This post is a part of a series:
**Please feel free to join the discussion. Your comments will help me as I continue the series**
I think that we are back to where we started. Tell me this: what reason could possibly be sufficient to make it alright to allow a little child to be starved and killed? Perhaps you are willing to say that it is alright because you have a distorted conscience. Perhaps you are mad. What sort of moral code allows for the death of an innocent so that some greater good might be accomplished? The idea that the end justifies the means has allowed for all sorts of atrocities throughout history and any decent man sees that such a stance is morally reprehensible. Your answer has done nothing to answer my question. It has simply shown that you hold your god to a low moral standard.
Ahh, you mention a moral code, but there you have a problem with your question. You appeal to a moral code – to a sense of right and wrong. You expect me to agree with you that the harming of an infant is wrong. Well, I do agree with you, but on what grounds can you say that it is wrong? To declare it to be wrong is to make a judgment that requires a standard of justice. For you, as one who does not believe in my God, you are speaking on borrowed capital when you reference the moral code or make any sort of statements about right and wrong. You want to have a law without a Lawgiver, but you cannot. Your effort to declare something as wrong works against you. It reveals that you have a concept of what is right and good.
But I object. I can have a sense of right and wrong. And I refuse to believe that it came from this God that you claim as your own. I also refuse to believe that it came from any other god. I can accept the Law because it is good for us, but I reject the notion of a Lawgiver.
But you cannot have the Law without the Lawgiver. That does not make any sense. There must be a source.
And God must be that source?
Yes.
And who gave the laws to God?
Nobody. God is the supreme being.
So, you are saying that the laws, or moral code, that we abide by must come from a source outside of us, but the laws by which God abides do not have an outside source? That is inconsistent. Why does God get to be the exception?
But you are missing the point of what it means to be God. He is the supreme being. St. Anselm described it by saying that He is that being of which no greater being can be conceived. St. Augustine baptized that grand idea of the philosophers of old and explained that God is the good, the true, and the beautiful. To be God is to be at the top. To be at the top is to be God. As such, He is source of all that is good. As Aristotle, and then St. Aquinas, explained he is the unmoved mover and the first cause. If a being gave God the moral code, then that being would be God. But let me explain another aspect that you have misunderstood. The moral code is not an arbitrary set of rules that God created or chose to enforce. Rather, they are a reflection of His nature. Everything that is good is that which is a reflection of His nature. Everything that is wrong is that which is contrary to His nature.
But God is not necessary in the picture that you just painted. You admit that if there were a being that dictated right and wrong to God, then that being would be the ultimate deity known as God. But you reject the notion of any such deity. Well, I just take it one step further. There is no need for your God. You reference the argument of the unmoved mover. That which is in motion must be put into motion. Yet, if I say that your argument then means that someone must have put God into motion, you will interject that it stops with God because it cannot continue ad infinitum. Well why not? The only reason that I can see that you would insist that it cannot continue ad infinitum is because it would make God unnecessary and that is not the conclusion that you want to reach. As quickly as you can make God the first cause I can make this world the first cause. And how can you tell me any different? Any reason that you give for why this world cannot be the first cause I can likewise flip to be a reason as to why God cannot be the first cause. This world contains order, someone must have ordered it… well, then who ordered God? If you stumbled upon a watch on the shoreline of a beach, you would understand that there had to be a watchmaker… well, who is the Watchmaker behind the watch that is God? A garden in the jungle, a jumbo-jet… there are a thousand manifestations of this argument but they all have the same problem. You say that all things must have a cause except for God, but why is God the exception? Because that is what it means to be God? Well just because you define it to be that way does not make it true. If it is fair for you to say that God is the exception, then it is fair for me to cut God out and just say that this world is the exception.
There where does you moral code come from?
I don’t know, but I don’t see that I necessarily have to know, especially if you are going to continue to affirm that it is alright for you to not know where God came from. Perhaps it is the result of evolution. Most of the moral code is good for the continuation of our species. If not that, perhaps we all have a bit of a divine spark within us that gives us our moral compass. Or perhaps I can borrow from you and say that is it simply a reflection of our nature. It is a part of who we are. If you don’t have to explain how it got to be a part of who God is, then I don’t have to explain how it got to be a part of who we are. I don’t have to know where it came from, I just need to know that it is.
But back to my original point, I say that it is inconceivable to create a world in which some greater good is accomplished at the expense of even one little baby having to suffer and be killed. My moral code dictates that there is no end result that would be worth killing a baby. For what end result would you be willing to kill an infant? I hope that you wouldn’t do it for anything. You would declare the murder of a baby to be wrong. Is this not the point that so many pro-lifers appeal to? You claim that you know that this is wrong because you have a moral code, a law within, that came to you from God. You even go as far as to say that it reflects his very nature. Yet, in the very next breath you are willing to tell me that this same God that gave you your understanding that the murder of babies is wrong, is the same God who, at the beginning of time, determined to create a world in which babies would be murdered. Not only that, but a great many other horrors occur in this world which you say that he created. If there was a time when there was nothing in existence but God, and if he is then the one that brought everything into existence, then he is, in some way, responsible for that which was brought about. I do not believe your story because it does not make sense of the world.
My friend, you are still misunderstanding God’s relationship to evil. Let us look at it from another angle. St. Augustine once explained that evil…
[To be continued…]
3 comments:
Luke.... what if the "skeptic" in the "Ivan conversation" takes a different stance on the morality argument. What if he argues that a moral code comes strictly from the Golden Rule? What if he claims that humans are selfish and therefore they treat others by a moral standard simply based on what they would want others to do to them? Would that logic not establish a moral law of some sort while also excluding God?
I only bring this up because it has been spinning around in my mind for a couple of weeks now. I believe in the "lawgiver" argument. I also believe that someone who is not a Christian can still be a morally upright person. I cannot combat the notion that the moral code came simply from man's thought to "do unto others, as you would have them do unto you".
Well... I do have one thought to counter this argument, but I am not sure that it is convincing.
My thought is that this argument establishes a tendency that I do not see in myself. For example, I have seen myself make fun of others to look cool in a crowd. If I stopped and thought about it, I would not want that person to make fun of me just to look cool. In this instance (and in many others), I do not see my nature default to the Golden Rule. Even Sigmund Freud claimed that the Golden Rule was contrary to man's nature and that Jesus was insane for instating it. So, the Golden Rule must have come from a lawgiver outside of our nature if it, in fact, runs contrary to our nature. Thus, I would say God is that lawgiver.
I am just not sure that my answer would suffice. Do you have any thoughts on this argument?
HAHA....So some of my punctuation is wrong in my comment...If you get confused just call me an idiot and feel free to move on....sorry
YOU THE MAN LUKE!!!!!!!!
Drew, I think that the skeptic could reasonably argue for a morality based on the Golden Rule. I think that could fit in with the idea of Naturalism and a survival instinct. It has been argued some and I think it is one of the better explanations of morality when seeking to exclude God. In this article, http://on.wsj.com/i6GP2D , that recently appeared in the WSJ (I found it on Conan's twitter), Gervais says that he lives by the golden rule while advocating atheism.
With your counter argument,I thing some would go for it, but I would personally alter it a bit. Few of us, probably none of us, live the Golden Rule. One could look at that and say that our nature is contrary to such a rule, so it could not have come from within. It must come from an external source and the external source of the law is the Lawgiver. I'd rather look at it and say that none of us keep it well. Perhaps a few keep it out of selfishness ("I'll do this because I want this done for me"), and probably even fewer keep it out of love for others. But even though it is universally broken, the notion of the sort of world it would create is universally desired. We all want peace and harmony. It is within our nature to want to keep it, but not within our capabilities to keep it. Thus, our nature must be something less than it was meant to be. Fallen, if you well.
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