I am a Christian professor in philosophy and apologetics, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.
Worth reading this post from Evolution News. Harari’s implications of Darwinian, naturalistic evolution fit with what I have argued in places such as my books, “In Search of Moral Knowledge” & “Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality.” Yet, I also try to show that there is no knowledge on naturalism, which undermines his & other naturalists’ cases.
Thanks to John Leonetti for pointing out this article.
A Darwinist Deconstructs the Declaration of Independence
Last time, I posted that though Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Rob Bell, and Tony Jones maintain God is love and good, they cannot preserve God’s justice, for it ends up being arbitrary for them. Yet, to be truly good, a person must be not only truly loving, but also truly just. So, by separating God’s love from His justice, they end up with a God who is not truly good.
Love and justice are partners, for love protects what is good and cared for. If I find that someone is trying to lure my wife’s heart away from me, I will intervene with godly jealousy for hers and my sake, and ours together. God is like this, too; Scripture depicts God as jealous for His beloved, and He too will intervene to protect His children from seductions because they will harm and drive us from Him. God despises sin because it is an affront to His holiness, and also because it steals us away from loving Him. To illustrate God’s jealousy for His people, He had Hosea take a harlot as his wife, as a sign to Israel of God’s faithfulness, yet also of their apostasy.
God is absolutely good, so He cannot act in a way that separates His justice from His love. He cannot act in a way that is just and yet unloving, or loving and yet unjust. Justice requires that God repays each one according to his or her due, due to God’s own just character. When He acts in justice, He acts in proper proportion to the offense. If we use Aristotle’s virtue theory as a lens, we can see God always will act appropriately in justice, never going to an extreme of deficiency by shrinking back from proper punishment or discipline. Nor would God go to an extreme of excess, by exploding in boiling rage. No; God’s “work is perfect, for all His ways are just; a God of faithfulness and without injustice, righteous and upright is He” (Deut 32:4).
Yet, for McLaren and others, it seems they cannot tolerate the idea that God ever could act violently. Bell expresses this concern clearly; at death,
“A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony.
“. . . If there was an actual human dad who was that volatile, we would contact child protection services immediately.
“If God can switch gears like that, switch entire modes of being that quickly, that raises a thousand questions about whether a being like this could ever be trusted, let alone be good.”[1]
Yet, in response and conclusion, I think Miroslav Volf expresses well the problems with this mindset:
“My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda of the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.”[2]
[1] Bell, Love Wins, 174 (emphasis mine).
[2] Volf, Free of Charge, 139.
Available now online in Metaphysica: “Tropes and Some Ontological Prerequisites for Knowledge“; in print soon
Many have written about trope ontology, but relatively few have considered its implications for some of the ontological conditions needed for us to have knowledge. I explore the resources of trope ontology to meet those conditions. With J. P. Moreland, one of my colleagues in the MA Christian Apologetics program, I argue that, being simple, we can eliminate tropes’ qualitative contents without ontological loss, resulting in bare individuators. Then I extend Moreland’s argument, arguing that tropes undermine some of the needed ontological conditions for knowledge.
Yet, we do know many things, and trope nominalists presuppose that too. Therefore, I consider three counter-arguments, starting with David Lewis’s rebuttal based on appeal to brute facts. Second, I explore Jeffrey Brower’s recent proposal as a possible solution. Last, I consider Robert Garcia’s recent distinction between module and modifier tropes, to see if it can be of assistance. I conclude, however, that trope nominalism cannot preserve some of the needed ontology to have knowledge.
McLaren and others think many Christians read Scripture from the wrong standpoint, the “Greco-Roman narrative,” which they have received. That G-R narrative shapes them to read it wrongly, so that God is violent and blows up in rage over our imperfections due to our fall into sin. People need to be forgiven so God will love them, yet He still has determined to sort them into one of two destinies: heaven, or hell, where He will blow up in rage for eternity upon them.
Yet, for McLaren, Jesus’ story needs to be read in its Jewish context, in which sin should be treated more as our “coming of age.” Though we act foolishly with new opportunities and freedoms, God does not disown us because we are in His “family.” Instead, He gives us instruction and correction. God does not let our freedoms run wild, restricting what we can do sometimes by limiting our freedoms and letting natural consequences take their effect, so we learn and grow. However, He never works directly, only indirectly; for instance, God did not cause the water in the Nile to turn into blood, but it likely turned red from a red tide.
When we develop socioeconomically and technologically faster than morally, we “fall” into sin, not just personally but also by social dynamics. Examples include how many in Germany became involved with the Nazis’ agenda, and how western nations built empires through colonization, for these oppress others and grieve God’s heart.
For McLaren, biblical depictions of God as wrathful stem from evolving interpretations of Him, but we find the mature view in Jesus. That view matches with the peaceable kingdom portrayed in McLaren’s understanding of the prophets’ main message, which he summarizes under the label “Isaiah.” God is good, which for McLaren means He is non-violent, loving, and just, yet His justice comes by His naming sins for what they are, getting us to agree with Him about them, and then His absorbing and forgetting them.
Now, surely he is right that God does not exhaustively determine the future. If He did, then God would be the author evil. Yet, that does not mean that his open theism wins by default; instead, McLaren should consider middle knowledge, a view on which God is sovereign and omniscient, yet we are free in a libertarian sense.
More so, is McLaren’s “Jewish” story a faithful, forward reading of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament? For various reasons, I don’t think so. Frequently, the biblical authors ascribe to God violent actions for judgment, e.g., the flood; the plagues upon Egypt and Pharaoh; death in conjunction with the Passover; the destruction of Egypt’s army in the Red Sea; the destruction of Israelites who worshipped the golden calf; the Levitical animal sacrifices; Jehu and God’s destruction of Ahab’s house; God’s sending Assyria and Babylon to conquer Israel and Judah, respectively; and many more. Even the prophets couch their message of a future, peaceable kingdom in terms of God’s judgment upon nations and His own people who sin.
So, what might seem to be a more faithful, forward reading of the Bible? I think the theme that Scripture develops, from Gen 1 through Rev 22, is that He is seeking a people for whom He will be their God, they will be His people, and He will dwell in their midst. While God is love, He also is holy –purely, completely good, and even the standard of goodness, and utterly undefiled by any evil. Therefore, being His people cannot take place on any terms other than His. Throughout Scripture, God will not leave the guilty unpunished because He is purely holy and just, and to be purely good, God has to be truly holy. Otherwise, He could allow evil to be in his presence and go unaddressed.
Yet, we will see in the next blog more reasons to see that on their view, God is not truly good, and even One of whom to be afraid.
To begin our historical tour, I will start with the ancient Greeks. I will focus on Plato and Aristotle, who still much influence on western ethics.
For Plato, morals are not human products. Instead, they exist objectively in the intelligible realm, which includes the forms. A form is a universal that itself is not located in space and time (it is metaphysically abstract). A universal is one thing, yet it can have many instances in the visible, sensible realm. For example, justice is a universal, and there can be many just people. The identical quality, justice, can be found in many instances.
A comparison of these two realms:
| The Intelligible realm: | Eternal | The true, the good, the beautiful in themselves | Forms, or universals: things in themselves, essences (e.g., justice itself) | Known by the intellect, through reason (mainly deduction) |
| The Sensible/Visible realm: | Temporal, finite | Particular examples of truth, goodness, and beauty | Particulars: many just people | Known by experience |
Plato’s Two Realms
Justice can be instanced in a human being because humans are a body-soul duality, and the soul is their essential nature that defines them as the kind of thing they are. All humans should be just, and to reach their true goal, or telos, they need a proper balance of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Yet, it is hard to reach the telos, for the process of education in the knowledge of the good is very difficult. His “cave” illustration shows that only a few people leave the “shadows,” a place of illusions which they mistake for reality. Instead, only a few strive toward the true light outside the cave and acquire knowledge of the forms.
In this, Plato questionably assumes all people want to be virtuous. All they need is education and effort. Furthermore, though he realizes people should be virtuous, he seems to lack a “connection” between the moral forms and human nature. Why is justice appropriate for our souls?
Today, it is hard for many even to conceive that there could be immaterial and objectively real entities. Still, can Plato’s view sustain the four core morals? It seems it can; the virtues of love and justice, as well as the principles that we should not murder or rape, would be universals that are normative for all. Moreover, we know these morals by reason, which fits with our intuitive knowledge of their validity.
For Aristotle, there is a deep unity between the body and the soul. The body is appropriate for humans due to the kind of thing they are (i.e., our essence). Similarly, the cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, justice, and courage) are appropriate for humans due to their soul’s nature. As one’s essence, the soul enables a person to grow and change and yet remain the same person. That is, one’s personal identity is constituted by one’s set of essential properties and capacities (even for virtues), which do not change. If people changed in some way essential to them, they’d no longer exist! Yet, they can undergo other kinds of changes, like the development of the virtues, and still be the same individuals.
Aristotle’s ethics is practical, seeking how to achieve the function of a human being, which is to guide one’s actions by reason. The virtues are developed by habituation and training. This involves being apprenticed to someone who has the virtues. Moreover, virtues are a mean between two extremes. For instance, courage is a mean between cowardliness (a vice of deficiency) and rashness (the vice of excessiveness). Moreover, like Plato, the good is found in community; Aristotle would not support the western, autonomous individual.
Like Plato, Aristotle believed in universals, though they always had to be instanced in particulars. Still, immaterial, objectively real universals exist, which rubs against today’s common belief that humans are just physical things. Moreover, he was pretty confident in human abilities to use our reason and know universal truths, as well as in our abilities to be virtuous by habituation. Even so, like Plato, it seems his views can preserve the four core morals and our knowledge thereof. Of course, we will have to see later if it is reasonable to believe there are real, immaterial universals.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
Plato, The Republic, Books, 4, 6, 7, & 10
R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 2
Between the time of the ancient Greeks and the Scientific Revolution, western ethics was dominated by religious traditions. I will give a broad overview of several key thinkers from Jewish and Christian thought. Could these ethical views preserve these core morals?
First I will focus on the Hebrew Scriptures. There, ethics are grounded ultimately in God’s moral character and thus what He commands. Those commands, or laws, were not arbitrary. Instead, He always would will what fits with His morally perfect character. Thus, it was a deontological (duty-based) ethical approach.
As God’s people, Israelites were to be like God. For instance, because God is just, holy morally pure and undefiled by sin (evil), and compassionate and loving, they too were to practice justice (Micah 6:8), be holy (Lev 19:2), and be compassionate and loving.
In addition, there was room for other forms of ethical reasoning. The wisdom literature appealed at times to utility (consequences) of actions (e.g., Prov 6:20-29). There also was room for self-interest (e.g., Deut 28:1-7, 15, where Moses spells out blessings of obedience, and the consequences of disobedience). There also was room for appeals to reason, or natural law. People should know particular moral principles based on how God has created them and nature (e.g., from observing nature, be diligent, Prov 6:6-11; do not slaughter pregnant women to extend one’s territory, Amos 1:13).
Also, Maimonides (d. 1204) lived in Spain, home of the Jewish intellectual center during the Islamic empire. He tried to synthesize Aristotle’s thought (which he received through Islamic sources) with the Mosaic Law, or Torah. To him, God’s revelation is perfectly compatible with natural law. Moreover, both sources give us knowledge of objective moral truths, which ultimately are grounded in God. As with Aristotle, Jewish thought has room for virtues, but the primary emphasis is obedience.
Christians draw ethics from both the Old and New Testaments. However, unlike Israel in the Old Testament, Christians do not live under a theocracy. Moreover, they are not under the Mosaic Law, but grace, to be in relationship with God. Still, they should obey the moral law out of love for God.
Specifically, they are to love God with all their being, their neighbors as themselves (Matt 22:37, 39), and one another as Jesus has loved them (John 13:34). They also are to care for the vulnerable (James 1:27, Luke 14:16-24) and, generally, to embody Jesus’ kingdom’s values. Moreover, there is a continued stress upon obedience, but with special emphasis upon heart attitudes (Matt 5:17-20). However, Christians cannot do this apart from the power of God’s Spirit in them. Virtues continue to matter, for Christians are to become like Christ, their telos (Eph 4:13, Col 1:28).
Augustine (d. 430) built upon the biblical teaching that God is intrinsically good and sovereign. Since God only does what is good, His creation is good, so He did not create evil. Instead, evil arose from humans’ feely willed rebellion against God. Evil, then, is spoiled, perverted goodness.
Augustine posited two cities, or kingdoms: that of humans, and that of God. Members of the city of man live after their sinful desires. At best, they can achieve a rough peace and justice, and they follow their love of themselves. In contrast, members of the city of God follow God’s Spirit, and they have the peace of God and with God. They are motivated by God’s love.
Augustine adopted the cardinal virtues and tied them to the theological ones, faith, hope, and love. Yet, he refocused the cardinal ones in terms of the love of God. Due humans’ sin, it is impossible to be truly virtuous by their own efforts.
As a Catholic, Aquinas (d. 1274) synthesized Augustinian theology with Aristotelian philosophy. Aquinas posited two realms that can be depicted variously: the heavenly and the earthly; revelation and reason; sacred and secular; supernatural and natural; and grace and nature. The supernatural realm includes the theological virtues, while the natural realm includes the cardinal, or natural, virtues.
In each pair, each realm is for the other. For instance, God cares for and gives revelation to creation, and creation is to glorify God. Also, revelation is intelligible by reason, though reason cannot exhaust what we know by revelation.
Aquinas also blends both deontological and virtue ethics. Christians should embody the theological and natural virtues, while non-Christians should embody the natural ones. So, his ethics applies universally, and we can know ethics by reason and revelation.
In all these Christian and Jewish views, there is a body-soul dualism, with the soul as humans’ essence. So, the virtues and commands are appropriate for humans due to their nature, and morals exist objectively. In these ways, it seems they can preserve our four core morals.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part (on law), and the Second Part of the Second Part (on virtues)
Augustine, City of God, and The Enchiridion
Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought, 393-408
R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, chs. 1, 3
Today, in the west, we live in a time with many different moral “voices” and competing claims. When I was a graduate student in Religion and Social Ethics at the University of Southern California from 1995-2000, this was quickly apparent. Many of my fellow grad students rejected any kind of objectively real morals. Instead, they saw morals as their own construct, which were based on a wide range of preferred views. One person, a Reformed Jew, tried to integrate her religious tradition with the insights of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism and the sociology of knowledge. Many rejected their Catholic roots and instead embraced some form of critical theory, which is deeply liberationist in spirit. Some followed Foucault and queer theory, while others embraced Nietzsche. Still others followed various feminist theorists.
Like them, many people think morality is simply “up to us”; morals are just particular to individuals or communities. Indeed, they are deeply suspicious of any claims that there are morals that transcend and exist independently of us. They think that to impose others’ morals, including “objective” ones, on people is deeply imperialistic and oppressive. After all, who are you to say what is right or wrong?
There also are different social visions that align with these moral viewpoints. For example, progressives seem to be secular, such that morals for society should be based on secular, public reasons, not narrow, sectarian, or religious reasons. Otherwise, how could we come together and be a society in which there are so many different, private moral visions?
Now, for those influenced by western thought, and especially those who have grown up in the west, it easily can seem that not only is this moral diversity the way things are, but also the way things should be. After all, in the west (and especially the U. S.), we prize the value of autonomy, which we understand as being free to determine our own lives. Coupled with the view that morals are basically “up to us,” we should expect there to be an irreducible plurality of viewpoints, norms, and values.
Over time, in the west a large number of competing moral theories have been advanced. But these did not come out of a vacuum. They have a history with many shaping influences, leading even to the mindset that morals are up to us. One of the things I will do in this series is to explore those shaping factors. Two of them are the Scientific Revolution, and the “fact-value split” in the late 1700s.
Despite this great plurality of ethical views, it still seems there are at least some core morals all people simply know to be valid. For instance, people want justice to be done. They may disagree about what constitutes justice, or their theories about justice. But, it seems people know that justice is good and should be done. Love is another virtue people know to be good. They may disagree about what the loving action should be, but they still seem to agree that we should be loving.
Besides these virtues, there are some principles that people simply seem to know are right. For instance, it seems people simply know murder is wrong. While some may disagree about what act should count as murder, nevertheless, we know that murder (as the intentional taking of an innocent person’s life) is wrong. I would add that rape is wrong too. These four morals seem to be core –we simply seem to know they are valid.
Some might add other moral principles and values to that short list. For example, for many, it is clear that genocide and chattel slavery are wrong. In this series, I will focus on those four core morals. I will look at the various types of ethical views in western historical context, to see if they can preserve those core morals. If a theory cannot do that, then it seems we should reject it. In that process, a key question I will ask is this: what kind of thing are these core morals? But, before I start that survey, I will explore the influences from the Scientific Revolution on our ethical thinking.
In previous posts, I had summarized the more mature views of these former “emergents,” as well as offered some assessments. Now, I will return to more assessments, starting with issues posed by their views of sin.
For them, inherited, original sin is a mistaken doctrine due to a few things, such as: 1) it presupposes that we have a body and a soul, which they have rejected for a physicalist view of humans; and 2) it presupposes that we are separated from God, but they have rejected that for a more panentheistic view of God. We already are “in” God (in relationship with Him), as is the rest of creation. If we are not dead to God due to sin, then our need is not for God to forgive us and for the Spirit to give us a new birth, in order to come alive to God. Instead, we need to work on our relationship with God, which primarily occurs through living out the way of Jesus with one another and creation.
If creation is physical, then sin must be redefined too. On traditional Christian orthodoxy, sin is a matter primarily of the heart that affects our whole being – not just body, but our heart, mind, and every aspect of us. For instance, Scripture says that the heart is more deceitful than all else (Jer 17:9). Moreover, Jesus tells us “the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders” (Matt 15:18-19, NASB). Therefore, not only do thoughts and lustful attitudes come from the heart, so also do behaviors and actions.
Yet, sin cannot be a soulish thing on their views, so it seems it must be behavioral, i.e., involving physical actions. Yet, if thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and our purposings are just physical, then, as I have argued previously, they do not have any intentionality (which is the ofness or aboutness of our thoughts, desires, beliefs, purposings, etc., things commonly called mental states). The same must hold for evil thoughts, etc. Yet, how can there be sin if there are no real thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and so on? So, by putting sin into a physicalist framework, it seems they undermine the nature of sin and evil.
Yet, we also must notice that if their panentheistic view is true, then sin is in God too. That is, it is present in Him. Therefore, God is not separated from sin, but He has evil in His being. That strongly indicates that their God is not truly holy, and if so, then their God is not purely good. Unfortunately, that result seems to leave us with a God who could do all sorts of monstrous things.
However, perhaps they might reply that when Jesus lived on earth, He was not separated from being amongst sin or sinners. He hang out with sinners all the time and came to save them (1 Tim 1:15). While true, His “hanging out” with people and dealing with their sin did not entail he Himself would have sin be in His being. Hebrews 7:26 explains that as our High Priest, Jesus is separated from sinners, but this must mean that He Himself is not defiled by sin, not that He couldn’t hang out with sinners.
In my next blog, we will start to explore reasons why their God ends up not being truly good.
There are some key premises in their thought about God’s love and goodness: God essentially is both loving and good, and love is essential to good relationships. However, violence (e.g., with punishment of sin) is incompatible with these qualities of God and good relationships. So, how does God deal with injustice, and evil? It seems it is by His absorbing it into Himself, then forgiving and forgetting it.[1] God overcomes evil creatively by His goodness.
Now, McLaren and our other authors are deeply, and rightly, concerned about God’s goodness and justice being realized on earth as it is in heaven. They realize justice needs to be lived out now, and not just after we are with the Lord in heaven.
Yet, if God is truly good, just, and holy (i.e., utterly pure, righteous, and undefiled by sin), it seems He would hate evil and must exact punishment for it. This fits with God’s self-description in Exodus 34:6-7, where He discloses He is not only loving, compassionate, faithful, and more, but also that He will not leave the guilty unpunished. We can relate to this, for if a human judge did not punish evil actions, we would recognize that judge’s action to be unjust.
Nevertheless, this view is not an option for McLaren, or even Jones, for it treats His holiness as absolute, and it requires that God act retributively in justice. Evidently, then, on their views, God can choose not to punish sin. However, this implication leaves us with two disastrous results. First, God would be defective in terms of being truly holy, just, and even good because He would not necessarily be repulsed by evil.
Second, if God can choose not to punish sin, then He would punish it simply based upon His willing something to be wrong, and not due to His character of being just and holy. Yet, if so, then it seems God is arbitrary in His ethical requirements and even His character, the latter of which McLaren seems to presuppose is not arbitrary. This result makes McLaren’s view of God vulnerable to the Euthyphro objection, that whatever God wills is right, simply because He willed it. But that raises the prospects that on McLaren’s view, God could will all sorts of things we clearly know are immoral. Thus, if God can be arbitrary, He would not inspire “fear” in the sense of reverence, awe, and love, but instead deep terror. For on McLaren’s view of God, He could blow up in rage, the very kind of God McLaren and others reject as unacceptable. Even though McLaren wants to affirm God is good, and His character does not evolve (while our interpretations do), his view cannot sustain God’s goodness. For, to be truly good, a person must be not only truly loving, but also truly just. Yet, God’s justice is arbitrary on McLaren’s and others’ views, and therefore they cannot preserve God’s justice. Sadly, this leaves us with a God who is not truly good – and thus not worthy of worship.
[1] E.g., see McLaren, The Story We Find Ourselves In (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003), 153.
Posthumously, Dallas Willard (one of my key mentors) published a book with Routledge called The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge. I learned a lot from him about the importance of tracing the history in the west of how morals became viewed as mere opinions, preferences, constructs, etc. That became the backbone of my own In Search of Moral Knowledge.
In May 2019, the Biola Center for Christian Thought convened a meeting sponsored by Dallas Willard Ministries to discuss this book. From that, I came away with an idea that there is a spiritual aspect to this issue, and not merely moral & philosophical ones. To read what I developed, see my “A Spiritual Issue with the ‘Disappearance of Moral Knowledge’” at the website for the Evangelical Philosophical Society.