Collapse: The Blog

God and Morality: Euthyphro Isn't Really a Dilemma

Some (though not all) atheists seem to be under the impression that the Euthryphro dilemma is a slam-dunk for atheism.* God commands murder, after all, and murder's bad, so God must be bad. This must mean that Christians are wrong about God's nature, so they're probably wrong about God existing period; after all, they've clearly never given the issue any thought. (How easy it must be to be an atheist, to be satisfied with such superficial thinking).

As I wrote once before, the error here is in the assumption that morality is something distinct from God -- something, in fact, superordinate to God, so that God is subject to it, as well. But if there is something greater than God, than God has some unrealized potentiality: thus he is not perfect, thus not unqualified being, thus not God. Goodness, whatever it is, must not merely be present in God in the sense that it is present in us humans, as one aspect among many; it must actually be God, and God it, or else God is not God. Likewise, God's divine simplicity means there is no real distinction between the fact of goodness and the moral injunction to obey it: the two are fused. Good is its own authority, in Him.

In other words, the error is something like the error atheists in make in presuming the natural world to be all there is with respect to epistemology. In this case, they presume that the natural law is all there is with respect to ethics. As I wrote before,

. . . is natural law absolute? Perhaps in a world without God, it would be: there would be nothing beyond nature, so of course natural law would be inviolate. Which rather makes the atheists' objection circular: God doesn't exist because He commands immoral things, and those things must be immoral because God doesn't exist.

But natural law is "natural" precisely because it arises from nature; and nature is necessarily subordinate to God, since He created it and is all that sustains it in being. Thus, even the highest of natural goods is subordinate to the lowest of supernatural goods.

(Actually, they don't assume this, as they don't even believe in natural law. They assume Christians believe this.That they don't doesn't seem to bother them).

God, I said recently, is thought to be all-good not for evidential reasons but for logically necessary ones: because goodness in a theological sense is convertible with being and God is pure being, thus pure goodness (for a fuller treatment of this, see Dr. Feser's take on the "dilemma"). So whatever God commands is necessarily good, in that He is incapable of evil. It doesn't follow from this that a thing is good because God commands it (it follows from this that there are some things God, being all-good, simply cannot do)**, but rather that anything which God commands must be good. If natural law appears to contradict some divine command, it is only because the natural law is an expression of the divine will in an imperfect context. Thus the general expression of divine will in natural law must always give way to its more specific expression as revealed directly by God Himself.

So what are we to make of the situation, then? If moral goods relate to natural law and natural law arises from human nature, it follows that God is not subject to them. So there is no sense in accusing God of violating them; it is simply meaningless jabber, akin to calling me, an American, a criminal because the content of my blogging sometimes runs afoul of Swedish hate crime laws. So what if God commands you to kill someone? Then you would have a case of divine law conflicting with natural law, and as natural law always gives way, you'd be obligated to carry out the act. (Really, would your refusal affect some significant change? He could easily wipe out all creation simply by willing it; what difference does it make if, in some particular case, He deigns to act through a subordinate instead of directly?)

The problem, ultimately, is very like the "problem of evil," which is to say facially weak: if God is thought to be good as a matter of metaphysical necessity than there is simply no use pointing to some datum that appears to contradict it, because the contradiction cannot go beyond appearances unless it can be determined that there is no possible good which some commandment serves. It is therefore not necessary to pinpoint exactly what good a given divine commandment serves (although this is very often possible, as in the case, for instance, of God's command to the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites). It is, rather, sufficient to point out that there is at least one conceivable good which that command would serve.

*Actually, when I talk about the "Euthyphro dilemma," I'm talking about the pop-culture misapprehension of it as understood by most atheists, who tend to be ignorant of philosophy. As James Chastek points out, what is actually discussed in Euthyphro is not whether God/the gods are good, but how best to define piety.

**Since God's nature is existence itself, it follows that the justice of His actions are bounded only by the demands of reality itself. For instance, since God cannot create anything such that He is not its creator, it follows that everything which exists owes Him gratitude, obedience, and love, and that He moreover cannot except anything from this because there is no way He could have created anything otherwise. So God cannot command a person, for instance, to hate Him. Likewise, I believe it is reasonable (though I don't know if anyone else has reached this conclusion) to say that He could not utterly destroy being, by which I mean not merely cause death of the body but utterly remove a thing from existence: this would be evil in its purest form, the affectation of total nonbeing, and thus something of which God would simply be incapable. Hence, the disposition of souls who reject God's invitation to communion is not destruction (as the annihilationists hope) but exile (i.e., to Hell).

Reactionary Entertainment: Black Death

An intriguing-seeming movie popped up on Netflix, one I'd never heard of before: Black Death, a 2010 film starring Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne (Jack Builder from Pillars of the Earth). I was initially suspecting a bit of hokey trash along the lines of the awful Season of the Witch. What I got, instead, was a fascinating period piece, gritty and grim, of a medieval world in the throes of a pestilence-induced crisis of faith. No spoilers here, sorry to say, but suffice to say it resonates with our occasional discussions of atheism and religion.

The cinematography alone makes it worth watching: check it out.

The Fragmentation of Philosophy

"Keep your morality out of politics" is an historically aberrant and deviant mode of thought, and for the simple reason that ethics and politics are not really distinct fields; rather they are distinct expressions of the same thing, fields of inquiry which lead, ultimately, to the same object.

In fact, pretty much all the fields of philosophical inquiry are now conducted as if they were quite distinct from each other, so that ethics is totally unrelated to politics which is totally unrelated to epistemology and so on. Hence Rawls sought a theory of justice which was "political, not metaphysical." What a strange thought; its historical inauthenticity is one datum for the falseness of the endeavor even to find (that is, invent) such a theory.

For premodern man, ontology was the glue which held the philosophical endeavor together. Just as surely as talk of truth, beauty, and virtue are simply discussions about the good under different aspects, so too are talk about right action, right knowledge, the good life, the best government, and so on simply different expressions of the question of what it means for something to be. How can you ask what the "best government" is until you know what "government" is? What "best" is? What "is" is? Ontology made an organic and harmonious unity out of a philosophical enterprise that is now not even so much specialized or modularized as it is simply fragmented. The abandonment of organized ontology has loosed on the world a flood of errors.

What we have today are shards of philosophy: a vast number of schools of thought about different fields, the necessary connections between which have been severed, which may be mixed and matched arbitrarily to produce a functionally infinite number of combinations, with no real reason to pick any one of them or even a method for doing so. Had a revolution? Close your eyes, reach into the bag, grab seven metaphysical systems at random and see what social orders you can build on the resulting mix. Philosophy has reduced the social order to a generations-spanning game of Scrabble. A dress-up Barbie doll philosophy for a Barbie doll society.

One of the things that impresses me most about reactionary thought is its remarkable coherence: everything fits together; more importantly, everything points upward. Every so often, a thought strikes me (I need to get better about writing them down so I can blog them later), a necessary connection suddenly realized, another piece in the puzzle fit into place. It is not even that one arbitrary arrangement has been proved to me to be optimal; it is that the idea that there could ever be any other arrangement has been proved to me to be irrational.

All this convinces me that if the world is ever to be saved, a revitalization and revalorization of ontology will have some part to play in it.

More on Scientistic Question-Begging

See Alan Roebuck's "No Evidence for God?" in Intellectual Conservative for a useful treatment of the tendency of atheists to beg the question against theism by simply assuming, without basis, something like naturalism, materialism, or positivism to be true -- in other words, assuming the natural/material/empirically observable world is all there is.

While you're at it, check out one atheist's near-perfect instantiation of this tendency when he challenges theists to debate him... on a few conditions:

* By "knowledge and facts" I mean factual, scientific proof. No personal opinions, appeals to revelation, quoting the bible, no arguments purely from quoting an authority without actual evidence, personal/second-hand stories that cannot be confirmed, and no "philosophical bullshit.” **

** By "philosophical bullshit" I am referring to the fact that philosophy is not the most reliable method of getting at the truth. The sciences and empiricism are the most reliable methods of getting at the truth, not simple thought experiments, or philosophizing.

Of course, whether or not science is the fullest description of reality is precisely what is at issue here; taking it off the table simply begs the question against theism. And the claim that science alone is the basis of all knowledge is at once a philosophical assertion and a nonscientific one (as all epistemological claims necessarily are) -- and thus is simply self-refuting. The only way to get around this irreconcilable contradiction is to indulge in what Voegelin called the prohibition of questioning, a better example of which I couldn't have asked for.

Theodicy: Not a Big Deal

How is the "problem of evil" regarded as a problem at all? The claim that God is omnibenevolent is not evidential but metaphysical: He is good as a matter of necessity. Theodicy, properly understood, then, is simply an endeavor to reconcile the fact of evil with the necessity of God's omnibenevolence (a thing so necessary that even to say "God's omnibenevolence" is, strictly speaking, a redundancy). The problem of evil depends for its force on the claim that there is no possible reason why an all-good God would tolerate any evils. So it suffices to show that there is at least one possible reason why, even if we can't know for certain if it's true.

We may, for instance, suggest that the toleration of evil is instrumental: we may say God allows certain evils because they cultivate virtues such as self-sacrifice, courage, patience, or temperance, which would not exist in the absence of those evils. Or we can suggest that evil, being convertible with imperfection, is a necessary feature of any entity that is not God, who alone is perfect.

Or (and I think this is the proper response) we can simply point out that "all-good" does not mean "actualizing every possible good" any more than "all-creating" means "actualizing every possible being" (a fact pointed out by Just Thomism's James Chastek); it suffices to say that all the goods which exist are owed to God (just as all the beings which exist owe their existence to God).

Adminutia: Comments

We appear to be having some trouble with comments. One commenter reports having multiple comments "disappear" and it's happeend to me once now, too. This isn't a new problem but it's the first time I've heard multiple reports of it in a single day. Until I can get this figured out, I caution all readers to type out their comments in Notepad first, copy and paste them over, and confirm that they posted successfully before closing it.

On Masculinity, Chivalry, and Women-and-Children First

Are men morally obligated to self-sacrifice for women and children? The answer, I think, is resoundingly yes. (The following post is based on an exchange in the comments section of the above-linked post, with some addenda; see also Justin at The Truth Shall Set You Free's here and then here.)

The reductive treatment:

1. Women are more necessary and thus more valuable than men with respect to procreation.
2. Procreation is essential for social continuity.
3. Therefore, women are more necessary and thus more valuable than men with respect to social continuity.

There is a datum which supports this treatment without question: the fact that, in the entire history of the human race, the percentage of women who successfully procreated is roughly double the percentage of men, to the tune of 80%/40%, according to Roy Baumeister. (Baumeister's talk, by the way, is a very subtle but nevertheless quite savage attack on feminist presuppositions, even though it's phrased with the mealy-mouthed esotericism typical of a university professor. It's enough to make me question if he's one of us).

Why is this so? Successful procreation depends on one woman and one man. The man's biological involvement in the reproductive act is more or less instantaneous: the act of ejaculation. The woman's is continuous and of considerable duration: the nine months of pregnancy. If the man subsequently dies, oh well -- his involvement is done. If the woman dies post-conception, her unborn child generally dies with her.

A logical consequence of this is that the average man can impregnate, at least hypothetically, a thousand or more women in the course of his life. (I had originally formulated this as "easily ten thousand," for which commenter Bill rightly roasted me: "That’s two impregnations a day for more than 13 and a half years. I quail before your manliness.") By contrast, the average woman can bear, perhaps, no more than two dozen pregnancies in extreme cases, and most nowhere near that many. Social continuity, then, requires a much greater number of women, who must be kept in much greater health, than it does men.

Evolutionarily speaking, a predictable consequence of this is that men face a much steeper difficult in obtaining reproductive advantage than do women. They must do more to achieve the same reward. Thus, as Baumeister notes, men are rightly overrepresented at the highest strata of society: there are more men in the highest levels of government and of the economy. The converse is that many men try and fail to acquire this advantage, and so there are also many men represented at the lowest strata of society: in prison, on death row, killed in combat, or maimed in workplace injuries. Baumeister intriguingly suggests this is related to the IQ distribution (the validity of which, note, he doesn't question -- again, is he one of us?): men and women have the same mean IQ, but men's standard deviation is greater than women's. In other words, women cluster around the mean IQ of 100 more tightly than do men. There are many more male geniuses, but also many more male retards.

This also suggests that a sane society is one that prioritizes the care of its women. Thus men go to war while women stay home. A society that sent its women to war in any appreciable numbers would probably soon go extinct. Seriously, think about it. European nations' populations were positively devastated during World Wars I and II, but the casualties were largely male. If that devastation had been mostly female, there'd be vast tracts of unpopulated land in Europe right now.

It does no good pointing to the fact that early societies tended to favor male children over female ones, because this only proves what I'm saying: primitive peoples favored male children because they were disposable and because the radical resource scarcity they faced made the prospect of caring for a pregnant woman frightening and difficult. It also does no good to point to the institutionalization of women-and-children-first as relatively recent, as if the moral character of the act were invented whole-hog alongside the widespread public acceptance of the duty. The failure of previous societies to take this duty seriously is not evidence that it didn't exist: it's only evidence that they were deficient.

Heretofore, I have talked about the fact of the rationality of men's natures being ordered toward self-sacrifice. In other words, I have been talking about women-and-children first as an is, not an ought. I have established that it's rational to self-sacrifice for women and children; I have not established that it's obligatory to do so.

But bear in mind that, from a natural law perspective, there are no accidental features of human nature. Human nature, by definition, is essential. And whatever is essential to a thing contributes to our understanding of its goodness, for the goodness of a thing is simply the degree of its existence according to its mode of being. A good knife is sharp, a good meal nutritious, a good sleep restful, and so on. Our nature is not, as moderns hold, a mere prison within which we are unjustly held, and which we may licitly rebel against it. The mere fact of our participation in the order of being -- an order of being necessarily headed by an all-good, all-actual God -- means we matter, and thus the mode of our participation also matters.

In other words, there are no "is's" where human nature is concerned where there is not a conjoined "ought." Human nature is human goodness: and so to act according to our natures is to act in a fashion that is good. It's in our nature to sacrifice for women and children, even women and children we don't like, even ones we don't know. Put simply, if our natures are such that it is good for us to self-sacrifice, then perhaps we ought to ask why this is so, instead of simply objecting to the fact. And perhaps we ought to respond with gratitude to a God who so loves His creation that he enscribed on his heart the means of emulating His virtues.

Masturbation, Prostrate Cancer, Stats, and Science

Remember that famous study according to which men who masturbate more frequent are less likely to develop prostate cancer, the one that has since been used as evidence that everyone everywhere simply must masturbate and if you disagree then you want people to get cancer? You know the one. (The idea, supposedly, is that routine masturbation flushes out the carcinogens that build up in the prostate without exposing the masturbator to the risks of STD transmission). I recently came across a study ("Sexual activity and prostate cancer risk in men diagnosed at a younger age," BJU International, 2009) which refines that finding -- specifically, finding that it only applies to men in their 50's. Masturbation exposes younger men to greater risk of prostate cancer. Who would've thought drowning your body in steroidal hormones would be bad for you?!

That got my gears turning in light of my recent pondering about statistics and the scientific enterprise, so I sought out a copy of that original study. I couldn't find one, but every newspaper report I found about it strongly suggests the original study was merely correlational. That stands to reason since it was probably intended to be exploratory, i.e., hypothesis-generating, the first in a longer line of research that, for whatever reason, seems not to have materialized.

Look at it this way. Suppose this study had not simply been compromised by type I error, measurement error, improper sampling, or any of the other problems that bedevil modern methodological research. Suppose, in other words, that men who masturbate really are at lower risk for prostate cancer later in life. Is the only possible interpretation available to understand this that nonmasturbation causes cancer? Is it completely impossible that anything else at all could relate these two things to one another? Isn't it possible that, say, the antecedents of prostate cancer inhibit sex drive? Problems with the prostate are, after all, associated with all kinds of sexual dysfunction, including anorgasmia and erectile dysfunction. Or that the kinds of healthy behaviors that reduce risk of prostate cancer (such as regular exercise) also boost sex drive (by improving cardiovascular health)?

So what we have is what is probably a perfectly reasonable statistical analysis which lends itself to a very, very narrow, exploratory interpretation -- within an arbitrary range of certainty probably inflated by the failure to meet methodological assumptions to violations of which those tests are not very robust. Which scientistic leftists (who, bear in mind, are so much smarter than you!) have, for whatever reason, misapprehended, falling for what ought to have been a very humiliating mistake warned against on the first or second day of every statistics 101 course.

Is the deception intentional, born of dishonesty in service to an evil agenda of utilitarianism and sexual subversion? Or is it born of ignorance, scientific illiteracy, and functional retardation from a group of people who insist (with the silent collusion of the researchers who never correct their errors) that science alone is the authoritative ground of all knowledge despite their inability to distinguish correlation from causation?

QualiaSoup's Ill-Thought Atheism

I understand there's something like an argument out there along the lines of "atheists claim they disbelieve but disbelief in God is still a belief, so they're incoherent" (or something). Our associate pastor made a similar argument the opening night of our RCIA course when he declared that atheists' disbelief in God is incoherent because disbelief requires an existent object. (Being Filipino and, evidently, a Fregean, he phrased it less coherently than that).

This is a bad argument. That's all. What is objectionable about atheism is not whether it constitues faith or doubt but the object of its faith or doubt -- not its fervency but its falsity. A weakly-defined or weakly-held atheism is no less objectionable than a militant one.* Who cares whether it's better to say that atheists don't believe in God or to say they believe there's no God? Is there any interesting implication regarding the outcome of such a linguistic squabble?

It's one of those silly and completely inane bits of BS, which I'm baffled anyone thinks sophisticated. It's similar to the typical Christian-turned-atheist conversion story they all feel the need to share, along the lines of "something bad happened to me once so God must not exist!" No one cares, yuppie. Let it go.

The reason I bring this up is that it appears to be a main theme in an atheist video advanced by a YouTuber named QualiaSoup. Pretty well done video, by all accounts, and an able presentation of (what passes for) the rationale for atheism, although initially it seems he might bristle at being called such. Nor, however, does he permit himself to be called an agnostic, and here he ceases to be terribly engaging: agnosticism, he says, is a specific epistemic attitude, and his belief (or lack of belief, he insists on saying) does not even go so far as to encompass that. Well, we'll see about that.

The reason I say this isn't an engaging argument is because it relies on a linguistic malformation common to the vulgar use of the English language today: the presumption of distinction between "knowledge" and "belief." There is, of course, a distinction in the loose sense that they refer to different things; but they refer to different things in the also-loose sense that my throwing brick at a window is different from the window shattering. Knowledge and belief are not untethered from one another, an argument I made earlier. Belief is simply the assent of the will to something apprehended by reason. I believe the sky is blue because I know the sky is blue. I believe I have ten fingers because I know I have ten fingers. And agnostics withhold belief because they regard the question as simply unanswerable -- because their reasons apprehend (albeit improperly) that the question is unanswerable. A person who says "I believe in UFOs" isn't expressing a belief he thinks is irrational: he's generally convinced by (what he sees as) the evidence that UFOs exist. And a person who refuses to assent to something he knows to be true, such as the battered woman who insists that it'll be different from now on, is not doing anything noble: they're simply delusional.

Anyway, QualiaSoup gets to what he actually believes at around three minutes into the video, when he declares that the theistic assertion of God's existence is "irresolvable" because "no procedure available to us could reliably establish the existence or non-existence of such an unscientific entity." What he means here, of course, is that no scientific procedure exists (he doesn't ever acknowledge that there are plenty of metaphysical procedures available to us to reveal this truth, namely syllogistic logic, so it's reasonable to question if he's even aware of them). And he believes this because he's a positivist. Which he means he does, in fact, approach the question with a particular epistemology -- one that is so fundamental to his worldview he does not even acknowledge it by name and, presumably, never bothers to ask whether it's actually true.

The problem with positivism, I've said before, is that it's incoherent. The denial of nonscientific knowledge leads invariably also to a denial of scientific knowledge for two reasons. One, science cannot establish its own validity: there's no scientific experiment you can conduct that would validate the scientific method. Two, that means the only other method available to you of establishing the validity of scientific knowledge is a metaphysical axiom which is itself unscientific. So positivism winds up refuting itself -- and that which refute itself cannot be possibly true. You can get around this if you make an unpricipled exception to your own belief system, and you may be content with that, but why should anyone else be satisfied with the incoherent patchwork mess you've concocted?

So this strange breed of confused, hybrid agnostoatheism is, evidently, all atheism and no agnosticism. He proves this immediately afterward, when he declares that "God (the being said to exist in biblical times) exists" is "demonstrably false." He declares there are "many problematic qualities" we're asked to accept about this God that proves its falseness, but then provides perhaps the stupidest sample of what those "problematic qualities" are: "No being can be regarded as perfect," he says, "if it needs to be worshipped."

Agreed! Such would be a contradiction in terms. God, being perfect, has no imperfections in need of realization and therefore no "needs." So we should not presume to worship God because we think He needs to be worshipped. We should worship Him because he deserves to be worshipped, and moreover, because it is good -- that is, consistent with our natures as created beings who owe their creator a debt of gratitude and obedience -- to worship Him. The argument as expressed by QS is stupid and he is right to call it such. But he is wrong to call it a "problem" for theism because no one, to my knowledge, has aksed anyone to accept that argument. Anyone who did, I'd regard as ignorant. This is quite remarkable since we're evidently supposed to believe that this belief no one believes is not only a problem for theism but is representative of all the kinds of problems theism faces. Well, if that's the worst we have to deal with, then I suppose we're well-off!

It doesn't seem to occur to QS to question this argument. If "God is perfect" and "God needs worship" are irreconcilable, isn't that just as likely to be proof that one of the two statements has been improperly formulated than that the whole idea of "God" is bogus? Indeed, he doesn't seem to be aware what theists actually believe, nor does his ignorance so much as trouble him. It's as if he's never really encountered any theism more sophisticated than the postings of his silly pseudo-Baptist friends on Facebook.

QS goes on to claim that "a lack of belief in gods is the default position." Let's ignore for a moment the historical evidence that this is not, in fact, true, and simply grant him the benefit of the doubt that he's trying to establish some sort of epistemic norm: that one should not assent to something not known to be rational. That's a perfectly defensible position. But it's not as if there are no arguments for theism -- there are only arguments one might refuse to accept because of unquestioned and basically irrational nominalist and positivist presuppositions. That doesn't make him a neutral or disinterested party, nor is proper for him to pretend as much, because nominalism and positivism are themselves the assertion of a particular metaphysical worldview. When one says, then, that I must provide scientific evidence for the existence of God, one is essentially asking me to do the legwork for them of inserting God into a preexisting existential paradigm that denies there is anything knowable that cannot be known through the scientific endeavor. In fact, such a task is impossible, not because God doesn't exist but because that paradigm is false and irrational.

Around 8 minutes in, QS loses me entirely. He proceeds to complain (with a grating, plaintive whine) that atheist fervency is a response to Christian name-calling provocation. To this, I say: eh. Take a look at the last century's treatment of Christians, especially Catholics and the Orthodox, at the hands of atheists and then have the temerity to complain that they regard atheists with suspicion and contempt.

A full treatment for the case for theism is beyond the scope of this post. You can find a simple one in Bonald's "Finite and Unlimited Being" -- and atheists, be warned that the man's an astrophysicist and very likely smarter and better-versed in matters scientific than you. Suffice it to say that there is no really good reason to treat QS' breed of bland and thoughtless scientism as even a respectable position to hold, much less the default one.

*Except where militancy causes one to, say, go nuts and start killing people.

 

EDIT: An anonymous commenter e-mailed me to suggest that the belief that God "needs" prayer may actually derive from too heavy an investment in science fiction and fantasy, where the meme appears to be common, especially in the writings of Terry Pratchett. Given the non-zero correlation between atheism and literary escapism, it sounds plausible to me.

Modernity and Spiritual Autism: A Question of Chickens and Eggs

I have previously diagnosed modernity as the ascendence of rebellion against the order of being. And this, I have argued, arises from spiritual autism, the inability to experience the order of being as sacred. The predictable result is the demand for ever-more freedom: first political freedom, then freedom from want or need, then freedom from social conventions, from morality, and finally (I hope, anyway) from biology itself. (Taxpayer-subsidized elective sex changes for all!)

I have, in other words, regarded insensibility to the sacred as having causal priority over rebellion agaisnt the order of being. I wonder now if that is the correct ordering of things. Is it possible that man's atheism is instrumental -- that he denies God because he yearns to be free of the order of being, not vice-versa. It is the distinction, in other words, between spiritual autism as akin to literal autism (a simple pathological defect of understanding, will, and spirit) and as the intentional affectation of ignorance so as to rationalize the unfettering of one's will from basic rational and ethical considerations.

Discuss!