On Living Life and Accepting Death

  photo by Lari Huttunen (cc by-nc-nd 2.0)

I don’t believe in an afterlife, which means I do believe in death. It shouldn’t be such a strange thing to believe life ends in death, but most people believe or at least hope for more. Death denial is an understandable impulse; sometimes it even extends to family pets, but less often to other animals. We want ourselves and those we care about to carry on. We won’t. They won’t.

Does the reality of death mean life doesn’t matter? No, it means life is the only thing that matters. You get once chance to exist and it’s happening now. Now is the time to love, the time to learn, the time to create, the time to enjoy yourself and choose to either bring comfort or suffering to others.

What about jerks who prosper in life and kind people who live hard lives? Doesn’t the reality of death mean the world is unjust? Yes. That may sound harsh, but how kind is it to tell people that the suffering and deaths of their loved ones is for the best? It can be disheartening to know we can’t make everything better, but what we can do matters all the more because there’s no other help on the way.

Besides, popular alternatives tend to be worse. At least suffering and injustice end along with life. Mainstream Christian and Muslim beliefs promise unending joy for a select few and unending suffering for most people. That’s solving a house fire with an atom bomb.

Why not just have as much pleasure in life as possible and forget about other people? Well, there’s nothing wrong with pleasure. Pleasure is great and it comes in many satisfying forms! As a loved one says: “No time enjoyed is entirely wasted.” As for ignoring the suffering of other people, moral philosophers have tried in vain to find a reason for completely selfish people to care about others. You have to start with caring a little. Thankfully, most of us do. We don’t have to solve whole categories of suffering on our own; we can cooperate with others, working within the limits of our imperfect empathy and our incomplete understanding to make our lives a little better.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.”

— Emily Dickinson

Christian to Agnostic: A Short Explanation

[I'm making this the latest post because a family member asked over the weekend. This was originally posted here on June 11, 2012 and written around 2008.]

    During my last year at Iowa State University, I stopped believing Christianity — or anything like it — is actually true. This came at the end of several years of study which began with the opposite goal: learning how to show others that Christianity is true. Talk about backfiring! Instead of finding more and stronger justifications for Christian belief, I lost even my starting justifications. All remaining evidence was compatible with Christianity being an entirely manmade religion, so I concluded that's probably all it is. I drew the same conclusion about other religions. If there is a God at all, it's not one concerned with setting us straight on religious matters.

    I was raised in the Churches of Christ sect. Early on, I was under the impression that everyone in the world believed the same things I was taught in Sunday School. Why wouldn't I? Everything from Biblical history to theology was presented to me as a matter of uncontroversial fact. If someone didn't worship God, that was only an obedience problem as it is with kids who don't mind their parents. I accepted God's offer of salvation with unquestioning faith. I believed God had forgiven my sins and would raise me to live in Heaven with other Christians forever. Prayer, praise, and scripture reading were not a burden but a joy.

    That joy started to sour when I was sent to an interdenominational Christian high school. You see, the Churches of Christ teach baptism as an essential step in accepting salvation; they even refer to baptism as "obeying the Gospel." By contrast, all the teachers and most of the students at my new school believed that only faith was necessary to be saved. This meant most of the Christians at school had not obeyed the Gospel and were still on their way to never-ending torment in Hell. Yet these were not apathetic or rebellious people; many were clearly striving to understand and submit to God's will. How could people serving God to the best of their knowledge deserve eternal torment? And the more I thought about Hell, the more I began to question its justice. I realized that no human — no matter how monstrous — could cause as much suffering as an eternity of hellfire. For a long time, I didn't doubt the truth of any of this, but I did start to see the next world as a far greater horror than even the worst temporary evil in this world.

    Just as high school opened my eyes to divisions among Christians, college life put me in direct contact with a wider array of religious beliefs. I went from only hearing debates about the meaning of Bible verses to hearing people claim the Bible wasn't inspired by God at all. So I did what I always do when challenged: study up! I already knew the book of Daniel contained detailed prophetic descriptions of Alexander the Great and the kings who followed him, so I started looking into arguments from supernatural prophecy. I was confident I could show that the Bible was more than a collection of human writings. But it didn't take long for my confidence to turn into disappointment.

    Daniel was supposedly written in the sixth century BC while the Jews were exiled in Babylon. Among other things, it describes Alexander's fourth century BC eastward conquest and the fate of the empire after his death. Even without names, the descriptions match up with secular history too well to be a lucky guess. Or at least, they match until the 160s BC when the prophecies become much more elaborate…then go wrong. See where I'm going with this? Many Biblical scholars believe Daniel was written during the 160s BC as if it contained ancient prophecies leading up to the ongoing Maccabean Revolt. The author simply wrote history and current events disguised as prophecy, then got the future parts wrong. This is a mainstream view in the Catholic Church, probably because their Bibles still contain histories of the revolt, which happened during the mysterious "intertestamental" period as far as Protestants are concerned. I was disappointed in my own Bible teachers for failing to know or failing to tell me about any of this.

    I needed to find prophecy immune to date-based skepticism, so I turned to messianic prophecy. Figured I'd start with Matthew and look up Old Testament references as I got to them. Big mistake. It turns out Matthew had little regard for the context of his quotes. The original passages concerning "Immanuel," "out of Egypt," and "Rachel weeping for her children" were written about specific situations far removed from the Gospel plot. I was amazed to find that the first few pages of Matthew mistreat the Jewish scriptures so badly no one could fault a curious Jew for picking up a New Testament and setting it right back down a minute later. Are the other messianic prophecies merely less obvious impositions of new meaning on old scriptures? My studies were inconclusive. With Christian preconceptions, it's easy to see Jesus in the Old Testament. But without those assumptions, all "messianic prophecies" can be reasonably understood as merely human Jewish hopes. For example, the servant described in Isaiah 53 can be understood as religiously faithful Jews who suffered through the Babylonian exile along with the unfaithful Jews who brought about the judgement. As a reward and justification for their suffering, God would end the exile and set Israel above all other nations forever. The exile ended, but the rest proved too optimistic. Later Jews reinterpreted the passage as a future event, then Christians used it to build a theology to justify the suffering of Jesus on the cross. This naturalistic interpretation is strongly in line with the overall historical context of Isaiah 40-55. I eventually had to give up on using prophecy to argue for a supernatural Bible.

    What would it take to show the truth of Christian belief over alternatives? Critical evidence, i.e. evidence which is compatible with Christian belief but not compatible with alternative beliefs. Take the book of Daniel. It fails to be critical evidence because it can be explained as history rather than amazing prophecy. However, Daniel would be critical evidence if compelling, secular evidence were found that Daniel's prophecies actually were written in the sixth (not the second) century BC. Skeptics who acknowledge the uncanny accuracy of Daniel between those centuries would be unable to maintain their belief that Daniel was written by human means.

    I continued looking for any critical evidence which favored Christianity over the alternatives. Instead, I kept finding critical evidence against the fundamentalist Christianity I was taught at both church and school. A quick rundown:

    I had believed first-century apostles finalized the Bible as I knew it and that any later ideas or writings were either superfluous or deviations from true Christianity.
  …but then I learned that the New Testament's table of contents was settled much later by distinctively Catholic Christians who also affirmed a larger Old Testament. I couldn't trust my sixty-six book Bible had only inspired books and all the inspired books without believing God whimsically guided fourth century Catholics to put the New Testament together right and AD-era Jews to put the Old Testament together right.

    I had believed the Gospels were independent witnesses to the life of Jesus, by the traditional authors.
  …but then I learned that the first three Gospels are textually dependent on each other like three homework essays showing signs of collaboration; scholars call this the "synoptic problem." Not such a big deal for Luke since the author admits to putting together earlier accounts, but I found it impossible to believe Matthew was written by an apostle of Jesus who only bothered mangling other accounts instead of writing his own.

    I had believed all scriptures were preserved word-for-word in their original languages.
  …but then I learned that the New Testament authors usually quoted an Old Testament with many subtle differences from the Old Testament I knew. For example, Matthew 21 depicts children praising Jesus during the triumphal entry. Jesus defends their actions to critics by quoting Psalm 8 as, "Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies You have prepared praise for Yourself." Yet Psalm 8 reads, "From the mouths of infants and nursing babes You have established strength." I realized either Jesus had a corrupted Old Testament or I did.

    I had believed the Bible accurately reports speech, though not necessarily everything a person said.
  …but then I learned that the Bible inaccurately reports speech even when accuracy would have been just as easy. For example, Mark 11:1-3 reports Jesus asking for a single donkey while Matthew 21:1-3 reports him asking for plural donkeys. This isn't an omission or a matter of translation into English; the words in Jesus' mouth are just different. If it's ok to mess with the speech of God incarnate, what else might have been adjusted?

    I had believed Biblical history was reliable and any secular history that disagreed was simply mistaken.
  …but then I learned that the Bible starts with fictional creation and flood stories. This might have been fine if they were treated as myths-with-a-message (like the Narnia novels or the Parable of the Vineyard Workers), but Eden and the flood are part of the main historical narrative. Luke even traces Jesus' genealogy back through David to Noah and Adam. I had to start worrying that other parts of the Bible might also be fiction presented as fact.

    As I was discovering problems with my fundamentalist view of the Bible, I heard about "progressive" Christians who get around all of the above by treating the Bible as a fallible human work: a book about God but not from God. This lets progressives write off gender roles as a cultural vestige and distance God from troublesome Old Testament morals such as enslaving foreigners (Lev 25:44-46), killing children as part of genocide (1 Sam 15:3), executing apostates (Deut 13:6-11), and taking virgins as sexual spoils of war (Deut 21:10-13, Num 31:17-18). Progressive Christians usually also deny Hell doctrine on the basis of incompatibility with a morally praiseworthy God. They've effectively reshaped Christianity to fit modern knowledge and moral sense. After all, there are still many wise, good, and possible things in the Bible after cutting out the foolish, evil, and false. I tried to adopt a progressive Christian view, but it was short-lived. I didn't see how a God interested in forming loving relationships with humanity or even in being worshipped as a good God would be so hands-off in allowing his character to be slandered by his own followers.

    I began to see Christianity as "just another human religion." That's the phrase that got stuck in my head and wouldn't go away. I identify with stories of other deconverts who said that once they were capable of seeing Christian faith as a product of mere human psychology and culture, they suddenly had great trouble taking off those new "glasses." (Or putting the Christian glasses back on, if you prefer.) Take prayer, for example. The doctrine that all prayers are answered "yes," "no," or "not yet" is hard to take seriously after seeing it as precisely the doctrine people would invent if no prayer were ever heard by a God. A false Christianity would also neatly explain why the Holy Spirit does not counteract the ever increasing schisms among Christians. Or why there seems to be needless suffering in the world even though an all-good, all-powerful God would ensure all suffering is for the best. And finally, why the best predictors of Christian faith are where and to whom a person is born.

    Though my beliefs had changed, I didn't want to be an unbeliever so I kept looking for reasons to think some form of Christianity is true. What if I had simply missed something? So I deliberately put my new skepticism at risk by continuing to engage with apologetics. I did come to see problems with many popular skeptical arguments and I also came to appreciate some of the more refined defenses of Christianity, especially those of Alston and Plantinga. But in the end these were only defenses of the possibility of Christian Theism, not critical reasons to believe any of it is true. Then I realized something which gave me confidence I wasn't missing some hard-to-find good reason for belief: if there is an all-powerful God who "desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth," it would be in God's own interest and power to make religious truth unmistakably clear so that "all men" are able — if willing — to respond to his offer of salvation. For this reason, I take the lack of clear critical evidence for Christian belief as strong positive evidence against Christian belief.

    Where does this leave me? Not too different in day-to-day terms. I found it doesn't take belief in God and an afterlife to believe in other people and this life. If it matters how I'm treated, I know it matters how I treat others. I can't rely on thinking God will right every injustice, but then I hadn't believed unending paradise and torment were just fates since high school. I now believe it's up to us to correct injustice and suffering in the world. It's also up to us to preserve our planet for those to come, with no scheduled remake of a new heavens and new earth. And if anything, I have an increased sense of humility from realizing the universe wasn't made just for us. No single religious image ever brought out the awe I feel looking at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and trying to grasp the sheer scale of what it reveals in one tiny, seemingly dark patch of the night sky. Is there a God hidden beyond it all? Maybe, maybe not. Though I remain open to the possibility of a God who hasn't bothered to reveal its identity and desires to humanity, I lean toward a fully natural order because God-explanations have been steadily retreating in the face of natural explanations. I doubt we'll ever run out of unanswered questions, so there will always be room to project religious answers onto the unknown, but I'm comfortable waiting until there's good reason to believe those answers are correct.

The Heterosexual Redefinition of Marriage

Critics of same-sex marriage offer a narrative along these lines:

Marriage has always meant "a union between a man and a woman" therefore it makes no sense to talk about two men or two women marrying each other. Homosexuals are trying to redefine the word "marriage" to mean something completely different from what marriage is!

While it's true that, historically, marriages have nearly always been heterosexual relationships, there is another very plausible explanation: marriage was a kind of male-oriented ownership relation. A man could possess one or more wives, but it it made no sense for men to possess each other or for women to possess each other in this way. It was only with the modern women's movement that marriage has commonly come to mean a co-equal life partnership. Our culture's acceptance of this heterosexual redefinition of marriage from ownership to partnership has already opened the concept of marriage to homosexual partners. Gays and lesbians don't need to redefine marriage. Straights have already done so.

Give Me That Old Time Marriage

Appeals to "traditional marriage" usually invoke the Bible for support, but our marriage tradition has come a long way from Old Testament and even New Testament views on marriage. The Old Testament is especially relevant since religious arguments against homosexuality often rely on the assumption that ancient Jewish laws are still relevant, at least in spirit. Let's start with one of the Ten Commandments:

"You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor." Exodus 20:17, NASB

This sure looks like a rule for men about respecting other men's things. At least the neighbor's wife was mentioned before the donkey, even if she does come after the house. Unmarried women were the property of their fathers or their fiancés. If another man were to come along and break her seal (so to speak), it was a crime against the man she belonged to.

 Violation: Consensual sex with a non-engaged virgin.
 Penalty: The man must marry her and pay her father, unless the father decides to keep both the money and his daughter. The woman must comply with her father's decision. (Ex. 22:16-17)

 Violation: Rape of a non-engaged virgin.
 Penalty: The man must marry her and pay her father. He can never divorce her. The woman must marry her rapist. (Deut. 22:28-29)

 Violation: Consensual sex or rape of an engaged virgin in the city.
 Penalty:  Both stoned to death. The man for "violat[ing] his neighbor's wife." The woman for not crying out for help; all city sex is presumed to be consensual. (Deut. 22:23-24, NASB)

 Violation: Consensual sex or rape of an engaged virgin in the country.
 Penalty: The man is stoned to death for harming her fiancé (yes really). No penalty for the woman because she is presumed to have cried out for help, but there was no one in earshot to save her. (Deut. 22:25-27)

 Violation: A supposed virgin lacks a hymen on her wedding night.
 Penalty: She is stoned to death at the doorway of her father's house. (Deut. 22:20-21)

 Violation: A man falsely accuses his new wife of lacking a hymen.
 Penalty: The man must pay a fine to her father, and he can never divorce her. (Deut. 22:13-19)

I realize this notion of forcing women to marry their rapists seems really out of touch with contemporary morality, but I want to be fair and give Hank Hanegraaff a.k.a. Bible Answer Man an opportunity to provide some cultural context:

"First, the Mosaic Law is hardly about letting a rapist off easy. The consequence for raping a woman engaged to be married was stoning (Deuteronomy 22:25). If the woman was not engaged, the rapist was spared for the sake of the woman’s security. Having lost her virginity, she would have been deemed undesirable for marriage—and in the culture of the day, a woman without a father or husband to provide for her would be subject to a life of abject poverty, destitution, and social ostracism. As such, the rapist was compelled to provide for the rape victim for as long as he lived. Thus, far from barbaric, the law was a cultural means of protection and provision." — Hanegraaf in answer to "How could the Bible command a rape victim to marry her rapist?"

A strange answer considering a nation's laws would be an opportune place to provide for the welfare of poor women by other means. At any rate, rape was treated primarily as a harm done to a woman's father or fiancé, which can only be justified under a property view of women.

War Booty

We think of marriage as a mutual choice to commit to each other for life. While there might be some room to hope Israelite fathers consulted their daughters on their choice of husband, foreign women taken after the slaughter of their families couldn't have had any choice but to sexually submit to the men who killed their fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers.

"When you go out to battle against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take them away captive, and see among the captives a beautiful woman, and have a desire for her and would take her as a wife for yourself, then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails. She shall also remove the clothes of her captivity and shall remain in your house, and mourn her father and mother a full month; and after that you may go in to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. It shall be, if you are not pleased with her, then you shall let her go wherever she wishes; but you shall certainly not sell her for money, you shall not mistreat her, because you have humbled her." — Deut. 21:10-14,  NASB

"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves. [...]
Now the booty that remained from the spoil which the men of war had plundered was 675,000 sheep, and 72,000 cattle, and 61,000 donkeys, and of human beings, of the women who had not known man intimately, all the persons were 32,000." — Num. 31:17-18, NASB

Forcing an enslaved woman into the marriage bed isn't even permanent. When you tire of her, send her away. Just don't "mistreat" her! Can you imagine the reaction if modern Israel tried this policy of genocide-except-the-virgins? Would we recognize such marriages as marriages?

Big Love

Polygamy, like slavery, was regulated rather than condemned in the Bible. Sometimes these regulations were intertwined:

"If a man sells his daughter as a female slave, she is not to go free as the male slaves do. If she is displeasing in the eyes of her master who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He does not have authority to sell her to a foreign people because of his unfairness to her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her according to the custom of daughters. If he takes to himself another woman, he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights." Ex. 21:7-10, NASB

Or there's the law about polygamy and inheritance:

"If a man has two wives, the one loved and the other unloved, and both the loved and the unloved have borne him sons, if the firstborn son belongs to the unloved, then it shall be in the day he wills what he has to his sons, he cannot make the son of the loved the firstborn before the son of the unloved, who is the firstborn." Deut. 21:15-16, NASB

Not to mention that prominent holy men like Abraham, Jacob, Gideon, David, and Solomon were never condemned for practicing polygamy as such.

The Lord Your Husband

New Testament views on marriage may seem pretty close to our own, but this might just be a matter of focus. New Testament writers don't discuss marriage arrangements and rules for slavery as much as Old Testament writers did. Polygamy seems to have gone out of style. Slavery is acknowledged but not challenged (Colossians 4:1). The ruler-and-subject concept of marriage was explicitly re-affirmed. Paul wrote:

"Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. [...]
So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body." Eph. 5:22-24, NASB

Women are told to be submissive; men are told to be loving. There is an order here with God above both men and women equally, yet husbands are still clearly above their wives. Paul reinforced this double hierarchy in 1 Corinthians:

"For if a woman does not cover her head, let her also have her hair cut off; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, let her cover her head. For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man; for indeed man was not created for the woman’s sake, but woman for the man’s sake. Therefore the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.
However, in the Lord, neither is woman independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as the woman originates from the man, so also the man has his birth through the woman; and all things originate from God." 1 Cor. 11:6-12, NASB

To review, marriage in the Old Testament treated women as property purchased from their fathers, or as spoils of war plundered from enemies. Polygamy was occasionally practiced, but polyandry was unheard of. The New Testament urged women to be unilaterally submissive to their husbands. Husbands were to love their wives, not as separate persons, but as part of themselves. The concepts of mutual choice and co-equal partnership in marriage did not yet exist.

Before the Uprising

By the 1760s, around the time of the American Revolution, marriage had evolved in some respects. William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England carefully distinguished civil marriage from holy matrimony. Both the husband and wife had to consent to the marriage, though boys under 14 and girls under 12 could be "imperfect[ly]" married, then allowed to decide to affirm or void the marriage at those respective ages. Affirmation was implied to involve voluntary sexual union after reaching his or her "years of discretion." Polygamy was expressly forbidden. Forcing slaves into marriage was not addressed, but was likely precluded by the same principle behind the general consent requirement. All of this represents a substantial advance toward modern views on marriage.

Still, once a woman chose to enter into a marriage, she gave up a lot more than her maiden name. Blackstone wrote:

"By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert [married woman]; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. [...]
For this reason, a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage. [...]
If the wife be injured in her person or her property, she can bring no action for redress without her husband's concurrence, and in his name, as well as her own: neither can she be sued, without making the husband a defendant. [...]
But, in trials of any sort, they are not allowed to be evidence for, or against, each other: partly because it is impossible their testimony should be indifferent; but principally because of the union of person: and therefore, if they were admitted to be witnesses for each other, they would contradict one maxim of law, "nemo in propria causa testis esse debet" [no one ought to be witness in his own cause]; and if against each other, they would contradict another maxim, "nemo tenetur seipsum accusare" [no one is bound to accuse himself]." — Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 1, Chapter 15

If any form of marriage deserves to be called "traditional," it's marriage as the lordship of a man over a woman.

The Age of Equality

The Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 allowed women in the United Kingdom to own property separately from their husbands. The latter version also recognized women as separate legal entities in many of the ways denied to them under the doctrine of coverage, as discussed by Blackstone above.

One year before the first Married Women's Property Act was passed, John Stuart Mill's essay The Subjection of Women had raised public awareness of the legal inequalities experienced by married women. In practice, husbands had dominion even over their wives' bodies.

"[A] female slave has (in Christian countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral obligation, to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to — though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him — he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations." — John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, Chapter Two

In case the language was unclear, husbands could demand sex whether their wives were willing or not. Husbands could also imprison their wives. At least, they could get away with doing this in England until the watershed "Clitheroe case" (Regina v. Jackson) of 1891. Frustrated with his wife's refusal to live with him, Mr. Jackson and two of his friends seized her as she was coming out of church with her sister, and dragged Mrs. Jackson into a carriage. She was kept in his house, guarded by his friends, while her family "laid siege" to the house and filed for habeas corpus. The first judges refused to intervene, but an appeal judge ruled that a husband may not "imprison" his wife "until she consent[s] to the restitution of conjugal rights." An early women's rights activist wrote in a letter to the editor:

"Of the momentous character of this judgment there can be no question whatever. It is a declaration of law which is epoch-making in its immediate consequences, and its ultimate results reach far into the future, involving indeed the establishment of a higher morality of marriage, and the substitution, in the relation of husband and wife, of the ethics of justice and equality for the old and worn-out code of master and slave." — Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, The Decision in the Clitheroe Case, and Its Consequences

This is precisely the modern "redefinition" of the marriage relationship that this post is about. The idea of partnership marriage has taken time to spread, and is still struggling against the idea of male authoritarian marriage. Stephen Grunlan's recent Christian textbook, Marriage and the Family, has a section explicitly devoted to comparing arguments for "traditional marriage" and "partnership marriage," ultimately leaving it up to the convictions of each couple. It's not a simple matter of religious marriage being one way and secular marriage being the other.

An Open Door

What does all of this have to do with same-sex marriage? I wanted to show that homosexual marriage is — as its opponents claim — incompatible with traditional marriage. But then so are all the heterosexual marriages today which don't feature a man-as-master and a woman-as-servant. A defining characteristic of traditional marriage was a difference in authority based on sex, not merely a difference in sex. This explains why same-sex marriage is an almost entirely new phenomenon, previously blocked by the expectation of inequality. As a contemporary historian puts it:

"The ancient Romans had no problem with homosexuality, and they did not think that heterosexual marriage was sacred. The reason they found male-male marriage repugnant was that no real man would ever agree to play the subordinate role demanded of a Roman wife. Today, by contrast, many heterosexual couples aspire to achieve the loyal, egalitarian relationships that Greek and Roman philosophers believed could exist only in a friendship between two men." — Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, Kindle Edition p. 11.

The long fight against sexism in marriage has opened the door for same-sex marriage. The most respectable form of marriage today is that of a co-equal life partnership, and there's no reason two men, two women, or one of each cannot make this same kind of commitment to each other.

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 11)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter 9

Deep Concord

"Modern Western empirical science originated and flourished in the bosom of Christian theism and originated nowhere else."¹

According to Plantinga, this is no accident. Theism — and Christianity in particular — provides the deep ideas necessary for science to flourish. And here I thought science started with Greeks, was fostered by Arabs, and finally awoke in Christian Europe after a millennium of slumber. What was holding science back all those years, if the soil was more fertile than ever? No answers from Plantinga here. Let's see what he does have to say.

The Supreme Knower

According to the Bible, humanity is made in the image of God. God is maximally great at knowing things. So to be like God, our nature must include a faculty for knowing things about the world.

"Notice that it is blind luck if the human science-forming capacity, a particular component of the human biological endowment, happens to yield a result that conforms more or less to the truth about the world. From the point of view of theistic religion, this is not blind luck. It is only to be expected."²

This strikes me as rather roundabout.

Thought 1: I can know things about the world.
Thought 2: There is a God who knows everything, and that I'm modeled after God, so I can know things about the world!

Did everyone sit around worried that they couldn't know anything until Christians spread around that second thought? Later in this book, Plantinga will argue that naturalists should be terribly worried that we can't know anything if God isn't around ensuring that we can.

Faith in Nature's Order

"Furthermore, science requires more than regularity: it also requires our implicitly believing or assuming that the world is regular in this way."³

Why is the world orderly instead of "unpredictable, chancy, or random"? Because God made it that way. Why did God make it that way? Here Plantinga presents a medieval debate over whether God's will or God's intellect is primary. Ockham was on team will; Aquinas on team intellect. Plantinga backs Aquinas by saying that God's intellect has to be primary for the world to be orderly. A God whose will is greater than his intellect would be capricious. So...

Thought 3: The world is orderly.
Thought 4: A God whose intellect takes precedence over his will created the world, therefore the world is orderly.

Are you starting to see the pattern here?

(Not) Breaking the Law

The laws of nature are unlike civil laws because we can't violate the laws of nature, try as we might. Why not? They don't seem to be logically necessary. Plantinga suggests they are "propositions God has established or decreed, and no creature—no finite power, we might say—has the power to act against these propositions, that is, to bring it about that they are false."⁴

God serves as the explanation for why some things are impossible in our world, even though they aren't logically impossible. Naturalists once again have to assume the world just is a certain way. Theists can assume God is a certain way and does certain things to produce the world we see.

Mathematics

Why is the natural world so amenable to mathematical analysis? Because "sets, numbers and the like [...] are best conceived as divine thoughts."⁵ God's creations would, therefore, conform to mathematics.

Irony...I mean: Simplicity!

"Complicated, gerrymandered theories are rejected. Complex Rube Goldberg contraptions are ridiculed. When confronted with a set of data plotted on a graph, we draw the simplest curve that will accommodate all the data."⁶

Like mathematics, the concept of simplicity (or parsimony or beauty) works surprisingly well as a way of comprehending our world. Why is this? Because God likes simplicity. He created a world which conforms to his ideals. Since we're made in God's image, we have the same preference for simplicity. "This fit is only to be expected on theism, but is a piece of enormous cosmic serendipity on naturalism."⁷

The Formula

Find something unexplained. Posit a creator God with the right kind of attribute to explain why his creation would display the otherwise-unexplained feature. Deny naturalists the same opportunity to posit a world with the right kind of attribute to directly explain the feature in question.


1. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 266
2. ibid. p. 269
3. ibid. p. 271
4. ibid. p. 281
5. ibid. p. 291
6. ibid. p. 298
7. ibid. p. 299

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 10)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter 7

Fine-Tuning

"I’ve argued that science doesn’t conflict with Christian belief: can we go further, and say science offers positive support for it?"¹

This chapter goes over fine-tuning arguments for theism. In contemporary physics, there are some numbers which need to be close to what they are, otherwise our universe would not support stars, heavier elements, and life. It's a mystery why these numbers are the way they are, and for every mystery there's an argument for theism waiting to be made.

"The basic idea is that such fine-tuning is not at all surprising or improbable on theism: God presumably would want there to be life, and indeed intelligent life with which (whom) to communicate and share love."²

And a basic objection is that God wouldn't need to create a universe which requires fine-tuning (and is fine-tuned) to have a universe which supports life. I suppose one could argue that God chose to make a universe that requires fine-tuning so that 20th and early 21st century humans would be puzzled by it and some would consider it evidence of theism. That's a lot of trouble to set up a weak argument available to relatively few people. Physicists might even solve the fine-tuning puzzle this century.

Chapter 8

Intelligent Design

Speaking of solved puzzles, the amazing diversity and complexity of life once posed a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to naturalism. Since Darwin, Mendel, and lots of 20th century work on biochemistry, that obstacle is pretty much history.

Yet Plantinga again drags out Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box as if it's a legitimate challenge to contemporary biology. The sort of derision Behe gets (like the kind I'm giving here) is taken as evidence that scientists don't have serious answers for Behe and they're just culturally opposed to intelligent design.

Design as a Basic Belief

For the sake of argument, Plantinga considers the possibility that design arguments like Behe's all fail to make their point. Is there still a place for talking about biological design? Yes, he says, because we still have a tendency to simply look at things and form a belief that they are designed without needing an argument to that effect.

Even if evolutionary theory provides a way for, say, the human eye to evolve naturally, it could still be the case that God had a hand in its evolution and God designed our cognitive faculties to perceive design in the human eye. Design discourse, as Plantinga calls it, could be warranted even if design arguments aren't sound.

Chapter 8 is supposed to be about the positive support science offers theism, but it relies on fringe criticism and then a shift back to the defensive stance of earlier chapters. On the other hand, this chapter looks fantastic next to a talk I previously covered.


1. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 193.
2. Ibid. p. 199.

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 9)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Six

Defeaters

Supposing some results of scientific method really do conflict with a person's religious beliefs, is that person required to resolve the conflict by giving up those religious beliefs? Plantinga's short answer is: no. His longer answer requires an introduction to the concept of defeaters.

A defeater is a belief that has a detrimental effect on another belief. There are two types of defeaters: rebutting defeaters and undercutting defeaters. A rebutting defeater directly conflicts with another belief (and wins the conflict). If I believe my dog is outside, then I see her dash across the living room, my belief that she's outside is defeated by the belief that she's inside. An undercutting defeater doesn't conflict so much as it takes away the reasons for holding a belief. Suppose I believe my dog is outside because I hear scratching at the door. If I open the door and see that a stray dog was doing the scratching, I no longer have a reason to believe my own dog is outside.

A belief that works as a defeater for me, might not act as a defeater for you. Scratching noises might have been my only reason for thinking my dog is outside, but you might have seen my dog through a window two minutes ago. When I open the door and see the stray dog, I have no reasons left to think my dog is outside, but you still do. Ours sets of preexisting beliefs are different.

Can you see where this is going? A religious person typically holds beliefs which aren't in the common store of beliefs from which science proceeds. Just as seeing the stray dog had different consequences for my belief and your belief, scientific discoveries may have different consequences for individuals according to their total store of beliefs.

Plantinga advises theists to admit — when appropriate — that scientific results are reasonable conclusions to draw from the limited viewpoint of scientific inquiry, but not feel compelled to accept scientific results when other conclusions are more reasonable to draw from one's total worldview.

The Reduction Test

Can a theist hold onto any religious belief no matter what scientific inquiry turns up by saying: "Science suggests not-B, but my total store of beliefs includes B. Too bad for not-B." No, because then anyone — not just theists — could do that to avoid ever giving up a belief.

Instead, Plantinga proposes a thought experiment. Take your preexisting store of beliefs and remove B, along with any other beliefs which entail B. This leaves you with a reduced store of beliefs which is as close as possible to your original store of beliefs, except B could possibly be denied. Now, add the scientific suggestion of not-B. What is the best conclusion to draw from:

(Original total beliefs) minus (B and beliefs that entail B) plus (Scientific suggestion of not-B)

Take the example of evolutionary psychology. Plantinga's original belief B is that our minds were designed by God. Science suggests our minds arose by natural processes, without an intelligent designer. Plantinga can reduce his original store of beliefs to leave open the question of whether God designed our minds and still have God creating the world, God intervening in the world, God wanting human beings to have certain mental abilities, etc. Science without these ingredients might conclude: 100% natural origin of human minds! But Plantinga can mix in these extra ingredients and come to a different conclusion without assuming (specifically) that our minds were intelligently designed.

What about a Christian who reads Old Testament poetry and so believes the Earth is rectangular? When she encounters the scientific evidence that the Earth is globe-shaped, she can set aside her belief that the Earth is rectangular and any beliefs that entail it, then see how the scientific evidence interacts with her remaining store of beliefs. Plantinga thinks the globe-shaped Earth belief will win out and replace the beliefs that led her to believe the Earth is rectangular. For example, she might have to drop the belief that poetic sections in the Bible are trustworthy descriptions of the physical world.

I think this is a decent approach. There is a lot of room to argue about how to apply the reduction test, but the exercise of putting beliefs and conclusions into these terms is at least a helpful way to organize a complex issue.

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 8)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Five - Continued

Historical Biblical Criticism

In case anyone still thinks this book is about theism and science, the remainder of Chapter Five is about the clash between (1) assuming the Christian Bible was authored by God, and (2) examining the Bible to see how it fares apart from that assumption. Plantinga gives no notice of the Qur'an, the Book of Mormon, or the Jewish scriptures considered apart from Christian creeds.

And remember: this chapter is supposed to be about real-but-superficial conflicts between religion (or at least Plantinga's religion) and science. Just as he couldn't make up his mind whether evolutionary psychology is at odds with Christian belief, we'll see that his analysis of historical Biblical criticism is also needlessly inconsistent.

Traditional Biblical Commentary

The traditional (i.e. religious) approach to reading the Bible is to start from the assumption that God is the principal author of the whole thing. No book can ever contradict another. Each book is an authoritative lens through which to interpret the other books. "Commentary" to the exclusion of "criticism" is key, as Plantinga illustrates by comparing Biblical and Kantian studies:

"In Kant scholarship, for example, one tries to figure out what Kant means in a given passage [....] Having accomplished this task (at least to one’s own satisfaction), one quite properly goes on to ask whether Kant’s views are true or plausible, or whether he has made a good case for them. This last step is not appropriate in traditional Biblical commentary. Once you have established, as you think, what God is teaching in a given passage, what he is proposing for our belief, that settles the matter. You do not go on to ask whether it is true, or plausible, or whether a good case for it has been made."¹

Plantinga then describes two "critical" approaches to the Bible.

Troeltschian Historical Biblical Criticism — On the assumption that there aren't really any miracles and God didn't really inspire the Bible, what can be salvaged, historically, from the Bible?

Duhemian Historical Biblical Criticism — Without assuming Christian beliefs are true (or false!), what can historians from a variety of religious backgrounds agree is historical in the Bible?

I expected Plantinga to endorse Duhemian HBC as a worthwhile project in the scientific spirit of doing what can be done with public evidence interpreted across differing worldviews. He could have used the same pattern from earlier in this book:

Genuine Science (Duhemian HBC) + Philosophical Naturalism -> Alleged Science (Troeltschian HBC)

Instead, he expresses disappointment at how "monumentally minimal" the results of Duhemian HBC are, compared to Christian belief. Historical Biblical Criticism as a whole gives "negative results" from a Christian perspective. "[T]here are no miracles; there is no resurrection, and certainly nothing to suggest that Jesus was the incarnate second person of the Trinity or even that he was son of God in any unique sense."²

Why count a failure to affirm Christianity as a negative rather than a neutral result? If his goal in the first half of this book is to emphasize compatibility, he's making the job needlessly hard on himself. Nor is it great advertising to play up unquestioning "commentary" as the only appropriate way to approach his holy book.


1. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 154 
2. ibid. p. 160

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 7)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Five

"My overall claim in this book: there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism."

That was the first sentence of this book's Preface. Why bring it up now? Because the first four chapters covered the unmentioned "alleged conflict" part of the book. Evolution and the idea of scientific laws don't even qualify as "superficial conflict" by Plantinga's count.

"Of course there is conflict between the widely accepted idea that natural selection, or evolution more generally, is unguided; but that claim, though widely accepted, is no part of current science. It is instead a metaphysical or theological add-on; an assumption that in no way enjoys the authority of science."¹

Chapter Five covers ideas which Plantinga believes are genuinely part of current science and genuinely (though superficially) in conflict with theism.

Evolutionary Psychology

While it might be okay to explain the tiger's stripes in terms of natural selection, it's problematic to extend "Darwinian" explanations to human psychology. In particular, to explain religion and morality as the products of natural selection. 

One paper by Herbert Simon really pushes Plantinga's buttons by hypothesizing that a predisposition toward altruism (doing good without expectation of personal benefit) may result from natural selection favoring individuals with a moderate amount of "docility," i.e. the tendency to just accept what society teaches. On average, Simon claims, uncritically accepting the teachings of society helps individuals pass on their genes.

"In this scheme of things, altruism is a relative matter, for only a subset of the altruist's behaviors reduce fitness. Moreover, the altruist is rewarded, in advance, by the 'gift' of docility; altruism is simply a by-product of docility. Docile persons are more than compensated for their altruism by the knowledge and skills they acquire, and moreover not all proper behaviors are sacrificial."²

Why couldn't a self-interested individual just accept the parts of societal wisdom which are personally beneficial and reject the parts which aren't? Simon's answer is that it's often difficult (or impossible) for an individual to figure out which is which:

"Belief in large numbers of facts and propositions that we have not had the opportunity or ability to evaluate independently is basic to the human condition, a simple corollary of the boundedness of human rationality in the face of a complex world."³

Plantinga finds it thoroughly insulting to suggest that the altruistic behavior of "a Mother Teresa or a Thomas Aquinas" comes from their inability to sort out the costs and benefits of social suggestibility and notice they're on the losing side of the gene passing game. Frankly, I think Plantinga is confused about the nature of Simon's paper...and possibly about the language of genetic "fitness" in general. Yes, scientists use value terms to describe genes as tending to encourage or discourage reproduction in a given context. This is meant as a convenient way of talking, not as a social-Darwinist style commentary on human ethics. Of course there's a special danger of making this mistake when a paper discusses human ethics (whatever their contents might be) as arising from what we might call "gene values."

A few pages later, Plantinga writes on a somewhat different topic:

"[God] could have brought it about that our cognitive faculties evolve by natural selection, and evolve in such a way that it is natural for us to form beliefs about the supernatural in general and God himself in particular. Finding a 'natural' origin for religion in no way discredits it."⁴

Why not apply this thinking to ethics? Plantinga could allow for the possibility that altruistic tendencies have evolutionary roots, and still give God the credit. He could draw the same distinction he did in earlier chapters between natural selection and naturalistic selection, where the latter carries the additional burden of philosophical naturalism. Even if Simon himself were antagonistic to theism, I see no reason why Plantinga couldn't separate the man from the field as he does with Richard Dawkins and evolutionary theory in general.

Evolutionary Origins of Religious Belief

Pretty much the same issue as above, except religion is viewed as the byproduct of naturally selected traits. This time, he does draw a distinction between natural origins and naturalistic philosophy. More surprisingly, he goes back to the idea of evolved ethics and now claims it isn't a problem! Then, he writes of both evolved ethics and evolved religious beliefs:

"These theories, therefore, do conflict with religion, but in a merely superficial way. They conflict with religion in the way in which a theory that results from conjoining Newtonian physics with atheism does: that theory conflicts with religion, all right, but it certainly doesn’t constitute a serious religion-science conflict."⁵

Argh! His cases of no-real-conflict and real-but-superficial-conflict turn out to be equivalent.

Genuine Science + Philosophical Naturalism -> Alleged Science

In the first four chapters, he concluded "no real conflict" because he pointed to Genuine Science before the philosophical add-on. In this chapter, he's using the same structure but pointing at Alleged Science to conclude "superficial conflict." I can't interpret this charitably because he explicitly mentioned Newtonian physics on the first page of the chapter, then wrote: "There are other areas of science, however, where the appearance of conflict is matched by reality."⁶ Evolutionary psychology was first on the list that followed.

I hope a second-edition editor encourages him to make up his mind and consolidate these sections under one characterization.

1. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 129

2. Simon, H.A. (1990, December 21). A mechanism for social selection and successful altruism. Science 250, p. 1667. [pdf]

3. ibid. p. 1666
4. Plantinga (2011). p. 140 
5. ibid. p. 143
6. ibid. p. 130

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 6)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Three

"No Miracles" Zone

Shifting away from the discussion of evolution, Plantinga next addresses claims that modern people can't go around thinking it's possible for a supernatural God to act in the natural world (how quaint!). I wasn't satisfied with Plantinga's example, so I went and found this gem from Michael Martin:

"Consider science. It presupposes the uniformity of nature: that natural laws govern the world and that there are no violations of such laws. However, Christianity presupposes that there are miracles in which natural laws are violated. Since to make sense of science one must assume that there are no miracles, one must further assume that Christianity is false. To put this in a different way: Miracles by definition are violations of laws of nature that can only be explained by God's intervention. Yet science assumes that insofar as an event as an explanation at all, it has a scientific explanation--one that does not presuppose God. Thus, doing, science assumes that the Christian world view is false."¹

Put another way, there's something wrong with a person who helps herself to scientific explanations and still wants to appeal to miracles at times. Notice how this goes beyond the more typical claim that scientific explanations must be natural explanations; you can't commit adultery by entertaining supernatural explanations on the side and expect science to let you back in the house.

Plantinga responds by characterizing scientific laws as descriptions of "how things go when the universe is causally closed, subject to no outside causal influence. They don’t purport to tell us how things always go; they tell us, instead, how things go when no agency outside the universe acts in it."² We can imagine a little footnote anytime a scientifically discovered regularity is mentioned:

 * Valid when God isn't messing with nature.

I'm not quite happy with this philosophy of science, but I have to admit it's a pretty standard way of handling the problem.

Everything... All the Time

On Plantinga's view of classical theism, God does a lot more than occasionally intervene. God continually and actively sustains the natural world.

"[A]part from that sustaining, supporting activity, the world would simply fail to exist. Some, including Thomas Aquinas, go even further: every causal transaction that takes place is such that God performs a special act of concurring with it; without that divine concurrence, no causal transaction could take place." ³

This changes the footnote for scientific discoveries from "valid when God isn't messing with nature" to "valid when God is messing with nature in his more usual ways." Continual divine activity is what makes the natural world function at all.

Whatever the metaphysical situation may be, I view scientific laws as descriptions of how things go, as revealed by scientific method. Laws don't mention God's sustaining power or God's special interventions because these are "pluralities" scientists have not needed in order to describe the phenomena open to public view. If you want to believe God is behind Newton's law of gravitation, that's fine with me. But let's not put a metaphysical footnote on it.

Chapter Four

Masters of the Universe

Before the twentieth century, it was common to picture the universe as a whole behaving like it does at roughly human scales and human speeds. If, like Laplace's demon, you could know the current state of the clockwork universe, then — in theory — you could calculate future events perfectly. Or you could calculate backwards to reveal all the details of the past. Relativity and quantum physics made things more complicated, or at any rate more interesting.

For people of certain philosophical temperaments, the problem of divine action in the world remains a concern. Plantinga points out the Divine Action Project as a recent example.

"It would be fair to say, I think, that the main problem for the project is to find an account of divine action in the world—action beyond creation and conservation—that doesn’t involve God’s intervening in the world."⁴

Plantinga himself has no issue with the idea of God sometimes taking special action that disrupts the usual operation of the world, but he offers "a way around this problem" for those who do consider it a problem. On the Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber view of quantum physics, wave function collapses can happen spontaneously. As far as nature is concerned, something is going to happen...but what exactly will happen is left open. Plantinga offers a divine collapse-causation (DCC) model where God is deciding how things turn out when wave functions collapse.

"Furthermore, if, as one assumes, the macroscopic physical world supervenes on the microscopic, God could thus control what happens at the macroscopic level by causing the right microscopic collapse-outcomes. In this way God can exercise providential guidance over cosmic history; he might in this way guide the course of evolutionary history by causing the right mutations to arise at the right time and preserving the forms of life that lead to the results he intends. In this way he might also guide human history. He could do this without in any way 'violating' the created natures of the things he has created."⁵

He goes on to suggest at least some of the Bible's miracles could be chalked up to extremely unlikely outcomes of quantum physics. Even more exciting: maybe human beings possess this same special ability as part of our "image of God"! Our non-physical minds might be communicating our free choices to our brains. "Here we see a pleasing unity of divine and human free action, as well as a more specific suggestion as to what mechanism these actions actually involve."⁶

Before Christians get too carried away by this theological breakthrough, Plantinga has some words of caution:

"The sensible religious believer is not obliged to trim her sails to the current scientific breeze on this topic, revising her belief on the topic every time science changes its mind; if the most satisfactory Christian (or theistic) theology endorses the idea that the universe did indeed have a beginning, the believer has a perfect right to accept that thought. Something similar goes for the Christian believer and special divine action.

But where Christian or theistic belief and current science can fit nicely together, as with DCC, so much the better; and if one of the current versions of QM fits better with such belief than the others, that’s a perfectly proper reason to accept that version."⁷

Isn't accepting DCC a case of being significantly more flighty than keeping up with mainstream science? This seems like picking through oddball versions of periphery scientific suggestions for a way to make peace with a fairly obscure theology of not-intervening-when-intervening.


1. From Michael Martin's paper "The Transcendental Argument for the Nonexistence of God" which sparked a lively debate with John M. Frame. This paper is a kind of parody, so I'm not sure Martin would assert the same ideas in another context.
2. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 79
3. ibid. p. 67
4. ibid. p. 97 
5. ibid. p. 116
6. ibid. p. 120 
7. ibid. p. 121

On "The Epistemological Objection to Divine Command Ethics"

"Believers can argue that morality requires God all they want, but until they can provide some legitimate reasoning or evidence for it, they do not deserve the benefit of a doubt. Who's to say that a universe without God could have no morality? We aren't 100% sure that this one has a god, and yet many of us seem to have no difficulty in making moral decisions. Being good without God is not a problem."¹

While I agree with Taylor Carr that better reasoning or evidence is needed to make divine command ethics a convincing position for those of us who don't subscribe to it already, I think he goes one step too far when he raises what is known as the epistemological objection (i.e. the knowledge-based objection). Essentially:

How could morality require God, if knowing right from wrong doesn't require knowing God?

The not-entirely-absent moral sense of atheists is supposed to demonstrate God's irrelevance to morality. But does this objection work? My short answer is: no, because it's possible for our moral sense to rely on God somehow, without us realizing it.

Knowing vs. Knowing How One Knows

In case my short answer didn't totally satisfy you, let's take a look at Glenn People's recent paper "The Epistemological Objection to Divine Command Ethics." Or, if you're more of an auditory learner, I can recommend his podcast episode on the topic.

First, let's see how he characterizes the basic epistemological objection.

"The underlying argument is as follows, where Q is the act of knowing moral facts and C is anything.

1. If C is the cause of our ability to Q, then person p cannot Q unless he believes in C.
2. p does Q, and does not believe in C.
3. Therefore C is not the cause of our ability to Q."²

As an example, take Aristotle's views on the heart and the brain:

"Moreover, the motions of pain and pleasure, and generally of all sensation, plainly have their source in the heart, and find in it their ultimate termination. This, indeed, reason would lead us to expect. For the source must, whenever possible, be one; and, of all places, the best suited for a source is the centre."

"The brain, then, tempers the heat and seething of the heart."³

So...if [electrical activity in the brain] is the cause of our ability to [think and feel], then [Aristotle] cannot [think and feel] unless he believes in [electrical activity in the brain]. Yet Aristotle could think and feel even though he didn't believe his brain contained any such activity. (1) is false. It stays false when filled in this way:

1. If [God] is the cause of our ability to [know right from wrong], then [Richard Dawkins] cannot [know right from wrong] unless he believes in [God].
2. [Richard Dawkins] does [know right from wrong], and does not believe in [God].
3. Therefore [God] is not the cause of our ability to [know right from wrong].

Since (1) is false, (3) is an invalid conclusion to draw from (2).

31 Flavors

What counts as a "command" in divine command ethics? There isn't a consensus here. At one extreme, divine commands might be aspects of God's unexpressed private will. At the other extreme, a divine command might be a literally voiced, undoubtedly divine imperative given directly to the individuals expected to follow it. Let's label these extremes secret and explicit respectively.

If divine commands were secret, the epistemological objection would be quite strong since there would be absolutely no reason for our moral sense to bear a relationship with God's will. If divine commands were explicit, we'd all know it! Philosophers who actually subscribe to divine command ethics are at various points in between. They hold that God expresses his will somehow, but not as spoken commands to each person.

Here's a moderate form of divine command ethics:

"Consider for example the possibility that God conveys the “sign” to people regarding some act (let’s pick murder) via a proper function of the human conscience. Nobody needs to know what conscience is, how we got one, or that God uses it to ensure that we have some true beliefs in order for them to know, via conscience, that murder is wrong (assuming, of course, that there were a conscience with proper functions)."⁴

So God does express his will, not as a verbal command, but in the design of our consciences. Whether we believe in God or not, we have an innate sense of moral outrage when we witness certain kinds of killing.

I don't think this is how the world actually works, but it's not easily disproven.

Oh, Academics!

Up to this point, I haven't actually addressed the core of Peoples' paper. He's writing in response to a paper by Wes Morriston called "The Moral Obligations of Reasonable Non-Believers" who is himself writing in response to a book and some papers of Robert Merrihew Adams.

Adams is well known for developing a form (or two or three) of divine command ethics intended to steer a respectable path between the extremes of secret and explicit.

Morriston seizes on the most explicit-leaning aspect of Adams' work, and applies an epistemological objection to it.

Peoples responds to Morriston's paper by (1) pointing out that Morriston's objection is so narrowly aimed that it doesn't threaten divine command ethics in general, and (2) accusing Morriston of misconstruing Adams' position anyway.

I have no interest in taking sides on the interpretation of Adams' divine command ethics. It's a minor battle which isn't going to sway the campaign. But then...that does appear to be Peoples' main point.


1. Carr, T. (2009, July 24). Being good without God. GodlessHaven. Retrieved February 19, 2011, from http://www.godlesshaven.com/articles/good-without-god.html
2. Peoples, G. (2011). The epistemological objection to divine command ethics. Philosophia Christi 13(2). La Mirada, CA:Biola University. p. 389
3. Aristotle, On the parts of animals. Heart quote from Book III. Brain quote from Book II. Peoples used a different example, so blame any defects on me.
4. Peoples, G. (2011).

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 5)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Two - Continued

Draper's Evidential Argument

Dawkins and Dennett are meant to represent the position that evolutionary theory has ruled out theism, or at least traditional Abrahamic theism, or at least Plantinga's interpretation of God creating humankind in his image. Paul Draper will now represent the position that evolution at least constitutes significant evidence against theism.

Without getting into Draper's supporting arguments,¹ the basic idea is that we would be relatively less likely to discover that our origins are evolutionary in a world created by God than we would in a fully natural world. The discovery that our origins actually are evolutionary, therefore, constitutes some evidence that we live in a fully natural world. You may recognize this as a form of inference to the best explanation.

Suppose Draper is correct and the fact of evolution counts in favor of naturalism. Plantinga counters by saying that other facts weigh in favor of theism, e.g. that there are intelligent beings on Earth with a moral sense who worship God. Such beings would be relatively more likely to exist if there is a God who wanted them to exist, than in any scenario without a similar guarantee. At this point, I would argue that the facts of moral and religious diversity would be odd in a world with one God who wants a unity of morals and religion...to which Plantinga might play the Calvinism card. And so it goes.

Remember Plantinga's theology about theism being necessarily true? He also complains about Draper assuming theism is a contingent matter. (I really need to write a post on this topic sometime.)

Science Education

"A solid majority of Americans are Christians, and many more (some 88 or 90 percent, depending on the poll you favor) believe in God. But when that choir of experts repeatedly tell us that evolution is incompatible with belief in God, it’s not surprising that many people come to believe that evolution is incompatible with belief in God, and is therefore an enemy of religion. After all, those experts are, well, experts. But then it is also not surprising that many Americans are reluctant to have evolution taught to their children in the public schools, the schools they themselves pay taxes to support. [...] The association of evolution with naturalism is the obvious root of the widespread antipathy to evolution in the United States, and to the teaching of evolution in the public schools."²

I pretty much agree with Plantinga's point that equating evolution and naturalism is a foolish move if you want evolution taught in public schools. To use the weather analogy, meteorology might be controversial in middle school classrooms if Richard Dawkins were out there claiming the hydrological cycle reveals the truth of atheism.

At the same time, Plantinga is badly mistaken about the primary source of "the association of evolution with naturalism." He acts like American Christians are being duped into thinking there's a conflict between evolution and their religious beliefs. Nope. They came up with that idea on their own. Naturalists like Dawkins are reacting, not instigating. For many American Christians, taking Genesis as history is an essential doctrine, despite Plantinga's quick dismissal earlier in the book.

Come to think of it, this book bothers me the same way Intelligent Design books and articles usually do. There's no outright affirmation of the basic scientific discoveries that divide Old Earth Creationists from Young Earth Creationists. It's all about leaving things open for Christians, even when it's the equivalent of leaving open geocentrism. Plantinga is like a politician trying to please a broad base while hoping his scientifically literate constituency and his anti-science constituency don't notice he's refusing to stand with either of them.

Natural Evil

Setting the Genesis issue aside, what about the argument that evolution doesn't fit the picture of a good God who cares for the well-being of his creatures? As Darwin wrote:

"I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice."³

Plantinga gives a possible reason why God may allow so much suffering that can't be blamed on humankind.

"God wanted to create a really good world; among all the possible worlds, he wanted to choose one of very great goodness. [...] Among good-making properties for worlds, however, there is one of special, transcendent importance, and it is a property that according to Christians characterizes our world. For according to the Christian story, God, the almighty first being of the universe and the creator of everything else, was willing to undergo enormous suffering in order to redeem creatures who had turned their backs on him. [...] The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He was subjected to ridicule, rejection, and finally the cruel and humiliating death of the cross. [...] All this to enable human beings to be reconciled to God, and to achieve eternal life. This overwhelming display of love and mercy is not merely the greatest story ever told; it is the greatest story that could be told. No other great-making property of a world can match this one.

If so, however, perhaps all the best possible worlds contain incarnation and atonement, or at any rate atonement. But any world that contains atonement will contain sin and evil and consequent suffering and pain. Furthermore, if the remedy is to be proportionate to the sickness, such a world will contain a great deal of sin and a great deal of suffering and pain. Still further, it may very well contain sin and suffering, not just on the part of human beings but perhaps also on the part of other creatures as well. Indeed, some of these other creatures might be vastly more powerful than human beings, and some of them—Satan and his minions, for example—may have been permitted to play a role in the evolution of life on earth, steering it in the direction of predation, waste and pain."⁴

What I'm hearing is that huge numbers of sentient beings suffered over millions of years to provide a fitting background for God to suffer briefly. Answers like this are why I recommend people read apologetics books rather than Dawkins, Dennett, et al. if they want to risk their faith.


1. See http://naturalisticatheism.blogspot.com/2006/01/biological-evolution-as-evidence.html for a more detailed analysis.
2. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 53
3. Darwin, C. (1860/1911). Charles Darwin to Asa Gray. In F. Darwin (Ed.), The life and letters of Charles Darwin (vol 2). New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company. p. 105
4. Plantinga (2011). p. 58

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 4)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Two

Which came first, the mind or the material?

Richard Dawkins may not be a card carrying member of the philosophers guild, but Daniel Dennett sure is.¹ In his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett argues that our natural — rather than intelligently designed — origin has profound implications for our lives outside of biology class. He compares the Darwinian Revolution to the Copernican Revolution, since both drastically changed our views about our place in the world.

One of the largest shifts, as Dennett tells it, was believing that a mind (God) brought the physical world into existence...to believing that the physical world brought minds into existence.

I admit this is a harder sell than the natural design of the human eye. At least with an eye, we all agree that having the parts in the right places will result in a functioning organ. There is much less confidence — even among atheists — that having the parts in the right places for a functioning brain will result in a functioning mind. (In fact, this is the reason I call myself a naturalist, but hesitate to identify as a physicalist; I'm not convinced that consciousness has been explained by the physical sciences.)

Clash of the Extremists

It's easy to paint Dawkins or Dennett as zealots for naturalism who go beyond what science strictly requires of modern educated people. Here are some options I see for theists:

• God brought the kind of physical world into existence which was capable of producing human-like beings by natural processes. Since it did, it's still correct to give God the ultimate credit.
• Our world could have produced human-like beings by natural processes, but didn't happen to do so. God tweaked the natural world to set things going in our direction.
• Our world could not have produced human-like beings by natural processes.
• No possible world — in the broadly logical sense — could have produced human-like beings by natural processes.

The first two options are, I would argue, easily compatible with modern science. The third is typical of Intelligent Design arguments. Plantinga himself holds the fourth and most extreme position, as he lets on here:

"So neither Dennett nor contemporary evolutionary theory shows that possibly, all of the features of our world, including mind, have been produced by unguided natural selection. But assume (contrary to fact, as I see it) that this is in fact possible in the broadly logical sense. If so, is it also biologically possible?"²

In a previous post, I explained that Augustine was reluctant to accept the standard interpretation of the days of creation because he held to a theology which made it hard for him to imagine God working on something over time. Plantinga's position also comes from a theological stance that God is the same in all possible worlds. This makes it hard to imagine that features of our world with close ties to God's intentions could differ in other logically possible worlds.

You keep using that word...

Plantinga does try to address the question as if naturalistic evolution were logically possible, but still questions whether it is possible given the way our physical world works:

"For, of course, it is perfectly possible both that life has come to be by way of guided natural selection, and that it could not have come to be by way of unguided natural selection. It is perfectly possible that the process of natural selection has been guided and superintended by God, and that it could not have produced our living world without that guidance."³

Q: Do you know what we call "guided natural selection"?
A: Artificial selection.

Rationalism and Empiricism

Let's talk about Plantinga's other signature area: the rationality of theistic belief. Through much of the twentieth century, certain philosophers brushed off theism as an idea unfit for even bothering to consider whether it is true or false; theism is irrational either way. Plantinga wrote a series of books which essentially argued — and argued successfully, I think — that if (a certain kind of) theism is true, then theism is not irrational.

What puts people off is that Plantinga can maintain his brand of Christian belief in a way that is almost in principle immune to contrary evidence and needs no positive evidence or arguments!

"But suppose Swinburne’s arguments are indeed unsuccessful, and add that the same goes for all the other theistic arguments—for example, the moral argument as developed by George Mavrodes and Robert Adams, and the cosmological argument as developed by William Lane Craig, and all the rest. Does it follow that one who believes in God is irrational, unjustified, going contrary to reason, or in some other way deserving of reprimand or abuse or disapprobation? No. After all, one of the main lessons to be learned from the history of modern philosophy from Descartes through Hume is that there don’t seem to be good arguments for the existence of other minds or selves, or the past, or an external world and much else besides; nevertheless belief in other minds, the past, and an external world is presumably not irrational or in any other way below epistemic par.

Are things different with belief in God? If so, why?"⁴

Until philosophers can defeat his theism on these terms, Plantinga is content to reject natural human origins because it doesn't fit the internally consistent story he believes about the world. Whatever the substantive fruits of science may be, the spirit of scientific inquiry is to look and see what is true about the world. This attitude of empiricism is very different from free-floating rationalism. Granted, we do need some minimal philosophy before empiricism can get to work, but theism — let alone a niche kind of theism — is not required.


Note: The Kindle Edition does not use traditional page numbers. I'm using "k. 93" to indicate Kindle location 93. This book is 6,220 locations long.

1. Plantinga and Dennett have beards. Dawkins does not.
2. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. k. 701. 
3. ibid. k. 712.
4. ibid. k. 754.

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 3)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter One - Continued

Dawkins' Subtitle

Famous science writer (and infamous atheist) Richard Dawkins gave his book The Blind Watchmaker a provocative subtitle: "Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design." Plantinga points out — rightly — that the naturalistic evolution of living beings would not imply a naturalistic universe overall. It's a bad subtitle, except for marketing purposes.

(As an aside, I was frustrated with The God Delusion for much the same reason. Dawkins treats biological evolution as a fatal blow to theism, or at least he comes off that way.)

Plantinga is much more concerned with the implication that "the evidence of evolution" reveals a lack of design in human beings. If biological evolution only happened to produce God-like creatures (us), then the all-important theological claim that God intentionally created us in his image is false. But does evolutionary science really show that humanity arose by happenstance?

Notice how low the bar is set. Dawkins must prove there is no room for a divine hand in human development, or Plantinga succeeds.

...and I think he does succeed. After all, the bar for Dawkins is set very high:

"Nor does [Dawkins] try to show either that there is no such person as God, or that, if there is, it is not possible that he should have somehow set up and directed the whole process. And why should he? After all, he’s a biologist and not a philosopher."¹

Plantinga further points out that Dawkins hasn't shown how the mental can arise from unthinking material. (How lazy!)

After all, he's a philosopher and not a biologist

Not content with an easy defensive victory, Plantinga decides to attack Dawkins on his home turf.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Atheists can't appeal to God to explain the diversity of life, but they can appeal to natural evolution! This — and not the strength of the evidence — is why atheists are so passionate about claiming life evolved naturally. Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, has challenged Darwinist orthodoxy and has yet to be adequately answered. Atheistic scientists like Dawkins are only going by their feelings and guesswork that natural evolution can explain it all. Plantinga writes:

"There is no attempt at the sort of serious calculation that would surely be required for a genuine answer. No doubt such a calculation and hence an answer to those questions is at present far beyond our knowledge and powers; no doubt it would be unreasonable to require such a calculation; still, the fact remains we don’t have a serious answer."²

Silly scientists, only addressing Behe's specific challenges and not proving him wrong in principle!

I used to believe evolution was motivated by atheism, but only because I was kept in ignorance by my family, my church, and my private school. This isn't good advertising for the harmony of science and (certain kinds of) religion! Now I read Plantinga's claim that biologists aren't doing the serious work to give serious answers to objections and it just blows my mind.

Biologists are the ones doing real work. No wonder they sometimes get testy; they have to put up with lazy, ill-informed, or irrelevant criticisms from a society that demands biologists admit God might guide genomes, but doesn't demand that meteorologists admit God might guide cold fronts. Can the weather man prove cloud formation is entirely made plausible by natural processes alone? Maybe if we had school boards demanding recognition of "Divine Wrath Stormology" we would have the equivalent of Dawkins making naturalistic claims and the equivalent of Plantinga writing:

"For the nontheist, undirected [weather] is the only game in town, and [the exchange of heat energy] seems to be the most plausible mechanism to drive that process. Here is this stunningly intricate [atmosphere] with its enormous diversity and apparent design; from the perspective of naturalism or nontheism, the only way it could have happened is by way of [an] unguided [hydrological cycle]; hence it must have happened that way; hence there must be such a[n Aristotelian] series for each current [rain storm]. The theist, on the other hand, has a little more freedom here: maybe there is such a series and maybe there isn’t; God has created the [meteorological] world and could have done it in any number of different ways; there doesn’t have to be any such series. In this way the theist is freer to follow the evidence where it leads."³ (substitutions for the sake of parody)

Assembling a Modern Eye, One Cell at a Time

Maybe you think I'm being too harsh on Plantinga's science. Please watch this short clip of Dawkins explaining how eyes could plausibly have evolved in a gradual manner:

Dawkins - Eye Evolution

Make sense? Starting from light sensitive cells on the skin, small changes would have been progressively more helpful. We see other animals with eyes all along this range, so it's not even much of a hypothetical. Yet somehow Plantinga picked eye evolution as a good place to question the plausibility of natural selection:

"We can see this as follows: consider a particular human eye—one of Dawkins’s, for example; assign a number to each cell contained in that eye (as with certain kinds of build-it-yourself toy kits); let the first member of the series be a creature that has cell number 1, the second be one that contains cells number 2 and number 1; the third contain cell number 3 plus cells number 1 and 2, and so on. This won’t quite work; for this eye to function, there will also have to be an appropriate brain or part of a brain to which it is connected by an optic nerve. But you get the idea: clearly there is such a series. Of course that by itself doesn’t show much; if it’s to be relevant, the length of the series will have to be constrained by the time available, and each step in the series will have to be such that it can arise by way of genetic mutation from a previous step. Furthermore (and crucially), each mutation will have to be fitness-conferring (or at least not unduly costly in terms of fitness), so that it’s not too improbable that they be preserved by natural selection."⁴

Did you catch what he did there? Plantinga thinks eye evolution is about starting with one cell present in a modern eye and progressively adding single cells in their modern places. This is like enumerating each building in, say Chicago, then thinking Chicago started with one of those modern buildings and progressively added every other modern building on the list until filling out the whole thing. That's not how Chicago came to be the way it is and it's not how biologists think living systems came to be the way they are. The "toy kit" view leaves out all the intermediate history of what worked at the time and what shaped what came after, but isn't a subset of what we have now.

I wouldn't fault a person for initially misunderstanding evolution as a straightforward cell-by-cell buildup toward current lifeforms. But I do expect more from a published book that's largely about evolution.


Note: The Kindle Edition does not use traditional page numbers. I'm using "k. 93" to indicate Kindle location 93. This book is 6,220 locations long.

1. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. k. 393.
2. ibid. k. 465.
3. ibid. k. 485.
4. ibid. k. 441.