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What’s Your Basis for ‘Reason’ and ‘Morality?’
A Catholic cathedral in France taken by my nephew Luke Renoe. This visual art hangs in our home, a marker of transcendence.
Now those who follow me on social media, my websites, and teaching videos know that I have deep respect for other points of view. But everyone who knows me also realizes that my first response will always be to ask straightforward questions. So here are the questions I would ask Kate Cohen.
“How do you define ‘reason’ and ‘morality?’” “What is the source or origin of those concepts, ‘reason’ and ‘morality’?’” And most important of all “Who gets to answer these questions, then, apply them?” Again, those who know me know that these are questions I ask everyone all the time, whether in high school, undergraduate, Ph.D. studies, or casual conversation.
And my answer will always be the same: the standard for ‘reason’ and ‘morality’ must have a transcendent source. If there is no outside, supernatural origin for decision-making about right and wrong, then we are left with human definitions, sources, and decision-makers. And if we are left solely with humans at the helm we are left with a haunting question, “Who will decide which humans decide and how will those decisions be made?”
Published in General
Imagine I have a friend who is both a fine violin maker and player. He spends years on crafting his masterpiece violin. Finally, he invites me to a concert where he will play the new instrument. At the concert, I’m shocked at his playing: The bow screeches across the strings, the tempo is irregular, his notes are flat and sharp, and the instrument isn’t even in tune. After the concert, I ask him about the poor performance. He tells me he played that way to prove that he is superior to the rules of good violin playing. Those rules don’t bind him.
I think my friend may be a fine violin maker, but he’s a poor philosopher. When he created the violin, he created it with a certain nature and purpose, the fulfillment of which could produce beautiful music. Acting in frustration of that purpose by playing out of tune and with a screeching bow isn’t “freedom” or “superiority”, it’s just a contradiction of his earlier act of creation that produces nothing at all. It’s an act of impotence, not power.
God created man with a certain nature. Respecting that nature by following the moral rules God Himself embedded in man’s nature just shows that God isn’t an idiot. God is both the source of morality and bound by it. That “binding” is an expression of freedom.
Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was not a Christian and created a “Jefferson Bible” where the passages of the Bible that he believed were objectionable or mythical were removed.
The Founders were not all of the same mind when it came to their religious beliefs, but Thomas Jefferson was more of a Deist than a Christian.
As for religious toleration, remember that Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas both believed that torturing heretics was a good idea. Also consider that in the Hebrew Bible people are put to death for things as trivial as gathering wood on the Sabbath.
The founding of the United States of America was a new course, quite different from the religious Theocratic regimes that preceded it.
I don’t think so. I feel like I’m just skimming the surface. The Deposit of Faith is both wide and deep.
But in thought experiment we are dealing with, where God commands the Israelites to kill infants and children, it is God who is creating the screeching noises with his violin. It’s just a question of whether we will just nod our heads and praise the noise as wonderful music or if we will be honest and say that God put on a bad performance.
I also think we need to consider the possibility that many of the folks who wrote the various ancient texts that found their way into the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, were just offering up their opinions and conjectures.
It’s possible that the dude who wrote about God commanding the Israelites to kill infants and children was just talking out of his hat and that God commanded no such thing.
Deists recognize a Creator who has created eternal law embedded in natural law that can be nailed down with reason.
But since you bring up our good man T. J., we find a complicated person with a brilliant mind and an understanding, I think, of “ right” and “wrong,” even as he so often picked self-indulgence….
He seems a poor model for “moral,” though even the American Cincinnatus who promoted religion more than Jefferson was just a guy, like all the Founders.
I would not look to any of them to establish my full sense of morality, though all certainly had some virtues worth noting.
I’m responding to this comment of yours:
“We don’t have to use a passage from the Bible as part of this thought experiment. We could just dream up a scenario where you understand God is commanding you to do something that you think is absolutely, positively immoral.”
So the argument is abstract and has nothing specifically to do with God and Israelites. My point is that “dreaming up” a scenario where you understand God commanding you to do something positively immoral, is like dreaming up a scenario where a fine violin maker and player deliberately plays bad music. It’s not a real scenario because no real violin player would do it, because it involves a contradiction of their nature as violin players. Same with God. Dreaming up a scenario where God frustrates the designs of his own creation is just creating a scenario where God contradicts Himself. Won’t happen.
On a more abstract level we would have to speculate as to whether God is bound my the moral facts or if God created the moral facts.
If God created the moral facts then God could have decided that boiling babies in boiling water was good and giving babies food and hugs was bad.
If God could not have ever decided that boiling babies in boiling water was good and giving babies food and hugs was bad, then God is bound by the moral facts, not the maker of those facts.
That’s a more abstract argument for moral realism.
But leaving aside those more abstract arguments.
Let’s say one does subscribe to Divine Command Theory. That is, if God tells you to boil babies in boiling water, the moral thing to do is to boil babies in boiling water while disobeying this command would be immoral.
Still, we would still want to know if God really did command you or me to boil babies in boiling water.
Let’s say I show you some ancient text that says, “And God commanded Jude to boil those babies in boiling water. And so Jude boiled those babies in boiling water and God was pleased.”
It would be reasonable for you and me to doubt that whoever wrote this ancient text was accurately recording a conversation between God and Jude. Maybe this ancient scribe just had a vivid imagination. Or maybe someone told him this story and he wrote it down. But the person who told him this story might have had a vivid imagination.
We might want to apply the same level of scrutiny to the passages in the Hebrew Bible where God commands Israelites to kill infants and children.
Maybe God never issued any such command.
I’ve never thought of God as needing a moral compass to guide his immortal non-human character. If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, everlasting, etc, etc, etc, then He can wipe us all out and wipe us all back in; Job. So records of Him commanding a people to be wiped out would seem to be more about an extreme example of trust in God and not the killing. The bible theme, after all, is trust in God. The story of Abraham and Isacc is even more telling in this regard. Whichever way we attempt to reconcile Abraham’s actions as it appeared he intended to carry through on the command, Abraham also had the promise beforehand and the end result was faith and I suspect reason and morality played no part as Abraham did not seem to question.
There are many things in the bible that do not make sense on the first or even the tenth or hundredth read but based entirely on my own experience, the mysteries reveal with time and faith. If answers you truly seek, then keep reading and imagine God as being God and not limited by our feeble minds.
You have never explained why boiling babies is bad. I offered you a highly praised secular ethicist whose ideas are currently at work in our culture who seems to suggest boiling newborns would be fine.
I can’t remember how long real consciousness takes to exist, but I think we move that newborn pretty far into babyhood per the Singer standard.
I don’t think saying “just because we know that’s bad” works because I can point to human societies that are *fine* with human sacrifice. *Including ours.*
No, because that would contradict his Purpose in creating babies in the first place. Just like crafting a violin only to play it badly is just contradicting the purposes of the violin maker.
Why can’t Someone who is the source of moral facts also be bound by them? If I create a violin, it follows that there are ways to play the instrument well and play it badly. Bad playing doesn’t become good just because I created the violin, even if I’m the source of what it means to play the violin well.
I don’t subscribe to Divine Command Theory.
The easiest answer is that I have an intuitive sense that boiling babies is bad. I realize that my intuitions are falliable. But still, if I am told, by anyone including God, to boil babies in boiling water, I will intuitively believe that I am being told to do something immoral.
There are more complex answers available, such as the moral valence of suffering, the moral valence of health and flourishing. But this only kicks back the question to: Why is suffering bad? Why is health good? Why is flourishing good? And also, what is suffering? What is health? What is flourishing?
So, at some point I think I do have to rely on my intuitions, as fallible as they are.
I agree that our intuitions are fallible and we have to keep that in mind as we make our moral judgments. I don’t think morality is always easy-peasy.
This is susceptible to the same type of Euthyphro dilemma that is often argued against God. The ultimate basis of your moral judgements is intuition. It’s also admitted that intuitions are fallible, i.e. could be wrong. Wrong as judged by what? If intuition is the ultimate ground of moral judgement, then there is nothing beyond it by which it could be judged wrong. So either intuition is either always right, or it’s not really the thing we ultimately rely on for moral judgements.
Some moral realists would argue that even if God was the one who created babies, it does not follow that it would be moral for God to command people to place babies in boiling water.
These moral realists believe that God might be an ideal observer of the moral facts. God’s behavior and commands are perfectly aligned with the moral facts, but is not the maker of these facts.
What if someone thinks that God is the maker of these facts? One thought would be that God could have decided to make the moral facts anyway he pleased. If God wanted to make cruelty good and generosity bad, God could have done so.
The response to this might be that God would never make cruelty good and generosity bad because that would go against God’s nature.
But the response to this would be that if God’s nature makes it impossible for him to make cruelty good and generosity bad, then God is bound by his nature to be perfectly aligned with the moral facts. The moral facts govern God. That’s at variance with Divine Command Theory.
Some people are moral realists and some people are more anti-realists. Some people are moral constructivists.
Moral constructivists think that morality is constructed by various societies. These people tend to believe that if the society you live in has concluded that it is moral to deny women the right to own property or to sit on jury or to learn how to read, then this is morally correct.
But a moral realist would disagree. A moral realist thinks that the moral facts exist independently of what any human being or even a Supreme Being (God) thinks about these facts.
I don’t think my intuitions are always right. It’s just that I don’t think I have any choice but to rely on my intuitions when I make moral judgments. I do find moral realism persuasive in a meta-ethical sense.
This person has absolutely no foundation for what is objectively moral.
And your intuition is formed in the crucible of vestigial Christian morality… which you seem to be arguing means boiling babies is morally right if God says so.
But you are arguing against a God that does not exist. You arguing against a God we know does not exist BECAUSE of the Abraham – Isaac story, where God sets himself apart from the other gods of that region in not requiring the blood sacrifice of humans.
So stop arguing about an imaginary god fabricated in your mind to stand trial for the Christian God you have brought a case against. You misrepresent him with your fallacious hypotheticals.
Hey, HW is really good against that strawman.
I don’t think the moral realist argues that he or she personally has a foundation for what is objectively moral, only that a moral reality exists.
According to Divine Command Theory, whatever God says is moral is moral and whatever God says is immoral is immoral. Not all Christians subscribe to Divine Command Theory.
How do you know that an Evil God or an indifferent God doesn’t exist?
I am not misrepresenting a God that I am not convinced exists at all.
I have presented a hypothetical situation were someone hears a command from God that the receiver of the command senses is immoral. Then he has to decide if he will obey the command, in spite of his moral intuitions or if he will reject God’s command based on those moral intuitions.
Me? I would reject a command from God if I thought the command was immoral. I used the example from the Hebrew Bible where God commanded the Israelites to kill infants and children.
I don’t think God actually issued any such command. In fact, I tend to think God doesn’t exist at all. But even if God does exist and God did issue a command to the Israelites to kill infants and children, if I had been one of those Israelites, I would like to think that I would have told God to go jump in a lake, figuratively speaking of course.
He has not revealed himself in that way. And that is why your hypotheticals fail. Because our God is not unknowable, he just is not fully known.
He has revealed himself to us and declared himself unchanging. Always was and always will be, forever and eternal.
We are told to test all teaching or personal revelation on what has already been revealed. If it contradicts, it isn’t divine revelation.
I have no interest in debating you on fake gods sprung from your fevered and godless imagination. Either deal with the one most here believe in or continue to tilt at windmills.
What if your understanding of God is defective? After all, the Hindus, the Mormons, the Muslims and the Jews have a different understanding of God than you do.
Jews believe in God but do not think that Jesus rose from the dead or was born of a virgin.
So, different people have different understandings of God and God’s revelation.
I think a lot of people have gods that are evil, or at best indifferent. These gods aren’t truly gods, of course, but people follow them nonetheless. There is yours, for instance, which is nothing more than your finely tuned innate moral sentiments. But it is not infallible. You’ve already said that it can change. Does it only change when you have more information, or can it change when circumstances make that which would have been wrong somehow less wrong? Anyway, you have a hard time articulating it, so why don’t you go with: “‘Do as thou wilt’ shall be the whole of the law.” That would seem to cover your position quite well.
Sure. I don’t think of myself as infallible. And even if God does exist and God is perfectly moral, I do not have perfect access to God’s opinions regarding morality.
I do tend to doubt that a perfectly moral God would command people to kill infants and children as the Hebrew Bible presents.
That’s why I think it’s important to question whether the fallible human being who wrote that ancient text just offering up his own speculations, writing down a tale that someone told him or accurately representing a conversation between God and some Israelites.
If this conversation featuring God and the Israelites was just a guy’s crazy idea then we don’t have to worry about it.
That is why some people describe themselves as “practicing Christians.” We’re not good enough at it yet.
I think imperfection is woven into the human genome. Evolution has given human beings are very mixed bag of moral instincts.
@heavywater, your reason and morality don’t seem to be that far off of the perspective of one who believes God exists. I’m genuinely curious where you would consider your moral basis to be. Nick Hall, PhD speaks of having beliefs, and then below the beliefs are what he calls values. If I remember, his thinking is we can change what we believe, but values are more deeply set and not necessarily changeable.
This conversation with Heavy Water will continue to be fruitless because he doesn’t know who God is and doesn’t exhibit the curiosity to learn about Him from the Church. So, it’s all a bunch of navel gazing and rationalizing “moral” intuition. This is how you get private interpretation and moral relativism run amok.
Ask yourself which religious culture produced the best results (you will know them by their fruits) and treats the most people (catholic = universal) with the most human dignity as made in God’s image and likeness and work your way backwards from there. Hint: it ain’t Buddhist, or Shinto, or (especially) Muslim cultures, that’s for sure. It isn’t post-Christian America, either. I attribute the West’s decline directly to the fall of Christendom. But, the Church persists and grows in some unexpected places (usually under persecution by atheists). God works with our weaknesses. Heck, He even called Nebuchadnezzar his “servant.” Most of us can do better than the Nezzar.
My sense is that the God you worship is simply a product of the imagination of people who lived in years past.
For example, that dude who wrote about God commanding the Israelites to kill infants and children might not have been presenting a conversation that actually took place in reality.
He might have been just some guy with a messed up mind who liked killing infants and children and decided to make God the author of these murderous desires.
You have your own interpretation of various religious ideas too. You think that the Catholic church is God’s church.
That’s your opinion. I think it’s wrong. But you are entitled to your opinion.
Those infants and children that God commanded to be killed (which I think is entirely fictional, by the way) would also be made in the image and likeness of God.
Seems like being in the image and likeness of God is no protection against a bunch of religious people deciding to hunt you down.
I would argue that the rise of the West is attributable to the decline of Christianity. Instead of various Christian denominations slaughtering each other over the proper way to worship God, we let everyone take a live and let live attitude towards religion.