in # 163) that we sometimes are justified in saying more than this. You say nothing here to refute these reasons.
Now, since you brought this up again, how do you reconcile it with what you said on the “Nothing Lasts” thread? You grant that morality and mathematics are objectively true; you grant that morality is absolute; you don’t come out and say that these truths are eternal, but it’s a natural extension of what you say here.
At “Nothing Lasts” you said that nothing lasts because every real thing is subject to entropy. I agree with all these points about mathematics and moral law–objectivity, absoluteness, eternality. This is part of why I think there are things not made of matter, non-physical things, things not effected by entropy–because no one, so far as I can tell, has been able to explain how any of these things about morality and mathematics can be true if all reality is physical.
So much William James stuff!
All irrelevant, a change of subject.
I’m not talking about guilt the feeling. I’m talking about guilt the fact–corresponding to definition 1 rather than 2 at Dictionary.com.
Ok. So it looks like we agree on that. (Yay!)
No comment. (Even if I have them–and I probably don’t; I’m too tired! This isn’t a topic I want to take up, at least not this week. I think I’ve avoided addressing it in this thread so far.)
So mind-independent reality is real, but reality-as-we-understand-it is shaped by us? And that shaping involves our beliefs and our names? And this is the essential human function?
But it’s merely shaped by humans, right? Shaped, cultivated, created in part? Not created out of nothing?
When or if the universe does end, then perhaps so does math, but I doubt it. Since we will never know, the question is moot.
Keeping my moral subjectivist hat on for a little longer, let me take up “guilt the fact.”
So, it seems like you are asking if someone can be guilty of something if morality is subjective. Correct me if I am wrong.
Well, let’s say I live in Saudi Arabia and I have a Christmas tree in my living room, with ornaments and presents under the tree. I have been told that having a Christmas tree is illegal in Saudi Arabia. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it actually is illegal.
Am I guilty of having a Christmas tree? Yes. However, in my mind, I am not guilty of doing anything wrong. The authorities in Saudi Arabia disagree and I suffer the punishment. Should I suffer any punishment for having a Christmas tree? In my opinion, no.
What is the objective moral truth of the matter? Isn’t freedom of religion an objective good, an objective human right? Isn’t a governments’ violation of a person’s freedom of religion morally wrong, objectively?
Even if my answer is no, even if I say that I have no access to the objective moral truth, I will still say, “I think freedom of religion, properly defined, is a basic human right.” [Basic human right can be translated into God given right.] But I can’t conscript God into my side of the argument with someone who argues the contrary.
Someone else might argue that God would not want anyone to engage in idolatry and owning a Christmas tree is idolatry and should be punished by death. They think God is on their side. They think objective morality supports their position.
So you doubt the proposition “Nothing lasts”? That’s good.
Now this is a question to be referred to # 160, in which I point out that we were talking about moral law which is absolute and the violation of which incurs guilt.
So no: Not quite.
As far as I can tell, William James’ theory explains how a bottom-up morality based in human subjectivity can produce moral law the violation of which incurs guilt. But it’s still not the same kind of moral law I thought we were talking about–more because of the absoluteness than the guilt.