Moral Conundrum

Christian philosopher Victor Reppert raises an interesting question about moral choices (here).  He describes a hypothetical situation where one is faced with a dilemma - to choose between allowing a man to be murdered, or stealing a million dollars to prevent the murder from happening. This is his post in its entirety (which contains a mistake that I have bracketed):

Here is an interesting ethical question. Suppose Smith knows for sure that if he steals $1.000,000, Jones will not murder Williams. But if he does not steal $1,000,000, then Jones will [not] murder Williams. If he steals, of course he's a thief, but if he doesn't steal, does that mean he's an accessory before the fact to murder? See what trouble you get into when you ask questions like this to a philosopher? - Reppert

It's interesting to Victor, presumably, because of the moral conundrum.  The unfortunate person presented with this choice has no way to escape the commission of a sin.  No matter what his choice is, he is doing something wrong in the eyes of God.  And you get yourself into trouble by asking a philosopher to pontificate on this question.  I think what Victor really means to say is that you get the philosopher into trouble by presenting a question he is not prepared to answer.

For The Glory of God

I found a somewhat interesting article by apologist Timothy McCabe that made me do a double-take when I read it.  McCabe takes a stance on free will that sounds strikingly different from what the vast majority of Christians hold.  The way I read it, he flatly denies that there is free will.  The title of his post, and the question that is purports to answer is: If God has a "divine plan" for everyone, then does that mean he controls humans and animals to meet his plan?  McCabe wastes no time in answering that question.  He says, "Definitely."  So he says that God determines our actions and choices, but he's not a determinist in the same sense that I am.  While I believe that our actions play out according to physical laws, McCabe believes that God decides what will happen, and everything that happens is for the glory of God.

The Conversion of Leah Libresco

I wrote an article some time ago about ex-atheist converts to Christianity.  The main point of that article was to note that by reading their own accounts of their conversion experience, it is usually possible to discern that they had non-rational reasons for making the conversion.  There are two key factors in these stories.  First, they had never completely abandoned the religious beliefs that they grew up with, but retained some core elements of it somewhere in their psyche (such as the feeling that there must be an over-arching reason for our existence, for example).  Second, these core elements of belief re-emerged when they encountered a period of stress or emotional need, and became the real impetus for their fully embracing religious belief once again, often accompanied by a sense of relief that they no longer had to pretend that they were atheists. 

God's Perfect Justice

In the commentary on my previous post, there was some discussion about what it means for God to be perfectly good or benevolent.  Most theists like to include some notion of justice in their definition, as a way to explain why God would mete out punishment for sin.  God is perfectly loving and merciful, but at the same time, he is just.  He must exact payment for our sins in a perfectly fair and impartial manner.  But justice seems to be in conflict with mercy.  In perusing the posts on Cross Examined, I came across an article that is relevant to this issue.  A commenter had noted

Justice is getting what you deserve. Mercy is getting LESS than what you deserve. Take your pick.

How can God be both just and merciful at the same time?  Al Serrato attempts to answer the question by explaining that God is just because he demands payment for sin, but he is also merciful because he allows someone else (Jesus) to pay the price for us.  But I have some problems with that explanation.

Craig On Original Sin

In my previous post, I discussed the absurdity of the Christian doctrine of atonement.  It does not seem reasonable to think that someone else should be able to alleviate me of moral responsibility for my sins by taking the punishment upon himself.  But that is exactly what Christians believe Jesus did by dying on the cross.  A closely related issue is the idea that we should assume guilt and bear moral responsibility, subject to God's punishment, for the sins of our ancestors.  This is the Christian doctrine of original sin.  It holds that Adam and Eve sinned by their own free will, and the guilt for that sin is passed on to all of their progeny.  Furthermore, their sinful nature is also passed to the rest of us.  So according to the Christian dogma, each and every one of us is guilty the sin of our ancestor, and we are born as "fallen" beings, which implies that we are compelled by our nature to commit still more sinful acts.

Ray Comfort's Religious Babbling

I came across an article by Ray Comfort that purports to explain why the killing of Jesus as payment for the sins of man makes sense.  The question that had been posed to him is this:

I would like to ask you a couple of relevant questions pertaining to the ‘sacrifice’ of Jesus and its purpose. Please logically explain why an omnipotent, omniscient, and omni benevolent God would need to sacrifice Himself (as Jesus) to Himself (God) in order to forgive man of sins against Him (God)? The entire premise seems totally absurd. - Chuck

This is a question that has been asked many times by people who are trying to make sense of the most fundamental tenets of Christianity, when ordinary logic doesn't seem to suffice.  If you can step back from any ideological attachment to those religious tenets, and take an objective look at them, it really is a bizarre thing to say that God demands this sacrifice.  Perhaps Comfort can shed some light on it where others have failed.  Let's hear what he has to say.

Jesus: Just a Regular Guy

I've always heard that Jesus died as redemption for our sins.  We grew up being told that we were born sinners, and Jesus took our sins upon himself.  In so doing, he bore the punishment for those sins so that we could be saved and find our way to heaven.  Indeed this has been one of the central tenets of Christianity from the earliest days of the faith.  Unlike the concept of the Trinity, which wasn't established until centuries after the life of Jesus, the notion of redemption has direct support in the bible.

For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit - 1 Peter 3:18 

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

Of course, this whole idea violates my own innate sense of fairness.  If Adam and Eve were sinners, why should that guilt be passed on to me?  And the idea that my own sins could be redeemed by someone else paying for them has never seemed right to me.  From the time I was a young child listening to these stories in Catechism class, it bothered me.  It didn't make sense.  This was the very first inkling of doubt that eventually led to my rejection of Christianity.

Conscience As a Guide to Truth

Victor Reppert made an interesting post that raises the issue of reliability of our moral intuitions.  Since it is brief, I'll repeat his post here in its entirety:

A common atheist retort: "Would you rape, pillage, and plunder if you did not have the Bible to tell you not to?"
The implication is that this would be a superficial morality. And it would indeed.
Reply: Theists and atheists alike refrain from such acts because conscience tells them that it is wrong. The question is whether they have equally good explanations for why we should suppose that conscience is a reliable guide to truth. - Reppert

The first question it raises in my mind is what kind of statement is this retort from atheists responding to?  It seems to be an answer to the common trope from religionists that atheists lack the moral guidance that comes from God, which is often stated as Dostoyevsky's famous line from The Brothers Karamazov: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted."  Many religionists take this claim at face value, and assert that atheists are devoid of any morality at all.  To such an assertion, a retort like the one Victor cites might be appropriate.  But Victor's view is slightly more sophisticated than that.  At least he doesn't deny that atheists have some kind of morality.  He just denies that the morality of an atheist is a truly worthwhile or effective way of guiding human behavior.

Lying For Jesus: Blame It On Atheists

Shadow To Light is at it again.  Mikey is spewing more of his hate-filled propaganda against atheists in an effort to distance Christians from anything bad that happens, and pin the blame on those nasty atheists.  This time, it is the recent mass killing by Devin Kelley at a church in Texas.  Mikey wants desperately to attribute this tragic event to an atheist, so that he can point to it as evidence for his monotonous message: "How terrible those atheists are!"  But not surprisingly, Mikey is truth-challenged, as I will show.  In his latest two posts, he goes to some effort to make a case that the killer was an atheist, and then double down with the claim that the killing was an anti-theistic act against Christians.  And in his zeal to paint this event as an example of atheist rage against Christianity, he only succeeds in making a case against the ethical standards of Christian zealots like himself.

Problem of Evil - the Nuclear Option

This is a topic that I addressed some time ago.  The Problem of Evil, or POE, is basically that the ubiquity of evil in our world is incompatible with a God who has the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence.  The typical response from theists is that God has some good reason for allowing evil, and even that evil is necessary to fulfill God's plan.  People are evil by nature, and they must be granted free will so that they can rise above it and earn their place in heaven.  Bad things happen to teach us valuable lessons so that we will be worthy to abide with God, etc.  There are a number of such explanations, and they are called theodicies.

On Human Rights

I have been thinking about the topic of human rights lately.  Victor Reppert has raised the issue recently, first by pointing out an article in The Guardian from 2010 titled Do human rights exist? that denies the existence of human rights, as if to note the absurdity of the idea, and then writing a short post of his own that continues the same line of reasoning.  Victor says:

We might ask what evidence there is that rights exist. You have a feeling that everyone ought to be treated equally. Isn't that just your social conditioning? If you grew up in India, and were raised to believe that people occupy different positions in the caste system based on the Law of Karma, wouldn't you think that the idea that everyone was created (or evolved?) equal was slightly ridiculous? - Reppert

It is clear, at least in Victor's case, that this is intended as a kind of satire.  Victor is slaying two dragons with one arrow.  First, he seems to be ridiculing the notion that human rights might not exist, since they are self-evident by his way of thinking, even if some cultures may not agree.  Second, if you can accept that argument, then you can agree with him that John Loftus' Outsider Test for Faith is faulty as well.  I won't address the merits of Loftus' OTF in this article, but I would like to consider the question of human rights.

The Dark Side of Irrational Discourse

Over at Shadow To Light, Mikey is at it again.  In his never-ending crusade against "New Atheists" and all things that he can construe as being an affront to his religionism, Mikey has shown once again that there is no room for rational debate of issues that touch on any topic where he holds religious-based beliefs.  This time, his decidedly emotional rant is about a TEDx Talk by Gregg Caruso on The dark side of free will.  Now, this talk isn't about religion, and it doesn't directly attack religious beliefs in any way, but it does make a comparison between beliefs associated with free will and those associated with determinism.  In particular, it contains a chart that shows the results of empirical studies making a correlation between free will belief and other associated ways of thinking that may have negative social consequences for society.  Those correlations are religiosity, punitiveness, "Just World" belief, and right wing authoritarianism.  Even though the talk didn't include any discussion religiosity or right wing authoritarianism - it was focused entirely on punitiveness and "Just World" belief - the mere fact that they were included in that list of correlations was enough to set Mikey off, accusing Caruso of being a "New Atheist":

Whoa! “Religiosity” is the “Dark Side.” It looks like the professor is peddling the “Religion is Evil” talking point of the New Atheist movement. As for “Right Wing Authoritarianism,” does this mean Left Wing Authoritarianism is correlated with a lack of belief in free will? Or maybe for the professor, there is no such thing as Left Wing Authoritarianism.

Thinking About Logic

I often wonder how a person who is trained in philosophy can be so utterly confused about logic.  It's not that they don't know the rules of logic, such as modus ponens, or that they are unable to apply those rules in a syllogism.  It doesn't take an education in philosophy to be able to construct an argument that follows the rules of logic.  Even an animal can reason something like this:  If I can unlatch the door, then I can escape.  But it does take a deeper level of understanding to be able to formally state what those logical rules are, and express them in symbolic terms.  The animal does not know that he us using modus ponens, despite the fact that he actually is using it in his primitive reasoning process.  But there are philosophers who don't see the distinction between using logic and thinking about logic.

Slavery and Evolution

It is always sad to see Christians trying to make themselves seem intellectually or morally superior, but even more so when they attempt to use science to justify their smug haughtiness.  Sad, because this attitude is a violation of one of their Seven Deadly Sins (namely pride), which they blithely ignore, even as they go about touting how much better they are because of their Christian values and beliefs.  And sad, too, because they reject science whenever they see it as a threat to their belief system, but proudly claim credit for it when they think it will make them look better (as in their claim: It was Christians, not atheists, who invented science).  And then there's the misuse of science (or pseudo-science) in a vain attempt to show that their religious beliefs compare favorably to non-theistic scientific theories.  Perhaps the most notable example of this is ID science, which doesn't follow the methods of scientific investigation, but sounds kind of sciencey, and that's good enough for them.

Reppert on Culpable Ignorance

In a recent piece at his blog, Victor Reppert takes issue with John Loftus for saying that he was ignorant regarding the question of what it takes to convince atheists of God's existence.  This is a topic that I have already commented about here.  A few days later, Loftus also responded to Reppert in a somewhat different manner.  The thrust of his argument was that he had already answered the question in detail, but Reppert refuses to read it.  So, like other defenders of the faith, Victor is arguing from a position of ignorance.  If only they understood atheists' claims about evidence and skepticism, they would surely realize that their complaints about atheists' unwillingness to accept evidence for belief in God are unfounded.  And I must say, I agree with Loftus on this.  Victor simply doesn't listen to what we have to say.

The Soteriological Drama

It is interesting to see the stories people make up about why their supposedly maximally good and loving God would allow so much evil, pain, and suffering in the world.  These stories, known as "theodicies", are an attempt to explain away our observations of the world in the face of apparently contradictory assumptions about the qualities of God.  Most of them try to make the case that it's all for our own good - that we need all these bad things in our lives in order to build or prove our character, so that God can know we are worthy of spending eternity basking in his presence.  But every theodicy I have ever heard sounds like a just-so story   It provides an unlikely explanation that might be fascinating to a child, but doesn't stand up to any serious scrutiny, either from an evidential or logical perspective.

Moral Realism = Muddled Reasoning

It has long been my opinion that moral realists (aka theists) are confused about the difference between fact and opinion.  That's not surprising, because theists in general are confused about the difference between objective reality and fantasy.  They speak of God's existence as if it were an objective fact, like the existence of the table in front of me right now.  One might argue that it is only my perception of the table that makes me believe it exists, but that's not true.  I know the table exists as an objective fact because it impacts not only my perception, but it can be detected and measured by physical devices and instruments, as well as being seen and felt by other people.  Nobody says you have to believe first, and then you can see it.  It's there, and I can photograph it and weigh it.  Everyone can see it, regardless of whether they have a certain kind of mindset, or framework of beliefs.  That's the essence of objective reality.

"God Did It" Explains the Ethical Treatment of Slaves

Victor Reppert has pointed out a piece of apologetic fluffery that he sees as evidence that the biblical Yahweh raised the ethical level of the Hebrews above that of the rest of the world.  The article, found in the blog Cold-Case Christianity , discusses slavery in the biblical Hebrew culture, and makes the claim that under Mosaic law, the practice was humane and ethical, especially as compared to the form of slavery practiced in the New World in more recent times.  More on these claims later.  With this "evidence" in hand, Victor believes that the behavior of the Hebrews, as influenced by Yahweh's law, rose to an elevated standard of morality that couldn't be explained under naturalism, which he supposes would entail that people act only in their own self-interest.

You can call Yahweh a moral monster, but somehow, he managed a quantum leap forward in the moral consciousness of the Western world. Quite an accomplishment for the most unpleasant character in all fiction. ... I think these leaps are hard to explain naturalistically. - Reppert

Reppert On the Scientism Bandwagon

Scientism has been a topic of considerable interest to me lately, mainly because I see it as a major battleground in the war on reason.  As with other monotheistic religions, Christianity has long been hostile to anything that would encroach on its ideology.  In a recognition of the logical absurdity of belief in the Christian mythos, Tertullian proclaimed that faith was incompatible with natural reason.  That attitude is still reflected today in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which places faith above reason as a matter of doctrine.  Most Christians today deny that they are opposed to reason, but when it comes down to matters of science or secular philosophy versus religion, there is no question that their sympathies lie on the side of faith.

The Problem With Religionism

Shadow To Light recently posted a You-Tube video made by Jordan Peterson expounding The Problem With Atheism.  The point of Jordan's discussion is that, as Dostoyevski said, without God, anything is possible.  It is a repetition of the mindless religionist assertion that God serves as the ground of morality, and without that grounding, there is no rational basis for moral behavior.  So the logical consequence for atheists is a moral void.

Peterson claims that in the absence of God, it would be perfectly rational to base one's behavior purely on self-interest.  It would make sense to set aside any tendencies to act for the benefit of others, and instead do whatever benefits ourselves, even if that includes murder.  The thing that prevents us from behaving in the most rational self-interested way is what he calls "moral cowardice" - the moral inhibitions that result from being indoctrinated with religious beliefs.  So according to Peterson, without God, and without our religious moral indoctrination, everyone would be acting strictly out of self-interest.  The presumed consequence is that a functional society would be impossible to achieve.  And it is God that saves us from the abyss.