Again, when a dog steals a t-bone steak from the picnic table it is not being immoral. It is not even stealing–it is just being a dog. That does not mean that he can’t be trained to leave the steaks alone, but he was not doing anything immoral by taking it.
Emmanuel Kant and CS Lewis do not think that “Without God there is no morality” is a silly statement. As a matter of fact, they and others think that morality is actually proof that God exists. You obviously disagree. That’s fine.
What morality? Whose? How does morality prove God exists?
I don’t know much about Lewis but I think as Haidt does that Kant was an extreme and unusual human being with very little empathy for or insight into human nature. His philosophic work takes a rather outsider - some might say Martian - approach to making sense of human behavior. That he did not agree with my evaluation that the thesis is silly which states morality requires God really does more to make my case than to brake it. Given the high regard in which Lewis is held by my friends at this site I have to admit that may change my mind though, as you note, it has not changed my mind that what has given rise to and still supports belief in God is not actually an ancient, omni-powered being with a mind much like a person.
Edited to weed out the greater than usual incoherence resulting from texting in the middle of the night on Oxycodone.
Quite true, and good of you to point out. It seems the "age of accountability " is a doctrine rather awkwardly contructed to accommodate that concept, not a new idea, but rather a way to fit our sense of justice into our understanding of salvation.
All Protestants misunderstand salvation and there are overwhelmingly Protestant Christians on this Protestant Christian site.
I single it out because it’s misunderstood. Christian apologists have been arguing for “objective morality” and against “relativity” for as long as I’ve been around, and I believed them for a long time. But I’m the curious sort and eventually looked into it, and it turns out they were arguing against the wrong thing.
God isn’t necessary for morality nor anything else. I can construct a purely material explanation based on nothing but observable facts and be satisfied that my answer is rational. But is it complete? Almost everyone has a suspicion that there is something more to our existence than the purely physical. That’s where I come down.
It’s a task on the analogy of ha’adam (“the man”) being given the task of “tending” and “guarding” the garden. These are the same verbs used to describe the priests’ work in the temple. We are to serve God as his priests in the cosmic temple, by caring for his creation and “guarding” it from evil. The job also could be described as a “calling” or “vocation.” God created us for a purpose, which was to represent him on Earth. One could also use the metaphor of “imaging” God, or reflecting him. Since Christ is the clearest revelation of God, we reflect God in all his goodness when we imitate Christ. He is the “trailblazer” of our faith, as Hebrews puts it. Thus, the task is as you say, to love others as ourselves. It’s not a matter of following rules, but following Jesus.
Yeah, I know that Francis Collins (founder of BioLogos) also believes the moral argument for God’s existence, but I also disagree. You’re in good company, at least.
Kierkegaard was a better guide.
All? Now, now. I could name some Protestant Christian universalists (G. MacDonald and Greg Boyd) and some Protestant Christian universalists on this forum.
Yeah, I’ve said before that my years in juvenile justice have affected my beliefs on hell. I’ve seen too much evil to forego some form of justice. It’s not a bar we have to leap, as @klax put it, but morality itself ceases to exist without some form of punishment for wrong. We’re all speculating at this point, but I don’t rule out some sort of continuum. I also can’t rule out universalism with any claim to certainty. However things turn out in the end, the one thing I’m sure of is that none of our speculations will be true to the final outcome. God has a habit of surprising us.
Hey, sorry if that sounded accusatory or personal. I realize neither you nor many others here make such gross errors. I think you’ve probably thought about and looked into morality more than I have. Theology taken on vigorously with the intention of reconciling it with the rest of human knowledge so far as possible leads to some good insight. It is the many who avoid thinking too hard about any of it for fear of appearing to doubt God’s benevolence that I worry about.
As do I and I also share that apprehension of something more. I do think that whatever that something more is has something to contribute to a good life, good both in terms of personal fulfillment but also for making one a good neighbor.
I have no problem with your summary up to this point. A small quibble here, but humans in the womb have the potential capacities to be image bearers. Unlike apes and other mammals, a great deal of a human’s brain development is post-natal, occurring outside the womb. Many things can go wrong between conception and birth, and neglect or abuse in a child’s life can unalterably affect his/her development into a human being with “normal” psychology.
Outside of that, yes, animals lack the capacity to qualify as morally responsible agents.
The origin of “bad deeds” in animals? It’s called “self-preservation.” Animals can’t conceive of “bad deeds.” They simply do what they do. They don’t reflect upon their own behavior, which requires theory of mind capable of metacognition. They don’t have guilt or shame. Only fear of punishment.
I’ll have to punt on the story of the fall for now. Not that I don’t have a reply. Just a shortage of time.
Not at all. I’m just blunt sometimes.
When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
That is apparently called partial interventions. Not only are there impartial interventions in some animal groups but studies show that both types of interventions are effective for prosocial policing. As for herd animals I could not verify either my claim or yours. But I have little doubt that my claim is not valid for all herd animals but is only the case in very few herd animals.
This “image-bearing” terminology sounds a bit tortured to me. It seems to me my own understanding of being in the image of God having to do potentiality in the first place avoids such difficulties.
I think it is the worst argument of all of them, requiring morality to be authoritarian and arbitrary rather than rational. It is good example of how these arguments for God create huge distortions replacing the faith in God with a faith in something quite different. Some might even call this idolatry.
I’m not particularly a fan of “image bearers” and “image bearing” terminology either, but I’m answering the question on its own terms. I don’t remember your understanding of the image of God.
This is from an upcoming article that I’ve written. I think you’d appreciate it:
In his 1932 classic, The Moral Development of the Child, Jean Piaget studied children of various ages playing games and concluded that the younger ones regarded rules “as sacred and untouchable, emanating from adults and lasting forever. Every suggested alteration strikes the child as a transgression.” This matches quite well the attitude of many interpreters toward the command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The first humans should have accepted it without question, obeyed it and, presumably, lived forever in paradise. But is unquestioned acceptance of the rule truly a mature moral choice? That condition belongs to the state of childhood.
Updating Piaget’s work, developmental psychologist William Kay observed, “A young child is clearly controlled by authoritarian considerations, while an adolescent is capable of applying personal moral principles. The two moralities are not only clearly distinct but can be located one at the beginning and the other at the end of a process of moral maturation.” In what could be called the first instance of peer pressure, the serpent introduced doubt from the outside, and the woman determined her personal moral principles vis-à-vis the command. She applied her own moral judgment, a phenomenon that begins in adolescence and continues throughout the rest of life, and weighed whether the rule was hypothetically non-binding and contrary to her own self-interest (the fruit was “good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom”). The universal nature of temptation and sin appears at the end of a process of moral maturation that all children undergo. In the end, the adolescent applies her own moral principles, considers her self-interest, and declares her independence, albeit prematurely. In the second instance of peer pressure, the man takes the fruit from the woman and eats it without apparent thought. If everyone else is doing it, me too!
It is that our infinite potentiality is a reflection of God’s infinite actuality and that this is the basis of an eternal parent child relationship with no end to what God can give or what we can receive from Him. This is also my explanation of the meaning of “eternal life.” Thus…
Good bet considering my psychology inundated upbringing. Piaget’s name is very familiar even if I cannot exactly remember my previous exposure(s) to his ideas. It seems he made contributions to many areas where I his ideas would have been talked about: education, artificial intelligence, philosophy, cognition, and morality in addition to developmental psychology.
I haven’t read the book, but it seems worth checking out.
Hume, is compelling, don’t get me wrong, “Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions.” But where I disagree with Hume (ethically speaking) is where he says you can’t get an ought from an is. Too skeptical, methinks. If you really put your brain to the task, it is indeed hard to see how we get oughts from is’s.
But at a basic level, it isn’t too hard to understand. “My child fell into the water. I ought to dive in and rescue her.” It’s hard to choreograph the processes from which you can derive an ought from an is, but such processes are there. Otherwise you have to assume all of our “oughts” come from basic impulses. And that simply isn’t true. We think we ought to do things based on our assessment of how things are. (In other words, excluding our basic instinctual drives, all of our oughts “come from an is.”)
This is also where I disagree with @mitchellmckain on ethics. Instinctual drives (such as those found in animals) can be neither moral nor immoral. They’re just there. Jay put it better than I did, scientifically speaking. We have all kinds of drives (as do animals). Some of them are moral, others are destructive. Only a logical mind can tell the difference. And that was my point. My point wasn’t that animals don’t behave morally. They do. But animals don’t (intellectually) know the difference between moral and immoral. They can only follow (or not follow) their drives. This makes them free of moral responsibility.
We humans, on the other hand, can rationalize the difference. (Or if you want to get metaphorical, we’ve eaten of the fruit). THAT makes US morally responsible. Wild rams clash horns. They brutalize their fellows to have a better chance at mating. What are they doing? Following their impulses.
But are these impulses good or bad (destructive or non-destructive) this only a rational mind can distinguish. In short, calling non-destructive animal drives “moral” misses the mark.
I’d like to take my time with this but my immediate impulse is to say we don’t get oughts from ises. ‘Oughtness’ is the felt quality of an instinctual drive as expressed verbally by language using creatures such as ourselves. A careful assessment of our duty to others augmented by logic has no power to generate the compelling drive of an ought. We can’t do it and neither can God no matter how thorough ones theological approach. But my words, like the topic, are a hot mess. I’ll try to do better when I come back to it.
Logic by itself has no ability whatsoever to tell the difference between moral and immoral. It is not true that animals cannot tell any difference in this at all – only that they have limitations in this regard. It is true that we can rationalize things and animals cannot. It is the claim that our rationalizations add what you claim which is questionable. We pick our premises to get whatever rationalizations we want for whatever conclusion we prefer. The idea that only our rationalizations give us any moral responsibility is even more dubious. It is instincts and social relationships which give us moral responsibility and animals have both of these – to a far lesser degree I would certainly agree, but that is all. This is what our language and rationalizations give us – a measure of social interaction and relationship which far surpasses any of the animals. It makes our social environment far far more important than the natural environment. And if we compare it with the advent of multi-cellular organisms the significance of this cannot be overstated. It is life and evolution on whole different level.
Besides compatibility with scientific findings, there are the philosophical consequences of this to explore. In addition to cutting ties with the rational poverty of authoritarian morality, the above realizations give morality both a cultural, religious, and species independent foundation which greatly strengthens our grasp on morality itself – so we can distinguish the arbitrary relative elements of mere convention from those things which are absolute and essential. We can understand what kind of morality makes society function with greater well being for its members – for that is what we ultimately expect from a morality which we can all embrace whole-heartedly.
I think the points of our agreement easily outweigh those where we disagree. Probably more a testament to our improving ability to understand one another than of our ability to score debate points, and that points to some initial points of agreement I think.
I think it may have a lot to do with having pretty much having the same foundation and basement, and perhaps even ground floor so to speak. I may have embraced the Bible and Christianity, but that is what I have added on the top most floors, not where I have started. I think people who start with those build in very different direction in order to embrace the findings of science as much as they can. It makes communication and understanding a bit difficult when the orientations are all different… a lot like we are in completely different worlds.
Though… since I don’t really know where you started, my metaphor may required some adjustments. I started with parents majoring in psychology and not so much interest in religion other than the criticisms of the Christian establishment by the extreme liberals of the 60s. I went from there right into the scientific worldview with floors in SF&F fiction, Buddhism, existentialism, math and physics at university, and only exploring the whole spectrum of Christianity on top of that.
I like the analogy of a house. I’ve done some exploring myself and have been through many passages and rooms. But I can’t recall having constructed any of it. I wouldn’t know how to begin though it may be that what we read and dwell on do influence what we discover next.
Tell that to Kant.
Yes… not for me is the pretense to restricting myself to objectivity and observation which I see as only suitable to the activity of science. The scientific method is a tool I can and often use, but the pretense of doing this always is practically delusional for living ones life. Life is about building and creating – all subjective participation to the max. Perhaps it is the SF&F floor of my building that gave my search for truth the strategy of imagining all the possible answers to a question and picking the one which best fit the evidence, was the most logically coherent, and had the best pragmatic implications for living a good life.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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