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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
The most sensible comment I’ve read in this long “discussion.”
Are there any other works of fiction that loom so large in your psyche?
Of course you would. But, you still can’t tell us why boiling babies is wrong.
He can start with the task in Comment #2.
I do not know this guy, though I think he’s right from what I quickly read about *reason* taking one to God, unless one is truly a nihilist.
What is my moral basis? If the moral realists are correct in that there exists at least one moral fact, well, then I should hold views on morality consistent with those moral facts. For some people it is a moral fact that obedience to God is morally right and disobedience to God is morally wrong. My guess is that God doesn’t exist at all or if God does exist God might not have any views about morality. That’s an estimation on my part based on what is known as the problem of evil and also the problem of inconsistent revelation.
I don’t pretend to know all of the “correct” answers to all possible moral questions. I supported the Iraq war back in 2002-3 when President George W. Bush and about 70 percent of the US Congress supported the Iraq war resolution.
I have often reflected back on why I supported the Iraq war and whether, knowing what I know now, I would think my decision was correct.
As I reflect on issue like the Iraq war and other issues like it, (for example, whether we should spend more money on food stamps or for health care for people who lack health insurance), I keep coming back to issues such as happiness, suffering, flourishing, autonomy, health and life.
It would seem that if I told someone that policy A will result in terrible suffering for everyone, that person would probably say that we shouldn’t pursue policy A. If I told this person that policy B will result in increased happiness, less suffering, more flourishing, more autonomy, improved health and longer life expectancy, this person would likely support policy B.
Or maybe this person would introduce other considerations regarding policy A or policy B. This person might prefer one set of policies over another because “those policies are more familiar to me” or some other considerations.
Are you saying that you think the Bible is a work of fiction?
I think boiling babies is wrong because it is at variance with what I perceived to be the moral facts. Could I be wrong about the existence of these moral facts? Sure. But as for now, I will continue to think that there are some moral facts and these moral facts convince me that boiling babies is wrong.
It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that the reason why various passages in the bible don’t make sense to us is that those passages were written by fallible human beings and there was some defect in the moral reasoning of some of the people who wrote these ancient texts.
Some guy who lives several thousand years ago writes that God commanded the Israelites to kill infants and children. Maybe that guy was a little messed up it the head, like Timothy McVey or the 9-11 hijackers.
There are kooks alive today. There were kooks that lived thousands of years ago.
So, why model your morality based on the writing of some kook who wrote something thousands of years ago?
Subject the Bible to the same sort of scrutiny that you would subject the Koran or other “holy texts” from other religions.
Great!! You agree with the author of moral facts! (I wonder who that is….)
:)
No, you’re saying that you think the Bible is a work of fiction. Try to keep up.
I think the moral facts do not have an author.
I am not saying that the entire bible is fictional. I do think that the passage that depicts God commanding the Israelites to kill infants and children is depicting something that never actually happened in reality. Can I prove it? No. That’s my estimation.
The historical writings are in the mix of my mind, but modeling my morality based on behaviors in the historical writings doesn’t seem to have happened. People seem to wander astray when they excerpt out bits and pieces and stand on those bits and pieces. I don’t see a reason to try and figure out the why-God question from a few millennia ago when I can’t figure out the why-God question for the things for which I have been an eye-witness. I endeavor to keep things simple.
And yet, the consequences of an incident you don’t believe in weigh heavily on your non-existent soul. Why would that be?
It reminds me of when a devout Muslim argues that he believes that a woman who exposes her ankle in public should be beaten up because this is God’s law. We live in a world where some people feel obligated to accept some pretty crazy ideas simply because it was written by some dude a few thousand years ago or they heard it from some religious leader. It’s not as bad as it once was.
When I was attending a Presbyterian Church back in the 2014 to 2017 time frame, it did seem like the leadership of the church placed more emphasis on feeding the hungry and clothing the naked than killing those wicked people. I suppose everyone who tries to derive their morality from the an anthology of writings like the Bible will have to decide which writings deserve more emphasis and which writings have more applicability to current circumstances.
Dreaming up a scenario seems to be rather godless, so why bother?
I am sympathetic to a lot of Heavy Water’s feelings.
There are a ton of different narratives, and it’s hard to figure out who/what to trust.
It’s like Dr. Fauci runs the universe!!!
All I can tell anyone is that I believe there is an objective truth. There are absolute “rights” and “wrongs.” But I cannot get to absolutes without having an author of some sort, and I have tried.
For me, God seems to be what is the only reasonable answer, and this is before I talk about anything so specific as Christianity, though I am a Christian! (FYI: I also don’t think God is a magician in the sky, a seemingly fairly common conception that creates a lot of confusion about Him as well.)
The truth is that this discussion about boiling babies is a sideshow to that question, though I think this is an objectively bad action. ;)
Also, be careful. If you really start wrestling with God, the odds are pretty good you’ll throw out your hip.
Reason is good, but it only lakes you so far. Abraham came from a human society as advanced as any. And it is likely that the LORD God was know and was considered by people of Ur “a god”. But it was a belief in God telling the truth that saved Abraham. And it was a trust in the truth of God’s saying that Isaac would be the progenitor of a race of people from whom the Messiah would come regardless of whether Isaac was killed and resurrected in the mean time.
God wants us to take Him at His word and not to rely on our own understanding but to reason with Him who deigns to reason with us.
And likewise God says that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.
If these are unseen and unknowable, and we have to take God’s word for them, the reasoning to believe God involves believing God and not reasoning ourselves into conceptualizing what these forces may or may not be and then agreeing with God based on our own reasoning.
This is so, just as what God has in store for believers in Heaven, which has never been conceived or entered into the heart of man to intimately know, and God only describes in brief.
Reason is good, but reasoning alone is not everything and can used to mislead.
duplicate
I don’t believe that everything that is religious is bad and that everything that is non-religious is good. I think the killing fields of Cambodia, Stalin’s gulags, Mao’s murderous regime demonstrate that very well.
Now, September 11 2001 did make me realize that both religious and non-religious people can inflict tremendous amounts of suffering and death onto people.
Without God, everything is permitted. With God, everything can be construed as God’s justice.
The story of Abraham in Genesis is interesting. But I tend to think that the events depicted in that story never actually happened in reality. Also, the lesson that one should “trust” in whatever God says, regardless of what God says can lead to people flying airplanes into buildings so that God’s justice will be visited upon the infidels.
Like I mentioned, I know that secular people can accept terrible ideas too. One reason I joined the Republican party in 1984 was because I believed they were more serious in their opposition to communism than the Democrat party. Let’s hope that Islamic Theocracy and Marxist-Leninist Communism aren’t the only options on the table.
You’ve said your intuitions are not always right. What makes you say that? Which of your moral intuitions do you suspect are not right?
I suppose there was a time that I struggled or wrestled with some of it, but that memory has almost faded. I had to stop and think about it to recall. Some of it is applicable today and much of it is not, based on my experience. If we are looking at the Christian perspective, it is summed up in a few verses and then there are several books (of the Bible) that follow that give some pretty in-depth thoughts. I don’t worry about things I don’t understand; sometimes they make sense later, maybe years later, and some haven’t yet.
For the record, I didn’t compare them either. That was just a first step in the general direction of what we might need to know in order to learn what is really going on in those Bible passages.
Kierkegaard’s struggle is badly misunderstood.
Intro here.
I don’t know which of my moral judgments are not right. If I know which of my moral judgments are not right, I work correct them. It’s just that I doubt that all of my moral judgments are correct given that I have my limitations (as I think all human beings do) and the world is very complex.
If God exists it’s worth considering God as an ideal observer of the moral truth, morally perfect. I tend to think that if some Supreme Being does exist this being isn’t morally perfect because of all of the moral imperfection that exists in our world.
If our world were like we imagine heaven would be, then God as a morally perfect being becomes very plausible, in my estimation. I don’t think that heaven or hell exist but are products of the religious imagination.
Not even the ones that clash with your interpretation of the Bible?
I don’t know. I recoil from the idea that God issued a command to the Israelites to kill infants and children. I am pretty close to 100 percent certain that such a command would be immoral.
I can go back and forth about the morality of raising taxes on citizens to pay for food stamps or Social Security. But being against a command to kill infants and children is as close to a slam dunk as one is likely to get.