Category Archives: Morality
Scripture Saturday: Who Conceives Evil? (Ps 7:14)
Recently a commenter going by Patrick asked me, regarding this article, if it mattered whether God created calamity or evil. He wondered if that was just semantics.
Well, no, it isn’t just semantics. Evil here means “moral evil.” If God created moral evil, then he cannot be good by any definition of the term. A perfectly good God could not look back on his creation and say it was “good” if he had created moral evil.
On the other hand, “calamity” is neither this nor that. It’s a force of nature, neutral. In the hands of a righteous God, argues Clay Jones, calamity is a powerful call to repentance.
So for this Scripture Saturday Sunday (better late than never, right?), I wanted to take a peek at Psalm 7 to determine just who creates “moral evil.” The answer is in verse 14:
Behold, the wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies.
This verse describes a potentiality — the potential to sin. It all begins with the will to evil; a desire to commit mischief and that gives birth to lies. James, the brother of our Lord, explains it this way:
Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. (Jms 1:15)
So the desire is our own, not the fault of God. The desire, having taken root, produces the sin. Sin, fully realized, is death. That’s why God takes all of this so seriously — and why we should, too! But, alas, Francis Schaeffer was right to observe “. . . that none of us in our generation feels as guilty about sin as we should or as our forefathers did.”
Case Against the Case for Gay Marriage, part 4
David, an atheist who is dedicated to exposing Christianity for what it is, has begun a new blog that I discovered quite by accident.
Though he deleted the post that this series is replying to, I am still running my series.
David lays out the following argument in favor of gay marriage:
Homosexuality is not unnatural. (answered)Neither homosexuality nor its acts have been proven inferior to heterosexuality or its acts. (answered)Marriage is a basic human right. (answered)- Homosexual unions are unfairly not being given full and equal rights as heterosexual unions.
- Therefore, homosexual marriages with full and equal rights should be legalized and put into effect.
These get easier and easier to answer.
Premise (4) is a nominal attempt to say that homosexual unions aren’t given full rights through a fallacy of special pleading.
However, that’s not the case for three reasons. First, we have shown that homosexuality isn’t the typical order of things.
Second, we have demonstrated that heterosexual unions are superior by simple utilitarianism — which is the typical philosophy of right and wrong espoused by supporters of gay marriage (see NotAScientist’s comment for a great example of utilitarianism in action).
Third, marriage rights are regulated for perfectly valid reasons.
Therefore, it is easy to conclude that there is no special pleading going on. Recall for something to be special pleading, there can be no valid reason for differentiating it from other cases. In the case of gay marriage, there are big differences between it and heterosexual marriage, which is exactly the reason its forbidden in the first place.
This means (4) is out of gas. And, it means I’m done without having to address (5) as a conclusion. David has uber-failed to establish any of his premises as true. In fact, they are all false. Therefore, the conclusion is faulty and I will let this series stand, unless David cares to defend himself.
Case Against the Case for Gay Marriage, part 3
David, an atheist who is dedicated to exposing Christianity for what it is, has begun a new blog that I discovered quite by accident.
Though he deleted the post that this series is replying to, I am still running my series.
David lays out the following argument in favor of gay marriage:
Homosexuality is not unnatural. (answered)Neither homosexuality nor its acts have been proven inferior to heterosexuality or its acts. (answered)- Marriage is a basic human right.
- Homosexual unions are unfairly not being given full and equal rights as heterosexual unions.
- Therefore, homosexual marriages with full and equal rights should be legalized and put into effect.
Now we tackle premise (3), which is (like its predecessors) demonstrably false. Read the rest of this entry
Case Against the Case for Gay Marriage, part 2
David, an atheist who is dedicated to exposing Christianity for what it is, has begun a new blog that I discovered quite by accident.
Though he deleted the post that this series is replying to, I am still running my series.
David lays out the following argument in favor of gay marriage:
Homosexuality is not unnatural. (answered)- Neither homosexuality nor its acts have been proven inferior to heterosexuality or its acts.
- Marriage is a basic human right.
- Homosexual unions are unfairly not being given full and equal rights as heterosexual unions.
- Therefore, homosexual marriages with full and equal rights should be legalized and put into effect.
Premise (2) pretty much deserves a rhetorical “Are you kidding me?” in reply and nothing more.
David’s incoherent explanation:
According to the American Psychological Association, it has officially been declared that homosexuality is not a choice or a decision. (source)
Which we already acknowledged in the refutation of premise (1). The issue with premise (1) is that homosexuality was immoral, not that it is “unnatural;” it is certainly found within nature and is likely a part of our human nature.
But that doesn’t make it “good.”
Now, this premise takes it that we haven’t proven it “inferior,” but it never takes the time to define what would constitute the act being inferior. Read the rest of this entry
Case Against the Case for Gay Marriage, part 1
David, an atheist who is dedicated to exposing Christianity for what it is, has begun a new blog that I discovered quite by accident.
It’s actually a funny story, which I’ll tell even though it has nothing to do with the actual argument that I’ll be critiquing from the site. I was trimming my RSS feed and noticed that, very long ago, John W. Loftus had started a blog called Counter-Apologetics Master Program. He intended to create a degree program to combat Christian apologetics. I noticed that it hadn’t been updated in a long time, so I visited the site to see if it was even still active.
Turns out, the blog address had been abandoned by Loftus, but claimed by David. David started his blog as a counterpoint to Matt Slick’s ministry CARM, even calling his blog by the same acronym. Probably to get accidental traffic.
So, anyway, I literally wandered into this by total accident.
In a deleted post, David challenges CARM to reply to his argument in favor of gay marriage. I don’t know if David deleted the post because it’s a terrible argument, or because he’s attempting to refine it. However, I’m still going to answer it, a piece at a time, in this series.
Even though I’m not affiliated with CARM.
I Gave My Life to Christ: Now What? (part 5)
As we continue with Brownlow North’s six steps for new Christians (and old Christians can benefit from these, too), we come to a tough one:
Never take your Christianity from Christians, or argue that because such and such people do so and so, therefore, you may (2 Cor 10:12). You are to ask yourself, “How would Christ act in my place?” and strive to follow him (Jn 10:27).
The church is, in fact, “the pillar and buttress of truth” (1 Tim 3:15). So it’s impossible not to take (at least some) Christianity from Christians. To not take your Christianity from Christians denies the whole concept of discipleship, which is the spirit in which I posted these rules in the first place.
The place of the church is education and discipline. It should be the responsibility of the church’s elders to identify sin in the congregation and do something about that.
So it’s fair to say that I disagree with the first clause.
The second clause is excellent. Because other people do it, that doesn’t make it okay. As a manager for over a decade and a half in the fast food industry, every single time I dealt with someone’s tardiness the first thing I always got to listen to was an angry litany of names of people who are also “always late.”
That’s what North is talking about. Using someone else’s behavior to justify your own is not acceptable. Take responsibility for yourself.
Amanda Brown, co-founder of We Are Atheism, posted a video that indicted Christianity using the other side of this coin. She said that the church she grew up in preached abstinence, but her peers had sex in the pews during the service. Therefore, abstinence-only education is total crap and doesn’t work
Well, let’s think about this:
- Everyone has sex before marriage.
- It’s really hard to abstain from sex until marriage.
- Currently, the church thinks it’s morally wrong to have sex before marriage.
Given these facts, society has decided that the best solution to the problem is to lower its expectations, accept sex before marriage, and make fun of the church for continuing to preach “antiquated” morals.
Let’s look at this from a different perspective.
What if I were the new manager of your local fast food restaurant? Let’s say that the people in the store think that it’s okay to serve french fries that have been baking under heat lamps for two hours. It’s really hard cook new ones and make customers wait, and it also costs a lot of money in wasted food. Everyone in the store thinks this is cool.
If I were to follow Amanda’s logic, then my best course of action as the new GM is to lower my expectations until I, too, believe that serving two-hour old french fries is acceptable.
Ridiculous, right?
Lowering expectations is never the best solution. Indeed, it shouldn’t even be an option. Yet, with sexual morals, this is exactly what society is doing. It’s too hard to resist having sex until marriage, so let’s just have sex now and risk unwanted pregnancies, incurable diseases, serious heartache, etc. Just wrap it up with a condom and you’re good to go. The solution to loose sexual morals is to encourage them, as long as the people involved are being “responsible.”
That’s about like using a Band-Aid to treat an ear-to-ear throat slash.
Bringing this back neatly to the point, we cannot expect to justify behavior by comparing our behavior to the behavior of others. The yardstick for comparison is what North says next: Ask what the Lord would do were he in our place. In other words, “What Would Jesus Do?”
We might not have an immediate answer, but if we follow the first rule and the second rule, we’re on our way to having a good sense of the answer.
On Originality and Divine Revelation
Peter Breitbart’s short film A Madman or Something Worse is the latest in a line of criticisms of Jesus’ teachings to carry an unspoken, but integral, underlying assumption that divine revelation must somehow be original in order to truly be divine.
So, I would like to pose the following question: Why must something be original in order to be considered divine revelation?
This criticism isn’t unique to Breitbart. When I mention a teaching of Jesus or the Bible, the skeptic counters that said teaching predates the Bible or Jesus by centuries. I see this especially in connection to Jesus’ ethic of reciprocity, the so-called Golden Rule. This little gem predated Jesus by quite a bit; centuries in fact.
The implication seems to be that if the Bible were truly God’s word, that it would be 100% original. Or, that if Jesus were the Son of God, he’d say things that no mortal teacher had ever said.
So pointing out that things like the Golden Rule existed well before Jesus is somehow supposed to mean that Jesus isn’t divine. Or that the Mosaic Law isn’t divinely inspired because similar legal strictures existed 500 or so years earlier in the Code of Hammurabi.
So what?
We humans are made in the image of God. While every fiber of our being is tainted by sin, the fact of the matter is that we still retain part of this identity as God’s special creation. And that means that it is possible for us to know morality when we see it, and that means that moral teachings might come from places other than the divinely inspired texts or the words of Jesus. It is possible that some enlightened individuals, though not divinely inspired in the strictest sense of the term, may have found part of the divine truths by means other than a word from God. Moreover, they might have discovered them before God revealed them in a divinely inspired teaching.
Given that humans are made in God’s image, this isn’t really unexpected.
Morality is absolute and objective. Our knowledge of morality can change, but what is right is always right and what is wrong is always wrong. Child sacrifice is just wrong, whether or not Canaanite society believed it was right and just. The Holocaust was wrong, whether or not 1930s-1940s German society was overwhelmingly in favor of it.
Morality, therefore, is something that we discover as our knowledge increases; not something subjective that we put to a vote. Being made in the image of God means that this morality is written on our hearts and that we can gain a greater understanding of it as time passes. We can find a better path than even the morality on display right now.
And we probably will.
Two thousand years from now, an enlightened society will probably look at America 2011 and think that we are as backwards and as barbaric as we in America 2011 view the ancient Israelites and their Canaanite opposition.
The Bible is the divinely-inspired and objective guidebook to finding this higher morality, but no one is claiming that it is the only source of morality or even the first source of any particular moral teaching.
Now, some folks do claim that the Bible is the source of certain teachings, like the Golden Rule, but they’re misinformed. Since, however, there’s no reason (given that humans are made in the image of God) to believe that a teaching must be unique to the Bible or to Jesus to be true and divinely inspired, let’s just educate the misinformed person and move on. Unless the skeptic is prepared to explain why a teaching must be unique in order to be divinely inspired.
Ethical Pain
It never fails to amaze me that people deny objective morality. Morality isn’t mere opinion. Right now, somewhere in this world, there is someone who is doing something that, regardless of his or her personal opinion (or the opinion of the society in which he lives), is just plain wrong.
For example, in certain Islamic traditions, it is a sin for the woman to enjoy sex. So, her genitals are mutilated in a way that will preclude any sort of enjoyment from sex. That society, even its women, approve of this practice and celebrate it. But it’s just objectively wrong, even though it is allowed to proceed even with the blessing of those affected the most adversely by it.
CAA member Sam Harper has a really interesting way of knowing that we have objective moral values. It borders on the fallacy of appeal to motive, so I’m not presenting it as an argument. It’s some really good food for thought. Sam writes:
A divorced girl once confessed to me that she had cheated on her husband with his best friend just to get revenge. Then she tried to justify herself by saying, “After what he did to me, I didn’t feel married.” Of course marriage is not a feeling, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and even the most absurd excuse will do if it’s all you’ve got to avoid admitting that you’ve done something so wrong.
Interesting. People do go to great lengths to justify incorrect behavior. In my years as a manager, I’ve seen people rationalize the most bizarre behavior. Everyone is the exception to the rule. Like the divorced girl, we find reasons (however thin) to commit immoral acts because we know they’re wrong and it hurts us to do them.
Yet, the pull to commit them is stronger than the potential consequences. So what is a person to do? Sam responds:
There’s another way to avoid ethical pain that few people seem to ever try. Instead of getting rid of the rules or looking for loopholes to let yourself off the hook, why not just obey the moral laws? Why not just do right and avoid wrong? Why don’t more people try this?
Reminds me of the old adage “Christianity is not tried and found wanting. It is found difficult and left untried.” When I was growing up and going to Catholic school, I used to hate the song “Amazing Grace” mainly because I knew I wasn’t a wretch. Except that I was:
Why is being moral so hard? It’s because of the kind of people we are. It’s easy for somebody with nothing but good intentions, good motives, and good dispositions to be good. Being moral is almost impossible for us, though, because that’s not the kind of people we are. We do bad things because we have bad intentions, motives, and dispositions. Christianity is unpopular, because Christianity is realistic about this. Embracing the Christian worldview requires people to admit things they don’t want to admit.
That’s what was so amazing about God’s grace in the first place! It took me much of my life to realize that I was a wretch and that I hurt a lot of people. When I finally admitted that to myself, I was ready for Christianity. Most people don’t want to go there. As Sam closes:
The reason Christianity is so hard for people to except is because before you can accept it, you have to first drop all the excuses and admit that you really have violated the moral law. You really have done wrong. There are no loopholes to let you off the hook. You’re guilty. Once you admit your guilt, you are left to face yourself in all your moral failure. That’s not easy.
No it’s not. But when our sinful nature is confronted and we no longer make excuses for ourselves, this is the most freedom anyone can experience in life. This is what it means to know the truth, and the truth makes you free.
Comment Round-up! (part 2)
The second part where I reply to Doc’s comments is much shorter. Only two comments remain, and they aren’t as long as the previous.
Context: Doc echoes some sentiments from Alex in my much-derided post on methodological naturalism vs. metaphysical naturalism. Alex had previously stated:
the implications for just how loud and clear your god’s message in the bible really is, needing an army of theologians to explain and ponder and postulate and theorize and channel and project and often just make up stuff in order to make sense of the bible
Now, to Doc’s comment:
Exactly this. What kind of God would rely on an ancient text that he knows (if he is truly omniscient) will be doubted, misinterpreted, and only followed properly by a fraction of believers (since only one religion, or none, would be right; whichever one follows his exact message exactly as he intended) and argued for centuries by people who clai to know the truth and disagree among each other on the message’s details?
This would either be a sadistic god (sending to hell all those who innocently believe in a different interpretation of his message) or an incompetent god (relying on an unsuccessful game plan if he wants to keep believers).
Of course, the easy answer is that it’s all BS.
Nope. It’s not BS. But I hardly think that disagreement on exact interpretations qualifies all of Christianity as BS. Scientists often disagree and debate, sometimes for decades. Does that mean science is BS?
Nope, and neither is theology. At the end of the day, God’s grace alone saves you, which is actuated by your faith. The denomination of Christianity matters little, I think. Knowledge of the person of Jesus may not even be necessary, so long as you make that step in faith with enough knowledge of God (and that is easier to come by then you guys like to think; see Rom 1:19-20, 10:5-21).
C. Michael Patton has some thoughts on that topic as well.
A few comments down, he makes the following statement:
You make a charge and then back off from it when I call you out on it.
You KNOW I was focusing on how you said, ” Evolutionists, the honest ones, admit that evolution only explains what happens to life when it’s already here. ”
You are implying here that Evolution is used as a way to cover up the question of the origin of life, and the *honest* ones will “admit” that it doesn’t.
This is loaded language, and by backing off of it and saying, “Oh I was just saying that evolution does not explain the origin of life, that’s all!” Is being purposely dishonest.
I used the “gravity” example to illustrate that it’s not “admitting” something. It’s not claiming it to begin with. Nobody “admits” that evolution doesn’t explain the origin of life in the same way nobody “admits” that evolution doesn’t explain the origin of life; they don’t need to, because that’s not what evolution is about. You plainly did not see the analogy I was making and replied with the snarky, “Um, good for them?” Because it went right over your head.
And during this retreat from the loaded statement you made, you actually have the nerve to try to play it off like *I’m* the one who lacked understanding of what you were saying.
No wonder you people are less respected every day.
One potential explanation for the origin of life is that it was gradually assembled from single molecules, then diatoms, then … etc. Eventually, an entire cell (a bacterium, most likely) was the result. These cells eventually began to specialize, and thus formed more complex organisms. This gradual assembly of life from molecule up to a cell, and then diversifying from there is an extrapolation of evolutionary theory.
Now, this explanation for the origin of life probably isn’t a very good one. But, the fact remains that some scientists regard evolution as capable of explaining the origin of life. However, most do not. So I will admit my use of “admit” wasn’t the best choice, since that particular theory isn’t in wide acceptance among evolutionary scientists. However, I was not wrong to imply that evolutionary theory could attempt to explain the origin of life.
That concludes us for now. I have some great posts in the draft stage, so don’t go too far!
Comment Round-up! (part 1)
I’ve decided to respond to all comments from the user styled “Doc” in this post because I’ve taken so long to get to answering them that my 30 day window is drastically narrow. With this, Doc has another 30 days to reply (should he choose to do that).
First up, my post on fallacious arguments for homosexuality, here’s Doc’s reply to my previous comment:
“Since we’re on this topic, let me ask you a question that I promised myself I would ask the next idiot that said homosexuality is okay because animals do it: ”
I didn’t say that. I asked you if “done in nature” is your definition of “natural.” If it is, then “It’s unnatural” doesn’t hold up, since it is done in nature. Of course, like a typical theist, you twist that into, “If animals do X, it’s okay for humans to do X,” because you’re a theist, and logic is hard.
So, no answer forthcoming.
“There’s no broad definition of natural that’s going to work for everything.
No, you can’t run away from your own charge. You say homosexuality is wrong because it’s unnatural. In order to make this claim, you must define what you mean by unnatural.
It’s true, though: there isn’t a broad definition that’s going to work for everything. As I apply below, common sense is going to have to apply. Unfortunately, I gave an answer that a utilitarian would be proud of, and I think that school of thought is totally bogus. Which means that we’re going to have to refine things a bit. Read the rest of this entry
Back Rome Again 