September 2, 2009
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C. S. Lewis, Victor Reppert, and Anon on "Hotly Criticizing Divine Justice" (part 1)
Intro:
On Victor Reppert's (VR) Dangerous Idea blog, he quotes some C. S. Lewis to show that atheists can't call the universe evil unless it is a moral agent. In addition, those hot headed atheist critics of God should be commended for validating the theistic basis for morality and that their fervor is equal to how validated divine morality is. VR never responded, but an anonymous Catholic Christian did. There are several rather straight forward ways this backfires for theism, but at least here there is more recognition that there ought to be a connection between our definition of good and God's definition of good. That makes for a more engaging conversation.
Victor Reppert blogged (link):How eager ought we to be to set our standard of justice aside so that we can accept the ways of God. What Lewis is presupposing here is that our moral sense is rational, and that in a theistic universe, it should be thought to derive from God.
There is, to be sure, one glaringly obvious ground for denying that any moral purpose at all is operative in the universe: namely, the actual course of events in all its wasteful cruelty and apparent indifference, or hostility, to life. But then, as I maintain, that is precisely the ground which we cannot use. Unless we judge this waste and cruelty to be real evils we cannot of course condemn the universe for exhibiting them. Unless we take our own standard of goodness to be valid in principle (however fallible our particular applications of it) we cannot mean anything by calling waste and cruelty evils. And unless we take our own standard to be something more than ours, to be in fact an objective principle to which we are responding, we cannot regard that standard as valid. In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it. The more seriously we take our own charge of futility the more we are committed to the implication that reality in the last resort is not futile at all. The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really only private whims of his own with no objective and impersonal roots, and if he realized this, he could not go on being indignant. The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still. I cannot and never could persuade myself that such defiance is displeasing to the supreme mind. There is something holier about the atheism of a Shelley than about the theism of a Paley. That is the lesson of the Book of Job. No explanation of the problem of unjust suffering is there given: that is not the point of the poem. The point is that the man who accepts our ordinary standard of good and by it hotly criticizes divine justice receives the divine approval: the orthodox, pious people who palter with that standard in the attempt to justify God are condemned. Apparently the way to advance from our imperfect apprehension of justice to the absolute justice is not to throw our imperfect apprehensions aside but boldly to go on applying them. Just as the pupil advances to more perfect arithmetic not by throwing his multiplication table away but by working it for all it is worth.
From "De Futilitate," in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), pp.69-70.
I responded:I do often argue as a matter of internal coherency that if our moral compass is supposed to reflect God's essence, then naturally we should be able to evaluate any given theism by it that proposes such a relationship is valid. This point often falls on deaf ears, for the Christian folk who are used to arguing that non-theism has no place to hotly criticize the divine. I would like to think that if there was a good god out there, it would expect such a criticism and rejection of false religion. I don't see how a belief system can ask us to set our standards of justice aside so far as Christianity does to accommodate itself and ever hope in addition to that to pull off some kind of argument *from* morality.
"In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it."
I'm not sure this makes any sense. What atheist condemns the natural world as "evil"? Don't they appraise it as *amoral* and apathetic to life? It's only evil if there is a reason to take it personally. And if you have no reason to believe a deity has presented this reality to us, we *aren't* taking it personally in anything but hypothetical terms to criticize theistic ideas presented to us by culture. Is Lewis' answer to the "what about the amoral option" response really, "God would be offended if you didn't presuppose the divine moral circuit"? Or did he have something less question begging to say in response? I'm not familiar enough with Lewis' writings to know for sure.
Ben
Anonymous responded (to kbrowne):kbrowne,
Yes, there actually is a problem with condemning God in such a fashion. Any instance of condemning a man requires having insight to various facts of the matter. His intentions, his knowledge, his mindset, his actions, capabilities, his reasons, etc. If we don't have access to these - if we only have the barest hint of these things - then condemnation is hard to justify. Indeed, it may itself be condemnable as an unjust act. Here we are, back to thinking of God as 'just another guy, except powerful'.
And that an atheist can believe in objective morality without feeling compelled to believe in God isn't saying much. They may have simply not thought through the issue terribly much. Or their 'impersonal source' may actually sound an awful lot like classical theism with some details blurred. Objective morality in naturalism is a non-starter. Objective morality in non-theistic non-naturalism may be possible, but whether taoist, buddhist, or otherwise, to me it always sounded remarkably 'God-like' when all was said and done.
I responded (to Anonymous):Anon,
I could certainly infer room for doubt on numerous issues in terms of evaluating whether a good god may be at work behind the scenes. However, "the jury is still out" doesn't seem to work as well on some of the more clear cut cases like eternal damnation for finite crimes.
The "we don't have access to relevant info" seems to cut both ways for the Christian, since it seems we also do not have enough information to tell if this God is good either. Is the Christian free to be an agnostic about the issue? That's a rather awkward position to have to take.
And I wouldn't consider God "just another guy" who happens to be more powerful. One would expect the supreme being to create and maintain a perfect creation...one quite unlike our own. Even with whatever uncertainties there may be on a host of issues in the argument from evil, it seems clear an argument the better explanation can be made from all of it towards the theory that there is no loving force behind the amoral workings of the universe.
I'm also not quite sure how you think theism is a "starter" in terms of objective morality when that standard is quite invisible and appears to be in quite the dirty lens of ancient history. It is hard for the naturalist to see why mere better *ideas* about what objectively maps onto the world of human well being fail to be worth while to theistic sensibilities when we all have access to the laboratory of the mind and the test of experience. You'd at least have to take the argument out of morality land and into something like Victor's argument from reason.
Ben
Outro:Three more parts to repost so far. Stay tuned.
Ben
Comments (5)
"I'm not sure this makes any sense."
Firstly, that atheists wouldn't ascribe moral properties to the universe doesn't mean that the argument doesn't make sense (or is not internally consistent/coherent.) Secondly, some of C.S. Lewis' contemporaries and intellectuals of his time were modernists. They believed in absolute truth, beauty, and moral principles, even if they were atheists. And most people, irrespective of their religious beliefs, believe in things like that, so his argument (if valid) certainly is relevant. The atheist today generally won't think of the universe as evil, but some atheists have thought that there was specific and objective evils in the universe. They didn't take it as a hypothetical thing. Finally, many atheists today, even though they don't ascribe moral properties to the universe in general, ascribe it to human beings. C.S. Lewis' argument applies on the micro-level (of humans) as well as on the macro-level (galaxies and blackness of space). Since both are just as natural and determined by antecedent conditions, no member of either groups can be moral agents.
@nyclegodesi24 - I suppose I do tend to forget historically Chesterton and Lewis were responding to other nonsensical views. :p
Ben
@nyclegodesi24 - Oh yeah, and I would consider it a fallacy of composition to claim that because something is entirely made of matter that it can't exhibit moral properties. Airplanes are made up of all non-flying parts and yet we aren't on a hunt for the mysterious element flightium. Assuming you care to know what a response is to the "micro level" application of Lewis' argument.
Ben
@WAR_ON_ERROR - Heyy., I liked modernism. =I
hm, I think that airplanes are made up of some flying parts. at any rate, the flying can be a macro-level feature, a result of several things placed together. i don't think morals are similar in that way. I'd liken moral facts to color facts. The color of a thing cannot be inferred from its shape or size. (I'm talking in terms of epistemology here, not necessarily ontology of morals, but the two, I think, are sorta connected). A moral doesn't seem to be something that can be inferred from purely physical stuff. How can a proposition about what ought something be be derived from a physical fact? It just doesn't seem possible to me. We can intuitively see this, that no matter how we shuffle around physical facts, we can never come up with what the thing those facts describe ought to be like. One explanation of moral facts, that I find persuasive, refers to a things purpose. If we know what a thing exists for, we can understand how it is supposed to work. Theism comfortably explains that. Atheism doesn't explain anything (since it's not an explanation or a viewpoint). There are some naturalistic explanations on the market, but I feel that (although I may be biased, heh) they fail at capturing the essential purposefulness/intentionality of a moral.
Plus, my original point is that humans are the same as everything else with respect to their being entirely determined by sufficient antecedent conditions. All their behavior is accounted for by physical causes, given materialism, and so no human being is a moral agent. That's the point.
@nyclegodesi24 - We can actually tell you want color something is from physical facts apart from direct sense perception. There is a physical ontology of color since it is a real frequency of light and our brains merely interpret that data.
"A moral doesn't seem to be something that can be inferred from purely physical stuff. How can a proposition about what ought something be be derived from a physical fact? It just doesn't seem possible to me."
As I said in the next post (link) in this series, "If it is objectively true that behaviors x, y, and z (whatever they might be) greatly increase the probability of genuine long term well-being and happiness of virtually any human being that puts those behavioral strategies into practice, then what in the world does that have to do with God? And if morality is about "something else" then why should I care about whatever that something else is?"
"We can intuitively see this, that no matter how we shuffle around physical facts, we can never come up with what the thing those facts describe ought to be like."
If you are arguing in a vacuum, then yes, there's no way to tell what moral facts are supposed to be. However God's essence is just an arbitrary insertion into that vacuum that is no more or less justified than recognizing what natural moral ideals are derived from human nature on its own terms. I suggest reading more of this series since this is what Steve and I get into later.
"One explanation of moral facts, that I find persuasive, refers to a things purpose. If we know what a thing exists for, we can understand how it is supposed to work. Theism comfortably explains that."
Evolution doesn't have a plan per se, but no one is going to argue that the heart isn't "meant" to pump blood through the body. In a similar limited sense, it isn't hard to figure out what the "purpose" to moral behavioral patterns are "supposed" to be in light of where our species happens to be in terms of its evolutionary history. If there is no mental regulation of our economy of desires, then virtually all interests at all levels from all parties involved are forfeit.
My point is that either way morality is a pattern whether it is arbitrarily embedded in God's essence or in matter. And matter can be arranged in just about any pattern, including moral ones. It doesn't really matter how the pattern got there, since the moral facts ought to be the same in any event from the top down or the ground up.
Ben
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