I found myself boggled today.
Here it was that, after link-hopping through a series of blogs about God, I happened upon a recent article by noted atheist Sam Harris. In this article, he interviewed former United Methodist pastor (of 20 years!) Tim Prowse about his journey out of faith and into disbelief. As a United Methodist minister myself, I found myself drawn with a breaking heart into this man’s story. For the most part, it was a fairly predictable progression – the lack of empirical scientific evidence for a deity makes God seem less and less likely, until belief has finally eroded entirely. I expected that. What I did not expect, however, was to find myself staring at the page in befuddlement as Tim attempted to discuss morality without God.
Since God is nothing more than our creation and projection, any talk of God is our reflection looking back at us. Hence, our morality begins with us anyway. My morality hasn’t changed for the worse since I left the faith. If anything, it is much more honest because I am forced to consider what is really going on in ethical decisions. Family, culture, beliefs and values, genetic tendencies, all play a role in shaping morality, but I’m not arguing an extreme relativism. While I do give credence to certain cultural influences on determining right and wrong, I believe that some issues are universal.
Some issues are universal? Morality, while “begin[ning] with us anyway,” is not subject to our own relativism? How do we reject anything transcendent, yet identify that moral obligation exists beyond ourselves? The dots simply don’t connect for me.
I am not alone in this, either. Atheist philosophers throughout history have long contended that the rejection of God allows humanity to create their own moral structures. It is only in relatively recent history that the evangelists of atheism have attempted to reclaim a moral foundation. Unflichingly, however, they arrive back at the problem that moral certitude rests on the individual, and individuals disagree, thereby making morality relative. To attempt to claim a universal implication for morality is to imply transcendence, and you simply cannot have transcendence in a world without God.
What do you think? Did our innate moral compass originate with our creator? Is morality inherently transcendent, or can it exist in an absolute sense within a worldview construct devoid of God?
Related articles
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- Podcast: Where Is God When The Church Goes Bad? (ofdustandkings.com)
When subjective truth becomes the “standard” over objective truth within a society or to an individual, then it’s impossible to say whether or not a subjective truth is absolutely right or wrong since it’s left completely up to the subject who decided the “truth” to begin with.
To live by nothing but “subjective truths” is to live by a compass that spins round and round! If there is never a “true” North, South, East, West then one can never really know where they are going.
I like the cartoon you used too.
Very good points. I wonder, what would you say to someone who supposes that all ethical decisions are contextually driven, and therefore there is no “absolute truth” in the realm of ethics?
I suppose that’s a difficult conversation to have with one who holds to that view point. Human nature reveals among many things that 1) We know that rules must exist. and 2) We don’t like rules!
The later is only revealed when the previous is bound upon us. I believe the very fact that within the human psyche there is a realization that there is truly a right and wrong so because of that, ethics are not determined by situations but by a standard that exists regardless one’s point of view.
To hold any view contrary to this is to hold a view that believes that murder, rape, concentration camps, ect. can never be wrong no matter how much it “bothers” us. In other words, there are NO morals if there are NO morals. For some reason it’s hard to get people to understand that because so many relate morality to how a person behaves/acts instead of how a person ought to behave/act.
If I were a person who believes that ethics are only “situational” then I suppose I would “hope and pray” that I was never caught in a vulnerable situation with only “situational ethics” people available to help me (i.e. my post that I did called “Untouchable” – http://wp.me/p20YNR-7p)
Make sense?
I would say personally that the mind can create anything, so regardless of the transcendence of morality or not, it can exist. The mind creates ideas of various things that don’t exist, like spirituality or god. It also depends on what you mean by transcendence, You could mean the 19th century christian theological movement, which argued that god was easier to find in nature than any works of man. Or you could be saying transcendence to mean various dictionary definitions such as “exceeding usual limits”, “beyond comprehension”, or “universally applicable”. You could even be using another use meaning “God removed from the universe”.
Despite religion and culture determining where anybody’s moral compass points, I don’t feel it originates from a creator. I actually believe morality originated from selfishness. So much violence occurs in the natural world that eventually, people became focused on staying alive so much they eventually took their own immediate need for lesser and put a longer-term need to live above it. Thus our selfishness creates morality. Most people when introduced to a religion, take christianity for example, don’t see it any other way than selfishly, the don’t want to go hell. You could reply to say “Oh, that’s God’s way of making us want to be with him.” That would be false, because an omnibenevolent deity would always promote himself with the carrot, never the stick, otherwise not omnibenevolent.
From the other guy’s “rules” scenario I do like how it gives opportunity to say that gives us motive to create a deity from out imagination, because our innate drive to break rules, even if the most trivial, makes us create a imaginary being that can accomplish things outside of the rules if we only follow the rules we create for ourselves and then imagine a deity telling us to do them.
What a great response. Thank you for taking the time to give such a well thought out reflection.
In answer to your question, in this context I use “transcendent” to simply mean “beyond ourselves.” Thus, my primary question is that, if ethics are simply found rooted in ourselves (particularly if they are rooted in selfishness), can we really suggest they are objectively binding? Why should I adhere to ethical standards if such a “standard” is simply an instinctual illusion? Furthermore, if we have contrasting views on ethics (let’s say you believe in freedom, and another believes that certain cultures should be locked up or eradicated “for the good of society”), on what basis do we elevate one above the other?
We all see everything through our flawed perception, so objectivity, the way we know it, is a lie, but similarly, subjectivity, due to our flawed perception, is also a lie. This is the paradox of subjectivity and objectivity. We could use Occam’s Razor to determine baseline moral standards, thus putting the standards which are most freeing (and have least amount of steps) automatically at the top, but then again making those freedom accessible requires us to break the Razor. Personally, I elevate moral standards above another up till those standards don’t negatively impact me or any other human being. Theoretically speaking, if we applied this to all moral statements, we’d eventually receive a hierarchy which would result in the best possible morality. Then again, you’d still run into the problem of the aforementioned paradox, so essentially, reality is what you believe it is.
This sounds delightfully postmodern.
I can’t say I agree, but I am enthralled at the Niezchean undertones. If all morality is illusion, is there such thing as a “best” morality? What prevents me from reaching the same conclusion as Sartre, or Niezche, or even Dahmer who, admittedly as a result of sociopathy, still identified his moral motivations as stemming from the sudden awareness that, after rejecting God, he discovered himself free to do whatever he wished?
Well there’s not much we can do the reconcile our differences of morality and opinion, but there are surprising notes. I draw a lot of my philosophy from that of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his famous Tractatus. Though, I have made it my own.
What we essentially boil down to is the idea of morality only with god versus morality possible without god. Then again, defining morality is like walking around barefoot in an unlit cave filled with poisonous snakes and broken glass on the floors, then telling me to give exact dimensions of the cave while transcribing the writing on the walls. Philosophically speaking, morality, ethics, and anything are only able to be defined by the person thinking about them.
Honestly, it pays us no mind, because we can do whatever we want regardless of god’s existence or not, despite the illogical and invalid attempts to rectify the problem with hell, the problem with evil, the omnipotence paradox, the invalidity of the concept of free will, or other such thought experiments. It ends up that we are left to choose, or not. Depends on your views. I do enjoy your deliberatory, not debative, attitude. It fosters good discussion. You could make a good freethinker yourself.
I should do some blogs about those. I’ve written papers on hell, evil, free will, and the omnipotence paradox. I assume by the omnipotence paradox you are referring to questions such as “can God create a rock so heavy He cannot lift it?”
Yes, that same paradox. You seem much more of a freethinking theist than I have ever encountered before. It’s surprsingly, honestly.
Non-freethinking beliefs (especially christian beliefs) which I talk to eventually give me this “God doesn’t play by the rules” kind of garbage. If that was true we’d all be in heaevn now if he was truly omnibenevolent , or in hell if the opposite was true. Besides that, the omnipresence “god resides everywhere in everything all the time” would say the part of god attached to all creation would follow the rules established for creation.
Furthermore, I think god reminds me of Antoine Lavoisier and his version of the now-debunked Caloric theory, which says heat was in element just like oxygen or hydrogen that was self-repellant, thus when things heated, they expanded because caloric was being added to the substance present, causing expansion. Heat is just particle motion, so I view the notion of god like Caloric, you don’t add a substance to create an effect, you just change the attribute of the substance already there. So god isn’t needed for reality, but a change in the energy that makes up all of the universe.
Unless heaven and hell are existential realities, rather than simple locations marked by reward and punishment. If the heart of Christianity is rooted in the idea that we are slowly being transformed away from the darker side of our nature and into love and selflessness, as opposed to the human tendency to move in the opposite direction, then we have the makings of heaven/ hell right there. Taken to the logical extreme, we have a community transformed into love and selflessness existing together for eternity, and another community which has yielded to the darker side of our nature existing together for eternity, then the former would rightly be called heaven, and the latter hell.
Thus, we face a choice. Allow ourselves to be transformed by the Holy Spirit in restoration with God’s kingdom, or go our own way. If the choice is allowed, then we will naturally have the previously mentioned polarities. The alternative is to bring us all into “heaven,” but such a reality requires the suppression of our capacity to choose. Allow the polarities, or impose a robotic form of enslavement. In Christian theology, God chose the former route.
I would argue that “free will” is not really valid. Why? It’s a rock and a hard place. Hell is there, and it’s eternal punishment, while Heaven is there, and it’s eternal reward. So logically you’d do whatever you could to avoid hell and enter heaven, which is why there’s not really a choice. You have the carrot or the stick but the master still wants you to plow the field, and at the end of the field you either get whipped for the rest of your life while the other results in endless carrots.
I would also contend that your supposition that the human nature always wants to move towards what you refer as darkness is a flawed argument, due your own interpretation of darkness, which I could refer to as light. So couldn’t expect that we even have the proper compass to judge north and south, let alone decide what is “right” or what is “wrong”. Biblically-speaking murder wasn’t necessarily wrong, it was only wrong doing it against another israelite for personal reasons, but any other trivial reason (which we would regard as not valid reasons for deadly force today) and you could kill somebody. Not to mention how many times god told them to wipe out whole races, tribes, and cultures around them because they were “bad” or “enemies of israel”. So scripturally, if we cannot even determine if murder/killing is bad, because god appears to decide based on a whim, then how do we do anything else?
Existential reality could refer to not necessarily other places of reward and punishment but degrees of reward and punishment on earth. So Auschwitz circa 1945 would be hell and post-WWII United States would be heaven. Moving from dark to light is even against what we can see with science, as entropy is moving from perfection to chaos and never to return. So if we cannot determine using biblical history or science, it would say it’s out of our concept to grasp.
Well, coercion doesn’t violate free will. If it did, martyrdom would not exist. Even so, I see the work of redemption in Jesus Christ to be the process whereby we are being freed from that part of ourselves which threatens to swallow us whole. The existence of that aspect of our nature seems, to me, to be consistent with what I see at work in the human experience. And yes, I would consider Auschwitz to be a temporal glimpse into hell. Make Auschwitz eternal, and you have an example of the hell I think Jesus is seeking to save us from.
You raise some good points regarding Biblical history, but I think there is more going on there than what is visible on the surface. I won’t get into all of it here, as it would take too long, but I will point to two scholarly works on the issue: “God Behaving Badly” is one; “Is God a Moral Monster?” is the other.
Bringing us back to topic, then, let me pose this hypothetical: Were a god to exist who not only created us, but instilled within us a moral compass in reflection of that deity’s character; a morality that is designed to help us find wholeness and fulfillment in alignment with how we were created and intended to function, would that result in an ethic which exists beyond ourselves and, thus, is objective?
There’s a difference between coercion when you talk religion. It’s not really coercion if you truly believe in heaven and god, because you just (in the most extreme example) get shot for your beliefs and go to heaven, so you actually gained from dying for the belief. While, using extreme coercion methods on a nonbeliever is an actual threat, because they are going to die permanently, no afterlife. I would argue truly “free” will cannot occur when there is no alternative. If you coerce the young, they don’t know any better and become beholden to the belief system. If you coerce the non-believer, they don’t believe in the afterlife, heaven, or hell, so threatening them unto death is a real threat, not just a punchcard the believers use to take the train to heaven. When you threaten someone with eternal punishment, there is only one logical conclusion if you believed any of it: do what you have to do to avoid that punishment.
I will see about reading them, or at least giving them a good look-over.
I would say no about the hypothetical situation because the moral compass would be, as you said, put onto us, and we cannot be objective. Then again we go back to that objectivity-subjectivity paradox which causes problems. Morality, by default, is also never objective, because it generally does depend on context. God does this as well, David committed adultery and was punished for it, but forgiven, while many people did such in the past and apologized to god, and weren’t forgiven. Also, it’s also like asking, if there no way to avoid one of the options, whether to avert a train resulting in ten deaths or one death, while saving the ten in logical, that becomes morally abhorrent for something like medical transplants or otherwise. Furthermore, considering if we were supposed to have the same morals and decisions of god, I would also think that we would end up the exactly same place, seeing how god, like humans, have ordered the deaths of millions, genocide, rape, and other things we find egregious in our modern day existence.
@ Garrett
You said, “From the other guy’s “rules” scenario I do like how it gives opportunity to say that gives us motive to create a deity from out imagination, because our innate drive to break rules, even if the most trivial, makes us create a imaginary being that can accomplish things outside of the rules if we only follow the rules we create for ourselves and then imagine a deity telling us to do them.”
Since you’re so obviously all about following “observable” rules and not ones just “imagined” by the human mind, could you please tell me whether or not you believe in the scientific LAW of biogenesis? Or do you actually believe in spontaneous generation…which, by the way, has not been proven at all by a single person or experiment and goes against the very nature of biogenesis. So much for the imperial evidenced belief of the no-God religion.
Maybe all this “evolution” stuff has just been “imagined” up by someone so they can selfishly live whatever lifestyle they see fit. Tell me Garrett, which RULE are you breaking in your scientific “fact-based” belief about the origin of life. Where is your evidence that snakes can become kittens or that apple trees can become an oak tree.
After all, Garrett, if you don’t believe in a Creator then you must believe that everything we see came from one microscopic organism! But to be honest, that doesn’t sound very fact based. At least not facts that can be impericaly observed like some people try to say it can.
This isn’t even touching the things that T.E. mentioned about morality.
Just wondering out loud. Thanks and have a good night.
“P.S.” – I would encouarge you to visit Apologetics Press. They are very capable of defending the Bible and the reality of a Creator God with real science – http://www.apologeticspress.org/APPubPage.aspx?pub=1
I’m going to go ahead and approve this comment, but let’s be careful about how our tone comes off on here. I am open to – even hopeful for – divergent views being discussed on here. I will, however, be a stickler for civility. I may not agree with Garrett’s perspectives, but I respect them and respect him for the respectful manner in which he presented them. Let’s make sure we offer him the same courtesy.
Ok. But I don’t really see how my comments could be taken as “uncivil” though, since my comments were only given in a reverse manner as far as the words I used go.
He called God “imaginary” and Christianity “selfish” so I repsonded by calling evolution “imaginary” and “selfish” which it is. Other than that, I don’t see how any thing I said could be considered as “agressive” as far as “tone” goes, much less personal.
But either way, it’s your blog so I’ll step aside. I only responded because he referred to my comment when he said, “…the other guy’s rule scenario…”
It’s all yours. Have a good night T.E..
No worries, Eugene. It is sometimes hard to tell “tone” via written medium, and I wasn’t sure how the post was intended. A part of me could have read it with a condescending sarcasm, but I wasn’t sure. So, I approved it and left a comment just in case. You are welcome to post here, I just felt I needed to clarify as we went forward. Just in case.
Just a note: I never called Christianity selfish itself, I said morality in general was based in selfishness, and just used the faith in an example to relate to the blog’s author most closely.
I am breaking rules just like you are. Philosophically-speaking, agnosticism is correct more than atheism or theism. Mainly this is due to the incompatible nature human beings with reality. Though, like a mathematical function, we should expect an asymptote where the function gets so close it is practically reached the asymptopte (even though it hasn’t). Then again, math was created by those incompatible human beings. The chief nature of incompability can be easy demonstrated in creating a logical paradox. According to the “rules,” the paradox cannot function, though we know the universe itself does function. We might also logically deduce, by applying philosophy to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, that any interaction we have with reality chances the nature of reality so we cannot be completely sure of our observation (which is why error exists.)
By the way, biogenesis isn’t a law, but a theory just like abiogenesis (which is the one about chemical formation of life.) Regarding correctness of science versus religion, I tend to favor those with the most applicable results. Science is how we can communicate, using the internet, using computers, using electrical interaction, using satellites above to talk to people across the world in seconds, creating efficient engines for machines, creating machines themselves, being able to accurately predict (using math) and then confirming phenomena down to the quantum level (such as Bose-Einstein condensation) with science. Prayer, belief in a deity, or any of that didn’t create this apparatus, the scientific principles which guide it, nor will in the future. While it might seem to you a lack of evidence, they used to say the same things for lots of things. We used to barely know genetics, and now
The essential problem with arguing belief v. nonbelief is that science is generally limited to what is logical, what is workable, what is testable, whereas beliefs can make up any crockery they wish to suit the argument through their own logical (and incorrect) view of scripture. I don’t belief in religions first and foremost because I don’t, but otherwise the religions can’t agree with themselves! Look at how many sects of major religions there are, if these disparate and enlightened believers can’t reconcile their beliefs within their own large religion, who’s to say the religion has it right in the first place. Then again who’s to say science is right either? The really special thing is that science corrects itself when it goes wrong, religion mostly stays the same.
Empirical observation has its limits, but within those limits we’ve reached the moon, had probes visit other plants, photographed the universe, seen how spacetime distorts with gravity and many such things. For things to be accepted in science, especially physics, they generally have to have 5-sigma certainty (meaning 99.9999% certainty). That’s pretty good certainty. I’m certain if you spend time praying for something there won’t even be 1-sigma certainty if something does occur (which is highly unlikely)
If you really wanted evidence of evolution, you’d already have it. I can show you we have plenty of evidence for microevolution, and macroevolutionary evidence is slowly appearing. As with DNA when we first discovered it, we knew little, but now we know thousands of times more. So I can can guarantee you we will find more conclusive evidence. Though I do want to let you know that because of evolutionary adaptation you have too look out for “superbugs” now, because the bacteria underwent microevolution and now resist things they previously didn’t. Still, if we took only one percent of our current evidence for evolution, it would still be more evidence than religion has ever presented against it (in all history). Most religious arguments are thought and theological experiments, while scientists actually have things they can link together. Currently, evolution is like a giant puzzle with the frame already put together and some joined sections throughout. Despite, not knowing how the pieces exactly fit together, we see enough infer a picture of the whole thing. And if you really want ways “apples become oak trees”, geneticists have modified DNA of ecoli bacterium varieties so the bacteria consume refuse and excrete crude oil. How’s that for undertanding how things work in the world?
I don’t like people trying to go the other way with science. Science is about observing, and through those mechanisms, attempt (through a filtering process) causality. Starting with the causality (in terms of religion) and working backwards just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
(Mr. T.E., Sorry if I got a bit heated or brash, he came at me and it incurred my ire.)
I happen to concur with evolutionary theory, though I disagree with the conclusion that it (or any empirically validated science thus far) provides evidence against religion. The challenge I have with empiricism is that it assumes scientific naturalism, thereby rejecting the immaterial; on that basis, it then only accepts evidence coherent with a naturalistic worldview, thereby concluding naturalism. It is circular.
To be fair, that is the same with any worldview presupposition, including theistic ones. I am convinced, however, that if we open the spectrum of acceptable evidence to include logical/ philosophical deductions, a deity becomes increasingly plausible. Combine that with the mountains of anecdotal evidence (which is what we would rightly expect from an entity the experience of whom would be non-replicable in any controlled manner), and I further find a theistic deity to be plausible. Admittedly, those experiences result in contradictory religious explanations, but I find that explained in light of the “blind men and the elephant” concept.
Btw, I rather enjoy being able to converse with divergent perspectives in what has, thus far, been a remarkably pleasant discussion.
Logically speaking, if god was omnipresent, he would exist in nature as much as everywhere else. Also, god would also exist in nature because he designed it. So it is rational and logical to expect that naturism would result in either case, because the diety would have created such, so naturism would include god, not exclude him. Though, if through the naturism there is evidence that things can start without a guiding hand, so to speak, than naturism would discredit theism.
Immaterial things are just that, immaterial. Technically speaking, all particles are made of various wave-particle dualities, so there is nothing material or immaterial in existence, just different forms of energy in different arrangements, quantities, and structures.
Omnipresence does not confer binding. If God created the laws of nature, then He must be capable of existing without them. Thus, while being capable of operating within a natural framework, He is not bound by the laws of that framework. Thus, experimental parameters would be incapable of imposing a reaction, and there would be no repeatability. If the only acceptable evidence is that which is subject to natural law, and we are trying to find evidence for an entity which transcends natural law, then we exclude the existence of that entity on principle by only accepting non-applicable evidence. It is important that we recognize that there is a difference between pantheism and omnipresence.
But, with that said, I am off to bed. I have to preach in the morning. Good night, my friend. Great conversation.