After sketching this basic view, Peter van Inwagen [philosophy prof. at Notre Dame] says:
Critics of the morality of the God of the Hebrews rarely ask themselves what the source of the morality from whose perspective they present their criticism is. A few years ago, I watched with great pleasure the HBO production called ‘Rome’. The final disk of the DVD version of ‘Rome’ includes interviews with some of the people involved in the production of the program. In one interview, someone or other was asked in what ways he thought the Romans were like us and unlike us. He replied that they were remarkably like us in most ways, but that there was one way in which they were very different from us: in their extreme brutality—in both their willingness to commit brutal acts and in their indifference to the pervasive, entrenched brutality of their world. When he was asked whether he could explain why we and the Romans were so different in this respect, he did not quite answer by saying ‘Christianity is what made the difference’—I don’t think he could have brought himself to say that—but he did identify ‘Judeo-Christian morality’ as the source of the difference. And that was a very good answer. The morality of almost everyone in Western Europe and the anglophone countries today (if that person is not a criminal or a sociopath) is either the morality that the Hebrew Bible was tending toward or some revised, edited version of that morality. Almost every atheist (in Western Europe and the anglophone countries), however committed he or she may be to atheism, accepts some modified version of what Judeao-Christian morality teaches about how human beings ought to treat other human beings. And even the modifications are generally achieved by using one part of that morality to attack some other part. (For example, by attempting to turn the principle ‘don’t make other people unhappy’ against Judeo-Christian sexual morality.)
Critics of the morality of the God of the Hebrews rarely ask themselves what the source of the morality from whose perspective they present their criticism is.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we know different critics. Everyone intelligent adult I know has asked him or herself where morality comes from. But I suspect that anyone who talks about a combination of cultural and genetic factors is simply summarily dismissed by Inwagen as "not having asked themselves", since they can't back up their answer with almighty certainty.
i) In my (extensive) experience, infidels who attack Bible ethics typically take morality for granted. They don't attempt to ground morality in a secular worldview. They just have a politically correct kneejerk reaction to certain Biblical accounts and commands.
ReplyDeleteii) A combination of cultural and genetic factors doesn't yield objective moral norms. That's an inadequate basis on which to attack Bible ethics.
Well, steve, I guess you just don't know the right infidels. I don't take morality for granted.
ReplyDeleteAnd you're right: a combination of cultural and genetic factors doesn't yield objective moral norms. But neither does religion or any other source. Sure, Christians (among others) claim to have objective morals, but a) they certainly don't demonstrate this by their behavior, and behavior is what counts; and b) in absence of proof for the existence of their God, the "objectivity" of the morals is also not demonstrated.
We're all in the same boat here, trying to find ways to build societies. There are lots of fairly obvious ways of doing this, and religions, governments, philosophies, and dreamers keep coming up with basically similar ones- the Golden Rule, loving thy neighbor, not stealing or murdering, and so forth. But you can have all those no matter what God you believe in- or don't believe in.
cheers from chilly Vienna, zilch
zilch
Delete"they certainly don't demonstrate this by their behavior, and behavior is what counts."
Behavior only counts if we have standards. Objective standards.
"in absence of proof for the existence of their God."
Begs the question.
"the 'objectivity' of the morals is also not demonstrated."
In which case, anything goes.
"the Golden Rule, loving thy neighbor, not stealing or murdering, and so forth. But you can have all those no matter what God you believe in- or don't believe in."
You can't have all those if they are groundless. That's pretend morality.