“Is God the Source of Morality?”
Is it rational to ground right and wrong in commands issued by God?
Matthew Flannagan (left, affirmative) vs Raymond Bradley (right, negative)
University of Auckland, 2^nd of August 2010

Few subjects in philosophy are more interesting to me than the meta-ethical question of what makes any moral claims true. My particular area of interest is the question of whether or not moral facts can be grounded in a purely naturalistic view of reality. The topic of this debate therefore grabbed my interest as soon as it was announced – and this was in no small part due to the fact that one of the debate participants was my good friend Matthew Flannagan, who blogs at MandM. What follows is my summary and review of that debate. As someone with no duty whatsoever to not take a side in the debate, I’ll comment on the arguments as they unfold throughout the debate rather like one commentating a live boxing match. And now the opening bell rings.
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Some observations from Matt Flannagan over at M and M reminded me of the existence of the atheist campaign to evangelise the world through billboards. In honour of that campaign, I suggest launching another, much more important campaign:

Any lifeguard who tells me this is sure to put my mind at ease.

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J. L. Mackie was famous for defending two claims. Firstly, God doesn’t exist (a claim defended in his book, The Miracle of Theism). Secondly, there are no moral facts (a position called moral nihilism or an error theory of morality, defended in his book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong). According to Christian thinkers over the centuries, these two claims have been thought of as closely related, and the second claim is really a consequence of the first. If God does not exist, then moral facts do not exist either. Interestingly enough, this was Mackie’s position as well.
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Scientism, as I am using that term here, is an approach to studying an issue that assumes that if something is a question of fact, then it can (at least very probably) be answered by science. A very strong form of scientism would be logical positivism. Logical positivism, now a largely abandoned perspective, said that in order for a question to be meaningful it had to be either scientifically verifiable, or else it had to be something that was true by definition (e.g. squares have four sides). Scientism need not go this far.

Richard Dawkins has been accused of employing scientism in his attacks on religious belief. I’ll look directly at the accusation shortly. In a recent blog by Stephen law, he takes issue with this accusation and seeks to exonerate Dawkins from it. Before I get to that, another comment in the same blog entry caught my attention. Law writes: “The God Delusion is a world-wide best-seller that provoked a huge storm of criticism from the religious, who accused Dawkins of all sorts of confusions, muddles and bad arguments.”
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In the last podcast episode on Plantinga and properly basic beliefs, I briefly discussed the “Great Pumpkin Objection.” As it’s a subject worthy of a blog post of its own, and given that I know some people prefer things in writing, I thought I’d add a blog entry focused on that objection.

Alvin Plantinga has hammered out and defended the notion that if God (the Christian God that he believes in) really exists, then a Christian’s belief in God can be construed as properly basic. A properly basic belief is one that is rationally held and yet not derived from other beliefs that one holds (this is another way of saying that it is not justified by what is often called evidence). We hold many such beliefs, for example, the belief that the universe was not created just five minutes ago, any beliefs based on memory, belief that other minds exist, the belief that we are experiencing a certain colour, and so on. Set aside, for now, the fact that a lot of Christians think that they can produce decent evidence for the existence of God. Plantinga argued – successfully in my view – that even if that’s true, theism can be construed as properly basic and hence suitably justified even without such evidence. God created us in such a way that when we function properly we believe in him. The normal epistemic response to creation is to believe things like “God created this,” or more fundamentally, “God is real.” For more details, check out the podcast episode.

One bandwagon that anti-theists have jumped on is to claim that if theists can claim that their belief in God is basic, then just anybody at all can do this in regard to their belief in just anything. Here’s one popular version of that objection: In the comic strip Peanuts, the character Linus believes that there exists a Great Pumpkin who rises from the pumpkin patch every Halloween and rewards good children with presents. If Christians get to think that belief in God can be properly basic, then why couldn’t a person (like Linus) think that belief in the Great Pumpkin is properly basic, and so claim the right to believe it even though he cannot produce evidence for the belief’s truth?
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This is the second time in a pretty short space of time that I’ve criticised something said by Stephen Law. I don’t want people to think that I’m picking on him. It’s a coincidence, I swear. I had a book of his out of the library and critiqued his (apparent) claim that Christians who use the fine-tuning argument commit the lottery fallacy. Then when I was in that same library a couple of days ago that same book caught my eye because I recognised it as the book that I recently had out. Right next to it was another book by Stephen Law. It was bright green, so it stood out. That’s how I came to be reading him again and how I spotted the comments that I’m about to comment on. I promise, it’s nothing personal.

Having said that, it’s still an example of some pretty bad philosophy. Law’s book The Philosophy Files is basically an introduction to philosophical issues for young people. In general, it’s good; enjoyable, clear, helpful and it has nifty pictures. (I have on my desk the edition published in 2000).

But just as with his other book that I commented on, The Philosophy Gym, things head south when it comes to the section on theism (belief in God). Now of course we should cut him some slack. The book isn’t an in-depth text book. It provides an introductory coverage of issues for people who may never have encountered them before. But even in a simplified presentation, surely we have a duty to represent people’s positions in a way that doesn’t mislead, and that doesn’t portray people that one disagrees with as using arguments that are much worse than the arguments that they use in real life.
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Recently I read a few comments by Richard Dawkins on the phrase “a Christian child” or “a Muslim child” etc. he writes:

A phrase like “Catholic child” or “Muslim child” should clang furious bells of protest in the mind, just as we flinch when we hear “One man, one vote.” Children are too young to know their religious opinions. Just as you can’t vote until you are eighteen, you should be free to choose your own cosmology and ethics without society’s impertinent presumption that you will automatically inherit those of your parents. We’d be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn’t it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child? Especially in Northern Ireland and Glasgow, where such labels, handed down over generations, have divided neighborhoods for centuries and can even amount to a death warrant?

Catholic child? Flinch. Protestant child? Squirm. Muslim child? Shudder. Everybody’s consciousness should be raised to this level. Occasionally a euphemism is needed, and I suggest “Child of Jewish (etc.) parents.” When you come down to it, that’s all we are really talking about anyway. Just as the upside-down (Northern Hemisphere chauvinism again: flinch!) map from New Zealand raises consciousness about a geographical truth, children should hear themselves described not as “Christian children” but as “children of Christian parents.” This in itself would raise their consciousness, empower them to make up their own minds, and choose which religion, if any, they favor, rather than just assume that religion means “same beliefs as parents.” I could well imagine that this linguistically coded freedom to choose might lead children to choose no religion at all.

There’s a certain disanalogy here with political points of view. Being a “Hayekian monetarist” or a “Leninist” is largely (or at least to some extent and in an important way) about cherishing certain values, whereas religious belief has more to do with affirming certain claims as metaphysically true.

But more importantly, Richard Dawkins is on record as treating all factual beliefs as “scientific” beliefs. There’s a factual answer to the question of whether or not the moon orbits the earth, or how many protons there are in an atom of lead. I doubt that Professor Dawkins would look kindly on the parent or teacher who answered a young boy’s question about the moon by saying “I’m sorry Timmy, you’re too young. I can’t possibly impose my view of the moon’s movement upon you. How dare I try to make you share my beliefs.” I’m interested in your thoughts. Do you agree with Richard Dawkins? Should fact claims that most people would consider “religious” be treated as exceptional – unlike all other beliefs – and excluded from the beliefs we share with our children? If so, why?

I do wonder, too, how Richard Dawkins would answer his own child (hypothically) if she asked him: Is there a god?

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Some arguments are like mosquitoes. They get slapped and well and truly squashed – unambiguously defeated in plain sight for all to see, obviously crushed. The smeared body is witnessed. But then as soon as you try to relax again, that familiar whining sound fades in again. You think, Didn’t I just squash you? Yes you did, and it’s back.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, objections to divine command theories of ethics are a good example of arguments like this. But they’re not alone. Another is the Lottery Fallacy Fallacy. I know, calling something a “fallacy” is a bit of a rhetorical device, but I use the term because the argument that I want to rebut – again – is one that trades on using that word for rhetorical effect, so my use of the word twice must surely double the effect!
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Episode 35 is an analysis of a recent talk given by Sam Harris on science and human values. The talk was part of a TED conference, and you can see part 1 here. Harris thinks that he has argued that moral facts are actually scientific facts. I think he has failed, and here I offer an explanation of how I think he has failed. In brief, I think his entire presentation is an exercise in circular reasoning.

Harris has a new book on the subject, The Moral Landscape, which is to be released later this year. If you’d like to order a copy, please use this link and the Book Depository will look kindly on me.

 Episode 035: Sam Harris, Science and Morality [46:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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James S. Spiegel, The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief (Chicago: Moody, 2010), 141 pages including notes.

One of the most endearing features of James Spiegel’s new book, The Making of an Atheist, is that it is quite short. You might think I’m kidding, or that this is a slight on the quality of the book (which is excellent, actually). It’s not. Dr Spiegel has some points to make, he makes them, and then he’s done. This is how I think all good Christian scholarship should be done (actually this is how all scholarship should be done, whatever the cause in which name it is done). It doesn’t take long to see what he’s getting at, it’s not hard to grasp, and once you’ve appreciated the point, you are allowed to leave, better off for having invested a relatively short amount of precious time.

But brevity is (fortunately) not the only feature of this intellectually compelling and eminently enjoyable read. Spiegel is a Christian writing on atheism, so it’s natural to assume that his goal is to show that atheism is false. However, that atheism is false is not the thesis of this book. Yes, the author reveals that he does think that atheism is false, and yes he also gives some reasons for thinking that it is false (just as those engaged in the science of religion might also offer their own reasons for thinking that this or that religious belief is false), but to fixate on that at the expense of the book’s overall theme would be to miss the point. The subject of the book is the fact that once we get past the idea of people being intellectually compelled to believe atheism on the grounds of rational argumentation (which is actually a rare phenomenon) there are, from a Christian perspective, identifiable causes of atheism that are both biblical and very often readily identifiable in practice. One of those major causes is the sinful desire for moral autonomy from God, and in particular the desire to engage in a sinful lifestyle (that is, a lifestyle marked by a rejection of the ethical mores of commitment to obeying God).
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