The naturalistic fallacy

***QUOTE***

Jim said:

Steve,

Interesting post. However, I don't think that it applies in every case of an atheologian's use of the "problem of evil."

Usually the a-theologian will claim that "evil happens" (therefore there is no God) and your criticism would apply. However, he doesn't NEED to do this to formulate an argument. All he needs to state is that "'evil' - as a theist would define it - exists" while maintaining a relativist position, and he could sidestep your objection.

BTW - I believe your criticism of George is accurate - he is clearly appalled by the actions he posits. But what if he formulated his argument by saying that the THEIST should see these things as evil - even though he views them reserved nonprescriptive stance?

***END-QUOTE***

Jim,

Good questions.

1.Yes, it is possible for a moral relativist to mount a purely internal critique of the Christian faith.

Since, however, George and Sam Harris are clearly including their own moral intuitions in the way they frame the problem of evil against Christianity, I didn’t bother to address your example.

2.But let’s play along with your example a little further. A moral relativist can press the problem of evil against Christian theism, but he will pay a price.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that he’s successful in showing that the problem of evil disproves the existence of the Christian God. What has he accomplished?

As a moral relativist, he doesn’t think it’s wrong to hold false beliefs. So even if the Christian faith were a false belief-system, there would be nothing morally objectionable, from his viewpoint, about continuing to adhere to the Christian faith.

So his victory would be a Pyrrhic victory.

***QUOTE***

George said:

“I don’t have to do any such thing, I just have to point to what theists consider evil, and show that their myriad gods are doing nothing to stop it.”

There are a couple problems with this claim:

i) Yes, you can point to events which a Christian would regard as evil. But that’s not enough to make an internal case against the Christian.

Rather, you need to point to events which a Christian would regard as gratuitous evils.

ii) To say that God is doing nothing to stop evil is fatally ambiguous.

It’s true that God doesn’t prevent every evil. But by common grace, he prevents many evils.

And in terms of Christian eschatology, there will be a day of reckoning.

“Most theists don’t want to die, or have their loved ones die slow painful deaths from diseases. Thus, they pray to their gods to intervene and provide a supernatural cure for these illnesses.”

This does nothing to disprove Christian theism. Christian theology doesn’t deny the existence of death and disease.

And prayer is not unconditional in Scripture.

For you to successfully mount an internal critique of the Christian faith based on the problem of evil, you need to cite phenomena inconsistent with Christian theology.

Your anecdotal examples don’t achieve that objective.

“Yet these alleged caring gods who allegedly ‘intelligently designed’ these killer viruses and cancers, don’t cure theists, or Reformed Protestant Christians, with any greater frequency than Buddhists or humanists or atheists.”

All you’ve done is to frame a straw man argument.

1.If some Christians labor under the misimpression that God will answer every prayer, the fact that their false expectations will be disappointeed does nothing to falsify the Christian faith. To falsify a false belief does nothing to falsify a true belief.

George, you need to try a little harder to be logical. You are letting your emotionalism get the better of the argument.

2.Also, I expect that Christians are healed at a higher rate than Buddhists or humanists or atheists.

“Again, if you want to claim that your god wants a little 12 year old Christian girl, to die a slow, painful death of cancer, and have her parents and her whole church, racked with anquish, as their prayers to this god go unanswered, that’s fine. I'm sure it can all be rationalized as "god's plan". But please don’t pretend that this god ‘cares’ about the welfare of this little girl or her family in this life and this world.”

Again, George, you’re substituting hysteria for reason. As Paul Helm has stated:

“There is no reason to think that God intends the details of the universe separately; there is one divine will, which encompasses all events. It would be fallacious to suppose that the divine attitude is the same with respect to every detail of what god wills…As Aquinas put it, ‘God, and nature, and indeed, every causal agent, does what is best overall, but not what is best in every part, except when the part is regarded in its relationship to the whole.’ We may suppose that when God knowingly and willingly permits certain events he does so in furtherance of some wider consideration wholly consistent with his character with respect to which they are a logically necessary condition. And likewise, some of those things which he causes are means to some further end,” J. Beilby & P. Eddy, eds. Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views (IVP 2001), 182.

“Your gods, as usual, are nowhere in sight.”

You are falling into a fallacious all-or-nothing argument. The fact that God doesn’t intervene every time doesn’t mean that God doesn’t intervene anytime.

Once again, try to be rational about this.

“As far as your cliché strawman that I can’t critique your invisible god’s impotence, in the face of the death and destruction of his loyal followers, ‘without an external standard of comparison’. I believe if I commissioned a poll, most Christians would agree that they don’t want to die slow, painful, premature deaths. Nor do they want their children to. And I believe the same poll would show most of these Christians believe they can petition the Christian god to change the course of events should they be stricken with a deadly disease. They may even say that there god is ‘watching out for them’ or perhaps he has assigned an angel the task, or some such superstition.”

This is not an internal critique of the Christian belief-system. Every step of the way you fail to make good on your stated claim.

The fact that some churchgoers get their theology from “Touched By An Angel” rather than the Bible is irrelevant to the coherence of Christian theism.

“I’m not sure who told you that naturalists can’t believe that certain human behaviors are atrocious or gratutious or even ‘evil’ without the benefit on your three headed Hebrew tribal deity. But I assure you, you’re wrong. Just because someone accepts the universe and natural world for what it is, and perhaps can even identify the causes of disease or violent tendencies in certain humans, doesn’t mean we surrender our value judgments of what we believe is good or right behavior.”

If you are a naturalist, then where are you getting your value judgments if not from the natural world? So why are you so disapproving of what you seen around you? For a naturalist you’re pretty ill-adapted to your natural surroundings.

“No, the ‘problem of evil’ only exists when there is an allegedly omnipotent god that could prevent evil...but doesn't, for unknown reasons that theists like to rationalize.”

This is a simple-minded caricature of the problem. The fact that God doesn’t prevent every instance of evil, here and now, is not a defeater for Christian theism.

Also, the fact that we may not know why every individual evil takes place does not mean that we are in the dark regarding the general role of evil in a Christian theodicy.

“Perhaps you are the kind of theist who upon witnessing a rape, thinks ‘I’d better not do anything to stop it, I’m sure my personal god has a good reason for allowing this evil to occur.’

This is false with respect to the preceptive and decretive will of God alike. Rape is a sin. Rape is contrary to God’s moral law for man.

Conversely, if God had decreed me not to intervene, then I’d be unable to intervene. If I’m able to intervene, then my intervention does not run counter to his decretive will.

***QUOTE***

I thought I explained that in my reply. That's a really nasty fallacy spread by theists, in order to distract from any argument, that has a moral component. Theists, especially Muslims and Christians, certainly don't have the patent on human morality. Nor do their alleged killer gods.

If you want to argue with me over rape being wrong, thats fine. If you agree its wrong, please don't pretend we don't share that same moral standard, in an effort to sidetrack the main discussion.

"Rape" is wrong by definition. The value judgment is contained in its definition. Just like it is in the word murder.

***END-QUOTE***

There are a couple of basic problems with this reply:

1.The association of moral relativism with secular humanism isn’t a malicious rumor spread by Christians.

It was Hume who brought up the is-ought problem. It was Moore who brought up the naturalistic fallacy.

Various unbelievers subscribe to some version or another of moral antirealism, whether emotivism, non-cognitivism, social constructivism, cultural relativism, descriptive relativism, &c.

These debates crop up all the time in varieties of evolutionary ethics, such as social Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology.

For an overview, cf.:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/evol-eth.htm

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/

And this is applied to cases of rape. Consider academic studies such as:

A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (MIT 2000)
by Randy Thornhill, Craig T. Palmer, Margo I. Wilson

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Mariner Books 1997)
by Dale Peterson, Richard Wrangham

Or consider the following exchange between Bertrand Russell and Fr. Copleston:

***QUOTE***

R: You see, I feel that some things are good and that other things are bad. I love the things that are good, that I think are good, and I hate the things that I think are bad. I don't say that these things are good because they participate in the Divine goodness.

C: Yes, but what's your justification for distinguishing between good and bad or how do you view the distinction between them?

R: I don't have any justification any more than I have when I distinguish between blue and yellow. What is my justification for distinguishing between blue and yellow? I can see they are different.

C: Well, that is an excellent justification, I agree. You distinguish blue and yellow by seeing them, so you distinguish good and bad by what faculty?

R: By my feelings.

C: By your feelings. Well, that's what I was asking. You think that good and evil have reference simply to feeling?

R: Well, why does one type of object look yellow and another look blue? I can more or less give an answer to that thanks to the physicists, and as to why I think one sort of thing good and another evil, probably there is an answer of the same sort, but it hasn't been gone into in the same way and I couldn't give it [to] you.

C: Well, let's take the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen. That appears to you as undesirable and evil and to me too. To Adolf Hitler we suppose it appeared as something good and desirable, I suppose you’d have to admit that for Hitler it was good and for you it is evil.

R: No, I shouldn't quite go so far as that. I mean, I think people can make mistakes in that as they can in other things. If you have jaundice you see things yellow that are not yellow. You're making a mistake.

C: Yes, one can make mistakes, but can you make a mistake if it’s simply a question of reference to a feeling or emotion? Surely Hitler would be the only possible judge of what appealed to his emotions.

R: It would be quite right to say that it appealed to his emotions, but you can say various things about that among others, that if that sort of thing makes that sort of appeal to Hitler's emotions, then Hitler makes quite a different appeal to my emotions.

C: Granted. But there's no objective criterion outside feeling then for condemning the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen, in your view?

R: No more than there is for the color-blind person who's in exactly the same state. Why do we intellectually condemn the color-blind man? Isn't it because he's in the minority?

C: I would say because he is lacking in a thing which normally belongs to human nature.

R: Yes, but if he were in the majority, we shouldn't say that.

C: Then you'd say that there's no criterion outside feeling that will enable one to distinguish between the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen and the behavior, say, of Sir Stafford Cripps or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

R: The feeling is a little too simplified. You've got to take account of the effects of actions and your feelings toward those effects. You see, you can have an argument about it if you can say that certain sorts of occurrences are the sort you like and certain others the sort you don’t like. Then you have to take account of the effects of actions. You can very well say that the effects of the actions of the Commandant of Belsen were painful and unpleasant.

C: They certainly were, I agree, very painful and unpleasant to all the people in the camp.

R: Yes, but not only to the people in the camp, but to outsiders contemplating them also.

C: Yes, quite true in imagination. But that's my point. I don’t approve of them, and I know you don't approve of them, but I don't see what ground you have for not approving of them, because after all, to the Commandant of Belsen himself, they're pleasant, those actions.

R: Yes, but you see I don't need any more ground in that case than I do in the case of color perception. There are some people who think everything is yellow, there are people suffering from jaundice, and I don’t agree with these people. I can't prove that the things are not yellow, there isn't any proof, but most people agree with him that they’re not yellow, and most people agree with me that the Commandant of Belsen was making mistakes.

C: Well, do you accept any moral obligation?

R: Well, I should have to answer at considerable length to answer that. Practically speaking -- yes. Theoretically speaking I should have to define moral obligation rather carefully.

C: Well, do you think that the word "ought" simply has an emotional connotation?

R: No, I don't think that, because you see, as I was saying a moment ago, one has to take account of the effects, and I think right conduct is that which would probably produce the greatest possible balance in intrinsic value of all the acts possible in the circumstances, and you’ve got to take account of the probable effects of your action in considering what is right.

C: Well, I brought in moral obligation because I think that one can approach the question of God's existence in that way. The vast majority of the human race will make, and always have made, some distinction between right and wrong. The vast majority I think has some consciousness of an obligation in the moral sphere. It's my opinion that the perception of values and the consciousness of moral law and obligation are best explained through the hypothesis of a transcendent ground of value and of an author of the moral law. I do mean by "author of the moral law" an arbitrary author of the moral law. I think, in fact, that those modern atheists who have argued in a converse way "there is no God; therefore, there are no absolute values and no absolute law," are quite logical.

R: I don't like the word "absolute." I don't think there is anything absolute whatever. The moral law, for example, is always changing. At one period in the development of the human race, almost everybody thought cannibalism was a duty.

C: Well, I don't see that differences in particular moral judgments are any conclusive argument against the universality of the moral law. Let's assume for the moment that there are absolute moral values, even on that hypothesis it's only to be expected that different individuals and different groups should enjoy varying degrees of insight into those values.

R: I'm inclined to think that "ought," the feeling that one has about "ought" is an echo of what has been told one by one's parents or one's nurses.

C: Well, I wonder if you can explain away the idea of the "ought" merely in terms of nurses and parents. I really don’t see how it can be conveyed to anybody in other terms than itself. It seems to be that if there is a moral order bearing upon the human conscience, that that moral order is unintelligible apart from the existence of God.

R: Then you have to say one or other of two things. Either God only speaks to a very small percentage of mankind -- which happens to include yourself -- or He deliberately says things are not true in talking to the consciences of savages.

C: Well, you see, I'm not suggesting that God actually dictates moral precepts to the conscience. The human being's ideas of the content of the moral law depends entirely to a large extent on education and environment, and a man has to use his reason in assessing the validity of the actual moral ideas of his social group. But the possibility of criticizing the accepted moral code presupposes that there is an objective standard, and there is an ideal moral order, which imposes itself (I mean the obligatory character of which can be recognized). I think that the recognition of this ideal moral order is part of the recognition of contingency. It implies the existence of a real foundation of God.

R: But the lawgiver has always been, it seems to me, one's parents or someone like. There are plenty of terrestrial lawgivers to account for it, and that would explain why people's consciences are so amazingly different in different times and places.

C: It helps to explain differences in the perception of particular moral values, which otherwise are inexplicable. It will help to explain changes in the matter of the moral law in the content of the precepts as accepted by this or that nation, or this or that individual. But the form of it, what Kant calls the categorical imperative, the "ought," I really don't see how that can possibly be conveyed to anybody by nurse or parent because there aren't any possible terms, so far as I can see, with which it can be explained. It can't be defined in other terms than itself, because once you've defined it in other terms than itself you've explained it away. It's no longer a moral "ought." It's something else.

R: Well, I think the sense of "ought" is the effect of somebody’s imagined disapproval, it may be God's imagined disapproval, but it's somebody's imagined disapproval. And I think that is what is meant by "ought."

C: It seems to me to be external customs and taboos and things of that sort which can most easily be explained simply through environment and education, but all that seems to me to belong to what I call the matter of the law, the content. The idea of the "ought" as such can never be conveyed to a man by the tribal chief or by anybody else, because there are no other terms in which it could be conveyed. It seems to me entirely....

R: But I don't see any reason to say that -- I mean we all know about conditioned reflexes. We know that an animal, if punished habitually for a certain sort of act, after a time will refrain. I don't think the animal refrains from arguing within himself, "Master will be angry if I do this." He has a feeling that that's not the thing to do. That's what we can do with ourselves and nothing more.

C: I see no reason to suppose that an animal has a consciousness or moral obligation; and we certainly don't regard an animal as morally responsible for his acts of disobedience. But a man has a consciousness of obligation and of moral values. I see no reason to suppose that one could condition all men as one can "condition" an animal, and I don't suppose you'd really want to do so even if one could. If "behaviorism" were true, there would be no objective moral distinction between the emperor Nero and St. Francis of Assisi. I can’t help feeling, Lord Russell, you know, that you regard the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen as morally reprehensible, and that you yourself would never under any circumstances act in that way, even if you thought, or had reason to think, that possibly the balance of the happiness of the human race might be increased through some people being treated in that abominable manner.

R: No. I wouldn't imitate the conduct of a mad dog. The fact that I wouldn’t do it doesn't really bear on this question we're discussing.

C: No, but if you were making a utilitarian explanation of right and wrong in terms of consequences, it might be held, and I suppose some of the Nazis of the better type would have held that although it’s lamentable to have to act in this way, yet the balance in the long run leads to greater happiness. I don't think you'd say that, would you? I think you'd say that sort of action is wrong -- and in itself, quite apart from whether the general balance of happiness is increased or not. Then, if you're prepared to say that, then I think you must have some criterion of feeling, at any rate. To me, that admission would ultimately result in the admission of an ultimate ground of value in God.

R: I think we are perhaps getting into confusion. It is not direct feeling about the act by which I should judge, but rather a feeling as to the effects. And I can't admit any circumstances in which certain kinds of behavior, such as you have been discussing, would do good. I can’t imagine circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect. I think the persons who think they do are deceiving themselves. But if there were circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect, then I might be obliged, however reluctantly, to say -- "Well, I don't like these things, but I will acquiesce in them," just as I acquiesce in the Criminal Law, although I profoundly dislike punishment.

http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/p20.htm

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To finish up on George:

“The fact remains, the alleged, caring, omnipotent, Christian god chooses not to stop rape, in the worldview of Christians. He doesn't stop rape in my worldview, because he doesn't exist, he's a figment of theist imagination. Thus his failure to act, to protect, and to cure, like any loving parent would, is a problem for Christians to rationalize, and they've become very good at it over the years.”

This is not an internal critique of Christian theism. All George has ever done in this course of this thread is to pull certain adjectives like “loving” and “caring” out of the air, apply them to God, point to some instance of evil, then exclaim: “Aha! God doesn’t exist!”

You are attacking your own homegrown version of Christian theism.