Why Are We so Damned Nice?

Anthony Esolen from LifeSiteNews.com posted an interesting article on the current problem with moral discourse. In it he discusses how social considerations have intruded on popular moral discourse, much its detriment. I completely agree with him, but I don't think he really struck at the root of the problem, which I think has a lot to do with the way philosophy is taught. 

I recently read a book by Taylor R. Marshall called Thomas Aquinas in 50 Pages: A Layman's Quick Guide to Thomism. He wrote about this exact phenomenon on page 56,

Ethics is thus a learned and applied life of virtue. Nowadays, college freshmen are typically exposed to situational ethics in introductory philosophy courses. They are usually given difficult, even impossible, moral dilemmas and then asked to solve them. These kinds of “philosophical experiments” are misguided and juvenile. Their ultimate aim is to lead students into a form of utilitarianism—choosing the most useful option—or into a form of consequentialism—choosing the option with best-foreseen outcome. Both schools are very dangerous.

The moral dilemmas he was referencing usually come in the form of choosing whether to save e a baby or ten retirees from impending disaster. This tends to impart upon the student that morality is something for each individual to be discovered in the moment, it is subjective, and you have to make it up as you go along. 

This is ludicrous, of course. Real moral decision making must be based on an external source and then refined over time, much as one would work out a muscle or develop a mental discipline. It's not too difficult to see how utilitarianism or consequentialism are both woefully inadequate in their shortsightedness. No human has the capacity to properly evaluate decisions in this context. If they did they would be something akin to Frank Hebert's God Emperor of Dune an unimaginably tedious novel of pontification on moralistic totalitarianism in the same vein as Atlas Shrugged, only harder SF.

Human beings must ground their moral decision making in something objective, that is outside their own individual experience, in order to have any sort of useful discourse on morality. These are simple truths that a person can discover through reason, if only they are taught how to reason. That sadly seems not to be the case for many people if what Mr. Esolen is saying is true. The ramifications of this will likely be lost on those without the proper moral grounding, which makes the case for objective morality so much more urgent before we drown in swill of relativism.

Kalam Cosmology

Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig released a new video today, and while I haven't finished watching it yet (I had to stop at the Q&A part), I have to say that it is the most interesting video that Reasonable Faith has published in a while.  Dr. Craig's explanation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument was extremely profound that touched on many important theological themes. Many of these reminded me of a couple things that one of my favorite modern evangelists, Fr. Robert Barron of Word on Fire Ministries, said about Scripture and theology. 

Fr. Barron describes Genesis is a an amazing book of theology. Dr Craig described in his video an ancient debate between Hebrew and Greek philosophy, the former holding that the universe had a beginning and the latter holding that the universe is eternal. Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning God created..." is a very profound theological statement, and also Dr. Carig's closing statement. 

Modern audiences seem to lose the gravity of this. We live an era of unprecedented development in cosmology and the philosophical notion that the universe has a beginning seems to be lost on us. It's easy to take the universe's beginning for granted given the current science of cosmology. Back then, though, it was a pretty significant prediction that turned out to be true. 

Fr. Barron also said much of the language in the Bible is actually pretty defiant. The introduction of the Gospel of Mark, for example, describes Christ in terms ordinarily associated with the Roman Emperor. Using language to subvert the mainstream seems to be a tradition going back to Genesis and speaks to the idea that the Christian religion is a radical one not in the sense of protests and civil disobedience but in the sense that it challenges the popular paradigm.

Christianity is a new way to understand the world. It's not old and dusty. St. Paul understood this and tried to explain it to the Church in Rome, saying "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect." - Romans 12:2

Argument from Bad Morals

One of the most common objections to arguments for the existence of God is what I like to call the Argument from Bad Morals. It seems to be fairly common among New Atheists and tends to surface whenever the Argument from Morality comes up. It goes something like this:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Few will object to the first premise since it's the condition for the whole argument. All sorts of objections crop up with the second premise, though. The typical counter-argument goes as follows (there are two variations on Premise two, but the argument is essentially the same):

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2a. Theists (read: "Christians") do immoral things.

2b. God does immoral things.

3. Therefore objective moral do not exist and it follows that God cannot exist. 

One can immediately see that the third premise does not follow the second, it's a non sequitur. It also fails to price that objective moral values exist.

Theist immorality is really a non-issue as far as the Moral Argument goes because it doesn't prove anything, except maybe that Christians and Jews are mistaken about a few things. So it fails to disprove God but it can't because it has no bearing on the existence of Jesus, his divine nature, death, and resurrection.

It seems that they are really trying to say "God did something I don't like so he's not real." That's absurd. I can't do that to God anymore than I can do it to my boss. 

Next time you hear this, try phrasing their argument like this and see what happens. It will hopefully give them some food for thought. If not, then you can at least be sure you know what's really going on.

God Delusion or Part One

I have not read Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion yet, but I think I ought to. I meet so many New Atheists on the Internet who are so poorly informed that I am beginning to suspect that they get all their information from this book and this book alone. I am not really motivated to pick it up, though, because even though I have not read it I have read about it and it seems to be fantastically bad book. In fact, I think I can refute his central premise here and now.

Let us start with Dawkins’s main argument. He says:

“1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.

3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.

4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection.

5. We don't have an equivalent explanation for physics.

6. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.

Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.”

Dawkins started on solid ground. The first line is actually pretty accurate and I do not have any problems with it. Line two is basically true, I am tempted to attribute design to the entire universe and I am sure that everyone else at least considers it at least once in their lives. Line three is where he falls apart.

Dawkins seems to be misstating the Unmoved Mover Argument, which states that everything that is in motion has been put in motion by something else. At first glance Dawkins seems to refute this by asking who designed the designer, or in other words, who put the first thing in motion. In other words, Dawkins argues that believing in God is sort of like believing in infinite regress, which is an infinite series of causes. That is not the case and it is not what the Argument from the Unmoved Mover says.

Aquinas formulated the Unmoved Mover Argument from Aristotle and adapted it to explain the Christian God. He was very careful to avoid infinite regress and actually used that as a reason NOT to believe in atheism. He also did not use the word motion to describe cause, like putting the planets in orbit around the Sun. Aquinas means change when he says motion, like moving from one state, like liquid, to another state, solid, for example, or forward through time. He also says that nothing can be changed (or moved) except by something that has already been changed. A good example of this would be how a hockey puck cannot move unless a hockey stick hits it and the stick cannot hit the puck unless something swings it and so on and so forth.

This sounds like infinite regress at first, but something else is happening here. Aquinas described motion as change, or moving from potentiality and actuality. Everything has potential to varying degrees. The hockey puck has potential to be hit and to hit something, like Jimmy Howard’s blocker pad. The stick has the potential to hit something, like the hockey puck, and to be swung by something like Justin Abdelkader. Justin Abdelkader has the potential to swing the stick, pick up the stick, throw the stick, or even play without the stick (that is not a very good idea). He has more potentiality than the stick and puck and can move that potentiality to more actuality than either. This chain eventually leads to something that is pure actuality, that is it has the ability to do everything and is doing everything at once.

A being like this is the Unmoved Mover. It is a being that is so transcendent that it is everywhere at once and doing everything at once. It is nothing but being, in the most literal sense of the word. There is no need to ask “who moved the Mover?” because the Mover is self-actualizing. It is the pinnacle of being. Dawkins’s question seems foolish once the Argument from the Unmoved Mover is properly explained.

The really fascinating thing part of all this God called himself the Unmoved Mover in the Old Testament when Moses asked God what his name was. God said his name is “I am.” There are no qualifiers and no distinguishing potentialities, just pure being. That is amazing. God told Moses that he is the Unmoved Mover centuries before Aristotle first conceived about it and several millennia before Thomas Aquinas expanded it. God is. That’s all.