Pretty sure you are correct that everyone here will agree with what you say here. But it does raise a question I’ve often wondered about.
Is there any objective truth from God’s point of view, or is our objective His subjective? Also, is there any necessity regarding our objective reality or is it all in the end God’s whim? If this feels like a tangent I’d be happy to raise it elsewhere at another time.
Maybe this isn’t so much tangential as “over and above” even any musings on our part – at least as I “see” it. The very question seems to me to still carry that flavor of the whimsical Zeus --mighty leader of gods though he could be imagined to be, and imposing his whims on us mere mortals; yet he is still subject to the vagaries of a reality that encompasses him. Old testament imagery aside (and that is a HUGE aside), the Christian God just doesn’t have any parallel in any of that except in our own parochial imaginations born of that same ancient (O.T.) history.
So even though I reject both pantheism and panentheism, I still think of God as immanent in all reality – (not the same as, mind you, but just present with it, around it, and in it). That all could be confused for panentheism, but only by misreading what I wrote. Just because I’m present with my house doesn’t make my house = to me.
The upshot of that all for me is … there is just no getting God underneath our intellectual microscopes, even in principle. Because to do so is to assume a contradiction from the outset: that we could step “outside of God” to evaluate any whims, activities, or such from some sort of “extra-God” perspective. But not only does the Christian have no such perspective on offer, she also sees that such a perspective couldn’t exist. God is the necessary end of all causal chains, or prospective perspectives.
For someone who can’t say what God is you seem awfully quick to say what He isn’t. This is what always leads me to suspect I may be being led on another wild snipe hunt. 
In my defense I’ll note that it’s easier to pick off wrong answers than it is to nail down right ones. Whether or not it all turns out to be merely a “snipe hunt” … I guess you can always “taste and see”!
Even so, you’re right that I like to talk a lot. It’s a way of thinking for me - thank you for that! It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone that Proverbs 10:19 is not one of my favorite verses in the Bible.
Or as I remember my high school biology teacher quoting to us: “It’s better to stay silent and let people think you’re a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” […but I would add that the trouble with that is that the silent fool … may stay a fool, unless somebody else is willing to be the fool and get the question asked!]
Empathy and reason is what gets us there. You wouldn’t want those things done to you, so you shouldn’t do those things to other people knowing that they have the same emotions as you do.
Putting more priority on those around us is certainly an interesting feature of human morality, and one that appears to be shared by nearly all humans. Since we favor our own family, we also realize that others favor their own families and neighbors. Again, empathy helps us out in this arena as well.
There are many occasions where reason has overturned laws and views within cultures that were previously based on emotions. The history of racism in the US is a really good example.
Conscience is our inner sense of morality. Empathy and reason are things we are born with, not things we learn, and it is those things that form our conscience. We are moral agents, not merely robots who are programmed by our parents.
Empathy + Reason does not equal conscience. A 2-yr-old has no remorse for hitting a playmate, or stealing her toy. Conscience is not implanted in our minds at birth. If it were, all of us would have the same sense of conscience, and it would never change. In contrast, the Scripture says that the conscience can be weak, strong, hardened, defiled, or even instructed. Thus, conscience is learned. Remove a child from social contact, and they will not only fail to learn language, they will fail to learn morality and will not acquire what we call a “conscience.”
Who said anything about robots? But, if you think parents have no impact on their children’s sense of right and wrong behavior, you simply haven’t spent enough time around children.
Actually, a 2 year old lacks the empathy and reasoning skills found in adults.
All cultures have the same basic moral rules, so I am not quite sure how this argument would hold up.
You said we were robots, that we can’t figure out morality for ourselves so we have to be taught morality.
I’m still not seeing the “ought” materialize here without some other outside help. Nor does it seem settled at all to me that the function of empathy is entirely laid at the feet of biology. It is an interesting proposition to consider, but the full acceptance of that premise seems to me to entail that certain groups of people (let’s say … the Nazis) were either somehow biologically deficient in that regard; or else they had insufficient reasoning skills (intelligence) to process the empathy they did have; or …both. I’m pretty sure no study is going to find the Germans of that time to be generally less intelligent or less potentially empathetic than any of the rest of us. So I’m pretty sure there are other things going on.
All that said, I don’t reject your proposition entirely either. I think it interesting to ponder how there is some “ingrained” empathy that we must inherit; and a study that I just looked up suggested that among the primates there is probably some measurable manifestation of this (contagious yawning) that gives researchers a bit of a handle to take a look. (Interestingly enough the same study failed to find a statistically significant relationship between empathy and pro-social behavior, though they conceded their results did not test everything they could have --e.g. testing for pro-social behavior among groups closer to the subject.) [Franzen, Axel et al. (2018) “Contagious Yawning, Empathy, and Prosocial Behavior” Journal of Experimental Psychology. APA PsycNet]
But in any case, regardless of how evolutionarily-sourced empathy turns out to be, I still contend for the necessity of yet additional premises. Here’s why.
Our empathy, such as it is (and whatever its source), still comes before our conscious minds as a supplicant for attention and verdict. You seem to equate all empathy-acquiescence with goodness, but I’m convinced that is not so. Everyday we are making decisions that draw on some of our empathetic inputs, and necessarily suppress others. For example, the administrator standing before her school assembly giving students instructions may notice needy students among the sea of faces in front of her; but she goes on conducting the business of the assembly (giving instructions for the upcoming field trip etc.) because she realizes that if she stops doing that to ask Johnny and Jane and Jack each how they are feeling today and is everything okay … the assembly will stretch on. This just isn’t the appropriate place to do that. Their needs are deferred, perhaps to be met later by somebody else entirely. My cell phone rings … my empathy tells me that somebody probably wants to talk to me, even if it’s a salesperson just trying to meet their quota and eek out a living. I suppress my empathetic urge to indulge them for the entirely selfish reason of continuing my present task. Is this always wrong? I suggest not. In which case we have to ask what these governing agencies are, then, that are raising some of our empathetic sensibilities up into the foreground to command our executive attentions, while suppressing many others, even denying them executive consideration entirely.
Reason is present in all that, to be sure. But again, for the same reasons we’ve been discussing, reason alone cannot account for all this moral governance. If I indulged in every empathetic sensitivity I could possibly have, I would quickly become professionally non-functional as a teacher. Every science class would be reduced to meeting this or that student’s emotional needs while the others would just throw up their hands in the realization that “I guess we aren’t going to learn any physics today either!” My teacher self might rightly wonder at that point, “shouldn’t I be empathizing with all the students who came here hoping to learn some science?” The answer is probably: yes. Which means suppressing other competing empathetic summons most (but not all) of the time. But of course, that is the whole point here.
So I suggest that our reasoning is the “calculator”, and “empathy” is one of the inputs (and a very worthy one at that!), but that the calculation still can’t be performed in the absence of yet more inputs (significantly from my perspective): that ever present “guest” still lurking in the shadows just inside your back door.
Even if I were to grant you that empathy is 100% biologically ingrained, and that said empathy + reason = sufficient reason for me to want to be altruistic … even granting all that, it still would not enable science to, on its own exclusive authority, finally stamp anything at all with a moral “ought”. And yet I fully embrace and celebrate your desire to do so – I rejoice both with you, and that shadowy guest you bring with you whose presence goes unremarked.
BTW, -and sorry if this is rehashing stuff you’ve already discussed elsewhere - but do you believe in evil? E.g. -is racism evil? or is it just people either suppressing their empathetic impulses or lacking sufficient reasoning skills (or courage) to process their empathy? Curious for your thoughts there. Thanks for the challenges.
[edits.]
If the ought in religion’s quiver comes from consequences meted out by God, perhaps the legal system can play the same role for secularists. If there is no over-riding consideration for doing what I prefer, why shouldn’t I honor my preference? Empathy and fellow feeling already assure that my preference will often enough include the well being of my family and neighbors. Why isn’t that enough?
Well … I will concede that whatever it is you’ve got apparently is enough – if you are caring for your neighbor, after all. (if that is our entire goal here – and a worthy goal it is.) I would just push back that I think you have more arrows in your quiver than you are admitting.
I think the important bit is that you describe it as suppressing our empathy. In other words, we ignore our conscience.
I was working with an undergraduate intern the other day and came up with my own quip: “Practical is the combination of perfect and lazy.” There is a practical morality that is less than a perfect morality, but each of us understands that all of us are imperfect and more on the practical side. Everyone cheats a little bit, and it works as long as everyone cheats the same amount, and only a little.
For the purposes of this specific discussion I don’t think it is important to nail down the ultimate source of empathy and reason. The fact that we have both is the point I am trying to make. More specifically, we are moral agents in that we have the ability to judge morality and act accordingly and are held accountable for own actions because of this.
Hold on. You said empathy and reason are things we are born with. I’m simply pointing out the obvious – that a 2-yr-old lacks empathy. They haven’t acquired the ability to “project” themselves into another mind, just like they can’t project very far into the future to anticipate consequences, which is another requirement for moral behavior.
So, “honor killings” and female genital mutilation are universally acceptable in all cultures? I don’t think so. Please don’t make me rehearse additional examples, but the argument holds up quite well.
(Edit: I should add that Jewish circumcision was disgusting to Greco-Roman culture.)
No, I’m simply saying that your ideas about right and wrong were learned when you were very young and by processes other than rational consideration. This isn’t purely biological; it also is cultural and social. Later, you acquired the ability to doubt.
Thus, you learned your basic morality when you were a child, and only much later could you use your empathy and reasoning skills to question the veracity of that early moral code. I’m simply pointing out that if you want to “figure out morality for yourself,” such a process cannot be inborn and is only possible for an adult.
Innate would probably be a better word. Empathy and reason appear to be something that develops with our cognitive skills and overall brain development.
By and large, things like murder and theft are considered immoral in all cultures. I never said that every single moral rule was universal.
So you are saying that I would go around murdering and raping if I hadn’t been taught to not do those things by my parents?
No, because parents aren’t the only inputs available. The parents of our hypothetical 2-yr-old may not teach him/her not to hit others or steal their toys, but there are aunts and uncles and cousins and neighbors, and later on peers at school and teachers and other adults. The “shared values” that make up moral codes are communal, not decided by any one person (or parent). Just as one person cannot have a “private language,” as per Wittgenstein, one person cannot have a “private morality.”
Edit: And if they did, it certainly would be classified as “immoral.”
I have a hard time believing that someone would lack any sense of morality if it weren’t taught to them. At least in my experience, empathy is something I just do, not something I was trained to do.
Perhaps this is one of those things we will just have to agree to disagree on.
Oh, yes, I agree with you that empathy is innate. (We would have to agree what “reason” constitutes before I could agree to that!) A normal child will develop along those lines, assuming that they have normal social interactions. But an inborn urge to relate and communicate with others is not the same thing as conscience, and a child deprived of normal social interactions (i.e. one who is neglected) may not develop empathy or even a reasonable facsimile of a conscience. In fact, they often become sociopaths. I dealt with more than one of them when I worked in juvenile detention. You see, I know from personal experience that God does not implant a conscience in everyone’s mind. Many people are entirely lacking it. They are the only ones who ever scared me.
I’m happy to agree to disagree on this point. Most Christians probably agree with you!
That is certainly an interesting aside. There have been studies of feral children who lacked nearly all normal human interaction, and they have serious social problems as well as cognitive disabilities. It’s as if the human brain needs social interaction during those early years in order to develop correctly, even in a cognitive sense.
I would agree with you that there does need to be social interaction, but perhaps not in the way you are thinking.
Hello Jay,
You’re conflating a voice from heaven to communicating a message to an individual. If God wants someone to understand a message, He is more than capable of doing that, even in Acts 9 when He spoke to Paul on the road to Damascus.
How is the fact that one of God’s image-bearers recorded a bunch of societal laws a problem for Christian morality?
Hello T,
You have it backwards, believers recognize a loving God then accept his moral precepts, not the other way around.
[from Novella]
Many moral philosophers did their thinking within a religious belief system, and we should not reject the fruits of their wisdom because they are couched in religious terms.
Because you, like Dawkins, tend to conflate all religions as if there aren’t objective, fundamental differences between them. Christianity and Islam are half the world now because people have rejected multiple, immoral Gods and no God and see the truth in there being one true god who is good.
To most people it doesn’t make sense that there could exist a God who is powerful and intelligent enough to create a unimaginably-large universe that produced conscious, intelligent life forms that recognize love, justice, beauty and good and at the same time be immoral. And it only make sense to them that this god would communicate his will for his creations.
Inspired by another Dawkinsesque logical fallacy, which is:
Biblical claims can't be true because they happened in an age where digital recording didn't exist.
Which conveniently excludes the possibility that God could have had men perform miracles in the ancient world. And your claim rejects a huge form of evidence, that is historical evidence. Some historical evidences for Christ are.
4 written accounts of the life of Christ, 3 as witnesses and one who collected first-hand accounts. These mini-biographies have a high degree of correlation that the man Jesus Christ lived in Judea ~2,000 years ago, performed miracles, was crucified by the Romans and rose from the dead on the 3rd day.
11 of these men, who historically were, “unschooled and ordinary” started a movement that changed the world.
These unschooled men preached a message of a moral, pure, and good God who wanted people to imitate the Christ, which included being completely honest - making it problematic that they would risk (and mostly give) their lives preaching lies about Jesus.
The first-century Jewish historian Josephus wrote passages on Jesus, his brother James and John the Baptist, which most historians agree are authentic. A much-agreed upon un-interpolated kernel of the Testimonium Flavianum is:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds [miracles], a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
So there are evidences of the claims of Christ.
if God exists, which most people instinctively believe, and if He separated seas and wiped out Pharoe’s army for the Hebrews, then they would have trusted Him to a greater than anyone in modern times can imagine.
Hitler didn’t perform miracles, didn’t claim to be a god and in fact rejected the biblical god, so there was no reason to trust him other than he was an effective leader. Your point of view only makes sense if the Hebrew god was an imaginary God and makes another, massive false equivalency.
a·the·ism - ˈāTHēˌizəm/Submit - noun
disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.
Atheism is a belief system. If there is no God, then this universe is the result of something natural. I’ve seen you make comments like, “we can’t trust intuition” (about nothing coming from nothing). But it’s not intuition, as I’ve said before, the study of the physical has shown that we have and will never understand a way for a universe (or multiverse) to originate from ontological nothingness. So it’s atheists, and yourself, do have faith in your lack of belief in God/gods.
Again, all your arguments hang from your belief that there is no God and/or the bible accounts are fictitious. But IF God existed and delivered the Hebrews from the Egyptians then it is reasonable that they would trust Him. And IF the apostles saw the risen Christ then it is reasonable that they would have trusted him also, as a benevolent god. Above that, your argument that, “just because a god ordered plagues and opened a sea and stopped a river for a people doesn’t mean he’s a good god”, and, “just because Jesus did miracles and rose from the dead doesn’t mean he’s a good god” lacks any force whatsoever. If god exists and is the god of the bible then He has to be a good god and therefore his morality trustworthy, or you have to make an incredulous claim that your subjective, fallible brain and sinful being produced a moral code superior than that of the creator of an unimaginably large universe that created intelligent, moral beings.
It is your opinion that God is loving, and it is a subjective opinion.
I agree. I also think that religious belief systems are a product of human culture, not the other way around.
All I am saying is that being a creator God does not automatically make you a moral God. The two are unrelated.
That reads like a subjective judgment being made by humans.
It isn’t my intent to have a massive debate about the historical or factual accuracy of the Bible. That seems like a massive diversion from the interesting topic of this thread.
I don’t see how performing miracles translates into being moral.
Then not playing golf is a sport.
“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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