Many people know that it is wrong to rape, but know nothing about the goodness of the Christian God. How we come to know moral facts is often different from how we come to know theological facts. Based on this truth, many skeptics claim moral facts must be independent of God. This conclusion, however, is simply mistaken.

An illustration may help to explain. The following is adapted from philosopher John Milliken.

Imagine a language called Twing someone makes up and sets down in an official manuscript. Suppose, years later, a person named Tim learns Twing indirectly from some friends who speak it. Suppose further that one day he stumbles upon the official manuscript, reads it, and exclaims about the official manuscript, “This thing is written in perfect Twing!”

Tim is here making a substantive statement. Tim learned Twing from his friends, without ever knowing anything about the official manuscript. But then, when he came across the official manuscript, he recognized that the manuscript was “written in perfect Twing!” His discovery of the manuscript was completely independent of his discovery of Twing through his friends.

Even though Tim came to know Twing separately from how he came to discover the manuscript, it would be ridiculous to say that perfect Twing is independent of the official manuscript. For without the official manuscript, it would be impossible for perfect Twing to exist. The official manuscript is the source of Twing.

Christians claim we can discover moral facts without knowing about God, but when we do discover who God is, we can identify moral goodness with God. This is not some slight-of-hand move by Christian theologians. John Milliken explains how this works:

It is clear that, in order to make a substantive ascription of goodness to God, our conception of it need only be epistemically independent and not ontologically so. In other words, it is only necessary that we learn what is good from instances other than God. It would be a real and important discovery for us that what we antecedently understood as the good is exemplified in God, even if He is ultimately its source.

God is the Good, and so moral facts are not ontologically independent of God, even though we may come to know God independently of moral facts.

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

In part 1, we learned that thinkers in the seventeenth century proposed to divide up reality into that which could be quantitatively described by mathematics and that which could not.  Philosopher Edward Feser, in a blog post, argues that this move by Galileo and Descartes was a massive blunder and compares it to the following analogy:

Suppose someone is cleaning the house and carefully sweeps the dirt out of each room into a certain hallway, where he then proceeds to sweep the various piles of dirt he’s created under a certain rug.  You tell him that that’s all well and good, but that he has still failed to get rid of the dirt under the rug itself and cannot do so using the same method.  He replies:

Are you kidding?  The “sweep it under the rug” method is one long success story, having worked everywhere else.  How plausible is it that this one little rug in this one little hallway would be the only holdout?  Obviously it’s just a matter of time before it yields to the same method.  If you think otherwise you’re just flying in the face of the facts — and, I might add, the consensus of the community of sweepers.  Evidently you’ve got some sentimental attachment to this rug and desperately want to think that it is special somehow.  Or is it some superstitious religious dogma you’re trying to salvage?  What do you think it is, a magic carpet? 

The sweeper thinks his critic is delusional, but of course he is himself the delusional one.  For the dirt under the rug is obviously the one pile which the “sweep it under the rug” method cannot possibly get rid of, and indeed the more successful that method is elsewhere, the more problematic the particular pile under the rug becomes.  The sweeper’s method cannot solve the “dirt under the rug problem” precisely because that method is the source of the problem — the problem is the price the method’s user must pay for the success it achieves elsewhere.

Feser explains explicitly how his analogy of sweeping dirt under a rug works:

Human beings are like the hallway in my example, and the human mind is like the rug.  The “mathematically precise quantitative description” of the natural world provided by modern science has been as successful as it has been only because those aspects of the natural world that don’t fit that method — irreducibly qualitative features like color, sound, etc. as they appear to us (as contrasted with scientific redefinitions of color, sound, etc. in terms of such quantifiable features as surface reflectance properties, compression waves, and the like); and final causes, teleology, or purposes — were swept under the rug of the mind, re-characterized as purely “subjective,” as mere projections that only seem to be features of the external world but are really only aspects of our perceptual representation of it.

As Nagel says, it was precisely this methodological revolution that created the mind-body problem, just as the “sweep it under the rug” method in my example creates a “dirt under the rug problem.”  If you essentially define the physical in such a way that it excludes color, sound, purpose, etc. as they appear to us in ordinary experience, and define the mental in such a way that it is the repository of these qualities you have removed from the physical world, then you have carved up the conceptual territory in a way that rules out from the get-go an explanation of the mental in terms of the physical.  Far from constituting a desperate resistance to the implications of the scientific revolution, dualism of this essentially Cartesian sort was a consequence of that revolution.

In other words, there is a only a mind-body problem if you accept that all that exists is that which can be mathematically quantified. If you do not accept this highly dubious contention, then the mind-body problem disappears.

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Contemporary philosophers often refer to the “mind-body problem,” which is roughly the following: how is it that the physical body interacts with the seemingly non-physical mind? Many philosophers answer this question by simply denying that the mind is non-physical. They claim that the mind is a manifestation of the brain and the chemical processes going on in the brain.

But this answer is also quite problematic. As atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel writes,

Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science.  The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything.  If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its implications, it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture.

Why is it that philosophers are so concerned about where the mind (consciousness) fits into reality? According to Nagel, this entire mind-body problem stems from our philosophical forefathers.

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution.  Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them.

Subjective appearances, on the other hand — how this physical world appears to human perception — were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers.  It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind — as well as human intentions and purposes — from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.

Philosopher Edward Feser argues that this move by Galileo and Descartes was a massive blunder and in part 2 we will see why that is.

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According to Rosenberg, then, unless you agree that science is the only genuine source of knowledge, you cannot consistently believe that it gives us any genuine knowledge.  This is about as plausible as saying that unless you think metal detectors alone can detect physical objects, then you cannot consistently believe that they detect any physical objects at all.

“Metallicism” is the pejorative label given to our positive view by those who really want to have their stone, water, wood, and plastic cakes and dine at the table of metallic bounties, too.  Opponents of metallicism would never charge their metal detector-owning friends with “metallicism” when they need help finding lost car keys or loose change in the sofa.  But just try subjecting their nonmetallic mores and norms, their music or metaphysics, their literary theories or politics to metallurgical scrutiny.  The immediate response of outraged humane letters is “metallicism.”

Those beholden to scientism are bound to protest that the analogy is no good, on the grounds that metal detectors detect only part of reality while physics detects the whole of it.  But such a reply would simply beg the question once again, for whether physics really does describe the whole of reality is precisely what is at issue.

One hears this stupid non sequitur over and over and over again when arguing with New Atheist types.  It is implicit every time some Internet Infidel asks triumphantly: “Where are the predictive successes and technological applications of philosophy or theology?”  This is about as impressive as our fictional “metallicist” smugly demanding: “Where are the metal-detecting successes of gardening, cooking, and painting?” — and then high-fiving his fellow metallicists when we are unable to offer any examples, thinking that he has established that plants, food, works of art, and indeed anything non-metallic are all non-existent.

For why on earth should we believe that only methods capable of detecting metals give us genuine access to reality?  And why on earth should we believe that if something is real, then it must be susceptible of the mathematically precise prediction and technological application characteristic of physics?  I submit that there is no answer to this question that doesn’t beg the question.

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Many atheists believe that reality consists of only what physics can describe. This viewpoint is also known as scientism. They point to the fact that the progress of physics over the past few hundred years has been astounding and that the mathematical descriptions of the natural world, given us by physics, have brought us technological advances that our ancestors could not have imagined.

While I completely agree with the success of physics, it simply does not follow that because physics has been successful, that only what physics describes exists. Edward Feser also sees that this argument is fallacious. He criticizes one of the foremost proponents of it, atheist Alex Rosenberg. According to Feser, here is Rosenberg’s basic argument:

1. The predictive power and technological applications of physics are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge.

2. Therefore what physics reveals to us is all that is real.

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Although most philosophers of religion have conceded that the logical problem of evil (i.e., an all-powerful, all-good God cannot logically exist if evil exists) has been effectively answered by theists, there is still a battle over the evidential problem of evil. The problem for theists, as stated in the evidential argument, is that an all-powerful, all-good God could do a lot more to reduce the gratuitous evil in the world, and since he does not, it is more rational to believe that he does not exist.

David Baggett and Jerry Walls write that for the anti-theist to make the case that “there are far more sufferings than are morally justified, he needs an argument that a good God would not create the actual world.” Can the case be made that it would have been better for God not to create the world than to create the actual world we live in? Baggett and Walls think that it is doubtful.

His case would require more than showing that there are many instances of excessive sufferings, which seems true, but that there are more and worse of those than there are countervailing or parallel goods overall. And the case of whether there are depends on the evidence for Anselmian theology. To the extent that independent reasons exist for such theology, we have more grounds for doubting [the anti-theist's] insistence that we’re rationally constrained to give up theistic belief.

Anselmian theology holds that God is the greatest conceivable being – all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect in every way. The anti-theist must show that this particular conception of God fails to explain how the world could contain the evil it does. Baggett and Walls argue that it

is plausible to think that there would be a great number of occasions during which God would not intervene to stop people from exercising their wills in terrible ways if he went to the trouble of creating a world featuring such freedom. By parity of reasoning, the case is similar with a world of stable natural laws, assuming that God saw its creation as valuable enough to effect in the first place.

Assuming that God sees value in creating a world of meaningful freedom and stable order, it is doubtful that he would intervene often to thwart people’s evil expressions of freedom or disrupt the natural order unless the overall balance between goods and evils in the world began to tip in the direction toward evils.

But how can there be any counterbalancing goods in the face of evils such as child torture? Aren’t there simply some evils which are so gratuitous that there can be no possible ultimate justification for God allowing them? For Baggett and Walls, gratuitous suffering does not entail ultimately unjustifiable suffering.

Consequently, we accept that a good God wouldn’t allow suffering for which there aren’t morally sufficient reasons, but we reject the notion that . . . problematic gratuitous sufferings are simply to be equated with ultimately unjustifiable sufferings. The distinction between gratuitous suffering and ultimately unjustified suffering may rest on how much value we place on certain intrinsic goods.

The anti-theist must

genuinely leave open enough room for the intrinsic good of God’s allowing the actual world to “play out.” If [the anti-theist] can’t accommodate this actual world, his concession to the potential value of free will amounts to very little. He insists that, even if God went to the trouble of creating a world with free will and stable natural laws, he would not allow a world like this one, even though creating a world with traits like physical laws and meaningful free will introduces the possibility of great suffering. This is, needless to say, a highly ambitious claim, and one we find unpersuasive.

Although in principle reason does rule out some things for a good God—unconditional reprobation, a command to torture children for fun, and certain qualitative and quantitative evils—the claim that this world belongs in that category is far from obvious, to put it mildly.

God has created a world with free will and stable natural laws, and therefore great suffering may occur and does occur. The anti-theist, to persuade us that God would not create the world we live in, must somehow show that God has insufficient moral reasons for allowing the evil we see around us. It seems impossible to ever demonstrate this, given the Anselmian God, and so the evidential argument from evil fails.

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The story, in Genesis 22, of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac has always been perplexing to readers. However, this story takes on special significance to Christians, for it foreshadows the sacrifice of God’s Son for mankind.

David Baggett and Jerry Walls, in Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, bring this significance to light. Before doing so, they chide readers of this text who fail to take into account the theological context of the story:

Kierkegaard is famous for taking the passage as paradigmatic of the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” according to which obedience to God trumps morality itself. He no doubt has pushed many readers to personalize the narrative of the binding of Isaac and ask themselves what they would personally do if they thought God commanded something like this.

But of course the story thus construed has been shorn of nearly all its unique theological and historical significance. The quest to derive universal principles from a story like this is at cross-purposes with the particularistic, gradualist, and narrative-driven character of many portions of scripture, particularly in the Old Testament.

How should one approach the interpretation of Genesis 22?

One who wishes to read [it] with a genuine openness to [its] wisdom and revelatory nature would be well advised not to so recklessly and spuriously traverse the hermeneutical gap. Genesis clearly states that God was testing Abraham, so that the reader knows in advance that it is not really the will of God for Abraham to do this. Abraham, of course, does not know it, and so the point of the test is to see the extent of Abraham’s obedience.

For the reader, the dramatic tension is not the content of the command, but whether Abraham will fully trust God, and what God will do to stop it. Including Abraham’s story in the history of revelation was a much more powerful way to show that God does not, in fact, want child sacrifice than just to say so.

So how does Jesus figure into the Christian understanding of Genesis 22?

Christian readers, however, have always seen in this story a profound fore-shadowing of another scenario in which the Father actually allowed his Son to be sacrificed. Rather than being spared by a ram caught in the thickets, the Son was himself the lamb of God who died to take away the sin of the world. And he went to his death not as a helpless child, but as a perfect man who willingly offered his full obedience to his Father in a fallen world bent on killing him.

While the story of Jesus is even more surprising than the story of Isaac, perhaps in another sense it is not. Is the face of Jesus surprising when omnibenevolence takes human form? It is worth emphasizing here that the book of Hebrews, which reflects at length on the sacrifice of Christ, describes him as one “who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”

The sacrifice of Christ was not a sacrifice into oblivion, but a sacrifice with the prospect of resurrection and exaltation as its final outcome. In view of this, perhaps it is not surprising that the author of Hebrews explains that Abraham obeyed God when called to sacrifice Isaac because he reasoned that God can raise the dead, and must have been planning to do so if he were to fulfill his promises through Isaac, as he had promised. God’s ultimate ability to rectify things as shown in the resurrection provides ways to square even difficult commands with his perfect love and goodness that are simply out of reach if death is the last word.

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I have been asked, on occasion, why it is that human beings should obey the commands of God. After all, just because God created us does not mean that he has ultimate authority over us. We would never argue that a mother who gives life to her child has ultimate authority over that child. The mother’s authority only goes so far.

So how is God any different?

Davis Baggett and Jerry Walls give an insightful answer to this question in their book Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. Here is their approach to this question:

Let us consider the reasons we normally ascribe authority to someone. Sometimes it is a simple matter of power. A person who has the legal power to enforce his will, for instance, has a certain kind of authority. Another source of authority is knowledge and information. We recognize as authorities those persons who have sufficient mastery of a field or discipline that they can command respect for what they know and understand. A third source of authority is moral integrity and character, the sort of authority that appeals to our conscience and demands respect in a deeper sense than the authority that comes from mere power, or even knowledge. Indeed, a person who has mere power or legal authority but who lacks moral integrity lacks the authority to command our respect, even if he has the power to enforce his will on us.

As we mentioned earlier, just because God created us (has power over us), does not necessarily mean that he has the knowledge, wisdom, or moral character to exercise authority over us. After all, human parents lack the knowledge, wisdom, and moral character that would enable them to exercise complete authority over their children for their children’s entire lives.

Does God lack those same attributes? Not if we’re talking about the Christian God.

God has supreme power, knowledge, and goodness, and all of these underwrite his moral authority. He created us and this world and stamped us with his image, and has the power to hold us fully accountable for our actions. Since he has perfect knowledge of us, he understands perfectly what is good for us and our flourishing. Moreover, since he is perfectly good he desires our well-being and does everything short of overriding our freedom to promote it.

In view of his nature as a perfect being, there are no good grounds for doubting his authority. There can be no blindsidedness, no bias, no imperfect understanding, no possibility of misuse of power, or having obtained it wrongly. If all rational withholdings are blocked, we ought to accept God as an authority. And part of what is involved in that is accepting his commands, unless we have good reason to do otherwise; but again, with a perfect being, there can’t possibly be good reasons to do otherwise. In short, we think the issue of authority is a matter of power, knowledge, and character, all of which add up to moral authority.

The Christian God, therefore, possesses all of the qualities we would want to underwrite his complete and total authority over all human beings. God is not like our earthly parents. He is the most perfect Being and the source of all that is good, true, and beautiful. There is no reason to ever doubt his legitimate authority over us.

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Classical Christian theism affirms that God is the Good. David Baggett and Jerry Walls explain that

in some important sense we wish to argue that God just is the ultimate Good. This view . . . has a venerable history within Christianity. Thomists, Anselmians, theistic Platonists, and theistic activists, including such contemporary analytic philosophers as Alvin Plantinga and Robert Adams, all concur that on a Christian understanding of reality, God and the ultimate Good are ontologically inseparable.

Notice that last sentence. Ontologically inseparable means that God and the Good are the same thing. If we look at Thomas Aquinas’s view, in particular, we see that the

terms “being” and “goodness” are the same in reference, differing only in sense. A thing is perfect of its kind to the extent to which it is fully realized or developed; the extent to which the potentialities definitive of its kind—its specifying potentialities—have been actualized. In acting, a thing aims at being.

Being and goodness . . . co-refer, picking out the same referent under two different names and descriptions, . . . Since Aquinas took God to be essentially and uniquely “being itself,” it is God alone who is essentially goodness itself. This allows us to make ready sense of the relationship between God and the standard by which he prescribes or judges.

Many atheists still throw the Euthyphro Dilemma at Christians, as if it is a telling blow against the existence of the Christian God. This dilemma, in essence, argues that either moral laws exist ontologically independent of God, or moral laws are arbitrarily commanded by God. Both of those options are problematic for Christians, but as has been stated numerous times by Christian thinkers, there is another option – the moral law is built into God’s nature. In other words, God is the Good.

Baggett and Walls expand this point:

For the goodness for the sake of which and in accordance with which God wills whatever he wills regarding human morality is identical with his nature. Yet since it is God’s very nature and no arbitrary decision of his that thus constitutes the standard of morality, only things consonant with God’s nature could be morally good. . . .

We are inclined to think that the ultimate ontological inseparableness of God and the Good is something of an axiomatic Anselmian intuition; a vision apprehended, not just the deliverance of a discursive argument. That so many solid theists through the centuries have gravitated toward such a view bolsters this impression.

If God is the ultimate Good, such that necessary moral truths are reflective of an aspect of God, then indeed Plantinga is right that to apprehend such truths is to catch a glimpse of God himself. Moreover, if such dependence or even identity obtains or is even possible, then the Euthyphro Dilemma is effectively defused and the moral argument for God’s existence accordingly gains strength.

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Some Christians have a negative view of philosophy, mostly, I think, because they don’t understand what it is and they see it being wielded against their most cherished beliefs. However, philosophy, properly understood, is not an enemy of biblical authority, but a great support.

Philosophy has been called by one Christian philosopher “the skill of thinking really hard.” The ancients thought of philosophy as the love of wisdom. Surely, if you are a Christian, you are not opposed to thinking really hard or the love of wisdom, but just how does philosophy practically interact with the Bible? To the person who says, “I don’t need philosophy; all I need is the Bible,” what can be said in response?

David Baggett and Jerry Walls, in their book Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, provide some helpful ways to answer this kind of question.

[T]rust in the reliability of scripture in the first place assumes trust in the experiences of those biblical writers whose written words God genuinely inspired. Without the requisite trust in those experiences, we are left without rational conviction in the authority of the Bible. Or take the choice of the Bible as authoritative rather than, say, the Koran; this selection, to be rational, requires that we have good reasons for believing the Bible to be God’s real revelation. Appeal to those considerations involves trust in reason, which involves trust in our ability to think philosophically.

So we need good reasons to trust that the biblical writers really experienced what they recorded. We also need reasons to believe that when the biblical writers contradict writers from other religious traditions, that the biblical writers can be trusted. These are not issues that can be resolved by appeal to the Bible. We need to think philosophically, or put simply, reason our way to these conclusions using logic, evidence, and argumentation.

Baggett and Walls continue:

The Bible is to be taken as authoritative in the realm of theological truth. But before we can rationally believe such a thing, as human beings privy to general revelation and endowed with the ability to think we must weigh arguments and draw conclusions, that is, do philosophy. Proper trust in the Bible altogether involves the process of thinking rationally. It’s a fundamental mistake to think otherwise.

No less of a luminary than John Wesley weighed in on this subject:

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, said that renouncing reason is renouncing religion, that religion and reason go hand in hand, and that all irrational religion is false religion. In fact he happened to believe that a thorough acquaintance with philosophy and logic is an indispensable part of a minister’s preparation.

So how are we to answer someone who says that we don’t need philosophy to understand theological truths taught in the Bible?

The sentiment wrongly assumes that we are even able to understand the Bible, let alone discern that it is the ultimate revelation from God, without the capacity to think. Philosophy is, to put it most succinctly, clear thought. Perhaps it sounds pious to say that all we need is the Bible, and Protestants do in fact believe there’s a sense in which it’s true that Christians are to be people of one book, but it’s at worst a sentiment predicated on a laughably shallow, simplistic, naïve epistemology and hermeneutic. It’s just not that simple. We can’t open the Bible and begin to understand it without engaging our reason, and using our critical faculties in this fashion as an interpretive tool is not to exalt the deliverances of reason above the deliverances of scripture.

Don’t think of philosophy as some of kind of esoteric science that threatens to subordinate Scripture. Philosophy simply calls us to think hard, to reason, to use our minds to arrive at truth. Jesus himself commanded us to love God with all of our minds, did he not? So, ironically, those who say we should not philosophize are actually disobeying the Lord.

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