Friday Mentionables: Euthyphro (oh brother), Revealed Wisdom, Dancing to Justice, and more...

Euthyphro Dilemma: God is irrelevant to ethics? Apologia blog
Can you Accept "Revealed Wisdom" and still be "Scientific"?  A View from the Right
A theory of justice: the musical - a romp through 2,500 years of philosophy Philosophy Mag

5 Ways to Make Your Kids Hate Church Resurgence
11 books every christian should read Dinesh D'Souza

That's it. Interesting posts this week.

Why Dawkins won't debate Craig

I read Richard Dawkins' article today on why he won't debate William Lane Craig and I still find his answer(s) unsatisfactory. Should he change his answer to meet my need for a satisfactory answer? Not at all. Why does he not debate Craig? He refuses to debate Craig because, "The Christian philosopher is an apologist for genocide." After insulting Craig and bringing up the supposed genocide of the Canaanites he then says, "Would you shake hands with a man who could write stuff like that? Would you share a platform with him? I wouldn't, and I won't. Even if I were not engaged to be in London on the day in question, I would be proud to leave that chair in Oxford eloquently empty." 

The article is much longer than that, but I only pasted Dawkins' answer for not debating Craig. So it seems he won't debate Craig because Craig doesn't shy away from giving an answer to the "genocide" account in the bible. I might be wrong, but wouldn't the debate be on the existence of God? How does arguing for or against the existence of God have anything at all to do with the account in Deuteronomy? I think Dawkins' answer is lousy. I know he has arguments against the existence of God so he should use them in a debate against Craig to show why his arguments dismantle Craig's arguments for the existence of God. His answer of Craig being an apologist for genocide is ridiculous. 

Come on Dawkins! You're better than that....aren't you?  

I think Paul Copan has a much better answer to the Canaanite problem in Deuteronomy. 

"We should carefully note the language of "driving out" and "thrusting out" the Canaanites (Exod. 23:28; Lev. 18:24; Num. 33:52: Deut. 6:19; 7:1; 9:4; 18:12; Josh. 10:28, 30, 32, 35, 37, 39; 11:11, 14) or "dispossessing" them of their land (Num. 21:32). "Driving out" is not at all the same as the "wiping out" or "destroying" passages found in these same contexts. Upon examination, the former references are three times as numerous as the latter.[52]  When a foreign army might pose a threat in the ANE, women and children would be the first to remove themselves from harm's way?not to mention the population at large: "When a city is in danger of falling," observes Goldingay, "people do not simply wait there to be killed; they get out. . . . Only people who do not get out, such as the city's defenders, get killed."[53]  Jeremiah 4:29 suggests this:

At the sound of the horseman and bowman every city flees; They go into the thickets and climb among the rocks; Every city is forsaken, and no man dwells in them.

Hess draws the following conclusions: "There is no indication in the text of any specific noncombatants who were put to death." Indeed, the "justified wars" of Joshua "were against combatants."[54]  We read in Joshua (and Judges) that, despite the "obliteration" language, there are plenty of Canaanite inhabitants who are not "driven out" but rather are living in the areas where Israel has settled. Joshua himself refers to "these [nations] which remain among you" (Josh. 23:12?13; cp. Josh. 15:63; 16:10; 17:13; Judg. 2:10?13). The process of driving them out would be a gradual one, as even Deuteronomy 7:22 anticipates and is reaffirmed in Judges 2:20?23.[55]  

Israel's occupation of Canaan involved not simply military activity, but also infiltration and internal struggle.[56]  In my previous article, I note that the text of Deuteronomy 7:2?5, Joshua, and Judges suggests that we have the language of (i) obliteration as well as (ii) acknowledgment of Canaanites as future neighbors. Goldingay comments that Israel knew how to read Torah: "It knew it was not to assume a literalistic understanding" of destroying the Canaanites. That is, Moses did not mean for this to be taken literally. Rather, as Goldingay notes, "Israel was to dispossess the Canaanites and destroy their forms of religion and have nothing to do with them." That is, Israel took this "totally destroy" command metaphorically or hyperbolically?which reflected the ANE language of bravado and exaggeration in warfare.[57] 

 

To summarize, we should distinguish between two central aspects of the Canaanite question. On the one hand, herem includes stereotypical language of "all" and "young and old" and "man and woman"?even if women and children are not present. So far as we can see, herem is carried out in particular military/combatant settings (with "cities" and "kings"); this specific combatant scenario could well apply in the Amalekite case (1 Sam. 15). In these limited settings, herem is thoroughly carried out (involving even livestock [for example, 1 Sam. 15:9, 14])?though it allows, and hopes for, exceptions (for example, Rahab). The sweeping language which appears to involve only combatants is truly all-inclusive here. On the other hand, evident in Deuteronomy?Judges is the clearly exaggerated ANE language of utter obliteration and total destruction. These hyperbolic references to "totally destroy[ing]" run on parallel tracks with regular mention of many remaining Canaanite inhabitants after the "total destruction" (for example, Judg. 1). Additionally, we should take seriously the many references of "driving out" the Canaanites, to clear away the land for habitation, which does not require killing. Civilians would flee when their military strongholds were destroyed and no longer capable of protecting them."

Read the whole article by clicking here. 

Update: WK responds to Dawkins' article. 

"His entire column is easily dispatched using Dawkins’ own words against him, because he contradicts himself.

Dawkins has previously written this:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
(“God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, November, 1995, p. 85)

Meanwhile, in his column, Dawkins claimed that God’s command to destroy the Canaanites was an instance of evil:

Most churchmen these days wisely disown the horrific genocides ordered by the God of the Old Testament. Anyone who criticises the divine bloodlust is loudly accused of unfairly ignoring the historical context, and of naive literalism towards what was never more than metaphor or myth. You would search far to find a modern preacher willing to defend God’s commandment, in Deuteronomy 20: 13-15, to kill all the men in a conquered city and to seize the women, children and livestock as plunder.

So, in one statement, there’s no good or evil, and in the next statement, there’s evil. That’s a contradiction, and it undermines his entire column, Q.E.D. You can’t claim that there is no standard of good and evil in one breath, and then make judgments of good and evil in the next. It’s self-refuting. Dawkins didn’t even try to respond to any of Craig’s standard arguments for God’s existence in the editorial, he just went off on a tangent about a few Bible verses that, even if true, might only defeat Judaism and Christianity in particular, but not the existence of God in general. And the debate “Does God Exist?” is about the latter." 

Read the rest of his post here.

*****Update*****

Skeptic Daniel Came writes that Richard Dawkins' refusal to debate William Lane Craig is cynical and anti-intellecutalist.

Excerpt:

"In his latest undignified rant, Dawkins claims that it is because Craig is "an apologist for genocide" that he won't share a platform with him. Dawkins is referring to Craig's defence of God's commandment in Deuteronomy 20: 15-17 to wipe out the Canannites. Here is Craig's offending passage:

"[If] God's grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of [the Canannite] children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven's incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives."

I am disinclined to defend the God of the Old Testament's infanticide policy. But as a matter of logic, Craig is probably right: if an infinite good is made possible by a finite evil, then it might reasonably be said that that evil has been offset. However, I doubt whether Craig would be guided by logic himself in this regard and conduct infanticide. I doubt, that is, that he would wish it to be adopted as a general moral principle that we should massacre children because they will receive immediate salvation.

But whatever you make of Craig's view on this issue, it is irrelevant to the question of whether or not God exists. Hence it is quite obvious that Dawkins is opportunistically using these remarks as a smokescreen to hide the real reasons for his refusal to debate with Craig – which has a history that long predates Craig's comments on the Canaanites.

As a sceptic, I tend to agree with Dawkins's conclusion regarding the falsehood of theism, but the tactics deployed by him and the other New Atheists, it seems to me, are fundamentally ignoble and potentially harmful to public intellectual life. For there is something cynical, ominously patronising, and anti-intellectualist in their modus operandi, with its implicit assumption that hurling insults is an effective way to influence people's beliefs about religion. The presumption is that their largely non-academic readership doesn't care about, or is incapable of, thinking things through; that passion prevails over reason. On the contrary, people's attitudes towards religious belief can and should be shaped by reason, not bile and invective. By ignoring this, the New Atheists seek to replace one form of irrationality with another."

Slavery and the moral argument

This post has two aims. 1) to explain Israel's use of slavery and 2) to explain how anti-slavery laws are good evidence for objective morality. So, first things first, we'll look at slavery "back in the day" and antebellum slavery or slavery in the good ol' South. 

The objection

When some folks are discussing the Bible and its atrocities, slavery is usually brought up. The charge, "Well, what about slavery? If the moral code of the bible is SO GREAT, then why is slavery condoned?" I have to say, if slavery in Israel was anything like slavery in the South, with its slave trades and cruelties, then I would side with the objection against the bible. When we read about slavery in bible we cannot equate that form of slavery with the slavery implemented in the South. The two are not similar. Want to learn about Hebrew servanthood? Paul Copan will teach us. He writes in his article on slavery:

"We should compare Hebrew debt-servanthood (many translations render this “slavery”) more fairly to apprentice-like positions to pay off debts — much like the indentured servitude during America’s founding when people worked for approximately 7 years to pay off the debt for their passage to the New World. Then they became free.

In most cases, servanthood was more like a live-in employee, temporarily embedded within the employer’s household. Even today, teams trade sports players to another team that has an owner, and these players belong to a franchise. This language hardly suggests slavery, but rather a formal contractual agreement to be fulfilled — like in the Old Testament.

Through failed crops or other disasters, debt tended to come to families, not just individuals. One could voluntarily enter into a contractual agreement (“sell” himself) to work in the household of another: “one of your countrymen becomes poor and sells himself” (Leviticus 25:47). A wife or children could be “sold” to help sustain the family through economically unbearable times — unless kinfolk “redeemed” them (payed their debt). They would be debt-servants for 6 years.4 A family might need to mortgage their land until the year of Jubilee every 50 years.

Note: In the Old Testament, outsiders did not impose servanthood — as in the antebellum South.6 Masters could hire servants “from year to year” and were not to “rule over … [them] ruthlessly” (Leviticus 25:46,53). Rather than being excluded from Israelite society, servants were thoroughly embedded within Israelite homes.

The Old Testament prohibited unavoidable lifelong servanthood — unless someone loved his master and wanted to attach himself to him (Exodus 21:5). Masters were to grant their servants release every seventh year with all debts forgiven (Leviticus 25:35–43). A slave’s legal status was unique in the ancient Near East (ANE) — a dramatic improvement over ANE law codes: “Hebrew has no vocabulary of slavery, only of servanthood.”

An Israelite servant’s guaranteed eventual release within 7 years was a control or regulation to prevent the abuse and institutionalizing of such positions. The release-year reminded the Israelites that poverty-induced servanthood was not an ideal social arrangement. On the other hand, servanthood existed in Israel precisely because poverty existed: no poverty, no servants in Israel. And if servants lived in Israel, this was voluntary (typically poverty-induced) — not forced." 

That doesn't seem like antebellum slavery at all. If you read the bible's entire treatment of slavery, "masters" were commanded to treat their servants as persons and not property. Notice also, that servants were hired not forced to be servants. This is radically different from the treatment of slaves in the South. The comparison of Israel's slavery to antebellum slavery is a false one. Paul Copan goes on to write a section titled "Three Remarkable Provisions in Israel."

"1. Anti-Harm Laws: One marked improvement of Israel’s laws over other ANE law codes is the release of injured servants (Exodus 21:26,27). When an employer (“master”) accidentally gouged out the eye or knocked out the tooth of his male or female servant/employee, he/she was to go free. God did not allow physical abuse of servants. If an employer’s disciplining his servant resulted in immediate death, that employer (“master”) was to be put to death for murder (Exodus 21:20) — unlike other ANE codes.10 In fact, Babylon’s Hammurabi’s Code permitted the master to cut off his disobedient slave’s ear (¶282). Typically in ANE law codes, masters — not slaves — were merely financially compensated. The Mosaic Law, however, held masters to legal account for their treatment of their own servants — not simply another person’s servants. 

2. Anti-Kidnapping Laws: Another unique feature of the Mosaic Law is its condemnation of kidnapping a person to sell as a slave — an act punishable by death (Exodus 21:16; cp. Deuteronomy 24:7). Kidnapping, of course, is how slavery in the antebellum South could get off the ground. 

3. Anti-Return Laws: Unlike the antebellum South, Israel was to offer safe harbor to foreign runaway slaves (Deuteronomy 23:15,16) — a marked contrast to the Southern states’ Fugitive Slave Law. Hammurabi’s Code demanded the death penalty for those helping runaway slaves (¶16). In other less-severe cases — in the Lipit-Ishtar (¶12), Eshunna (¶49-50), and Hittite laws (¶24) — fines were exacted for sheltering fugitive slaves. Some claim that this is an improvement. Well, sort of. In these “improved” scenarios, the slave was still just property; the ANE extradition arrangements still required that the slave be returned his master. And not only this, the slave was going back to the harsh conditions that prompted him to run away in the first place.11 Even upgraded laws in first millennium BC Babylon included compensation to the owner (or perhaps something more severe) for harboring a runaway slave. Yet the returned slaves themselves were disfigured, including slitting ears and branding.12 This isn’t the kind of improvement to publicize too widely. 

Old Testament scholar Christopher Wright observes: “No other ancient near Eastern law has been found that holds a master to account for the treatment of his own slaves (as distinct from injury done to the slave of another master), and the otherwise universal law regarding runaway slaves was that they must be sent back, with severe penalties for those who failed to comply.”13

If the South had followed these three clear laws from Exodus and Deuteronomy, slavery would have been a nonissue. What’s more, Israel’s treatment of servants (“slaves”) was unparalleled in the ANE."

Human Rights

There's another part of the accuser's objection to slavery I want to examine. The accuser sees something wrong with slavery, e.g., it's cruel to human beings and that human beings shouldn't be treated as slaves. Well, if human beings shouldn't be treated that way, then that really says something about humans, doesn't it? Why should we not be treated as someone's slave? Because it's cruel and inhumane? What makes it cruel and inhumane? The fact that we have inalienable rights is what makes slavery cruel and inhumane. Where do those rights come from? Not from government. These rights can't be taken or given to us by government; it merely acknowledges the rights of human beings. 

Our rights are transcendent rights given to us by God. Objective morality (morality that exists whether persons acknowledge it or not) flows from God's nature and is expressed to us in His commandments to us. Our rights come from God. Our rights cannot come from a physical quality in us. Physical qualities do not give us inalienable rights endowed to us. As Greg Koukl wrote in an article, "human beings are endowed by God with certain inalienable rights, and the endowment is not related to any physical thing in itself--any particular physical thing. We are endowed in a metaphysical way that is not related to our physical characteristics, but it is related to our humanness." 

If you're a materialist, you cannot argue that our rights are inalienable and can't be taken away because rights are not material. There is no morality because morality is not material. The best a materialist or naturalist can come up with for the apparent objectivity of morality is a morality based on survival of the fittest and we know that theory doesn't work; nor does the other option, relativism, work. 

I think the cruelty shown by antebellum slavery screams the truthfulness of the existence of objective moral values and duties. Given naturalism, slavery would not be cruel, it would not be evil because on naturalism human beings are not special, human beings do not have inalienable rights; we are just evolved primates and enslavement of some evolved primates for the selfish benefit of another evolved primate would not be wrong. In fact, on naturalism, slavery would be a good sign of survival of the fittest. It's possible I'm wrong, but I would think slavery would be just fine on a naturalistic worldview. What do you think?

Read the articles referenced

Does the Old Testament endorse slavery? by Paul Copan

Slavery, Abortion, and Inalienable Rights by Greg Koukl

More info:

Slavery in the Bible: 8 Quick Resources

N.Y. Public Library now offers porn...sort of.

I know when I'm at the public library I like to look at a little porn on the internet before I peruse the books.

The following excerpt comes from Jonah Goldberg's latest post for Townhall.com. 

"... the New York Public Library has gotten into the porn business. "With adults, anything that you can get on the Internet, you can legally get on a computer in the library," explained an official. "It's difficult, but we err on the side of free and open access."

Well, imagine you went to your local library in, say, 1989 -- or some other year before Al Gore invented the Internet.

Then imagine going up to the librarian and asking him, "Do you carry Hustler?"

The shocked librarian answers, "No."

"Back issues of Swank? High Society? Penthouse?"

"No, no and no," quoth the librarian.

"OK, OK. I get it. Do you have movies?"

Librarian answers: "Yes, of course."

"Great!" you reply. "I'd like to sign out 'Debby Does Dallas.'"

"What? No!"

"How about the VHS of 'On Golden Blonde'?"

Finally, the librarian explodes: "Sir, we do not carry any pornography. What do you think we do here?"

Well, the answer to that question is suddenly in doubt. Because up until very, very recently, the idea that public libraries should -- nay, must! -- peddle unfettered access to hardcore porn would have baffled almost everyone.

I'm hardly an anti-porn crusader, but the list of reasons why libraries didn't -- and shouldn't -- carry porn is vast. The two most obvious and mutually reinforcing reasons are moralistic and budgetary: A) "It's wrong," and B) "We have very limited resources and we must choose what we think is worthwhile and what has no redeeming value."

The problem is that the legs have been knocked out from under both answers. Of course, the moralistic -- or "judgmental" -- bias against porn has been eroding for generations. How bad or good a development that is depends on your point of view." 

You can read the rest of the post by clicking here.

Why objective morality fails on scientific naturalism

I've written quite a lot of blog posts on objective morality, what it is, where it comes from and such. With each post I write, I'm trying to work the meaning out in my mind, i.e., how does objective morality work in the world and in us, human beings, and how this works with worldviews other than the Christian worldview. Does objective morality only fit perfectly in the Christian worldview? The answer I come up with is yes. Objective morality fits only within the Christian worldview. It fits perfectly within the Christian worldview. Objective morality does not fit at all within the scientific naturalist worldview. It can't. The piece, objective morality, does not fit in the puzzle pieces of scientific naturalism. You can try to shove it in with all of your might, but it just won't fit. You might hear some popular naturalists speak that there is objective purpose in their worldview, that morality is objective; don't buy it for a second. All of that is rhetoric. (In this post I'll be borrowing heavily from J.P. Moreland's essay The Image of God and the Failure of Scientific Atheism).

Evolutionary naturalist Michael Ruse writes

morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says "Love thy neighbor as thyself," they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction...and any deeper meaning is illusory. 1 

From Michael Ruse's statement, it's hard to find intrinsic value and an objective moral order given naturalism. To the naturalist, morality is simply an aid to survival and reproduction, i.e., kin selection and reciprocal altruism. What is kin selection? Self-help by way of natural selection; but natural selection isn't operating at the level of individuals, it operates at the level of the individuals' genes. An example of this is: a mother who dives into a burning car to save her daughter. The mother is not acting out of pure altruism, i.e., our of selfless concern for the well-being of others; rather she is acting out of desperation to make sure her genes, which are shared by her daughter, make it into the next generation. Even if she (the mother) dies, her genes live on through her children. Reciprocal altruism is, "I'll be nice to you, so that you'll be nice to me." On naturalism, human worth and objective morality is, as Michale Ruse said, illusory. 

One would think, since naturalism cannot explain the existence of objective morality, it counts as a nod toward Christian theism. Atheist J.L. Mackie acknowledged: "Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful god to create them."2 The best scientific naturalism can do is explain what I call "low-end" morality, which is explained partly by kin-selection and reciprocal altruism; it cannot explain intrinsic value, objective moral order, or the high equal value and rights of human persons (high-end morality). Naturalists Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse acknowledge that the best justification for the high equal value of human persons is in the grounding of Judeo-Christian doctrine of the image of God.3 This claim by Singer and Kuhse is acknowledged by many thinkers, most notably by Joel Feinberg. 4 

J.P. Moreland writes 

The following skeptical question, Feinberg believes, has never been adequately answered: why would we treat all people equally in any respect in the face of manifest inequalities of merit among them? The simple response "Because we just have such worth" does not answer the skeptic's query. If "human worth" is real and generic, says Feinberg, then it must supervene on some subvenient base that (1) we al lhave equally in common and (2) is nontrivial and of supreme moral worth. Operating within a naturalistic framework, Feinberg considers several attempts to delineate that base, and he judges them all to be a failure because they

• require an entity such as "pricelessness" for which we have no answer as to where it came from and with respect to which one must postulate a problematic, mysterious, intuitive faculty of direct awareness of such an entity;
• are grounded in a degreed property (one that is possessed to a greater or lesser degree) such as rationality (Feinberg takes the potential for rationality to be degreed) which, therefore, cannot do the job of founding equal worth for all; 
• simply name the problem to be solved and do not provide an explanation of the problem itself.

At the end of the day, Feinberg acknowledges that the notion of equal worth and equal rights for all human persons is groundless and may simply express a noncognitivist, unjustifiable pro-attitude of respect to ward the humanity in each person. 5  

Feinberg gives an excellent illustration of the difficulty of grounding equal value and rights (objective morality) on a naturalistic worldview. It cannot be done because given naturalism, it's illusory.

J.P. Moreland then cites David Hull who is the leading philosopher of evolutionary theory in the twentieth century. 

The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of "natures" to a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental. If species evolve in anything like the way that Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that traditional philosophers claimed they did. If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo sapiens as a biological species. If homo sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one's claims about "human nature." Perhaps all people are "persons," share the same "personhood," etc., but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology. Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Darwin's theory brought into question all these theories. The implications are not entailments. One can always dissociate "Homo sapiens" from "human being," but the result is a much less plausible position. 6 

He (Moreland) goes on to cite atheist James Rachels as claiming, "...a Darwinian approach to the origin of human beings, while not entailing the falsity of these notions, nevertheless provides an undercutting defeater for the idea that humans are made in the image of God and that humans have intrinsic dignity and worth as such. Indeed, according to Rachels, Darwinism is the universal solvent that dissolves any attempt to defend the notion of intrinsic human dignity." 7 

Rachels writes: 

The doctrine of human dignity says that humans merit a level of moral concern wholly different from that accorded to mere animals; for this to be true, there would have to be some big, morally significant difference between them. Therefore, any adequate defense of human dignity would require some conception of human beings as radically different from other animals. But that is precisely what evolutionary theory calls into question. It makes us suspicious of any doctrine that sees large gaps of any sort between humans and all other creatures. This being so, a Darwinian may conclude that a successful defense of human dignity is most unlikely. 8 

Rachels is correct. On the naturalistic worldview, "...a successful defense of human dignity is most unlikely." All you have with naturalism is an explanation for low-end morality. Naturalism cannot explain the high-end morality that humans demonstrate, which is behavior that doesn't care about reciprocal or genetic advantages to the action. Why do people give blood? The blood is going to help those who the person does not know. There is no naturalistic rationale for this behavior. Richard Dawkins concedes that that the Darwinian thesis cannot explain why people give blood, a fact that he puts down to "pure disinterested altruism." 9 The Darwinian model cannot account for "love your enemies." Or for the actions of Mother Teresa, or for the good Samaritan model. The Darwinian model is confined to the realm of self-interest and the essence of morality operates outside the realm of self-interest. As Dinesh D'Souza writes, "The whole point of morality is that you are doing what you ought to do, not what you are inclined to do or what is in your interest to do. Morality is described in the language of duty, and duty is something that we are obliged to do whether we want to or not, whether it benefits us or not." 10

J.P. Moreland finishes his essay with 

Naturalists can't appeal to emergence to solve their problems because (1) this is just a label for the problem to be solved and not a real solution and (2) it begs the question against Christian theism in a most egregious way. It would seem, then, that important features that characterize us human persons provide evidence that there is a Creator God who made us. And this is exactly what one would predict if biblical teaching about the image of God is true. 11

Sources

1. Michael Ruse, "Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics," in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262 - 69 

2. J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 115 

3. Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, Should the Baby Live? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 118-39. 

4. Joel Finberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 84-97

5. J.P. Moreland, "The Image of God and the Failure of Scientific Atheism," in God is Great, God is Good (USA: Intervarsity Press, 2009), pp. 45-46 

6. David Hull, The Metaphysics of Evolution (Albany: State University of New York, 1989), pp. 74-75

7. Moreland, pp. 46-47

8. James Rachels, Created from Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 171-72. Cf. pp. 93, 97, 171

9. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) pp. 230.

10. Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great About Christianity (USA: Tyndale House Publishers, 2007) pp. 239-240.

11. Moreland, pp. 47


Check out all of my posts on morality by clicking here.

Euthyphro's Dilemma revisited

Due to the recent William Lane Craig and Sam Harris debate, there has been more discussion regarding objective morality and Euthyphro's *cough* false *ahem* Dilemma. Rather than write an entirely new piece, I'm going to use a part from my post Objective morals and Euthyphro's False Dilemma.

The Euthyphro Dilemma

What is another response from unbelievers? It's called the Euthyphro Dilemma (named after a character in one of Plato's dialogues). The dilemma is: Is something good because God wills it? Or does God will something because it is good? This is a popular objection to the moral argument for God's existence. If you say something is good because God wills it, then that good becomes arbitrary. God could have willed that cheating is good or that hatred is good, etc. That doesn't work does it? If you say that God wills something because it is good, then that good becomes independent of God, which makes moral values and duties exist independently of God, which contradicts premise 1. 

How does Craig answer the Euthyphro dilemma? He says that "we don't need to refute either of the two horns of the dilemma because the dilemma is a false one: There's a third alternative, namely, God wills something because He is good...I mean God's own nature is the standard of goodness, and His commandments to us are expressions of His nature. In short, our moral duties are determined by the commands of a just and loving God."6
 
So according to Craig, moral values and duties don't exist independently of God because God's own character/nature defines what is good and those morals flow out of God's nature. When the atheist asks, "If God were to command spouse abuse, would we be obligated to abuse our spouses?" he's asking a question akin to "If there were married bachelors, who would the bachelor be married to?" There is no answer because the question is absurd. 

Craig assures us that the Euthyphro dilemma presents us with a false choice, and we shouldn't be tricked by it. "The morally good/bad is determined by God's nature, and the morally right/wrong is determined by His will. God wills something because He is good, and something is right because God wills it."7


Source:
1. William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2010), pg. 132
2. ibid, pg. 133
3. ibid, pg. 133
4. ibid, pg. 134
5. ibid, pg. 134
6. ibid, pg. 135
7. ibid, pg. 136

Common questions to this answer of Euthyphro's Dilemma are: How do we know God is good? How is his nature good? Wouldn't it be possible for murder and rape to be 'good' if God commanded it? 


Philosopher Ed Feser has an answer to the above questions. [h/t] Joe's comment on WK's blog post.


“Given the doctrine of the convertibility of the transcendentals, on which being is convertible with goodness, that which is Pure Actuality or Being Itself must ipso facto be Goodness Itself. Given the conception of evil as a privation – that is, as a failure to realize some potentiality – that which is Pure Actuality and therefore in no way potential cannot intelligibly be said to be in any way evil. Given the principle of proportionate causality, whatever good is in the world in a limited way must be in its cause in an eminent way, shorn of any of the imperfections that follow upon being a composite of act and potency. Since God is Pure Actuality, he cannot intelligibly be said either to have or to lack moral virtues or vices of the sort we exhibit when we succeed or fail to realize our various potentials. And so on. All of this is claimed to be a matter of metaphysical demonstration rather than probabilistic empirical theorizing, and the underlying metaphysical ideas form a complex interlocking network that is (as anyone familiar with Platonism or Aristotelianism realizes) motivated independently of the problem of evil or the question of God’s existence.” 

Read more by clicking here. 

Greg Koukl answers the questions too. 

"The Christian's job is not done, though, because Bertrand Russell's observation suggests a second problem. Socrates' challenge to Euthyphro has not been met. What is "good"? It doesn't help to say that God is good unless we know what the term refers to. 

If the word "good" means "in accord with the nature and character of God," we have a problem. When the Bible says "God is good," it simply means "God has the nature and character that God has." If God and goodness are the very same thing, then the statement "God is good" means nothing more than "God is God," a useless tautology. 

The answer to this problem hinges on the philosophical notion of identity, expressed symbolically as A = A. When one thing is identical to another (in the way I'm using the term), there are not two things, but one.[10] For example, the president of Stand to Reason (Gregory Koukl) is identical to the author of this article. Everything that's true of the one is true of the other.[11] The author and the president are the same. They are not two, but one. 

According to Christian teaching, God is not good in the same way that a bachelor is an unmarried male. When we say God is good, we are giving additional information, namely that God has a certain quality. God is not the very same thing as goodness (identical to it). It's an essential characteristic of God, so there is no tautology.[12]

   

A proper understanding of Christian teaching on God removes one problem, yet we still face another: What is "good"? How can we know goodness if we don't define it first?

The way Abraham responded when he first learned of God's intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah gives us a clue to the answer:

Far be it from Thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous and the wicked are treated alike. Far be it from Thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly? (Genesis 18:25)

Here's the question. How did Abraham know justice required that God not treat the wicked and the righteous alike? As of yet, no commandments had been handed down.

Abraham knew goodness not by prior definition or by some decree of God, but through moral intuition. He didn't need God to define justice (divine command). He knew it directly. His moral knowledge was built in.[13]

 

Even the atheist understands what moral terms mean. He doesn't need God in order to recognize morality. He needs God to make sense of what he recognizes. 

This is precisely why the moral argument for God's existence is such a good one. The awareness of morality leads to God much as the awareness of falling apples leads to gravity. Our moral intuitions recognize the effect, but what is the adequate cause? If God does not exist, then moral terms are actually incoherent and our moral intuitions are nonsense. 

Christians need not fear Plato on this score. When Euthyphro's dilemma is applied to Christianity, it mischaracterizes the Biblical view of God. Goodness is neither above God nor merely willed by Him. Instead, ethics are grounded in His holy character. Moral notions are not arbitrary and given to caprice. They are fixed and absolute, grounded in God's immutable nature. 

Further, no outside definition of piety is necessary because morality is known directly through the faculty of moral intuition. God's laws express His character and--if our moral intuitions are intact--we immediately recognize those Laws as good. 

This doesn't mean Christianity is true, only that it's is not handicapped by Plato's challenge to Euthyphro."

Read his whole post by clicking here. 

Study objective moral values and duties further:

Do objective moral values and duties exist?

Euthyphro Argument

What is the basis of our values?


For more posts on morality click here.

Wanting objective morals without an objective moral standard

Listening to the Harris vs Craig debate last night on "Is good from God?" I noticed, yet again, a person defending objective moral values in a relativistic fashion. In the opening statement, it appeared that both men agreed on objective morality. What is objective morality? Objective morality, put simply, is a standard of morals that is binding on us whether we acknowledge them or not. I wouldn't want to confuse objective morals with universal morals because universal morals are morals that are recognized universally not necessarily objectively. Right now, universally people acknowledge that murder of an innocent is wrong. What if tomorrow, universally, people acknowledged that murder of an innocent wasn't wrong? That would mean that it's fine to go down the street, gun blazing, killing everyone you see and you could get away with that action. Objective morality means that even if tomorrow, the universal opinion is that killing the innocent is fine, that objectively killing the innocent is not fine, it's bad even if you don't acknowledge that it's bad. That is objective morality. 

Having said that, I think some defenders of objective morality are actually defending universal morality. Why do I think that? Well, for one because such defenders are basing their arguments on either a) evolution or b) utilitarian principles. Objective morals cannot be a product of evolution/herd/culture morality. Why? If objective morality developed by evolution, then I understand that it would have developed by natural selection. If the objective standard was developed by natural selection, then how could that be "objective?" Objective morality is the standard whether we acknowledge it or not; it's true without any help from us. An objective moral value is selflessness. Can selflessness be a product of natural selection? No. In natural selection the self is maximized. Greg Koukl gives a good explanation:

"So, in abbreviated form, the reasoning goes like this: I ought to be unselfish because it is better for the group, which is better for the species, which is better for me. So why ought I be unselfish? Because it is better for me. But looking at what is better for me, is selfishness. So all of this so-called description of where morality comes from, gets reduced to this ludicrous statement: I morally ought to be unselfish so that I can be more thoroughly selfish. That is silly. Because we know that morality can't be reduced to selfishness. Why do we know that? Because our moral rules are against selfishness and for altruism. They are against selfishness and for the opposite. When you think about what it is that morality entails, you don't believe that morality is really about being selfish. Morality is about being unselfish, or at least it entails that. Which makes my point that this description, based on evolution, does not do the job. It doesn't explain what it is supposedly meant to explain. It doesn't explain morality. It is simply reduced to a promotion of selfishness which isn't morality at all." 1

We can see from this observation that objective morality cannot have evolved over time. When dealing with evolution, it's all about the self. When dealing with morality, it's all about selflessness. 

What about good deeds? They're really done just so you can get something back right? The old "scratch my back I'll scratch your back." Well, I can think of a few things people do without getting anything back in return. I'm doing a good thing when I help someone that I do not know. So, I'm not trying to preserve my family, my "herd" at all, this person is a complete stranger. I'm in a restaurant waiting for a table, sitting down on an already crowded booth in the waiting area. An old man walks in and I give him my seat. Why do I do this? There's definitely not a reward; I'm not getting money or a free meal for this action, I'm not his grandson, cousin, brother; I'm simply a human being doing a good thing for another human being who is a complete stranger to me. 

Why does a soldier jump in front of enemy fire for an innocent bystander? There's definitely no reward for him in that action. There's no preservation of his species when he does that. He is not looking out for himself. When you see a person stranded with car trouble on the side of the parkway, you stop to help him. You have no connection with him, yet you help him. You don't help in hope of earning money or recognition; you help because you felt like you ought to help him. No one else had stopped to help and you felt it was the right thing to do. Objective morality imposes the ought on us whether you acknowledge it or not. Evolution can't explain morality. 

Can utilitarianism explain morality? First we should define what utilitarianism is. Utilitarianism (also called consequentialism) is a moral theory developed and refined in the modern world by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). It can be defined as follows: An action or moral rule is right if and only if it maximizes the amount of nonmoral good produced in the consequences that result from doing that act or following that rule compared with other acts or rules open to the agent. 2 I'm going to be borrowing heavily from J.P. Moreland's critique of utilitarianism because he answers my question quite well. In fact, I'll just post his rebuttals here. 

"Several objections show the inadequacy of utilitarianism as a normative moral theory. First, utilitarianism can be used to justify actions that are clearly immoral. Consider the case of a severely deformed fetus. The child is certain to live a brief, albeit painless life. He or she will make no contribution to society. Society, however, will bear great expense. Doctors and other caregivers will invest time, emotion, and effort in adding mere hours to the baby's life. The parents will know and love the child only long enough to be heartbroken at the inevitable loss. An abortion negates all those "utility" losses. There is no positive utility lost. Many of the same costs are involved in the care of the terminally ill elderly. They too may suffer no pain, but they may offer no benefit to society. In balancing positives and negatives, and excluding from the equation the objective sacredness of all human life, we arrive at morally repugnant decisions. Here deontological and virtue ethics steer us clear of what is easier to what is right.

Second, in a similar way, utilitarianism denies the existence of supererogatory acts. These are acts of moral heroism that are not morally obligatory but are still praiseworthy. Examples would be giving 75 percent of your income to the poor or throwing yourself on a bomb to save a stranger. Consider the bomb example. You have two choices — throwing yourself on the bomb or not doing so. Each choice would have consequences and, according to utilitarianism, you are morally obligated to do one or the other depending on which option maximized utility. Thus, there is no room for acts that go beyond the call of morality.

Third, utilitarianism has an inadequate view of human rights and human dignity. If enslaving a minority of people, say by a lottery, would produce the greatest good for the greatest number, or if conceiving children only to harvest their parts would do the same, then these could he justified in a utilitarian scheme. But enslavement and abortion violate individual rights and treat people as a means to an end, not as creatures with intrinsic dignity as human beings. If acts of abortion, active euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, and so forth maximize utility, then they are morally obligatory for the utilitarian. But any moral system that makes abortion and suicide morally obligatory is surely flawed.

Finally, utilitarianism has an inadequate view of motives and character. We should praise good motives and seek good character because such motives and character are intrinsically valuable. But utilitarianism implies that the only reason we should praise good motives instead of bad ones, or seek good character instead of bad character, is because such acts would maximize utility. But this has the cart before the horse. We should praise good motives and blame bad ones because they are good or bad, not because such acts of praising and blaming produce good consequences.

In sum, it should be clear that utilitarianism is an inadequate moral theory. Unfortunately, ours is a pragmatic culture and utilitarianism is on the rise. But for those of us who follow Christ, a combination of virtue and deontological ethics is a more adequate view of common sense morality found in natural law and of the moral vision contained in the Bible." 3

Evolution and utilitarianism fail to explain morality, especially objective morality, which more and more people seem to be acknowledging. However, they're "accepting" it, then smuggling in their preferences, which is not adhering to an objective moral standard. Someone may say, "I believe in objective morality," but then he says that women should be beaten if they don't give in to sex. That's relativism. You cannot make objective moral statements when your worldview is relativism. On relativism, anything goes! What's true for you is not true for me goes both ways. On relativism, we wouldn't have women's rights or the abolition of slavery. On relativism, rape, murder, adultery, could not be wrong. Relativism is personal preference and guess what? Personal preferences are very diverse. Relativism if thought through critically is not what any sane person really wants to commit to because of its volatile nature. Relativism, evolution, and utilitarianism cannot explain morality. 

The major thing to realize here is that people want objective morality. People want to acknowledge that some things are objectively good and some things are objectively bad, and that we realize the ought in us pushing us to do the right thing. We all want to acknowledge that. Why do some dislike it though? Why do some people want objective morality in a different way? Because the objective moral standard can only be explained by God. Some people want the objective moral standard without the sufficient grounding for the moral standard, which is God. 

Sources

1. Evolution can't explain morality by Greg Koukl

2 Utilitarianism and the Moral Life by J.P. Moreland

3. ibid. 

Related content

My other posts on morality  

Clicking the above link will lead to more resources for morality.

Wintery Knight's morality posts (more resources here too.)

How to abolish capital punishment

We seem to have a love-hate relationship with capital punishment. Those who are for it, usually are against it when capital punishment is going to be enforced on them or someone dear to them. Then those who are against it, usually want to enforce it on those that have done them wrong or when someone they love has been wronged. We have this love-hate relationship with capital punishment. Of course, there are those that don't fit into those two categories I mentioned above. Some really are for capital punishment at all times and the same with those that are against it. The question is, should we abolish capital punishment? 

Arthur Schopenhauer asserted, "For safeguarding the lives of citizens, capital punishment is therefore absolutely necessary." 1 "The murderer," wrote Schopenhauer, " who is condemned to death according to the law must, it is true, be now used as a mere means, and with complete right. For public security, which is the principal object of the State, is disturbed by him; indeed it is abolished if the law remains unfulfilled. The murderer, his life, his person, must be the means of fulfilling the law, and thus of re–establishing public security."2 

How do we abolish capital punishment? According to Schopenhauer, ""Those who would like to abolish it should be given the answer: 'First remove murder from the world, and then capital punishment ought to follow.' "3 
I agree with Schopenhauer. 

Sources:

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation 

2. ibid.

3. ibid.  

Unions, Tucson shooting, and mental health

DISCLAIMER: The following viewpoints are not those of the blogger, but a friend of his. If this point of view upsets you, you may vent, but don’t yell at the person who posted them. Start a discussion, express and opinion, but don’t yell at the person who didn’t write it, that is just senseless… These writings are the intellectual property of me, the Author, with permission granted to the blogger who is positing them. They may not be reposted or used in any form without express written consent by either myself or the blogger of Reformed Seth.

Well, for those who enjoy my writings or ramblings, I am back. I do apologize for the length of time I was away from the blog, holidays are hard for me, and it took a little longer to get it together again.

I was going to write about the Shooting in Tucson, and the aftermath, and to what I saw as the real problem that caused it, which to me are public unions. You know, those people who work for the state or the county, or city, who say they are there to help and to do the things that need to be done, to make YOUR life better, and easier, but it seems, they actually hate doing their job, and doing what is expected of them, to actually make YOUR life easier.

Public unions have been taking money for as long as they have been in existence. And they aren’t always good. In fact, having been in two different unions, I pretty much despise them, and find they serve no real purpose. At one point and time, they were required, business owners were too busy taking all the profit, and making the workers have deplorable working conditions. That is a sad fact of our history, and unions brought things to a better understanding to those in the work force, as to what should be right for the worker.

Now of course we have the NFLPA, National Football League Players Association, who are demanding half of the profits up front. Not taking into consideration that out of the profits that the owners have to pay salaries for players, coaches, front office, stadium up keep, etc. No, they just want the cash, and they make plenty of it to start with. How would T.O. Chad Johnson, or Peyton Manning do working at McDonalds, 8 dollars an hour?

Well, as I was looking up the cost of public unions, and how they suck so much money out of a state budget, because you have to promise people that you will take care of their retirement needs, after giving them a decent paycheck to start with. So, with a longer life expectancy, those benefits go for a long time…

And they take away from other areas that are needed, like Mental Health Care. Like the care that the shooter in Tucson should have had, should have been forced into getting.

So, as I was looking into all of this, ready to just slaughter unions for their existence, I asked a friend of mine who teaches psychology, and was a clinician for over 20 years, and asked if my premise had legs. He said NO! That isn’t the real problem; the real problem exists because we, the general public, don’t know what can be done to get people the help. We don’t know what to do when we see someone going around the bend, to get them help.

I was asked if I knew how to get someone help here in the place that I live, and I said no. I know how to in California, call a peace officer, tell them someone is going off the deep end, and they can call a 5150. That is an automatic 72 observation in a mental facility. And that fact has been known even BEFORE Van Halen put out an album with that as the name, 5150.

So, that kind of killed the rant in mid rant. As much as the liberals want to say it is wrong for people to have firearms, which is a right, 2^nd Amendment, and they continue with the attitude and name calling that incites people to wonder who they think they are, we as a nation need to look to those who fall in between the cracks in our society. Those who seem to be talking to themselves, which IS preferable to talking to a liberal, but those who talk to walls, which has a higher I.Q. then MOST liberals, but you the reader know who I am referring to, you see them on the street, at a Burger King, sitting alone, thinking that no one cares. We as a nation need to show that we do care. We need to show love, as Jesus shows us love, concern for one another. We ARE our brothers’ keepers, and can’t keep dumping it on other people.

Take time to meet someone who looks a little off, show some kindness to someone who kind of scares you, take that chance, that step to show that there are people out there who are willing to stand up and help those who fall flat, and think there is no way out.

If someone had done that in Tucson, they could have seen that there was someone in trouble, and found a way to get them help. And there wouldn’t have been a 9/11 child who didn’t get to see her 10^th birthday.

I challenge the readers of Reformed Seth to find out in your towns, states, countries, what needs to be done to get someone the help that they need. Take that step, be that person, be to others how you would like them to be to you.

These are my thoughts, and how Mark C’s it.

Objections to the moral argument. Reasonable Faith question

Reasonable Faith's Question of the Week, #199, is Objections to the Moral Argument.

Question:

Hello Dr. Craig,

I attended your debate with Dr. Williamson at the University of Saskatchewan last night, and I was surprised to hear you use the example of child rape being universally viewed as wrong as evidence of objective morality coming from God. This is not to say that I disagree with you that child rape should be universally condemned - of course I do - but if you are to say that objective morality comes from God, and if, as a Christian, you believe that the Bible is the revealed word of God, as you seem to regarding the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, then how do you find child rape so abhorrent when there is nothing in the Bible condemning it? Indeed, Deuteronomy 22:28-29 NLT says that if a woman (regardless of age) is raped, the rapist must pay her father 50 silvers and marry the woman, which hardly seems a punishment to the rapist. This, of course, excludes engaged women, for whom the punishment for being raped is death if they don't cry for help (Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB). The only instance in which it is only the rapist who is punished is if the victim is engaged (possible but not likely if they are a child), and they cry for help (again, a child would very likely be intimidated into not calling for help, and therefore, by Biblical law, be killed). This is of course to say nothing regarding the sexual abuse of male children, for whom it seems that Leviticus 20:13 would dictate that a molested boy be put to death for the crime of being a rape victim. Therefore, your objection to child rape can not come from the Bible. Therefore, how can you argue that this sense of pedophilia's objective immorality, as well as the sense of the immorality of other acts that the Bible does not discuss, comes from God? If it is due to the personal experience of God achieved by opening your heart, as you argued in the debate, what of those of us who have not been fortunate enough to receive this personal relationship with God, but are still morally repulsed by pedophilia?

Thank you,

Spencer
Canada


Dr. Craig responds:

I’m glad you came to the debate, Spencer (though the tone of your question leads me to think you were cheering for the other side!). It was a substantive and entertaining exchange, wasn’t it?

I’m afraid that you’ve seriously misunderstood me, Spencer. Here’s the moral argument for God that I defended:

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

The argument is logically valid; so if you want to deny the conclusion, you must reject one of the two premisses. So which one do you deny? Although you present your reservations as worries about (2), it’s evident that you agree that (2) is true, for you say not only that you are “morally repulsed” by child rape, but that you think “child rape should be universally condemned.” I agree. So if you deny that God exists, you must reject (1). But do you reject (1)? There’s nothing in your letter that suggests that you do.

So how am I to understand your worries? Perhaps as follows: you’re wondering what warrant there is for affirming (2). You seem to think that the justification I offer for (2) is biblical revelation, which you think is inadequate as a justification for (2). If this is not your concern, then I simply don’t understand your worry.

But it should be obvious that this worry is wholly unfounded. I never appealed to biblical revelation as a justification for affirming (2). On the contrary, Spencer, I affirm (2) for probably the same reasons you do! As I put it in my opening speech, “In moral experience we apprehend a realm of moral values and duties that impose themselves upon us. There’s no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world.” I like the way Louise Anthony put it in our debate of the foundations of morality: “Any argument for moral scepticism will based upon premises which are less obvious than the existence of objective moral values themselves.” Hence, moral scepticism can never be justified.

Spencer, you show that you have completely missed the thrust of my argument when you go on to ask, “how can you argue that this sense of pedophilia's objective immorality, as well as the sense of the immorality of other acts that the Bible does not discuss, comes from God?” It was no part of my argument that God is necessary to explain our moral sense of right and wrong, good and evil. Over and over again in the debate I carefully distinguished between moral ontology (questions about the reality of moral values) and moral epistemology (questions about how we come to know moral values), and I said that my argument is solely about the objective reality of moral values, not how we come to know them. I’ll appeal to all the same mechanisms that you appeal to in order to explain how you know that (2) is true. In point of fact, Spencer, I don’t think that we need to appeal to God at all to know that objective moral values and duties exist, so you’re just barking up the wrong tree insofar as I’m concerned.

As for the personal experience of God, you’re conflating the moral argument with my sixth point in the debate that we can know that God exists wholly apart from arguments through personally experiencing him. I do not believe, nor did I suggest, that a personal experience of God is the way one comes to know that (2) is true. Nor, for that matter, did I suggest, as you intimate, that the justification for (2) is universal consent.

So since I don’t appeal to the Bible as justification for (2), why is all this stuff about Old Testament ethics crowding into the discussion? You say that my argument regarding (the resurrection of) Jesus shows my belief in the Bible as the revealed Word of God. Again, Spencer, you’ve failed to understand that my argument regarding the historical credibility of Jesus of Nazareth treats the New Testament documents as we would any ordinary historical documents, not as revealed, much less inerrant. You’re wholly off track here. My argument neither presupposed nor sought to prove that the records of Jesus’ life were anything more than ordinary, fallible records of antiquity, which are reliable, at least, with respect to the three facts I mentioned.

At most, then, your argument from the inadequacies of Old Testament ethics would call into question the infallibility of the Old Testament, which is just irrelevant to the cogency of the case I presented for Christian theism.

But do your examples even do that? The immorality of rape is immediately given in the seventh of the Ten Commandments “You shall not commit adultery.” Any sexual intercourse outside the bounds of marriage is proscribed by the Bible. So rape is always regarded as immoral in the Bible. That puts a quite different perspective on things. What your complaint really is is that the penalties for rape in the passages you cite seem unduly lenient. You think that the criminal laws against rape needed to be even stronger than they were in ancient Israel. Well, maybe you’re right. What does that prove? There’s no claim that Israel’s laws were perfect or adequately expressed God’s moral will. Jesus himself regarded the Mosaic law on divorce as inadequate and failing to capture God’s ideal will for marriage (Matthew 5.31-2). Maybe the same was true for rape laws. Israel’s criminal statutes were not timeless truths for all societies but were intended for Israel at a certain specific time in its history. Moreover, these statutes are examples of case law: if such-and-such happens, then do so-and-so. These were idealizations which served as guides and might admit all sorts of exceptions and mitigating circumstances (like a child’s being afraid to cry for help).

In any case, Spencer, how much effort have you really made to understand these laws in the cultural context of the ancient Near East? None at all, I suspect; you probably got these passages from some free-thought publication or website and repeat them here with little attempt to understand them. By contrast, Paul Copan in his Is God a Moral Monster? (Baker: 2010) deals with these passages in their historical context, thereby shedding light on their meaning (pp. 118-119). Copan observes that there are three cases considered here:

1. Consensual sex between a man and a woman who is engaged to another man, which was a violation of marriage (Deuteronomy 22.23). Both parties were to be executed. 2. Rape of a woman who is engaged to another man (Deuteronomy 22.25). Only the rapist is executed; the woman is an innocent victim. 3. Seduction of a young woman who is not engaged to another man (Deuteronomy 22.28; cf. Exodus 22.16-17). The seducer is obliged to marry the young woman and provide for her, if she will have him; otherwise her father may refuse him and demand payment of the usual bridal gift (rather like a dowry) anyway.

In short, rape was a capital crime in ancient Israel. As for Leviticus 20.13, this verse prescribes the death penalty for consensual sexual intercourse between two men; that you interpret this passage to condemn a child who is assaulted by a pedophile only shows how tendentious your exegesis is.

If anything, then, the Bible is far stricter in its laws concerning sexual behavior than we are today. So even though appeal to the Bible is no part of my argument for (2), what the Bible teaches about the immorality of rape is right in line with my claim that objective moral values and duties exist.

Reasonable Faith has many more resources than the question of the week. If you sign up (it's hassle free) you can receive newsletters from William Lane Craig delivered to your inbox, scholarly and popular level articles, discussion board, and much more. Check out Reasonable Faith and start learning.

Glee, God, and Unsupported Faith...

DISCLAIMER: The following viewpoints are not those of the blogger, but a friend of his. If this point of view upsets you, you may vent, but don’t yell at the person who posted them. Start a discussion, express and opinion, but don’t yell at the person who didn’t write it, that is just senseless… These writings are the intellectual property of me, the Author, with permission granted to the blogger who is positing them. They may not be reposted or used in any form without express written consent by either myself or the blogger of Reformed Seth.

Glee, God and Unsupported Faith…

It might surprise some people that I am a huge fan of Glee. For those who don’t know, Glee is a show on Fox that shows the trials and tribulations of a group of singers who want to be accepted by the general populace, and to fit in with each other.

I was in choir in high school, and in theater also, and I’m straight. I can relate to the crap they take from outside the group, as we were called ‘Choir Fairies’ ‘Choir Fags’ all because we wore robes. Of course, with the average height of our Baritone/Bass section being over 6 feet, they only would say things if one of us were alone and there were at least 3 of them.

Well, on the episode of Glee that I write about, three episodes ago, one of the characters, Finn, made a Grilled Cheese Sandwich that had a little burnt part that looked like Jesus, he called it Cheesus.

Finn was not a person of faith, but thought that God was talking to him, or showing an interest in him, and he started asking questions, wanting to have faith, even praying to Cheesus to make him Quarterback of the football team again, so he could be popular as he had been before, and when he does achieve that goal, then he thinks that Cheesus is all powerful

On a secondary plot, the Openly Homosexual, Kurt, has a crisis when his father has a stroke. Now Kurt, of course has NO FAITH what so ever, because in his world, all Christians can’t handle that he is homosexual, which of course isn’t true, in the Glee Universe, or in real life.

So, Finn is trying to find God, and Kurt is pissed off because people want to be there for him, and he pushes them away, because God can’t be real, at least to him. Even when he comes to his father’s room, and he friends are around his father, praying for him, of all faiths, Jewish, Christian, Catholic, Buddhist, Kurt dismisses them all, kicking them out of his father’s room, because if God can’t love him for who he is, then God can’t be real.

So, then we get Sue, who hates the Glee club, see them as a drain on useful things in life, like being a Cheer-io, the cheerleader coach. Jane Lynch is wonderful as the Cheerleader Coach, and is brought in to dissuade people for expecting God to be there, to answer prayers, to actually care about US, because her prayers weren’t answered when she prayed for her older sister to be healed, from having autism, and because she wasn’t, God isn’t real.

So, Sue gets Kurt to stop believing in Cheesus, Mercedes invites Kurt to her church, where he sees that there are people who accept him as who he is, or has decided to be, and Sue finds out from her sister, that she never wanted to be ‘normal’ but was happy the way that she is.

Well, to me, this really does mimic so much of life, in its real course.

Finn, instead of finding someone, including his friends, to confide to, thinks he has all the answers, and then gets his new found faith crushed by one who doesn’t believe in God, due to her ‘prayers’ not being answered, as instead of seeing how God can work through people who might be different then the norm.

Kurt discovers that not all Christians are out to condemn him, to hurt him, to stone him, but that there are those who will accept him. Because we do not, in anyway shape or form have the right to judge others. We may disagree with their choices, but they are the ones who have to answer to God in the end. We can share the love of God that we have received, we can disagree with the way they chose to live their lives, but we cannot judge them for it.

Now let’s take this to real life and how our high schools seem to be. Had there been someone allowed in the high schools to talk to Finn about his new found faith, he would have found that there really is a God who answers prayers, and that it isn’t about false idols, but about faith in things unseen, but hoped for. Catholics, to me, have a problem in burning candles to Saints, and the virgin Mary, when all they were are people, and it turns their eyes away from God, and onto things that don’t matter.

Had Kurt not allowed his heart to be hardened against a loving God, because Kurt pigeon holes all Christians as being the same, then he would have been open to hear the true message of God and Jesus.

And in real life, who knows, maybe that is what should happen, to those who are so lost in high school. People are so freaked out by those who profess faith, they bag on those who show faith, attack those who want to help, and turn to people who want to stop them from seeing God, and that faith TAKES faith, and it isn’t always an easy answer, and sometimes the answer is no, but that in the end, it is up to you and a relationship with God that will determine your path.

Glee is a wonderful program, and boy do they make the bucks off of the soundtracks, which they push each week after the shows, but the writing is wonderful, showing how hard it is for those who are different to fit in during the high school years. I know I had a hard time because of my faith, and I don’t push it on anyone, but have always been willing to share it with those who want to know.

These are my thoughts, and how Mark C’s it.

More information on these topics:

William Lane Craig answers the question, "Christian homosexuals?" here.

God and Tragedy by Greg Koukl here.