The Euthyphro dilemma

John W. Loftus said:

“When it comes to the Euthyphro Dilemma, I've already answered both your objections and Frame's objections here, even though what I wrote was before I looked at anything you wrote. What do you say in response to what I wrote? Come on. Give it a try. Your whole apologetical strategy is at stake.”

Several false opening moves:

i) TAG is not my “whole apologetic strategy.”

ii) Even if it were, TAG is primarily concerned with epistemology, not ethics. What precondition must obtain for knowledge to obtain? That’s the core argument.

Even if a Van Tilian had no answer to the Euthyphro dilemma, that would hardly scuttle the appeal to TAG.

It’s possible to mount a transcendental argument for ethics. But TAG is not dependent on that extension.

“I'll read your response and see where it goes from there, okay? But your attempts are already doomed to failure.”

Sounds like something the Borg would say: “Resistance is futile!”

Unfortunately for Loftus, the prospect of being assimilated to Seven-of-Nine in a cat-suit has compensatory benefits for which John Loftus is a sorry substitute.

So if Loftus wants to tempt me over to the dark side, Mephistopheles will need to sweeten the deal.

“Would you be willing to give up presuppositional apologetics if I can show you wrong here?”

Since I’ve never been a chemically pure Van Tilian, I don’t know which component of my apologetic apparatus he thinks is vulnerable.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/02/transcendental-theism.html

“And if it's a stalemate between us, you still lose, because you can only be sure of your faith to the same degree as you can defend your position on the Euthyphro.”

This goes awry on several grounds:

i) Even if I had no answer to the Euthyphro dilemma, I can have many reasons for believing in God irrespective of the Euthyphro dilemma.

The better part of wisdom lies in learning to distinguish between the answers we can live without and the answers we cannot live without.

ii) You act as if I enjoy direct control over my level of certitude. As if I had a knob or dial that I could manipulate to raise or lower my level of certitude at will.

But my faith is not adjustable. It simply is. It doesn’t come to me in degrees. I can know more quantify my faith in God than I can quantify my belief in the external world, or other minds.

iii) In doing apologetics we try to analyze the rational grounds for our faith. To tease tacit knowledge out into the open.

And this can be done up to a point. But I agree with Cardinal Newman about the illative sense. We know more than we can ever say or ever prove.

Apologetics can only scratch the surface. There’s a whole dimension of religious experience that remains in reserve because it’s essentially private rather than public. Something accessible to an insider rather than an outsider.

As to what he wrote, most of it consists in a false dilemma which I already exposed in my critique of Russell. So I’ll confine myself to a mopping up operation:

“It does no good to step back behind the commands of God to God’s purported nature at all. For we’d still want to know whether or not God’s nature is good. God cannot be known to be good here either, without a standard of goodness that shows he is good. For unless there is standard that shows God is good beyond the mere fact that God declares that his nature is good, we still don’t know whether God is good.”

i) Notice how Loftus is shifting ground. This is not the Euthyphro dilemma. The Euthyphro dilemma is concerned with the ontological question of what makes something right or wrong, not the epistemic question of how we can know something is right or wrong.

ii) Loftus is diverting attention away from the order of being to the order of knowing. That’s a bait-and-switch tactic.

And it doesn’t even work at that level. Suppose we judge the goodness of God by our moral intuitions. Okay, but what’s the source and standard of our moral intuitions? All Loftus has done is to push the original question back a step.

“Furthermore, we usually call someone good when they make good choices. So an additional question here is whether or not God has ever made any good choices. To choose means there were alternatives to choose from. Did God at any point in the past ever choose his supposedly good nature?”

A moral agent doesn’t choose his moral character for the obvious reason that he chooses according to his moral character. His character is a precondition of choice, not a consequence of choice. Otherwise, he would be amoral.

“Besides, there are several ethical systems of thought that do not require a prior belief in God, like Social Contract Theories, Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics, Kantianism, and John Rawls’ theory of justice.”

That’s beside the point. The question at issue is not whether there are secular alternatives on the market, but whether these are successful alternatives to Christian ethics.

“Even Christian philosopher Thomas V. Morris admits that…”

We need to distinguish between opinion and argument. Even if Loftus could quote a Christian whose opinion agrees with his, that’s not the same thing an argument. The question at issue is what supporting argument underwrites the opinion.

Continuing with Morris:

“It has…been argued in various ways over the past century that the evolutionary process somehow provides a framework of moral reference. Basic human instincts could be cited as loci for the moral constraints needed in society. The physical, survival, functional needs of men in society or community could act as moral matrices for the guiding of moral motions…there are many possible bases or explanations for moral motions in an impersonal universe. They could easily have arisen from evolutionary or community survival needs, for example, and consequently, when identified as a human ‘aspiration,’ the practice of making moral distinctions could be said to be ‘fulfilled’ when it is successfully functional within those contexts.”

i) Notice that Morris is summarizing one version of secular ethics. That doesn’t mean he agrees with evolutionary ethics.

ii) The argument begs the question. If and only if the survival of the human species is good can you then mount a utilitarian argument for the common good.

But why would a secularist say the survival of our species is good? Appealing to instinct will hardly suffice, for that either begs the question or pushes the question back a step. Is this a good instinct or a bad instinct?

“Even if Christians did have objective moral standards, they cannot be objectively certain that they know them, or that they know how they apply to specific real life cases!”

i) Assuming that this is true, so what? This isn’t generated by the Euthyphro dilemma? This isn’t generating the Euthyphro dilemma.

ii) Why should this be a necessary condition of moral valuation? To quote something that Dr. Anderson said in another context: “Loftus seems to be assuming that S's knowing p entails that p is indubitable for S or incorrigible for S. But why think that? Why should Calvinists (or anyone else) be committed to such an implausible Cartesianism?

iii) Within Calvinism, God’s preceptive will doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Rather, his preceptive will works in conjunction with his general and special providence.

“Since Dr. Craig earlier mentioned Hitler, Auschwitz, and Dachau in his apologetics book, consider this response: Germany was a Christian nation—the heart of the Lutheran Protestant Reformation! How could a Christian people allow these evil deeds to happen and even be his willing executioners?”

Several things go wrong here:

i) This is irrelevant to the Euthyphro dilemma.

ii) It is also unresponsive to Craig’s reasoning: “If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint.…”

How does the failure of the church in Germany undermine the logic of Craig’s observation?

iii) Loftus fails to distinguish between Christian theology and Christian ethics. It’s perfectly consistent with Christian theology for Christians to be morally inconsistent. Christians are sinners. Christian theology consistently predicts that Christians will be inconsistent with their code of conduct.

iv) Luther was a notorious anti-Semite. That’s obviously unscriptural given the Jewish character of the Bible.

v) The Christian character of Germany was first eroded by the Enlightenment, and further eroded by Darwinism, higher criticism, and the like.

vi) In a country where you had mass infant baptism, whether Lutheran or Catholic, the room for nominal religious affiliation is enormous.

vii) Christians have prior social obligations and concentric social obligations. We should care for our neighbor, but a Christian father also has an obligation to care for his family, and, given a choice, his familial obligations take precedence over neighbor-love.

Finally, a couple of the Christian commenters over at DC scored direct hits:

At 12:53 AM, January 31, 2006, Genius said...

I think your approach the divine command theory involves a flawed approach to the world.

Lets say water is wet. Is it wet because it is water or is it water because it is wet? This is a nonsense question - furthermore it is a nonsense thought experiment to consider non-wet water (ok there might be wet stuff that is not water but that just points out the lack of perfection of the example).

From this perspective in a sense it is nonsense to propose, "if god was not benevolent would you support him" question has a practical implication because you believe it is fundamentally untrue.

I.e. the higher standard and God's standard are fundamentally the same neither is "created" by the other any more than water is created by wetness.

Or more clearly it is a bit like saying if 1+1=2 does the 2 create 1+1 or does 1+1 create 2?

At 9:57 AM, February 03, 2006, Jeremy Pierce said...

This last point is worth paying attention to. The problems raised in Euthyphro-like questions can be raised about any meta-ethical view. If morality is based, for instance, on whatever rational people would agree to follow if they were concerned only about self-interest (which many contemporary social contract theorists of morality believe), then we have to ask a Euthyphro-like question. Is it good merely because rationally self-interested people would prefer it, or would they prefer it because it's good? The same line of questioning could very easily be raised about any meta-ethical grounding for ethics.