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The Atheist and the Acorn
This starts with a joke. Not a particularly good one, but perhaps the novelty will save the humor. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard it told.
An atheist is arguing with a priest as they walk through a grove of trees. “How can you believe in a God who created such a disordered universe? Look at these mighty oak trees. See the tiny acorns they produce. And yet the massive pumpkin grows on a feeble vine. If I had designed the world that situation would be corrected, let me tell you.”
Just then an acorn falls from the oak and taps the atheist on his noggin. “Imagine” drawls his companion “if that had been a pumpkin.”
The humor here (and I hope you’ll pardon my analyzing the joke. Perhaps with a better one I’d worry about squandering it) the humor lies in the atheist who is so confident that he knows how the universe ought to be ordered. He has a clear aesthetic view that fails to take into account some practical implications.
The Argument For and Against the Existence of God by Design
I doubt that particular conversation ever actually took place but I have seen similar arguments made. The blood vessels in the eye go in front of the retina where they inevitably block some percentage of the light. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to run the blood vessels along the back of the retina so you don’t get the “down in front!” effect? Maybe; maybe not. The system really is a wonder for oxygenating the eye, and it blocks only a small percentage of the incident photons. (I speak only from second-hand knowledge, mind you; I’ve never given the matter much study myself.)
The general form of the argument seems to be: “Nature works in this way. It would work better if instead, it worked this other way. Therefore a rational God did not design this.” And a general counter-argument. “Nature actually works better the way it does because of this reason you have failed to consider.” Either way, I don’t find it very convincing; you can swap the argument and counter-argument to the opposite positions as well. Both the atheist and the theist, in making their arguments, are assuming that they know all functions a given thing has and can deduce all reasons that the Lord might have constructed that thing that way.
I bring it up to illustrate two closely-related principles that one must keep in mind when reasoning about the Almighty:
- God is smarter than I am.
- God is also wiser than I am.
The Good Lord who stretched out the giraffe’s neck presumably had a good reason for doing so. Possibly it was for some overriding engineering concern. I think it more likely that He did so because he takes joy in the delight children get from seeing such an absurd animal. Not a value that many of us science types generally worry about, but that’s that second principle for you. The Good Lord has his own purposes that are better than the ones that you and I hold. In the end, that sort of design objective is hardly a thing that could be proven, at least on this side of the grave.
Arguing With the Almighty Himself
If one were to argue design with God, however, the general argument would take on a different form. “Nature works this way. It would work better if instead, it worked this other way.” (Therefore…? What exactly would one hope to gain by gainsaying the Almighty?) God would respond “No, this is the best configuration because…” and there would follow a series of reasons and counterarguments that would settle the matter. A God who knows the end from the beginning will have weighed every competing concern and derived the optimal solution. That is, He’d respond if He felt the need to justify His reasons to you in the first place. Job got several chapters of “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth?”.
That lack of an answer is deeply unsatisfying to us as readers. You let the man’s kids die; the least you can do is explain why to him. Job though, Job takes it as a complete answer. He doesn’t argue; he apologizes for demanding an answer in the first place.
I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees You.
Therefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.
Why? The answer to that question comes from the first chapter of the book, but not from the story, from something that Job said after he had lost everything.
Then Job arose, tore his robe, and shaved his head; and he fell to the ground and worshiped. And he said:
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
And naked shall I return there.
The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”In all this Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong.
Everything — the money, Job’s health, his children — everything was given to him by the Lord. None of it was immutably his; he enjoyed all the gifts at the pleasure of the Lord. There’s no higher court, no standard of justice, no celestial insurance company to make him whole after the Lord removes those gifts. It’s easy to assume that His justice reflects our own ideas of justice when we’re talking among ourselves, but the holiness of God allows no quibbling. Job here reverts to the usual reaction of man when confronted with the reality of the Living God; stark, raving terror. All our sophistries fade away like snowflakes in a rainstorm when we’re forced to acknowledge the actual, living presence of God.
The Implications of Infinity
If one is going to consider the nature of God, then it’s probably best to consider God on God’s own terms. If God is infinite, then reasoning about a god that is not infinite won’t actually tell you about the Lord. If you start with the assumption that God is confined by the Laws of Physics then you’ll never understand anything about a God who isn’t. I touched on the point briefly when discoursing on my opium dreams.
If God is in fact infinite, then you’ve got to reason about Him as if He’s infinite in order to get anywhere. If he’s infinitely intelligent then it’s not enough to just say that you’re likely to lose any sort of game of cosmic riddles. You’re measuring your finite IQ against his infinite IQ, and any finite quantity is less than an infinite quantity. But once you start talking about God as if he’s infinite there are whole debates that just sort of melt away.
For instance, evolution. If the Lord spoke the Earth into existence literally as it’s described in Genesis chapter 1 then He could have done it precisely that way. Any amount of clever biologists discoursing on fossils and DNA doesn’t change that. An infinite God can speak whatever he likes into the fossil record just as easily as He could have spoken its absence in. Alternately, perhaps he ran evolution like a computer simulation to see if you could get whales back out of land mammals, or maybe he just let the Earth run for an epoch and said ‘Let there be ponies now.” If God is infinitely powerful and infinitely intelligent then we have to acknowledge the possibility that He did things any old way He pleases and never mind what we’d have chosen.
We’ve established a means, do we have a motive? Why not? God, judging from the Bible, values the salvation of people rather highly. Suppose he set up the whole pageant of evolution in order to reach a single biology grad student in North Carolina. Seems like an awful lot of work, doesn’t it? Again, we’re thinking about infinity here. It’s just as easy for Him to do it that way as any other. If I have infinite money on hand, I can pay the national debt just as easily as if I can pay for an ice-cream cone. Infinity dollars minus 20 trillion works out to the same thing as infinity minus two bits; it’s still infinity.
As such I’m never much bothered by questions of atheists and acorns. From either side of the question, it’s nothing but a plausibility argument. We can play our games with wisdom and logic but we ought to do so with a certain amount of humility. One may argue with the Almighty, one would be foolish to expect to prevail. There’s no possible example, experiment, theoretical, hypothesis, what have you that can prove God exists unless God allows it. The question always — always — always resolves to the one Christ offered to Peter:
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
Peter answered and said, “The Christ of God.”
In the end, that’s the question that matters.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
So, someone who believes that God exists has to figure out which commandments have been issued by God and might also have to determine if these commandments of morally good (unless one assumes that God, by definition, is omnibenevolent).
Someone who does not believe in God has to figure out which asserted moral facts are actually moral facts.
Both the believer and the non-believer have some figuring out to do. What I think many believers in God do is in addition to asserting that God exists and asserting that God is omnibenevolent also assert that they know which commandments God has issued.
So, given that, the believer in God can argue that the non-believer has no epistemological warrant to accept proposed moral facts A and B instead of asserted moral facts A and C. But the non-believer can argue that the believer in God has no epistemological warrant to accept that Commandment X was actually issued by God while Commandment Z was not.
My comment was directed at the original post, not specifically you.
You’re either missing the point, or engaging in base-stealing with the term “moral facts”, or else winging it entirely by insisting on using a nonsensical term.
A fact cannot be moral or immoral.
An action can be moral or immoral.
These are not facts. These are laws, or at least guidelines. Which points to what discussions of morality are: discussions of boundaries.
This is base stealing again. I’ve never met anyone who seriously called themselves a “moral realist,” except either as an affectation or else as a means of insisting they were smarter than everyone else (i.e. “I’m just being a realist here..” with the implication that the other parties are somehow not being realistic).
I have met some surrealists, however they were insisting that the bananas were late for their walk.
One could make that point, and we could discuss it. Right now I’m just trying to understand what your position is. I think your position – based on your analogy with intelligent life on planets – is that there is no way to distinguish true moral facts from illusory ones, anymore than we have a way of knowing on which planets intelligent life exists (other than this one, of course). Am I wrong about that? (I’m not asking whether your position is true or false. I’m just trying to learn exactly what it is.)
So, you have never taken a college course on moral philosophy where metaethics is discussed and terms such as “moral realist” and “moral error theorist” and “non-cognitivist” and “moral constructivist” are used?
You accuse me of base stealing because I am familiar with some of the terminology used in moral philosophy. You can’t issue an edict and eliminate moral philosophy just because you aren’t familiar with it.
My analogy regarding intelligent life on planets was simply that, with respect to moral facts, one could believe that moral facts exist without necessarily claiming to know the content of those moral facts.
The metaethical viewpoint I currently subscribe to, influenced by professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Russ Shafer-Landau and his book, “Moral Realism: A Defense,” is moral realism.
So, as a moral realist, I believe that moral facts exist and that these moral facts are conceptually prior to and existentially independent of any social agreement or command issued by an ideal observer (i.e. God).
So, let’s say that God is an ideal observer of the moral facts. God issues a moral commandment, “Do not torture puppies.” A moral realist like myself believes that torturing puppies was morally wrong prior to the issuance of God’s commandment that one ought not torture puppies.
There is a Buddhist saying that a finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. A moral realist would say that an ideal observer of the moral facts is not a moral fact.
These uncreated moral facts — uncreated implies that the number does not increase over time. Unless new ones are discovered, of course. What happens when one moral fact impinges on another?
I think moral facts can be either categorical (“Do not eat squirrels.”) or defeasible (“Do not eat squirrels unless you are on the brink of starvation.”).
For example, I have heard the following 3 statements offered as defeasible moral facts:
[1] Other things being equal, the suffering of human beings ought to be minimized.
[2] Other things being equal, the autonomy of human beings ought to be maximized.
[3] Other things being equal, the flourishing of human beings ought to be maximized.
These 3 defeasible statements are in tension each other. There might be situations where one would want to restrict the autonomy of someone (a criminal, perhaps) in order to minimize the suffering and maximize the flourishing of human beings.
While some moral realists are comfortable with defeasible moral facts, not all moral realists are. Some moral realists argue that moral facts must be categorical, not defeasible.
I think you ought to look at this one again.
Here is Dr. Russ Shafer-Landau in his book, “Moral Realism: A Defense” explaining why moral facts can not be discovered by scientific means.
ooops. I’ll fix that.
Here is another excerpt from Shafer-Landau’s book, “Moral Realism: A Defense,” where Shafer-Landau describes metaethical views other than moral realism.
I understand that. I’m doing a terrible job of putting the question I’m trying to ask, because I can’t get an answer to it. My question is, given that moral facts exist, is there any way in principle to distinguish the real moral facts from illusory ones? For instance, you’ve written that you believe torturing puppies is wrong, and that it was wrong before God commanded it to be wrong. Fair enough. Is the evil of torturing puppies a real moral fact? What makes us think so? I’m not asking for certainty, just why we think it is reasonable to consider torturing puppies a real moral fact rather than just an illusory one.
The exploration of what we can know about the world independently of science is a fascinating question deserving its own thread. But I will say briefly that we can know for certain some things exist that are not conclusions of science.
One of those things is the existence of scientists themselves. Science is an activity of scientists – no scientists, no science. So as soon as we’ve begun talking about “natural science” as a way to test existence, we’ve already acknowledged the existence of scientists. Fictional scientists can’t conduct real tests of existence. Note this is a logical precondition for science existing at all, not a conclusion of science itself.
Another thing is the existence of a world capable of being explored and understood by scientists. No such world, no science. If the world were merely a “blooming, buzzing confusion” in William James’s words, no science would be possible. The world must have a rational structure capable of being discovered by the human mind. This is again a logical precondition of science, not a conclusion of science.
This is just a start of the things we can know exist that aren’t conclusions of science. I’ll leave it here.
One can’t really appeal to the natural sciences when it comes to determining which proposed moral facts are real moral facts and which proposed moral facts are not real. One can only use ones reasoning ability, ones experience and ones ability to imagine oneself in the circumstances of others. As I see it, those are the only tools we have to distinguish real moral facts from illusory moral facts, although I would be interested to learn of other possible tools that might be available to us.
Let’s say you have 5 people who all believe in God. But one of them believes that God wants human beings to burn a 3 year old child to death in order to satisfy the God’s desire for burning flesh and this person thinks it is moral to perform such child sacrifice. The other 4 people disagree, either because they believe that in some circumstances it is better to disobey an unjust commandment issued by God or because they believe that God does not command people to sacrifice 3 years olds.
The natural sciences are of no help in this hypothetical case either. So, asserting that God exists does not resolve the disagreements people have regarding what is moral and what is not moral. It only leads to additional questions regarding whether one should always obey God’s commandments and also the epistemological issue of how one distinguishes what God has in fact commanded from what one mistakenly thinks God has commanded.
My, my, my … whatever shall we do about things that exist without scientific proof that they do exist?
We will argue about whether they exist or not.
I’m still not making progress with this question. I’m asking specifically how one can use reasoning ability and experience to distinguish true moral facts from illusory ones. What I get back is a generic affirmation that we should reasoning ability and experience. I don’t think anyone could disagree with that. That’s how we think about anything. What I’m asking is how, specifically, reasoning and experience is to be used in the service of distinguishing true from illusory moral facts. For instance, in the specific case of torturing puppies, which you’ve said you believe to be a real moral fact. What was your reasoning by which you concluded that this is really a true moral fact and not just an illusory one?
One approach would be to assert that a world where every conscious creature is experiencing 500x amount of suffering is less desirable than a world where every conscious creature is experiencing 2x amount of suffering. In other words. If one were to accept the proposition that, other things being equal, less suffering is more desirable than more suffering, then one could easily conclude that torturing puppies is wrong.
Now, if you don’t accept that 500x amount of suffering is less desirable than 2x amount of suffering, this argument won’t convince you.
But I would ask you this: How does asserting that a God or multiple gods exist make this conversation about morality more illuminating? I don’t think it does. One could argue that God or gods are an illusion just as someone opposed to moral realism can argue that moral facts are illusory.
Yes, those are all valid questions. I agree that the mere assertion of the existence of God does nothing to resolve moral questions. Just as the mere assertion of uncreated moral facts does nothing to resolve moral questions. That’s why I keep pressing the question of how specifically true moral facts are to be distinguished from false ones in your view.
If true moral facts are like intelligent life on other planets, then people can use their reasoning ability and experience all they want, but they won’t get anywhere. After all the reasoning is done, they will still be where they started, just guessing which facts are the true moral facts like they can only guess which planets have intelligent life.
The questions you raise with respect to God and His commandments are good ones. I’ll address them after we’ve finished with your views on uncreated moral facts.
I disagree that we won’t get anywhere as we use our reasoning ability to distinguish actual moral facts from illusory moral facts. Slavery existed for thousands of years. Slavery is viewed as immoral today. That’s what a moral realist would call moral progress.
If there are no moral facts, then it’s hard to see how a society can make moral progress. If a law allowing slavery is no more or less moral than a law prohibiting slavery, prohibiting slavery would not represent moral progress but would instead be similar to telling people they must drive in the right side of the street instead of the left side of the street.
Think of how human beings have made progress in the a natural science like medicine. We can diagnose various diseases much more effectively than we could one hundred years ago. How did we increase our knowledge regarding the causality and treatment of disease? My using our reasoning ability.
So, we apply our reasoning ability to morality and we eventually determine that while slavery was accepted in previous societies slavery is not acceptable in our society. If you think this represents moral progress you probably think that at least one moral fact exists.
Let’s say I assert that the following are moral facts:
[1] Other things being equal, suffering of human beings ought to be minimized.
[2] Other things being equal, the autonomy of human beings ought to be maximized.
[3] Other things being equal, the flourishing of human beings ought to be maximized.
You could ask, “How do you know that these three propositions are moral facts and not just illusory?”
In response I could simply say, “Imagine a world in which human beings were suffering much more than they suffer today. Would that be a better world or a worse world?”
In other words, I can only use argumentation, thought experiments, reasoning and trying to put oneself in another’s circumstances as a means of distinguishing genuine moral facts from illusions.
If I were to tell you that Stalin’s Soviet Union was no more or less moral than Franklin Roosevelt’s United States of America because morality is an illusion, you can accept that argument if you like. But I would imagine you would reject that argument. My sense is that you believe that there are some right actions/inactions and some wrong actions/inactions even if you can’t demonstrate this in a laboratory.
That said, many philosophy professors reject moral realism.
The analogy between life on other planets and moral facts was your analogy, not mine. If you want to drop it, that’s fine. And yes I do agree we can use our reasoning ability to distinguish true from illusory moral facts. To the extent we can, moral facts are not like intelligent life on other planets.
Well, yes, if minimizing suffering is a moral fact, then minimizing the suffering of puppies is also a moral fact. All we have done is shift the question from the suffering of puppies in particular to suffering in general. Is then, minimizing suffering in general a true or illusory moral fact?
I am perfectly willing to say that it is a self-evident moral truth that suffering should be minimized (all else being equal). All sane people should be able to know it simply through common sense, and whether they believe in God or not. And by self-evident moral truth I mean that it is “true moral fact” that some hypothetical objective moral observer would validate as true. We have access to these truths through an innate moral sense, that intuits real moral features of the world. Not all moral truths can be intuited this way, but some can.
Is that what you mean by “accept the proposition?” If so, we are in agreement. A lot of atheists would not be in agreement with me here because they would deny we have an innate moral sense that can intuit genuine moral features of the world.
I don’t see how this helps. It seems circular. An imaginary world with more human suffering would be a worse world if in fact suffering is a moral fact to be minimized. If it’s not, then such a world is no worse than this one. Both worlds are judged by whether suffering should in fact be minimized. Why not just stick to the real world, then?
My analogy regarding intelligent life on other planets was only mention that one can believe that moral facts exist without necessarily believing that one knows the content of those moral facts. Similarly, someone might believe that intelligent life exists on other planets while not believing that one knows which planets have intelligent life.
So, I think you misunderstood what I was trying to communicate with my analogy.
No, I got that part of it.
I think that “other things being equal, suffering ought to be minimized” is a true moral fact.
I agree.
We are in agreement.
Atheists disagree among themselves on human nature. I am currently reading, for the second time, Steven Pinker’s 2002 book “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.” I have watched Steven Pinker’s video’s where he summarizes his views on the nature versus nurture debate and I have found his views, that much of human behavior and thought has a genetic basis.
One example Pinker uses is that of Phineas Gage. From page 42.