Category: Philosophy

The Moral Argument for God Gets Some Air

[On August 21, 2021, our local newspaper, The Eugene Register-Guard, published a “Guest View” by atheist Charles H. Jones, to which I felt compelled to offer a riposte, which was published as a Guest View September 4, 2021.  Here are both essays.]

Guest View, “Whose Morality Carries More Weight?”

By Charles H. Jones, Register-Guard August 21, 2021, page 6A

Saying an entire class of people is immoral, such as Blacks or Jews, is generally considered prejudicial and hateful. I would be surprised to see, and don’t recall seeing, such racist statements in The R-G. Yet, versions of “atheists are immoral” have appeared at least eight times in the past four years – including three columns within the last year. This is usually stated in less obvious, but logically equivalent, variations of “morality derives from God.” But, after all, how can atheists be moral when they deny the source of morality?

This isn’t just a philosophical issue. There are countries where atheism is a capital offense. I’ve met someone who is hiding for fear of their life because they left Islam. Complete shunning – loss of family, friends and jobs – is not unusual when people leave some religious communities.  I’ve met someone who was kicked out of their house at 16 for leaving Christianity.

The acceptance of openly stated anti-atheist prejudice epitomizes religious privilege.  But this privilege shows itself daily via “in God we trust” and “under God.”  Public promotion of faith and prayer also is an example of this privilege and prejudice.  And it is very concerning that the Supreme Court is legalizing religious discrimination based on this prejudice.

Claims of moral superiority based on God aren’t limited to denouncing atheists.  There are religions where not believing in the proper god deserves eternal torture.  Even within a single religion, God’s supposed morality has been used to claim supremacy and privilege for men, heterosexuals, the monogamous, the married, whites and castes (among others).

Another harmful result of morality from God is the promotion of the United States as a Christian nation.  Stating the mistaken belief that the Constitution is based on biblical principles reduces the roughly 30% of the U.S. that are non-Christian to second-class citizenry.  I’ve personally been told I should leave the country because I’m atheist.  This erroneous belief also played a part on Jan 6.  Most of the people in the Capitol mob weren’t just white supremacists, they were also Christian Nationalists.  Their movement is partially motivated by the belief that Christians are morally superior.  Their violent actions are even supportable by Jesus’ militant side (Matthew 10:34).  The Christian god is an authoritarian figure – a divine king, not an elected official.

I am not saying all theists are inherently immoral.  I am not claiming there is a single external source of morality and you are immoral if you deny it. I claim, and the evidence supports, that theists are simply mistaken about their source of morality. For example, most people today condemn slavery, yet slavery is doctrinally supported by the three largest religions.  Jesus never denounced slavery and implicitly condoned it, while Paul explicitly wrote, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters …” (Ephesians 6:5-6); Mohammed owned slaves; and then there’s karma. Even if some doctrinal passage appears to be anti-slavery, it demonstrates doctrinal self-contradiction rather than elimination of the doctrinal support. This is evidence that people look for doctrine to support their preexisting beliefs rather than deriving their beliefs from doctrine or God.

Religions are doctrinally in opposition.  Yahweh is not Allah is not Zeus.  Reincarnation does not lead to Valhalla.  Claiming belief in one religion is claiming that all other religions are false.  (Why claim one of thousands of religions if you don’t think it’s the one true – and thus superior – religion?) If you want to promote unity – to bring everyone together – you have to keep your religion out of the public square.  This is the reason for the establishment clause of the First Amendment.  This is why it is unconstitutional to promote religion in public schools and why it is polite to hold a moment of silence rather than a prayer at public gatherings.  I fully support people’s right to their religious beliefs, but that same right allows me to say, “Keep them to yourselves; they’re divisive.”

Where does morality come from? There are arguments based on evolution, but most people are unaware of them.  I believe most people, secular or not, derive morality from love, compassion and humanism.  Isn’t having a conscience part of the human condition?  Would you rape and murder if God didn’t tell you not to?

What’s more important, promoting morality and unity, or claiming one group of people is morally superior to all others? 

Charles H. Jones, Ph.D., is a retired mathematician. He organizes the Eugene Atheist Pub Social through Meetup.

Guest View, “Objective human values we all cherish”

By Thomas Alderman, Register-Guard September 4 2021, page 6A

Charles H. Jones (Guest View, Register Guard August 21, 2021, page 6A) maintains that the expression, “‘morality derives from God’ [is the] logical equivalent [of] ‘atheists are immoral,’” and thus claims that to hold to traditional theism is in itself a claim to moral superiority.  How fortunate we are that it is not so!

Christian theists, of all people, are the least likely to consider themselves morally superior, for the faith itself entails an admission of moral failure and the need for forgiveness.  It is forgiveness that we celebrate.

Jones goes on to say that “theists are simply mistaken about their source of morality. . . .  I believe most people, secular or not, derive morality from love, compassion and humanism.  Isn’t having a conscience part of the human condition?  Would you rape and murder if God didn’t tell you not to?”

But the question is not what I would or would not do: the question is, if I do it, am I wrong, or am I merely breaking a social convention?

Jones himself expects us to acknowledge such duties as binding apart from God, and he says we can know about these duties through conscience.  Conscience is merely the perception of a moral duty, however; and in order for a duty to be objective, it must be binding irrespective of our perceptions.  If it is wrong, it is not because I think it is wrong: it is wrong whether I think it is wrong or whether I do not.  Otherwise, it is not objective, and my perception is an illusion – which is precisely what many other non-theists maintain.

But Jones joins the rest of humanity in affirming objective moral values and duties; his appeal to conscience, however, does not account for their existence.

If we have a duty to care for each other, it must be because of something inherently valuable in us.  Then there would be something real for conscience to apprehend.  But Darwinism does not help us – what is my duty to an accident of nature or a highly-organized collection of cheap chemicals?  And if I myself am an accident of nature, how can I know that my experience of conscience is not itself an illusion?

Other nontheistic accounts of morality also fall short.  Under social compact theory, I give up some of my prerogatives in exchange for your doing likewise so that we can coexist; but I am perfectly entitled not to give up my prerogatives (even if we call such people criminals and put them in jail).  Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) Categorical Imperative taught that we are obligated to act according to principles which we would wish to be universally observed.  That is surely good advice, and may seem appealing to other philosophers; but it fails to explain why we are morally wrong if we reject it.  In short, no adequate nontheistic account of objective morality has ever been proposed.

But the biblical account of creation explains it well: humans have inherent value and dignity because we were created in the image of God, as we see in the first book of the Bible:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

     Genesis 1:26-27

Jones is right about one thing: we do have an intuition of the value in ourselves and others and hence, of our duty to care for one another.  The God image in ourselves and in others, if it is real, explains, as nothing else does, our perception of ourselves and of others as having inherent dignity and value, and justifies our belief in objective moral values.  Conversely, our intuition about inherent human value, supposing it to be true, provides additional warrant for our belief in God.

God is also the best explanation for the origin of the universe, for the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, for the origin of life, for language, mathematics, and for reason itself.  God exists.  If God exists, then there is a ready explanation for the objective human values we all cherish.

Bio: Thomas Alderman is a lawyer and blogger living in Springfield.

Letter to Mary

For Christmas 2019 my daughter-in-law gave me Andrew Roberts’ biography of Winston Churchill. This is the letter I wrote to thank her.

March 7, 2020

Dear Mary,

I just finished Andrew Roberts’ Churchill and I want to say again, thanks!

It was quite a few years ago that I first realized how indebted we are to “the Greatest Generation,” and I have since then had a heightened interest in the history of the 50-year period prior to my birth in 1949.  One of my regrets is that I did not quiz my parents more about their experiences.

But now I realize for the first time the extent to which we owe our freedom and prosperity to one man.

Roberts concludes by saying (p 975) that if Hitler had delayed the Anschluss [the annexation of Austria] and Czech crises for a few years, Churchill’s moment would have passed.  Halifax would have become Prime Minister, and he would have sought, quite reasonably, to discover Hitler’s terms of peace.  Those terms might not have been very onerous, since all Hitler needed at that moment was a single front.  Churchill saw that if the Soviets were alone, they would more likely face defeat; whereupon there would be nothing to prevent Hitler from disavowing the settlement with England, who then would in turn also be alone.  Then it would have been too late for the US to re-arm.

Churchill maintained that it was the British people who had the lion heart, and that he merely “had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.”  Roberts denies that: “[I]t was much more the case that Churchill had the lion heart and also gave the roar, and in so doing taught the British people to rediscover the latent lionheartedness in themselves.”  (p 980.) 

Whether one believes in Providence, as I do, we can only regard these things with gratitude and awe.

By the way, thanks, too, for the WhatsApp call the other day for Leona to chat with us.  So great to see her walking and flourishing as she is clearly doing in every way.  Thanks for thinking of us.

Love,

Tom

Toward an Epistemology of Love

N. T. Wright, Loving to Know: The 2019 Erasmus Lecture (First Things Magazine, February 2020, pp. 25-34.)

 

To transcend the divided field of knowledge – the antitheses between fact and value, objective and subjective, reason and faith, science and religion – requires an epistemology of love – a love, that is, which recognizes the material universe for what it is, “the loving gift of a wise creator.”

N. T. wright places the origin of these antitheses in ancient Epicurean philosophy, which held that “The gods may exist, but they are in an entirely different sphere to ourselves, taking no notice of us and certainly not intervening in our world.” He traces this view of the cosmos through the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution to the present.  To this day, he says, “most Westerners – including, alas, many Christians! – don’t realize that they are looking at the world through Epicurean spectacles.”

The intellectuals of the Enlightenment were receptive to Epicurean philosophy because it justified their “antipathy to  [hierarchical] top-down social, political, cultural, and religious systems . . . which were perceived as denying a proper aspiration for freedom.”  What they failed to realize, and what many today also do not realize, is that Epicurean cosmology is just as “top-down” as divine creation.  It says, essentially, that since the gods are not involved in mundane things, the universe must therefore create itself – “so that the evolution of species was approached not simply as a newly discovered bit of inductive knowledge from below but as the necessary postulate from . . . the Epicurean assumption that if the gods do not act within the world then the world must make itself.”

Wright’s observations help explain how it is that modern science acquired its naturalistic bias.  It is indeed a thing requiring some kind of explanation.  It is completely evident, after all, that naturalism – the prejudice that the material world of space, time, matter and energy is all that exists – is not something that science has discovered.  It was not found in a test tube, or on a distant planet.  Where did it come from?

Epicurean philosophy pre-dates modern science by more than 1800 years, so it was ready and waiting when the Enlightenment philosophers needed it.  Wright says that this helps to show that “modern Western culture is not a new thing based on modern science as is so often assumed, but an ancient worldview with some modern twists and footnotes.”

Wright’s antidote is to view the cosmos as a gift from a loving Father, and he has an answer for those who charge that theism’s openness to divine activity in the universe discourages scientific inquiry:

An epistemology of love, seeing the creation as the outflowing of divine creative love, must pay attention to that creation.  It isn’t enough to know that it is God’s creation, and so to infer that we already know all that’s important to know about it.  Love demands patient curiosity.  Love transcends the objective/subjective divide, because as the image-bearing stewards of creation, as liturgists of creation’s praise, as prophets called to speak creation’s reality, we humans are called not to a cool, detached appraisal of the world, nor to a self-indulgent grasping of it, but to a delighted exploration and exposition, in which respect and enjoyment go together.

. . . .

. . . Our delighted, sensitive, respectful, and curious exploration of creation is the response of love to the love we have received.

 

A Challenge to Intellectual Engagement

This is why I love William Lane Craig.

To those who think there is no real truth, what history teaches is:

that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism.  The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather, it is not to think you are right at all.

. . . [T]he very concept of tolerance entails that one does not agree with that which one tolerates.  The Christian is committed to both truth and tolerance, for he believes in Him who said not only, “I am the truth,” but also, “Love your enemies.”

(From “In Intellectual Neutral – a challenge to Christians to intellectual engagement.”   Read the entire essay at https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/apologetics/in-intellectual-neutral/.)

 

Christopher Hitchens on God’s Wastefulness

In his April 2009 debate with William Lane Craig (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tYm41hb48o), Christopher Hitchens presented a long string of arguments which I regard as irrelevant to the question which those gentlemen were actually debating, which is whether or not God exists.  In this post I’ll discuss one example.  Following is a close paraphrase of what Hitchens said.

You are free to believe that this creator put himself to the trouble of creating all these species, 99.9% of all of which have become extinct – as we nearly did ourselves.

We are supposed to believe that all this mass extinction and death is the will of God – all done with us in view.  That’s solipsism.  [Solipsism: 1. The theory that only the self exists or can be proved to exist; or 2. Preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption.  (Dictionary.com.)]

The wastefulness, cruelty, and incompetence of it!  It doesn’t work for him.  Believe it if you can or if you like.

We’ve heard this argument before, from Darwin himself and ever since, so the question may deserve some consideration.

The existence of waste in nature is irrelevant to God’s existence or non-existence.  The question for debate was not whether a wasteful creator exists, but any creator.  Supposing, for the sake of the argument, that what Hitchens sees as waste is indeed waste, if the waste itself could not exist without God, then the fact of waste in nature would not diminish by one iota the probability that God exists.

And that is our case.  Given that anything at all exists – say, the universe, for example, with all its waste – then an eternal cause of the universe must also exist necessarily; for otherwise one must posit either an eternal universe (which we know is not the case), a universe that caused itself to exist (which is absurd), a universe which came into existence without a cause (which is implausible), or an infinite regress of prior finite causes (which is absurd).

Those four alternatives to theism are exhaustive: there are no other alternatives.  All of them being clearly false, theism must therefore be true – despite waste in nature (if that’s what it is).

Besides, as Craig points out elsewhere, a lack of economy would not be the same for a being who has infinite resources as it might be for Mr. Hitchens.

Finally, if God exists and was wasteful and Mr. Hitchens doesn’t understand why, then the fault is probably with Mr. Hitchens’ understanding and not with God, because, well, He’s God!  If He exists, He can be profligate if He wants to!

 

Professor, Was Jesus Really Born to a Virgin?

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff interviews William Lane Craig of Talbot School of Theology and Houston Baptist University, asking about Jesus’ miraculous conception and birth.  The interview was published in the Times on December 21, 2018.  Click here.  Enjoy!

Click here to read Dr. Craig’s replies to detractors commenting on the interview.  Very much worth reading!  Happy New Year!

 

 

 

Lennox on Divine Aseity and the Trinity

John Lennox is another of my favorite Christian apologists.  He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, Oxford University.

In this 2011 film clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIknACeeS0g), which is just over 10 minutes long, Dr. Lennox discusses the question, If God created the universe, then who created God? and the question, How can God be a triunity?

Lennox tells of an occasion on which he addressed a convention of scientists.  Afterward, a member of the audience approached him and asked whether it was possible that Lennox should actually subscribe to such an irrational doctrine as that of the Trinity.  Instead of answering immediately, Lennox asked him a question of his own.

Do you believe in consciousness?  Energy?  (Yes.)  Do you know what they are?  (No.)  Should I write you off as an intellectual for believing in something you don’t understand?  (No.)  That’s what you were going to do to me five minutes ago.  Why do you believe in them?  (Lennox supplies the answer:) Because of their explanatory power.  A trinity is the only explanation that makes sense of the evidence as Lennox sees it.  God Himself is a fellowship.

What is it that a divine fellowship explains?  Many things, I’m sure; but perhaps principally it answers the question, How can God be love, if in eternity past, prior to creation, there was no one around for Him to love?  The doctrine of the Trinity explains that God has never been alone, but that each Person of the Trinity has eternally been in the most intimate fellowship with the other two Persons.  Thus, the doctrine of the Trinity explains how it is that God is love.

Do yourself a favor and introduce yourself to this wonderful man.  For further reading, see God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Lion 2009) and God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anyway? (Lion 2011).

The Existence of God: A Concise Summary

Since publishing my essay on the existence of God, I have wanted to provide a concise summary of the argument.

Why do I do this?  It is because when I see the trees and the stars, realizing the transcendent genius which was required in order to create them, I hear a voice saying to me, “I love you.”

The classic cosmological argument for the existence of God rests on the premise that whatever begins to exist – that is to say, anything which is not past-infinite, anything which is not eternal – must have a cause for its existence.  But even before one considers whether or not to accept that premise, it is useful to observe that there are really only four possible scenarios for the origin of the universe.  This can be clearly seen from the following set of necessary propositions.

Either the universe had a beginning, or it didn’t.

If the universe had a beginning, then either it had a cause or it did not have a cause.

If the universe did have a cause, its cause likewise either had a beginning, or it didn’t.

Those three binary possibilities are exhaustive; that is, there are no other possibilities.  This leads to four possible origin scenarios.

  1. Possible scenario #1.: The universe did not have a beginning; that is, it has always existed.

Modern science has shown this simply not to be the case.  There is a scientific consensus, based on extensive observation, that the universe had a beginning approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

  1. Possible scenario #2.: The universe had a beginning, and it popped into existence out of nothing, uncaused.

This is not logically impossible, but it is implausible because it violates the principles of causation, which affirm that nothing happens without a cause.[1]

  1. Possible scenario #3.: The universe had a beginning, and it was caused by some separate entity which itself also had a beginning.

This too is logically possible, but it entails an infinite regress of non-eternal causes, since one must then ask, what caused the cause, and then, what caused that cause, etc., etc.  If the regression is infinite then it begs the question: how did the regression begin if it did not begin with an eternal cause?  The only way for the regression not to be infinite is for it to come sooner or later to a cause which had no beginning, which is equivalent to the fourth scenario.

  1. Possible scenario #4.: The universe had a beginning, and it was caused by some separate entity which did not itself have a beginning – that is, the cause of the universe was some eternal entity. This is one step from theism. Theism does not entail any of the difficulties inherent in the other possibilities: it has not been falsified empirically, it does not violate the principles of causation, and it does not beg the question.  Thus, theism is truly the only plausible explanation for the existence of the universe.

Scientists believe that all matter and energy, along with space and time themselves, came into existence about 13.8 billion years ago.  If so, and if the universe had a cause, then the cause must have been immaterial, timeless, and immensely powerful.  The Fine-Tuning of the universe shows that the cause was a conscious, purposive Agent of incomprehensible intelligence.  These are some of the attributes which science shows the Creator possesses, to a virtual certainty, and now we have come all the way to theism.  God exists.

There is another basis for concluding that the Creator is a personal entity.  If that were not the case – if the cause of the universe were some physical state of affairs existing from eternity past, then all of the conditions needed for the universe to come into existence would themselves have existed from eternity past; and if so, then there would have been nothing to prevent those conditions from producing the universe at some time in the infinite past.  And if that had occurred, then because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in a closed system entropy (disorganization) always increases with time, the universe would already have reached heat death.  It has not done so; therefore, the cause of the universe could not have been a purely physical state of affairs existing from eternity past.

[1] This is the first premise of the cosmological argument.  For a more complete analysis of this premise, see joshualetter.com/blog, June 28, 2018, page 11.