Readers at Old Life know that Puritanism is not on the A-list of favorite topics (unless it is to kvetch about experimental Calvinism). But the recent discussion of Propaganda’s song, “Precious Puritans,” has me reaching in my apologetics tool box (as if John Frame taught me nothing or that I ever heard of Propaganda before).
The issue so far seems to be whether or not to criticize heroes. Anthony Bradley, defender of Propaganda, argues for a sensible outlook on historical actors:
Those who would reject the Puritans because of their white supremacy will themselves struggle to find much of anyone in Western Christianity to embrace. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God in some way (Rom. 3:23), including all of those we hold in high esteem. There is an obvious “no” because this is not how the Bible teaches Christians to engage in cultural and historical analysis. We are to eat the meat and spit out the bones. This includes those who are both inside and outside the tribe. There is much meat in the Puritans but there are also massive bones.
Thabiti Anyabwile concurs at his Gospel Coalition blog (though the irony is rich since TGC is pretty averse to criticism of its theological celebrities):
That’s why we need people less infatuated than ourselves to tell us the plain truth we miss. As I read the exchanges, the folks who seem to have the greatest difficulty with the song are the folks who seem (sometimes they say so) to have the highest appreciation for the Puritans. That’s the pedestal Prop mentions. By definition, raising someone to a pedestal means lifting them beyond critique and realistic assessment. If we “pedestalize” our heroes, we’re bound to miss things and we need others to point to it. But, we don’t like to have people kicking around our pedestals. Our idols may topple and fall. For instance, I don’t like people kicking around the pedestal of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I grew up with a grandmother who kept a cheesy painting of Jesus, King, and Kennedy hanging on her living room wall. Jesus was elevated in the center of the picture, with the requisite soft yellow halo, while King and Kennedy appeared on his left and right. Makes you wonder if the painter ever heard King’s “Drum Major Instinct” sermon. But many evangelicals have the habit of mentioning plagiarism and adultery and “liberal theology” whenever Dr. King’s name is raised. And there’s something in me that kicks back, defends, guards the pedestal and remembers the painting.
2kers, Matt Tuininga and Scott Clark, approve generally the points made by Bradley and Anyabwile. First Tuininga:
. . . we need to ask what it was about Puritan piety that made them so vulnerable to the vices and injustice of racism and exploitation. Of course, the Puritans were not unique in this.
And Clark:
If nothing else, this is yet another reminder of the folly of the “golden age” approach to history, the idea that says “if only we could get back to period x.” Such a program will always disappoint because it always depends on a mythologized view of a past, a story about a past that never really existed. Colonial America was not a golden age, not if one was an African bought and sold by “godly men” who, as creatures of their time, were unable to criticize the peculiar institution of American slavery.
What is missing from this discussion is not a defense of the Puritans or of slavery — though I would suggest it is possible to defend the Puritans without defending slavery — but what is lacking is a critique of the holier-than-thou anti-slavery meme. Of course, slavery is unjust and of course, racism is despicable. But is it possible to see problems with the anti-slavery? The charge of slavery, like that of racisim, paints with a broad brush. It lacks nuance. It renders the world manichean, akin to the old line about pregnancy — you can’t be a little bit with child. In which case, if you owned slaves or are guilty of racism, no need ever to consider anything you have to say. You will forever be known as a slaveholder and racist the way that we now know Jerry Sandusky as a one dimensional pervert.
For instance, is it possible to make distinctions between orthodox slaveholders and Unitarian ones? If so, is it possible to say that the orthodox slaveholder’s theology is better than the Unitarians? In which case, is it possible to read slave holders’ theology and benefit from it? Can we separate aspects of historical actor’s life or does his wickedness go all the way down? The differences between Reformed confessionalism’s 2k posture, which separates holy, common, and profane matters all the time contrasts here with Reformed pietism which disdains all such distinctions under the canopy of “all is religious.” Of course, if we can’t separate matters, then readers should avoid Old Life at all cost not because I own slaves but because I — can you believe it — sin.
In other words, inherent in the anti-slavery position is not a form of genuine Christian reflection but one of perfectionism. This is a one-strike and you’re out scorched earth policy, with certain sins achieving red-letter status. If you break those, we’ll never hear from you again. This has happened with the American founders, slaveholders and chauvinists that they were, among large sectors of the academy. It also explained why mainline churches don’t read older theologians — the PCUSA’s awkward attitude to Princeton Seminary’s bi-centennial is an example. This trend seems to be afflicting evangelical Protestants. No surprise there since nineteenth-century evangelicals fell prey to this binary perfectionism back in the antebellum era.
And if a similar cultural perfectionism is seeping into the evangelical world, when will denunciations of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and the West more generally follow? The lyrics of Propaganda’s song point out the problem.
Pastor, you know it’s hard for me when you quote puritans.
Oh the precious Puritans.
Have you not noticed our facial expressions?
One of bewilderment and heartbreak.
Like, not you too pastor.
You know they were the chaplains on slave ships, right?
Would you quote Columbus to Cherokees?
Would you quote Cortez to Aztecs?
Even If they theology was good?
It just sings of your blind privilege wouldn’t you agree?
Your precious Puritans.
So what is the pastor to do? If he says, “the English theologian,” before quoting doesn’t he bring up all the enormity that went with English colonialism? What will the Native Americans in the congregation think? Or how about “the Calvinist theologian”? All monarchists who think well of the Stuarts will be put off with that nasty business of regicide. Or how about if the pastor quotes a male theologian, will feminists quiver and melt?
Are all of these offenses equal? Probably not and it would be hard to find any monarchist these days. But other minorities do have their list of offenses and if we only listened to the pristine, we’d be left quoting Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Keller, and Mrs. Carson.
Perhaps the best way out of this dilemma is to toughen up. After all, how happy were the early Christians hearing the apostle Paul quoted in their worship services? Wasn’t he the guy who helped kill Christians? In fact, if we apply our standards of social justice all the way through the past, we will have to close the good book altogether. The reason is that none of the Bible’s saints could withstand our moral rectitude.
227 Comments
CD – Atheist moral philosophy exists and has existed for millennia.
RS: Which is not the same things as saying that it is based on its own foundations, that any of it is true, and that it can lead to true morality. Jesus Christ is truth and He told the truth. Since He is the truth, we are not to be taken captive by earthly philosophy that is based on the elementary principles of the world. Atheistic moral philosophy is based on elemantary principles on the one hand and utterly baseless reasoning on the other.
Col 2:2 that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, 3 in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. 4 I say this so that no one will delude you with persuasive argument.
5 For even though I am absent in body, nevertheless I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good discipline and the stability of your faith in Christ 6 Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, 7 having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude.
8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. 9 For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form,
CD – There are entire works about construction of meaning and morality by atheists
RS: Indeed there are many works, but all of them are meaningless. The provide no real standard of morality and not oughtness in morality. It becomes simply what I think it takes to be moral. That is precisely what happened when the devil tempted Eve and told her that she could be like God knowing good and evil. The works of atheists attempting to come up with moral standards is evidence that God exists as they try to find morality apart from Him. It also demonstrates that the devil is alive and active today as he gets out the same lie that he passed off on Eve.
CD – If you want to keep asserting that atheists have a moral obligation to act in ways that undermine the ability for humans to maintain complex societies you are certainly free to, but you are free to only in the sense that you are free to run around asserting that the world is flat.
RS: But asserting that the world is flat does not send people to the eternal wrath of God. All people have an obligation to love God with all of their being. You don’t believe in God (a-theist) and I don’t believe in atheists (a-atheists). Down deep every human being knows that there is a God. Some of them, however, want not to believe so bad that they try to convince themselves and others that there is no God. In other words, I believe the Bible and so I don’t believe in atheists. The truth of God is evident to all atheists and they want to convince others that there is no God so they can continue to suppress the truth in unrighteousness. CD, down deep you know there is a God and you hate the fact that He is sovereign and you are not. So you spend your time trying to show that God is not. Until you can prove that you have no being you cannot prove that there is no evidence for God. Every single human being is made in the image of God and is evidence that God exists. Even your use of logic and the use of reason cannot be accounted for in your system of thinking. Give it up and seek the Lord who may grant repentance.
@Jeff –
The problem with NOT doing so is that the question will eventually arise: Why should I care about what other people say is Right or Wrong? Humans have the ability to jump out of the system and examine it from the outside; hence, systems must be justifiable.
What I’m arguing with respect to morality is that more or less humans don’t have the ability to jump out of the system and examine in from the outside. We have no idea what a fully developed alien morality would look like. All of our cross cultural moral conflicts more or less boil down to weighing various elements when they come in conflict.
We can joke about a morality that encourages killing the innocent on Tuesdays while considering it abhorrent on Fridays but we have no idea what such a moral system in a fully developed form were to actually look like. I gave the example of Sextus Empiricus 5 aspects of a moral system. 1900 years later in a culture totally unlike his, I can easily understand someone adopting that list wholesale.
So sure in theory someone can say they reject it, but they can’t really. It is possible that we might sometime in the future actually have an alternative morality to work with. To pick an example even 100 years ago humanity couldn’t conceive of what an alternative intelligence would look like. In their fiction fantasy creatures, science fiction aliens, robots all thought along human lines. Similarly our philosophy about the nature of mind. But the experience of building computers has given us our first example of an alternative way of structuring thought, a way of building brains very much unlike human brains. And so for the first time we are genuinely capable of picturing at least one alternative notion of intelligence. Today’s fiction and philosophy about mind goes far deeper then the writings of 100 years ago because that one additional example has taught us so much.
So far we have not managed to create an alternative morality. So no I don’t agree that someone can step outside the human moral system anymore than someone 200 years ago could step outside the beliefs from that era about mind. There is no outside yet or possibly ever.
____
So what happens when someone tries to step outside morality and ask the “why should I care” question.
There are three options here:
a) They are genuinely outside any moral framework. Which means “should” questions cease to be meaningful questions at all. No type of should question can be answered in a moral sense. The answer in this case is the question is total nonsense.
Pragmatism has little trouble getting off the ground. So something like:
i) Some times of brain responses are pleasurable while others are uncomfortable
ii) You are designed to derive please from a close connection to others
etc…
Can quickly end up creating a mini morality.
b) Outside a moral system the only thing you can do is arbitrarily construct one based upon properties. And just like in our empiricism debate once someone asserts even a few properties from conventional morality they end up with a mini morality that can make judgements about the other precepts. Mostly that will allow you to build up to conventional morality rather quickly.
Lets take an example of being willing to grant a mini morality of “the greatest good for the greatest number”. From there the care/harm dichotomy that it is better to help others than harm them can be derived. Fairness/cheating that you should treat others in proportion to their actions can be derived from this moral axiom and game theory. Etc…
So in other words any mini morality more or less consistent with human moralities will build something like a universal human morality.
c) The last stage would be to ask this question in some theoretical alternative morality. Not a mini morality but a full blown well defined alternative morality that denies some of the precepts of universal human morality. Hopefully their intersection is non empty and has enough content to have a mini morality which provides a basis for weighing these two moralities. This is what we experience this in a limited sense with the minor moral disagreements in our society. We try and argue from the common intersection.
If not, if the intersection were empty or even just too small to evaluate them, then picking between them is arbitrary. In this situation we really would have relativism. But, and this the key, the existence of such an alternative morality conducive to humans is at this point an open empirical question i.e. its non-existence has not been falsified.
CD-Host quoting Richard: No, your experience could be false. Following the evolutionary view your senses have evolved and you have no way of knowing if your faculties of knowledge operate properly and if your senses are giving you accurate knowledge. For example, a clock that is not operating properly may have the correct time two or even four times a day, but that does not mean that it can be relied on for telling us the truth. Then again, from your view if things happen that appear good for me then it is true.
CD-Host: The stopped or running fast clock is not the right analogy. Let’s try a slightly different analogy. My friend Traci has a special clock that is “really” running an hour fast. But the hour hand is also a little too low in the dial and a result anytime someone reads the clock they misread the time subtracting an hour. The effect is that anyone who uses this clock gets the correct time, even though I consider the clock running fast. My friend Steve argues that the clock is right that Traci is both wrong about the positioning of the hour hand and the fact it is running fast.
That’s the analogy you want. That there is some sort of meaningful difference between Traci’s claim about the nature of the clock and Steve’s.
RS: No, that is not the right analogy at all. The point was that if you base truth on your experienes and on yourself, it may be that you can “accidentally” be right a bit of the time, but that is not to say that you are finding the truth much of the time at all. But then again, analogies are simply that and nothing more. If the only “reason” is that you have senses, then you have no idea of whether those senses have evolved in a way where you can sense what is truth or not. You don’t have access to anything that can tell you if you have real knowledge or not. You are there and something is processing something and you think it is knowledge, though indeed you cannot know that.
CD-Host quoting RS: No, you have no way of saying it is wrong. The most you can say is that you won’t like it but even then since you have never been murdered you don’t have enough evidence to say that you wouldn’t like it. Atheism is left completely devoid of any basis for morality. It is at this point, though there are others, that it shows that what it is really about is hatred for God.
CD-Host: I just did say it was wrong. So evidently I can say it. As far as the basis for morality there’s been about 8 listed in this thread so far.
RS: You have not given us any real idea of any real morality and you have provided no basis for morality at all. But you didn’t just say that it was wrong, you typed it. However, that is not the point. The point is that you cannot say it in a meaningful way within your atheistic system. For some reason you want to assert that you can be moral and yet within your system of thought (if you stayed within it and tried to argue from it) that is complete nonsense. There is no possible standard of right and wrong and there is no possible oughtness to a morality without a standard of right and wrong. As a philosophy professor of mine said one time, “I cannot tell you why you should be ethical.” Neither can you.
CD-Host quoting RS: But you cannot demonstrate from your view of the world that your statements above are true. You are just assuming that they are true. You want to have DNA with intent with no one giving the DNA intent. You want life with a purpose of copying DNA and yet you deny that can be purpose. Even in your language you demonstrate the concepts of purpose and intent and thus show you cannot escape those concepts.
DG-Host: I can toss DNA strands in a pool of amino acids and they replicate. Cut yourself, the reason it eventually heals is proof of the intent.
RS: For DNA or anything else to have intent is for someone to give it an intent. DNA can have no intent on its own. Like I said, you have to sneak in the concept of God at all points to even argue against Him.
DG-Host: As far as escape those concepts I’m not trying to escape those concepts. Your forgetting the thesis here. I’m not the one who argued that Atheism doesn’t believe life has intent, that was your argument not mine, I argued the opposite. I know in the presuppositional script I’m supposed to say that life is meaningless, but the script is wrong.
RS: I am not arguing what you are actually trying to say or believe, I am saying that within your system you cannot have life with intent. Whether or not you say that life is meaningless or not, your system of belief (logically) demands that life is meaningless though you will try to adjust the facts and the logic to get the result that you want. The very fact that you want to avoid what your position logically leads you to points to the truth of God in you that you are suppressing. You know there is a God despite all the suppression you have done and it just keeps coming out and you are declaring the glory of God despite yourself.
CD-Host quoting RS: According to your view, once again, human beings are simply accidents in a comos that will live but a short while, then die, and then they are gone. The universe will be gone in but a short time as well. What kind of meaning can you draw from that?
CD-Host: Plenty I’m a finite being. I don’t need infinite meaning. That’s a rather big assumption that anything that’s not infinite is non existent. The number 5 isn’t neither infinite nor 0. Nor for that matter do I consider something along the lines of the likely possible death ages of the universe 10^30, 10^40 or 10^120 years a short time. Relative to me that’s plenty of time.
RS: But of course you are manipulating the information to avoid the point. The point is that you are simply an accident that will appear for a short time. I did not say anything non-infinity being non-existent. I am simply saying that according to your system of thought you were born for no reason and without meaning. In a very short time (according to the logic of your thought) you are headed for nothingness which also has no reason or meaning. What can give your short existence meaning at all when you had no meaning and will never have it?
CD-Host quoting RS: Repent of your enmity against God. You can do nothing to resist and hurt Him so why send yourself to eternal destruction fighting the whole time?
CD-Host: You and Mark need to talk. That’s sounding a lot like conditional election.
RS: Not at all. God commands all men to repent, but that does not mean that they have the ability to repent. They must seek Him so that He may grant them repentance. However, if a person flees from sin in this life that will mean less judgment to come even if they are never converted.
CD-Host: God elects to raise the spiritually dead, the spiritually dead don’t elect themselves. My fake repentance would be but a further insult and my real repentance is not matter of my own will.
RS: Of course God must raise the spiritually dead and no one can do that of themselves. However, that does not mean that a person should not seek the Lord and ask Him for that. Of course you should not settle for a fake repentance, but instead should seek the Lord for Him to grant you a true repentance. My guess is that you have tried to repent of yourself (old evangelical days) and saw that it was futile. Now you have given up on God and are striking out against Him because your own repentance that you worked up did not work. A true repentance is giving up on yourself and all our own ability to do anything but bow before the living God and ask Him for mercy.
CD- Host: Even if I found the argument convincing, it wouldn’t matter. Because I’m unable to be convinced to repent in the meaningful sense of the elect.
RS: Ah, but instead of fighting God you can seek God. That is meaningful. The doctrine of election does not teach the same thing as fatalism, but instead it is the only teaching that can give sinners hope. It teaches them to give up all hope in themselves and to look to God alone. You have been looking to yourself for the wisdom and strength in evangelicalism earlier and now you are looking to yourself for wisdom and strength in fighting God. True enough you cannot repent and God commands you to do so. He must grant it to you, which means that you should seek Him and ask Him for a new heart. It is not just a matter of being convinced, it is a matter of having a new heart. Yes, you hate God and He is the only One who can give you a new heart. If you stay where you are you will perish for certain. If you seek Him, perhaps He will give you a new heart. It is obvious what you should do.
CD-Host: As for assuming materialism… There are two possible arguments:
a) Does Atheism allow for a morality? In that argument I can take Atheism as a given. I can just assume stuff like materialism and empiricism because Atheism mostly assumes them (i.e. atheism is materialistic, there are not empirical atheists but “orthodox” atheism is empirical).
RS: But remember you want everything to fit your senses and you must be able to verify those by repeated experiments. If you want a rational system of thought, surely you cannot just assume that there is nothing that does not fit within the materialistic parameters. But how can you come up with an empirical test that can demonstrate that there is nothing else?
CD-Host: b) Is Atheism true. In that one obviously I can’t take Atheism as a given but whether it has a morality or not is a bit of a side point.
We were arguing (a). Argument (b) starts with sense experience and builds from there. It takes quite a while to get to the non existence of supernatural beings.
RS: I supppose if one tried to argue that way they would be in an infinite regress and so that would take quie a while. But then again, how can one that is committed to a materialistic universe even try to argue against supernatural beings as s/he would have no way to do this and there would be no way to falsify the evidence?
CD-Host: Since you are refusing to define sense experience as “truth” the rest of the argument has to wait.
RS: But of course I am sense your position of evolution cannot give you senses that give us truth and experiences within your system can be manipulated as you please.
CD-Host: Ultimately I’m probably not a good enough philosopher to argue that “I experience the world as if peppermint makes me sneeze” and “peppermint makes me sneeze” are the same statement. But I feel perfectly comfortable saying that the person asserting that I should focus on the difference has to make an incredibly strong argument. Because if things like that are false, something like “the bible says X” become towers of questionable assumptions.
RS: But they are not the same statement. The first is a statement of people that have your evolutionary and materialistic view should make. They have no idea if their senses are telling them the truth and they would have no idea if their memories were correct since memories would be nothing but past experiences. The person saying that pepper makes him sneeze is a person that believes in a God that has created the world and upholds it in a consistent way. That person knows that he is sneezing and he knows what a sneeze is and does not need to define all things as they happen to him. It is not strange at all to think of a person with your views saying things like “I experience the world as if peppermint makes me sneeze”, though to be more accurate they should only say that “I think (whatever that is) that I (whatever that means) experiene (though I cannot know that is true or not) the world (though it is not the world that I experience) makes (though I cannot really determine causation whatever that may or may not be) me (again, not sure what that is) sneeze (though I cannot be sure my memory is correct about what a sneeze is).”
Nobody is moral by definition? How would you know that, without being yourself moral by definition? By what standard of morality is Arminianism “more moral” than what John Calvin wrote?
Richard –
In reading your responses one of the big things that seems to be missing the is the working definition of true.
a) There are statements that are non-falsified that is I don’t have any experimental reason to reject them
b) There are statements that are empirically verified that is those are statements that acted as the working hypothesis for an experiment, an experiment was conducted and the hypothesis was confirmed.
c) There are statements that are heavily empirically verified that is they’ve been the subject many many experiments.
But this is key to this breakdown. If there is no experiment that can tell statement X from statement Y, they are the same statement. There is no difference in empiricism between “peppermint makes me sneeze” and “I experience the world as if peppermint makes me sneeze”. The difference is not something that needs to be empirically verified, they are taken to be equivalent by the definition of a statement in the system.
Similarly there is an experimentally undetectable god and there is no god are the same statement. Any difference that exists between them is aesthetic. That is empiricism leaves you free to choose to transform between equivalent things.
You keep aiming for some notion of truth that is outside the epistemology. There is no such thing as a true statement outside all epistemologies. Given two epistemologies A and B there can be 3 senses:
a) A extends B, that is everything true in A is true in B.
b) B extends A.
c) A and B conflict that is there are statements true in A false in B and visa versa.
You can within an epistemology evaluate whether another epistemology is an extension or not; but you can’t evaluate them on the question of truth. That is a categorical error, they are not just a method for determining truth, they define truth. This is very much like the situation above with asking a should question once you step outside all moralities and then try and ask a “should” question. You can’t.
Now I’m going to use sense experience as a base epistemology. Statements like 20121015091431 my left middle finger feels the key-press. The truth of that epistemology that any epistemology must be an extension of sense experience I’m taking as an absolute given. Now in the sense experience epistemology “I experience the world as if” becomes “the world is” because sense experience is the way the world is known. Epistemology is a way of learning about the world, absent sense experience there is no world, so of course there is nothing to learn. I’m 100% content to say that any epistemology I intend to actually use must be an extension of sense experience.
I understand you reject that. It is your belief that an atheist isn’t entitled to make that first step, while a theist is and want to argue that I have no right to identify the world of sense experience with “the real world”. But a real world that doesn’t create sense experience strikes me as a fiction. It would be like choosing an epistemology that is tuned for asking questions about the output of fisheries on Star Wars planet. I can’t argue for the truth of the sense experience epistemology as a base epistemology. That’s just part of being human. I understand fully you reject that in your various posts, but I suspect you don’t reject it in real life. The moment you bang you finger in a car door you react as if there really was a finger and really was a car door.
In other words I’ll agree I don’t have a good philosophical reason to acceptance sense experience. But in terms of life I have more reason to accept sense experience than philosophy. The argument for empiricism is absolutely dependent on the sense experience as a base epistemology. I grant that completely.
@Mark
Nobody is moral by definition? How would you know that, without being yourself moral by definition?
I lost the context of what you are responding too. I suspect you are responding to my comment to Jeff about the definition of morality. In which case you are missing the point.
Right now sitting at your computer: do you have over $400 in monopoly money? How many houses and hotels do you have? Is Park Place mortgaged? Your answer would be that those sorts of questions can only be answered from within the context of a monopoly outside it they are unanswerable. You cannot even ask them.
My point is that the definition of morality is dependent on a moral system. Outside the system there is no morality, in precisely the same way that outside a monopoly game there is mortgaged / unmortgaged status for Park Place.
By what standard of morality is Arminianism “more moral” than what John Calvin wrote?
The very definition of reward / punishment. People should be rewarded for things they do well, and punished for things they do wrong.
Pelagianism says:
seeking to obey Jesus is good.
Good stuff earns a reward
seeking to disobey Jesus is bad
Bad stuff earns a punishment
which is fundamentally a more moral philosophy punishments are tied to acts. Even more moral would be something like purgatory where the degree of punishment was proportional to the offense.
Calvinism says:
Rewards and punishments from a human perspective will be entirely random completely unconnected with any actions you have willed yourself to take.
That’s fundamentally an amoral system. It would be like the IRS randomly taking the income tax refunds and letters for further payment, shuffling them up and mailing them to random houses. Your refund ceases to be connected to your taxes it becomes an amoral event not a moral consequence.
Arminianism is an attempt to try and thread the needle and capture the intrinsic morality of the Pelagian system without entirely denying election. It understands the moral dilemma and tries to address it. Attempting to address a moral failing is to my mind more moral than being proudly indifferent.
@Jeff –
Not so sure about that. I don’t recall Mill arguing that altruism is a moral evil. Singer sure does not.
I’m not trying to defend Ayn Rand but let me take the attack on altruism you cited:
Note the moral context here.
a) When altruism is defined in the normal way, giving the dime to the beggar, she doesn’t really object.
b) She then redefines altruism as a denial or rights all together, humans exist for the purpose of servicing other humans and don’t have any meaningful existence apart from that. Which is a fair description of ant seem to view themselves if they were self aware. There is no evidence that any human views themselves this way. There are totalitarian states that have this position and she attacks that.
So what I’d like to point out that is even in your example, Ayn Rand’s attack on altruism, she can’t really attack altruism but rather has to do an equivocation where she says altruism as commonly defined is fine and a totalitarian morality, that as far as I know was never meaningfully believed anywhere, is unacceptable. It is an attack on a straw man. And the reason she has to attack a straw man is because every human considers it better to help others than harm them. Every human society including hers, believes in altruism as commonly defined. She cannot escape from human morality and be believable to any reader.
Mark: By what standard of morality is Arminianism “more moral” than what John Calvin wrote?
CD-Host: The very definition of reward / punishment. People should be rewarded for things they do well, and punished for things they do wrong.
RS: On what basis are you using the word “should” in a moral sense? What if people do things well, but that they are doing well is evil? Hitler did what he did well, but was it wrong for him to it? You have no way of asserting that Hitler did something wrong other than you don’t like it. Why should people be rewarded for anything they do since it is utterly meaningless anyway? Why should people be punished for things they do wrong? You have no basis for what is wrong and so why should your views be pushed on others? After all, nihilism is inescapable if you are going to follow your system in a logical manner. But again, the sentences you wrote above make sense at one level if there is a Divine Being that has created all things for His own glory. God has written Himself into the very fabric of your being and in your very fighting against Him His glory is shining through.
CD, thanks.
I’ll be jumping out of the fray for now. May I commend to your attention the Stanford Encyclopedia’s articles on relativism? Without meaning it perjoritively, you are espousing a classic relativistic position: truth is absolute within a reference frame, but relative to one’s sytem.
@ Jeff –
OK good talking to you. And no that’s not relativism.
1) Relativism there are N > 1 frames that are equally valid.
2) Positivism there is a unique valid frame
I’m arguing for a unique valid frame.
– There is one set of human moral instincts that lead to one morality.
– There is one set of sense experiences that lead to the classical positivist epistemology
CD-Host: But this is key to this breakdown. If there is no experiment that can tell statement X from statement Y, they are the same statement.
RS: But what experiment have you done to show that if no experiment that can tell statement X from Statement Y, they are the same statement? You are making huge assumptions in order to arrive at the conclusions you desire.
CD-Host: There is no difference in empiricism between “peppermint makes me sneeze” and “I experience the world as if peppermint makes me sneeze”. The difference is not something that needs to be empirically verified, they are taken to be equivalent by the definition of a statement in the system.
RS: But in a consistent way from your own position you cannot demonstrate this. You cannot even make the statement with knowledge that “peppermint makes me sneeze” because you do not know that it is the peppermint that “makes” you sneeze. You have no empirical experience of cause and all you may think you know (of course your position cannot account for the accuracy of memory) you is simply that there is something like a sneeze (does your position allow you to know by verified experience that you and another person have the same experience of a sneeze? Are you so sure that another person has the same experience you do when you sneeze?) when there is something like peppermint around. But perhaps it is not the peppermint, but instead it is the wrapper or…
CD-Host: Similarly there is an experimentally undetectable god and there is no god are the same statement. Any difference that exists between them is aesthetic. That is empiricism leaves you free to choose to transform between equivalent things.
RS: But again, you assume the lordship of experimental detection. You just arbitrarily assign lordship and even deity to experimental verification to all things except itself. Once again, if all things have to be verified by experimental verification, does that include experimental verification itself? You might want to apply that to sin. Does your own experience show you that sin brings misery? Is the cause in sin or is the cause in the God who punishes and judges sin?
CD-Host: You keep aiming for some notion of truth that is outside the epistemology. There is no such thing as a true statement outside all epistemologies.
RS: I am just arguing that your position does not allow for an epistemology that can possibly be true and give true knowledge. Your position does not allow for you to know that what you think you know is truth, so you have no reasonable epistemology at all.
CD-Host: Given two epistemologies A and B there can be 3 senses:
RS: Do you have experimental verification that your statement above is true?
CD-Host:
a) A extends B, that is everything true in A is true in B.
b) B extends A.
c) A and B conflict that is there are statements true in A false in B and visa versa.
You can within an epistemology evaluate whether another epistemology is an extension or not; but you can’t evaluate them on the question of truth. That is a categorical error, they are not just a method for determining truth, they define truth. This is very much like the situation above with asking a should question once you step outside all moralities and then try and ask a “should” question. You can’t.
RS: But one can do that in morality. On the one hand there is metaphysics and on the other hand we have metaethics. If there is no such thing as true morality, then we have no way of saying that anything is right or wrong. Your position has no access of knowing what true morality is or even if there is, so it has no way of discerning that anything is right or wrong. In the same way you have no access to truth, so how can you discern what is true or false? If you cannot experientially verify that experimental verification is true, then all else falls.
On the other hand, Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. He is the One that the universe and all things were created through and He is the One that in Him all things hold together. As truth Himself all that He did and spoke was true. As the Creator God He gave us senses that are generally reliable when they function properly and are used properly. So the Bible gives us truth and confidence that we can know truth. The Bible sets forth a God that we trust in for all things and as such we look to Him as the basis for all truth. Your system leaves you without any hope of truth and relying on yourself. Sorry, but when you act as your own verification principle, that does not work. God can swear by Himself as a triune God and that can be believed. All human beings, however, cannot be trusted like that.
CD-Host: When altruism is defined in the normal way, giving the dime to the beggar, she doesn’t really object.
RS: But others do. There is no such thing as altruism. Fallen human beings are self-centered and in their very best of works their righteousness is as filthy rags. The non-Christian giving the dime to the beggar is not giving the beggar the dime out of love for God and so it is not out of love for the beggar. Only those who are born of God and know God can have true love. One can do an act out of self-love, that is, it makes me feel better, it makes me think I am righteous, or perhaps I can be an atheist and still be moral. Apart from true love, all we do is of no benefit and certainly it is not altruism. By the way, do you have an experiential verification of what altruisim is and why it would be good rather than evil?
But what experiment have you done to show that if no experiment that can tell statement X from Statement Y, they are the same statement?
Ah… well there has been thousands of years of trying alternative definitions and they break down. Axiomatic logic was a huge push in the 19th and early 20th century. That definition worked in a wide range of areas.
You are making huge assumptions in order to arrive at the conclusions you desire.
I’m making the assumption about the sense experience epistemology, that this is the world we should be interested in. Which you’ve been unwilling to grant. Other than that, the rest of it is just a construction.
You have no empirical experience of cause [peppermint example]
Of course I do.
a) The statement hasn’t been falsified.
b) When I take peppermints I get the “having to sneeze” sensation. That’s been experimentally verified.
b’) Few other foods have this effect nor is this effect common, so it is highly probably that’s the cause.
c) I’ve tested it multiple times over multiple years.
That means non-falsified, heavily empirically verified. What you keep trying to say is that I’d don’t have perfect knowledge of what peppermint does. And that’s true. But perfect knowledge isn’t required knowledge in the empirical epistemology. Mainly because human beings aren’t capable of perfect knowledge so such an epistemology would be worthless.
But perhaps it is not the peppermint, but instead it is the wrapper or…
Now that’s a good question. Because I could do an experiment like take other candies and wrap them in a peppermint wrapper. So those are not equivalent statements. So lets assume I did to that experiment and it turned out to be wrapper and not the candy itself.
Then “peppermint candy makes me sneeze” would be falsified
“peppermint candy wrappers me sneeze” would be non-falsified and heavily experimentally verified.
So I’m failing to see how this presents a problem for the epistemology.
Once again, if all things have to be verified by experimental verification, does that include experimental verification itself?
No. Things that can be called “true” or “false” have to verified by experimental verification. The epistemology itself isn’t “true” it defines true. You can ask the question about whether it extends sense experience, but you can’t ask whether it is true.
Lets pick a more trivial example. Assume I were to choose an alternative epistemology that things are true based on the flip of a quarter. In that epistemology inconsistency is fine.
In the empirical epistemology “all epistemologies should be consistent” is unanswerable since should questions are moral.
In the quarter flipping epistemology the quarter flip will determine whether all epistemologies should be consistent and the answer might change.
But what I can say is that the quarter-flipping epistemology doesn’t extend the sense-experience epistemology. Extension is testable outside an epistemology (and Jeff BTW this is the distinction with relativism, the notion of extension). So if you are outside all epistemologies then nothing is true. You are inside an epistemology A the meaningful question you can ask about another epistemology B is whether A extend B, B extends A.
Does your own experience show you that sin brings misery?
No. Lets take tonight’s debate contestant Mitt Romney a man who made a career out of deceit. His primary innovations were in bankrupted companies to pillage their pension funds and give the money to himself and friends. He’s blessed with a wonderful life, a terrific wife and children; lots of neat toys. Despite his behaviors he even is respected enough by his peers to have their overwhelming support in his quest for the Presidency of the United States. I ain’t seeing a lot of misery.
: I am just arguing that your position does not allow for an epistemology that can possibly be true and give true knowledge.
Of course it does. The sense experience epistemology is at its root the source of true knowledge. The role you want God to play, as the ultimate author of truth, the Sense Experience Epistemology plays in empiricism.
CD: Given two epistemologies A and B there can be 3 senses:
RS: Do you have experimental verification that your statement above is true?
Yes! I’ve considered alternative epistemologies and thought through how they would relate.
Your position has no access of knowing what true morality is or even if there is, so it has no way of discerning that anything is right or wrong.
The Empirical Epistemology by itself doesn’t have moral content. It can however test moral claims of fact. So for example “mothers generally love their children” is experimentally testable. Whether mothers should love their children is not a question of fact and thus not testable.
Now my claim has been that humans possess a moral instinct, that they have intuitive notions of right and wrong, and these notions are mostly but not perfectly consistent across individuals. Those are empirically testable claims; and I’d argue they have been tested. Then from there I can start to construct policy, that is what humans should do if they want to / have to live in accord with their moral instincts.
But just as sense experience is taken as a given in empiricism in conducting investigation into the world, moral instinct is taken as a given in empiricism in conducting investigation into moral questions. You can choose to reject sense experience, but without sense experience there is no world. You can choose to reject moral instinct but without moral instinct there is no morality.
By the way, do you have an experiential verification of what altruisim is and why it would be good rather than evil?
Sure. I can go with the dictionary definition: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others. As for why it would be good. We know that animals sacrifice to preserve other animals with similar DNA: family then tribe then same specifies then related species (sometimes). That is an action born of moral instinct. Altruism as we commonly define it is good because it is based on that principle.
Calvin, Institutes, 1:17:2–”-the sophists profanely separate God’s righteousness from His power.”
3:23:2—-”we do not betake ourselves to the fiction of absolute power–the will of God is pure from all fault but is the supreme rule of perfection, even the law of all laws”
CD-Host quoting RS: By the way, do you have an experiential verification of what altruisim is and why it would be good rather than evil?
CD-Host: Sure. I can go with the dictionary definition: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others.
RS: But that is not an experiential verification. It is simply going by a dictionary which is words, but not the reality. What is an experiential regard and what is an experiential unselfish anything? How does one experience an intellectual concept in the way that you are demanding?
CD-Host: As for why it would be good. We know that animals sacrifice to preserve other animals with similar DNA: family then tribe then same specifies then related species (sometimes). That is an action born of moral instinct. Altruism as we commonly define it is good because it is based on that principle.
RS: But you have not shown in accordance with experiential theory that alrtuism is even possible much less is it good. By the way, according to an experiential theory, you cannot determine what is good. You can only say it appears to relieve misery at the moment. But then again, I can give someone a large dose of morphine that will relieve their misery and yet it kill them later.
CD-Host quoting RS: But what experiment have you done to show that if no experiment that can tell statement X from Statement Y, they are the same statement?
CD-Host: Ah… well there has been thousands of years of trying alternative definitions and they break down. Axiomatic logic was a huge push in the 19th and early 20th century. That definition worked in a wide range of areas.
RS: So your definition is best because it appears better than others definitions, but that would hardly meet the experiential qualification.
CD-Host quoting RS: You are making huge assumptions in order to arrive at the conclusions you desire.
CD-Host: I’m making the assumption about the sense experience epistemology, that this is the world we should be interested in. Which you’ve been unwilling to grant. Other than that, the rest of it is just a construction.
RS: In other words, your theory of experiential knowledge rests upon the foundation of things that are not experieced. You simply assume it. But even more, you just assume that this world in all that we should be interested in. That, once again, is impossible to experience and yet it is a huge assumption of your position.
RS old post: You have no empirical experience of cause [peppermint example]
CD-Host: Of course I do.
a) The statement hasn’t been falsified.
b) When I take peppermints I get the “having to sneeze” sensation. That’s been experimentally verified.
b’) Few other foods have this effect nor is this effect common, so it is highly probably that’s the cause.
c) I’ve tested it multiple times over multiple years.
RS: Just because something cannot be falsified does not prove it is true. It has yet to be falsified that a Supreme Being exists two universes over. It may be the case that two events happen at more or less the same time, but you have yet to prove the causation whatever causation might be in the experiential theoretical mindset.
CD-Host: That means non-falsified, heavily empirically verified. What you keep trying to say is that I’d don’t have perfect knowledge of what peppermint does. And that’s true. But perfect knowledge isn’t required knowledge in the empirical epistemology. Mainly because human beings aren’t capable of perfect knowledge so such an epistemology would be worthless.
RS: I am saying that you don’t have a way of showing causation. You cannot experience causation and so you cannot say (in a meaninful way according to your theory) that one causes the other.
But that is not an experiential verification [on the question of altruism]
Sure it is. You are being too deep here. Dictionaries are the look things up device, a word being defined a certain way in a dictionary is an experiment confirming the definition of the word. I don’t have any reason to disbelieve the definition (i.e. it is non-falsified).
But you have not shown in accordance with experiential theory that alrtuism is even possible
Sure there are examples of sacrificial behavior all the time (heavily experimentally verified). I don’t have any reasons to believe it is impossible (non-falsified).
much less is it good.
I’m definition good as deriving from the animal moral instincts. The fact that humans experience this instinct is the very definition of good. Particular acts of altruism, would need to advance to the next level of a policy analysis but the instinct itself is good by definition.
But then again, I can give someone a large dose of morphine that will relieve their misery and yet it kill them later.
Exactly. That’s a policy choice. We have an instinct not to kill. We have an instinct to relieve suffering. We don’t have an instinct regarding the appropriate use of morphine. Empiricism tells you how to derive moral policy from moral instinct. So you would build a set of objectives balancing suffering with preserving life, and then through reason tested by experiment try to build policy to best achieve those objectives.
So your definition is best because it appears better than others definitions, but that would hardly meet the experiential qualification.
Actually that is precisely the definition of experimental qualification.
a) There is no reason to believe it is false (non-falsified)
b) It has been used successfully (experimentally verified)
that’s all the system requires.
In other words, your theory of experiential knowledge rests upon the foundation of things that are not experieced.
No the exact opposite. My theory of experimental knowledge rests on the foundation of things that are experienced. That’s the point of demanding sense experience epistemology. By demanding the Empiricist Epistemology extend the Sense Experience Epistemology it injects actual sense events.
But even more, you just assume that this world in all that we should be interested in. That, once again, is impossible to experience and yet it is a huge assumption of your position.
“Should” is a moral not an epistemological question. If we had otherworldly instincts then the Empiricist Epistemology would be interested in those. And it is plausible we might have them. Basic aspects of religion like ceremonial burial are common to all human cultures as far as we know.
Empiricist Epistemology allows for exploration of “other worlds”. For example it is entirely possible to be an Empiricist practicer of Voodoo, Wicca or Spiritualism. Most Empiricists have concluded that those theologies have been falsified and hence reject them.
Christianity makes strong testable historical claims. Christianity makes strong testable moral claims. Christianity, at least as popularly understood makes strong testable magical claims, for example the efficiency of prayer. Most Empiricists have thus concluded that Christianity is falsified.
Just because something cannot be falsified does not prove it is true.
Cannot be falsified, generally means the statement is meaningless. Is not falsified, is the definition of true in the Empiricist Epistemology. The Epistemology gets to define the meaning of “true”. I think you are getting caught up on the word “true”. The word is arbitrary, just use NFEV = non-falsified, empirically verified in place of true.
It may be the case that two events happen at more or less the same time, but you have yet to prove the causation whatever causation might be in the experiential theoretical mindset.
Correct. Co-occurence doesn’t prove causation. To prove causation (i.e. to make it a NFEV statement) you would
a) No reason to disbelieve it.
b) Some experiment where it was verified. I.E. if you are testing if A causes B, induce A and see if B occurs with A and doesn’t occur without A.
Old RS: I am just arguing that your position does not allow for an epistemology that can possibly be true and give true knowledge.
CD-Host: Of course it does. The sense experience epistemology is at its root the source of true knowledge. The role you want God to play, as the ultimate author of truth, the Sense Experience Epistemology plays in empiricism.
RS: But your sense experience version of epistemology is not the god, but instead it is the person that is the god determining what is true and false as well as right and wrong by the senses and thoughts of self. The true God exists in and of Himself and is truth Himself. Your senses cannot determine what is truth nor what is true as they are all simply the self trying to figure things out based on self.
CD: Given two epistemologies A and B there can be 3 senses:
RS: Do you have experimental verification that your statement above is true?
CD: Yes! I’ve considered alternative epistemologies and thought through how they would relate.
RS: But according to your system you cannot just consider them, you have to test them and verify them by experience. If you are only thinking how they would relate, then you have not verified your statement above. But again it appears that you are manipulating things that you want in order to believe the things you want. You don’t want to believe that there is a God, so you go to the ends of the earth, epistemology, and morality in your efforts not to believe in God.
Old RS post: Your position has no access of knowing what true morality is or even if there is, so it has no way of discerning that anything is right or wrong.
CD-Host: The Empirical Epistemology by itself doesn’t have moral content. It can however test moral claims of fact. So for example “mothers generally love their children” is experimentally testable. Whether mothers should love their children is not a question of fact and thus not testable.
RS: But you are making a huge leap to saying that the senses can see and determine the nature and act of love. Since you cannot determine the nature and acts of love, you cannot test any statement about whether any person actually loves. It is a fact that mothers should love their children, though indeed it is not testable according to your system. However, your system cannot provide a should under any circumstance (other than hypotheticals) and so it is void of true morality.
CD-Host: Now my claim has been that humans possess a moral instinct, that they have intuitive notions of right and wrong, and these notions are mostly but not perfectly consistent across individuals.
RS: But can you demonstrate where this instict came from and whether that instinct is good or bad? If these things are mostly or perfectly consistent, that is evidence that God makes Himself known to these individuals. A non-moral instinct cannot cause a moral instinct. Now, why do you think that instincts (as you call them) are empirically verifiable? Have you ever seen an instinct? How do you these things are instincts in other human beings?
CD-Host: Those are empirically testable claims; and I’d argue they have been tested.
RS: They are not empirically testable claims. You cannot verify instincts in people from empirical methods. You can only observe what people say and do and make deductions, but that is not the same thing as empirical observation. I would also remind you that you don’t view logic as laws of logic and so you cannot count on deductions to be clear and consistent.
CD-Host: Then from there I can start to construct policy, that is what humans should do if they want to / have to live in accord with their moral instincts.
RS: But you cannot tell them why they should do anything. If they have moral instincts, then why would you have to tell them to live in accord with them? It sure sounds like you are skirting around the edges of playing God here.
CD-Host: But just as sense experience is taken as a given in empiricism in conducting investigation into the world, moral instinct is taken as a given in empiricism in conducting investigation into moral questions.
RS: But there is no verification principle of that according to your sense experiences. You have to assume this once again. It seems that the more you write the more your assumptions keep coming out and the less you are proving from your sense experiences.
CD-Host: You can choose to reject sense experience, but without sense experience there is no world.
RS: You can choose to reject God, but without God there would be no world. My experiences cannot determine what is there, but instead what is there determines my experience of that world.
CD-Host: You can choose to reject moral instinct but without moral instinct there is no morality.
RS: You can choose to reject a holy God who does all for His own glory and is His own standard, but without this holy God there is nor holiness or morality. But since you still want to assert that there is a morality, this shows that God is making Himself evident within you. But you still want to suppress that knowledge in unrighteousness.
RS: But your sense experience version of epistemology is not the god, but instead it is the person that is the god determining what is true and false as well as right and wrong by the senses and thoughts of self. The true God exists in and of Himself and is truth Himself. Your senses cannot determine what is truth nor what is true as they are all simply the self trying to figure things out based on self.
The assumption is the senses are relating based on an external world, not based on self. There seems to be genuine input because for myself to have constructed a set of illusions as complex as what I experience from senses would imply a self vastly more knowledgeable and capable than the self I experience myself as being. I agree that there would be absolutely no way to distinguish between those two, i.e. something like The Matrix would be considered true, until you had experimental knowledge of Zion. But mostly it doesn’t matter.
As for the rest of the comment. I can’t parse what you are saying here. Saying God is truth himself sounds like saying he is Butterscotch himself, it is just one of those claims of nobility like God is moral, from the discussion much earlier in this thread. Mostly though whether God is involved or not, you engage in the world the same way. If I ask you if a letter is on your dinning room table you’ll use senses not prayer to get the answer.
But according to your system you cannot just consider them, you have to test them and verify them by experience.
For constructs, like logical or mathematical constructs thinking about them is an experiment. Remember NFEV.
You don’t want to believe that there is a God, so you go to the ends of the earth, epistemology, and morality in your efforts not to believe in God.
The empiricist epistemology doesn’t take a position on the existence of God anymore than it takes a position on the existence of corned beef apriori. A god who regularly engaged in experimentally verifiable actions would exist under empiricist epistemology. On the other hand, empiricist epistemology is also consistent with atheism. Your claim was that atheism implied nihilism. This whole extended discussion is evidence that it does not.
They are not empirically testable claims. You cannot verify instincts in people from empirical methods.
Sure you can. Take for example the withdrawal reflex which is a reflex you have which causes a limb to retract in the presence of strong unexpected stimuli, like accidentally touching something hot. I can verify this reflex in other people via. simple experiments.
. I would also remind you that you don’t view logic as laws of logic and so you cannot count on deductions to be clear and consistent.
Sure I can. Laws of logic being applicable to deductions meets the NFEV criteria. They are clear and consistent ways of modeling until falsified.
If A is NFEV
and A implies B is NFEV
then B is NFEV
etc…
But you cannot tell them why they should do anything. If they have moral instincts, then why would you have to tell them to live in accord with them?
I don’t have to tell them to live according to their moral instincts I do have to tell them how to apply those instincts, i.e. moral policy. And the reason is that the instincts themselves can’t weigh complexity. They form a basis for policy but they do not form policy. Humans don’t disagree on whether it is a good thing or a bad thing to be disloyal to those loyal to you. Humans do disagree on how to apply this instinct to circumstance.
CD-Host: But just as sense experience is taken as a given in empiricism in conducting investigation into the world, moral instinct is taken as a given in empiricism in conducting investigation into moral questions.
RS: But there is no verification principle of that according to your sense experiences. You have to assume this once again. It seems that the more you write the more your assumptions keep coming out and the less you are proving from your sense experiences.
Empiricist methodology i.e. the NFEV criteria, is a machine that requires input to have content. In the case of material observations it requires sense experience. In the case of moral policy it requires input about the nature of the good. In the case of aesthetics it would require yet another set of instincts regarding what is beauty. In each truly distinct area of study it is going to require a base. We as a species only know of about a 1/2 dozen of those areas which each require a base to start.
You want the machine to be vacant. If there were a species with entirely different moral instincts, you would want their moral policy to be different. Otherwise epistemology and morality would not be different areas of study.
You nailed in with a good post with a handful of good info