Herein Lies the Rub

Can you all just, well, get along?  Cut it out, will ya!

Juuust kidding, juuust kidding.

I’m actually quite excited about the comments to my last post.  It’s comforting to know something I said got someone out there riled up.  The discussion is mainly between two gentlemen, but still: it’s neat to see one of my posts bring out such passion.

Since the events of the summer, I have had to stop commenting on my own posts.  My new policy is that the comments section is for…the commenters.  I have my hands full enough just posting once a day.  However, once in a blue moon, when circumstances both call for it and allow it, I write a post on a comment.

I’m not going to comment on everything that’s been said.   Too broad.  Instead, I want to focus on the first comment made, by the Rambling Taoist.

The Rambling Taoist is a somewhat frequent commenter on the P.I blog.  Seems like an allright chap.  Pretty confident in his beliefs, by my lights.  Good to see him pipe up every now and then.

Here’s the comment:

What about the many primitive cultures in the world who have never heard of Christianity or have heard it but it doesn’t make any cultural sense to them? Are you suggesting that without the Christian God none of these people can be good?

If so, that’s a rather arrogant position to take, don’t ya think?

He brings up a common question: what about those that have never heard? *** (also here) It, and its derivatives, are ones that I think about a lot.  Though ultimately it has a good answer (see the link), it’s a perfectly good question to ask.

But not in this context.  The main issue I have with this comment is that it’s a red herring.

The whole post was on something totally different.  When I did, in the end, get around to commenting on the answer to “you can be good without God,” (mainly via two links), I took the issue in a totally different direction.  The comment represents a distraction from what I was mainly addressing.   Perhaps he didn’t read the links.

In the first link, William Lane Craig puts to rest the accusation:

Can we be good without God? At first the answer to this question may seem so obvious that even to pose it arouses indignation. For while those of us who are Christian theists undoubtedly find in God a source of moral strength and resolve which enables us to live lives that are better than those we should live without Him, nevertheless it would seem arrogant and ignorant to claim that those who do not share a belief in God do not often live good moral lives–indeed, embarrassingly, lives that sometimes put our own to shame.

But wait. It would, indeed, be arrogant and ignorant to claim that people cannot be good without belief in God. But that was not the question. The question was: can we be good without God? When we ask that question, we are posing in a provocative way the meta-ethical question of the objectivity of moral values. Are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by mere social conventions akin to driving on the left versus right side of the road or mere expressions of personal preference akin to having a taste for certain foods or not? Or are they valid independently of our apprehension of them, and if so, what is their foundation? Moreover, if morality is just a human convention, then why should we act morally, especially when it conflicts with self-interest? Or are we in some way held accountable for our moral decisions and actions?

Today I want to argue that if God exists, then the objectivity of moral values, moral duties, and moral accountability is secured, but that in the absence of God, that is, if God does not exist, then morality is just a human convention, that is to say, morality is wholly subjective and non-binding. We might act in precisely the same ways that we do in fact act, but in the absence of God, such actions would no longer count as good (or evil), since if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. Thus, we cannot truly be good without God. On the other hand, if we do believe that moral values and duties are objective, that provides moral grounds for believing in God.

Consider, then, the hypothesis that God exists. First, if God exists, objective moral values exist. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti-Semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.

The rest of the essay provides the “back-up” to this thesis.  Like this (I apologize for quoting at length):

Now it is important that we remain clear in understanding the issue before us. The question is not: Must we believe in God in order to live moral lives? There is no reason to think that atheists and theists alike may not live what we normally characterize as good and decent lives. Similarly, the question is not: Can we formulate a system of ethics without reference to God? If the non-theist grants that human beings do have objective value, then there is no reason to think that he cannot work out a system of ethics with which the theist would also largely agree. Or again, the question is not: Can we recognize the existence of objective moral values without reference to God? The theist will typically maintain that a person need not believe in God in order to recognize, say, that we should love our children. Rather, as humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz puts it, “The central question about moral and ethical principles concerns this ontological foundation. If they are neither derived from God nor anchored in some transcendent ground, are they purely ephemeral?”(emphasis  mine)

If there is no God, then any ground for regarding the herd morality evolved by homo sapiens as objectively true seems to have been removed. After all, what is so special about human beings? They are just accidental by-products of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. Some action, say, incest, may not be biologically or socially advantageous and so in the course of human evolution has become taboo; but there is on the atheistic view nothing really wrong about committing incest. If, as Kurtz states, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion,”5 then the non-conformist who chooses to flout the herd morality is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably.

The objective worthlessness of human beings on a naturalistic world view is underscored by two implications of that world view: materialism and determinism. Naturalists are typically materialists or physicalists, who regard man as a purely animal organism. But if man has no immaterial aspect to his being (call it soul or mind or what have you), then he is not qualitatively different from other animal species. For him to regard human morality as objective is to fall into the trap of specie-ism. On a materialistic anthropology there is no reason to think that human beings are objectively more valuable than rats. Secondly, if there is no mind distinct from the brain, then everything we think and do is determined by the input of our five senses and our genetic make-up. There is no personal agent who freely decides to do something. But without freedom, none of our choices is morally significant. They are like the jerks of a puppet’s limbs, controlled by the strings of sensory input and physical constitution. And what moral value does a puppet or its movements have?

So, to bring it back to RT’s comment: RT and Neil had an interesting conversation on one sense of the question, but this was not the sense I was focusing on in my post.  What I was hinting at is that without the actual existence of an actual good God that bestows dignity and intrinsic value upon human beings and who’s very nature is the standard of good, saying “you can be good without God” is nonsense.  Good has no real meaty meaning.  Heck, if there is no God, then saying “you  can be good with God” is equally nonsense….at least not in the sense of  “good” that is normally meant.  In the absence of God, Christian, atheist, and Taoist alike might *think* or *claim* they are acting good, but that’s silly.  All they can claim, rationally, is something like “I can behave in such a way that is beneficial to my species/social group/person,” or “I can behave in such a way that my genes and the force of human evolution command my neurons” or “I can behave in such a way that I personally think is good and that I personally like,” but that’s it…and that’s not much to cheer about.

I’ve commented on this before, and each time, someone tries to take the conversation quickly off the rails by claiming I’m saying that no one can be good without belief in God.  This is not the case I’m making.

Secondly, RT throws out another red herring by suggesting I’m being arrogant.  Name calling is not an argument.

Again: in my post, several things were at issue.  One of them germane to the comments was the truth of the proposition “you can be good without God.”  Rather than make a comment about the case I made, he made a comment about my character, which was off topic.

For the record, he might be right: I might be very arrogant and puffed up.  I might be incredibly self-righteous.  But that’s a distraction; I might be a pompous jerk, but that doesn’t make my claims false.

There’s no need for me to defend my character against moral judgments; I’ll let the people that interact with me on a daily basis speak into my life as to what needs pruning.  In this blog, we should stick to the arguments.

Anyone want to comment on the actual case I’ve made?

***if needed, use the same ID and password on both: ID–pugnacious; PW–irishman